Spanish Lessons

by Derek Lambert

  I didn’t take a lot of notice—I was busy at my typewriter describing permafrost in Siberia. Diane was in Denia teaching English at the Institute and Ángel was tending a mysterious plant he had sown in a replica of an amphora, a tall earthenware jar used by the Romans and Greeks for storing oil. The plant looked like a datura, a bush bearing bell-like blossoms, usually white, which Ángel warned me were poisonous. But there was a difference: instead of hanging like a carillon of bells these flowers pointed skyward. Local botanists were baffled. Where had Ángel obtained the seeds? they asked. He didn’t know, because although he “borrowed” cuttings and seeds from other gardens where he worked, nothing like this was growing in any of them.

  In fact our garden was a breeding ground of enigmas. Oranges and lemons grew on the same tree. Two white egrets settled here. They were wading birds who required shallow water, and even the shallow end of the swimming pool would have been too deep for them.

  I asked Ángel why he thought the datura-like blooms were upside down.

  “Maybe I planted the seeds the wrong way up,” he replied.

  It was the only joke I ever heard him make.

  The next fire warning was a change in the color of the sunlight from gold to bronze. Smoke had begun to obscure the sun’s rays, but I failed to react because I was still writing about a blizzard in Novosibirsk and, in any case, I hadn’t lived here long enough to appreciate the danger.

  Diane arrived home as a fire-fighting helicopter clattered overhead, disappearing behind Montgo. The stem of smoke had thickened into a trunk and from a distance the mountain looked like the volcano it had once simulated in the Krakatoa movie. Supposing a spark set fire to our house . . .

  We went up to the roof terrace. In the distance orange fire-fighting aircraft were skimming the surface of the sea, scooping water into cavernous tanks in their bellies and dumping it on the fire on the other side of Montgo. Fire engines, ambulances, and police cars brayed. Spurts of flame flickered in the high smoke like gunfire on a battleground.

  I decided to see if I could help. Our village wasn’t yet threatened, but the lemon grove that was for sale at the foot of the terraced wall below our garden was tinder dry, so I left Ángel on guard.

  By the time I reached the lower levels of Montgo in Diane’s Citroën, it was late afternoon and flames had spread to the slopes overlooking Denia.

  Descending traffic clogged the roads, but climbing them in the Citroën was relatively easy. By five P.M. the flames had burned away the scrub on the mountain’s broad summit and from the road I could see them leaping through the pines below.

  Most of the houses in the foothills had been evacuated, but a middle-aged English couple with a menagerie of pets were still in residence in a house with a patio bordered by a white wall. They had spent most of their lives managing a tobacco farm in Africa in what was then Rhodesia, and we had met them in Pilar’s store.

  When I knocked, the door was opened by the wife, Jane, comfortably built and exuberant, who said: “Come in and have a gin and tonic.”

  Their house, now only half a mile away from the flames, was already sweltering in the heat. A mixed bag of dogs and cats barked and meowed on the patio. Sparks floated overhead like fireflies. The fire, fueled by resin in the pines, surged toward us. Jane’s husband was hosing down the walls of the patio.

  “Don’t be bloody fools,” I said, “you’ve got to get out and bring your zoo with you.”

  “The car’s kaput,” Jane said tipsily, “and we can’t leave the animals. Are you sure you won’t have a g and t? Just a little one?”

  “I’ll take the animals,” I said. “You get your money and papers and some clothes and walk to our house—it’s only a couple of miles away.”

  I grabbed a shaggy mongrel by its collar and dragged it barking and snarling to the Citroën.

  “Well, really!” Jane splashed gin into her glass.

  “I think he’s right, dear,” said her husband, a skinny sharp-boned colonial.

  “Of course I’m right,” I snapped.

  I picked up two spitting cats and deposited them in the Citroën beside the mongrel as an aircraft dumped seawater, hissing, onto the advancing flames. A hose connected to a hydrant one hundred yards away thickened as water coursed through it toward the yellow-helmeted firemen fighting the fire. Just as the water spurted out a pine tree exploded, tossing burning embers into the air.

  Jane said: “Be careful with Winston, he can’t see very well.” I picked up a bulldog with glazed eyes and put him beside the two cats.

  Jane’s husband collected a daschund and a yelping terrier of some sort.

  By the time we had finished, the Citroën was stuffed with canine and feline life.

  I phoned Diane and asked her what the situation was at home.

  “Ángel says everything is under control,” she told me. “There are clouds on the horizon. He reckons it will rain later this evening.”

  Jane, traveling bag in one hand, gin and tonic in the other, made her way unsteadily to the gate followed by her husband.

  “About Winston—” she began.

  “I know,” I said, “his eyesight . . .”

  “He’s also incontinent.”

  I cleared the driving seat of living fur. A spaniel licked my face. I looked in the driving mirror but all I could see were my passengers. One of them was a cross-eyed Siamese cat.

  I eased the Citroën into the downhill traffic and headed for home. By the time I got there Winston had proved beyond any shadow of doubt that he was indeed incontinent.

  I left the car outside the gates, windows open a little so that the animals could breathe, and went to the end of the garden to check out the highly combustible lemon grove.

  The burning was still about one and a half miles away but flakes of glowing ash were floating on the hot air. As I reached Ángel standing guard, garden hose in hand, one of them settled among the ravaged lemon trees.

  The long grass, as dry as straw below the trees, caught fire immediately. I envisaged the flames leaping through the garden, scaling the bougainvillea on the terrace, and engulfing the house. And I hadn’t insured it yet.

  Ángel ran to the hose-pipe tap beside the swimming pool and turned it on. Water spurted from a leak halfway along its length. Ángel should have checked it. I would have to sack him.

  The flames in the lemon grove were on the move, setting light to the unkempt trees.

  Ángel mended the leak with insulating tape. But water then spouted from other leaks further down the hose.

  I told Diane, who had joined us, to call the fire brigade, but I doubted whether they would come—they were too busy on Montgo and the last time Diane had reported that she could smell fire half a dozen fireman had rampaged through the house finding nothing more dangerous than an exposed wire in the oven ventilator.

  The fire was now rampaging through the lemon trees. Ángel aimed the leaking hose at the flames but the puny jet didn’t even reach the end of our garden where we had made our original ascent with Emilio.

  Ángel pointed at the clouds looming on the horizon. “Don’t worry, Señor Derek, they are full of rain.”

  I wasn’t worrying: I was panicking. The flames were inching toward the cypress hedges on both sides of our garden. If they got to them, two prongs of fire would race toward the house.

  A breeze sprang up, fanning the flames toward the hedges. Smoke rose from their dark and dusty depths. Tree rats who nested in them were making a run for it. Ángel aimed the hose at both hedges, but the water seemed only to thicken the smoke.

  Suddenly tongues of flames flickered out of the smoke and began to race toward the house. Could the glorious vision Diane and I had shared be extinguished by a flake of burning ash?

  I ran from one side of the garden to the other trying to douse the flames with buckets of water. But they gathered speed as though I were tossing gasoline on them. The house was doomed.

  Diane ran down the garden from the house. “The fire b
rigade is on its way—I told them the whole village was threatened.”

  A fire engine drew up on the roadside next to the lemon grove. The firemen located a hydrant and aimed their hoses at the blazing trees. The water cannon hit them instantly, killing the flames.

  The firemen trampled through the smoking ash and showered the two hedges.

  As the last flames died, a swarm of dogs and cats, released from the Citroën by Jonathan, who had just arrived home after spending the afternoon in Denia with friends, charged down the garden.

  The cats disappeared into the smoking hedge while the dogs, led by Jones, chased after them.

  A fireman asked me: “Are all those yours?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. I started to explain but he wasn’t listening.

  Finally Jane and her husband arrived on foot, downed a couple of gins and tonic and rounded up their boisterous pets.

  I checked through binoculars that their house was safe—firemen had contained the flames about half a mile away—and drove the menagerie home, making sure that Winston and his leaky bladder were on Jane’s lap.

  Five minutes after I got back, the clouds opened up and, standing under an umbrella on the roof terrace, Diane and I watched torrential rain snuff out the last of the flames on Montgo. Ángel had driven off home so, mercifully, he couldn’t gloat about the accuracy of his weather forecast.

  Rainwater swept joyously through the orange groves, flooding the baked soil. Foolishly we drove into Denia with Jonathan to have a look at the inevitable floods; they were extensive—the lower levels of the town had become a little Venice, cars floating like gondolas.

  When we drove back, the access road to the house was also flooded and the Jaguar stalled one hundred yards from home. We waded back in the dark and the three of us slept together in the big bed.

  It was still raining the following morning, but by the afternoon it stopped. At four P.M. Ernesto struck water, six weeks, two days, and nine hours after he had begun to drill for it in his garden.

  At first it was assumed that the bore hole was flooded by the rain, but an official from the water company confirmed that the water was subterranean.

  The following day the same archaic drill was erected in the garden of the patronizing orange grower next door. It struck water within three days.

  FOURTEEN

  The Roofer Who Couldn’t Stand Heights

  Vicente the roofer arrived one July morning when the rain-soaked garden was steaming in the sunshine. His grandmother had regained her health—camomile tea had done the trick, apparently—and because she looked good for another few years he had caught the ferry back from Majorca.

  He was stout with a weather-beaten face, unruly brown hair, and frightened eyes. He mounted a ladder tentatively to assess the work ahead of him.

  I asked Emilio what was the matter with him.

  “He’s afraid of heights,” Emilio said.

  “A roofer who’s scared of heights?”

  “He didn’t want to be a roofer but he didn’t have a choice, that’s the way it is here. You do what your father did. That’s why I’m a carpenter.”

  The ladder wobbled and the roofer stopped climbing.

  Emilio shouted: “You’re almost there.”

  “It’s higher than usual,” the roofer shouted back.

  I stared at Emilio in amazement. “Supposing he worked in New York?”

  “He usually puts roofs on one-storey bungalows,” Emilio said.

  “Is he related to you by any chance?”

  “Distantly,” Emilio said.

  “Supposing he falls . . . Is he insured?”

  “If he fell,” Emilio said carefully, “you might have to pay some of his medical bills.”

  “You mean he isn’t insured?”

  “He won’t fall. He might be scared but he’s as steady as a mountain goat.”

  Vicente came down the ladder, went to his van, and began to mix cement. Roof tiles, treated with bird droppings to encourage mildew and make them look old, were piled beside him.

  Life was complicated by Jonathan’s activities with Port Rotes falla in Denia. It was the eve of the July fiesta and he was taking part in the competitive procession in which, with an imaginative float, Port Rotes hoped to recover some of the glory they had lost when their statue was burned up in March.

  Twice a week I drove him into Denia to a warehouse where members of the falla were putting the finishing touches to the float. The theme was supposed to be a secret, but parents scouring attics for bowler hats, baggy trousers, and walking sticks were a giveaway.

  I had just returned home with a borrowed stick when I heard a crash. I ran to the dining hall and stood ankle deep in rainwater. Above me I saw the horrified face of Vicente staring at me from atop the twenty-foot-high wall above the open fireplace.

  “What happened?” I asked Emilio, who was assembling parts of the minstrel gallery on the terrace.

  “He dropped a tile on the path,” Emilio said.

  “Is he all right?”

  “He’s an experienced roofer.” A masterly evasion.

  “How distant a relative is he, Emilio?”

  “Not all that far.”

  “Supposing he had fallen onto the path?”

  “He knows how to fall.”

  “You mean he’s had a lot of experience of it?”

  “He’s never been seriously injured,” Emilio said.

  It was beginning to sound as if Vicente’s mainstream profession was high-wire artist.

  “But does he know how to lay tiles?”

  “He is the best,” Emilio said with dignity.

  However accomplished he was, I didn’t think he would be able to do his job properly if he was in the grip of vertiginous panic, so I climbed the ladder to see if I could inspire confidence.

  It was now more than six months since work on the dining hall had begun, and the roof at least should have been in place. Having lived in Russia and Ireland, where the pace of life was just as leisurely, I had been prepared for procrastination in Spain. What I hadn’t anticipated were some of its treacherous accomplices—unforeseen snow, ailing grandmothers in Majorca, a roofer who couldn’t stand heights. Most of the time I envied this tolerant attitude to punctuality, perhaps because my working life had been dominated by deadlines, but occasionally frustration took hold of me. When it did, I was liable to succumb to foolhardy impulses. Joining Vicente on the walk was one of them. He was kneeling where he had been laying tiles on the framework of the roof. (The exposed wooden beams that were to give the interior baronial panache were, I learned later, purely decorative.)

  His face was frozen with fear.

  I had always believed I had a moderate head for heights but fear is infectious. I stared at the lake of rainwater below in the dining hall, felt dizzy, and had to sit on the wall beside Vicente, nonchalantly kicking my feet against the cinder blocks.

  “It isn’t really any different from being on top of a bungalow,” I told him.

  “It would be if I fell off.” I tightened my own grip, one hand on either side of me on the wall.

  “But you won’t.”

  “How do you know I won’t?”

  “Because you’re good at your job—it’s just that you’re a little higher than usual.”

  I suddenly appreciated the bravery of policemen who risked their lives on ledges of tall buildings to talk would-be suicides out of jumping.

  “Who says I’m good at my job?” Vicente asked. “Emilio?”

  “Well, aren’t you?”

  “I’ve fallen off a few bungalows,” he said.

  A sparrow perched on the wall and eyed us beadily.

  “Maybe you should come down, then.”

  “No,” he said, “I’ll be all right—as long as I don’t look down.”

  “But—”

  “Please leave me. At least I know how to fall.”

  I realized that Spanish pride was at stake. This was as big a factor as losing face in China
so, without displaying undue haste, I climbed down the ladder.

  On the last rung I called out. “Are you sure you won’t come down? No one will blame you.” I certainly wouldn’t, having shared his vertigo—the dining hall wasn’t the Empire State Building but it was no bungalow either.

  “Yes,” he shouted back, “I’m sure.” A scrap of wet cement dropped from the top of the wall and fell on the path beside me.

  Vicente didn’t return the following day and I feared that either he had lost his nerve or his grandmother in Majorca had taken a turn for the worse, but my misgivings gave way to preparations for the procession that evening.

  Jonathan put on his bowler, baggy trousers, and stick-on mustache and posed beside the swimming pool while I took pictures with my antique camera.

  Then I drove him with Diane to Denia where rival floats were lined up waiting to move off. Small Charlie Chaplins brandishing their walking sticks chased each other around the Port Rotes float, an ambitious creation with a Hollywood motif, complete with giant reels of film made with paper. Adults disguised as film stars from the past—Clark Gable as Rhett Butler, Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara in GoneWith theWind among them—stood aloof from the diminutive Chaplins. Clark Gable was having trouble with an errant mustache and his greasepaint was beginning to run.

  Tractors stood ready to tow the floats in the evening sunlight. Spectators sat on folding chairs lining the main street beneath the plane trees. Hundreds of tourists thronging the sidewalks shouldered their way through crowds spilling from bars. Children threw streamers from apartment balconies, a silver balloon broke loose from a stall also selling bubble gum, licorice roots, and lengths of sugarcane and floated out to sea above the masts of the fishing fleet moored at the quayside.

  At seven P.M. the procession, led by a chestnut horse ridden by an Andalusian horseman wearing a low-crowned Córdoba hat, set off, each of the floats, two hundred yards or so apart, accompanied by a band from a nearby town or village. At our partisan end of the main street no one doubted that the craftsmanship of the Port Rotes entry was the best. It was certainly the most original.

  Children on the floats threw handfuls of sweets to the spectators. I waved at Jonathan; with his blond hair protruding from his bowler, he was an instantly recognizable Chaplin. He threw a toffee that hit me in the eye.