Spanish Lessons

by Derek Lambert

  We adjourned with Emilio to the garage to find out what was happening to the Jaguar. Its body was raised on a ramp; parts of its engine lay on the greasy floor like the components of a stripped gun.

  A voice issued from the pit. We were lucky: the fault had been located. “When will it be ready?” I asked.

  “Mañana”—tomorrow. A bowlegged mechanic, his cherubic face daubed with oil, climbed out of the pit. Meanwhile, he could lend us a Seat 600, Spain’s ubiquitous little workhorse in the 1970s.

  We left Emilio behind and drove the car, little more than a battered toy, to the village bakery, where we bought four big crusty rolls for bocadillos, jaw-straining sandwiches stuffed with fillings such as tuna, cheese, chorizo (a relative of salami), or ham. In a grocery we bought Manchego cheese, strong as saddle soap, smoked ham, tomatoes and olive oil, plastic knives, forks, and cups, and a bottle of red wine from Navarra.

  The purchase of these small items made us feel proprietorial toward the village, like pioneers in an undiscovered outpost.

  We drove along a dirt road to a clearing in a citrus grove where orange pickers had left the remains of a fire, the hub of their almuerzo, their mid-morning snack. We stirred the still-hot ash and pale flames danced in the embers. Diane slit open the rolls, spread them with olive oil, and crammed them with cheese and sliced tomatoes.

  On one side of us, grapefruit lay rotting on the red earth beneath the trees, no longer a fashionable fruit, we had been told.

  A herd of munching goats passed by, accompanied by an ancient shepherd with a gooseberry chin and cloudy eyes. A burst of what sounded like machine-gun fire threw us into a panic while on our second cup of wine—merely fireworks marking a private fiesta.

  When we got back to the garage to check out the car again, Emilio was waiting for us. The number of engine parts on the floor had multiplied, and the mechanic was standing in the pit staring gloomily at the chassis.

  Emilio said he had taken the liberty of booking us into a hotel on the main Valencia-Alicante road, but now there was just time before it got dark to take a look at the property he had set aside for us. He would take us there in the Seat.

  Why not? We were free spirits.

  I thought I caught a flicker of clandestine understanding between the mechanic and Emilio. Were they in cahoots?

  Emilio squeezed his bulk behind the wheel of the little car and we took off.

  “Is the mechanic a friend of yours?” I asked.

  “The house is just around the corner,” he said, overtaking a motorcyclist who wobbled to a stop and raised one finger at him.

  “I asked you if you were friendly with the mechanic.”

  “He is not just a friend.” The Seat skidded to a halt outside a pair of wrought-iron gates. “He is my sister’s husband.”

  At the end of a short driveway stood a white casita, a small house, with barred windows, moldering roof tiles, and an exterior circular staircase with a rope handrail leading up to a terrace. The garden was hedged by tall cypress; a dozen or so citrus trees grew on one side of the driveway which continued down the opposite flank of the building, presumably to land hidden from sight at the rear. A single chimney rose like an imperious finger from the roof—incongruous on such a self-effacing building—and creeper covered the wall facing us.

  We waited for Emilio to unlock the gates.

  “We will approach from the rear,” he said.

  “Why not the front?”

  “I haven’t got the keys—I left them in my house.” He slapped the pockets of his blue dungarees.

  “Well, let’s go and get them.”

  “By the time we get back it will be too dark to see the place.”

  “So we’ll come back in the morning,” I said.

  “By then it might be sold.”

  “Overnight? Don’t push your luck, Emilio.”

  “This property is very special.”

  Special? In the fading light, the house looked more apologetic than prepossessing. And yet it beckoned as though it contained small mysteries that might one day become familiar to us.

  I shook off such fancies. Why had Emilio chosen this predusk hour to show the place to us? Was he a charlatan preying on vulnerable foreigners, or was he motivated by genuine pride in his adopted village? After all, he was a relative newcomer too. Maybe he longed to share it with other dewy-eyed newcomers.

  As the air turned colder and the outline of the house sharpened against the darkening sky, his voice grew conspiratorial, and an alarming possibility occurred to me: maybe he was crazy, armed with a hammer or a screwdriver sharpened to a point.

  He shepherded us to the Seat, drove a few hundred yards and parked on the roadside. Then he led us through a grove of neglected lemon trees, creepers entwined in their ragged branches. A couple of stars sparkled frostily, bats flitted overhead.

  He stopped at the foot of a drystone wall about eight feet high shoring up one of the former agricultural terraces built centuries ago by the Moors to retain the soil. He pointed at the top of it. “There is the end of your garden.”

  Diane said: “You mean we’ve got to climb the wall?”

  “Paradise lies up there,” Emilio told her.

  “Paradise lost, if the Guardia see us,” Diane murmured.

  Some prescient instinct told me that this moment could decide our future lives. It might be no more than the ignominious ascent of a crumbling wall; but surely fate, a geriatric Jaguar, and a Falstaffian carpenter had combined to offer us something more grandiose than the humble edifice we had seen through the wrought-iron gates.

  “Okay, let’s go,” I said to Diane.

  “Are you sure?” she asked. A rat or lizard scuttled along the wall. “We don’t want to make any decisions we’ll regret—we’ve got all the time in the world.”

  But Emilio was already climbing. Stones tumbled around us. A car stopped nearby for a moment or two, its engine idling, but then it took off again.

  Diane, who was wearing jeans, shrugged and found a foothold. I steadied her, she found a second ledge, and grasped Emilio’s down-stretched hand.

  I followed, and rolled onto the grass at their feet.

  Ahead stood fifty or so citrus trees. Beyond them, water glinted in the first light of the rising moon.

  We approached stealthily, snail shells crunching under our feet. The water turned out to be a swimming pool, a breeze shaving the moonlight on its surface into pieces of silver. Beyond that a lawn and a naya, an arched terrace. The arches were framed with bougainvillea; a tiny extension with a sloping roof stood to one side of the main building.

  Emilio flung wide one meaty arm. “Well?”

  The house looked mysterious, enchanted, in the moonlight. But it was small and we had our son, Jonathan, and friends from long ago who would probably resurrect our friendship when they heard we had bought a place in the sun. I almost hoped that the interior would be dripping with beards of moss, because there is nothing like rampant damp rot to put paid to an infatuation with a house.

  “It looks interesting,” I told Emilio, “but we would like to see inside.”

  “Of course.” He mounted the steps to the arched terrace and pointed through a barred window. “There!”

  I pointed at a massive wooden door. “Haven’t you got the key to that, either?”

  “Keys, you are always talking about keys. What you need is heart.”

  “For God’s sake, Emilio,” I said. “We’ve got to have a look around. Maybe it’s rotten inside. Maybe there are squatters in there. A body, a skeleton . . .”

  And maybe you are a fraud.

  Peering through the windows I could just make out an open grate beneath a copper hood and the charred remains of a fire. The floor was covered with ceramic tiles. No beards of moss.

  I imagined cushions scattered in front of a blazing log fire, Diane and I lying on them gazing into its glowing caverns.

  “The house is cozy,” Diane said, “but far too small.”

 
; Emilio chuckled. “Small? What is size? We will build a dining hall, you and me.” He gave me a rib-cracking hug. “Another fire-place, great beams, a gallery . . .”

  I imagined myself smoking a churchwarden pipe in an inglenook, waited upon by a serving wench wearing a low-cut bodice, rosy nipples visible to the discerning eye.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  “Think big, hombre,” Emilio said. “And think quickly, because tomorrow it may be gone.”

  TWO

  First Night, Second Thoughts

  After Diane and I had decided to quit our jobs in Africa, my newspaper sent me to Moscow. And as the prospects for gathering material for thrillers were glittering, we stayed there a year. Initially, the Russian consulate in Canada had refused to grant Diane a visa, but when I announced in Moscow that her absence would blight my dispatches, a KGB contact made one midnight phone call to Ottawa and she got her papers the following day.

  After a year in Russia I finally quit, and we lived in Israel, the United States, Canada, Ireland, and Gibraltar while I worked as a freelance journalist to muster funds to enable me to write THE NOVEL about the Soviet Union.

  I did make one abortive start. Seduced by stereotyped visions of Ireland—soft rain, salad-green pastures, bottomless wells of Guinness, and the wayward charm of the Irish—we rented rooms over-looking the ocean in the village of Ballycotton near Cork. There Diane developed a talent for painting and her neat, resolute figure, fair hair bright in the occasional sunshine beside her easel, became a landmark on the cliffs above the pounding Atlantic surf.

  We loved Ireland with unbridled passion and got married in Dublin—I had been married once before to an English girl but, like many others, the marriage had foundered on the treacherous rocks of journalism—but then our savings and my creative inspiration ran dry and we moved to Gibraltar, the peninsula on the southern tip of Spain that was bristling with news stories waiting to be plundered.

  One summer day, we crossed the border into Spain and knew that we had found our future homeland. We drove to the highlands of Galicia in the northwest and drank a firewater called orujo, and to the Pyrenean mountains spiking the border with France; we toured parade grounds of vines, plantations of silvery olive trees, and gasping ochre plains in the interior; swam off the shimmering beaches of the Mediterranean and skirted the wetlands of Doñana in the south-west. We stopped at cities as elegant as grandees and villages as threadbare as beggars.

  But because we were still poor, we had to wait another couple of years, sojourning in Canada and the United States, before, with a publisher’s advance for my still unwritten novel in my wallet, we finally drove to Spain in the 1970s in our chocolate-brown chariot, determined to put down roots. We also had a small son, Jonathan, whom we left temporarily in Montreal where he had been born, while we searched for the Elysian fields.

  I was awakened at one A.M. by shouting in the hotel that Emilio had found us. I shook off dreams of the house in the moonlight and the ragged lemon trees, struggled into the molting bathrobe that had served me well in luxurious watering holes and bug-ridden flop-houses around the world, and strode out of the room. I held only a few commodities to be precious and sleep was one of them.

  Down the corridor outside an open door, a naked man was slapping a fully clothed woman around the face. Remembering my headmaster’s final injunction—“Always treat the fair sex chivalrously”—I grabbed him by his shoulders and shoved him through the doorway.

  As he came back at me, bald and overweight but burly, I slammed the door in his face, grabbed the key from the woman, and locked it.

  I handed the key back to the woman, a plump bleached blonde, one eye slitted in swelling flesh. She spat at me, stuffed a wallet down the front of her rhinestone blouse, and ran down the corridor.

  Other men and women in various stages of undress appeared in doorways; a small man with strands of hair plastered from one ear to the other whom I took to be the night porter approached.

  I asked if he had called the police.

  “Why should I?” He looked perplexed.

  “Because a woman just stole his wallet,” I said, pointing toward the door the prisoner was battering from inside the room.

  The porter shook his head patiently. “He is the police,” he said.

  The porter put our minds to rest marginally when we paid the bill at seven-thirty A.M. Yes, we had been staying in a brothel; no, we needn’t worry about the policeman. When the hooker had realized the identity of her client from the contents of his wallet, she had returned it to the front desk.

  But I had assaulted him, I pointed out. The porter shrugged. This was a macho country; no police officer would admit he had been ripped off by a prostitute and tossed, naked, into a bedroom by an extranjero, a foreigner. In any case, he came from far away.

  The Seat was waiting for us under a stuttering neon sign CLUB. What we hadn’t realized last night was that “club” was often a euphemism for brothel.

  We stopped at a café for breakfast, ate toasted hunks of bread spread with olive oil, washed them down with café con leche, then drove to the garage.

  The Jaguar was still mounted forlornly on the ramp. Emilio stood outside, gold teeth reflecting sunlight in the depths of his smile.

  “You will, of course, make an offer for the house,” he said. “Never pay the price anyone asks—they will think you’re loco. In shops, always ask for discuento.”

  “We haven’t made up our minds,” I told him. “And why did you book us into a whorehouse?”

  “The owner is a cousin of mine . . . But never mind, we will go to the Bar Paraiso and discuss finance.”

  “Emilio, stop trying to railroad us. We don’t even know the asking price. Or the name of the owner.”

  Emilio tapped the side of his nose. All would be revealed. “Come.”

  “First, we’re going to look at other properties,” I said. “And tell the owner of your house that whatever price he’s asking it’s too much.”

  “But Señor Derek, even I don’t know what price he’s asking.”

  Odd, we agreed as we drove away. If Emilio was a scout who found properties and charged a commission on their sale, then surely he should know how much they cost.

  We called on several real estate agents two miles away in Denia, a fishing port kneeling beneath the walls of a ruined castle, its main, tree-lined street leading from a self-effacing square to a harbor with crab-claw jetties reaching into the Mediterranean, rocky inlets to one side, sandy beaches to the other. The agents showed us half a dozen “desirable properties” with views of the sea—if you stood on the chimney.

  A few were pleasant enough, with swimming pools and orchards and negotiable prices, but they were too close to the specter of tourist Spain, with its gift shops, tacky bars, and currency bureaus. And in any case, I was haunted by a picture of a small moonlit house waiting to have a timbered dining hall added to it.

  Later that morning we drove back to the house, approaching it circumspectly in case Emilio might be lurking there. We again climbed the terrace wall and wandered through the orchard. Oranges lay on the ground, a blackbird sang.

  The rear terrace was tiled in black and white squares, the white walls looked sturdy. Peering through all the barred windows, we saw high ceilings, webs left by generations of spiders trailing from beams, tiled floors, but, miniature annex apart, only two bedrooms. Never mind, we would be able to sleep an army in the dining hall. This hall, still only a figment of Emilio’s capacious imagination, already dwarfed the rest of the house in my mind.

  Diane read my thoughts. “We don’t know the price. We don’t even know if it’s for sale. And I don’t like the kitchen, it’s too poky, like the rest of it. And supposing Jonathan falls in the pool.”

  I made a mental note to call Diane’s parents in Montreal and ask them to arrange swimming lessons for four-year-old Jonathan.

  We climbed the spiral staircase to the roof terrace. Jasmine sprawled across it a
nd the view was awesome. Ahead stood Montgo, a small mountain with a broad brow. To its left lay a handful of whitewashed cottages and a lane winding through the dense, dark-green citrus orchards hung with oranges, lemons, grapefruit, and mandarins, to Denia in the distance. To its right, at the end of a road through the orchards, stood the village itself, sun-faded terraces clustered round the space-rocket church spire.

  Behind us stood the wrought-iron gates of the driveway we had seen the previous evening. They led onto a narrow road and a high, drystone wall encircling the grounds of a deserted mansion, once the home of a citrus baron, according to Emilio. The grounds encompassed a chapel, a line of swaying umbrella pines, and a coach house containing a landau that, according to legend, so Emilio said, took to the road on Midsummer Eve.

  We made inquiries from a couple of neighbors about the availability of our house.

  It had been on the market for a year they said—a far cry from Emilio’s call for swift action to secure it. It belonged to a property developer in Denia, and Emilio had no authority to sell it.

  So he was a flimflam merchant. And yet . . . There was a naive quality to his enthusiasm, as though he were deceiving himself as much as us. Even if he was out for a fast buck, he stood little chance of getting it if he didn’t even know who the owner was.

  Then one of the neighbors, a plump, middle-aged woman who was painting a picket fence green, told us that Emilio, devastated by the collapse of his father’s toy-making factory, often talked about building a minstrel gallery. “You know, one of those platforms with wooden rails near the ceiling where years ago musicians used to play.”

  I heard mandolins, lutes, clavichords, troubadours singing ballads.

  “Emilio loves music,” the woman said. “He wanted to play classical guitar but his fingers were too thick.”

  A minstrel gallery above an inglenook in a timbered dining hall! Emilio wasn’t a Mr. Five Percent: he was a dreamer who saw Diane and myself as the instruments of his fantasies. He was the blacksmith who dreams about shoeing the prancing Lipizzaner horses at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, the house painter haunting the galleries of the Prado in Madrid.