Spanish Lessons

by Derek Lambert

  In the bar of the station, as neat as a breast-pocket handkerchief, I read about Alicante in an antique Baedeker I had bought.

  Behind the bar a muscular Spaniard with a bandaged hand served beer, strawberry flan, and tortillas—solid potato-based omelets that bore no relation to their Mexican cousins—and cut slices of paper-thin Serrano ham. In the tiny kitchen a pretty girl with a pale face chopped anemic steaks.

  Alicante, I read, sipping a beer, had been involved in many wars. The War of Spanish Succession, the Peninsular War . . .

  In the kitchen the pale girl took a vicious swipe at a steak, getting her thumb out of the way just in time.

  I ordered a slice of strawberry flan and consulted a more recent book about Alicante’s role in the Civil War. The dashing young leader of the fascist Falange, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, had been executed by firing squad here; in 1939 Republican refugees trying to flee by boat from Franco’s troops had committed suicide when they realized there was no escape.

  The girl aimed a blow at a chop, the barman winced and fingered his bandaged hand: I ate the last strawberry in my slice of flan.

  I walked along the promenade, cafe to the right, beach to the left. A junkie and a scruffy dog lay asleep under a palm tree.

  Opposite the harbor, where yachts lay at rest in the luminous sunlight for which Alicante was famous, I entered the Paseo de la Explanada, Alicante’s tiara, a pedestrian walkabout unsurpassed in elegance anywhere in Spain, an avenue paved with swirls of red, cream, and black marble, hedged with indolent palms.

  Aging Spanish dudes sat on benches like Mafia godfathers clinching deals, mottled hands wagging, prodding, fisting.

  A prayer of nuns in gray drifted around the bandstand where the municipal band played during fiestas and on weekends. Girls with shiny hair and young men, truculently self-conscious, traded smiles in rehearsal for the evening paseo, the twilight parade that was the prelude to serious courtship. Pigeons pouted beside flowerbeds filled with pansies. A small girl dropped an ice cream cornet and squashed it with her foot, as though she were finishing off a wounded beetle. Through the palms I glimpsed elegant terraces beneath the walls of Santa Barbara castle.

  After I had seen the lawyer about the house, I adjourned to a bar for tapas: prawns in pink armor, mussels, salted tuna, meatballs, beans in thick sauce, snails, empanadillas, squid and clams and slices of Manchego cheese in oil.

  In one corner stood a collection of antique radios and wind-up phonographs. On the bar among the tapas an ancient cash register. On the wall signed photographs of Manolete, the bullfighter, whose melancholy eyes seemed to accept his fate on the horns of a bull as inevitable; another matador beside him, the swashbuckling El Cordobés. There too were Salvador Dalí and Ernest Hemingway.

  The owner of the bar, Pepe Gallego, a silver-haired man of commanding height, light on his feet, with sun spots on his temples, fiddled aimlessly with the knobs of an old wireless, its vocal chords wasted long ago.

  “Tomorrow,” he said, “I will tell you about Hemingway and Dalí.”

  “Why not today?”

  “Because I have to think.” He tapped his sun spots with his finger and ordered a Scotch for himself and a finger of chilled sherry for me.

  “I may not be here tomorrow.”

  “Then you will miss revelations.”

  I strolled to the old quarter to explore. By day it was a hungover labyrinth. Bar girls wearing slippers sat on doorsteps, talking about their children and their wayward pimps.

  Here, a few hours earlier, adventure and sexual promise, lit by the stars, lubricated by drugs and alcohol, had spilled onto the thin streets. Here disease had been sown, marriages broken, wallets lifted.

  A small bandit with a walnut face and hair dyed the color of plum juice leaped from a doorway and grabbed my shoulderbag.

  “I want it,” he said.

  “You can’t have it.”

  “I have a knife.”

  He pulled and I pulled.

  “I must have it,” he said.

  “Sorry.”

  He gave the shoulder strap another tug but the Taiwan plastic was made of stern stuff.

  Finally he let go and, tears gathering in his eyes, said: “I must have money.”

  “For a fix?”

  “No fix.”

  I gave him one hundred pesetas and comforted myself that instead of drugs he might buy a shot of plum-colored dye.

  I woke the following morning in a hostel overlooking a square where young men with motorcycles cradled their crash helmets like babies while they chatted to girls in jeans, undecided whether to stay another day and night in this patrician city, largely ignored by tourists hell-bent on reaching the beaches of Benidorm, or whether to catch the next train home.

  I had breakfast, freshly squeezed orange juice, a cup of hot chocolate, and toast smeared with grated tomato at a boulevard café beneath the palm trees in the Paseo de la Explanada, its marble floor still wet from its early morning rinse.

  Smoky clouds hurried in from the sea. The sunlight had a silvery luster to it. A gypsy urchin in a torn frock stuck out her small and grubby hand and I gave her the change from my breakfast, one hundred pesetas or so. She stared at the coins incredulously before dancing away.

  I debated whether to stay. The problem was that Diane and I believed that sharing was everything, and here I was alone on a marble avenue designed to be shared.

  I went back to the hotel, half packed my bag, and stared out of the bedroom window still undecided. There on a bench in the square below was the poet, scribbling in his red notebook, a fairly alarming spectacle because it raised the possibility that he had been following me.

  I had no doubt that whatever he was writing was intended for me. (I learned later that he saw the two of us as a literary duet and I had to enlist Emilio to disillusion him.)

  But he served his purpose: he convinced me I should go home and share the City of Light (and the rest of Spain) with Diane and Jonathan some other time, certainly not now with a stalker who thought life was bullshit.

  I finished packing, paid the bill, left the hostel by the rear exit, and caught a taxi to the railroad station.

  As the little train gathered speed, hooting impatiently, the poet appeared on the platform waving his notebook. I waved back and relaxed among another gaggle of schoolchildren nibbling sunflower seeds.

  ELEVEN

  Honeymooners and Hoofers

  Diane was only just coming to terms with the premature death of her father, an extrovert French Canadian whom she had adored, and I decided that a therapeutic visit to one of the Mediterranean island outposts of our new “homeland” would be timely while Jonathan stayed for a couple of days with his friend Arturo.

  I chose Majorca and bought tickets for a three-day break there. What the travel agent didn’t tell me was that the package deal was primarily for honeymoon couples.

  And there they were at Valencia airport canoodling and nibbling each other’s ears, a convention of lovebirds assembled by Cupid and an enterprising tour operator.

  As the jet flew over the 110 miles of sparkling sea between mainland Spain and Majorca, cooing stewardesses served fizzy white wine. The twenty-five or so couples touched glasses and swore undying devotion and we did the same.

  I was disturbed, though, by the couple sitting beside us, Federico and Cristina. He was as blond and as routinely handsome as a California tennis coach, she was a pale wallflower from a village near Valencia. How they had met I couldn’t imagine, only that I wouldn’t bet on their finishing the obstacle course of marriage, or the honeymoon for that matter.

  The couple on the other side of the aisle appeared to be better prospects for the good name of matrimony. He had the look of a man of the fields, face wind-whipped and sun-dried; she looked amiably prepared for the hardships and togetherness that lay ahead. Throughout the fifty-minute flight they stared into each other’s eyes, whispered, and sipped wine from the same glass.

  From th
e airport at Palma, the capital of Majorca, its bay clustered with resorts as thick as barnacles, we were driven in a minibus to various hotels.

  Both Federico and Cristina and the couple from across the aisle, Juan and Marisa, were in the same hotel as we were on the water-front.

  While Diane was getting ready to go out to a show—part of the package—I went down to the pristine white bar and ordered a Scotch. Federico came down a couple of minutes later and ordered a large brandy.

  I greeted him: we had after all shared air space.

  He nodded and stared into his glass like a busted financier during the Wall Street Crash.

  I persevered. “Are you coming to the show?”

  “Maybe.” He ran his fingers through his hair. He was wearing a white suit and an open-neck cream shirt and looked ready for aprés tennis action rather than a night of bliss with his bride.

  Cristina joined him. She wore a blue short-sleeve dress and sat demurely beside him. He bought her a mineral water. They didn’t speak. Diane had nicknamed them the Unlikely Couple, Juan and Marisa the Likely Couple.

  The Likely Couple came into the bar. He ordered a couple of Cokes and they sat together at a table gazing at the yachts in the harbor, nuzzling and whispering.

  Diane joined us and we all piled into the minibus. The driver picked up couples from the other hotels and took off on a tour of Palma, a sophisticated city with a looming Gothic cathedral, as black as storm clouds in the evening sky.

  The show was staged in a club with raised seats at the rear like a small movie house. Drinks were served, the lights were doused, and spotlights picked out the two principals.

  I was unprepared for what followed. So were the other couples. Maybe I should have guessed—it was staged for honeymooners—but I thought some of the Puritanism from the Franco era, when even bikinis were banned on beaches, still lingered.

  Not in the view of the show’s impresario it didn’t. Without preliminaries the couple, a lithe young man with oiled, blue-black hair and his partner, an older, buxom brunette, stripped off their robes, lay naked on a pile of cushions and began to perform simulated sex.

  The effect this had on the honeymooners must have been traumatic. Many of the girls who came from villages where morals were still as strict as health farm menus were probably virgins. And their bridegrooms’ experience was most likely limited to furtive one-night stands—sexual activity in some rural areas was still discouraged outside marriage.

  Whatever their experience, it must have seemed to them that true love could be consummated with a few yelps and shouts and no physical contact. A disheartening prospect for the night ahead.

  I gave it a couple of minutes before indulging in an act of such histrionic prudishness that I surprised myself. I stood up, announced grandly, “I don’t think we need to put up with any more of this,” and led the way out.

  The two stars of the cabaret lay back on their cushions panting. The other couples followed Diane and myself into the foyer.

  The club owner protested but relented when I told him that if he didn’t let everyone leave without paying for their drinks I would report him to the police for staging a lewd act.

  Couples dispersed pensively.

  The following morning I rented a baby Seat and we toured the island with its mountains in the northwest splashed with scarlet poppies and yellow wattle, its beaches on the east coast where tourism was growing as abundantly as the poppies, and the plains and valleys of the interior ripe with almond, apricot, orange, and lemon orchards.

  Wherever we stopped, the Unlikely Couple, Federico and Cristina, materialized like pictures in pop-up children’s books: at Valldemosa where in 1838–39, Chopin stayed with his lover, the trouser-wearing authoress George Sand; in the village of Deya, home of the English poet Robert Graves until his death in 1985.

  Federico greeted me gruffly when, that was, he condescended to acknowledge me at all. His bride stared at us sadly, whispering a few words in Valenciano. I feared the worst: her expectations of married love had been sent packing by the remote control coupling in the Palma club. Or maybe their visitations indicated some more complex trauma.

  The minibus picked us up at the hotel after lunch on the third and last day of the vacation.

  Federico was beaming, the smile of the accomplished lover who has scored yet again. The head of his bride, hand tucked under his arm, was bowed but at an angle of fulfilled supplication.

  Federico winked at me, an unnerving experience.

  Next into the minibus were the Likely Couple, Juan and Marisa. He was staring ahead of him like an automation, she was dabbing her eyes with a tissue.

  My journalistic instincts got the better of me at the airport. I approached Federico in the check-in line.

  “What happened?” I asked him.

  “At first I was scared,” he said in hesitant English. “Cristina is the daughter of the mayour in the village where she lives. A lady! What am I? A waiter! I worried the honeymoon wouldn’t work out . . .”

  I stared at him in astonishment. “You had a complex?”

  “Like I say, I was worried.”

  “So what changed everything?”

  “You did,” he said. And before I could express incredulity: “You and your wife, you seemed so happy together. You know, sharing . . . So we followed you. And I pointed at you and said to Christina, ‘See, that is what we will be like in the years to come.’ And finally last night she said she love me and, well . . . everything was all right.” He shook my hand.

  There were flaws in his reasoning—I wasn’t a waiter and Diane wasn’t a mayor’s daughter—but I was pleased to hear that, unwittingly, we had acted as marriage guidance counselors.

  “Tell me one thing,” I said, “and I will leave here a happy man. You do play tennis, don’t you?” I had been so wrong about him that having always seen him as a tennis coach, wanted to salvage some pride.

  He frowned. “Never in my life, señor. But I do play pool. I give you a game? We play for money. Say five hundred pesetas?”

  I left them and made my way to the end of the line where the Likely Couple were standing apart like an estranged husband and wife outside a divorce court.

  “I’m sorry to bother you—” I began.

  Marisa interrupted. “Don’t be sorry. Never be sorry in the presence of this man. He is a pig!”

  “But what—”

  “He was married before,” she said. “That’s what.”

  “So was I. But Diane and I are very happy now.”

  “But you told your wife you had been married before. This man”—jabbing her thumb toward Juan—“didn’t tell me until last night. It is over, everything is over.”

  Her husband stared at his big countryman’s hands, rubbing the thumb and forefinger of one of them together as though he was sowing seed.

  I also took Diane to a couple of coastal towns between Alicante and Valencia, including Jávea in the south. In fact it comprised three towns—the old neighborhood, its terrace houses, wearing wrought-iron grilles like jewelry, gathered around a fortified Gothic church, the small port beside a beach where waves left hissing messages on the shingle, and the Arenal beach, a stretch of sand separated from the street by cafés and gift shops perfumed by melting ice cream and tanning oil.

  We went to Gandia on the way north to Valencia, to the original town complete with ducal palace where a branch of the Borgia dynasty once lived, Pedro Luis, brother of the bad and beautiful Lucretia among them. And to its sandy beach two and a half miles away, laundered daily by the municipal valet service and guarded by sentinel apartment blocks.

  We also made a second visit to Benidorm between Javea and Alicante, a sprawl of beachside skyscrapers colonized by the British.

  We booked into a flaky hotel where a palm court ensemble played Strauss waltzes while middle-aged women knitted contentedly and their husbands read the British tabloids.

  If we wanted to see more life, a girl at reception told us in fracture
d English, we should go to a hotel specializing in Spanish package deals. “Wow, you should see them old guys, and grannies from the north,” she said. “They’re something else.” She flapped one hand and returned to the shawl she was crocheting.

  We took an evening stroll along the seafront beside a flat beach lined with palm trees. Mature couples, British, German, Dutch, Scandinavian, and Spanish sauntered arm in arm, reminding me of the vacations of my childhood when orchestras played Gilbert and Sullivan in the bandstands and the air smelled of petunias and night-scented stock.

  Diane and I ate fish and chips drenched in vinegar and dusted with salt in paper bags wrapped in newspaper. Behind us high-rise apartment blocks stretched toward the coast road.

  We had a beer in one of the scores of pubs and went looking for grandpa and granny action. Music led us to it—Rock Around the Clock!

  The dance floor in the hotel was heaving with bodies jiving to the beat of a piano played by a woman who looked like Shelley Winters. The youngest dancer was fifty-five or so.

  As we entered, the floor cleared for one couple. A retired coal miner by the look of him, from Asturias, the cider-drinking region in the north of Spain, broad-shouldered and bow-legged with a jolly, seamed face. She was fiftyish, gray-haired and bouncy, wearing a short skirt and sneakers.

  They started well enough. She twirled and spun and the spectators clapped as the steps became more ambitious. Too ambitious. She suddenly emerged from between his legs, skidded on a discarded slice of lemon and, arms outstretched, ran toward me like a wife greeting her soldier husband after a long war.

  I steadied her then held up one arm. She pirouetted beneath my hand and returned to her husband, who was standing on the dance floor, head lowered, looking for her as though an illusionist had spirited her away.

  The spectators, assuming they had witnessed a set piece, applauded wildly.

  Diane and I moved on to an area of bars and discos where younger vacationers besported themselves until dawn and beyond. Rival gusts of music billowed onto the street; bouncers stood beside touts beckoning passersby into dark depths where the first drink was always free. The touts were not forthcoming about the price of the second.