Spanish Lessons

by Derek Lambert

  I was sitting by myself at a table surrounded by middle-aged women eating sticky pastries when the Englishman with the tufted eyebrows came in and, standing in the doorway, surveyed the scene like a captain on the bridge of a battleship. I tried to hide behind a newspaper but he spotted me and sat at my table.

  “Hear you’ve abandoned ship,” he said, after he had ordered a black coffee and a brandy. “Mind if I give you a word of advice?” Whether I minded or not he gave it. “Don’t give up too easily, it creates a bad impression.”

  “Not British?”

  He nodded, smiling tightly. He drank his brandy in one gulp and sipped his coffee conspiratorially. “We’ve got to set an example.” He tightened his cravat and finger-combed the waves of graying hair above his ears.

  “Who to?” I asked. “The natives?”

  “I’m only trying to be helpful.” He twiddled one of the brass buttons on his blazer like a radio ham tuning an old-fashioned wireless. “Your attitude leaves a lot to be desired. Were you in the army?”

  “Air force,” I told him.

  “Ah, navy man myself. You were a pilot?”

  “Sorry.”

  “You look pretty fit,” he said grudgingly.

  “Gardening,” I said, thinking of Ángel laboring in the compound.

  “Play any sport?”

  “Not any more,” I said. “Do I get the job?”

  “What job?” His eyebrows twitched.

  “I got the impression I was being interviewed for one.”

  He ignored me. “I thought we might show the flag next week. I hear they’re staging a contest in your village. Spot of arm wrestling. We can show them we Brits are made of stern stuff.”

  “Arm wrestling Spaniards?” I remembered Emilio’s invitation. The Englishman looked trim enough with a golfer’s tan and an upright back, but he wouldn’t be a match for Emilio’s bulging muscles.

  “No, you and me,” Tufted Eyebrows said. “That way at least one Brit wins.”

  I looked at him in astonishment. “What about my attitude? I thought it left a lot to be desired.”

  “Could do it the world of good. You know, British sportsmanship, that sort of thing.” He eyed me cannily. “Thought we might have a bet on the side. Say fifty pounds?”

  “You’re on,” I said. I had never really included serious gambling among my assorted vices, but now I was ready to splurge because I realized there was more at stake here than mere antiquated patriotism: we were going to battle over attitudes to settling in a foreign land. His banner was isolationism, mine was integration. I suspected that he was more proficient than he was admitting. “Make it a hundred pounds,” I added.

  “Done.” He stood up and shook my hand; his grip was surprisingly strong.

  “How did it go today?” I asked Diane when she came into the café.

  “Terrific.”

  “Terrific?” How could irregular verbs be terrific?

  “I’m changing classes.”

  “Promotion?”

  “Not exactly—Julio has asked me to teach English to a class of children.”

  “Mein Gott,” I said.

  I didn’t tell Diane about the arm wrestling, which meant I didn’t have to tell her about the wager either. She would have been supportive, but some initiatives are private and personal. I spent the next few days arm wrestling walls and squeezing a small rubber ball, which I had been told strengthened the muscles of the forearm. Diane caught me once in a trial of strength with the wall of the garage and looked at me as though I had been drinking.

  I was haunted by the strength of Tufted Eyebrows’ grip when we shook hands over the café table—a Rambo-Rocky squeeze that suggested iron-pumper’s biceps lurking beneath his blazer.

  By the time the day of the arm-wrestling dawned my right forearm was drained of strength and a pain shot through my wrist when I knuckled my fist. I searched for Emilio to seek tactical advice, but he had taken a week off to rehearse for the Moors and Christians and spent most of his time in Denia drinking, smoking the big flaking cigars that were an obligatory accessory for Moors, and swatting flies with his sword.

  When I got to the Bar Paraiso for the contest at eleven A.M. Emilio was sitting at the counter next to Jesús, the gag delivery man. His black, silver-threaded hair was oiled and plastered flat, his craggy face wore its usual expression of resolute honesty confused by glimmers of cunning.

  The first bout, he said, would be between two relative strangers.

  He pointed at a table behind the crowd thronging the bar. Tufted Eyebrows was sitting next to a legendary visitor to Denia, the Napkin Man.

  A Catalan, he materialized in the village every month or so, burly and jolly with a head of gray curls and stubby fingers with which he fashioned ballet dancers from white paper napkins.

  Children gathered round his table as he tore and twisted the paper into tutus. With a sweet smile he distributed his creations, one for each outstretched hand.

  He also brought with him scarlet napkins; with these he made carnations for any girl who took his fancy, and many a paper blossom probably rekindled sunlit memories in chilly homes far away from Spain.

  I stared at Emilio. “Why those two?”

  “Why not? Everyone’s welcome.” Emilio lowered his voice to a stentorian whisper. “And the Napkin Man is the favorite.”

  The bets were laid with Jaime the pint-sized barman, who recorded them in a notebook. Spaniards were compulsive gamblers—the national Christmas lottery, El Gordo (the Fat One), was the biggest in the world in terms of money invested—and wage packets were lost at poker, fortunes made on forecasting results of matches on the football pools.

  In an illegal casino in a nearby town, one gambler was reputed to have lost his house in a game of poker; another was said to have lost his wife, although rumor had it that he had thrown the game and offered his condolences to the winner.

  I turned to Jesús. “You think the Napkin Man will win?”

  “I agree with Emilio.” The carpenter clenched his fists. “What do you think, Señor Derek?”

  Remembering Tufted Eyebrows’ handshake, I massaged my right hand. “It won’t be as easy as you think.”

  “Then bet on the Englishman,” Emilio said. “Can you guess who he wants to wrestle if he wins?”

  “I know who he wants to wrestle,” I said. “Me!” The original scenario had been a single bout between the two of us but he must have decided on a double whammy.

  I opted to go with the smart money. Diane had given me one thousand pesetas to buy strawberries and cream so I put it on the Napkin Man at 2–1.

  The crowd drifted toward the table where the Napkin Man and Tufted Eyebrows were sitting. The Napkin Man made a ballerina from a white serviette, placed her on the table, and watched her pirouette in the breeze from the ceiling fan.

  An old mongrel came in from the heat and collapsed on the floor. Jaime left the hissing coffee machine and pushed his way to the front of the twenty or so spectators, all men.

  Eyebrows rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt. Muscles rippled on his forearms. He spotted me and raised an eyebrow. An acknowledgment that we were showing the flag?

  He and the Napkin Man planted their elbows on the table and, insides of their forearms almost touching, locked hands. Each bout was the best of three falls in which one contestant, keeping his elbow on the table, had to flatten his opponent’s arm.

  Eyebrows said: “Ready?” The Napkin Man smiled and nodded. Their arms strained against each other. The bar became quiet, probably for the first time in its history. Veins stood out on the Englishman’s temples. His arm started to bend backward. The Napkin Man, wearing a thick checked shirt despite the heat, winked at a friend in the crowd. Inexorably Eyebrows’s arm continued its descent until his knuckle touched the top of the table.

  A collective sigh from the crowd: the smart money looked safe. The hands of the wall clock slipped back a second, the ballerina the Napkin Man had made fluttered toward th
e edge of the table.

  One down, two to go.

  Beer, cornot, and brandy flowed; Eyebrows ordered a Scotch and soda, and Jaime poured him a generous measure of whisky. The Napkin Man asked for an absinthe—illegal in France and elsewhere because one of the ingredients, wormwood, was said to rot the brain—that was distilled in a nearby village. A plump German girl staying in the village sat at the bar and ordered a Coke; he caught her eye and started work on a red carnation.

  Eyebrows gulped his whisky and soda. “Ready?” he asked his opponent.

  The Napkin Man said he was and put down the embryonic carnation. The German girl raised her glass to him.

  Hands locked again. The Englishman’s arm bent backward and I prepared to collect my winnings.

  Suddenly his arm convulsed like a dying fish. The Napkin Man’s arm jerked backward and Eyebrows flattened it on the table.

  One each, one to go. Maybe Eyebrows was a hustler. I hoped not. An English con man visiting the village would damage the national image and impair our efforts to integrate.

  The eyebrows spoke to me again. I didn’t know what they said—“That taught the foreign devils a lesson,” perhaps—but I felt my own eyebrows, powered by some imitative force, trying to reply.

  The Napkin Man finished his glass of brain rot, smiled at the German girl, and fashioned a few more petals of red carnation.

  Eyebrows asked the Napkin Man if he was ready for the third and last trial of strength. The Napkin Man said he was—a mere formality, his tone implied.

  Knuckles white, tendons corded, the two arms bent first one way, then the other. Sweat trickled down the contestants’ faces. The silence thickened.

  From the direction of the crossroads came the crash of breaking glass. At the same moment the Napkin Man’s arm collapsed. The collective sigh this time was plaintive, but they were gamblers all and they accepted such disappointments as loss items in the weekly budget. My loss was more tangible: strawberries and cream.

  I noticed Jaime hand Emilio money.

  “I thought you backed the Napkin Man,” I said.

  “No Señor Derek. I only said he was the favorite.”

  “You could have warned me that he wasn’t going to try very hard.”

  “I didn’t know he wasn’t,” Emilio said. “But I did know the Englishman was. His sort never give up.”

  “So who are you going to back in my bout?”

  “No one,” Emilio said. “We are friends, you and me.”

  I turned to the Napkin Man. “You didn’t try, did you?”

  He shook his head, gray curls bobbing. “To begin with I did. Then I thought, ‘There’s too much struggle in this world,’ and I relaxed.”

  He handed me the ballerina and walked out of the bar with the German girl, paper carnation nestling above one of her ears.

  I took his place at the table and faced Eyebrows, who was drinking his second whisky and soda. He looked disconcertingly composed.

  “Good man,” he said.

  “Showing the flag,” I said.

  We clasped hands, his eyebrows rose, and we commenced battle, he the champion of expat insularity, I the exponent (or so I liked to think) of respect for our hosts’ customs. As soon as I exerted pressure his arm slumped back and his knuckles hit the tabletop.

  I accepted a beer from Emilio and we took up our positions again. Eyebrows’s grip was firmer this time, muscles moving on his jawline as he clenched and unclenched his teeth.

  I applied pressure but his arm was as obdurate as the garage wall. I felt the strength draining from my own.

  The old dog hauled itself to its feet and rested its whiskery head on my knee.

  I made a last push. Nothing. He tightened his grip and thrust forward, staring at me with his ice-blue eyes. I didn’t give up but my arm did.

  One each, one to go.

  I finished my beer. I was sweating like a leaking water cart.

  Emilio materialized behind me. “I’ve made a bet,” he said.

  “Who did you put your money on?”

  “The man who’s going to win.” He was beginning to sound like Ángel.

  I massaged my wrist and forearm, put my elbow on the table, and asked my opponent if he was ready. We faced each other again and locked hands. Silence except for the whining of the old dog.

  Together we exerted pressure. Pain shot up my arm. Then unwittingly my opponent came to my assistance. I remembered his words in the café opposite the English Institute. “Your attitude leaves a lot to be desired.”

  Adrenaline flowed. I felt a surge of power in my arm as potent as an electric shock. His arm bent back an inch or so, the veins on his wrists bulged. His arm retreated another inch, then recovered.

  Attitude be damned! I gave a last push. The fight went out of his arm and he bowed his head in defeat.

  “Well fought,” I said. I mopped the sweat from my face with a handkerchief. “By the way, you owe me a hundred pounds.”

  “Is a check all right?”

  “Of course. An Englishman’s word . . .”

  He scrawled a check and with a final twitch of his eyebrows walked out of the bar into the sunshine. His check cleared but I never saw him again.

  I noticed that Emilio wasn’t collecting any money from Jaime and said to him: “I thought you were backing the best man.”

  “You let me down, Señor Derek,” he said. “You won.”

  When I got home Diane asked me why I hadn’t brought the strawberries and cream. “I brought you this instead,” I said, and handed her the paper ballerina. And later, the check for a hundred pounds.

  THIRTEEN

  Ordeal by Fire and Fur

  July. And the countryside gasped for water. It hadn’t rained for weeks; serpents of heat lay coiled in hollows in the vineyards; the hills turned desert brown; figs withered and, despite the water that surged in irrigation channels, oranges shriveled and dropped before their time. Wells ran dry, diviners carrying metal rods or hazel twigs, both sensitive to subterranean water in the hands of those with a mysterious affinity to H2O, trudged the fields in search of sites where wells could be sunk.

  The local council published notices forbidding householders to hose their gardens or top up their swimming pools. Water from the mains supply tasted salty, so we filled plastic bottles from an emergency tank provided by the council in the village.

  Arrangements were made to pipe sweet water to Denia from Pego, a small town fifteen miles away, but bad feeling between the two towns had run high for years and the pipeline was sabotaged by militants who didn’t see why they should bring succor to an old enemy. Brawls broke out between the two factions and the Guardia Civil were summoned—but not before the relief pipe had been wrecked.

  Underground water dried up, weakening the strata of subsoil, so drastically in an orange grove a mile from our house that a crater opened up and a house fell into it. Would our dining hall, still without a roof, finish up as a basement?

  Every morning we looked hopefully for clouds but all we could see was a haze of latent heat. Jones lay flattened on the floor tiles, only moving if a bitch in heat passed by. Hoppity clumped lethargically around on his wooden leg; Ethel ate, slept, and blinked.

  The lack of water didn’t affect our garden too drastically. The red and yellow lilies shed their blossoms prematurely and the springy Bermuda turf became more like a trampoline than a lawn, but the fruit trees and Ángel’s vegetables were unaffected. Ángel, pale aesthetic features solemn with reverence for the forces of nature, said they were being sustained by an underground river.

  The owner of a cottage near our house didn’t fare so well. Plump and worried, a few strands of hair plastered from ear to ear, Ernesto was a fanatical gardener and, although he furtively watered his flowers and vegetables at night, they were dying.

  We were awoken one morning by a thump that shook our bed and sent lemons thudding onto the driveway.

  We dressed and walked down the street to investigate. A crowd had ga
thered outside Ernesto’s detached, whitewashed cottage. In the middle of the lawn stood a drill twice the height of the cottage—a rusting metal pole supported by struts, powered by a generator, and operated by its owner, a phlegmatic water prospector with rust-colored hair.

  “Drill” was a misnomer, because gravity rather than rotation seemed to be its propellant. As we arrived the shaft hit the ground and again the earth trembled.

  Ernesto told me the “drill” would strike water in three days to enable him to sink a well. Spectators were already making bets about the time the strike would be made.

  The owner of the cottage next to Ernesto, an orange grower with malicious eyes, as complacent as Ernesto was harassed, said three months was a more realistic wager.

  The generator picked up power and the thumping fell into a regular rhythm, continuing through siesta, stopping at dusk.

  On the third day, when it was expected that water would be struck, a dozen villagers reassembled outside the cottage. Midday was the most popular bet. The shaft rose and fell. Midday passed. So did siesta and dusk.

  One week. Two. Three. Villagers advised Ernesto to throw in his hand, but a streak of obstinancy provoked by the knowing smile of the orange grower had entered his soul. The shaft continued to rise and fall, a pulse that was scarcely noticed anymore.

  Ernesto’s dilemma crystalized one of the dangers that had always plagued this region, more so since the Moors first planted citrus fruit and rice. Water was its lifeblood, and its people lived in constant fear that one day its arteries would dry up.

  When a drought threatened the crops, another enemy arrived on its coattails: fire. Every summer, flames ignited by the sun’s rays through a piece of glass, by a campfire, a cigarette butt, or an arsonist’s burning brand, swept down pine-clad slopes on the hills beyond the citrus groves, leaving behind charred humps of land as stark as slag heaps.

  This year the first local warning that fire had once again stalked drought was a stem of smoke behind Montgo.