Spanish Lessons

by Derek Lambert

  I waved at Bernardo and detected a flicker of recognition in his eyes. Then he bowed his head, retreating into his personal torment.

  Whatever that was. Was a woman somewhere accusing him of a terrible deception? Had he been responsible for a death? He was too young for the Civil War. I wondered if Father Ignacio knew. If he did he would never tell. No, my only possible source of enlightenment was Bernardo himself. Maybe I would be able to help him purge his torment—and persuade Pepe to haunt someone more resilient. I wasn’t sure why I was so concerned about the village drunk. Maybe it was because I had seen so many of the rich and privileged get away with murder.

  After the procession I told Diane I would see her back in the hotel and followed Bernardo to the flophouse where he was staying. I invited him, still wearing his torn trousers and a blue shirt, to a noisy café, where he devoured merluza (hake) and soggy chips, washed down with a bottle of mineral water.

  I would understand, I said, if he wanted to keep the reason for his penitence to himself but if he wanted to share . . .

  He sipped the mineral water and for a moment I saw him as he might have been before he had anesthetized himself with cheap wine: perhaps an office equipment salesman who had finally earned himself his own corner desk.

  “Why,” he asked, “do you want to dig up the past?”

  “Because I’m a born inquisitor.”

  He smiled. “At least you’re honest. And so am I—the truth is I didn’t go that far on my knees.” He spoke better English than he had in the house.

  He ordered a flan, the quivering caramel custard dessert, and talked as though he had been stockpiling his guilt.

  “Years ago I was a gambler. The lottery, poker, pelota . . . I ran up such frightening debts that my wife committed suicide rather than face the shame. This year a loan shark found me in the village and commissioned Pepe to retrieve the money I still owe.” He stared at me across the table, his ravaged face angled to one side. “Now are you happy?”

  “Not happy. But if I have helped . . .” I hoped that by extracting the confession, I had staunched his guilt, but I acknowledged to myself I had also been motivated by incurable nosiness.

  “Talking to you was better than drinking two bottles of red wine,” he said.

  Surely the ultimate compliment from Bernardo.

  When Bernardo appeared at our house a week later to sweep the dining hall once again, a specter from Spain’s past was sitting on the terrace dunking a madeleine in his coffee.

  With his black beret, baggy trousers, and rheumy eyes, Don Eloy Morál Ortega, a far more cosmopolitan cleric than our Father Ignacio, looked like an onion seller. But forty years ago he had worn the black-and-silver uniform of the German SS and had a photograph of himself, wearing a peaked cap at an arrogant angle, to prove it.

  He had been a chaplain to the Blue Division, the SS unit mustered by the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco as a gesture of thanks to Hitler for supporting his cause in the Civil War. Don Eloy had served with the division in Russia in World War II and later become Franco’s personal chaplain.

  Diane, hunting for material for Lookout magazine, had discovered that although he was in his eighties, he still conducted services in a chapel in Las Rotas, a wealthy residential area of Denia on a rocky stretch of coast close to the cliffs where Republicans and Nationalists had supposedly dispatched each other during the Civil War.

  Bernardo, back on the sauce, came onto the terrace, saw the priest, took a hurried swig from his bottle, and fled: obviously one nemesis, Pepe, was sufficient unto the day.

  Diane fed Don Eloy, from Burgos, a cathedral city in the north of Spain, another madeleine, switched on her cassette recorder, and started her interview. “How can a man of the cloth identify with Fascism?” He took off his beret, laid it beside his copy of the right-wing newspaper ABC, and told her.

  “Our cause was to uphold Catholicism against Communism. There had been many atrocities by the Republicans. Churches burned, priests killed, innocents murdered indiscriminately—businessmen, Catholics, supporters of the Right—”

  “But surely,” Diane interrupted, “Franco’s Nationalists also committed atrocities?”

  The priest’s fragile voice strengthened. “Vengeance is part of war. If your husband, wife, or child is killed, the hate will not go away until you avenge them.”

  The interview progressed at a lively pace until, toward the end, one key question remained. Had Franco during his last confession in the presence of Don Eloy admitted to crimes against mankind?

  The frail little cleric refused to elaborate. But he did relay a few words from the dying dictator. “Tell me Don Eloy, to die . . . is it necessary to suffer so much?” Franco had asked.

  “It is God’s will.”

  “Sí, sí, it is in His hands.”

  Emilio appeared on the terrace. “Has anyone seen Bernardo?”

  Diane said he had vanished when he saw Don Eloy. “Why?”

  “Jesús just stopped by outside the gate,” he said. “Someone’s killed himself in the village.”

  Jaime, the barman at the Bar Paraiso, told me that Alfonso, a staid businessman whom I had known casually, had been found hanging from a rafter in his garage, a chair apparently kicked away from beneath the noose.

  Conjecture about the suffering that had driven him to take his life was rife but no one ever put forward a reasonable explanation. Maybe there wasn’t one, merely an aspect of despair outside the understanding of those of us who valued life. If anyone did know of a more substantial reason then it was Father Ignacio, but he shared such knowledge only with God. Personally I doubted whether there was one: as a reporter I had covered many suicides, and often the motive was an inability to cope with the savage swings of the human condition.

  Certainly, Alfonso’s death, although an isolated tragedy, was yet another illustration of the violent mood swings within Spain. An obvious tendency when you thought about it. Iberians, Celts, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Goths, Moors . . . all their legacies cut off and trapped in the great sack of land that embraced Portugal, knotted at the neck by the Pyrenees.

  Two days later Alfonso was slotted into a cavity in the wall of the cemetery; if there was any protocol about not interring suicides in consecrated ground it was waived.

  That evening in the village women in black were once more sitting in stiff-backed chairs outside their doorways, stitching tablecloths and weaving straw lampshades.

  And Bernardo was asleep among the weeds and tomato plants in the yard beneath his attic, a smile on his face as tiny green lizards darted across his wine-stunned limbs.

  Father Ignacio came into the bar a few days later and smiled conspiratorially at Pepe. You have debts to collect, the smile said, and I have sins to absolve. Neither of us will ever be out of a job.

  A man with a creased neck scooped coins from the slot machine and, with measured application, put them back one by one.

  The machine spewed more coins. He dropped them into his jacket pocket and headed for the bar to pay his bill.

  I left the table where I had been scanning two of the regional daily newspapers, Las Provincias and Información, and approached Pepe, who looked as though he was getting ready to chase someone.

  I sat at the table and asked: “Are you still ‘haunting’ Bernardo?” and when he guardedly said he might be, I asked him: “Did you know that Bernardo’s debts drove his wife to suicide?”

  Pepe shrugged. “The circumstances of debts are not my concern: all that matters to me is repayment of the money owed.”

  I handed him a page from my notebook on which I had written: If you don’t leave Bernardo alone I will haunt you to your grave. Sometimes the written word was more effective than the spoken.

  At the same moment the man with the creased neck started to leave. Stuffing the sheet of paper into a pocket, Pepe just made it to the door in front of him.

  I read Pepe’s lips. “Señor X sends his regards.”

  The deb
tor lowered his head and hurried down the street followed by Pepe rowing himself along with his cane.

  Pepe would probably haunt him at almuerzo, the morning snack, at lunch, at merienda, the afternoon snack, and maybe at a ‘club’ where his spectral presence would be singularly unnerving. Doubtless the debtor would ultimately pay up.

  I finished my coffee and got up to leave. Somehow I doubted whether Pepe would continue haunting Bernardo—a spook wouldn’t want a specter at his own graveside.

  “Señor!” Jaime, the diminutive barman, left the coffee machine. “Pepe forgot to pay his bill.”

  I settled Pepe’s debt and said: “Next time you see him tell him Señor Derek sends his regards.”

  TEN

  Pursued by a Poet in the City of Light

  The funeral that had taken our roofer, Vicente, to the Mediterranean island of Majorca had been anticipated prematurely: his grandmother was still alive and unwilling to be buried. Rather than waste the fare, he had decided to stay to await developments. As there were several centenarians on the group of islands, the Balearics, and his grandmother was a were eighty-five, his decision did not bode well for the dining hall roof.

  While we waited for Vicente to return, we decided to take a look at the frontiers of what we had decided was our homeland. The cities of Valencia to the north and Alicante to the south. To the east the Mediterranean coast, known as the Costa Blanca and, fifty to 150 miles out to sea, like an armada poised to invade, the Balearic Islands—Majorca, Menorca, Formentera, and Ibiza, the latter linked to Denia by a rusty white ferry. A haze of sierras and plains, sometimes blurred by rain, unfolded inland, so we gave up on them, consigning the rest of Spain to the “other side of the hills.”

  First Diane and I investigated “this side” of the hills, their flanks covered with pine, prickly oak, and gorse, finding villages where V-necks of ocean were just visible in the distance, painted pigeons wheeled in blue skies, and the air was redolent of jasmine and goats, stopping at bars with patios where they cooked paellas on fires laid with twigs of rosemary and served hunks of bread and alioli and small earthenware pitchers of red wine as raw as moonshine.

  Inhabitants were sparse in the streets, but behind the brass-studded doors and bars and crouching shops, life was as vigorous as it was in any street market, fading only when the afternoon siesta stilled the wagging tongues.

  Heavy with food and wine, we ambled along shepherds’ trails and dried-up riverbeds that still drained floodwater, strewn with boulders and clotted with pink and white oleander blossoms, before driving back to our house, where swallows skinny-dipped in the pool and bracts of bougainvillea had blown into mauve drifts on the terrace.

  Then Diane’s father died from a heart attack in Montreal. We decided that I would stay in Spain to keep an eye on the builders and complete some paperwork connected with the house while she flew with Jonathan to Canada.

  I thought I might have to drive to Valencia, one of the outposts of our homeland, for the paperwork.

  We had already been there to buy makeshift furniture. Wandered around its baroque facades; attended the outdoor meeting of the Water Tribunal, convened every Thursday at noon since 1350, where members in black smocks passed judgment on market gardeners’ disputes over water rights; knelt in the fourteenth-century cathedral with its museum, often claimed to be the home of the Holy Grail, Christ’s chalice at the Last Supper. But I was summoned instead to a lawyer’s office in another outpost, Alicante, and traveled there with an uninvited companion, a dotty poet.

  Like most poets he was poor. He wandered the streets of Denia—no one seemed to know where he had come from—and sold his poems for a few pesetas to panting suitors, sighing girls, and cheating husbands. Once when I had been detained in a bar and was late for lunch, I bought one of his sonnets in Valenciano and gave it to Diane. She read it, tore it into small pieces, shouted “Bastard!” and strode out of the house. I never found out why.

  On a drowsy May afternoon I packed a bag and made my way to the railroad station, not much bigger than a bus shelter. And there was the poet, small and middle-aged, sparse hair uncombed, wet-eyed gaze vague.

  He stood at one end of the platform waiting for the train, ambitiously called the Costa Blanca Express—it took two hours and nine minutes to traverse fifty-six miles, thirty-seven stations and halts, from Denia to Alicante. A swallowtail butterfly fluttered along the track. He noticed it and scribbled energetically in a red notebook.

  Five minutes until the train was due.

  I read a notice on a concrete pillar: THIS STATION IS A REQUEST STOP. THE TRAIN WILL NOT STOP AT THIS STATION UNLESS YOU SIGNAL THE DRIVER TO STOP FROM THE PLATFORM.

  In fact it arrived seven minutes late at five-fifty-five.

  As one, the poet and I stuck out our hands, balancing like two comics trying to end their vaudeville act on a note of artistic harmony.

  The two coaches stopped, hissing and throbbing. We boarded one of them, sitting opposite each other surrounded by schoolchildren eating sunflower seeds.

  “Si, señor?” The young conductor, crisply dressed in blue trousers and shirt, stood beside me, keeping an eye on the children in case they dropped the striped black-and-white husks of the seeds on the floor.

  I bought a ticket to Alicante.

  The little train burrowed south through the citrus groves, skirting Montgo, granite gray on the side facing our house, sienna on this, the other side, never far from the coast.

  First stop Gata de Gorgos, a small town that conducted its business on the N332 highway, its private life in squeezed streets and somnolent squares. That business was selling cane and wicker furniture, some of it made in China, in scores of cramped shops.

  A young German couple boarded accompanied by a wicker donkey. The husband was massively built with thighs like hams protruding from khaki shorts and an innocent, sun-reddened face; his wife was Pekinese pretty, and bored-looking.

  He patted the donkey, blew her a kiss, and began to take photographs through the open window with a 35mm camera.

  The train passed over an arched bridge across a gorge, the sort that saboteurs dream about. The husband clicked away. He photographed scrub, sheep, and the inside of a tunnel. Anything pictorially stimulating eluded him, worthwhile shots materializing as he changed the film, disappearing around a curve as he took aim.

  We were in guerrilla-style country now: rust-colored precipices holed like Gruyère cheese with caves. Cold air breathed through the windows as we dived through tunnels.

  The poet licked his pencil and wrote industriously, glancing at me as though we were in telepathic communication.

  The German photographed a cement quarry. As he did so, his wife caught my gaze and raised her eyebrows. What lies ahead? the eyebrows asked. Long winter nights showing slides to neighbors? Pictures of prickly oak, sheep, and quarries? Heaps of photo albums to show our grandchildren? Have I done the right thing marrying this man? the eyebrows asked.

  The train plunged into another tunnel and emerged at the town of Teulada, where it waited for a small boy running toward it across a field of knee-high vines.

  To the left I saw the sea at Calpe and, rearing up from it like a miniature Gibraltar, a peninsula named Ifach.

  The German finally sat down, pointed at the wicker donkey, and said to me: “Such industry is good. Local products I like.”

  I debated whether to tell him the donkey might have been made in Shanghai. No—I suspected a lot of disappointment lay ahead of him.

  He, his wife, and the donkey alighted at Altea, a coastal hill town clustered around a church with a blue dome like a glazed pincushion. On the platform he took a picture of me through the window. His wife raised her eyebrows and then they were gone.

  They were replaced by an American family who took over one corner of the carriage. Two freckled girls, a plump mother and a handsome father with graying hair who looked like an Italian film star. They sat enveloped together in an aura of unity.

  The
hotels and apartment blocks of Benidorm halfway to Alicante crowded the skyline on the Mediterranean side of the track. Wherever you met a Spaniard here he would say: “You should have seen it thirty years ago,” just as residents in other parts of the world peer at torrential rain and say: “You should have been here last week. Boy, was it ever hot . . .”

  What the Spaniards meant was that two decades ago Benidorm was a fishing village and now look at it. It had become the Elysium of pensioners who had worked hard all their lives, an affordable seaside resort plucked from rainswept northern shores and deposited in the sunshine, sauce bottles still on the café tables.

  The poor man’s Miami Beach, it hugged the coast for about a mile. Planeloads of Brits were the strike force, but there were plenty of support groups from other European countries, among them retired Spaniards from the north who meekly followed shepherding couriers all day but in the evenings hurled themselves around their hotel dance floors like whirling dervishes.

  The train swung to the right, shook off Benidorm, and bolted across clay-colored scrub.

  At Villajoyosa it waited for an oncoming train to pass it on a stretch of double track. Beyond the station, houses painted in pastel colors swept down to the sea. The stationmaster, wearing a red cap and brandishing a flag, waved us on; we cantered through wild hills waiting for Sioux or Apache to appear on their crests and approached the beaches outside Alicante.

  Some grand villas now, one with Grecian columns. Then a gully occupied by a herd of goats, holiday chalets giving way to a scimitar of pale sand deserted except for a plump woman in a bikini performing daunting exercises beside the waves.

  The engine gave a final hoot and came to a halt in the beautiful, blood-stained city of Alicante, the City of Light, according to the Romans.

  The poet tore a page from his notebook, thrust it in my hand, and made off along the platform. I asked an elegant, middle-aged Spaniard who was leaving the train what the words written in Valenciano meant. He read them and glanced at me strangely. “They say ‘All life is bullshit,’” he said, and hurried away.