Spanish Lessons Read online

  Even if he had booked us into a brothel!

  That evening we booked into a functional hostel in Denia from where we could hear the throb of fishing boats returning to their berths. After we had settled, we went to an old bar, Benjamin’s, hung with posters promoting long-ago bullfights and calendars with photographs of naked girls with big breasts.

  We drank Ricard—the bar had acquired a Gallic ambiance from French Algerian émigrés who came to savor the cheap booze and the calendars—and discussed Emilio and the house.

  “A dining hall needs a minstrel gallery,” I said.

  “Why?” Diane poured water into her Ricard and watched it cloud.

  I changed tack. “Emilio is a craftsman. Those toy soldiers . . .”

  “Those coffins!” She also changed direction. “If I tried to cook a chicken in that kitchen, the two of us would be a crowd.”

  “We could extend it.”

  “Using what for money?”

  She had a point: the advance for my as-yet-unwritten novel was modest in the context of dining halls, minstrel galleries, and kitchen extensions.

  “If the book does well,” I said, “we’ll even be able to afford another bedroom.”

  She finished her Ricard and laid her hand on mine. “I’m not doubting your ability, not for one moment. But you haven’t even started the book yet. We don’t want to do anything rash, let’s sleep on it.”

  I had, in fact, begun the novel in Ireland, but that was long ago, before Diane became pregnant, so I would have to begin all over again. Could we blow the publisher’s check and our savings on a mirage among the orange trees? No, Diane was right, we should be cautious.

  After all, we already had enough problems, one of which was the book itself, a thriller set largely in the icy wastes of Siberia, which I would have to write as the heat gathered in Spain.

  We left the Algerians gazing wistfully at the bosoms on the calendars and went back to our hotel to sleep on our options: house with gallery, house without, no house at all.

  THREE

  A Guardian Angel in the Garden

  We tracked down the Spanish developer who owned the property to an office in Denia. He was a dashing entrepreneur with sleek black hair and endowed with extravagant charm. He showed us the inside of the house; no obvious structural faults, no corpses.

  Having decided to put any decision on hold, I asked him to keep us in mind in case our cash flow changed direction. He agreed and rented us a small house on a hillside overlooking a valley on the outskirts of Denia.

  We broke the news to Emilio that we were keeping his pet project in mind. He stared into his beer in the Bar Paraiso in the village. When he stood up, we stood up with him. He shook my hand and kissed Diane on both cheeks.

  Then, head bowed, he left the bar without saying a word. As he walked down the street I noticed that he had crossed two fingers of one of his big hands.

  The garage was closed for lunch. When I went there in the evening, the Jaguar was standing outside, freshly polished bodywork gleaming in the light from a street lamp. The mechanic switched on the engine and it purred.

  I took out my wallet. “How much?”

  The mechanic wagged one finger from side to side. “It has been taken care of,” he said.

  I tried to write the book, blaming the absence of inspiration on lack of marital support when Diane flew to Montreal to collect Jonathan, blaming it on their intrusive presence when they both returned.

  But I was deceiving myself. I knew what the real problem was—I had found an ideal workshop, the house in the orange groves, and the creative juices would remain uncorked until I moved there.

  I managed to stick it out for another week, typing a few rambling sentences, staring into space, chatting maniacally in the garden with stray dogs. Finally, I told Diane that we had to buy the house.

  She said, “I know. You’ve been unbearable and I’ve made an appointment with Miguel Ferrer for tomorrow.” He was the developer.

  We made an offer and the paperwork began, mercifully straightforward, because Miguel was an honest man and journalism had alerted me to the pitfalls of property deals. We signed a few papers in his office, a modest establishment for one of the first big-time developers in the area, and then walked to another office in the tree-lined main street where we appeared before a notary like disobedient students in front of a professor.

  The notary, gray-haired and spruce, read out the deeds sonorously and we embarked on more signing—the lawyers’ signatures an art form in their own right, complete with scrolls, curlicues, and kiss curls. I scrawled my name once more—on a check—and the house with its phantom dining hall was ours.

  By lunchtime we were installed among the oranges or, as Diane put it, “embryonic marmalade.” In the bright midday sunlight, the house suddenly looked vulnerable, hairline cracks in its white walls, a loose shutter creaking in the breeze, and we wondered if we had done the right thing.

  Jonathan, Nordic blond hair like a halo (deceptively so), whooped round the garden, picked a bag of oranges, almost fell in the pool, and punctured his football on the spike of a yucca bush. Diane and I patroled at a more leisurely pace, wonderment expanding at what we had done.

  Rain earlier had distilled the perfume of the new orange blossoms already growing alongside the fruit. We walked to the end of the orchard. Fresh scents reached us from the gardens of the nearby cottages—thyme, rosemary, mint, and sage. We held hands: afternoons had never smelled like this in Montreal or London.

  We were awoken at dawn by birdsong. I padded through the living room to the kitchen in my bathrobe and squeezed our first jug of home-produced orange juice, as fresh as dew, and made tea in an earthenware teapot—no more teabags. Diane boiled brown, free-range eggs and we ate toast spread with honey.

  I took over the cramped annex and made it my office. Diane reigned elsewhere in the house. She swept and mopped, snared cobwebs with the head of a broom, lit fires with cut-offs from a timber merchant in Denia, charmed bureaucrats into switching on the water and electricity, unblocked the sink, ordered three of the butane gas canisters that fueled the basic stove and heated the water, and bought two sleeping bags that proved to be a serious handicap to spontaneous passion—on one occasion the zipper on mine jammed, and by the time I had fought my way out of it, Diane was asleep in front of the dying embers of the fire.

  What impressed me most during the following weeks was her seamless transition from serving packaged meals and duty-free booze on aircraft to primitive expediency. She was the stuff of which the adventuresses of history were made. More Amelia Earhart than stewardess.

  While I typed and retyped the first page of my novel, she kept house and cooked, producing gourmet meals from a Mickey Mouse stove with the aplomb of a magician producing rabbits out of a hat.

  She bought her provisions in one of the stores in the village but, deciding that we had virtually been camping under a roof for long enough, she insisted on driving to a department store in Valencia sixty miles away to buy makeshift furniture such as plastic tables and chairs to use while the dining hall was being built.

  We also bought a king-size bed. No more zipper-crippled lust. With a triumphant mating call I hurled myself onto the mattress and snapped the wooden frame of the bed on both sides.

  The garden, a rectangular acre of rampant fertility fenced off from the undulating citrus trees with chain link, was my territory. Or so I believed.

  I hadn’t anticipated Ángel. Either Emilio had advised him that I was fair game or he assumed that writers were dysfunctional. Whatever, he was as quirky and persistent as Colombo and convinced that I was in dire need of his services as a gardener.

  Ángel was a fey young man from Andalusia in the south with a pale poet’s face and a wiry, long-distance runner’s frame, who appeared to communicate with the clouds, glancing skyward when confronted with a difficult question. He wore a straw fedora that looked as though it had been nibbled by mice, and soon made it plain that h
e considered the house to be a mere appendage to the grounds. I told him I would consider his services, because the house was indeed lost in an acre of well-kept orange, lemon, and grapefruit trees, plum, apricot, and almond saplings, yucca bushes with their swordlike leaves—I blunted them with a pair of shears—jasmine and hibiscus that we hoped would soon bloom with red trumpets, one palm and one fig tree, a few flowerbeds sprouting with wild asparagus, separated from the house by a small lawn, a swimming pool, and a barbecue with a sink and a bar. The ground beneath the fruit trees was carpeted with Bermuda buttercups, yellow clover-leafed flowers with long stems which children picked to suck the sweet-sour sap. The land extended in an escarpment to the top of the drystone wall we had climbed during our first reconnoiter.

  But could I cope with it by myself? Spray and prune the fruit trees, plough the land between them with a cultivator. Tend exotic blossoms that I had only encountered on my travels. Sow and nurture and reap. I told Ángel to come back later and agonized long and hard over this my first decision as a property owner in a foreign land.

  I discussed it with Diane one cold and brooding afternoon. The trees, heavy with citrus, suddenly looked intimidating, the fruit as menacing as grenades. We wandered through their silent depths and noticed a sticky white blight on the leaves. “Can you get rid of it?” Diane asked.

  “Ángel would know how to,” I said.

  We reached the end of the garden and looked down on the overgrown lemon grove below. The trees were woody with dead twigs, stifled with creepers. That was how our orchard would degenerate if we didn’t have professional help. We looked at each other and nodded.

  “Ángel is selected unopposed,” I said.

  “For a trial period,” Diane said. “I get the impression that he’s a prima donna. You’ll have to be firm with him.”

  So I had made an executive decision. Replete with power, I picked an orange, peeled it, and bit into it. It tasted as sweet as honey.

  We shared the garden with a colony of tree rats, nursery-book creatures with gray fur and white bellies, which lived in the tall, dark cypress hedge; they ate the rind of lemons, leaving the pith, and ate the pith of oranges, leaving the rind. They were as graceful as squirrels and as disarming as chipmunks. Ángel, who took up his duties with alacrity, said they were pests but we didn’t believe him.

  The garden was also home to hedgehogs, field mice, voles, grass snakes, quick green lizards, and geckoes that scuttered across the white walls of the barbecue, which, with a roof and chimney, was as big as an alpine shelter, and to blackbirds, goldfinches, and a hoopoe, a clownish bird with pink plumage, black-and-white wings, and a crest that it raised indignantly when disturbed. Foxes and owls took over at night

  On his first working day, Angel beckoned us to the detached garage in the driveway, built at such an angle that it required a six-point turn to drive the Jaguar into it, and pointed at a tiny wooden box with a hole in one side nailed to an interior wall.

  He lifted a flap and told Diane to look inside. She approached warily and, standing on tiptoe, peered into it. And screamed.

  I steadied her as she stumbled back. “What is it, for God’s sake?” she asked.

  “A bat hanging upside down, it’s only a baby,” Angel told her. He spoke reasonable English acquired from other employers.

  When she had disappeared into the house, Ángel lifted the box off the wall. I peered in; the bat was little more than a winged scrap of tissue and it was indeed hanging upside down.

  “Where are you taking it?” I asked him.

  “To the pump house behind the barbecue, she’ll never find it there.” The pump house was a hut which housed the pump for the pool and the vacuum for cleaning it. “In the spring there will be lots of bats flying over the pool and drinking from it. But don’t tell the señora.”

  The tenor of the future relationship between Ángel and myself was established by a packet of marigold seed. I had been fond of the yellow-and-gold, daisy-like flowers ever since I was a child in North London, when my father embroidered our small patch with them and my mother relieved the pain of bee and wasp stings by rubbing the petals into them. I wanted to grow them here. Ángel didn’t.

  He removed his straw hat, poked one finger through a hole, glanced at the packet of seeds and said: “Some weeds are pretty.”

  He stuffed the packet into the breast pocket of his denim shirt, which he wore above baggy blue trousers, and sandals with soles made from automobile tires.

  “When can you sow them?” I asked him.

  He gazed toward castles of cumulus cloud on the horizon. “It is too early.”

  Maybe it was, but judging by the pitying expression on his pale face, the packet would remain in his shirt until the seeds germinated and flowered there if he had his way.

  “And I’ve bought some morning glory,” said Diane, producing a packet bearing a picture of the blue climbing flowers, as fragile as poppies of the field, that bloomed at dawn and died at dusk.

  Ángel laughed indulgently.

  “What’s so funny?” Diane demanded.

  “Gardeners spend a lot of their time trying to kill them and you want to grow them.”

  “I think they’re beautiful,” Diane insisted.

  So did I. I had often admired blue waterfalls of them tumbling from hedgerow and fence in Africa, and they had become part of the backcloth of our vision of a new life here. I wasn’t going to let Ángel trample on that.

  “Ángel,” I said, “you and I are going to have a good working relationship if you agree to one condition. I know you’re one of the best gardeners in the area.” Neighbors had told me this. “And I will accept most of your decisions.”

  Ángel frowned. “The condition?”

  “That you do what I ask you to do.” I tapped the packet of seed in Diane’s hand. “Plant them, Ángel.”

  “But—”

  “Please.”

  Crooning an Andalusian lament, he headed for the garage where he kept his tools. While Diane made coffee I followed him and asked him why he had left his home in the south. Because, he said, he had met his future wife there when she was on vacation in Granada two years ago and she had invited him back here. Bewitched, I supposed, by his youthful assurance—he was only twenty-six—and his fragile looks. Indeed, there was an enigmatic charm about him that I would have to treat as warily as Emilio’s exuberance.

  “There is also more work here,” he added. “I work on the land as well.”

  Town dwellers apart, most of the people in the area lived off the land, growing vegetables, oranges, olives, almonds, and nisperos, a yellow fruit with big slippery pips.

  They dropped tools during fiestas (national, regional, and parochial holidays), got boisterously drunk, and let off cannonades of fireworks that during the day struck fear into the hearts of tourists and at night smeared the sky with color.

  I asked Ángel how this part of Spain compared with Andalusia. For me, the greenery around La Jara and the cheerful fatalism of the people, augmented by a streak of guile, gave it the edge over a region that had been fashioned by travel writers, its cities clasped to their images like brooches.

  Ángel thought differently. He honed a scythe with a stone. “It is not as refined as Granada or Córdoba,” he said.

  I tried to imagine Ángel wearing a sharp suit in one of the smart cafés near the Alhambra but the image was short lived.

  I wanted to grow the sort of crops that were piled high in Spanish markets. Eggplants with polished purple skins, red and green peppers, habas (broad beans) with bulging pods, acelgas (chard) with celery-like stalks, carrots as small as babies’ fingers, parsnips with roots long enough to strike oil.

  I envisaged them growing in verdant rows hemmed with the yellow flowers of pumpkin and cucumber, melon and marrow.

  I explained this to Ángel. He nodded wisely. Just as he would have planned it. Diane and I were driving to Madrid for a couple of days and I gave him the go-ahead.

  When we
returned, I found he had built a miniature POW camp 80 by 20 feet, beside the two almond saplings at one side of the orchard, occupying about a tenth of the whole plot with concrete posts and chain-link fencing chest high. All that was missing was a watchtower manned by SS guards.

  “Why, Ángel?” I asked. “For God’s sake why?”

  “To keep out thieves,” he said.

  “But anyone can climb over that,” pointing at the chain link. Anger surfaced; it was the Irish in me—my father was a Londoner but my mother was born in Dublin, the daughter of a reprobate who had abandoned his family and fled to the United States never to return. I thought my modest furies had gone into retirement but here they were straining at the leash, rekindled by an eccentric gardener.

  “Foxes can’t climb over it,” Ángel said. “Nor can cats or dogs or rabbits or small children.”

  “Hostia!” I snapped, invoking the Host, the most common profanity in Spain. I stormed back into the house.

  That evening, sitting in front of a log fire watching sparks chase each other up the chimney, Diane and I debated Ángel’s behavior. My feelings had hardened: I wanted to sack him; Diane, who wasn’t dealing with him directly, was more compassionate.

  “Why does he always stare at the sky when I ask him a question?” I demanded. “I pay his wages, not Messrs. Cumulus, Cirrus, and Nimbus.”

  “He’s a contemplative person,” Diane said. “His head is in those clouds. You wouldn’t understand that.”

  “I don’t understand why a contemplative person would build a prison yard in my garden.”

  “He means well.”

  We agreed to leave Ángel’s future in abeyance, but secretly I determined to replace him: I wanted a gardener, not a mystic.

  A solution presented itself a few days later in the person of Rodrigo. Bowlegged and overweight, he arrived at dawn and said he had come to prune the fruit trees. He added that he had done so annually for the past ten years and was due to start again now.