Spain or Shine

by Michelle Jellen

  Late the following Saturday afternoon Elena found herself walking through Barcelona. Her great-aunt had called her back right away to say she was more than welcome to come for a visit. Great-Aunt Elena had offered to meet her at the train, but Elena didn’t want to cause her any trouble. And to her surprise, she was actually a bit excited about the thought of exploring Barcelona—if only a little bit—on her own.

  As soon as she stepped out of the train station, it became clear that although Barcelona was a beach town, like San Sebastián, it was also a big city. The air was filled with the smell of the ocean and the sounds of people and traffic. On her way to her great-aunt’s place she strolled up la Rambla, which served as town square, shopping mall, meeting place, and people-watchers’ paradise. As she walked alone up the street, which was blocked from all cars, she passed a raggedy group of jugglers, a fortune-teller, and a tight-faced woman dressed in head-to-toe Prada. It was a carnival of sight and sound. Miguel had told her that people gathered at la Rambla during all hours. If you wandered through at two in the morning, there would be people hanging out, playing the guitar, kissing on the corners, living life.

  As Elena ventured off la Rambla and wound through a jumble of intersecting streets, walking toward her great-aunt Elena’s condo, she reflected on how independent she had become, traveling alone in a foreign country.

  Finally Elena came upon her great-aunt’s condo. It was the only stoop among its drab white counterparts with a door painted turquoise and framed with hanging flowering plants. Wire baskets overflowed with bougainvillea, and potted plants lined the steps. Elena had only heard a few things about her great-aunt Elena, but from the little she did know, she wasn’t surprised that the woman had the most colorful home on the block.

  She’d barely knocked when the door opened and Elena found herself staring at two women who looked exactly like each other and vaguely like her own mother. Her mother’s features were there, but the noses were slightly larger, the eyes a shade lighter, the hair a bit curlier.

  “Hola,” the two women cheered. “Somos primas de tu madre.” Of course. They were her mom’s cousins. Twins named Anna and Paloma Delgado. “Bienvenido,” the twins echoed each other as they motioned for Elena to come into the foyer. As soon as Elena stepped over the threshold, the sweet smell of flowers was replaced with the scent of cooking. The aroma of spices, sangria, and roasting ham permeated the air. The smells made Elena feel instantly at home.

  The twins ushered Elena into the living room, a warm space made warmer by the people gathered inside. They rose together and sang out to her like a chorus, their “holas” and “bienvenidos” veering together in harmony. The previous night on the phone her great-aunt Elena had warned her that she’d invited a few relatives over for dinner. Elena was picturing a small gathering, enough maybe for three-on-three basketball. But this was an entire football squad.

  As Elena entered the room she was buried under an avalanche of hugs and cheek kisses. The twins proceeded to introduce her to more people than she could possibly remember. She was surprised by how many traces of her own immediate family she spotted before her. It was as though her mother and siblings were potato-head dolls whose features had been yanked off and spread around the room. Cousins Paloma and Anna had her mom’s Popsicle-stick legs. Tio Mateo had the same nose as Caleb, with a bump along the bridge, and Tia Alberta had Gwen’s black hair. Then there were the ones who didn’t look like anyone else. Elena counted herself among that group.

  As she neared the end of the introductions, the crowd of people parted to reveal an elderly woman dressed in a pressed green wool pantsuit and matching hat. There was something in the way she held herself that said, / may look old to you, but I’m as young as / want to be.

  “Elena, es un placer para mi que presentarle tu tia Elena,” Paloma introduced the two Elenas.

  The elder Elena swept the younger into a hug.

  “Welcome, Elena,” her great-aunt said in impeccably clear English, then held Elena out at arm’s length to get a look at her. “We are so happy you could come visit us.”

  Great-Aunt Elena had Gwen’s eyes; or, rather, Gwen had inherited Great-Aunt Elena’s eyes, dipped down slightly at the corners. Gwen often complained that people assumed she was upset when she wasn’t smiling. However, on Great-Aunt Elena they were understanding eyes. Without her saying a word, Elena knew that her great-aunt was the kind of person she would tell all her secrets to in one night.

  Sometime during her stirring welcome, Elena’s bag had been whisked from her hands and set at the foot of the stairs. She was shown to a stuffed chair in the middle of the room, and someone had set a fizzing Orange Fanta in a slender glass on a table beside her chair.

  It was a cozy room full of soft places to sit. There was a plump rose-colored sofa, big puffy armchairs, and ottomans. The layout of the place was open, with the dining room, kitchen, and back patio flowing one into the next. “Perfect for entertaining,” she could practically hear her mother cooing to a client. However, this wasn’t one of the boxy beige houses her mother often showed. In this house, yards and yards of paint-layered canvas covered the walls. She wondered if any of the art—painted in a range of styles—was the work of her great-aunt. The paintings hung side by side, running across the walls in a checkerboard of color. They were depictions of Spanish sunsets and architecture, the beach at dawn, church steeples, children flashing wide messy grins, old men, glittering lakes. Some of them were beautiful and some startling, but all of them were full of emotion. Elena wanted to paint herself into the corner of one and disappear into it for a while. She smiled at the thought, then realized someone was asking her a question in Spanish. She concentrated on the question.

  “What do you think of Spain?” a man named Diego repeated. He had been introduced as Elena’s second cousin, or perhaps he was someone’s husband. There were so many of them, it was hard to remember all their names and the complicated ways they were all related to her.

  “I love it here,” she answered cautiously, testing the words out in her mind before she let them leave her mouth. “There are so many things I still want to do and see, but I have less than a month left here.”

  The faces around the room nodded sympathetically, as if they could think of nothing worse than being ripped from Spain before you were ready to leave.

  “You don’t look particularly Spanish,” a woman in red observed timidly.

  “Well, my dad’s ancestors are English and Swedish. I take after him.” It was the same answer she’d given to the countless inquiries over the years about why she didn’t look like her siblings. She’d done a lot of explaining since coming to Spain due to her incongruous Spanish first name.

  Elena could feel more questions coming.

  “Do you prefer our fútbol or American football?”

  “I’m not that into sports. But I love how proud Spanish people are about their soccer, I mean fútbol teams.”

  “What are your hobbies?”

  “What do American girls do for fun?”

  “Do you like school?”

  “What are you studying?”

  “How is America different from Spain?”

  So many questions and they were all directed at her. For the first time Elena was the axis of a room. It was thrilling and embarrassing at the, same time. This was one of the things she had fantasized about before she’d come to San Sebastián. She wanted to stand out, to be the interesting one in the room. Until now, she’d never realized how much she counted on Gwen to absorb the attention, and Caleb and Jeremy to keep everyone entertained. Being the center of attention was a heavy burden for someone who spent so much time living in her own head.

  “Bueno, bueno,” Great-Aunt Elena interjected after listening for most of the interview. “We should let our guest rest after her long trip. Come, Elena, I will show you where you will sleep tonight.” The chorus of relatives let out a disappointed sigh. “Don’t worry. You will all have a chance to ask your questions at dinne
r.”

  Aunt Elena led her to the stairs, where she tested the weight of Elena’s overnight bag. “Tómelo,” she said, handing the bag off to Elena. ”Years ago I would have carried it for you, but I’m not as strong as I was once.“ She flexed a non-existent bicep muscle as evidence and chuckled. ”Come, follow an old, frail woman up the stairs.” Elena trudged behind her with the bag slung over her shoulder as Great-Aunt Elena moved briskly up the stairs. She might have been an old woman, and perhaps her body wasn’t as strong as it once was, but there was certainly nothing frail about her.

  The elder Elena led the way through the first door across the top landing.

  “This is where you will stay tonight,” she announced, showing Elena into the little room. Aunt Elena yanked on a handle at the top of a tall wooden plank along the wall. It lowered to reveal a mattress that settled on the ground like a normal bed. “You’ll be sleeping with the lovely ladies.” She made a sweeping gesture toward one wall with built-in shelves housing rows and rows of hats.

  “These are beautiful.” Elena reached her fingers toward a gray felt hat and touched the silky feathers that lay across the brim like a protective wing.

  “I’m glad you like them.” Great-Aunt Elena beamed. “This one took me a month because I couldn’t find the right feathers. What do you think?” She placed the hat on Elena’s head and turned her toward the antique mirror suspended on the opposite wall.

  “Wait, you made this?” Elena gasped, as she tipped her chin up a bit to get a better view of herself in the hat.

  “I made all of them.” Great-Aunt Elena laughed. “It’s what I do.”

  Elena turned toward her great-aunt to ponder the woman in a new light.

  “I’m an artist,” Great-Aunt Elena continued. “I’ve been painting for decades. The hats are my latest outlet.”

  “My brother Jeremy told me you were an artist. Are any of these paintings yours?” Elena asked, gesturing toward the paintings on the far wall.

  “Sí,” the elder Elena nodded. “All of them.”

  “All of them? Even the ones downstairs?” she asked as she approached a framed painting that looked different from the others, with murky swirls of paint that seemed to vaguely represent something, though she couldn’t tell what.

  “This one is a painting of a dream I had.”

  “You paint your dreams?”

  “Well, I’ve only painted a few actual dreams, but all my paintings represent dreams in a way. Dreams for the future; dreams of what could be or should be. I’ve always been considered something of a dreamer,” Great-Aunt Elena whispered conspiratorially.

  “Me, too,” Elena divulged. “I mean, my family is always telling me I have my head in the clouds.”

  “Well, where else would you want your head to be, stuck in the ground?” The older woman laughed heartily.

  Elena nodded. “I guess some people just think it’s better to be realistic. You know, to see things the way they really are. My family thinks that all the time I spend daydreaming is time I could be using to do something productive.”

  Great-Aunt Elena fixed those empathetic eyes on her, and Elena knew she understood. “The dreamers like you and I are the ones who see the potential in everything and everyone. That’s what dreaming really is, imagining what could be. Dreaming isn’t wasted time. The waste comes when you have these wonderful dreams, but you don’t do anything to make them real.”

  Elena thought of Miguel, and how she really wanted something to happen with him, something real. Ever since her conversation with Alex on the train, she’d been thinking about the fact that she would have to take some kind of action to show him she was interested. She would have to do something soon. She was running out of time in Spain.

  For Elena’s welcome dinner her great-aunt had invited a “couple of friends” to join the family. This time Elena was prepared. A couple of friends turned into practically the entire neighborhood. Elena’s intimate dinner with family had become a full-blown party with music, drinks, and trays of olives and cheeses set out on tables.

  Elena welcomed the party atmosphere. With so many family members crowded into one room, she was beginning to feel as if she hadn’t really missed Thanksgiving after all.

  “So, you are this American I’ve been hearing so much about,” a stoop-shouldered man with large ears and dark, sparkly eyes said as he gently pinched Elena’s shoulder, perhaps to see if Americans were made of real flesh and blood. “Another beautiful Elena.”

  Elena giggled nervously. “Well, you’re right about my being the American,” Elena answered, wondering if this was another relative she hadn’t met. “And you are?”

  “Allow me to introduce myself; I am Enrique del Toro.” He presented himself with a flourish, as though he were announcing a bullfighter entering the ring.

  “Nice to meet you,” she said, holding back a giggle. This guy was a trip. “How do you know my great-aunt Elena?”

  “She is my cousin.” They both looked toward the elder Elena, who stood laughing under an arched doorway, the yellow light swimming at her back. “So, do you feel like a Spaniard yet?” he asked.

  “I don’t know if I will ever feel like a Spaniard.”

  “But you are part Spanish.”

  “Yes, but you wouldn’t know by looking at me.”

  “Oh,” he waved off her remark. “I have plenty of Spanish friends with light hair, light skin. Being Spanish comes from here.” He pointed to his chest.

  Elena glanced down at her bare arms folded across her chest. She had expected somehow that coming to Spain might make her more Spanish, that the sun might stain her a shade of brown she’d never been before. But even after nearly three months in Spain, her skin had stubbornly remained the color of skim milk. She wondered why that mattered so much to her. Why did she have to look Spanish in order to feel Spanish? She felt connected to her great-aunt, but not because they looked anything alike. Rather, Elena had the same spirit, the same love of art, and the same romantic outlook. Gwen might have inherited their great-aunt’s eyes, but Elena had inherited her belief that the world did not just consist of things she could see and touch.

  Great-Aunt Elena clinked a fork against her glass.

  “Dinner,” she called. “Everyone into the dining room, por favor.”

  The group piled into the cramped dining room around two tables. After some gentle cajoling, Elena took a seat at the head of the largest table on one side, and Great-Aunt Elena sat across the long wooden plane from her. They were Elena bookends.

  Dinner was spread out in mismatched pots and platters like a potluck. There was a kettle of potato soup, several salads, cured ham, and a dish called ajo de la mano, which Enrique explained was made of potatoes and chilies and then dressed with garlic and spices, oil and vinegar.

  Hours later, over fruit tarts, Elena’s family members began to tell stories. Elena was glad to settle back in her chair, full and sleepy from the food and wine.

  “Elena,” Great-Uncle Roberto, the elder Elena’s brother, leaned back in his chair when he addressed her. “Did you know that your namesake is famous in Barcelona for more than just her art? Her parties were legendary.”

  Great-Aunt Elena laughed and tossed a napkin that landed on Roberto’s head, shading his eyes like one of her hats.

  “Don’t start inventing stories, Roberto.”

  “It’s the truth. You think this gathering is big. You should have seen the parties Elena used to throw here.”

  Aunt Elena laughed and covered her face with her hands, but she didn’t look at all embarrassed. She looked as though she wanted him to continue more than anything.

  Roberto proceeded to tell a story about the time his sister had had a three-day-long bash after Barcelona’s team won a particularly competitive fútbol match. It sounded like something out of The Great Gatsby, with people dressed in their finest, drinking and dancing for days on end.

  “Your mother was here during that party,” Great-Aunt Elena recalled sudden
ly. “What a fun time.”

  The fabled stories about the older woman’s parties led to talk of past boyfriends.

  “There was the one from Holland. He was a pilot,” Great-Aunt Elena recalled fondly. “But my favorite was Xavier from Paris,” she reminisced. “He was in Barcelona for only three months. We met one night on la Rambla, and we walked and talked until the sun came up. Three months later he was set to move back to Paris. I’d always wanted to go to Paris, perhaps even live there for a while....”

  “What happened?” Elena leaned over the table ledge.

  “He asked me to marry him.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Oh, what could I say? I said no, of course.” She laughed. Elena was aghast.

  “What about Paris?”

  “We went to Paris. I just wasn’t ready to get married.”

  “Elena, your great-aunt has always been good about making things happen the way she would like, and not waiting around for other people to make decisions for her,” Roberto added.

  Great-Aunt Elena laughed. “You make me sound much too noble, Roberto. Who wants more wine?”

  Elena lifted herself up out of her seat and grasped the wine bottle in the middle of the table.

  Roberto laughed. “I think you should skip the wine and go to bed.”

  Elena shook her head, but she knew he was right. She was so tired her eyes could barely stay open. It had been a long day of traveling and meeting new people. Now it was almost three in the morning. She reluctantly said good night to the twenty or so guests who lingered around the table, still talking and picking at the food.

  She trudged upstairs and closed the door to her borrowed room, although the hum of chatter seeped through the gap between the door and the carpet. When Elena settled into bed that night, she had a belly plump with food, a head swimming in wine, and a heart full of her namesake’s passion for life and love.