Spanish Lessons

by Derek Lambert

  She read the label and shook her head. “These,” she said, “are for the loosening of.”

  Well, if that packet was for loosening the other was for tightening. I went into the kitchen and made myself another infusion.

  In Denia the twin climaxes of the carnival, known by the same Valencian word as the participating neighborhood groups, the fallas, approached. First the judging of the papier-mâché groups of statues, as bright as berries and as vulgar as saucy postcards, looming roof high in the streets, then the night when, primed inside with gasoline and fireworks, they were put to the torch.

  The statues, built all over the combined region of Valencia and Alicante provinces, two hundred or so miles long, forty miles wide in places, took a year to make, cost millions of pesetas, and were burned, according to some authorities, in memory of carpenters in the Middle Ages who, in the spring, set fire to the detritus of winter. The big burn, the crema, took place on March 19, the saint’s day of the most illustrious carpenter of them all, Joseph. It was the busiest night in the fire brigades’ calendar.

  For the two mornings leading up to the final day, I drove Jonathan at dawn into Denia to join a team of adults and children from his falla, Port Rotes, at the harbor end of the main street. They roamed the neighborhood, hurling small fireworks that exploded on impact at walls and balconies. I went with them. Cats ran squawking from doorways, and women in dressing gowns tossed buckets of water from their balconies onto us.

  At two P.M. strings of firecrackers, mascletas, tied between posts and trees, exploded with a venomous roar that rattled the eardrums.

  Tourists stared uncomprehendingly at the papier-mâché groups labeled in Valenciano, each lampooning different targets—politicians, councilors, movie stars, financiers, fraudsters, local characters, and the tourists themselves. In Franco’s day the fallas were one of the few mediums in which protesters could criticize the regime without being tossed into prison. Jonathan, picking up Valenciano effortlessly, loved them all even if he didn’t understand the innuendo.

  But which of the statues would win? Losers always claimed that the rich neighborhoods, which could afford to pay fortunes to sculptors, triumphed, but this year there were high hopes for Port Rotes, even though its finer points were lost on me.

  Flags fluttered over the ramparts of the ruined castle high on its spur. Processions of male falleros and female falleras—girls with combs in their polished hair, gold and silver threading their bright, full-skirted gowns—shimmied through the terraced streets of houses, apartments, and whitewashed cottages in the old part of the town. Tipsy bandsmen who accompanied the processions took their thumping music with them into heaving bars. Miles of churros, ropes of pastry cooked in oil and dunked in oceans of hot chocolate, were devoured at street stalls.

  With Jonathan, blond hair tucked in his kerchief, I inspected the falla, erected by Port Rotes, which he had joined at the invitation of parents of school friends—his Spanish was as fluent as a four-year-old’s is in any language, and he had adapted to classes in the kindergarten as readily as any other child. He gave the impression, to me at least, that he was in charge, translating captions in Valenciano, identifying lampooned dignitaries, and greeting Port Rotes stalwarts as though they were equals. Like all the other entries the statuary was made by out-of-town specialists and assembled by members of the falla. Papier-mâché caricatures of politicians and fishermen, clerks wearing pince-nez, red-kneed tourists, and wantons with breasts like blancmanges . . . thirty or so outrageous figures in one, gathered around a principal statue fifty feet high.

  But Port Rotes never had a chance to shine, because that evening an errant firework set their falla ablaze long before its time. Diane and I watched helplessly as politicians melted, fishermen sank without trace, breasts drooped, pince-nez slid from ferret noses . . . Such was the heat of the fire that windows of apartments cracked and the lettering on the Bar Mediterraneo opposite the harbor across the street from the falla dribbled to the ground like molten sealing wax.

  No one seemed to be unduly worried. The president of the Port Rotes falla, a robust young man, wiped the sweat from his face with his kerchief and announced: “Tomorrow we will have a truly Valencian falla.”

  And sure enough the other falleros and falleras worked all night—Jonathan was asleep in the car before we got home—and built a replica of a Valencian cottage with a typical pointed thatch, balanced on the charred bones of the original structure.

  Some optimists thought the judges would find it in their hearts to make a special award, but adjudication was strict and Port Rotes came last.

  Before the climactic act of arson on March 19 the replica of the cottage also caught fire, giving rise to speculation that there was an arsonist with a grudge against Port Rotes in town. The fire brigade arrived too late. By the time they had unraveled their hoses the falleros and falleras were cooking sausages in the embers of the cottage, Jonathan munching away in their midst.

  I tried to commiserate with him but he stared at me incredulously. “It’s the floats in the summer fiesta that really count. Would you like something to eat?”

  He handed me a burned sausage.

  NINE

  Long Live Death

  Between them, two men knew most of the secrets of the village. One was the priest, the other the debt collector. The priest because miscreants poured out their sins to him in the confessional, the debt collector because he made it his business to pry into other people’s lives.

  The priest, Father Ignacio, middle-aged, balding, and plump, who wore a darned soutane and big boots, sometimes walked with his shoulders slumped as though he was bowed with the sins of mankind. Then a child would greet him, blow out a balloon of bubble gum, and dance away, or a couple of newlyweds would thank him for making them man and wife, and a smile would light his plump face and his big boots would take wing. He had come to the village five years ago from a dull town in La Mancha, the arid plateau in the center of Spain, but he was as near to God as any prelate in the Vatican.

  Pepe, the debt collector, wasn’t bowed: he was bent. But as spry as an Edwardian dandy. Rowing himself along with a silver-topped cane, a rose in his buttonhole, he confronted debtors with calculating courtesy.

  He was employed by a debt-collecting agency in Alicante more than an hour’s drive to the south, but he operated in small towns and villages. He lived inland near the town of Alcoy in a small, self-contained house that had about it an independent, debt-free air.

  Pepe called at our house ten days before Easter. The scarlet flowers of the hibiscus bushes had opened for the first time in the spring sunshine. The carefree knife-grinder (known as Peter Pan because he announced his arrival with a flourish of notes on a flute), was in the driveway sharpening our kitchen knives; swallows perched on the telegraph wires like notes of music.

  He appeared on the rear terrace, told Jones to sit—Jones uncharacteristically obeyed—and asked me: “Is Bernardo here?”

  Bernardo was one of Emilio’s part-time workers,—a protégé from Almería, 150 miles or so south of Alicante. Work had stopped yet again on the dining hall—progress virtually unchanged since the stoppage for rain—because the roofer was attending his grandmother’s funeral on the Mediterranean island of Majorca, and Emilio who, as a craftsman, wouldn’t stoop to menial work, had brought Bernardo to the house to do odd jobs.

  In his mid-fifties, Bernardo wore rope-soled shoes tied at the ankles, blue dungarees, and the vague smile of a boozer lost in fermented visions. He was a wastrel, but he acted like a man with a secret and that gave him an air of mystery. This reputation hinged flimsily on his reticence about his past but it was sufficient to give him charisma.

  I liked him because, during my years as a journalist, I had discovered that a peck of delinquency is sometimes more worthy than a pitcher of piety, and I speculated why he had become what he was. Through some congenital weakness beyond the vision of those who sit in judgment, perhaps. All that anyone knew about him was
that he had been a traveling salesman of some sort before unspecified disaster had struck. Chatting with him one day while he cleaned and oiled Emilio’s chisels, I sensed I was in the presence of a decent man. And close to discovering the origins of his plight. Then Emilio arrived at the house, dissipating the rapport.

  What Bernardo’s secret was gave rise to much speculation in the village. It reached its peak at the beginning of Semana Santa, Holy Week, when, like a punch-drunk boxer training for a comeback fight, he prepared for his regular annual disappearance, renouncing liquor, and exercising to prepare himself for the vigors of seasonal martyrdom.

  Where he went no one knew. What was known was that when he returned his eyes were slitted with fatigue, his knees crusted with dried blood visible through rents in his Sunday-suit trousers. Obviously he had been participating in an act of contrition. For some heinous act in his youth or, perhaps, the sins of his fathers.

  There was no shortage of such sinful acts in the 1936–39 Spanish Civil War when reputedly half a million died—it was still a disputed figure. Brother killed brother; Republicans slaughtered priests; Nationalists, in particular the Spanish Foreign Legion, whose motto was Long Live Death, butchered anyone who got in their way. Our region had been largely in the hands of Republicans. They were said to have herded supporters of Franco to their deaths over steep cliffs near Denia; later, when Franco’s Nationalists triumphed, they allegedly marched Republicans over the same precipices.

  Shame had long since been stashed away with medals and guns and uniforms in cellars and attics, in quicklime and in the Confessional, but it had never been totally expunged, as the old men in their berets resting on the benches beneath the acacia trees would doubtless confirm. Maybe the septuagenarian drooling over his grandchildren had gunned down clerics who’d been corraled in a bullring.

  In our peaceful village it was sobering to reflect that inbred slaughter might occur again, as it almost did in 1981, when a Guardia Civil officer took over the Cortes, the Parliament in Madrid, at gunpoint and tanks came out on the streets of Valencia only sixty miles north of our new home. Whom would I have supported if King Juan Carlos hadn’t appealed for calm and aborted the uprising? The Right or, like the International Brigade in 1936, the Left? Would the villagers have strung me up, a meddling foreigner, from the nearest orange tree? We recent invaders, British, German, and Dutch settlers, were not welcomed by everyone.

  “Who wants Bernardo?” I asked Pepe. I had met the debt collector once before as he sat alone and ostracized in a bar and I wondered now if he could be the missing link in the story of Bernardo’s decline.

  “Tell him Pepe’s here.”

  I didn’t think that would have much impact: shout Pepe, Pedro, Paco, or Pablo in any square and half a dozen claimants would leap to their feet.

  “Any other name?”

  “Just Pepe—he knows me.”

  Bernardo was sweeping dust and debris from the floor of the dining hall. Like the village street cleaner, he used a palm frond. Unlike the street cleaner who used his dexterously, he moved as though in a trance, occasionally swigging from a bottle of cheap red wine.

  I told him Pepe was here. He stood transfixed as the color drained from his face. I thought he was going to faint. He moaned and dropped the bottle. It smashed on the cement floor, not yet tiled, and wine spread as bright as blood.

  “Tell him I’m not here.” Wine dribbled from his mouth, coursing through the unshaven bristles on his chin.

  “But you are here,” Pepe said. He stood in the gap where the dividing wall of the original dining room, by the rear terrace, knocked down to allow open-plan access to the new dining hall, had been. “How are you?”

  Bernardo didn’t look too good. His hands shook, one bloodshot eye twitched. “What do you want?” he finally asked.

  “I’ve brought you a message.”

  “A message?”

  “Señor Garcia sends his regards.”

  “Hostia!” Bernardo shouted and, dropping the palm frond, ran through the doorless portal of the dining hall, kick-started his moped, and rode away, narrowly missing Diane, who had just arrived in the little secondhand Citroën she had just bought.

  “What’s wrong with Bernardo?” she asked as she walked through the same entrance.

  “He’s just met Pepe.” I pointed at him. “Pepe’s a debt collector.”

  “I’ll make coffee for the three of us.” I didn’t particularly want to entertain him, but these days Diane viewed anyone with an unusual occupation as potential material for her magazine.

  We drank our coffee on the terrace with madeleines baked in Denia, while Pepe explained in English how he extracted money from debtors, a job more conventionally undertaken by bruisers with jackets tight across bulging shoulders.

  “I haunt them,” he said, lighting a black-leafed Celtas cigarette.

  “Haunt?” Diane, a natural interrogator whose green eyes would make a mute garrulous, regarded him quizzically.

  “Si, señora. Wherever they go, I go. To church, groccry, restaurant, bank. To a club—” the euphemism, as we had discovered, for a brothel on the main road between Valencia and Alicante,

  “How can that help?”

  “When they emerge from their homes, I am there to greet them. When they return, I bid them goodnight.”

  “That’s all?” Diane asked incredulously.

  “I also bring them greetings from the man they owe money to. The man who has called the agency that employs me and pays me a percentage. ‘Señor X sends his regards,’ I say, and they begin to sweat.”

  “And they pay up?”

  “Oh, they pay all right. Would you”—addressing me—“want me at your side every moment of the day?” He coughed, his words emerging in wraps of smoke.

  I didn’t really want him at my side at any moment of the day. But every moment . . . I imagined him at mealtimes, during working hours, at intimate moments, blowing lungfuls of smoke at me.

  “Are you haunting Bernardo?” I demanded.

  “Why do you ask? Do you owe money?” His laugh was as dry as the rustling of parchment.

  Diane said: “I can’t believe Bernardo owes much money.” Like me, she had developed a perverse affection for the reprobate. Perhaps she also imagined him in his youth when the future beckoned as brightly as a guiding star. And, like me, suspected that Pepe had resurrected some long-ago shame.

  “I didn’t say he did and I never reveal the name of a debtor,” Pepe said reprovingly.

  “But you make it pretty obvious,” I said. Maybe enforcers who broke legs, not spirits, were preferable to Pepe.

  Bernardo returned after his precipitous departure from the house and I asked him if he was making his annual Holy Week pilgrimage. He nodded sheepishly. Tentatively, I asked him why, in case Pepe’s visit had jolted some escape valve in his conscience, but he merely offered me a crooked smile, murmured: “Don’t worry about Pepe,” and got on with his work.

  On the morning after Palm Sunday, Bernardo came into the Bar Paraiso while I was drinking a café solo. He was obviously about to depart. He was shaved, sober, wearing a dark suit a couple of sizes too small for him, rents in the trousers from last year’s odyssey now darned, and he was carrying a cardboard suitcase tied with string. With his black, unkempt hair freshly shorn and his cheeks pale where bristles had proliferated, he looked like a prisoner just released after a long stretch in the slammer.

  I beckoned to him, but he shook his head. He asked for a glass of water, drank it, and headed in the direction of the railroad station. I wanted to accompany him, but I thought he would have been embarrassed.

  I noticed Pepe outside the bar leaning on his cane, a yellow rose in the lapel of his tight-waisted jacket, peering after Bernardo’s retreating figure. There was an air of menace about him that suggested more than mere debt collecting. Maybe he knew Bernardo’s secret. Dormant journalistic instincts stirred and I felt that, for Bernardo’s sake, I had to follow this through.

/>   Diane and I decided to go away with Jonathan for Easter so, in the furtherance of my new mission, and without sharing it with Diane—we both believed in occasional private initiatives—I booked a room in a hotel at Bernardo’s birthplace, Almería. On the coast, surrounded by near desert, it was also the location where Sergio Leone had filmed his spaghetti westerns.

  We spent Good Friday morning on the old film set, now a tourist attraction, and watched two gun-slinging actors shoot it out in a last chance saloon. Later we went to church; in the evening, still walking tall like Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars, I took Diane and Jonathan to watch a Holy Week procession.

  The leading penitents wore crimson, blue, or white silk robes and pointed conical hoods, eyes glittering behind slits. (The Ku Klux Klan were said to have copied their hoods from participants in Seville parades, who in turn had copied theirs from heretics condemned by the Inquisition.) Then floats carried by sweating pall-bearers swayed past, one with a figure of the Virgin Mary, cheeks touched with rouge, aloft, the other with Christ at the Crucifixion.

  After the floats came more penitents, barefoot with chains around their ankles, carrying heavy crosses through the streets of Almería just as Jesus had once carried his in Jerusalem. Unlike those up front who were members of a religious confraternity, these were private sinners seeking atonement. Occasionally they half-heartedly lashed their backs over their shoulders with thongs.

  Diane spotted him first. “Look!” She pointed.

  Sure enough there was Bernardo, walking with his cross, knees like raw meat through the tears in his trousers. I was shocked but not surprised.

  “How did they get like that?” I asked.

  A prosperous-looking Spaniard in a black suit overheard me. “Some penitents who don’t have robes perform their own rituals and walk part of the way on their knees. Your friend must have sinned a lot—he isn’t even wearing pads.”