Spanish Lessons

by Derek Lambert

  The floats passed us as sedately as galleons. Carousels, Olympian gods, totem poles and wigwams . . .

  The judging took place further up the street. Would originality be recognized? Port Rotes had always been avant-garde in the themes of its floats, a trend not always appreciated in traditional Spain.

  And it wasn’t appreciated this evening: their float came second.

  A triumph, Jonathan told me later as rockets burst in incandescent sprays in the night sky.

  Wouldn’t first have been better? I asked him. “Winning isn’t everything,” he said. “In any case it’s the fallas in March that really matter.”

  Parental pride swelled inside me: I hoped he would always be just as obliquely philosophical.

  Two days later Vicente the roofer, who claimed he had been suffering from a feverish cold, reappeared accompanied by Emilio. I sometimes wondered how Emilio’s carpentry workshop survived when he was at my house, but he told me it was in good hands. Family presumably.

  It was a hushed morning, dawn clouds pink, an eagle from an eyrie on Montgo making its way across the sky with lazy wing beats.

  The lawn was covered with tiny spiders’ webs beaded with dew that sparkled as the sun rose. A toad sat under a drainpipe where it had made its home. A fox hurried home.

  I walked to the bakery in the village and came back with hot bread, which we ate spread with honey on the terrace while Vicente prepared for his ascent.

  The preparations were so drawn out that by the time he took his first steps up the ladder, I had driven Jonathan to school and retired to my study and Diane had gone to Denia to teach her class. (One young troublemaker had asked her to find out why tomb, comb, and bomb were pronounced differently.)

  I emerged from my office at eleven to make coffee. Emilio was sitting on a plastic chair on the terrace reading the local weekly newspaper Canfali. He said Vicente had already laid two dozen tiles.

  From the direction of the crossroads came a metallic crash. Sirens wailed. Two Jehovah’s Witnesses appeared at the gates, as neatly dressed as applicants at a job interview, retreating in good order when Jones curled his lip at them.

  I talked with Ángel about the garden. He told me he had news. The tree bearing both oranges and lemons was originally a lemon tree that had been grafted with shoots from an orange tree; the two egrets had adapted to their new environment by standing on the steps of the swimming pool where they wouldn’t drown. But he still couldn’t explain why the blossoms of the plants in the amphora were upside down.

  I returned to my study, content with the progress on the roof and Ángel’s discomfiture at being defeated by mere flora—I hadn’t sacked him after the episode with the hose but it had been close.

  My concentration was broken at midday by a thump and a cry of pain.

  I ran into the dining hall. Vicente lay on the floor in the dregs of the rainwater. Emilio knelt beside him.

  I told him to call an ambulance while I carried out basic first aid procedures I had learned when I was a conscript in the air force years earlier. I covered him with a blanket and looked for obvious injuries such as fractures or hemorrhage. I couldn’t find anything, but he seemed to be distressed. I asked him where the pain was, but he didn’t reply.

  Two medics stretchered him to the ambulance, and I accompanied him with Emilio to the hospital in Denia.

  Still he didn’t speak. Emilio did. “This will cost you, Señor Derek,” he said, sympathetically.

  From the ambulance he was taken to Emergency. Emilio and I waited in reception. It wasn’t peak time for accidents and the only other occupants were an unshaven youth coughing horrendously and a woman with a black eye.

  We were joined by a furtive young man with a long blond hair wearing a crumpled tropical suit who sat beside me and said: “Bad luck about that chap working for you.” He spoke English with what could have been a Portuguese accent.

  “How did you hear about it?” I asked him.

  “It’s a small town. Is he going to be all right?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not God.” I picked up an old magazine and began to read it.

  “He wasn’t insured, was he.” A statement rather than a question.

  “None of your business,” I said.

  “But it is.” He handed me a visiting card stating that he was an insurance broker. “I can do you a favor.”

  “You can,” I said. “You can get lost.”

  “I can offer you a policy at very reasonable terms covering accidents to anyone working for you. Back-dated to yesterday!”

  I glanced at his card. “What’s your address?”

  He ran his hand through his long hair. “Why do you want to know?”

  “Because it will help when I denounce you to the police for attempted fraud.”

  Denunciations were one of the more Machiavellian legal processes in Spain: you could get away with all sorts of offenses until a neighbor or an enemy purporting to be a friend denounced you. Police who often looked shamefaced when they had to act on the information would never divulge the identity of the snitch.

  He tried to grab the visiting card but I held onto it. “I’m only trying to help you,” he said.

  “Do you follow ambulances and hearses or does someone tip you off?”

  At that moment Vicente emerged, as though he had risen from the dead. Walking upright, if a little unsteadily, he made his way toward us accompanied by a young doctor in a white housecoat.

  “How is he?” I asked the doctor.

  The doctor replied in English. “He’s fine.” He lowered his voice. “Frankly I couldn’t find anything wrong with him but I told him he was a little concussed. A lot of patients appreciate that sort of thing—then they don’t think they’ve been wasting my time.”

  I turned to issue a last threat to the insurance broker but he had disappeared. I heard an ambulance wail. Outside the clinic I saw him take off on a motorcycle in hot pursuit.

  Vicente returned to work two days later a new man. He climbed the ladder with the agility of a monkey and began laying tiles as though he were dealing playing cards.

  I consulted Emilio. What had brought about the transformation?

  “All he needed was confidence,” Emilio said. “He didn’t know what it was like to fall from that height. Now he does, it wasn’t too bad, and he’s full of enthusiasm.”

  “You don’t mean he liked falling?” I asked incredulously.

  “He liked the attention he got.”

  A tile crashed onto the path. I looked up. The roofer grinned from his perch and raised a clenched fist in a gesture of triumph.

  FIFTEEN

  Running Water, Running Bulls

  If it hadn’t been for Javier I wouldn’t have run with the bulls.

  He was the local plumber—a genuine craftsman, unlike the specialist summoned by officials of the water company who believed that because of his parochial knowledge, he would be able to locate the source of a leak in our driveway.

  At first the leak had been nothing more than a damp patch, laced with silver snail trails, that lingered after the sun had burned away the dew.

  By the end of July it had spread ominously from one end of the driveway to the middle and we could hear water trickling.

  Ángel warned me that many old premises had the same problem with underground metal pipes that had corroded. The leak, he said, was somewhere under the driveway in the pipe feeding the house from the main supply under the road; if it was located between the meter in the driveway and the house, I would have to foot the repair bill.

  “If it’s on the other side of the meter closer to the road?”

  “The water company pays,” he said.

  “It must be their responsibility,” I said, pointing at the site of the seepage, which seemed to be closer to the road than the house.

  “Maybe.”

  “What do you mean maybe?”

  “Maybe the leak isn’t there. It could have spread under the driveway
until it found a weak spot.”

  “Where do you think it is?”

  Ángel consulted the heavens but there wasn’t a cloud in sight. “One side or the other,” he said.

  I called the water company and within half an hour two workmen arrived in a van that had more dents than Diane’s Citroëen. I also consulted them about the shuddering noise in the bathroom whenever we turned on the taps, but they said that was an inside job. Outside their jurisdiction.

  One of them was squat with a bushy mustache, the other lean with sandy hair, shoals of freckles, and a cough that came up from his boots. One was Pedro, the other Pablo, but I never sorted out which was which.

  They surveyed the driveway for a few minutes, then went to the van for their tools. Emilio drove up, surveyed the scene, and departed for the village. He must have reported what was happening, because soon afterward half a dozen spectators arrived at the gates, among them the specialist with the raffish mustache who had tried to claim the glory for fixing our sewage congestion.

  When Pedro and Pablo retired to the garage for their breakfast, the spectators dispersed, all of them, that was, except the specialist, who seemed to think the entrails of our garden were his responsibility. He stayed outside the gates stroking his mustache and offering advice. Pedro and Pablo turned their backs on him and went on eating their bocadillos.

  Finally Pedro, or it may have been Pablo, selected a pickaxe, coughed exhaustively, and aimed a blow at what looked like the epicenter of the seepage, which was beginning to gain depth in the jigsaw of sand-colored paving stones. Stone chips flew and Jones, who had been mutely begging for scraps of bocadillo, retired to the terrace. The second workman aimed a swipe with another pickaxe and soon, oblivious to the gathering heat, they were working rhythmically together.

  By lunch they had excavated a considerable cavity. Water oozed from the mud at the bottom of it.

  They summoned Ángel.

  “What did they say?” I asked him as they retired to the garage for a swig of water.

  “They said the leak isn’t there.”

  The words had a familiar and ominous ring. Could they be under the influence of the sewage specialist? As I glanced toward the gates he mounted his bicycle and jauntily pedaled away. Supposing the leak was on the stretch of driveway between the meter and the house? The destruction being wrought in the driveway would finally bankrupt me.

  Vicente dropped a tile onto the path and, standing on a concrete beam like a latter-day Blondin, grinned and raised his thumbs.

  “Where do Pedro and Pablo think the leak is?” I asked Ángel.

  “They said it could be anywhere. The water has spread below the surface.”

  After siesta Pedro and Pablo returned and mounted an assault on the whole length of driveway with sledgehammers. When they left three hours later it looked like a section of the Somme battlefield, but they still hadn’t located the leak. Despair overwhelmed me and I knew from the slump of Diane’s shoulders that it had affected her as well.

  “They’re coming back tomorrow with an engineer,” Ángel told me.

  “It can’t be all that hard to follow the flow of the water.” Diane said.

  “It’s a lake under there,” said Ángel, who was picking up a lot of English from us but little common sense—maybe we hadn’t any to offer.

  Why hadn’t we bought a frame house in New England, an apartment in Paris, a chalet in Switzerland? A home where everything worked.

  The swallows departed and bats took their place.

  We went to the restaurant owned by the manic depressive who had left Diane to turn the steaks. He was in a bitter mood, tossing steaks onto the grill over the open fire as though he was throwing out garbage, sipping moonshine absinthe, and glowering at his customers from behind the bar. But we enjoyed the meal as we had enjoyed the one before.

  When we got back to the house the cicadas were in full swing and the sky was crowded with stars. We saw one fall. I had read somewhere that it signified a birth. Or maybe it was death.

  I took Jones for a walk beside the wall encompassing the grounds of the supposedly haunted mansion and its coach house on the other side of the road. Glowworms switched off their lights as we got close to them. An owl hooted in the swaying pines beside the coach house. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the coach take to the road—we had kept an eye open for it on Midsummer’s Eve when, according to legend, it took off, but nothing had stirred.

  My bleak mood was infectious: Jones whined and tugged me back to our house. Navigating the devastation in the driveway, I acknowledged that, if I had to foot the bill and if my novel wasn’t written well enough to merit the rest of the staggered payments, I would have to admit defeat and abandon our vision in the sun. I gave us until the end of the year, another five months, to survive or succumb.

  The engineer, a studious young man wearing a blazer, arrived at midday and reconnoitered the driveway carrying a meter with a flickering needle. He said there was water everywhere beneath the surface, got in his car, and drove away, evidently satisfied with his diagnosis.

  Which was when Pablo, or it may have been Pedro, decided to call in Javier the local plumber because he might know the deployment of underground pipes in a property such as ours.

  Javier was a perfectionist who boasted in detail about his triumphs over faucets and U-bends. Pale-faced and prematurely balding, he gazed at the driveway, which was now a quarter inch deep in water in places.

  I asked him if he could tell where the leak was. He seemed to find the question impertinent. “How do you expect me to know? I work inside, cisterns and ballcocks, that sort of thing,” he said in English.

  Did he know about the layout of the outside pipes? “Obviously from the main supply under the road to the house,” he said. “But the pipe may have wandered if the original engineers struck rock. And then, of course, it would have branches to the kitchen, bathroom, annex, and swimming pool. All outside my control.”

  At that moment I heard a familiar shuddering through the open window of the bathroom. Presumably Diane had just turned on one of the taps.

  Javier tightened his lips and shook his head.

  “Is it serious?” I asked.

  “The water isn’t getting through to the bathroom properly.” He pointed at the seepage in the driveway. “That could cause a lot of damage. Like an engine without oil.”

  He went into the bathroom, now vacant, and turned on a tap. The pipe below the basin went into a paroxysm before a trickle of water emerged.

  “Just as I thought,” he said.

  “Isn’t that because they”—indicating Pedro and Pablo leaning on their sledgehammers waiting for his verdict—“have turned off the water at the mains?”

  “It will only get worse,” he said, ignoring a layman’s banality.

  “Can you fix it?”

  The question seemed to surprise him. “Not at the moment—it’s fiesta in the village.”

  “You don’t work during fiesta?”

  “Nobody works during fiesta.”

  I should have remembered that at these carnival times a cavalier attitude to work was adopted. I once asked the foreman of the builders why one of his team had been absent for a week. He stared at me dumbfounded and said: “I thought you knew it was fiesta in his village.”

  “All week?”

  “Half of it.”

  Javier interrupted my thoughts. “They’re running the bulls tonight,” he said.

  At this time of the year bulls were run in small town and village fiestas all over the region. The idea was to sprint in front of the snorting cattle in a modest imitation of the running at the famous San Fermin fiesta in Pamplona in the north, where on a regular basis participants were gored. The “bulls” in our region were often heifers but they could administer bone-jarring blows and fatalities weren’t unheard of.

  “Are you running with them?” I asked Javier.

  “I’m too old.” With his fingers he massaged pinch marks from
spectacles indelibly printed on the bridge of his nose. “How old do you think I am?”

  “Thirty?”

  “Forty-one. Forty-two on Wednesday.” Today was Monday.

  “You don’t look it,” I said.

  “No? Then maybe I should run with the bulls. If I look ten years younger I might have the reactions of a thirty-year-old.”

  I clapped him on the shoulder. “That’s the spirit.”

  “On one condition. That you run with me.” He looked at me slyly.

  “Done!” The madness that had made me dance the tango in Benidorm overcame me again. “On one condition—that you fix the noise in the bathroom.”

  We shook hands on it.

  He lit a cigar and, trailing smoke, swept past Pedro and Pablo in the driveway. Behind him the pipe in the bathroom trumpeted.

  Word had spread in the village that the escritor, the writer, was going to run with the bulls and that evening I was treated to a couple of glasses of wine in the Bar Paraiso.

  Emilio gripped my hand. “Just what Churchill would have done. And Nelson and Thatcher.”

  Javier arrived, pale cheeks burning with excitement, and ordered a brandy.

  It was the second running that day. During the first a bull, or a heifer, made a detour into a bar and stood behind a tourist, an Englishwoman, drinking tea at the counter. Feeling hot breath on her neck, suspecting perhaps an amorous waiter, she swung round and stared into a pair of brown taurine eyes. Unfazed, she gave their owner a lump of sugar and he wandered back into the street.

  I finished my wine and went to inspect the livestock herded into a makeshift corral at the end of the street. They were a motheaten bunch that wouldn’t have intimidated the most faint-hearted bull-fighter if he had been blindfolded and hungover. But they were solidly built just the same, pawing the ground irritably as children made faces at them.

  The route they took was lined on either side with timber barricades, slots left open at intervals to provide escape hatches for the runners. I noted their deployment carefully; some teenagers would leap over the barriers to dodge the lowered horns of the “bulls” but the years had taken some of the spring out of my heels.