We reached the tiny island and sat up on the rocks, enjoying the sun and looking back at the shore. It was past one, and Iñaki decided that it was time for lunch. He suggested that we go and eat with some old friends of his, so we climbed back down off the rocks and swam back to shore.
Iñaki’s “old friends” were Juan Mari Arzak and his sister, who run the famous Basque restaurant Arzak where Iñaki received his chef training. Juan Mari met us at the doorway with hugs and kisses and told Iñaki off for taking so long to come back and visit. He asked if we had come for lunch, and though it was almost impossible to get a reservation, he said that something could be arranged. But before we ate, Iñaki wanted to show me around.
First we went into the laboratory where Iñaki’s old friends were working as food scientists, investigating and designing new dishes. A young chef who had done his apprenticeship with Iñaki took us into the climate-controlled spice room, where every imaginable spice, seed, and aromatic leaf was categorized and stored in little jars. I gazed at the wall dedicated to spices from Australia. The chef opened some of the little jars and held them up for me to smell. I closed my eyes and let the aromas transport me back to our garden back home.
But there was no time to get homesick. Our next stop was the laboratory where a food scientist was experimenting with dry ice for a spectacular frothing chocolate dessert. He showed us how they would be presenting the new dish on the table, with cascading bubbles flowing from an elegant crystal glass. The house sommelier, another old friend of Iñaki’s, then took us to the wine cellar, where he proudly showed me their collection of Australian wines.
They set up a special little table for us in the kitchen where we ate while we watched the dishes being prepared around us. Large white plates with tiny delicacies were brought to us, each with its own story and an accompanying glass of wine selected by Iñaki’s friend in the wine cellar.
After lunch we drove up the winding road around the coast, into fairy-tale mountains dotted with old stone houses. These were the caseríos that Andrés had told me I would end up in.
Iñaki gazed out at them and told me that his ambition was to buy an old caserío and do it up. I asked him if he wanted to have children. Yes, he told me. Twelve. “Twelve?” I repeated. What is the Spanish obsession with having twelve children? “It’s to have a football team,” Iñaki explained. “Eleven on the field and one reserve.”
After our two-hundred-course lunch I couldn’t even think about eating again, but Iñaki insisted on taking me to a local cider house for dinner. It was in an old stone caserío off a mountain road. Inside were rows of giant cider barrels and little wooden tables to rest your glasses on. We were given a glass each. A man stood beside the barrels; he took a toothpick out of a tiny hole in the side of one, releasing a thin spurt of cider. Iñaki showed me how to catch the cider so that it broke against the side of the glass, giving it just the right amount of fizz. He told me to drink it straight down before the bubbles disappeared.
Iñaki ordered the traditional fare: fried green peppers, codfish, and a prawn omelet followed by cheese with quince paste and a basket of walnuts.
There were no chairs because in a cider house everyone eats standing up. It’s more friendly, Iñaki said, easier for people to move around and talk to each other. He picked up a walnut and placed it on the side of the table under his knuckle, then brought his other hand down on it, cracking the hard shell. It was a cool trick. I tried to copy it but only managed to hurt my hand; the shell was unharmed. So I let Iñaki crack the walnuts, while I ate cheese and watched the Basques catching cider in their glasses as it flew through the air.
• • •
The wedding was the next day. It was Iñaki’s cousin who was getting married, so just as Andrés had predicted, I was being thrown into a huge family event. The ceremony was in a little stone church up in the mountains. Iñaki parked the car nearby, but instead of heading to the church, we went to a little bar around the corner where the guests were drinking cups of hot broth and eating fried chistorra.
Iñaki’s father was at the bar drinking vermouth and talking loudly in Euskera to a group of big, ruddy-faced Basques. Andrés had told me that all I would understand when the Basques spoke in Euskera was the swearing. For some reason the Basques never invented their own curses, so they have to swear in Spanish. When I listened to the men speak, all I heard was: “(weird sounds) Hostia! (more weird sounds) Hijo de puta! (really weird sounds) Me cago en Dios!”
Spanish swearing is colorful and imaginative and does sound rather curious when it’s translated into English. Hostia means “the Host,” while hijo de puta means “son of the whore.” But the Spanish particularly like to talk about shitting on things: on your grandma, on your dead, in the milk, and, of course, on God himself. This last one was Iñaki’s father’s favorite expression. “Me cago en Dios!” he repeated. “Me cago en Dios y en todos sus santos!” I shit on God and on all of his saints.
Iñaki introduced me to his father, who looked me up and down then said something to me in Basque. I took a deep breath and said, “Ardo pixkat.” This made everyone laugh, and Iñaki’s father shouted to the bartender to get me a glass of wine.
After our aperitivo we made our way to the church. At the front was a group of musicians and dancers all dressed up in traditional Basque costume. The women wore white shirts and red skirts with black waistcoats and white scarves over their heads, and the men wore white shirts and pants with red berets and red kerchiefs around their necks. When the bride arrived on the arm of her father, the musicians played folk music on flutes, accompanied by a slow drumbeat, and the dancers jumped and did graceful high kicks.
After the ceremony we drove to a restaurant for the reception. After an array of seemingly endless pinxtos that just kept getting more and more extravagant, we were seated for lunch. Again, Andrés was proved right: the food kept coming. After the third course I had to pass my plates over to Iñaki. This kind of eating, I was learning, takes years of training, and the Basques have been at it from birth. After we had finished the final dessert course, it was time for gin and tonics, and cigars.
After the first round of cigars had been stubbed out in empty glasses, the music started and the bride and groom got up to dance their first dance as a married couple. The DJ played all the wedding classics, as well as some that I would never have expected, like a Spanish version of the chicken dance, which had everyone from grandma down to the flower girls flapping their arms and twisting their hips. And of course, what Basque wedding would be complete without…the “YMCA”? The whole family became the Village People. Iñaki’s father stuck his cigar between his lips and together we formed the letters with our arms.
So this is my life, I thought to myself. I had come all the way from Sydney to the mountains of the north of Spain to dance the “YMCA” with a roomful of cigar-smoking Basques. Well…why not?
• • •
That night as we lay in bed, Iñaki rolled over and bundled me up in his arms. He whispered in my ear, “Te quiero.”
There it was. The moment I’d been waiting for my entire life, when my handsome prince would take me in his arms and say those three magic words: I love you.
When I was young, I had envisioned this moment in so many ways: on a bridge in Paris in the rain, under the neon lights of some grungy diner on a busy street in New York, or on the beach in my hometown. I had never imagined it in the mountains of the Basque Country. But neither had I dared to imagine that those words would come from a man as perfect as Iñaki.
“Te quiero,” he whispered.
There was just one small problem: I didn’t understand him. The words sounded familiar—I’d probably heard them before in a song or something. But instead of looking at him, tears welling up in my eyes, and telling him that I loved him too, as I had always imagined that I would, I said what I said every time I didn’t understand him, “Sí, sí.” And I closed m
y eyes and went back to sleep, not knowing that the man I was falling in love with had just told me he felt the same way.
THE DOCTOR’S ORDERS
Or
What language are we speaking?
I’d often meet up with Iñaki after he finished work at midnight, but then I’d have to be up again at six in the morning to get to work. My accumulated exhaustion kept growing because I didn’t even get to rest on the weekends; instead I’d go out with Juan to listen to flamenco all night, or when Iñaki could take a weekend off, we’d go up to his village.
My body reached a point where it refused to cooperate. Some days I couldn’t even walk to my English classes; I had to climb into a taxi for a two-minute ride from the metro to the company. One day I even had to sit down at the foot of the stairs in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs because I didn’t know how I was going to make it up the three flights.
I got a shock one afternoon when I left Iñaki’s apartment to go to class. Iñaki lived on the fifth floor of a building with no elevator. We’d just had lunch and I had to go off to my class at the ministry. I was walking down the stairs when I tripped and fell, hitting my eye on the banister and somehow going head over heels to land with the back of my head hitting the wall.
The neighbors came up to see what had happened, and Iñaki came racing down. I lay in a crumpled heap in the stairwell, not wanting to move ever again.
After that I knew I couldn’t keep on living the way I was living, but it was too late. A couple of days later I came down with a fever. It descended over me like a mist, and I was unable to move the whole night. In the morning I had just enough energy to reach for my phone to cancel all my classes, then I lay on my bed, my body aching, drifting in and out of consciousness.
Iñaki called in the afternoon, and when he heard the sound of my voice, he told me he’d be there straightaway. When he saw me, I could see from the expression on his face that I was worse than I’d realized. He sat with me until he had to go back to work. Mariela told him not to worry, they were making me soup and chamomile tea, but he said that as soon as he could escape from the kitchen he’d come back to see how I was.
I lay in bed with fever for three days, maybe four, getting worse and worse. I couldn’t tell the difference between my waking hours and dreams. When Iñaki came to see me on the fourth day, I was so frightened I had tears streaming down my face. He tried to calm me down as I rambled deliriously about home, about my dreams, about the gypsies that came past my window singing. I didn’t want to die, but I was losing the little strength I had left. I closed my eyes and went to sleep.
• • •
When I opened my eyes, I had no idea where I was. Am I in my bedroom in Sydney? What time is it? I wondered. Am I late for work? Then I remembered that I had gone to Seville to dance flamenco. Maybe I was in my room in Inés’s apartment. I closed my eyes again and reopened them, and my memory started to come back. I went to Madrid, I thought. But where was I now? I was moving. There were bright lights flashing by. What was I lying on? I touched leather. I was in the backseat of a car.
I could hear a man’s deep voice speaking in a language I couldn’t understand. Where am I? I propped myself up on one elbow. A man was driving and talking on a mobile phone. I looked at the back of his head. His hair was brown. Who is that? Something told me I knew him. He looked at me in the rearview mirror. It was Iñaki. It all came back to me. I sank back into the seat. I didn’t know where he was taking me, and I didn’t care. I just wanted to sleep.
• • •
I had to walk from the car, but it was so far and I didn’t think I could make it. Iñaki held me up, and I concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. The lights shone brightly ahead of me. “Vamos, cariño.” Come on, darling, he said. I just had to make it to the doors and I could sit down again.
The cool air started to bring me around. “Where are we?” I asked. Then I realized I was speaking in English. I searched my brain for the equivalent in Spanish. “Dónde estamos?”
Iñaki gave me a concerned look. “Estamos en el hospital.”
A man in a green smock came toward us pushing a wheelchair. “I can walk,” I said, though it came out as a murmur.
“I know you can walk,” the man said with a smile. “But it’s more fun this way.”
I sat down in the wheelchair and felt all the energy drain out of my body. It took all my strength to keep my head from lolling on my shoulders.
We traveled down the corridor of the hospital and into the elevator. “Where are you from?” the man asked.
“Sydney,” I said, my voice little more than a whisper.
“Sydney? I want to go to Sydney. It is a beautiful city. What are you doing in Spain?”
I didn’t want to answer his questions, I just wanted to sleep. But it occurred to me that he was probably trying to keep me conscious, so I made an effort. “Dancing flamenco.”
“Wow, flamenco,” he said.
I wondered what language we were speaking. It felt like English, but I couldn’t be sure. “Where are you from?” I asked him.
“I’m from Romania.” The elevator doors opened and he wheeled me out into another long white corridor.
“Do you speak English?” I asked him.
“Yes, I do. We’re speaking English right now.”
“Really?” I said, my eyelids closing heavily. “That’s nice. I like English. I teach English…” but I wasn’t sure if I was saying that out loud or only in my head.
He wheeled me into a room and helped me climb up onto a big, high bed. My eyelids dropped as if they were weighed down with heavy stones. I felt someone take my arm and a needle prick my skin, and I heard the sound of someone tearing off a strip of tape. But I didn’t really care what they were doing. I just closed my eyes and fell asleep.
• • •
“Give me your arm.”
I opened my eyes. There was a nun in a white habit standing over me. She took my arm and wrapped a strap around it. She told me to make a fist, which required all my strength, then took a needle and pushed it into my vein. I closed my eyes as the syringe filled up with blood.
What’s wrong with me? I wondered. Why are they taking all my blood? What happened? I looked down at my arm and saw that I was hooked up to an IV. Am I dying? But it was simply curiosity. I didn’t really care. So long as I didn’t have to move or talk or open my eyes, it didn’t really matter.
When I finally woke up, I didn’t know how long I’d been asleep. A night, a day, two days. I had lost all concept of time. When I tried to move, pain coursed through my body, so I stayed still, soaking up whatever dosage of painkillers they were pumping through my veins.
I looked around at the room. It was painted white with great high ceilings. On the opposite wall there was a Christ on the cross, and next to him a framed picture of Mary looking weepy. It was a huge room with a sofa and glass sliding doors that led out onto a sunny balcony. This is sooooo much nicer than my apartment, I thought as I looked around.
Then, finally, I started to panic. I was in a fancy private hospital in a foreign country. What on earth must this be costing? I didn’t even have travel insurance. Oh my God, I’m going to be in debt for the rest of my life. Maybe I’ll have to skip the country and start a new life in Morocco.
There was a knock at the door and I was surprised to see Juan poke his head in. His gray hair was combed back and he wore a suit and tie. He looked like a different person, so serious and businesslike, not like my friend from La Soleá.
“Lamparilla!” He walked in, picked up the clipboard at the foot of my bed, and flipped through the pages. “Iñaki called to tell me you’re not well. What’s happened?”
“What are you doing here?” I asked, confused.
“What am I doing here? This is my hospital. What are you doing here?” Juan pulled up a chair next to me and placed a box of c
hocolates on my bedside table. He explained to me that in his life outside of La Soleá, he was the president of one of the biggest medical insurance companies in Spain. So he told me not to worry about a thing, all I needed to do was rest.
There was another knock at the door and Iñaki walked in carrying a bunch of flowers. “Hola, Iñaki,” Juan said, standing up. He took the clipboard and explained my situation to Iñaki in Spanish, then said he was going out to smoke a cigarette. Iñaki sat down next to my bed and took my hand.
“I’m not going to die?” I asked him.
Iñaki smiled and shook his head. “You’re fine,” he said, stroking my hair. “You have a fever, but you’re going to be okay.”
The nurse came in with a tray of food. She put it down on my bedside table. “I’m not hungry,” I said as Iñaki took the lid off a dish of vegetable puree. But he placed the spoon in my hand and watched like an anxious parent as I put a spoonful of puree into my mouth. The taste of food replaced the medicinal taste in my mouth from the drugs, and as I started to eat, I realized that I was hungry after all. I finished off the puree and ate the little fruit salad provided for dessert.
Then I let my head fall back on the pillow. I was tired again, but I didn’t want Iñaki to leave. It was starting to hit me what had happened. I was in a Spanish hospital. How was that possible? Never in all my dreaming and planning about moving to Spain had I once entertained the idea that I would end up in hospital. What a disaster.
Only in Spain Page 23