Spanish Lessons

by Derek Lambert

“And you truly don’t remember Ramón?”

  “I told you, it was a long time ago.” He stopped in the empty space beneath the acacia trees and smiled the wintry smile he had brought with him from Russia. “If you’ll excuse me I should like to spend a little time in the past.”

  Convinced now that neither Enrique nor Ramón was being totally honest I made inquiries about both of them. These were complicated by the villagers’ understandable reluctance to resurrect those barbarous years, but I was driven by a desire to see the two stubborn old men reconciled. To prove, as Enrique had said, that “all dissent is a waste.”

  Diane joined me in the quest one evening when we found Ramón standing outside the open-air cinema that in the summer was as popular as indoor movie houses had been before television. Families licking ice creams and munching popcorn watched Westerns and horror films under the stars; babies crawled beneath rows of fold-up seats; husbands retired to the bar behind the back row during tiresome love scenes. We enjoyed the informality of these evenings so much that we saw King Kong twice.

  We took Ramón that evening to a bar where there was usually a movie showing on a flickering TV screen. Tonight it was John Wayne in True Grit.

  “Helluva guy, the Duke,” said Ramón, pointing his bottle of beer at the TV.

  Diane sipped a penalti, a tiny beer. “You’re a macho man, right?”

  This pleased Ramón; he felt for his shades in the breast pocket of his black jacket. “Nothing wrong with that, ma’am. Macho men win wars. Patton, Churchill . . . Rommel if he’d been on the right side.”

  “But you were on the winning side in the Civil War,” I said. “Why did you go and why didn’t you come back?”

  “Always regretted it. But this neck of the woods was Commie and even after the war it wasn’t safe.”

  “How old were you?” I asked him.

  “About thirty, I guess.”

  “You could have come back.”

  “And left my mom and dad to fend for themselves? Tough city, New York . . .”

  Diane interrupted. “Macho men can forgive, can’t they?”

  “Sure they can,” Ramón agreed.

  “So why don’t you shake hands with Enrique?”

  “Up to him, I guess,” Ramón said.

  “The Duke would have done it,” I said.

  “Yeah, well—”

  A fusillade of shots erupted on the TV screen; by the time they had spent themselves Ramón was on his way out of the bar.

  “I think the final shootout is approaching right here,” I confided to Diane.

  “Why, are you pulling one of your journalistic stunts?”

  I put one finger to my lips. “All will be revealed,” I said.

  There was only one arena in which I could envisage the denouement between the two veterans and that was in the open-air cinema where gunlslingers and vampires had enlivened the hot summer nights.

  My suspicions about both of them had been confirmed by other ancients and I set the scene with the care of a Broadway choreographer. The fold-up seats had already been stacked for the winter; only a table and two chairs remained on the concrete floor below the high blank wall where the screen hung. There were two exits, one to the left and one to the right, leading onto different streets, and I made sure they were clear.

  On the table I placed an open bottle of wine, and two glasses.

  Happily the weather cooperated. A warm smoky evening with a few stars glimmering in he sky.

  Ramón’s daughter, Raquel, also happy to cooperate, had arranged to meet her father inside the empty cinema. I had summoned Enrique on a subterfuge—a nonexistent appointment to play another game of chess.

  Deadline: five P.M.

  Hidden behind the bar crouched a motley cast of extras, Emilio and the gas man among them.

  4:57. Not a murmur from either of the adjoining streets, not even the bark of a dog or the splutter of a moped. Had the two protagonists been scared off?

  4:58. A car drew up in the main street in front of the box office. A door slammed. I heard footsteps.

  4:59. The confrontation, I reflected, was going to look pretty silly with only one participant!

  Another automobile on the opposite side of the auditorium. Another set of footsteps.

  I had calculated that, with only the one table, two chairs, two glasses and a bottle in view in the fading light, whoever arrived first would sit down, barely distinguishable from anyone else approaching.

  Ramón approached hesitantly, glanced around, and sat down.

  Five P.M.: A tall, sharp-angled silhouette advanced from the opposite wing.

  As Enrique reached the table I snapped on the light beside the bar. He and Ramón stared at each other, frozen in its glare.

  I reached them before either of them had time to escape—the extras were to emerge at a given signal—and spoke softly and urgently.

  Stunned, they listened. Gratefully it seemed to me, Ramón in particular.

  “In the first place,” I said, “I know both of you lived in the village at the same time during the Civil War and that you knew each other. I also know that you”—prodding a finger at Ramón—“were not a Fascist, you were a Republican just like Enrique. Am I right?”

  Ramón sat down and poured himself a glass of wine. “My family couldn’t emigrate to America as losers, refugees. We had to have . . . a bit of style.”

  “As if it mattered a damn,” I said. “Spain lost the war, not the Republicans or the Fascists.”

  “It mattered to me,” Ramón said. “Things like that matter if you’re a Spaniard. Why do you figure Enrique went to Russia? Pride is why.”

  I turned to Enrique. “What I don’t understand is why you haven’t told anyone that Ramón was a Republican.”

  Enrique took off his fur hat and massaged his bald head with the tips of his fingers. “What’s the point? For thirty years he has been Fascist, he has convinced himself he’s one. Let him stay that way, we are all what life makes us. The people in the village don’t care what he was.”

  “They would have once,” I said.

  “Once is a long time ago.”

  “I pounced. “If it’s so long ago why don’t the two of you shake hands?”

  They stared at each other in the twilight remembering, perhaps, the futile passions that had divided the land.

  Slowly their arms rose, the limbs of old-fashioned toys freshly wound up. The palms of their hands brushed together, their fingers tightened in a frail grip.

  Which was when the supporting cast burst cheering from behind the bar, embracing them and producing more bottles of wine and beer.

  As the party got under way I noticed Ángel standing in the shadows watching. When he saw me he nodded almost imperceptibly and made his way out of the cinema into the street.

  For the next few days Enrique and Ramón took their places on the benches beneath the acacia trees on the same days telling the other old men about life in Moscow and New York. Then Enrique flew back to Moscow, where he had a Russian wife and a married daughter.

  “Will you come back?” I asked him as he waited in Denia for a bus to Valencia. “Settle here with your wife? After all, the Socialists are in power in Spain.”

  He examined his fur hat. “No,” he said. “That would be betrayal. I believed in Communism in the thirties. I still do. One of these days it will prevail. Christianity didn’t catch on overnight, did it?”

  As the bus picked up speed he smiled at me and from the backseat raised his shapka. In the distance I heard what sounded like a burst of machine-gun fire, but it was only fireworks.

  Ramón didn’t return to the United States. Raquel flew to New York and sold their house in New Jersey. With the proceeds they bought a new house with sharp edges and marble steps in a village near Denia with views of the coastal plain and, in the distance, the Mediterranean.

  From time to time Ramón returned to the benches beneath the acacia trees and told stories about organized crime. When he confessed
he had never killed anyone the old men looked so disappointed that he treated them to accounts of beatings with baseball bats and rubber hoses filled with lead.

  Once I met Raquel, on her way from the hairdressers to pick him up, her brown hair stiff with lacquer.

  Life, I ventured, must have been daunting, living with a hard man like her father.

  She laid a dimpled hand on my arm. “Has he been telling you all that stuff about the Mafia? Shame on him. The only time he ever saw a gangster was in a movie house—his favorites were James Cagney and George Raft.”

  “He didn’t work the numbers racket?”

  “Are you kidding? What he did was open a corner store in Queens. He sold Spanish food. Fuet, chorizo, Manchego cheese . . .” She licked her lips. “He sold the best potato tortillas in the whole of New York City.”

  When I got back to the house after putting Enrique on the bus to Valencia I found Ángel in the garage sowing seeds in a box.

  I asked him about the job in Granada.

  “My wife wouldn’t have been happy there,” he said.

  I pointed at the packet of seed in his hand. “Petunias?”

  “Pansies. I tried to buy petunias but I couldn’t find any.”

  I doubted this but at least they weren’t salvias.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The Fat One

  December, we had been in the house for nearly a year, and the deadline I had set five months earlier was nearly upon us.

  What we had to decide when the twelve months had expired was whether we were truly here to stay or whether our tenure in the orange groves had been a folly we could write off as experience. To do so we had to establish if we had adapted sufficiently and if we had been accepted.

  Even more pertinently we had to calculate if we could survive economically and that depended on the reactions of publishers in London and New York to my Russian thriller, which I had finished as autumn settled into winter. So far the response had been acknowledgement followed by silence as unfathomable as the Siberian taiga.

  But first Christmas, Navidad. The build-up to December 25 was complicated by El Gordo, the Fat One, as the annual national lottery on December 22 is known, and a belated christening—Jonathan’s.

  He should have been baptized years earlier but a couple of priests, one in Ireland and one in England, had refused to officiate because he wasn’t resident in their parishes and we had been so absorbed with getting him settled in Spain that we had overlooked our spiritual duty. If we left it much longer he would be so old that he would have to duck when he was ceremonially admitted into the House of God.

  We might have left it until after Christmas if his prospective god-mother, Sally Goddard, hadn’t arrived from England. Sally, the beautiful and bubbly daughter of two of our best friends in the United Kingdom, who harbored a deep sense of responsibility beneath her exuberance, was staying for only two days; as she wouldn’t be returning to Spain for a long time, it was imperative that we act promptly.

  We had already decided that Jonathan should have a Spanish godfather and we had chosen Miguel Ferrer, the swashbuckling property developer who had sold us the house. He was married to Janet, an attractive and savvy businesswoman, who was the daughter of the former motorcycling champion of Britain, Roger Frogley.

  There was a snag: Miguel didn’t know he had been chosen.

  In Spain all Christian rites are approached at a meditative pace, all except funerals, when no time is wasted in slotting the corpse into the cemetery wall. We approached Miguel in his office in Denia and he considered our request with dawning pleasure. Ahead lay a lot of planning . . .

  “When is the christening to take place?” he asked.

  A moment’s hesitation. Then Diane told him. “Tomorrow.”

  His smile wavered momentarily but he was an entrepreneur accustomed to converting adversity into achievement and he recovered swiftly.

  “Where?” he asked warily.

  “In the church in La Jara,” Diane told him.

  “And the reception?” An integral part of most holy rituals.

  Improvising wildly, Diane named a restaurant, the Cova del Mero, on the beach at Las Marinas, an extension of Denia, owned by the father of one of Jonathan’s friends, where fish leaped from the sea into the cooking pot.

  He nodded approvingly. Despite the unseemly haste the occasion was being conducted with decorum and celebratory indulgence.

  We drove to the restaurant while the morning was still yawning itself awake. The sea was milky calm; seagulls cried and a crescent moon left over from the night hung in the sky.

  “A christening lunch? We would be honored.” The restaurant owner, stocky and nautical, sat on the terrace and gazed at a cargo boat on the horizon. “How many?”

  “About thirty.” It was surprising how many friends we and Jonathan had acquired.

  “Perfect. When?”

  Diane stared into her coffee, fisted her hands, and said: “Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” He jerked back in his seat.

  Stirring her coffee as though it was a pot of glue, Diane nodded.

  “Impossible!”

  But we knew it wasn’t, because in the final reckoning a Spaniard always accepts any challenge in love, war, or gastronomy.

  “What do you want me to serve?” he demanded.

  “Seafood,” Diane said.

  He spread his hands. You might as well ask for the nectar of the gods but we will see what can be done.

  Next the priest. We found him in his little church in the village standing in a pool of yellow-and-orange light shining through the tinted panes of a window, staring forlornly at a crack in a stone arch.

  “When?” he asked, after he had agreed to conduct the ceremony.

  “Tomorrow,” Diane said.

  “Impossible.”

  “But God,” Diane said, “wouldn’t want to deny a child entry into his Kingdom.”

  “But it’s such short notice. And Christmas will soon be here.” He gestured toward the Nativity tableau.

  “The loaves and fishes . . .” Diane began.

  “What about them?”

  “That didn’t take long to arrange.”

  “Very well,” he said, “tomorrow.” Head bowed, he walked toward the altar dragging his scuffed boots.

  We went to bed early but we couldn’t sleep. Suddenly we heard the cries of Jonathan’s godfather, the restaurant owner, and the priest: “Tomorrow? Impossible!”

  The morning dawned with pockets of mist lying in the orange groves. The only flowers left in the garden were a few frostbitten roses—Ángel’s mysterious amphora plant, still unidentified, had stopped blooming weeks ago, its white blossoms replaced with prickly seedpods—but aloes and poinsettias were burgeoning.

  The dining hall was now plastered inside and out; glass had been fitted in the window frames; all we lacked was the minstrel gallery—Emilio was visiting a sick relative in Murcia, south of Alicante—a floor, and a door.

  The geckoes had hibernated and Jones was chasing low-flying blackbirds instead. Ethel slept.

  While we ate breakfast without appetite, both brooding on what could go wrong on this auspicious day, Jonathan, unaffected, sorted his collection of picture cards of Spanish footballers.

  At ten-forty-five we drove across the dangerous intersection, sparkling with frosted glass from a recent accident, and parked the car opposite the church. There waiting for us was Jonathan’s godfather, Miguel, glossy-haired and immaculately suited, with his wife, Janet, and Sally, his godmother—her devilment replaced by an air of dutiful responsibility. Like us, she believed in the rituals of religions, which are the staging posts of any life in which God is respected.

  Jonathan was duly cleansed from sin with holy water, while the priest smiled proprietorially as though he had instigated the impetuous ceremony. Miguel, Sally, Diane, and I adjourned to the vestry, where we solemnized Jonathan’s entry into the Church with our signatures. It seemed to me that the ceremony also ackno
wledged his presence in the community.

  I drove to the pasteleria to collect the cake for the reception.

  It was already in progress when I got to the Cova del Mero. A vastly different affair from the roofing party—fancy catering, more foreigners invited, not so much village involvement. The feast began with slices of tuna roe and soft black olives. Salad as crisp as frost. Succulent prawns, crab claws, crayfish, and swordfish. Ice cream in hollowed oranges. Red and white Rioja wine, followed by coffee, brandy, and champagne.

  “And now, señor,” the owner of the restaurant said to me as the climax approached, “please bring in the cake.”

  The cake! I turned to Diane. “Where did I put it?”

  “How should I know? You brought it—I came with Miguel and Janet.”

  “I must have left it in the pasteleria.”

  Pointing at Jonathan, who was preparing to cut it, Diane said: “So what are you going to do?”

  “Buy another one?”

  “All the shops are shut,” she said, adding: “I took care of everything else.” True—she always had while I labored with the novel in the claustrophobic annex.

  Guilt and failure settled heavily on me. I walked out of the restaurant and stared out to sea. The father who had lost his son’s christening cake . . .

  But I had paid for it. It had been packaged in white cardboard. I had walked out of the pasteleria holding it carefully in both hands. Then I had reached into the trouser pocket of my suit for the keys of the car, after placing the cake on the roof.

  On the roof!

  But surely it must have fallen off on the way. I ran into the parking lot. The cake had shifted to the middle of the roof and a small boy, wearing ragged short pants and a torn blue shirt, thumb in his mouth, was staring at it.

  “Would you like a slice?” I asked him.

  He removed his thumb from his mouth and nodded.

  Together we entered the restaurant with theatrical aplomb, partners in an exquisitely timed finale. Jonathan cut the cake and I gave the little boy two slices.

  When we got home, dusk was beginning to settle. After Jonathan had gone to bed Diane said: “I think it was a success.”