Crowds were gathering and a uniformed brass band twenty-five-strong, disheveled after impromptu performances in various bars, wandered along the street past boarded-up doorways and windows playing the “Hymn of Valencia.” It was a stirring tune, full of pomp and poignancy, and I found it moving, but brass bands always had that effect on me.
Ángel, sharply turned out in knife-creased pants and checked shirt, adoring wife on his arm, stopped me. Where was the señora? he asked.
“In Denia with Jonathan,” I said. In fact Diane had told me she was going to see our Spanish lawyer to check my will, adding that widowhood would be preferable to living with a suicidal lunatic determined to get himself gored.
A small boy offered me a lick of a green Popsicle dripping with emerald tears and said: “We’ve never had a foreigner killed here before.”
Javier joined me at the corral full of bluster. He offered me a swig of brandy from a silver flask; it burned holes in my stomach.
We chose a slot fifty yards from the corral. From there we could leap in front of the heifers when they were still a reasonable distance away and dive into the next escape hatch.
The band disappeared into a bar and the heifers, four of them, charged out of the corral.
Javier and I joined the young bloods—and a few older ones—who were running in front of the pounding hooves. Teenagers leaped over the barriers, old and experienced hands dived into the escape slots.
I had never been a fleet-footed runner and now it felt as though my sneakers were filled with liquid concrete. Behind me the “bulls” snorted, their hooves thudding as loudly as stampeding cattle. My heart thudded too. I glanced over my shoulder. The only other runner behind me was Javier. Where was the slot we had earmarked for our escape? I had passed it! The next one was another forty yards ahead.
I imagined horns ripping the artery on the inside of my thigh, the wound that caused most deaths in the bullring. I tripped and fell. A “bull” stopped and looked at me speculatively, its tongue hanging out. Because being licked to death didn’t have quite the same charisma as being gored, I shouted at it. It stared at me reproachfully before galloping after its companions.
So I was now behind the herd. But where was Javier?
I noticed a knot of spectators near the slot where we had both intended to make our getaway and ran back to it. Two medics from the ambulance that stood by during the running were kneeling beside Javier’s recumbent figure.
They put him on a stretcher and carried him to the ambulance. Was he badly wounded? I asked. They shrugged with somber eloquence. The ambulance drove away at speed, siren wailing. I felt sick with worry—and guilt because I had encouraged him to participate in the running.
I asked a spectator where he lived and collected his wife, dark-haired and gentle-faced, from her home and drove her to the hospital in Denia. Why had he done it? she kept asking. He had promised her he wouldn’t.
I kept quiet. If I hadn’t told him he looked younger than he was, he wouldn’t have broken his promise . . .
“It’s his birthday on Wednesday,” she said, knuckles bone white on her clenched fists. “I’ve bought him a tie.”
We waited at reception in the hospital where I had waited after Vicente the roofer had fallen from the wall of the dining hall. The same doctor who had examined Vicente came through the swing doors and beckoned Javier’s wife.
She returned five minutes later. “First he met the bulls,” she said. “Now he is meeting God.”
But the meeting with the Almighty didn’t last long. Apparently Javier had tripped but he had only struck his head on the curb. He was discharged from the hospital that night, suffering from concussion, the doctor’s specialty.
The following day, my feelings confused by relief at Javier’s recovery and annoyance at Pablo and Pedro’s incompetence, I called a halt to the destruction of the driveway. There had to be an easier way of finding a leak.
I adjourned to the garage with Pedro and Pablo while they ate the identical breakfasts they brought with them—serrano ham bocadillos, bananas, and bottles of beer.
The sewage specialist stopped his bicycle outside the gates, threw up his hands, presumably horrified at the lack of progress, and pedaled away.
“Cabron,” said Pablo or Pedro. Literally “goat” but open to other interpretations.
Diane summoned me into the house for poached eggs, marmalade, and toast and tea, relieved that she wasn’t embarking on widowhood.
We listened to the roofer, the sound of water leaking, and the occasional rumbling from the bathroom.
Diane voiced our mutual feelings. “That vision we had . . . it’s fading fast, isn’t it.” She eyed me over the steam from her mug of tea. “I met a Dutch real estate agent yesterday.”
“You think we should sell the house?”
“What do you think?”
“It’s admitting defeat,” I said.
“Or being sensible for once in our lives.”
“What about Jonathan?”
“I didn’t say anything about leaving the area.” She poured herself more tea. “This Dutch agent—”
“Knows of a place with stunning views?”
“It’s a wreck,” she said.
“Forget it.”
“Going for a song. And, yes, it has got great views. And he says we could get a fortune for this place.”
“Half a roof over the dining hall? The monster from the deep about to surface in the driveway?”
“He says he’s got a client,” Diane said.
I glanced at my watch. Ten A.M. “He should be in his office by now,” I said. “I’ll give him a call.”
SIXTEEN
Mrs. Prodski in Paradise
The client, the English-speaking real estate agent said on the phone, couldn’t view our house until the following day. When I asked: “Who is he?” the agent replied: “It’s a she, a bit of a mystery but loaded.”
“Nationality?”
“Bulgarian,” the agent said.
“Why does she want to live here?”
“I told you, she’s an enigma.” Like so many Dutch away from their homeland, he spoke almost faultless English. “About the price . . .”
“What do you suggest?”
“I haven’t inspected the property yet,” he said. “Your wife said there were a few problems.”
Diane had never been a master of understatement but she had outdone herself on this occasion. “You’d better come and have a look,” I said. “And bring a pair of waders.”
He arrived wearing black loafers with tassels and a cream, light-weight suit. A diminutive dandy with a tanned, poolside face.
He stared at the driveway with dismay. “Can’t you get this fixed?”
“We’re trying,” I said. “Believe me, we’re trying,” stunned by such an asinine question. I had been listening, ear to the ground, endeavoring to follow the current under the paving stones, but so far my deductive powers had failed me.
He stood in the dining hall and looked up at the unfinished roof. Vicente the roofer waved at him, dropping a hammer that crashed to the floor.
“Your wife was right,” he said. “There are problems. But my client is very anxious to find an old property in this area. Leave the price to me, I will sound her out. If you’re not satisfied we can negotiate.”
He inspected the house, noting its faults on a small and inadequate pad. “I have to prepare myself for any criticisms she might make,” he explained.
“How are you going to explain the driveway?”
“That’s a plus—you’re having new pipes laid. There aren’t many houses around here with new pipes.”
“The roof?”
“By the time she moves in it will be . . . baronial. Is that a good description?”
“Couldn’t have put it better myself,” I said.
We sat opposite each other on plastic chairs on the terrace. I waited for Jones to stop sniffing his legs before asking about the ruin he was offe
ring us.
“Not exactly a ruin,” he said. “It has great potential. And stunning views.” He held up one hand and chuckled. “I know what you’re going to say—in real estate speak all views are stunning.”
“I’ve been told it’s cheaper to build a new house than renovate an old one.”
“Your wife”—Diane was away teaching—“told me you were only interested in mature properties. Do you want to see it?”
“Why not? I’ve got nothing to lose.”
While I was writing a note in the kitchen telling Diane where I had gone, Jones yelped. I guessed the agent had kicked him. On the way to his Mercedes parked on the roadside he stepped on a loose paving stone, which squirted muddy water up one leg of his cream suit.
“Are you sure that’s a plus?” I asked him.
The ruin I discovered five minutes later about a mile away was a crumbling mansion with a long balcony supported by rusting metal pillars. Ten rooms on two floors contained by sturdy walls that looked as though they hadn’t been occupied since the Civil War. It was probably about one hundred years old. On the first floor I found copies of the right-wing newspaper ABC dated 1939 and black-bordered invitation cards to a memorial service the same year. It wasn’t connected to either the water or electricity mains but those, the agent said, could be installed cheaply.
“It also needs a new roof,” I pointed out, wondering how Vicente would react to the dizzy heights of a two-storey building.
“Of course. But you will end up with a palace instead of—”
“What?”
“What you’ve got now.”
I was beginning to dislike him. “Why isn’t your client interested in this place?” I asked him.
“It’s too big. And she wants to be closer to the village.”
“Are you sure she’s loaded?”
“As rich as Croesus,” he said with the assurance of a professional who can smell money.
I climbed a rusty outside staircase and gazed across the citrus groves. On one side of the house I could see the sea a mile away, on the other the reassuring bulk of Montgo, its broad brow bathed in sunshine.
“How much does the owner want for it?” I asked with studied lack of interest.
“He hasn’t decided yet. But he’s very anxious to sell.” The agent lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Creditors are snapping at his heels.”
Did he divulge such confidential details to all prospective purchasers? What had he told the Bulgarian woman about me? A deranged Englishman with an oversexed dog and a cat with a wooden leg?
He gave me a key to the mansion and that evening I showed it to Diane. She enthused, likening it to a grand old house in America’s Deep South, envisaging herself in later life sitting on a rocking chair on the porch embroidering tablecloths—anything between total love and utter rejection had always been foreign territory to her. I liked the house too. And yet we had put so much of ourselves into the home we had first glimpsed in the moonlight . . .
We agonized late into the night.
“We could convert a ruin like that into a small hotel,” Diane said ambitiously.
“I came here to fill pages, not stomachs,” I said. “I’m not into real estate speculation.” Anathema to me, in fact.
“But you do love the place, I can feel it.”
“Do you see me as a southern gentleman riding through cotton fields?”
“Not really,” she said.
We overslept the following morning, and when I finally got out of bed Vicente was already laying tiles with clattering abandon.
I put on a bathrobe, squeezed orange juice for the three of us, and went into the garden.
Montgo was etched sharply against a cloudless sky; the scent of jasmine was on the air. The green oranges were ripening, the blue trumpets of morning glory that had climbed the chain link around the vegetable garden, despite Ángel’s efforts to exterminate them, were dimpled by a breeze coming from the distant hills. Jones trotted past on important business, Hoppity tried out a new wooden leg, Ethel washed herself.
I swam a couple of lengths of the pool and picked the last of the figs, green-skinned and pink-fleshed, for breakfast.
Could we possibly leave all this for a gaunt mansion without electricity or piped-in water where atrocities had probably been perpetrated during the Civil War, and bodies were perhaps buried under its flagstones?
I wandered round to the front of the house. From the top of the dining hall came a cry of triumph. Vicente raised both fists, swaying dangerously. “The last tile is laid,” he shouted.
The telepathy that accompanies good marriages worked overtime at breakfast: we both now knew that neither of us wanted to leave the house, even with all its defects.
Diane, on her second, tongue-loosening mug of tea, said: “We don’t have to sell, do we?”
I spread honey on a slice of toast. “We don’t have to. But if we made a profit on the sale we could definitely stay in Spain.”
“You mean as things stand we can’t?”
“Not if we have to pay the demolition squad in the driveway, not if my book’s a turkey. As a matter of fact I’ve given us to the end of the year to make or break.”
“You have?” She looked crestfallen, then brightened. “Don’t worry—the leak in the driveway will be on the other side of the meter so we won’t have to pay and your book will be a bestseller, and we can take the house off the market.”
At eleven I drove Jonathan into Denia to a private tutor who, during the summer vacation, was teaching him elementary math—a subject in which he could expect no help from his parents. When I got back to the house the Dutch real estate agent was there with his client, a beefy middle-aged woman in a miniskirt, with red hair combed into a sixties-style beehive. She laughed easily, seemingly at nothing, and spoke inventive English.
“I am charming to meet,” she said, extending one hand, rings tight on dimpled fingers. “I shall like your house.”
I said to the agent: “Could you excuse us a minute?” and led Diane to the kitchen where I asked her what was going on. “Why didn’t you tell them we weren’t selling?”
“I did sort of promise we would sell it through him when I first met him a couple of days ago.”
“So what? We’ve changed our minds.” Suspicions began to dawn. “You didn’t sign anything did you?” A lot of agents asked vendors to sign forms giving them the exclusive right to sell a property. I had always doubted their legality.
She nodded. “I did sign something. He said it was a mere formality.” She squeezed my arm. “It doesn’t matter anyway, I’ve got a plan. What we do is this: we exaggerate all the disadvantages of the house. Do the opposite to what real estate agents do. That way she’ll lose interest and we’ll be off the hook. And he won’t bring any more clients around if he knows we’re going to badmouth it again.”
“You mean tell her it’s a dump?”
“Sort of. But be subtle. Watch my lips.”
From the devastated driveway the agent led the client—her name was Prodski—into the dining hall, now roofed. She laughed, dredged up some obscure Bulgarian humor and said: “Vere are the bats?”
Playing into our hands.
“They come at night,” Diane said.
“I loov bats,” Mrs. Prodski said.
“We didn’t think they’d stay,” Diane said. “You know the fire smoked so badly when we first lit it we thought that would frighten them away.”
“I loov woodsmoke.” Mrs. Prodski breathed deeply. “Where I am coming from we smoke sturgeon fishes.”
We went into the kitchen. “We’re hoping they’ve fixed the electrical fault,” Diane said. She was, I presumed, referring to the occasion when, smelling burning in the kitchen, she had called the fire brigade.
Mrs. Prodski said: “I worry not, my husband Serge will correct.”
“It’s a pity about the water,” I said, taking my cue from Diane. “Sometimes it goes off for a whole day. Sometimes longe
r.”
Mrs. Prodski laughed hugely. “Who drinks vater?” She wiped her eyes with a handkerchief embroidered with alpine flowers.
Her resistance to Diane’s strategy was beginning to worry me.
On the way to the living room, out of her earshot, the agent grabbed my arm. “What the hell do you think you are playing at?” he demanded.
“Something you wouldn’t understand,” I told him. “It’s called telling the truth.”
Diane pointed at a cracked floor tile. “Sometimes that moves as though someone is trying to escape from a dungeon underneath.”
Mrs. Prodski clapped her hands. “A tree that has not been properly gutted. Where I am born we had a cherry tree breaking into the eating room.”
I led her to the bar made from an old wedding chest that I had installed in the original dining room where, when the weather wasn’t good enough to dine outside, we ate while waiting for the new one to be finished. She pointed at the bottles behind it. “Wodka I loov. You have the Polish wodka?”
“Only Russian vodka, I’m afraid,” I told her.
“That will do. No vater. That is spoiling it.”
“Ice?”
More humor surfaced from the Balkans. When it had subsided she said: “Ice is vater, heavy vater.”
I poured her a vodka. “That would not be enough for Serge.” Not for her either because she picked up the bottle and topped up her glass. “With wodka you must be eating. You have the black bread?”
I appealed to Diane, who was pouring us each a beer, while the agent moodily sipped Bols gin. She found a sliced brown loaf and a jar of pickled gherkins.
When she had poured herself another vodka and noisily chewed a couple of gherkins Mrs. Prodski said: “And now the bedrooms I have to see.” She winked.
In our bedroom Diane said: “A pity about the screech owls—they keep us awake.”
“Ah, creatures of the nighttime,” Mrs. Prodski said. “They are making me sleep.”
Spanish Lessons Page 17