by Carlos Alba
I ignored him.
‘You wha, twenty-three, twenty-four . . . ?’
‘I’m twenty-two.’
‘Okay, twenty-two, and I pay you spend four years to sit and read books. Now is time tae get job and earn money, like your brother, and you go tae bloody Africa.’
‘You want me to be like my brother?’ I asked. ‘Divorced by twenty-seven with a son he never sees, unable to hold down a job and still living off his parents?’
‘Okay, you smartarse,’ he said witheringly. ‘You nae be smart little shit.’
‘What do you want from me, Papa?’ I screamed.
It was the first time I had ever raised my voice to him, and he recoiled. I waited for a reaction, not knowing what to expect. I thought he would be outraged, perhaps even violent, but instead he just stood, his eyes wide with incomprehension. I couldn’t hold back any longer. ‘What do you want? Tell me!’
‘Hey, you nae shout, you show respect. Poco de respeto.’
‘But it’s the only way to get through to you! You never listen to anything I say.’
He eyed me suspiciously and retreated a step. ‘You nae shout.’
I sat down and put my head in my hands. I could hear his laboured breathing, and I sensed Mama’s tension from across the room. Eventually I raised my head and looked directly at him, but he refused to make eye contact.
‘What are you saying, that you want me to stay at home to help out financially? That you want me to bring money into the house? Is that what this is really about?’
‘Why you dae this to me?’ he asked, pleadingly. ‘I work tae give you good living, tae give you education, so why you make your papa small?’
I was late arriving at the pub. It was full of excited new graduates, celebrating their freedom. I joined Cheryl, who was sitting in a group of classmates, along with a few friends from other faculties. Most of them had been drinking all day and they were grinning and half-cut, trading slurred non-sequiturs. She squeezed my hand and asked me if I was all right.
A short time later Max Miller arrived, looking serious. He had been at a meeting of the Socialist Workers’ Society general council, where, he explained, there had been an attempted putsch against a senior office-bearer who was guilty of some unpardonable ideological betrayal. He talked at length, and, though I wasn’t really paying attention, I was glad to have the company of someone still capable of coherent speech.
My friendship with Max Miller appeared to have recovered after a difficult period. I’d been uneasy around him after cuckolding him with Cheryl, but he seemed to have gotten over it. He hadn’t had a proper girlfriend since they’d split, despite the harem of attractive young women who perpetually surrounded him. Cheryl was unusually reticent about discussing their break-up, but she insisted that he wasn’t heartbroken, just a loner.
Max Miller had graduated with a first in philosophy the week before, but he hadn’t attended the ceremony, claiming he didn’t need a bourgeois trinket to validate his self-worth, but he was gracious enough to buy all of us a drink.
‘So you’re really going to work in Ethiopia?’ he asked.
Cheryl beamed. ‘Yes, it’s all systems go, we’ve been approved by the charity and we’re going to book our flights tomorrow. Aren’t we?’ she said, squeezing my hand.
I smiled weakly.
‘This time next month we’ll be teaching in a village school in Eritrea.’
‘That’s great. I really wish I was coming with you, but there’s so much going on in the Party at the moment. I’m worried that if I left now the whole branch would fall apart,’ Max Miller said.
He put his hand around the back of my head and pulled it towards him. Our foreheads touched, and he squeezed closer.
‘You’re doing a great thing, mate, you know that, don’t you?’
I tried to nod, but he had my head caught tightly against his.
‘I’m really proud of what you’re doing.’
18
I was going abroad for the first time and was determined to make the most of it. I had to admit the circumstances weren’t ideal: I was travelling with Mama and I was going to attend my grandmother’s funeral. Abuela had survived the stroke five years before, the stroke which had almost prompted my parents’ repatriation to Spain, but eventually she had succumbed to the twin afflictions of a weak heart and a rampant appetite.
I felt strangely unmoved by the news of her death, and consequently guilty. I told myself I’d never had a proper relationship with her and that such emotional detachment was understandable. I’d met her only once, after all, as a child, and we’d never spoken more than a few words of Spanish to each other. The only lasting memory of her was my embarrassment at the size of her pants. I tried to put these misgivings aside and think of the visit as a horizon-expanding opportunity to sample a new land and culture, to bask in the Mediterranean sun and enjoy the chance to relax, with a bit of bereavement and solemn genuflecting thrown in.
It was actually a good thing that only Mama and I would be making the trip. Papa had already established that he wouldn’t be going, and Pablito, as usual, had followed his lead. Papa justified his decision to stay at home by claiming he had no wish to “pray for dead franquista in room full a bloody Franquistas”.
I had no more wish to sit in a room full of bloody Franquistas than he did, but I was prepared to do so to support Mama. I also needed a change of scene and routine. I was less than a year into my career as an assistant on the local evening paper, and already I felt as though I’d been doing it for a lifetime.
Every morning I arrived in the office at six o’clock and ministered to the whims of a cadre of ill-tempered hacks until it was time to go home, where Mama had prepared my dinner, which I ate before settling down to watch television for the remainder of the evening until it was time to go to bed, to sleep so I could wake the following morning to go through the whole will-sapping routine again.
Weekends were uneventful. Sometimes I went out with Pablito. His favoured haunt was Cleopatra’s nightclub, known locally as Clatty Pat’s, an unpretentious venue where your feet stuck to the floor and a night wasn’t a good night without a fistfight at the bar. It was a peculiarly democratic environment, where wealth and status stood for nothing in the darkened, late-night charge of alcohol-fuelled confusion and carnal desperation. A limited Egyptian theme amounted to the Ladies and Gents toilets being renamed ‘Pharaohesses’ and ‘Pharaohs’ and a large stuffed camel in a sandpit which was occasionally used by customers as a urinal.
I had never seen Pablito more at home than when he was propped up at the bar of Clatty Pat’s with a glass in one hand and an inebriated female attendee hanging on his every double-entendre. Inevitably I’d leave earlier than him, incoherent and bloated with strong lager. Pablito would return home the following mid-morning and climb beneath his bedcovers, rough and sated, smelling of stale cigarette smoke and cheap sex.
Mostly I stayed in and wrote to Cheryl. Although I’d decided after all to stay at home and get a job, she had gone to Africa as planned. And because telephone communication to Ethiopia was unreliable and expensive, we’d only spoken twice in ten months. There was a slight time delay too, which meant that both conversations had been disjointed and annoyingly faint. We’d had to shout, so it had been difficult to gauge her tone. And of course I couldn’t be as intimate as I’d have liked with my parents in the next room. Letter-writing was equally unsatisfactory. She sent detailed, effusive stories about the great work she was doing with the collection of dynamic, committed people she’d met, but she wrote very little about us, about whether or not she missed me, whether she still felt the same about me. Her new friends sounded glamorous and infuriatingly middle-class – they all had names like Nadia, Brett and Corey, and they’d been brought up on game reserves in Tanzania and Zambia, or had attended American schools in Switzerland, or both. They all had ‘really amazing plans for the future’ – studying multimedia and Sanskrit at Columbia, joining the International Red Cr
oss, or working in bonds on Wall Street. Whenever a male name appeared in one of her letters, I felt a painful stab of sexual jealousy. If the same name was mentioned more than once, I collapsed into a pit of self-hating despair and tortured myself imagining them all having vigorous, exotic sex in a great altruistic gap-year orgy.
In one letter Cheryl told me that Max Miller had recently joined the VSO programme and that he, too, was being posted to Ethiopia. I hadn’t seen him since we’d left university. I wrote back, hinting that I was upset he hadn’t told me about it in person, but she wrote that he’d only recently accepted the posting and she had found out about it after seeing his name on a list of new appointees. She went on to point out, unsolicited, how he’d be based in Addis Ababa, almost five hundred miles away from where she was, so it was unlikely they’d ever see one another.
My trip to Spain could not have been more timely. At last I felt as though I too was being adventurous and achieving something. From the moment I stepped off the aircraft, into the hot buffeting wind on the runway, I felt surprised and liberated, as if colour had suddenly been introduced into my monochrome world. The landscape was rough, with a dry, smoky smell from the parched earth. The airport workers were dark-skinned and attractive, and their manner was pleasantly informal. They smiled at me as we passed them, and I felt somehow they were familiar.
We moved through the terminal building at an agreeably relaxed pace and hailed a taxi whose engine clattered and clunked as we pulled on to a busy dual carriageway. The smiling driver, who chain-smoked and wore sandals, drove speedily and volubly, giving us what I assumed was a running commentary on the events of his day. We drove into the narrow steets of Malaga, past residential blocks with candy-striped canopies, boxy air-conditioning units and chaotically draped items of laundry. Mama’s family had moved here from Tangier in the late 1950s after Morocco had gained independence, shortly after she and Papa had moved to Scotland.
It was mid-afternoon when we arrived at Tia Teresa’s apartment, located in an unremarkable neighbourhood near the centre. The street was eerily quiet, its shops closed for the siesta. Next to her building a municipal basketball court lay empty, its concrete pitch baking in the afternoon sun. As we emerged from the taxi I felt the intense heat drain my limbs of strength. I began to sweat heavily, the moisture causing my shirt to stick hard to my back.
Mama rang the buzzer and the glass door clicked open. It was a relief to step into the coolness of the polished stone hallway. We struggled up to the first floor with our suitcases. Teresa greeted us warmly, ushering us into a dim apartment that smelled of garlic and perming lotion. We moved along a row of grinning strangers, like guests in a line-up at a wedding reception, who clutched us and kissed us vigorously, reminding me of Abuela’s arrival in Scotland all those years ago.
Someone relieved us of our suitcases and we were guided into a cool parlour furnished with a mock-leather three-piece suite, a dining table and a matching display cabinet filled with cheap wine glasses and photographs of various children attending their First Communions.
Teresa emerged from a small kitchenette, carrying a tray with a bottle of red wine and bowls of nuts and olives. She retrieved some glasses from the display cabinet with a degree of reverence that suggested this was not a frequent occurrence. There wasn’t enough room for everyone on the suite, so several people sat on upright chairs and on the floor.
We spent the afternoon chatting endlessly about this and that. Although I couldn’t follow all of what was being said, I could recognise enough words to know roughly the theme of the discussion, and that none of it concerned anything of great importance.
I’d been expecting, with some trepidation, sober observance of Abuela’s death and even, perhaps, an open display of her cold corpse, but neither of these things happened. There was passing reference to the sad event, but no one seemed keen to dwell on it.
‘Ella era una señora mayor,’ said one of those present. ‘She was an old lady.’
‘Si, es por la major,’ said another. ‘Yes, it was for the best.’
Much of the conversation revolved around me – how well I was doing, which side of the family I resembled most, when I was getting married, why I hadn’t visited Spain before, why I didn’t speak Spanish. It made me feel self-conscious, yet also flattered to be the centre of attention.
Gradually I was able to work out who was who. Teresa was smart and attractive, with a lively demeanour. She was dressed in a youthful, brightly coloured cotton dress that accentuated her curves, and she had obviously recently visited the hairdresser because her dark, curly hair was freshly set. She was several years older than Mama but looked younger.
Her husband, Salvador, was grey and overweight, dressed in cheap, ordinary clothes. He had warm, expressive eyes and an unremittingly jovial demeanour, laughing throughout the afternoon, making witty observations and cracking jokes that I instinctively found amusing, although I had no idea what he was saying. He seemed to be unlike Papa in every regard.
Their sons, José and Fabio, were about my age, one a little younger, I guessed, slim, swarthy and with jet-black hair. Facially they looked like me enough for it to be slightly unnerving, but as time passed it seemed less so. It was even quite gratifying as they were both good-looking. They sat dutifully, enthusiastically engaging in the conversation.
They had an elder sister, Sancha, who was bookishly pretty and around Pablito’s age, and a brother, Cesaro, a year or two older than her, who had a beard and whose contributions were quietly authoritative. The others were an assortment of uncles, aunts and cousins whose names and provenance I had yet to establish.
What struck me was how affectionate they were to each other and to Mama and me. They weren’t the collection of murderous fascists that Papa had made them out to be, and although I didn’t know them, and couldn’t understand everything they said, I felt a sure sense of belonging.
As the afternoon progressed more wine appeared, followed by bottles of cold beer, plates of cured meat and seafood and salads, then an assortment of stews and bread, then sweets, fruit and pastries, and finally coffee and brandy, until it was well into the night. Eventually, around midnight, the guests began to return to their homes. I was ready to turn in, but José and Fabio had plans to take me out into the town. I was tired and unsteady, but they were so excited by the prospect that it seemed rude to decline. I freshened up in the bathroom and changed my shirt. As we stepped out my cousins kissed their parents and embraced them tightly, and I felt obliged to do likewise.
Because the alcohol had relieved me of any inhibitions I might have had about trying to communicate through hand signals and the few words of Spanish that I knew, and we managed to keep a lively conversation going as we meandered along the warm streets. Though it was midweek and after midnight, the bars were crowded and the streets buzzed with chatter and laughter. I felt relaxed and utterly happy.
We flitted from bar to bar, where José and Fabio seemed to know everyone, and I was continually introduced to smiling, friendly people who kissed me on the cheeks and offered me drinks and cigarettes. Though none of them spoke much English, they went out of their way to engage me in conversation and ask me questions about where I came from and what I did.
After several drinks we went to a nightclub, accompanied by a coterie of friends gathered along the way. It was a high and cavernous building, like an aircraft hangar, with whitewashed brick walls and an uneven stone floor. In the hazy atmosphere I found myself standing with my arms around a girl who’d been with us since the second or third bar. She was trim and petite – even in her high, scarlet heels she only just reached my chest. She had long, straight black hair that reflected the light like a still pond, and large chestnut eyes. We’d had a brief conversation sometime before we arrived at the nightclub in which I’d told her I didn’t speak Spanish, which she seemed to find intriguing. She’d told me her name but I’d forgotten it. It could have been Lucita. Or Paulita. Or perhaps something else entirely.
‘¿Por qué no?’ he asked on the exhale. ‘Why not?’ His voice was deep and gruff, like that of a voiceover actor in a low-budget melodrama.
‘Porque no quiero,’ I said. ‘Because I don’t want to.’
He looked at me sceptically, his mouth arched downwards. ‘¿Querría algo mas?’ ‘Would you like anything else?’
I didn’t know what he meant, and I frowned.
‘Heroína, cocaína, anfetaminas?’
I flushed with sudden conspicuousness, afraid that even by talking to him I was somehow doing something wrong.
I pulled away and went off to look for my cousins. José was standing on the other side of the bar, next to a plump black woman dressed unfussily in a cheesecloth shirt and a long patterned skirt and sandals. She was drinking beer from a bottle and looked somehow out of place. José introduced us and she extended her hand.
‘Pleased ta meet yer, love,’ she said in an east London accent.
Her name was Rachel. She’d come to Malaga the previous year, to work as an au pair with the children of a banker and his wife. She’d arrived without speaking the language, but had picked it up in a matter of months, she said, and now she planned to settle in Spain because she loved the country so much.
It was a relief to speak English, having spent the day struggling to be understood, taking an age to convey the simplest communication. It was also interesting to be able to question someone from back home about their perceptions of Spain. If only I could get my brain to function properly, I thought.
‘You ’ad a few, darlin’?’ she asked as I swayed from foot to foot.
I ordered a glass of iced water, and slowly I felt my senses return. We stood shouting above the pounding, deafening beat of Europop booming through the speakers, with me firing questions at her and at José through her. I was surprised to learn that both José and Fabio lived with their parents, despite having worked since they were seventeen and both having well-paid jobs.