“He says his work is done.”
“His work? My work. All he did was dig two and a half holes.”
“He says it was the holes that did the trick. Narrowed down the site of the blockage to where you sunk the stake. The stake pierced the pipe and relieved the pressure. But it will have to be repaired. He says you took advantage of his skills.”
“Bullshit!” I said. “I found the blockage. The earth actually moved under my feet. After that there was nothing to it, just like pricking a balloon. Tell him I’ll pay him for his time, not his skill.”
Emilio told him; at least I think he told him, because he spoke in Valenciano.
The specialist penciled a sprawl of figures in a notebook, tore out a page, and handed it to Emilio. Obviously he wanted no physical contact with a perfidious foreigner.
“Tell him I’ll pay him half what he’s asking,” I said. “When he’s filled in his holes.” Which was fair: I had located the blockage and I would get someone else to repair the pipe I had pierced.
Emilio spoke to the specialist again, then turned back to me. “He says a surgeon doesn’t have to sew wounds.”
“But a butcher has to clean up his mess,” Diane said. Although emotional, she was more level-headed than I was when she thought someone was trying to outsmart us. She didn’t destroy the opposition, she withered it.
Emilio spoke to the specialist, who shrugged and resignedly began to fill the holes.
Relief surged through me. I had won a practical and moral victory.
When he had finished, I settled the bill at 50 percent of the asking price and went for a stroll with Diane.
We walked to the village a few minutes away, passing a Judas tree with diamonds of rainwater clasped in its pink blossoms. Crossed the dangerous intersection where impacted glass lay as much a fixture as permafrost in Siberia, passed the pharmacy with its illuminated green cross outside, and turned into the main street.
It was early afternoon and the windows of the houses were shuttered. Children waiting for the yellow school bus played marbles among the puddles on the sidewalks. A group of teenagers clustered around the window of a small shop—closed like others until four-thirty or five—peering at a list of wedding presents that a couple about to get married wanted. Laughter spilled out from the bars onto the somnolent street.
We went to a functional new bar-café where young people met in the evenings and ordered coffee and chocolate éclairs oozing with frothy cream.
When we got home, clouds were gathering again on the horizon and Ángel was harvesting broad beans in his stockade.
I told him that while he’d been at the hospital with his wife, Emilio had called in a specialist to cure the underground eruptions. I had found the site of the blocked pipe but he had tried to claim the glory.
Ángel handed me a plastic bag filled with beans. “Paco always does.”
“Always? What do you mean, always?”
“It’s just a question of time,” Ángel said. “He digs a few holes and waits for the pipes to clear themselves. They always do even though it takes time.” His English was improving much faster than my Spanish.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t know Emilio was going to call him. Did Emilio recommend him?”
“He didn’t bother, he just phoned him.” Suspicions about Emilio’s loose interpretation of integrity surfaced again. “Why?”
“Paco is Emilio’s uncle,” Ángel said.
“You guessed the problem was in the pipes?”
Ángel nodded.
“So why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because they are underground.” He had the good grace to avert his eyes and continue picking beans.
“Of course,” I said. “How stupid of me.”
It rained hard that night. Red rain.
EIGHT
Scheming and Shopping
We felt guilty, almost as if we were committing adultery. Normally we shopped at Pilar’s in the village, but on several occasions we defected to the indoor food market in Denia.
Worse, like furtive bed-hoppers, we discovered ways to justify our transgressions, and even implicated Jonathan.
It wasn’t that Pilar’s store was inadequate. You could have stocked up for a nuclear fallout in her cramped emporium that smelled of washing powder, dried fish, and ripe fruit.
Pickled onions bobbed like corks in a huge jar of vinegar. Strings of yellow candles hung from the wall linked by a common wick that had to be cut when they were bought. Dusty bottles of herbal aperitifs from the Mediterranean island of Ibiza stood shoulder to shoulder with bottles of cheap wine, corriente. Manchego cheeses from the heartland of Spain sweated beside cuts of smoked ham, which Pilar shaved into transparent tongues with a circular slicer with a wicked blade. Long chorizo sausages hung from hooks like dead snakes; they could be sliced and eaten cold as tapas or tossed into a stew, or skinned to extract the filling to make a spread called sobrasada. Fresh fruits and vegetables nestled in a rack in one corner.
Forage and you could stock up with rat poison, after-shave, balls of string, pumice stones, beach shoes, rainbow-colored bars of soap, sulfuric acid, aspirin, razor blades, or licorice roots to chew—almost anything hawked by a salesman on whom Pilar took pity because he was a father of eight and had tragic eyes, or a frail grandfather who should have been resting on a bench under the acacia trees at the end of the street trawling the past.
To her customers Pilar, who was in her thirties, rosy-cheeked and petite, was victualler, arbiter, and financier.
While parochial argument—the pros and cons of installing traffic lights at the murderous crossroads, the use of Valenciano on road signs, noise abatement in the bars (pretty much a lost cause)—raged around her, she adjudicated, measured sugar into twists of brown paper, netted pickled eggs floating in liquid as murky as pond water, weighed an artichoke or a turnip—purchases were often meager—and scribbled debts in a notebook with the stub of an indelible pencil, wetting the mauve point with a cat lick of her tongue.
Her customers were a mixed bag. Grandmothers in black, young wives in curlers and bathrobes rationing their pesetas, swarthy gypsy women with wads of money stuffed down their blouses.
The gypsies, about twenty of them, lived nearby beneath tarpaulin and plastic covers on a smoking rubbish dump. They shopped ambitiously and were collected by a patriarch in a battered Mercedes. Where their money came from I had no idea, only that if your home was a mountain of combustible garbage then you were entitled to a few of life’s trimmings. They spoke conventional Spanish peppered with a few pungent words of their own.
Gypsies, many of them far removed from any Romany bloodline, had a rough ride in many parts of Spain. The purveyors of flamenco, which originated in Andalusia in the eighteenth century, were well respected, but outside that hand-clapping, guitar-strumming, heel-tapping brotherhood they were often treated with contempt.
Foreigners at Pilar’s were sparse, but a retired British Army brigadier and his wife shopped there. They were as fragile as moths and as tough as turtles, legacies of wars in which they had learned self-sufficiency. They patroled Pilar’s counters as a unit, clutching onto each other, and departed balanced with laden baskets, driving away in a small white car with imperious aplomb.
Some customers came just to talk, resuming conversations they had begun in the wash house, others handed Pilar shopping lists while they called at the butcher’s, where two women chopped up chickens with savage application, or the pasteleria to buy cakes for birthdays, saints’ days, weddings, first communions, and fiestas, or the sepulchral tobacconists, or the drapers that also sold glassware and toys.
Diane was enlisted by Pilar to help her pass judgment on food. Pilar, married to a salesman, was busily and brightly independent, occasionally summoning her parents or her sister-in-law to cope with a Saturday morning scrum of customers, brushing at her black fringe of hair with impatient fingers, but she valued Diane’s cosmopolitan tastes.
I
watched one day from our car parked outside—I was conscripted only as carrier and driver—while they sampled a consignment of fruit; the delivery man, fiery cheeked and impatient, fumed while they sniffed and squeezed and nibbled.
When they shook their heads, he savagely struck an item from his invoice. When they nodded, he penciled an extravagant tick. I went into the shop when Diane, in the absence of Pilar, who had taken a tray of bananas into the storage room, was tasting what appeared to be a tomato and arguing with the delivery man.
“Here, try this,” She thrust a shiny red fruit into my hand. I nibbled. It was so bitter that it contracted my cheeks. “He’s trying to tell me there’s nothing wrong with it.”
“There isn’t.”
She glared at me. “A tomato like that could shrivel your tongue.” Maybe not such a bad idea, her tone suggested.
“Except that it isn’t a tomato.”
“Listen, I might not be Julia Child, but I do know a tomato when I see one.”
“It’s a caqui,” I said. “As bitter as alum when it’s delivered to a shop. But it ripens almost immediately and becomes as sweet as honey.”
The delivery man who seemed to be getting the drift of our conversation raised his pencil expectantly and glanced at me gratefully.
Diane grinned. “Okay, as caquis go it’s not too bad.”
The deliveryman scrawled a triumphant tick on his invoice. His place was taken by another wholesaler, and Diane and Pilar moved onto chorizo and its skinnier cousin, fuet, Manchego cheese, and dried fish.
Occasionally Pilar delivered our groceries to our house by van, and she and Diane debated romances, marriages, births, and deaths in the village over infusions of mint tea. The friendship was only casual but it made our defections seem even more treacherous.
But the boisterous call of the market in the center of Denia was irresistible. Housed in a cavernous hall built in 1955, the clamor of transactions between vendors and customers trapped beneath lofty rafters, the hundred or so stalls were as competitive as a stock exchange, as rowdy as a tobacco auction.
One March morning when clouds sagged over Montgo and lightning blinked out to sea, we slunk through its portals as stealthily as smugglers.
Jonathan, now a fully fledged member of a falla, a neighborhood carnival group in Denia, was taking part in warmup processions for the spring fiesta, and we convinced ourselves that we had driven into town just to watch him.
And for a while we did as he marched around the town in a procession with his friend Arturo, the son of a Spaniard, Miguel Senti, and his English wife, Jenny. The streets smelled of spring flowers and the sea and, just occasionally, sewers. Both boys wore traditional dress—kerchief, white shirt, brocade waistcoat, culottes, rope-soled shoes laced ankle high, and shawls of many colors over their shoulders. The elaborate and decorative costume had caused me some misgivings but, as the men wearing it all looked more masculine than any football hooligan, I buried my doubts. Jonathan was integrating, that was what mattered.
As he paraded with the rest of the group’s fifty or so falleros of both sexes down the main street, the Marques de Campo—an avenue of shops and banks and bars shaded by plane trees leading from a square furnished with a puny fountain to the harbor—we made our way through the market past butchers’ stalls to the fish counters where brine-fingered women eyed prospective customers across heaps of a Mediterranean flatfish called lenguado, red mullet, squid and baby octopus, prawns, and live lobsters with roving pincers. We bought a white-fleshed lenguado and some succulent prawns.
Then we wandered down the center aisle, past piles of artichokes, sweet potatoes, oranges, lemons, and green apples; past nuts, prunes, garlic cloves, and sunflower seeds, blue-veined cheeses, brown farmyard eggs, dried cod, and jars of olives, buying only when we spotted items not stocked by Pilar.
Two florists’ stalls faced each other at the hub of the market. They sold evergreen plants, carnations, and daisies with petals dyed in exotic colors, which were purchased by the armful by husbands with guilty faces.
There we met an electrician from the village and his wife buying a rubber plant. We winked conspiratorially. Just visiting. Don’t tell Pilar.
Three bars and a grocery selling cheese and ham and olive oil, adorned with a mural of Joseph holding Jesus, were grouped around the florists. We stopped for coffee at the Viciano, where the owner, Antonio, bespectacled and nimble, toothpick protruding from his mouth, presided. Caterer and comic, he served tortillas, potato salad, sizzling slices of pork, and coffee from a machine that howled like a jet taking off; joked with customers that they owed a thousand pesetas instead of a hundred; held onto the banknotes when he gave change and, like a juggler, caught bottles he snatched from the shelves as they fell.
Two canaries sang sadly in a cage hanging on the wall while life teemed around them. A policeman, blues stretched across his paunch, stopped for a brandy and a cortado, a small coffee. A pretty, red-haired woman, crippled in a road accident, sold lottery tickets from her wheelchair.
A hairdresser with a blue rinse from the village stopped to speak to Diane. “I didn’t expect to find you here,” she said, as though she had caught us in a sex shop.
Diane told her we had driven into the big town (population about twenty-five thousand compared with one thousand in the village) to bring Jonathan to the preliminaries of the carnival. The hairdresser ran her fingertips through her soft curls. “Of course—you can’t get everything at Pilar’s.”
We wondered who would catch us next. Lowering our heads, we sipped our coffee.
Shopkeepers, bank clerks, and road sweepers traded insults, punched and hugged each other, tossed back nips of eye-watering brandy, and threw coins from their change into a can on the wall for Antonio’s staff. The prospects of the Valencia, Hercules (Alicante), and Denia football teams were hotly debated, as were those of Real Madrid and Barcelona.
The customers also cracked jokes of exuberant vulgarity, reviled well-dressed visitors from Madrid for their toffee-nosed arrogance and irresponsible driving; discussed the storm gathering over the sea, because, although the British have the reputation for being unsurpassed bores when it comes to talking about the weather, the Spanish have the edge, pretending to swoon in the heat and drown in the rain. In fact, they are all as addicted to meteorological reports as the men are to football and the women to TV soap operas.
Only the arrival of a baby in a pram halted the badinage. Bruisers with fists like hams uncurled their fingers; hecklers, oaths shriveling on their tongues, cooed like doves; comedians swallowed blue jokes and blew kisses.
From the bar we strolled to the street market outside the hall, passing a stall selling brown-and-white Roman snails. Here you could buy herbs reputed to cure most known maladies. Shop selectively and you could loosen or tighten your bowels, dissipate gas, cleanse your blood, sharpen your eyesight, oil your joints, rekindle your libido.
I bought a couple of packets of herbs. While I was paying the stall holder, who looked as though he suffered from all the complaints he professed to heal, I felt a tap on my shoulder.
I turned. “Hola, Pilar,” Diane said. “Fancy meeting you here.”
Though Pilar never referred to our defection again, retribution for that day was not far off.
For lunch Diane tried her hand at paella, the Spanish rice dish that originated in the province of Valencia where, in spring and summer, workers, watched by white storks and egrets, toiled like coolies in coastal paddy fields of short-grain rice. Paella—originally the name of the pan in which the dish was prepared—came in many guises and could contain quail, rabbit, chicken, pork, almonds, prawns, sausage, clams, lima beans, pea pods, and snails. A Spanish food guru, Antonio de Vega, described paella as “a gastronomic miracle.” I hoped Diane could sustain that wondrous description.
At least she had saffron. The yellow spice, at two thousand dollars a pound possibly the most precious in the world, was harvested from purple pastures of crocuses elsewhere
in Spain and was an epicurean indulgence in this region. Cheat with turmeric or Mexican marigolds and picky guests turned up their noses. Luckily only a pinch of saffron, the dried stigma of the crocus, was needed.
I lit a fire in the barbecue with orange and almond twigs—Ángel once caught me burning oleander and told me that it was poisonous and its smoke could decimate the village—added charcoal, and went indoors to mix a pitcher of sangria with a bottle of red wine, a couple of tablespoons of Grand Marnier, sugar, slices of orange, and soda water, and poured a glass of horchata, a milky drink flavored with tiger nuts, for Jonathan.
I sensed that, as she cooked chicken broth and rice, saffron, onion, olive oil, rabbit, and other ingredients, Diane was behaving furtively. But, at the time, I was too hungry to care.
Finally she placed the pan on the table on the terrace. Jones drooled and we began to eat. Diane, I discovered, had even managed the alchemy of socarrat, the crisp layer of rice beneath the softer grains.
“Delicious,” I said, putting down my spoon. “Especially the savory bits. What were they?”
She gazed at her plate and nibbled a grain of rice. “Snails,” she said eventually.
Silence broken only by the call of the little train burrowing through the orange groves. Diane was well aware of my paranoia about edible snails: this was premeditated sadism.
I pointed at a Roman gastropod heading for a bed of nasturtiums. “That sort of snail?”
She nodded. “I bought them in the market this morning while you were at the herb stall. You just said they were delicious—I’m glad you enjoyed them.”
That evening I had an attack of the digestive affliction that has many names, most commonly the runs.
I blamed the snails.
“Then why haven’t I been affected?” Diane demanded. “Why hasn’t Jonathan?” She followed me from the bathroom into the bedroom and picked up one of the bags of herbs I had bought in the street market that morning. “What are these for?”
“The tightening of,” I told her. I had made an infusion of them as soon as we got home.
Spanish Lessons Page 9