Only in Spain

by Nellie Bennett

  Iñaki had made a reservation in a little restaurant just up the street from his own. It had only a dozen tables and a bar displaying the thickest, fattest tortilla I had ever seen. Once we were seated, the waiter brought us two glasses of champagne. We clinked glasses and Iñaki made a toast: “Para nosotros.” To us.

  We sat there, facing each other, and I tried to hide my embarrassment behind my champagne.

  What was I going to say?

  Awkward pauses in conversation can normally be filled by witty remarks about the happenings of the day. But faced with this charming man I was so eager to impress, I realized that I literally couldn’t string two words together.

  My Spanish had improved since I’d arrived in Madrid. I’d had to learn to get by. But I’d been picking it up in a very random fashion. I had vocabulary to open a bank account, buy a metro pass, and understand a flamenco teacher shouting directions across a crowded dance studio. But for first date small talk I had nothing.

  I took another gulp of champagne. Iñaki didn’t speak any English, but he wasn’t fazed by my silence. He moved a little forward in his chair, tilting his head toward mine, and asked me very slow questions about my life in Australia. I stumbled over my words at first, but with a little more champagne, and his gentle encouragement, I became more and more animated. As I spoke, I realized that it was the first time I’d really talked to someone since I’d left home. Communication had been about survival, but now I was actually able to talk to someone about who I was, where I’d come from, and the journey I was on. And Iñaki related to a lot of what I said about being away from home. He had gone on a journey of his own, leaving his home in the Basque Country and moving down to Madrid to run the family restaurant. He was fascinated by the idea of Australia, a land so far away and so different to his own. He filled up my glass as I talked about the things I missed from home and the things I loved about Spain. He gave me space to tell my story, and to confess for the first time that things hadn’t been as easy as I’d thought they would be.

  The more I got to know him, the more I saw a boy from the mountains. His warm brown eyes were calm, yet always alert, taking in everything that happened around us. I could imagine him at peace in the forest. Beneath all his urban sophistication, he seemed like the kind of guy who would know how to rub sticks together to make a fire, and be able to tell by the wind which way was north and which was south. I was right. When I asked him what he missed most about his home he told me it was his mountain. There was a mountain in his village called Uzterre that he climbed every time he went home. I’d never climbed a mountain before. I wondered if girls with Basque boyfriends have to climb mountains. I wondered how high it was…

  My train of thought was derailed by the arrival of the tortilla. And oh my goodness, what a tortilla! It’s hard to be elegant when you’re eating Spanish food. A big, fat Spanish omelet is messy business, especially a good one. A good Spanish omelet should be three inches high and barely cooked in the middle. It should be just potato and egg held together by the collective Spanish fantasy, against all laws of gravity, and it should melt in your mouth in a kind of “Oh my God, where’s my napkin?” moment of sinful food bliss. And this one did. I said good-bye to my lipstick and let Iñaki pour me another glass of red wine.

  After dinner we wandered out of the restaurant, tipsy on champagne and wine. It was warm enough for us to sling our jackets over our arms and enjoy the night air. Iñaki walked me through the little yellow-lit streets back to my apartment.

  As we turned onto my street, I could see three of the primos standing under my window, calling up to see if I was out or just sleeping. “Are they waiting for you?” Iñaki asked.

  “Er…I don’t think so,” I said. The primos saw us coming up the street and headed off in the opposite direction. I noticed Iñaki watching them as they walked away.

  We paused at the doorway to say good night. He brushed back my hair and ran his fingers over my forehead, and I relaxed those frown lines that were forming way too soon from having to deal with things I was never meant to deal with—gypsies, donkeys, hot rollers… Standing there with Iñaki, I felt as if all the weight that I’d been carrying on my shoulders fell away. And I decided to try something. I reached up on tiptoes and I kissed him. It was like my first ever kiss. I wrapped my arms around his neck and I kissed him under the streetlight, and before I knew it he was kissing me back.

  Life doesn’t have to be so hard, I told myself. Life can be like this, wrapped up in the arms of a handsome chef on the street in Madrid. And he whispered in my ear, “Buenas noches. Good night.”

  When I opened my eyes, I saw four faces pressed against the glass on the window on the second floor. And as Iñaki pressed his lips to my cheek, I could see Mariela clutching her chest and saying, “Ay, mamí!”

  THE BASQUE

  Or

  Ardo pixkat

  “A Basque!” Andrés said, his eyes bulging. “First the gypsies, then the Basques. You like to live dangerous! From where is he in the País Vasco?” “País Vasco” is Spanish for Basque Country, though Andrés told me that the Basques prefer their own name, “Euskadi.”

  “Um…” I tried to remember the name of Iñaki’s village. “Tolosa.”

  “Tolosa! Un guipuzcoano? Bwarf!” He shook his head and looked at me with a mixture of horror and delight. “The worst! They are mountain people!” Andrés was originally from Bilbao, the economic and industrial capital of the region. “The guipuzcoanos frighten even me! They are etarras.” Etarras was the Spanish word for members of the terrorist group ETA.

  But then he laughed and told me not to worry. The Basques, he said, would kill me with food before they got me with a bomb. “First,” Andrés told me, “when you go to his village, he will take you out for zuritos. This will be at about eleven o’clock.”

  “What are zur…”

  “Zuritos? Little glasses of beer. You will drink, oh…three of these, maybe with any fried…er…shrimp. Then you go to a different bar and have txakoli.”

  Txakoli? Andrés wrote the word down for me and explained that in Basque they use the “tx” instead of “ch.”

  “Txakoli is a typical Basque wine. Good to have with pintxos—like tapas, but much, much better! You have maybe a little steak with peppers, or fish or duck…all this before lunch, eh. With pintxos you must to drink txikitos.”

  “Okay,” I told him, “you’re making these words up.”

  “No, no!” he protested, crossing his heart. “This is Euskera, the oldest language in the world! You must to learn it, because your children will be Basque.” He tore a piece of paper out of his notepad and started writing down some words for me. “When someone says to you, ‘Kaixo, zer moduz?’—‘Hello, how are you?’—you must to say, ‘Oso ondo. Very well.’ And if they ask you any question, you just must to say, ‘Ardo pixkat.’”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “It means ‘a little wine.’ Normally they will be asking what you want to drink. The Basque men are much more dangerous than the gypsies. You know what will happen? He will take you to the mountains and lock you up in a caserío, a country house.” Andrés shook his head regretfully. “You will not come back. You will be alone up there in the mountains, one poor Australian girl with twelve little Basque children, all talking Euskera so you don’t understand.”

  I laughed at that image. “What makes you think he’s going to invite me to his village?”

  “He will.” Andrés looked at me sadly. “I will be losing my English teacher.”

  Since I’d met Iñaki there wasn’t a day that he didn’t call. I didn’t notice it at first because he did it in such a gracious way. He called to invite me for dinner, then he called to say he’d had a lovely time, then every day he’d call to offer to be of some assistance. He’d call to ask if I was interested in going to see a new flamenco show, or to let me know about a free concert t
hat was on somewhere, or just to say hello.

  One afternoon I came home from work tired and hungry only to find that there was nothing to eat in the kitchen, and all I had left was half a packet of spaghetti. Not long after, he called me. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I’m eating,” I said.

  “What are you eating?”

  “Spaghetti.”

  “Spaghetti with what?”

  “With…spaghetti.”

  “With oil and garlic?”

  “No, I don’t have any oil or garlic.”

  “With salt?”

  “I can’t find the salt.”

  There was a pause. “You’re eating just spaghetti.”

  “Yyyeees…” I said. “I’m hungry.”

  “Come over here and I’ll make you lunch,” he said.

  “But I just made spaghetti!” I protested.

  “Bring the spaghetti,” was all he said.

  So I put a tea towel over the strainer and carried my spaghetti over to Iñaki’s place, which was only a couple of blocks from Mariela’s. By the time I got there it had already formed a gluggy mass.

  “Qué tal?” How are you? he asked, giving me a kiss and whisking the strainer out of my hands. On a board in the kitchen I could see that he already had diced onion and pancetta. He heated up some oil in the pan and put the onions on to soften. It would have been easy for him to put on a fresh pot of pasta that would come out perfectly al dente, but he had graciously accepted my attachment to my poor spaghetti.

  In no time the apartment was filled with the smell of caramelized onion and pancetta. Iñaki asked me what I’d like to drink, and I said, “Ardo pixkat.”

  He stepped out of the kitchen and said, “What?”

  “Ardo pixkat,” I repeated, hoping I’d got it right and that I wasn’t saying something offensive. I wouldn’t put it past Andrés to set me up.

  Iñaki stared at me for a long moment, then he said, “Oso ondo,” and selected a bottle of wine from a rack in the kitchen.

  Olé, I said to myself. Thank you, Andrés.

  “Can I help?” I asked, feeling a bit guilty that I was just lazing on the couch doing nothing while he prepared lunch.

  “You’ve already made the pasta.” He placed a salad on the table and served the spaghetti into two bowls. “Ardo?” he asked, offering to top up my wine.

  “Cheers,” I said.

  • • •

  Andrés was right. It was only a month later, in June, that Iñaki told me he had to go up to his village for a wedding and asked if I wanted to go with him. Since the day I’d told Andrés that I was going out with one of his countrymen, our classes had switched from English lessons for him to Basque lessons for me. I felt a little irresponsible, given that I was being paid to teach him English, but Andrés didn’t care. He was already CEO of a multinational company and had had his picture taken with the king. His attitude to English was that if someone didn’t understand him, he just had to speak louder.

  “You know how are these Basque wedding? You will needs a lot of stamina. First you will have zuritos and pintxos before the church, then at the restaurant a cocktail.” The Spanish have taken the English word “cocktail” to mean drinks and nibbles. “Then you have the lunch. In Euskadi the lunch is the most important thing. You don’t give a gift at a wedding; you give money. So the people think they are paying for the lunch. The lunch should be first a salad. A Basque salad, not your green shit. A salad of seafood, and maybe duck. Then fish. Then meat. Then another meat! Then dessert—must be two desserts; if not, it is not a Basque wedding. And cake. Cake is not a real dessert, it is—how you say?—an extra. Then gin tonic and cigars. You smoke cigars?”

  I shook my head.

  “You will have to learn. Don’t inhale! Like this.” Andrés mimed puffing on a cigar. “Then you are drinking, drinking, drinking, and dancing. You know what is the traditional Basque dance? It is like this, with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in other.” Andrés mimed dancing holding a glass and a cigarette. “Then you have dinner. More food, bwarf! Then drinking, drinking, drinking until six, maybe seven in the morning. Then breakfast. Bwarf! Fried egg and chistorra.”

  “That’s impossible,” I said, shocked.

  Andrés grinned. “It is not only possible, it is your future. This is what happen if you have a boyfriend from Tolosa.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” I protested.

  “You are going with him to his village, to a wedding where will be all his family. I think you must to, how you say? Face the music? I love this expression! Face the music. You have a boyfriend.”

  • • •

  The following Friday night, Iñaki picked me up after he’d finished work at midnight to drive up to his village. I was looking forward to seeing the north of Spain. From the tales Andrés told, I imagined the Basques spent their days drinking txakoli and lobbing firebombs at each other, though Iñaki told me that if I expected to see any Molotov cocktails I was in for a disappointment.

  We drove out beyond the bright lights of the city and on to the highway. We passed groves of olive trees and vineyards, and went through the rolling plains of Castilla–La Mancha, the land where Don Quixote once traveled jousting windmills with his friend Sancho Panza.

  I fell asleep as we were driving past fields of grapevines, and when I woke up, we were traveling through the mountains of northern Spain. Up ahead I could see flashing lights signaling drivers to stop at the boom gates. I asked, half asleep, “Is this the border?”

  “No,” Iñaki said, his eyes on the road. “But it should be.” I had quizzed Iñaki about his politics, excited by the idea that I might be dating a separatist. But he had explained that he was a nationalist, meaning that he believed in protecting and promoting Basque culture, but he didn’t think that the Basque Country should become an independent state.

  We passed through the last tollbooth between central Spain and the Basque Country. I closed my eyes and fell back to sleep.

  When I woke up again, we had arrived at Iñaki’s home. The radio was on and a man was crooning in a strange language that I assumed must be Euskera. Fresh mountain air rushed into the car as Iñaki opened the door. We pulled our bags out of the back, and I could just see the outline of the mountains through the early morning mist.

  We carried our bags up the stairs to the top floor. Big glass doors opened out onto a balcony from which we could see mountain peaks. I sat down on the bed, yawning and rubbing my eyes, while Iñaki went to the kitchen to see what there was to eat.

  He came back minutes later with two steaming cups of tea, a block of dark chocolate, and a packet of sliced chorizo sausage. I took my cup of tea and watched as Iñaki broke off a piece of chocolate and wrapped it in a thin slice of chorizo. I’d seen some pretty weird stuff in Spain, starting out with the fried pig’s skin I was served for breakfast in Seville, but chorizo with chocolate?

  Iñaki offered me a piece, but I said no thanks. “I don’t really feel like chocolate and chorizo.”

  “But this chorizo comes from Pamplona,” he said.

  “Er…even so, I’ll just have tea.”

  Iñaki shrugged and said it was my loss, and I was happy to agree.

  I sat up with him, drinking my tea until I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer. Then we pulled back the bed covers, switched off the lights, and fell asleep, breathing clean mountain air.

  THE WEDDING

  Or

  I thought you said you could surf?

  “Every time I come here I swim out to that island,” Iñaki said, looking out across the sea to a little island about a half a mile from the shore. Surf was crashing onto the beach, waves three and four feet high. There was only a lone surfer in the water. “Vamos?” Iñaki asked, pulling off his shirt.

  I had expected a wimpy Spanish beach, not pounding waves, a
nd I hesitated. The sea looked too rough for me.

  “I thought you said you could surf?” Iñaki said.

  Yes, well, about that. I didn’t exactly tell him I could surf. Spanish people have this idea in their heads that all Australians surf, so I just went along with it. He made the assumption that I could surf, and I didn’t tell him otherwise. But standing on the sand, I realized that I should have.

  The truth was, I hadn’t expected to be called on my surfing prowess. Spain didn’t seem to me to have a beach culture, and I rather enjoyed being seen as the exotic mermaid from Down Under who is most at home being buffeted by the waves, when the reality is that I hate getting water up my nose.

  And now Iñaki was expecting me to run into the surf like a volunteer lifesaver on Bondi Beach, and that was not going to happen. I still carried the trauma from the swimming lessons I was forced to do in primary school. But this was not the moment to explain that to Iñaki. He had already stripped down to his swimmers and was ready to run into the water.

  Here’s another thing that I hadn’t anticipated—in his spare time, Iñaki was also a triathlete. Of course. Not only was he big-screen gorgeous, a celebrated chef, kind, and considerate, he was also an Iron Man. So there would be no faking it, I realized as I pulled my T-shirt over my head. As soon as we hit the water, he would realize that I was a lousy swimmer.

  But I was an even lousier poker player, and Iñaki had already seen through my bluff. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I’ve got you.” And before I had time to protest, he grabbed my hand and ran with me into the water.

  The first wave came and lifted me clear off my feet, but I held on to him. I kicked out, trying to swim to get past the breakers. Iñaki pulled me along with him. The next wave almost pulled me away, but he held on to my wrist and we kept swimming.

  I came up for air and saw that we had made it out past the surf. The island was only about a third of a mile away. Only, ha! I tried to tell myself that it wasn’t that far. A third of a mile is a stroll to the milk bar. You’ve run farther in heels to get to the bus stop, I told myself. I tried swimming my strongest stroke—breaststroke—but Iñaki was powering ahead with freestyle. So I tried to do that too. Stroke, stroke, stroke—gasp and splutter. Stroke, stroke, stroke—come up for air and see how far I’ve come…but after traveling only a few yards I went back to breaststroke.