The tranquility was broken by the thump of rock music. A white van pulled into the driveway; the driver, a young Spaniard with auburn, shoulder-length curls, switched off the radio and climbed out. A moment’s peace. Then he switched on a ghetto blaster or a boom box, a portable radio and cassette player with twin speakers.
He smiled and shook my hand. He was, he said, the plasterer, an unnecessary introduction because his denim jacket and jeans were stiff with plaster. There were even traces of it on his bandit mustache.
I asked him how long it would take him to plaster the walls of the dining hall. The exterior was straightforward; what worried me was the interior, because we wanted an old-fashioned finish in which the plaster is applied with the heel of the hand, leaving slight hollows.
“Two weeks,” he said. “Mas o menos”—more or less, the standard get-out for all Spanish estimates, as commonplace as mañana, which means tomorrow or any time in the near or distant future.
A minimum of two weeks pounding rock music when I was trying to beckon prospective readers into the quiet of the Siberian taiga? I had adapted to noise because it was as necessary to Spansish life as kicking footballs and kissing babies. The roar of cars without mufflers, the rasp of mopeds, the cannon fire of fireworks, the chatter and clatter of busy bars . . . but my skull would not be able to accommodate a relentless bass beat.
I told him to switch off the ghetto blaster.
“Sure man, why not?” He spoke hip with a Cockney accent—I learned later that he had worked as a waiter in London. He turned the blaster off. “But I must warn you—I can’t do my best work without it.” He smiled sweetly. Why not live with it?
Ghetto-blasting workmen are not uncommon in Britain, but in Spain they are symptomatic of the national disregard for noise—maybe it harks back to the cannon fire of their many wars. I once gobbled up my breakfast in a New York diner because the waitresses barking orders loudly, incessantly, into the kitchen were putting me off my sunny-side-up eggs: I discovered that they were all Spanish.
“I’m trying to write a book,” I told him.
“A writer, huh? Cool, real cool.” His hand strayed to the On button of his blaster. “Music would give you inspiration, you know.”
“I’ve got plenty of that,” I said. “My problem is getting it from my brain down my arms to my typewriter.”
“Yeah, well, I dig. I write too, music. I’ve got my own group.”
“You can write while you’re listening to tapes?”
“It’s the only way I know,” he said.
“And you can’t plaster properly without playing them?”
He stroked his drooping mustache. “I’d lose the rhythm.”
“Could you play the tapes more quietly?”
“I could try, but rock music played softly . . .” He shook his head and his shoulder-length curls shook with it. “Music’s got to take you over body and soul.”
“Try,” I said.
“Okay, man, it’s your money.” I had previously arranged to pay him by the hour and I got the message—the lower the decibels, the slower the work.
I left him mixing plaster in the dining hall, where Emilio was fitting window frames and an electrician was threading wires into cavities behind the walls. When the three of them had finished, only the door, window glass, minstrel gallery, and floor tiles would be needed.
I adjourned to the annex—one tiny bedroom and a bathroom—and tried to return to the Russian steppe, but the beat of the music still reached me. Frustration spilled over: I had to find a way to broker peace.
I returned to the dining hall. The plasterer was standing on a ladder slapping plaster onto a wall listening to the Rolling Stones, whose music I normally enjoyed. So apparently did Emilio and the electrician, who were both working energetically to the beat. Diane was in Denia, Jonathan was back at his kindergarten in Denia after the summer vacation.
I beckoned the plasterer onto the terrace. He followed, bringing the Stones with him. Emilio joined us.
“Be honest,” I said. “What would really happen if you turned off the player?”
“Simple,” Emilio answered for him. “Toni couldn’t work.”
I looked at Emilio suspiciously. “Toni? Is he related to you?”
“Only by marriage.”
I sighed. “How closely?”
“He is my wife’s nephew,” Emilio said.
“Is there anyone in the village who isn’t related to you?”
“My wife and I both come from big families.”
Toni slotted another Stones cassette into the player. Jones, ears flattened, retired to the end of the garden. Even Ethel stalked away. A gecko fell off the wall.
I was tempted to throw the blaster into the pool. But if I did I would be without a plasterer and I had been warned by the builders that it was difficult to find anyone who was willing to render an old-fashioned finish on a wall.
Toni rolled a cigarette—maybe it was a joint. In the living room I could see Maria mopping the floor tiles to the beat. I was outnumbered.
I told Toni to carry on plastering and wandered round the garden. Ripe tomatoes hung from staked plants in the vegetable patch. Marrows and pumpkins nestled among dying leaves. Crickets jumped from the lawn into the pool and I rescued a few with the net.
The Stones reached me loud and clear.
I had experimented with earplugs in the annex, but although they could muffle the hammering and pounding of the builders, they couldn’t extinguish drums and bass guitar. What could I do? Delivery date for the novel was the New Year and the Trans-Siberian hadn’t even reached the bridge where it was going to be hijacked by Zionists.
Emilio joined me. He had a solution—I wasn’t surprised. He knew of a room to let where, during the day, I could escape from Toni and his blaster.
“How much?” I asked him.
“Cheap.”
“Is the owner a relative of yours?”
“Not exactly.” He brushed sawdust from his silver-streaked hair.
“Yes or no, Emilio.”
“My wife’s brother-in-law’s sister . . .”
The bass beat grew louder, dispatching a flock of swallows from the telephone wires. “Okay,” I said, “let’s have a look at it.”
The room was an attic in a line of whitewashed houses next to a seamstress whom Diane had met in Pilar’s. She made the traditional finery for girls and women in the fallas in Denia—brocade dresses with flouncing ankle-length skirts, gold-and-white, crimson, blue, or emerald green. (They wore coiled hairpieces at their ears and upright golden combs and they were all beautiful at these times of fiesta.)
The attic was furnished with a bed, a table, and a chair. On the table stood a jam jar containing stems of dead bougainvillea, the water stained mauve by fallen bracts. The window looked across a yard to another terrace house, painted pigeons in cages cooing on its roof terrace.
It was all I needed: it was quiet. I got it for the equivalent of seven dollars a week.
I arrived after breakfast the following Monday and worked through the morning, taking to the streets to brood if my characters refused to do what I had ordained for them. During these sorties I tried to integrate more, chatting to the priest, the traveling fishmonger, the simpleton with the knowing smile, the schoolmistress, and the policeman known as El Pistolero (the gunman) since he had loosed off a few shots at an unscathed but indignant bank robber.
At first El Pistolero treated me warily. I was a foreigner, a relatively rare breed inland from the beaches, and was probably a fugitive from the law in my own country.
So he played a waiting game, possibly hoping I would incriminate myself. He warned me instead of booking me when I parked illegally; reminded me when Jones, intimidated by a sighting of the woodman, escaped and went on the rampage, that he could be put to sleep because he hadn’t been inoculated for rabies.
When he was finally convinced of my probity he gave me a ticket whenever I parked the car indiscreetly and fined
me for Jones’s misdemeanors. He had accepted me!
What forged our rapport as far as I could make out was my respect for the village bobbies in Britain, back in those far-off days when the police were more revered than reviled. He reminded me of that breed and my reverence must have been transparent.
He was paunchy, dark hair thinning, blue pants sagging with the weight of his pistol. But he was local; he knew if any crimes such as the theft of crates of freshly picked oranges waiting to be collected on the roadside, or a shoplifting spree, were brewing and aborted them before they got under way.
In his view, laws were merely guidelines and foreigners’ respect for them never ceased to amaze him. The obedience of Germans exasperated him. Over a coffee and a brandy he told me one day that two of them had actually gone to the town hall in Denia and informed startled officials that their papers were out of order.
I thought El Pistolero’s finest hour had come one day when I was in Pilar’s store buying ham and chorizos and blue Cabrales cheese packaged in leaves. Customers were discussing the dearth of bank robberies. The culprit blamed for this lack of initiative was progress, not a popular phenomenon with villagers who, having observed what disarray technical innovation had caused elsewhere in the world, had turned their backs on it.
No one was more vociferous than a woman with a chest like a bookshelf and a voice like a chain saw.
“We used to tell the cashier at the bank how much money we wanted and he would give it to us. Now he makes love to a computer and we have to wait until he’s finished.”
Like the others in the shop she spoke in Valenciano and I had to decipher what she said as best I could.
Pilar handed her a morsel of jamon serrano, salt-cured and wind-dried ham, and she chewed it angrily.
She had a point about the banks. A year or so earlier transactions used to be completed speedily to enable the staff to pursue their private businesses—the first bank I visited on the coast was in turmoil because the cashier was in danger of losing his deck-chair concession on the beach. Today, personnel were slaves of wayward microchips.
The woman helped herself to a slice of fuet, a sausage thinner and harder than chorizo.
“Once we shuffled beads on an abacus and all our sums came out right,” she said. “Today we feed facts into an idiot brain and they come out fiction.”
She accepted a strip of dried bacalao, cod, from Pilar. “Once we listened to plays on the radio and made up our own minds what the characters looked like. Do we have a choice on television?
“Fax messages? Poof! Isn’t it better to listen to your daughter’s voice on an old telephone on the wall?”
She shook a jar of pickled onions, making them bob like corks.
Diane knew the woman moderately well because with her voice she was difficult to ignore—she could have found employment as a drill sergeant—but her message was low key and logical. What place, she was asking, do microchips have in villages where life is orchestrated by the seasons?
Her ally was the policeman who maintained law and order in his own magisterial fashion. I hoped there were still such policemen and stentorian spokesmen in villages all over Spain to keep technology at bay. Progress is a remorseless opponent, but it was just possible they had got it licked in pueblos like ours.
A frail woman with faraway eyes stroked a mauve eggplant. “Yesterday a computer in the bank sent my husband fifty thousand pesetas,” she said. “He would have been better pleased if he hadn’t been dead for thirteen years.” She smiled into the past.
An old man with an autumn-leaf face, reputed to have been a burglar until arthritis crippled his hands, tugged at his fingers, making the joints click. “Progress . . . That’s what finished the good times for professionals like me at the banks. Alarm systems, hidden eyes, infrared cameras . . .” He pulled his thumb and it popped as loudly as a twig snapping.
Which was when a young housewife with her hair in curlers dashed into the store. “A bank raid—just now—” At long last, her tone suggested. “Gunshots—”
I raced into the street and grabbed El Pistolero. Together we ran to the bank, a modest establishment containing a counter, a safe, and a computer that was treated by the staff of two with profound distrust.
El Pistolero, gun in hand, shouted to the impassive gray-haired cashier: “Where did they go?”
The cashier looked surprised. “The thieves? How should I know? They didn’t rob the bank.”
El Pistolero faltered and glared at me. “You said—”
I turned to the cashier. “There wasn’t a robbery?”
“There was an attempted robbery, all right,” he said. “The manager’s on the phone to police headquarters now.”
“But—”
“The robber had a gun, an imitation I think, but he tried to rob one of the customers, not the bank. The customer’s with the manager. He didn’t have any money anyway—I should know, he’s been overdrawn for months and I refused to give him any.”
“What about the gunshots?” I asked.
“Fireworks. It’s my father’s saint’s day. He lives above the bank. He loves explosions, the louder the better. These days he’s a little deaf. All those bangs . . .”
I turned back to El Pistolero but he had disappeared.
The woman with the chain-saw voice turned on her heel in disgust. “The robber stole nothing? Madre mia, that’s progress for you!”
I heard the gecko blaster—I had renamed it after it had blasted a gecko off the wall—one hundred yards from the house. I almost turned and drove back to the village, but Diane had promised to make zarzuela, fish and shellfish in a rich sauce, and I was hungry. She was in the kitchen snapping her fingers to the beat—I had no allies.
Emilio had fitted the window frames; a glazier with scarred hands was measuring them. Toni, perched on a ladder, was molding plaster on a wall with one hand.
I told Diane about the robbery. She nodded vaguely: Mick Jagger reigned. I returned to my attic in the afternoon and gave the driver of the Trans-Siberian a hard time.
Every day I wrote steadily, morning, afternoon, and evening. Then a couple of drinks in one of the bars, and home to supper beside the pool in the warmth of the late summer night, the scent of jasmine heavy on the air.
The routine lasted only a week. When I arrived at the attic the following Monday morning, three workmen were uprooting the street outside with pneumatic drills. By comparison the music from the gecko blaster was a string quartet.
Replacing my portable typewriter in its case, stashing the pages of the manuscript in my briefcase, I drove home, arriving just as Toni switched on the blaster, sending geckoes scuttering into the garden.
I took Diane’s arm. “Are you teaching today?”
She nodded. “At eleven.”
“Call up and say you’re sick.”
“But I’m not.”
“Oh, yes, you are,” I said. “You don’t know it, but you’re sick of this noise—it’s addling your brain. And pack a bag. We’re going shopping in Valencia. Jonathan can stay with Arturo.”
I slotted a cassette into the player in the Jaguar. Gentle music, “Lara’s Theme,” from the movie Dr. Zhivago in memory of our days together in Moscow.
The road to Valencia, sixty miles to the north, followed the coast through the small towns of Oliva and Gandia, to the Albufera, a lake separated from the Mediterranean by a sliver of land, the haunt of 260 species of birds. So serene was the lake that day that reflections of palm trees and sharp-roofed Valencian cottages on the shore lay on the water as motionless as images in a mirror.
There was supposed to be a sunken village in the center so we asked a guide to take us to see it in his flat-bottomed fishing boat powered by an outboard engine.
The guide, weather-beaten and taciturn, undertook the mission and pocketed our money with canny fatalism. Birds took off ahead of the boat; fish—the lake is renowned for mullet and eels—darted out of its way.
When we reached the mi
ddle we asked him to point out the village, said to have been built on an island or small peninsula, before it was dispatched to the bed of the lake by an earthquake.
He cut the engine and pointed downward with his thumb. We peered overboard but all we could see was water. We had been told that when it was calm and clear the roofs of houses were clearly visible.
Diane looked at him shrewdly. “Have you ever seen the village?”
“It’s down there,” he said.
“But have you ever seen it?” she demanded.
“You don’t have to see to believe.”
“You told us—”
“You asked me to take you to see it. You could have been lucky.”
“It just wasn’t our lucky day?”
He conjured up a smile that cracked his face, pulled the cord on the outboard and took us back to the shore.
We drove on through the huerta, rice and vegetable fields, the kitchen garden of Valencia, where herons waded as cautiously as old ladies paddling.
As we approached Valencia I got stuck behind a truck spouting diesel fumes and lost my patience. The journey, Albufera apart, had already taken nearly two hours and I was hungry. As I swung out, an oncoming truck, horn blaring, emerged from a heat shimmer.
Diane yelled. I braked, just managing to pull behind the truck I was trying to overtake. I stopped on the side of the road and, head in my hands, waited for the glimpse of death to fade.
Near the center of the city a gypsy leaped from the curb at a red light and washed the windshield that I had only just cleaned at the Albufera. I gave him two hundred pesetas: by rights I should have been in a hearse.
We booked into the Reina Victoria, a dignified hotel just off the Plaza del Pais Valenciano, the main square. Its solid bedrooms were designed for serious sleeping, its paneled lounge and bar as hushed as a club in St. James’s, London.
In the evening we strolled around the square, hemmed by lofty baroque buildings and streets swarming with fender-nudging traffic, its flower market blooming with late roses and chrysanthemums, its fountain tossing spray into the breeze.
Spanish Lessons Page 20