Spanish Lessons Read online

  To test his prowess I put him to work on an ancient lemon tree outside the kitchen.

  A devious idea occurred to me as, on one of Ángel’s days off, he attacked the tree with a small ax. Could he, I asked, manage other types of gardening? He spread wide his arms: the Garden of Eden if necessary.

  “Rodrigo may be our man,” I confided to Diane over breakfast. A strange mixture of relief and guilt washed over me—Ángel had meant well when he barricaded the vegetable plot.

  “Our man for what?” She sipped tea, incapable of articulating thoughts before her first cup of the morning. From outside came the steady thud of Rodrigo’s ax on the lemon tree.

  “To take Ángel’s place. Of course, we’ll have to get references for him.”

  Mopeds sputtered along the road past the wrought-iron gates. A yellow crop-spraying monoplane visible through the windows skimmed the orange plantations while Diane absorbed the fact that I intended to sack Ángel. Finally she said: “How can you be so two-faced?,” picked up her cup, and disappeared into our bedroom, slamming the door behind her. Flakes of plaster from the wall fell to the floor. Impetuosity and passion were engraved on her heart, leavened by a sense of the ridiculous.

  Alone on the terrace, I tried to rationalize. Ángel had built a stockade I didn’t want, Rodrigo seemed to be a hard worker and not so temperamental.

  At that moment Ángel arrived unexpectedly in his van. I wondered if he had been tipped off that a pretender to his throne had infiltrated the garden.

  He came onto the terrace. “What is Rodrigo doing here?” he asked.

  I told him Rodrigo claimed he always came to prune the trees at this time of the year. “Do you know him?”

  “I have seen him drunk in every bar in the pueblo,” said Ángel, who was a teetotaler.

  “But you don’t mind him pruning the trees?”

  “Murdering them.” He inspected the lemon tree outside the kitchen while Rodrigo ate his lunch in the garage. “He’s certainly killing that one. He’s removed the wrong branches, cut them at the wrong places, and used a blunt ax.”

  “Doesn’t Rodrigo come every year?”

  “Impossible—the trees are still alive!”

  “You could do a better job?” His presumption was getting to me.

  “Better than that,” Ángel said pointing at the lemon tree. He turned on his heel and drove away in his van.

  After lunch a truck backed into the driveway and deposited a large mound of horse manure.

  I asked the driver who had authorized the delivery. “Angel,” he said and took off, tires screeching.

  When Rodrigo started his afternoon shift, I diverted him from pruning and asked him to shift builder’s rubble that had been left under the cypress hedge to a garbage collection point at the end of the street where it joined the road to the village.

  His first accident happened almost immediately. I heard a cry of pain and raced to the spot where he was working.

  He was sitting in the shade of the hedge, balding scalp beaded with sweat, unlacing one of his rope-soled shoes. He told me he had dropped a brick on his foot. If he had known he was going to shift rubble, he said, he would have worn boots. Was he planning to sue for damages? I wondered. I inspected his foot but there was no outward sign of injury.

  An hour later he knocked on the door of the annex where I was working on my book. Could he drive into Denia to replace the handle of his azada, the tool like a large hoe, with which Spaniards perform much of their manual work on the land? “It snapped,” he said, “when I was clearing weeds in the area where the debris was.”

  He was away for two hours. At the end of his stint, he told me he had lost a hundred-peseta-banknote; it must have fallen from the breast pocket of his shirt when he was dumping rubble at the end of the street.

  I walked with him to his van. One of the tires was flat, a jagged wound below the tread. As he began to change the wheel I noticed dark clouds gathering on the horizon. Had Ángel summoned malevolent spirits?

  Half an hour later a dozen sacks of chemical fertilizer were dumped in the driveway by the same deliveryman. A few spots of rain fell.

  “What are we going to do about the pile of horse manure?” I asked Ángel when he made another guest appearance. If it rained heavily, it would be swept into the house.

  “It will be better damp,” he said. I suspected this was his way of telling me he had no intention of shifting it until Rodrigo was dismissed. He drove away in his van.

  So I was stuck with an accident-prone malcontent and an eccentric with a penchant for chain link. I stacked the plastic sacks of chemical fertilizer into a neat pile.

  I had just shifted the last sack when, with a flash of lightning and a crack of thunder, rain sluiced from the clouds—and the pile of horse manure began to disintegrate, moving on a malodorous tide down the slight incline of the driveway toward the kitchen door.

  I grabbed a shovel and tried to stem it before it flowed under the door. Diane found three sandbags in the garage and tried to make a dam. The rain fell harder, the smell of dung became more pungent. I had covered floods as a reporter and knew how ineffectual sandbags could be against an inexorable current of water; if we didn’t take decisive action the kitchen would become a stable.

  Inspiration visited me. I dragged the sacks of chemical fertilizer from the side of the driveway and, cursing Angel, laid them in the path of the oncoming tide. It lapped the bags, faltered, then changed course and flowed down the driveway toward the lawn on the other side of the house.

  At dusk we locked up and sat down to supper—Diane pointedly sitting at the end of the plastic table, as far away as possible from the faint aroma of the farmyard, which the two showers I had taken hadn’t totally dispersed. I slept in a sleeping bag and dreamed I was drowning Ángel in a barrel of liquid manure.

  In Britain, America, or Canada, or any other country where the customs were more familiar, I would have acted with more expediency—sacked Angel for refusing to shift the manure, paid off Rodrigo when I realized he was a malingerer, and found someone else to do their work.

  But, being a foreigner, I had to proceed with caution. Feelings could easily turn against us if we acted autocratically. And that would be unfair to Jonathan, who would soon be starting school and trying to adapt.

  And in any case the overall perception here was more benevolent than it had been in the cities where Diane and I had lived. The village was more a family than a community; crime hadn’t entered its portals (except for regular bank robberies in which money was handed over amicably); old people and children were cherished; bureaucracy existed to be outsmarted.

  It was up to us to adjust, and some foreigners I had met elsewhere in Spain who didn’t try should never have left their native shores. The greatest challenge was language; the Dutch coped brilliantly because, as practically no one else spoke their language, they were used to getting their tongues around other people’s; British, Americans, and Germans often struggled—they mostly succeeded, particularly the women who did the shopping, but a few gave up and went home.

  I woke at dawn, put on a bathrobe, and went outside. The rain had stopped, the jigsaw-shaped paving stones of the driveway had dried, and the flow of manure had stopped short of the lawn.

  The crop-spraying aircraft was making an early start. I waved at the hedge-hopping pilot, he waved back.

  Everything seemed to be back to relative normality except the problem with Angel and Rodrigo and Diane’s opinion that I was a hire-and-fire overseer from a sweatshop.

  The crisis began to resolve itself a couple of hours later. Rodrigo didn’t show up for work; instead a small and belligerent girl knocked on the door. Rodrigo wasn’t well, she said, and could I please give her the money for his work yesterday, bearing in mind that he had lost one hundred pesetas and hurt his foot.

  “Is he coming back?” She shook her head vehemently. Not to work for a perfidious foreigner like me. I experienced a surge of relief—one problem sol
ved, one to go.

  I paid her Rodrigo’s wages plus damages. She grabbed the money and ran away to remove herself from my malign influence as swiftly as possible.

  When Ángel reported for work he scraped up the drying manure with his azada, loaded it into a wheelbarrow, and took it to the vegetable garden. As he dug it in he crooned a lament, lightened, it seemed to my untutored ear, by a few triumphal notes.

  I told Diane he could stay—for the time being.

  FOUR

  Who Said Anything About Snow?

  Work began on the dining hall early in February. All we had wanted initially was a sun-warmed house steeped in character, remote from tourist traps with their thumping discos and whiffs of tanning oil. Now we had a house and suddenly an extension was the heart of the matter. High-raftered, baronial, redolent of orange-wood smoke in the winter, ventilated by breezes from the distant mountains in the summer. A massive timber door, old terra-cotta tiles, an inglenook, Emilio’s minstrel gallery . . . Slyly it had insinuated itself into the vision Diane and I had shared for so long. If my book was a success, then we would add a patio, an adjoining studio, and a kitchen extension.

  The dining hall was designed by Peter Pateman, an old friend and bon viveur. A bearded Englishman and entrepreneur, he had been a lumberjack in Canada and a TV cameraman in Britain, and had converted a warehouse by the harbor in Denia into a medieval inn.

  He obtained our building permit—a relatively easy procedure because we owned more than the minimum amount of land required and subcontracted the construction work. The contract between the two of us was a handshake, payment for labor and materials to be made as work progressed. Paperwork was the scourge of Spain, but common sense could cut through it as cleanly as a laser beam.

  Jonathan had returned from Montreal with Diane, unsure whether he was Canadian or Spanish, but willing to give either or both a try. One windswept day the three of us stood together like a family group waiting for a Victorian photographer to take our picture, to witness the symbolic laying of the foundation stone, a humble cinder block.

  The foreman of the eight-strong building team laid the block in a bed of soft cement and I squeezed Diane and Jonathan’s shoulders, the euphoria of the moment marred a little by doubts about the wisdom of what we were embarking upon.

  Could I afford the dining hall? Supposing the book failed; could we adapt to the clash of cultures? Were we right to impose our wishes on Jonathan?

  Emilio, who had been accepted by the foreman as a casual worker—his talents, it seemed, now encompassed brick-laying, plastering, and dispensation of advice on all aspects of building—applauded while Ángel fingered the holes in his straw hat. They had known each other for about a year, but their temperaments were so dissimilar that they were bound to clash.

  Ángel, who had decided with my consent to work five days a week with shorter shifts, and Emilio both kept arriving progressively earlier; if they continued to try to outdo each other, they would eventually be arriving at midnight or, worse, not going home at all.

  Once, on my daybreak trip to the bakery to buy warm bread, I found Emilio asleep in his van on the roadside. He had set his alarm clock an hour too early and decided to take a predawn nap; as I roused him, Ángel swept triumphantly past and parked in the driveway.

  Ángel now worked as close as possible to the dining hall, so that he could issue instructions, usually contrary to Emilio’s, to protect the garden from excavations.

  Emilio was expansive when it came to foundations. He told the foreman: “You’ll have to extend the wall here by half a meter to make it safe.”

  Ángel intervened. “Over my dead body.”

  Emilio to the foreman: “While you’re at it dig a grave.”

  At nine A.M. the whole team adjourned to the garage for desayuno, breakfast—bocadillos followed by oranges, peeled with the delicate application of manicurists, washed down with beer or red wine diluted with casera, weak lemonade.

  They were all hard workers, but sometimes ferocious debate, tempered by bursts of hilarity, prolonged the meal. While we ate breakfast in the house, we could hear the accents and occasionally some of the regional languages of Spain, which Diane did her best to interpret for me.

  Among the workers was Jordi, as stout as Friar Tuck with a monkish fringe of hair, from Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia, the sprawling, prosperous region in the northeast. He ate two bocadillos to everyone else’s one, poured wine down his throat as though he were filling a gasoline tank, and referred to Catalonia as a separate country. “Barcelona is the true capital of Spain,” he would announce and wait for outrage to erupt.

  The dissent was led by Chimo, a sunken-cheeked Madrileño, as skinny as Jordi was corpulent, his sleek black hair as shiny as new paint. Madrid, he said, was more than just the capital of Spain: it was the capital of civilization. And, even more provocatively, Real (Royal) Madrid was the inspiration for all world-class football clubs (Real Madrid and Barcelona were sworn enemies). Sebastián, a young and dour Gallego with Viking-blond hair, said that football apart, they were both talking rubbish: Galicia, the mountainous land in the northwest where he was born, was the most influential part of Spain because hardship had dispatched waves of immigrants from its shores to the United States and that was the only true superpower in the world, wasn’t it?

  He had a point, said Iñaki, a granite-faced Basque who wore a flat beret, the male headgear of his homeland, which straddled the French border, where ETA terrorists waged a campaign similar to the IRA’s in Ireland. “We speak our own language, and we were the original inhabitants of Europe.”

  “So?” With one syllable Emilio’s voice was unmistakable.

  “So? Were you in America so long you left your brains there? Europe is the center of Western civilization, we made it so,” Iñaki said.

  Regional differences and football apart, they debated village gossip, sex, and politics. From time to time Ángel inserted his own peculiar views.

  After breakfast, work accelerated. One wall of the original dining room was knocked down; the driveway became a builder’s yard; choking dust filled the house.

  The new walls of the dining hall rose roof high and even the weather collaborated. Frost sparkled on the lawn beneath arctic-blue skies, a cloud of almond blossom bloomed in a corner of the garden, yellow winter jasmine flowered close by. Diane fed crumbs to robins and glossy-haired carpet salesmen unrolled their wares beside mounds of sand and bags of cement. I worked on my book in the annex, wax plugs in my ears to isolate me from the din.

  Diane hired a languorous beauty named Maria to help her with the housework. She worked dreamily, accompanied by Julio Iglesias on her cassette player; we substituted a Rolling Stones tape and she jumped around like a Keystone Cop. And everything might have proceeded smoothly enough if it hadn’t snowed.

  Estimates varied about the length of time since the last snowfall. Some pundits reckoned it was twenty-five years, other sages—there was no shortage of them in the village—said a hundred.

  Snow had occasionally dusted the top of our small mountain, Montgo, but this was serious stuff. It capped the citrus trees with white millinery; the branches of olive trees snapped under its weight; motorists drove blithely into drifts of it.

  By midday it was nine inches deep in the village. Cats pawed it suspiciously, small dogs disappeared in it. The school closed down to let children touch it, taste it, throw it. Women swept it from the sidewalks with futile industry; in the Bar Paraiso there was dark talk of ruination.

  But it was our roofless dining hall that really concentrated it, funneling it into a blizzard. It climbed the walls, spilling out of glassless windows, and dispatched the builders into the garage where they played cards.

  I asked Ángel how long he thought it would snow for.

  “Until it stops,” he said.

  It continued to snow well into the afternoon. We lit two portable fires fed from canisters of butane gas to supplement the log fire and the house crackle
d with heat. Jonathan, who was staying with a friend, phoned and said, “Spain isn’t so different from Canada, is it?”

  At four o’clock the phone rang again, the owner of the building company asking to speak to the foreman.

  Five minutes later a truck arrived. The workmen piled into it. The foreman explained that they were going to finish interior work on a house on the beach near Denia. Time was money, he said.

  “But the snow will be gone by tomorrow,” I said. “This is sunny Spain, isn’t it?” He shrugged. “No pasa nada.” Don’t worry, the phrase that encompassed all life’s tribulations.

  A couple of workmen jumped out of the truck, collected tools from the garage, and with ominous finality handed them to their colleagues. The truck drove away, taillights fading in the gathering dusk.

  Normally I loved first snow, particularly at this time of day when it was bladed with cruelty and lighted windows beckoned beneath white bonnets. Not this evening. All it did was add another desolate dimension to the mounds of sand and heaps of bricks and cinder blocks and the skeletal silhouette of my folly, the dining hall.

  An hour later I realized we were marooned, our food supplies reduced to a loaf of bread, a few potatoes, and a bottle of vinegary wine.

  Ángel, who had been in the garage stripping and sharpening canes to be used as garden stakes, offered to drive me to a grocery, but I didn’t trust his van—cars and trucks had already been abandoned on all the roads around Denia. Snow was pouring from the sky as he drove away.

  As I walked back to the house down the driveway the lights in the house and the village went out.

  I tried to make a phone call: the line was dead. I found a flashlight: the batteries were dead.

  I piled logs onto the fire and sat beside it opposite Diane.

  “I’m hungry,” she said.

  “My mother used to make potato cakes with mashed potatoes and bread.”