He raised an eyebrow as he looked back at me. ‘I have one brother,’ he began, ‘in Granada, although he is everywhere. His name is Santiago, Saint James in English . . . although he is no saint . . . called Santi for short. But I have no sisters. Perhaps, Primavera, you would like to fill that gap.’
And that’s how it was. He became the brother I never had, and vice versa. And if there were still a few cynical crones who muttered behind our backs, then, as Gerard would never say, far less do . . . fuck ’em.
Three
I
was really looking forward to last summer. Unforeseen events had cast a shadow over the year before, and it had taken me a while to get over them, emotionally, if not physically. One of the positives of the experience had been its demonstration of the strength of the friendships that Tom and I had in the village. The resident population, within its ancient walls and in the area that surrounds them, is just a little short of a hundred, but there are none I don’t know, and none I don’t like.
When you’re shown such goodwill, it has to be returned, and so, in the aftermath of the blip in my tranquillity, I decided to do everything I could to involve myself in the village life and events. But that resolution isn’t as grand as it sounds, since for half of the year the people are devoted full-time to serving, and making money from, the hordes of tourists who descend on L’Escala and on the campsites along the beaches to the north of St Martí, and for the other half they’re devoted full-time to doing not very much.
I looked around, and asked around for ways to help; after much head-scratching, Cisco, who runs Meson del Conde, the restaurant that faces the church across Plaça Major, pointed out that one thing the village lacked was a proper information centre for visitors. I jumped on that one. My house is bang next door to the church, and I have a small garden . . . and dog-pound . . . in front. With the cooperation of the town’s tourist office . . . no Catalan can resist something for nothing . . . I had a small booth built, set into the fence on top of the wall, with a frame to hold all sorts of leaflets, and a bell that people who wanted more specific advice could use to call me, or Tom (who’s comfortable with adults, knows as much about the area as I do, and who’s well big enough to see over the top of the booth), or even Father Gerard if he happened to be around.
My new facility was a success; it opened at Easter and within a couple of months I’d been asked to sell tickets for the pleasure boats that cruise along the coast, and tokens for the
carrilet
, the tractor-drawn train that runs between St Martí and the beach at Montgo, on the far side of L’Escala. I’d even been approached by a golf course twenty kilometres away and asked if I’d handle bookings for them. (I turned them down; I was there to help visitors to my village, not send them away.)
The venture gave me something positive to do, and made me feel good about myself. But it didn’t use up all of my time. The peak tourist season lasts for only six weeks or so, from mid-July to the end of August: I knew I would be busy then, but for the rest of the mid-year months, most of the business is done at weekends. I was still in the market for things to do, and that’s when Ben told me about his wine fair.
Benedict Simmers is an English guy who pitched up in St Martí pretty much as soon as he finished university, so he told me, and never left. He did a few tourist-related jobs, involving, mostly, parties of school kids, before he got ‘repped out’ as he puts it, and went into the wine trade. He sold online for a while, until he saw an opportunity, and opened a bodega, a wine shop at the foot of the street that leads up to Plaça Major.
He’s Tom’s friend as much as mine, thanks to the dogs. We have an intellectually challenged Labrador called Charlie, and Ben has two of the same breed. As I understand it, Cher, the older of his pair, is Charlie’s aunt, which makes Mustard, her whelp, his cousin. When he’s not at school, Tom often helps Ben when the shop is busy, by walking all three of them. This is no problem for him; he seems to speak Labrador as fluently as all his other languages, for they all obey him instantly, even Mustard, who’s lawless with everyone else.
He was doing that, one Saturday in May, and I was in the shop restocking my wine cellar, according to Gerard’s guidance and recommendations . . . he’d been drinking a fair bit of it, so I decided that he might as well help me choose . . . when I saw what looked like a poster displayed on the shop’s computer monitor.
‘
Arrels de vi
,’ I read aloud. ‘Means “The roots of wine” in English, doesn’t it?’
I should explain that the St Martí community, even Tom and I sometimes, when there’s nobody else around, speaks a variety of tongues in its daily discourse, but most commonly Catalan, the language on the screen.
‘That’s right,’ Ben replied.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s the name of my wine fair . . . the fair I’m planning, that is.’
‘What’s a wine fair?’ I asked.
He and Gerard gazed at me, their expressions dangerously close to patronising. ‘A wine fair,’ the priest replied, ‘is a gathering of producers, brought together to display and offer their latest and finest vintages, for an educated public to taste and, hopefully, to buy.’
I looked at the Englishman. ‘Where are you going to hold it?’
Ben waved a hand towards the door. ‘The plan is that it’ll be out there, in Plaça Petita.’
I walked over to the entrance and looked at the small square, gently sloping, but terraced. Four pathways lead into it, two of them rising from the car parks that lie below the village. ‘Will it be big enough?’
He nodded. ‘Should be. I reckon it’ll take at least a dozen stands, and that’s as many as I’d want . . . for a first effort, at any rate.’
‘Who’ll be here?’
‘I don’t know yet. I’m approaching all the Emporda wine-makers. So far the response has been good.’
Catalunya contains a number of
comercs
, or regions; Emporda is ours, and it’s split into two subdivisions, upper and lower. ‘When are you going to have it?’ I asked.
He pointed to a date at the foot of the poster on the screen. ‘First week in September, soon as the August chaos is over . . . that’s if I can get everything put together. I’ve still got a hell of a lot to do.’
‘Need any help?’
He grinned. ‘Nice of you to offer, but I have to sell the concept to the exhibitors myself.’
‘There’s more to it than that, surely. There’s marketing, publicity; I could use the information centre to plug it, and to sell advance tickets.’
‘Advance tickets? I plan to sell on the day, that’s all.’
I frowned at him. ‘Ben,’ I said, ‘I don’t know a hell of a lot about business, but I do know that if you’ve covered your overheads before the show opens, everything else is profit.’
‘I hear what you’re saying,’ he conceded. ‘If you’d do that, I suppose it would be a big help.’
‘I will, and you could sell tickets through the hotels as well,’ I added.
‘That would be good too. I know most of them. Then there are the restaurants I supply; I’m sure they’ll advertise it, at the very least.’
I was well warmed up. ‘I could talk to the people I know in the tourist department in L’Escala; to see if they’d help. They have a website.’
Ben grimaced. ‘You might have a problem with them. There’s one big fly in the ointment; I need the mayor’s cooperation. I called her yesterday and . . . let’s just say she didn’t make any encouraging noises.’
‘Why do you need her onside?’
‘Because Plaça Petita is public land, and the mayor has the power to decide whether it can be used or not.’
‘What about the local traders’ association? You’re a member. Can’t they put pressure on her?’
‘I’ve talked to the leaders; they’re scared of upsetting her. A lot of them rely on town hall approvals to run their businesses. Getting on the wrong side of the mayor is never a good idea in L’Escala. Besides . . .’ He paused.
‘What?’
‘I’m not sure, but I think there might be a little bit of prejudice.’
‘Are you saying they’re agin it because you’re British?’
‘Could be.’
Beside me, Gerard sighed. By that time, he’d come to know my rising hackles when he saw them.
‘The hell with that,’ I declared. ‘Most of their businesses only survive because of the money that the Brits, the French, the Belgians and the rest of Europe spend in this town. And as for the mayor, L’Escala educates its children and runs its social facilities thanks to the taxes paid by expat property owners. You concentrate on bringing in the wine producers and leave her to me.’
Ben frowned. ‘Are you sure? I can’t afford to pay you, Prim. This will be a shoestring operation.’
‘I don’t want paying,’ I told him. ‘But I’d better have some sort of authority when I go to see her.’
And that is how I became operations manager of Arrels de Vi, the St Martí d’Empúries wine fair.
Four
I
f I ever suspect in future that I’m getting too big for my boots, I’ll remember my visit to the Casa de la Vila, the town hall of the Ajuntament of L’Escala, climbing the stairs to the reception desk on the first floor, and confronting authority, face to face.
Dolores Fumado Ortega, the mayor’s chief of staff, as she had introduced herself, was a short, stocky woman of an age that wasn’t easy to guess, but had to be fifty-something, maybe edging towards the next Big One. She was dressed in a grey seam-strained skirt, and a white blouse outlining the industrial-strength bra that was necessary to restrain her formidable bosom. Her hair was on the dark side of blond, but with a blue sheen, professionally shaped and lacquered. The ladies of L’Escala have a wide choice of hairdresser; I suspected that she paid daily visits to hers.
She had greeted me coolly, in a way that made it clear that whoever I was, she was more important, and the temperature seemed to be falling by the minute. She peered at me over the top of gold-framed, light-reactive glasses, her eyes offering nothing. ‘It is quite impossible,’ she declared. ‘The mayor’s diary is full. She couldn’t possibly see you now.’
I smiled, taking the meek and mild route. ‘I’ll wait.’
‘There is no point, senora.’ (There is no proper equivalent of Mrs in Catalan or Castellano.) ‘She has meetings all day and will have no free time.’
‘I’ll come back tomorrow, if you’d like to schedule me in.’
She sighed, telling me that I was trying her patience. ‘That will not be possible either.’
‘The day after?’
She shook her head. ‘The mayor is busy with the affairs of the town, with important matters.’
I tried smiling again. ‘Everything is important to someone,’ I ventured. ‘The wine fair is important to us.’
‘But not to the mayor.’ She had grown so frosty that she reminded me of a dumpy version of the witch in Narnia.
The truth is, the meek never will inherit the earth, so I changed tack. ‘When’s the next municipal election?’ I snapped. I could feel my eyes narrow as I spoke.
‘In two years. How is that relevant?’
‘How? Time for a reality check, Senora Fumado. I did some research before I came here. At this moment the mayor is at the head of a coalition. Her party has six seats out of thirteen; she’s sat on her arse in that office ten feet away from us thanks to the support of the single independent councillor that the people returned last time, her sister’s father-in-law, as I understand it. She’s hanging in there by little more than one polished fingernail. Two years from now she’s going to need all the goodwill she can get.’ Dolores began to move, as if to walk away from me, then stopped, as if she’d realised that wasn’t going to shut me up. ‘What she won’t need,’ I told her loudly, ‘is a determined, well-resourced person who speaks English, French, Catalan and Spanish lobbying against her, and maybe even fielding a multinational slate of expatriate residents. It may be an inconvenient truth, but truth it is, that I, and people like me, British, Belgian, French, Dutch and the rest, have a vote in the local elections and can stand as candidates. How many of us voted last time? Damn few. But how many of us are there in this town, just waiting to be stirred up? You don’t need much to find the answer. Just pick up the local telephone directory and flick through it.’
I’d cracked her; I could see that. I stood there waiting for a response. But when it came, it was from behind me.
‘You’ll waken the sleeping giant, Mrs Blackstone?’ said a female voice, in English. ‘In that case you’d better come in.’
I turned, and saw a tall woman, in her mid-thirties, gazing at me with a half-smile on her face. She couldn’t have looked less like her executive assistant if they’d both worked at it. Her eyes were big and brown, long lashed, the compelling feature of her oval face. Her hair was dark, and fell to her shoulders in loose curls. She wore a white T-shirt emblazoned with the name and logo of the town’s anchovy museum . . . no, I’m not kidding; L’Escala has an anchovy museum . . . and tucked into blue denim cut-offs in a way that emphasised the swell of her breasts, the narrowness of her waist and the curve of her hips. As I looked at her my first thought was, ‘
How come this woman didn’t pick up every male vote in town?
’