Outside one such establishment a bouncer was attacking two crew-cut teenagers with a baseball bat. He was a very small bouncer but his bat was big enough and he was flailing it with such energy that everyone on the sidewalk was threatened.
I caught the bat on a backward swing and asked him why he was attacking the two teenagers.
“They insulted my mother,” he said, adding: “I am from Cuba,” as if that explained everything.
As we neared our hotel we saw some British youths wearing boots leaping along the rooftops of a line of parked cars. They ran away as a police car skidded to a halt, siren wailing—into the arms of riot police who had anticipated their escape route. The police whacked them halfheartedly with batons, bundled them into a truck, and drove them to the police station, small fry in a routine night’s haul.
Palm fronds rustled in a nocturnal breeze . . . waves murmured on the beach . . . the stars glimmered. Back at the hotel I fell instantly asleep and dreamed that jiving to the beat of Bill Haley and the Comets, I emulated the coal miner and threw Diane across the floor.
Breakfast. Pitchers of orange cordial, a buffet with fried eggs, bacon, sausages, tomatoes, and baked beans on offer; toast, butter, and plum jam; urns of scalding tea, and sachets of instant coffee, sugar, and sweeteners.
I have a weakness for hotel breakfasts and helped myself to everything from the buffet. Diane took one egg and a slice of bacon.
We were joined at the plastic-topped table by a middle-aged American couple from the Midwest. He owned an agricultural machinery factory and they were spending the first three months of his retirement touring Europe. They had visited Britain and France, with Italy and Greece lying in wait, but so far Spain got their vote.
“The people are so friendly,” said Mary, small and quick with blue-rinse watch-spring curls.
“Great golf,” said her husband, Charlie, lanky with a wise face, not much hair, and cornflower-blue eyes.
“Charlie’s playing golf this morning,” Mary said. “I’m doing aerobics on the beach. Do you play golf?” she asked me, and when I shook my head: “So why don’t you both join me on the beach?”
Ever the party pooper, I shook my head.
Diane regarded me suspiciously. “So what are you doing?” she asked.
“I’m going dancing,” I said. “You have a workout.”
I checked out the two of them on the beach, dutifully following the commands of a blond Amazonian in a red track suit—Diane seemed to be one grunt behind pensioners twice her age—bought a newspaper, and headed for a seafront café that staged ballroom dancing from ten A.M. onward.
I didn’t intend to dance, just to make notes for a possible magazine feature. From the café I could see families with children staking claims on the beach beneath umbrellas with lethal spikes. A few women were topless, white breasts aimed at the sun.
I ordered a coffee and watched an elderly couple fox-trotting to the accompaniment of an electric organ played by a bored musician with extravagant sideburns. They looked hypnotically absorbed with each other, transported back to the soft-shoe rhythms of their youth.
The organist started to play a tango, “Jealousy” “Would you like to dance?” I looked up from my newspaper. A tall dark-haired woman in her forties with an arched back, wearing a blue polka-dot dress, smiled at me nervously.
“I’m sorry—”
“Please.” She leaned forward and whispered: “It’s a bet.” I gathered from her accent that she was from Birmingham in the Midlands of England.
“What sort of a bet?” I asked.
“That I wouldn’t have the nerve to ask you and even if I did you’d refuse. You won’t, will you?”
“How much did you bet?” I had never been much of a dancer—I was always apprehensive about going backward—but I did enjoy the occasional wager.
“A hundred pesetas,” she said. “Not much, I know, but—”
“Why me?”—fishing for a compliment.
“Well, you are the only man sitting by himself.”
She held out a slim hand heavy with rings and madness overtook me. I had never been able to master a basic quickstep let alone a tango, but the age of chivalry was not dead. I stood and followed her onto the floor.
She immediately took command. Strutting, gliding, tossing her head imperiously. She was a born-again Ginger Rogers, accompanied by a scruffy apology for Fred Astaire wearing jeans, a faded blue shirt, and tennis shoes that squeaked on the floor.
All went well enough until I found myself being propelled backward.
Panic overcame me and I tensed my muscles to try and control the momentum. It was like trying to plunge a manual gearshift from reverse directly into first. Pain stabbed my back.
Luckily the dance ended at that moment. My partner shouted: “Olé!” and strode back to her table to collect her winnings from two men with white hair and mahogany tans.
I limped back to my coffee and newspaper. The organist gave me a pitying, be-your-age look, slotted a Glenn Miller cassette into a play-deck, and headed for the bar.
When I got back to the hotel, Diane was hobbling across the foyer to the elevator, one hand pressed to the small of her back.
I reached her in a few faltering strides like a marathon runner about to collapse as he reenters a stadium. “What happened to you?” I asked.
“Those damned exercises,” she said. “When I touched my toes a pain shot up my back like a blowtorch. And do you know what that butch bitch in charge of us said?”
“Don’t be a wimp?”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s what I would have said.”
We helped each other into the elevator watched sympathetically by pensioners as fit as lifeguards.
We drove home that afternoon, to Jonathan, Jones, and the two cats, and in the evening Diane and I walked painfully to the end of the garden and listened to night settling. A nightingale singing, the chirrup of cicadas, the whisper of bats’ wings . . .
Misadventures apart, the exploration of our territory had, I felt, been an unqualified success. We had flown to the island of Majorca and observed tourism squeezing its beauty. We had driven to the resorts of Gandia, where apartment blocks rose like a towering sea wall, and to Jávea, so British that it might have been an extension of imperial India.
But paradoxically it was Benidorm that had the most profound effect on us. It had not merely reaffirmed our belief that resort life wasn’t our style: it had reminded us that outside our citrus groves there were other Spains, gracious and raucous, steel-bladed and sentimental, raw-tongued or eloquently muted.
A snatch of cante jondo, the tragic refrains of flamenco, issuing from a bar had reminded us that at Guadix, overlooking Granada, gypsies still lived in caves, some as neat at duplexes, others as primitive as foxes’ lairs. The exuberant pensioners from the north had brought with them images of both alpine hardship dictated by the health of a few head of livestock and the piston thud of heavy industry in cities such as Bilbao.
None of this was the stuff of brochure Spain.
The diversity of Benidorm’s temporary Spanish immigrants—pensioners often stayed the whole winter at knock-down tariffs—also stirred the contradictory bones of Spain’s blood-stained history.
Despite all the wars sparked by insurgents, territorial squabbles, and royal succession, Jews and Arabs had lived amicably together for three centuries—until the Christians finally conquered the Moors, and in 1492 expelled the Jews or forced them during the Inquisition to convert to Christianity. Perhaps it would benefit today’s peacemakers in the Middle East to study those three-hundred years of medieval camaraderie.
Becalmed among the orange and lemon trees behind the Costa. Blanca, it was easy to forget that we lived in a still turbulent land, and we resolved that evening to journey further afield again.
TWELVE
The Caliph and the Napkin Man
The heat took its first swipe at the village at the begining of June. The ears
of donkeys hauling carts drooped; schools went onto half days; the fans of the old women in the church flapped as frantically as the wings of trapped birds.
A van delivered ice. The fishmonger made his rounds every week in his van, announcing his arrival with blasts on his horn. Gypsies sold red-mouthed, black-toothed watermelons as big as beach balls.
On roadsides the yellow spires of mignonette and mauve viper’s bugloss wilted and died. At night glowworms switched on their lights on drystone walls.
Such was the heat that the sight of a Moor striding along the main street, manifestly cross, swiping at flies with a sword, didn’t astonish me. Maybe he was a mirage.
He turned into the Bar Paraiso with a flounce of his silky red-and-white robe. As I followed him, the roar of the coffee machine subsided and the minute hand of the wall clock slipped backward: stay there long enough and it would be yesterday.
The Moor, it soon became apparent, wasn’t illusory. He ordered a Dyc whisky, Spain’s answer to Scotch, tossed it back, and addressed a handful of regular customers. “What are you staring at?”
The voice was familiar. So was the truculent figure wearing the turban and exotic finery.
“Emilio,” I said, “what the hell are you doing?”
Rehearsing, it transpired, for the Moors and Christians, a fiesta in which locals dressed as Moors from North Africa, who flourished in Spain for seven hundred years, and Christians, who finally vanquished them in the fifteenth century, marched down Denia’s main street and staged a mock battle.
The fiestas were held elsewhere—the most ambitious in Alcoy, fifty miles away—with processions of combatants, Christians in armor and chain mail, and swaggering Moors, accompanied by the drumbeat and cymbal crash of marching bands.
There was a deafening battle with swords and muskets until finally the keys of the castle were handed over to the Christians. Recently in a nearby town, so I was told, the Moorish leaders shouted: “Come and get them.” The battle took a realistic turn and members of both armies ended up in the hospital.
Although the Moors had lost their holdings more than five hundred years ago, their presence was still tangible in the region, not on the majestic scale of the Alhambra in Granada, but in the fallen fruit of history. You could see stone walls built to contain cultivated terraces on steep hillsides, alleys that had once led to the souk, and young men with hawkish faces who looked as though they should have been riding Arab stallions through the Atlas mountains in North Africa.
It was all much more evocative than the legacies of the Iberians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, and Visigoths who had all sojourned in Spain, probably because the Moorish presence was more recent.
Emilio told me he had always wanted to take the part of a Christian: predictably perverse because most participants wanted to be Moors, not because they felt any allegiance to them, simply because the passage of time had infused them with a roguish quality, probably spurious.
“Why?” I asked.
Emilio gripped his plastic sword. “Because they won.”
Only that week he had tried to defect to the Christians, he said, but they wouldn’t have him. Which, I suppose, accounted for his bad temper.
He ordered another whisky and lit a flaking cigar. “You like a bet, Señor Derek?”
“If the odds are right.”
“Then be here next week at eleven in the morning—I’ve organized an arm-wrestling contest.”
A challenge, I decided, that would have to be approached warily if Emilio was in charge. I respected him these days, but he was unpredictable just the same.
He picked up his sword and strode out of the bar. On the wall the hands of the clock retreated another minute.
We had now been living in Spain for six months, and most of the excuses for not improving our Spanish had evaporated. We enrolled for classes at an institute in Denia. Diane was relatively fluent, but I had always struggled, grateful to those Spaniards who spoke a little English or those, like Emilio, who spoke a great deal.
One Monday morning we drove into town in Diane’s little secondhand Citroën, primrose yellow and liberally dented, for our first lesson. We took the back lanes passing through citrus groves, first oranges then tangerines and mandarins.
Once when Denia had been the center of the raisin trade, this corner of Spain had been planted with far more grapevines. British traders had besported themselves in the town’s brothels and casinos while the grapes dried, but at the turn of this century a disease, phylloxera, had killed the vines and the British had departed, not bothering to return when some of the vineyards were replanted.
Ahead of us on a spur stood the remains of Denia castle, mostly towering walls with little inside them. The site of the Temple of Diana supposedly lay close to the town walls and a golden statue of the Roman goddess was said to be buried nearby. Once, so it was rumored, the body of a Roman centurion had been excavated, but he had taken one look at the results of evolution and disintegrated.
We passed a matronly cyclist, a fisherman swinging a dried octopus by its tentacles, and a carpet seller with a glossy quiff of hair sitting on a rug beside his van drinking his morning bottle of beer.
Diane stopped to let a flock of sheep and goats get past. They approached us warily, then made a dash for it on either side of the Citroën while the young shepherd smiled gently as his two dogs did his work for him.
We passed a yellow-walled mansion, its turrets crowned with what looked like garbage can lids. Then we were on the outskirts of Denia.
Diane parked the Citroën and we walked through a tunnel under the castle, emerging into sunlight so bright after the dripping gloom that it made our eyes ache.
The director of the English Institute where Spanish was taught to foreigners and English to Spaniards was a dashing, curly-haired teacher named Julio, who had been a pilot in the Spanish Air Force. Diane was assigned to an advanced class. I was relegated to a roomful of duds, mostly that breed of foreigners who insist that although they can’t speak Spanish they can read it.
Certainly the inability to pick up the language was the most common cause of frustration among expats. I was lucky—I had Diane.
I was placed between a swaggering gray-haired German named Klaus who, during World War II, had been a tank commander on the Russian front—he walked with a Soviet-inflicted limp and gleamed with gold chains, identity tags, and rings—and Sonje, a glamorous Dutch artist who manifestly loathed him.
Julio greeted us cheerily in the classroom and a woman in the back row told him that he spoke too quickly, the familiar misconception about any foreigner who speaks his own language at conversational speed.
Sonje returned his greeting with a few well chosen and, I suspected, well rehearsed phrases; Klaus responded crisply as though ordering the destruction of a Soviet tank. They glared at each other across the no-man’s-land where I was sitting.
Julio asked all of us for our names and we gave them one by one. An Englishman with tufted eyebrows from a village near Jávea embellished his with unnecessary credentials and a fluency that suggested that by attending such a lowly class, he intended to show off.
The British and Americans were adequate students of Spanish. Italians, French, Portuguese, and Dutch were the best among the Europeans.
The secret of learning fluent Spanish was to mix with Spaniards. Better still to take a Spanish lover—but most foreign residents were of an age where all their faculties would have to be concentrated on performance rather than linguistic foreplay.
Sonje supplied her name with a smile and a wink. Klaus rose unsteadily to his feet: if he forgot his game leg and cracked his heels together, I feared he might fall into my lap. I braced myself but he stayed upright.
Julio addressed us in Spanish informing us that he was our teacher and we were his pupils and it was Monday and the sun was shining.
Outside the classroom, which was above a bookshop, the summer day beckoned. Coquettish laughter in the street, mopeds coughing, the beat of p
igeons’ wings in the air . . .
A hand gripped my thigh. I glanced down. It belonged to Sonje, not the tank commander.
“That man is a fool,” she hissed.
“Which man?” I asked.
“The German sitting beside you.”
“Why is he a fool?”
“The way he holds himself,” she whishpered mysteriously.
“Siencio!” Julio glared at us.
He asked Sonje what day it was and what the weather was like and she told him it was Monday and the sun was shining.
Tufted Eyebrows guffawed. Klaus nudged me and whispered: “She has a terrible accent, that woman beside you.”
“Yours is good?”
“Ja, is very got.”
Julio asked him what day it would be tomorrow and what he thought the weather would be like.
Klaus told him fluently enough, but he sounded as though he were giving the command to attack Stalingrad.
Sonje, who was displaying the foothills of a tanned bosom, gripped my thigh again and said: “He had a terrible accent.”
Toward the end of the lesson hostilities between Germany and Holland heated up.
Sonje laughed immoderately at any mistake perpetrated by Klaus; he invoked Gott whenever she made an error. At each outburst the Englishman raised his eyebrows a centimeter higher. After a while he directed his weary scorn at me; when I confused cervezas (beers) with servicious (toilets), I heard him confide to another student that I was “letting England down.”
The situation did not improve during the next couple of classes. My thigh remained under attack and when I escaped to a chair by the wall Klaus and Sonje took up positions behind and in front of me.
Julio was a good teacher, but I was learning more Dutch and German expletives than Spanish.
So I quit. After a particularly harrowing session in the buffer zone between Klaus and Sonje, I crossed the street to a café to meet Diane for coffee.
Spanish Lessons Page 13