Spanish Lessons

by Derek Lambert

  “I could only happen like that in Spain.”

  “With a little help from God,” she said.

  The other impediment to a smooth build-up to Christmas was El Gordo, the Fat One, the biggest lottery in the world in terms of total investment and cash payouts—the top prize, at today’s exchange rates, was $300 million, and the winning number could be bought many times over in different series of the same digits. There were also hundreds of lesser prizes.

  But it was communities rather than individuals that shared the top bonanzas—a city neighborhood, a village, a factory, or even a bar and its patrons could share the winnings.

  The reasons for this were complex. But basically one full ticket costing about $200 could be divided into decimos (tenths) and some of those decimos were split into even smaller fractions. So if one authorized vendor in a community sold the number that won the top prize, worth all those millions of dollars, then a lot of ticket holders who had bought decimos or even smaller investments could share the money and a poor hamlet could become El Dorado.

  These authorized vendors, all officially handicapped mentally or physically, sold tickets for El Gordo, drawn on December 22—also the lesser lotteries staged every week—on the streets and in bars and restaurants. They were allowed a markup on the price and the winners of big prizes gave them handsome tips. In our village there was no official seller—tickets were sold mostly by bar and shop owners.

  Tickets were also available from official bureaus—one named Bellos in Valencia was supposed to have the Midas touch—and organizations such as the fallas, which also made a profit from a markup.

  If El Gordo failed to make you wealthy beyond the dreams of working men then there was always the possibility that another lottery, El Niño, the Little One, not as corpulent but chubby just the same, might redeem your losses in January.

  Sales for the Fat One began in late summer, reaching a frantic climax on the eve of the draw when hopefuls scoured the country for numbers predicted by clairvoyants and stargazers or combinations linked to dates of births, deaths, and marriages.

  The winning numbers and accompanying prizes were laid like golden eggs from spinning Bingo-like cages on a stage and chanted by children from an orphanage in Madrid. Throughout the morning of the twenty-second their voices could be heard on television and radio throughout the land.

  When a big prize was sung out conversations froze, a rare phenomenon in Spain, while ticket owners checked their numbers. When the Fat One itself, the jackpot, was chanted, the country went into shock.

  As soon as the location of the big win was made known, con men and ambitious panhandlers leaped into their cars or boarded planes if the winner lived in maritime Spain—the Canary Isles in the Atlantic or the Balearics in the Mediterranean. In a village near us where a substantial prize was won householders splurged on electrical appliances: they overloaded the current and the village was plunged into darkness.

  My compulsion to doodle the figure eight was the catalyst in my problems with the Fat One. At times of stress or preoccupation I scrawled eights on notepads or, recently, on pages of typescript when the narrative of the Russian novel lost its way.

  Three days before the lottery was to be drawn Emilio came into the annex where I was rereading a typed copy of the manuscript of the book. I had come up with a twist involving the detonation of a bridge on the Trans-Siberian Railroad but I wasn’t sure about its plausibility. As I agonized, my eights proliferated—and Emilio saw them.

  “Your lucky number?” he asked.

  “I hope so,” I said.

  I asked him how the minstrel gallery was coming along. Progressing satisfactorily, he said, his voice uncharacteristically distracted. He hoped to finish it by New Year’s Eve. (A minstrel playing Auld Lang Syne on the mandolin sounded promising.) He was on his way now to his workshop in the village to fetch nails and screws, he said.

  What he did instead was buy every fraction of a ticket ending in eight he could lay his hands on.

  By evening word had got around about my numerical preoccupation and villagers, apparently believing that foreign authors were blessed with serendipity, were traveling far and wide to buy tickets ending in eight. (Even if you didn’t win El Gordo you got your money back if the last digit in your number corresponded to the last digit of the Fat One.)

  Ángel even drove to Valencia and bought a decimo from Bellos with three eights in it.

  Neighbors crossed themselves as they walked past our gates; patrons in El Paraiso competed to buy me drinks. I couldn’t sleep and took Jones for nocturnal walks although after ten P.M. he was a reluctant companion.

  The odds against winning the Fat One itself were so astronomical that I didn’t even consider buying a ticket. But if only the village could win one of the smaller prizes. If not . . . I knew how fickle human nature can be. I envisaged a lynch mob storming down the driveway.

  December 20 was a Wednesday. Two days to go before the draw. In the evening we pinned up festive paper chains in the dining hall, festooned a Christmas tree with baubles that Diane had brought from Montreal, and hung greeting cards from loops of twine in the living room. The preparations intrigued Maria, the dreamy girl who helped Diane with the housework, because the Spanish didn’t celebrate Christmas as rapturously as the New Year and Three Kings (Epiphany), when they exchanged presents, drank the champagne-like cava, and devoured turrón, almond and honey candy made in Jijona near Alicante. On New Year’s Eve they gobbled twelve grapes while the clocks struck midnight.

  I noticed Maria counting the Christmas cards.

  She smiled. “That’s lucky, thirty-eight of them.”

  “Supposing we get more tomorrow,” I said.

  “Don’t open them until after the draw for El Gordo,” she said.

  That evening we lit our first fire in the open grate in the dining hall with twigs of wild rosemary, kindling wood from a timber merchant, and logs delivered by Jones’s enemy, the woodman.

  The twigs caught fire; flames hovered round the sap-spitting logs. We toasted the baptism of the fire with cava.

  Finally the logs caught fire.

  Flames with dragons’ tongues leaped up the chimney. Plaster above the hood of the grate cracked. Nuggets of cement fell into the flames. Panic!

  I ran into the darkened garden and turned on the hose. It had been mended but the jet couldn’t reach the outside chimney, which was now glowing even though it was lined inside with firebricks. Sparks flew like flaming moths. Jones barked at them. Ethel emerged from the dining hall and disappeared regally into the night.

  The sound of plaster cracking finally faded and the last of the fiery moths flew away as the flames inside died down. I went indoors and told Diane not to worry: new chimneys always took time to settle, I explained.

  Only Jones and Jonathan, who was eating chocolate-coated turrón, seemed disappointed that the danger had passed.

  We drank another glass of cava and roasted chestnuts in the ash beneath a layer of smoke suspended across the dining hall.

  We were interrupted by the appearance in the open space, still waiting for a door, of Beryl Kranz, the American painter, who had just returned from a trip to London.

  “Boy oh boy,” he said. “Was I ever lucky.”

  Diane handed her a glass of cava. “Why?”

  “I bought a lottery ticket ending in eight at Valencia airport and I just heard that’s your lucky number.”

  December 21, the eve of judgment day.

  As the sun rose I walked around the garden with Jones. The poinsettias and the long buds of aloes, as smooth as snakes, were almost in bloom. The red-and-russet fruit on a pomegranate bush, packed with sweet-sour seeds, had split into grins. Leaves floated on the swimming pool—I had swum until mid-November, when a cold snap froze my blood.

  But today the sun was warm enough to eat breakfast on the terrace, grapefruit juice squeezed from fruit from the garden, ensaimadas (snugly curled rolls dusted with ground sugar), and mugs of hot
chocolate. We must have looked like archetypal foreign crazies eating in the open in midwinter.

  “Have you packed?” I asked Diane.

  “Packed? What for?”

  “You realize the whole village has staked its future on a number which I just happen to scribble in moments of stress? If they don’t at least get their money back we’ll be as popular as a pair of barracudas in a tank of minnows.”

  “We? You mean you. I always thought there was something Freudian about those eights. They look like handcuffs. Did your mother handcuff you to a tree?”

  “A lamppost,” I said. “But seriously, I think we should go away for Christmas. We haven’t got a door in the dining hall, the chimney looked as though it was waiting for blastoff when we lit the fire, and no one here gives a damn about Christmas except the cops.”

  Policemen directing traffic were inundated with gifts—wine, whisky, cigars, cigarettes, and turrón—that mounted so inexorably around the platforms on which they stood that motorists became dangerously disorientated.

  “Has El Pistolero bought a lottery ticket?” Diane asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Ending in eight?”

  “Naturally,” I said.

  “And the priest?”

  “He’s bought a whole bunch,” I told her.

  “I know Pilar bought a few.”

  “Don’t buy sugar from her after tomorrow—it might have powdered glass in it.”

  “The village could win the big one,” Diane said hopefully. “Someone’s got to.”

  “Pigs might fly. I haven’t even bought a ticket.”

  “I have,” she said, “ending in you-know-what.”

  When Jonathan came onto the terrace from his bedroom, blinking in the bright light, I asked him if he’d like to spend Christmas in a hotel.

  “Will we get our presents there?”

  “Of course,” I told him. “We’ll share a room, buy a little tree, hang up stockings . . . We’ll leave a note here for Santa Claus telling him where we are.”

  “Can he read your writing?”

  “He always has.”

  “Okay, let’s go to a hotel.”

  Later I went into the village. The latest developments there were intimidating.

  In a bar, Jesús, the gas delivery man, had bought three of the game-of-chance triangles of paper containing numbers. One of them had contained the figure eight and he had won five hundred pesetas.

  The priest had taken eight confessions.

  The debt collector had recovered 800,000 pesetas from a debtor.

  Hope and cupidity stalked the streets.

  On the way home I saw a white Seat lying on its side beside the crossroads, glass on the road sparkling in the sunlight. Its license plate ended in eight.

  On the morning of the draw frost sparkled on the lawn. Ambrosio arrived to clean the pool and I switched on the TV: reporters were setting the scene for the drama that would continue through the morning.

  By nine the smartly uniformed orphans chanting the numbers and prizes on the platform were well into their stride. One sang out a number, the other a prize, each picking up a ball bearing the relative information as it fell from a spinning cage.

  Soon there was a commotion among the audience in the hall as the first two orphans to do their stint took the balls that had just dropped to referees to be authenticated—a big prize had been won by a hamlet in Extremadura, in the southwest, one of the poorest regions of Spain, but it wasn’t the Fat One.

  Prizes came and went. Other angelic orphans took over. At eleven I went for a stroll in the garden. The frost had melted, Ambrosio was vacuuming the pool. I was filling a plastic bag with oranges when the chanting on the TV stopped.

  Jonathan appeared on the terrace and shouted: “El Gordo!”

  I ran back to the house.

  “What was the last digit?” I shouted to him.

  “I don’t know—I think it was eight.” So most people in the village would at least get their money back. Maybe El Gordo. I would be a benefactor, a hero, a saint!

  But the last digit wasn’t eight. It was three.

  Ambrosio drove away in his van. A middle-aged couple walked past the gates, heads bowed. I switched off the TV and called a kennel and a cats’ home where I had made provisional reservations for Jones and Ethel.

  When Diane got back from teaching I said: “Okay, let’s get out of here today before the hangman arrives.”

  We drove inland toward Albacete, a cold and inward-looking city 150 miles away, where the International Brigade had been quartered at the beginning of the Civil War. We hardly spoke; even Jonathan was affected by the sense of anticlimax. We stopped for tea in the beamed lounge of the Albacete parador, one of a chain of state-owned hotels, many of them palaces and castles. In gloomy silence, we ate hot buttered toast and cakes made with ground almonds and oranges.

  I paid the bill and we returned to the car like a family on its way to a funeral. And it wasn’t until the key was in the ignition that Diane and I came clean.

  “We shouldn’t have left home,” I said tentatively.

  “I know.” She still possessed the ability to surprise me.

  Jonathan also looked surprised. “I thought—”

  “Supposing,” I said, “there isn’t a chimney in the hotel room for Father Christmas to climb down.”

  “Let’s go home,” he said.

  “As a matter of fact,” Diane said, “we’ve got to go back—I forgot my overnight bag. Our money and traveler’s checks are in it.”

  “I was ashamed,” I said. “Losing the villagers’ money for them was bad enough but skedaddling . . .”

  “I enjoyed the drive and the tea,” she said.

  “A long way to come for hot buttered toast and cakes.”

  “It will be quicker driving back. It always is.”

  The receptionist in the Albacete parador canceled the booking we had made in Sub Almagro one hundred miles further on and we drove home, much faster than we had departed.

  It was dark and cold when we arrived, the sky glittering with stars. Diane hurried down the driveway with Jonathan and I nearly bumped into a massive door blocking the entrance to the dining hall.

  I stepped back. “That wasn’t there when we left.”

  The door opened. A feast had been laid on the antique table I had bought from Peter Pateman. Tapas, roast lamb, fruit, cheeses . . . Lights winked on the Christmas tree. A log fire blazed in the grate. The floor was laid with terra-cotta tiles. Emilio and Ángel and their wives were waiting for us.

  I turned to Diane. “You knew about this, didn’t you?”

  “That’s why I left my bag and the money behind. I did know we had to come back but first I wanted to see if you felt the same.”

  I kissed the two wives on their cheeks and began my apologies. “I’m sorry—”

  Emilio interrupted. “El Gordo? Don’t worry about it, Señor Derek. Did you know that the numbers on the winning ticket add up to eight? That’s good luck for El Niño. We have to buy tickets ending in eight all over again. Everyone in the village is very happy.”

  Not as happy as they would have been if they had won, but I realized later that the hard times they had endured in the past had left a legacy: it had made them grittily philosophical.

  “Are you happy, Ángel?” I asked.

  “January will be a lucky time,” he said. “It is written in the clouds. And if El Niño fails us then there is always El Gordo next December.”

  The admission that the January lottery might not bestow riches was the only time I heard him admit that the clouds could be fallible. He also confessed that he had bought the derelict lemon grove at the end of the garden while I was still negotiating for it with the owner. A familiar fury assailed me but he had timed the announcement well: it wasn’t an occasion for recriminations.

  Next day we picked up Jones and Ethel and I rekindled a fire in the dining hall from the still glowing ashes, and it burned without threa
tening the chimney.

  That afternoon I received a cable from my London publisher congratulating me on the Russian thriller. A REAL PAGE TURNER STOP UNDERSTAND ON GRAPEVINE NEWYORK FEELS LIKEWISE STOP CONGRATS.

  I surveyed the dining hall, finished except for a few nails and a lick of varnish. I remembered last night’s banquet. I reread the cable. I grinned idiotically at Diane and Jonathan. “Feliz Navidad,” I said. “Merry Christmas.”

  For Christmas lunch Diane cooked a turkey followed by plum pudding that we ate in the dining hall. We might have been in London or New York except that later that evening it was just warm enough to drink wine on the terrace beneath the stars.

  The following day we emerged from our festive cocoon. We had been in the house a year, give or take a few days. Orange pickers were having an exuberant breakfast in the orange grove next door, a carpet salesman, hair as glossy as duck’s feathers, was laying out rugs on our driveway.

  On New Year’s Eve Diane and I each ate a dozen grapes as the clocks chimed midnight and wished each other a Happy New Year.

  On New Year’s Day Emilio banged the last nail into the minstrel gallery. “Now all it needs is a few coats of varnish,” he said.

  “The painter’s a relative of yours?” I asked.

  “On my wife’s side,” he said.