Sanibel Scribbles (34 page)

The tour bus left, and the group spent the next three nights at a luxurious three-star hotel in a city called Llanes. There they drank sangria and cedra and ate fried squid and tapas under the moon overlooking the sea. They swam the icy waves of the Mar Cantabrio. Vicki and other Americans lay down on their backs in the sand near the shore and let the waves rush over their bodies, stealing their breath away. They danced way past midnight at flashy
discotecas
. They lived a lot and slept little.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

BACK IN MADRID, THE
city felt cold, crowded, and dirty compared to the Spanish countryside, but Vicki knew it would only be a matter of time before she found that one special place—Sanibel Island’s Lighthouse Beach, Tarpon Key’s old dock and houseboat, or its rustic bar. It might be a challenge finding it in a metropolitan city, but she felt determined. She would eventually discover a place to think, to dwell, to escape, just as Simon had said she would. Such secret places made time go by more slowly and new places became a little more comfortable.

Rosario had two such places in life, the apartment and the church on the corner. She made daily stops at the meat market and bread shop but spent most of her time in the apartment or at mass.

The day before classes began, Vicki had mailed a letter to Ignacio Guillermo. She kept it brief, simply stating that she had met a friend of his family’s while on a little island off the coast of Florida. His name was Howard. She included her Spanish family’s phone number and suggested he call to arrange a time and place to meet.

Dear Grandma
,

I especially feel drawn to the Prado Museum and the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia National Museum. I will return often. A museum has stories to tell. Every painting, every piece of art represents a story. When
I first stood outside the glass showcase of Picasso’s final “La Guernica” at the museum, I could almost hear the voices of crying mothers with dead babies, soldiers screaming in pain, and dying horses. The twelve-foot-high, twenty-six-foot-long canvas shares a gruesome, destructive story of the Spanish Civil War
.

Then the Spanish tour guide explained the symbolism behind it. The open mouths signal that the person is alive while the closed mouths mean the person is dead. The toro represents the country of Spain and hope for overcoming Fascism, while the arm holding the light points out the hope for Spain. The picture itself depicts the saturation bombing of a Basque village by German planes. I took a photograph of “La Guernica,” and I don’t think I was supposed to do that. As the guard came running, I hid my camera under my shirt and took off
.

And Palacio Real! What a great place to hold a wedding. But since the eighteenth century, its sole purpose has been to hold receptions for royal families and ambassadors. A few Spaniards asked me why there isn’t royalty in the United States. I told them there are. We call them “celebrities,” and they live in Hollywood
.

Then they asked me about American castles. Well, mansions don’t compete, so instead I told them we do have castles, but we call them “lighthouses.”

As for culture shock? Well, I’ve grown up near Midwest cornfields and streets lined with tulips, and I’ve never taken a subway before. Now, I have to take a subway that announces the stops in Spanish. I guess I also tend to smile at everyone who walks past me in the city. Our tour guide noticed and told me not to be so friendly, that it could be “peligroso.” It seems a bitterly cold thing to do, but I guess I’ll smile less
.

I’m also homesick and find myself quietly humming the national anthem as I walk. I guess I feel patriotic because I’m far from home, and I’m feeling like a complete foreigner. If I bumped into another American, I’d hug the person to death, simply for being an American
.

P.S. You must love living in the eternal kingdom. I can’t even imagine the peace, the glamour, the beauty, the love you must feel for the place where you dwell now. Nothing can destroy the city in which you live, Grandma. Nothing can damage its people, and nothing can tear down its walls
.

With a less than typical smile, she proceeded to walk about a mile to Madrid’s Complutense University for her first day of classes. Dressed in black pants, a red-and-black Spanish-looking button-down sweater bought in Florida, and new, black, pointy European shoes, she felt fashionably dressed to go with the rest of the Spanish culture around her. Her blond hair, with no dark roots, and her fair complexion were giveaways that she was American as she walked the downtown streets, stopping along the way for an espresso topped with milk and a thin, triangular tuna fish sandwich on white bread. She poured a little milk into the espresso, no longer desiring the amount of milk that a latte provided. As she walked, male voices called out several
“rubias”
to her. This meant blonde, and she knew they were only complimenting her. She looked like a Spanish soap opera star. In America, she’d glare back, but in Spain she knew men were only throwing out compliments as they shouted things at women walking by, a cultural thing. As long as they didn’t bark, or meow like a cat, she didn’t mind, so she smiled a “thank you” and continued walking, making no eye contact. If truth were known, women hated men gawking, yet if they didn’t gawk, the women secretly wondered why.

Like the hour hand of a clock, she felt in sync with the hours of Madrid. Street life awoke at around eight in the morning, shut down for siesta
from around two to four o’clock, then picked up again all afternoon and ticked well into the night. Restaurants overflowed with people between the dinner hours of nine-thirty and midnight, bars were packed by eleven-thirty, and traffic continued until three.

Her time for education had come. As she walked under a huge stone arch in the northwestern part of the city, she could see her destination, the campus, a couple of blocks ahead. Under the fresh colors of the morning sky, the campus appeared as a scribbled-down item on her life’s list of goals. In a few minutes she’d be sitting in a classroom, officially a foreign student studying abroad. If she had a question, oh well. If she didn’t understand something, oh well. Her professors didn’t understand English. And if they did know a bit, they wouldn’t let her know. While in
their
country, she had to speak
their
language. Those were the rules. She felt scholarly, so she dipped into her book bag and took out fake spectacles she had bought back home for five dollars. She didn’t need glasses, but she liked them. They made her look studious. It’s why she had bought them. She wanted to look studious for her semester abroad.

“Perdoname, Señorita, perdoname.”

She heard this voice louder than the other voices on the street, and woman’s intuition told her he was talking to her.
Don’t look, and definitely don’t smile
, she reminded herself.

She tried hard to act in a PMS sort of way, both glaring and ignoring the voice from behind her. She put her spectacles on, stared straight ahead, and pushed her hair behind her ears in a bold, don’t-mess-with- me manner.

“Puedes ayudarme, por favor?”
The male voice was asking her for help.

She stopped to look in a bakery shop window but wasn’t looking at croissants. In the reflection of the window, she could see a man in a car pulled up to the curb. Rolling down his front window, he beckoned to her.
Okay, he needs help. In times of potential crisis, a glance can’t hurt
.

She turned and smiled.

“A dónde está el Calle norte?
” He only needed directions to North Street.

She took full notice of the car, a Mercedes, and of its driver leaning out the front window. When he smiled, dimples overtook his face, making
him look years younger than he probably was. She did feel a bit safer knowing he drove an expensive car. In a stereotypical way, it meant he might be educated, a professional. Maybe he enjoyed the prestige of owning classy transportation, or maybe he drove long distances to work from a home in the country, a hidden getaway, and needed a well-engineered car—her imagination took over.
Okay, he could have stolen it, or he could have smuggled drugs or something. Okay, you’re analyzing things way too much
, she told herself.
You’ve already smiled, so the damage is done
.

“Yo no hablo español.” Smart
, she sarcastically told herself.

“Porque estas aqui, en Madrid?”

“Porque, estoy estudiando a la universidad de Madrid.”

She pointed at the university campus straight ahead, feeling quite confident that she had constructed a solid sentence. Words came to mind and, one by one, they formed a complete sentence, probably not in the right conjugation, but they created a rough sentence. She felt pride, as much as one might while building a skyscraper one floor at a time, then standing below and looking up at what had been accomplished.

In a slow, educated Spanish dialect, he said, “Un
estudiante. Si, si. Pues, parlez-vous francais?
”

Did she speak French?
¡Oh, por favor!
She had just spoken the most perfect
español
of her
vida
, and now this man—with hair long enough to rest on his shoulders, too short to make a ponytail but long enough to curl slightly on his sharp black sweater—wanted to know if she also spoke French. Well, they weren’t wasted moments after all, she told herself, the time spent washing her hair in the shower. She did know a little French because she spent every morning reciting and memorizing the French descriptions and “to use” instructions on the back of her hair conditioner bottles. Yes, she could speak French, as long as the conversation centered on shampoos and hair rinses. What did he use on his own brown hair? How did he slick it back to be as sexy as it looked?

Removing her fake spectacles after they fell down her nose, she replied, “Si,
la solucion demelante. Mode d’emploi. Appliquer sur les cheveux propes.”

The man laughed, displaying once again dominating dimples, the kind that say this man is a doll, this man can only be a sweetheart, and even in
times of anger he has a hard time hiding his softer side, thanks to his having dimples that large. He kept his glasses on. They were real, and he was real. He was no imposter. Those glasses belonged on his face.
“Tu eres Americana,”
he said.

She nodded and smiled. He had guessed that right. She looked and sounded American—whether speaking Spanish or French. She studied his eyes behind the eyeglasses—amused eyes—and felt curious about his story. Fine age lines only added to his appeal. Why did she understand his Spanish better than that of any other Spaniard she’d ever heard? His words came clearly and easily and, listening to him, she felt as comfortable as she might if standing in her favorite section of a bookstore. She understood his words as quickly as it took her to read the titles on the spine of a book. She didn’t have to read the fine print; the title said it all. Maybe he spoke more slowly than the other Spaniards, out of courtesy.

She asked him if he spoke English, to double-check that their conversation couldn’t just take place in English.

No. He spoke Spanish, Italian, and French, and explained that the people in his country tended to speak fast so she shouldn’t get discouraged. He told her that soon she’d be dreaming in Spanish.

He put his car in park and opened the door. She suspected she had gone too far, and that she should never have smiled or stopped in the first place. Her tour guide had warned her, but she lived in Spain now and wanted to learn the culture. How could she do that without chatting with its people? The man getting out the car wore a black turtleneck with black, dressy, pleated pants. Did he iron them himself? He came up to her and stood too close, invading her comfort zone, making her feel like a small piece of tissue, a biopsy being examined for disease. She took a couple of steps backward, but he drew closer again, and she felt intoxicated by the smell of his cologne. She reminded herself to buy mints later, because Spaniards like standing face-to-face when they talked. They conversed with no fear of spitting or coffee breath. And, up close, they talked as loudly as Americans who stand several safe feet away from each other. She understood this about him, so he didn’t offend her.

In Spanish, the stranger told her she spoke proper Spanish and started
to laugh.

She stared at his eyes, a kaleidoscope of brown and green, and, feeling offended, she asked him why he was laughing. What had she said?

He confessed that her Spanish sounded quite antiquated, at least a few centuries old. He told her to imagine a Spaniard in the modern-day United States speaking Shakespeare.