Spanish Lessons

by Derek Lambert

  Tomás arrived at dawn the following day. One of his two pigeons had won yesterday’s race, he told us, but the other was missing. He accepted a cup of coffee and splashed brandy from a hip flask into it.

  “Thank you again,” he said, “for allowing us onto your property.” He slugged his coffee with a second shot of brandy. “Work will start again on your dining hall later today.”

  And it did. But I doubted whether it would have done so if he had seen the handful of blood-stained feathers at the end of the garden. Nor would he have been impressed by the single painted feather protruding from Jones’s jaws.

  SIX

  The Night Spiderwoman Fell in My Lap

  As night fell, the vacant lot near the balding football field in the village was empty except for two dogs twitching in fleabitten dreams and a courting couple sighing in each other’s arms.

  By the following morning it was covered by a tent as dew-wet as a mushroom at dawn.

  The circus had arrived bringing with it threadbare glamour—and two mysteries—on its coattails. I had never enjoyed circuses, but the excitement generated in the village was infectious.

  Traveling circuses visited some Spanish towns twice a year, their appearance heralded by exotic strangers. Leathery impresarios with dyed hair and gold teeth; fan-snapping wives carrying their years with aplomb; young dudes assessing the local talent; girls with flashing eyes and hoops in their ears. And at night the cough of lions could be heard.

  This circus didn’t have quite so much impact, no big cats, only the moth-eaten domestic pets that accompanied it. But posters advertising Superman and the Amazing Spiderwoman and other daunting acts did appear on walls alongside faded posters from long-forgotten elections. Tickets promising half-price admission were distributed in bars and a van toured the countryside, loudspeakers blaring.

  One mystery began to unfold when Jaime, the jockey-size barman at the Paraiso, announced that he had served a beer to a customer claiming to be Superman.

  At lunchtime Pilar, the pertly pretty owner of a cramped little grocery, revealed that she had sold chorizo, cheese, and a packet of chewing gum to a clown in her store.

  Sightings multiplied. A cashier at the bank claimed he had cashed a traveler’s check for the juggler; a seamstress had sewed sequins onto the costume of the knife-thrower’s partner; the pharmacist had served the strongman with an iron tonic.

  If all these appearances were genuine, even if the players weren’t dressed for their parts, the streets should have been strutting with characters from Marvel comics. But they weren’t.

  This mystery was soon solved: it was a small family circus and its members performed a variety of acts.

  The clown was both the strong man and Superman; his plump wife was Spiderwoman, a rodeo rider from the “Wild, Wild West” and clerk at the pay desk at the entrance to the tent.

  The second mystery was more worrying—an outbreak of burglaries in the area. Gypsies were often blamed by the police for such crimes, more common since Franco died, taking his repressive rule with him to his grave and, well, circus people weren’t that far removed from gypsies, were they?

  The villagers didn’t apportion blame, they merely relished the presence of the swaggering performers from the little tent as they watered their ponies on the waste land, flexed their muscles in the winter sunlight, and laundered their gaudy apparel in the public wash house beside women scrubbing and wringing Bible-black skirts.

  The village girls haunted the two young men, as sleek as panthers with Romany faces, like fans doting on pop stars, while men of all ages gazed wistfully at Superman and Spiderwoman’s daughter-in-law, who wore a molting leopard-skin coat and looked like Gina Lollibrigida.

  I met her in a bar where she was drinking chocolate milk and eating a slice of potato tortilla. She beckoned me over to her table and said: “You’re not from around here, huh?” She spoke with an Italian accent. “You’re a writer?”

  “How did you know?” I sipped my cup of black coffee.

  “You’re watching all the time. Making the notes up here.” She tapped her black, upswept curls with one chipped shell-pink fingernail. “Why don’t you write a story about our circus? Our movie-star lives. Two caravans, one-horse towns, breaking my ass twice a night to please peasants hoping I fall off the high wire . . . Not so high in my case.” She smiled, revealing lipstick on one of her front teeth. “You should travel with us.”

  “Maybe I will one day,” I said. “Why do you stay if you hate it so much?”

  She explained with one word, as though it summed up all the torment in the world. “Family.” She nibbled the last crumb of tortilla. “My husband’s mama and papa . . . I leave, they die. Maybe you write a story about us and sell it to Hollywood. Little Big Top?” She looked at me hopefully. “You write a part for me?”

  “What do you do?”

  “I spin from a rope tied to a collar round my neck,” she said. “I walk on the wire. I go around and around on a wheel while my husband throws knives at me. If we fight before the show, then, poof.” She put one hand to her heart. “At half-time I sell sodas and popcorn. I look out for you. I give you free popcorn.”

  “You’ve got yourself a deal,” I said. “One pack of free popcorn and one day I’ll write a book about you.”

  “And one day the pigs will fly. I suppose you think we are thieves too.” She finished her chocolate milk and swept out of the bar onto the street.

  Later I heard from Emilio that there had been three more robberies. Cash from a house in a grove of grapefruit trees, paintings from the attic of a mansion, and jewelry from a newlywed couple’s cottage.

  Could the circus people be responsible? I doubted it: the fact that the burglaries coincided with their arrival was too obvious. I decided to try to help them.

  That afternoon two young Guardia Civil, a far cry from the Civil War stereotypes who had stopped beside us in the orange groves, arrived in the village in a small green-and-white car. Debonair and friendly, wearing olive-green uniforms and peaked caps, they inspected the circus and its two caravans, talked tersely into handsets, and frowned wisely.

  The Guardia were responsible for law enforcement outside cities and towns and as Spain was the second largest European country after France they controlled a considerable patch.

  The officers called at our house two hours after their arrival.

  One of them, freckled with crew-cut hair, saluted and said: “We understand you are the owner of a spinning wheel.”

  True—I had bought an antique weaver’s spinning wheel, small and made of wood, its wheel controlled by a single foot pedal, in an antique shop in Denia. I thought it would add a touch of class redolent of the past to the dining hall.

  The other Guardia, slimmer with shiny black hair, said: “A spinning wheel is among the items reported stolen in the past few days.”

  “Not my spinning wheel,” I said. “I bought it.”

  “Who from?”

  I gave him the name of the shop and he wrote in his notebook.

  “Does this mean I’m a suspect?”

  The crew-cut Guardia shrugged. “Do you know where the owner of the shop got the spinning wheel?”

  “No,” I said. “And I don’t know where the shopkeeper got these when I bought them,” pointing at my shoes.

  “Tranquilo, señor.”

  “I know, you’re only doing your job . . .” I said.

  “You have been interviewed by the police before?”

  “Only for rape and murder.”

  The slim Guardia smiled. “Careful, señor, we might take you seriously. Do you mind if we take the spinning wheel and check it out? We will return it, of course, if it’s . . . clean. Is that how you say it in English?” He smiled again.

  My father, a bank official, had warned me: “Beware of smiling policemen and con men who shake your hand.”

  “Take what you like,” I told him. “Take the dog if you want.”

  Jones barked.


  Fury at the injustice of the implied accusation possessed me, but I had to admit the Guardia had what seemed to be a genuine lead. Supposing the spinning wheel had been stolen? I would be detained, interrogated, brought before a judge, and probably released on bail. The delay before my court appearance could take as long as six months followed by a hefty fine if I couldn’t clear myself. Imprisonment if I had a previous record (no fear of that) or if I was convicted of the other break-ins. Not so different from procedures in the United States or Britain except for the cavalier attitude here to delay.

  Watched inscrutably by Ethel, followed by Jones still yapping—Emilio and Ángel had vanished—the Guardia poked around for a while and asked to see my papers.

  Three factors saved me—Diane was shopping in Denia—from closer scrutiny. One, the dining hall. They looked at the deep pile of powdered cement, gazed at the mirror-bright toecaps of their shoes, and turned away.

  Two, the revelation that I was a writer.

  One of them stared at my chaotic desk—books on the Trans-Siberian, last night’s empty whisky glass, and this morning’s tea mug.

  “You write here?” the slim Guardia asked.

  I nodded.

  “What sort of books?”

  “I’m working on a thriller.”

  They continued to stare at the desk in disbelief. Did acts of derring-do really emanate from such disarray?

  “What does your wife do?” Crew-cut asked.

  “She paints.” I pointed through the window at her easel on the terrace. “She also writes.”

  “Here?” He prodded the desktop.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Romances?”

  “Not quite.” Diane had started working for a glossy English-language magazine in Spain, Lookout, and had just written an article about our friend Beryl Kranz, the American painter of nudes, entitled “Bosoms, Bottoms, and Beryl.”

  At this point Hoppity came tapping into the room on his wooden leg. That was the clincher. The two Guardia took one look at him and decided to make a strategic withdrawal from such a madhouse. Before they could leave, in the interests of the circus people I gave them the benefit of my days as a crime reporter, my instincts sharpened perhaps by my own excursion into thriller writing, before they left.

  The robberies, I told them, all had the hallmarks of inside jobs. The thieves all seemed to have gone unerringly to the locations in each of the houses where the loot had been kept. No one in the circus could have had that knowledge. Burglars often cultivated maids or handymen who innocently divulged the whereabouts of valuables. Perhaps all three victims had the same employee . . .

  They nodded indulgently, the way police patronize meddling private eyes in TV series, and departed in their neat green-and-white car, taking the spinning wheel with them. I felt like grabbing it from them, but that would have guaranteed a night in the slammer.

  Meanwhile, theories about the identities of the thieves had begun to sweep through the village as joyously as floodwater.

  In the Bar Paraiso, an old man who was paid to stop snails roaming from a stall in a market—he merely detained them when they made a protracted run for it—sipped cornot, the locally distilled moonshine, poured from an unlabeled bottle, and whispered: “Superman,” adding, “but keep that to yourself,” those fateful words that make a town crier of every one.

  The suspect favored behind conspiratorial billows of suds in the wash house, we were told, was the traveling grocer. The knife-grinder also had his accusers. And, of course, we foreigners were high on everyone’s lists.

  I consulted Emilio. He smashed one fist against a studded door—he was rumored to drive home nails unimpaired by a hammer—and said enigmatically: “Necessity makes a thief of every man.”

  I sought out Ángel, although I should have known better, and asked him what he thought.

  He put down his trowel and scratched his head through the hole in his straw fedora. “There are strangers in the village,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I have seen them.”

  “You mean apart from the circus people?”

  “They are from the north.”

  Unsure whether this incriminated or absolved them, I asked him how he arrived at this conclusion.

  “I have heard them speak.”

  “What were they talking about?”

  “Money,” Ángel said. “Or lack of it.”

  “You think they are the thieves?”

  “They know who they are,” he said, completing a masterly digression on the obscure.

  That day, a few hours before the circus was due to open, there was another robbery. A house just outside the village, owned by a young bachelor who worked in a bank in Denia, was broken into and traveler’s checks and a pair of loudspeakers were stolen.

  Later that day as we took our seats in the tent, we noticed villagers glancing at the loudspeakers high in the canvas, but they were so battered, the music issuing from them so cracked, that surely no one would have bothered to steal them.

  “Such terrible speakers need to be replaced.” said Ángel, who was sitting next to me, Diane, and Jonathan. “Maybe—”

  But any dark suspicions he may have harbored about them were cut short by the arrival of the ringmaster, wearing black boots, a jacket of hunting pink, and a top hat, whose bark commanded the audience’s attention. Children’s fingers relaxed their grip on the licorice roots they were chewing, women’s hands lay motionless in bags of popcorn.

  The first act was a rodeo rider—the proprietor’s wife from the “Wild, Wild West,” who was said to have taught movie stars to ride horses.

  We waited expectantly, the smell of wild herbs that grew on the vacant lot which had been crushed underfoot strong in our nostrils; layers of cigarette smoke lodged in the glare of the spotlights.

  Finally a gray pony emerged and trotted prettily round the ring pursued by a plump equestrienne in buckskin who jumped on and off a couple of times, finally standing unsteadily on the saddle. As pony and rider disappeared through the exit we heard a fleshy thump. She didn’t look like a thief to me.

  The audience applauded enthusiastically and Jonathan spat out the husk of a sunflower seed he had been nibbling. So too, I noticed, did Diane.

  Next a clown. White cheeked and red nosed, a clown to be sure, as he poured a bucket of water inside his baggy trousers but, I now knew, Superman in disguise.

  He was followed by the tightrope walker, a beautiful shiny-haired girl carrying a cane and wearing fishnet tights, breasts straining at a black bodice. The girl I had met over a glass of chocolate milk.

  Ángel’s wife, petite and pretty with lustrous dark eyes, dug her husband in the ribs as he gaped at her.

  Then the strongman (the clown), taxing his retiring muscles as he bent a few nails and, with a sharp cry of pain, snapping a brick with the edge of his hand.

  During the intermission a girl wearing a blond wig sold sodas and popcorn. Gina Lollibrigida again. She threw me a packet of popcorn, refusing to take any money. “What was all that about?” Diane demanded.

  “Payment for services to be rendered,” I said.

  The second half began with an act in which the girl, a collar round her neck, rotated from a rope attached to the roof of the tent. Soon her husband would be throwing knives at her; I hoped they hadn’t had a fight.

  When she had finished spinning, one of the young bloods in the village shouted: “Where’s Spiderwoman?” and a girl demanded: “Where’s Superman?”

  The lights went out. Girls giggled nervously. When the lights came on again there was Spiderwoman, alias the rodeo rider, standing on a nylon rope web stretched between two beams at the top of the tent.

  She wore a gray bodystocking, inked webbing stretched by the generous contours of her body into confusing patterns.

  With a shrill scream she launched herself down from her web into space, skimming dangerously low over our heads.

  Behind us she kicked herself off from
a metal tent support and swept back again across the sawdust in the direction of her web, falling short by a foot or so. By now she was in danger of hanging ignominiously from the rope suspended above the ring.

  Not this arachnid. She created momentum like a child on a swing and made it back to our territory, dropping into the space between Ángel and myself. There she unbuckled her rope and fell into my lap. A not entirely pleasurable experience because she was a lot of woman.

  Disentangling herself, she stood up and raised two fists above her head, a gesture that sent the threads of her web on her body-stocking into spasms.

  This was followed by the knife throwing—no prior fight, apparently—some juggling, and an act in which the proprietor’s son sawed his sister in half in a coffin.

  It had been rumored that Superman would dive from a high platform into a tank of water. And suddenly there he was, trespassing above the ring on Spiderwoman’s web, resplendent in cape and blue tights that sagged alarmingly at the crotch.

  Had no one told him there was no tank of water in the ring?

  The silence in the tent thickened. Jonathan clapped one hand to his mouth and, not too convincingly, I tried to reassure him.

  Then Superman launched himself into space on Spiderwoman’s rope. He landed in front of us and chased Spiderwoman, coyly waiting for him, out of the tent with a lumbering gait. A fitting climax, it seemed to me.

  While Diane drove Jonathan home, I went to one of the two shabby caravans to find Gina—I didn’t care if her name was Mavis, she was Gina to me—and thanked her for the popcorn.

  She was sitting in front of a mirror lit by a single bulb. Her husband, Chimo, the proprietor’s son who had just sawed his sister in half, sat in a canvas director’s chair.

  I asked her if the Guardia suspected any members of the circus of the robberies.

  “Of course,” Chimo replied for her. He wore a pale blue T-shirt and muscles danced on his brown arms as he linked his hands behind his neck. “They always suspect us. We’re traveling people, always guilty. You a betting man? I’ll make a bet with you. The thief is a foreigner, one of your kind.”