Sanibel Scribbles (37 page)

“Mira, mira,”
she said, pointing to a pot on the stove. “We eat this tonight,” she said.

With a quick glance into the pot full of living, slimy creatures, Vicki knew she had no other options.
“Lo sien
to,” she replied, shaking her head.

“Me voy
. I go out tonight, I go now. I am late.”

“No,” declared Lorenzo as he entered the kitchen. “Spaniards are always late. It is good to be late. You have enough time to eat a little.”

“I’m already late so I would be way too late, very late, if I stayed to eat a little,” she explained.

“They are ready to eat now.” Rosario scooped snails onto a spoon. “I give you some now to enjoy before you go.”

“Si, si
. You stay,” added Lorenzo. “It is good to be late in Spain. Early is bad.”

“I am not early. I am late. I am very,
very
late,
muy, muy tarde. Me voy,”
said Vicki as she rushed out of the kitchen.

Within seconds, she was down the flights of stairs and outside on the sidewalk with the mysteriously rude Spaniard. He served one purpose, and that was rescuing her from downing another bowl of living creatures.

They strolled to a nearby café in the heart of Madrid and drank a small glass of
chato
, a red wine, and ate tapas, or appetizers of fried fish, slices of sausage and prawns in butter. The café was crammed full of shouting Spaniards, and Nacho’s voice blended in perfectly. His opinionated personality made him a sort of genius, except when it came to remembering whether or not his family knew a Howard from the United States. Vicki described Howard’s physical appearance, his personality, and the island, but still nothing came to mind. Nacho declared the entire thing suspicious but said he didn’t mind. He enjoyed meeting her anyway.

“Try this,” he demanded in Spanish.

“Okay,” she said as he fed her something off his fork.

“Mas, mas,”
he said before she finished chewing the first bite.

“Delicioso,”
she declared. “I like it.”

“You like it?”

“I love it,” she answered. “I’d like more.”

“I give you more.”

“Gracias,”
she said as she waited for him to feed her once more.

“What is it?”

“Bull’s testicles,” he answered in Spanish.

“No mas,” she declared out loud. “No
mas, no mas
. I’ll be right back,” she choked, wishing she had stayed home to eat the snails. At least they slid right down on their own. “Un
momento, por favor.”
She exited quickly for the restroom and remained there a good ten minutes, rinsing her mouth obsessively. She swore she would never tell anyone what she had eaten. She would never admit to having a bull’s testicle in her mouth, and, for the record, she had
never
declared anything about it to be delicious!

He lectured passionately about the Constitutional Monarchy, shouting out his own views, then wanted to know her views on political figures, domestic and international issues, literary authors, and more. His words flew out fast, like a human sneeze shooting stuff out at 100 miles per hour. He picked her brain and, frighteningly at times, he had a better understanding of her own country than she did. As he spoke and as he listened, his thick, bushy black eyebrows nervously twitched and arched in sync with the words.

Tranquilo, tranquilo
, Vicki thought. She was glad he wasn’t acting rude toward her, nor was he the least bit interested in her on a romantic basis. There was nothing fizzing and foaming and ready to burst inside any chemistry tubes. That was for sure!

He asked Vicki if she had seen the morning paper.

“No, no he leido a nada. ¿Porque?”
Vicki had not seen it.

He handed Vicki the
El Pais
newspaper and pointed to a small article on the second page.

The article reported that Spaniards, and especially
Madrilenos
, sleep
less than any of their European neighbors.

Espresso-intoxicated Spaniards still swarmed the café at one o’clock in the morning. A nearby table of students sat flipping through textbooks and highlighted notes. A woman across the room stood in a corner wiping her mascara-drenched face with a napkin as her friend shouted words of comfort at her. Young kids crowded a small table, trading CDs. For Vicki, keeping cafés open in Madrid long after midnight was an insomniac’s Utopia. They were therapeutic refuges from the world, philosophical havens and retreats for modern-day mourning. She thrived in this city of night owls and looked forward to the next day’s siesta to refresh.

All at once, as if the thought of insomnia triggered her problem, she felt short of breath, as if there wasn’t enough oxygen for everyone in the cramped café to share.
I’m so sick of this
, she thought, and ordered
tequila
at the bar.

“Tequila should calm me down a bit,” she announced in English, before downing the shot.

“¿Que?”
asked Nacho.

“Oh, never mind. Tell me, what’s the name of this café? Oh, wait, did I say that in English? I think I did.” The shot of tequila was doing her no good.

“¿El nombre de este cafe?
” she asked again, this time in Spanish.

“Yo no lo se.”

Vicki asked the woman sitting on a stool next to her the same question.

“Yo no lo se,”
replied the woman.

“You don’t know the name of this café either?” Vicki felt frustrated. She liked this place, despite its close air, but she wanted to know its name. She then asked the bartender.

“Yo
no lo se,”
he replied confidently.

“¿Que? ¿Que?
How can you
not
know the name of the place where you’re working? That’s absolutely nuts!
Mas tequila, por favor.”

As she waited frantically for her next drink, Nacho told her there were more bars in Madrid than in any other city in the world. He said there were something like eight thousand bars.

“Oh, as if that’s any excuse for not knowing the name of the bar you’re in right now. Well, I don’t know if this is a bar or a café. It serves both liquor and coffee.”

She downed another shot of tequila, disgusted that everyone she asked, including the bartender, did not know the name of the bar, café, whatever it was that they were in. She waited for a thank you from her lungs, and within minutes they were so busy breathing normally that they didn’t have time to thank her, and she was pleased. She wanted another, but also knew she didn’t want to mask one problem with another. “Let’s go,
vamanos.”

On their way toward the door of the crowded café, she stopped to ask one more intelligent-looking man the name of the place.

“Yo no lo se,”
he said.

“You do not know it either?
Estupido,”
the Spanish-speaking tequila slurred from within her. She ran outside and looked at the sign on the door. It read,
Yo no lo se
. That’s right. The name of the place was, “I don’t know.”

The next morning Vicki stared at the cookies and milk with the face of a woman who had just downed five shots of tequila and five worms. Rosario asked her guest what Americans eat for breakfast. Vicki liked the morning snack but could still taste the tequila from last night, so she answered honestly,
“Huevos.”
In case the woman didn’t understand, Vicki pantomined breaking an egg against the counter and pouring it into a pan.

“¡Si, si, si! ¡Tortilla Española!
” responded Rosario, and she went to the refrigerator and took out three brown eggs. “The most widely eaten dish in my country,” Rosario said in her native language. “Watch carefully. Take this recipe home with you. I teach you how to make the
tortilla
, or Spanish omelet.”

As she chopped two medium-sized potatoes into fine matchsticks, Señora Rosario bragged that the French stole the idea of the tortilla from Spanish chefs at the court of Louis the something after he married the daughter of Philip the something in sixteen-something. Vicki understood most of what she said. Was the
señora
now speaking more slowly or was she herself understanding more than before? Then again, maybe Rosario didn’t speak at all. Maybe her gestures spoke for her.

Rosario chopped a small onion in a manner that declared, “A mother knows things,” and the way in which she tossed the onion’s skin in the bucket said, “You need more than
galletas
for breakfast today.”

Vicki hardly answered. It didn’t matter. Often, the women in the kitchen watched each other more than they listened. Rosario rinsed her hands in the sink, then waved them in the direction of a picture of her daughter, Isabella, then held her hands up toward God in a way that said,
“Aye, Dios Mio
. Help her, dear God.”

Vicki watched the woman’s face, as if watching her soap opera, and made sure to accentuate her hand gestures because that too helped Rosario to better understand. This time she casually waved her hand in the air to say, “Isabella will be fine, don’t worry about her.” She didn’t understand why Rosario worried about Isabella to begin with, only that she would be fine.

As she fried the potatoes and onion together slowly in oil, without browning, Rosario took the time to carefully and passionately watch Vicki’s facial and hand gestures, as if watching someone directing traffic. Both only listened to ten percent of each other’s words, but
las mujeres
communicated.

Rosario nodded,
“Si, si.”
She beat the eggs well, added them to the pan, and then let them fry for a moment.

She placed a plate on top of the omelet and turned the frying pan upside down, then slipped the
tortilla
back into the pan on the other side. She signaled to the American to stand up and take watch of the eggs and then left the kitchen. When she returned, she had a suitcase in hand.

“Rosario, ¿adonde vas?
” Vicki asked where she was going.

“Hoy, no, mañana, si.”
she said. “No place today, tomorrow, yes.”

She turned the stove off and, for the first time, Rosario sat down, setting her chores aside as she spoke and cried. She was homesick. She missed her extended family in Pamplona. But her husband had a good job at the post office downtown, and they would never move back there, not now that the kids were grown and living in Madrid. Her children liked this modern world, their home, and moving back to Pamplona would mean leaving them behind.

Rosario’s husband, Isabella, and her two married sons and their families made the trip to Pamplona only twice a year. Rosario and Isabella took a third trip each fall and would be leaving tomorrow for a short time. She bragged about Pamplona as if she herself had designed it. She described it as a prosperous city with high-rise apartment blocks, nice lawns, and factories, if Vicki understood correctly. She said Pamplona was so old that, from the tenth through the sixteenth centuries, it was the capital of the kingdom of Navarre. After the Civil War, she said her people had changed it into a flourishing city. She boasted that her people were hardworking, religious, and conservative.

As she wiped her eyes with her dishcloth, she said she loved that city, but her husband was from Madrid. She said she often regretted having fallen in love with a man from another city because it forced her to choose between her man and her family, and her man would never leave Madrid. She chose Lorenzo, and ever since they had lived together happily in Madrid.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

ROSARIO WAS QUEEN OF
the house and wore the crown of the kitchen. She peeled, sliced, and minced garlic like the CEO of a large corporation cutting out the waste and getting to the core of business. She monitored the amount of food in the pantry, inspecting the onions, red and green peppers, and making sure nothing went moldy, just as the head of a company watches for excess spending and costly items not being used. She walked around her kitchen with a confidence that declared this woman knew every nook and cranny, and every speck of dirt in need of cleaning. She knew when the dish towel needed a washing and when the window needed opening. She gave her kitchen the stream of fresh air it needed, exactly when it needed it. She knew darn well how to peel an onion without tears, but at times, perhaps like a CEO too passionately and emotionally connected to the corporation, she let it burn her eyes and she cried. The voluntary downsizing hurt worst, the day when both her sons left the nest. And sometimes she stayed awake at night, calculating how much a new ironing board might cost or what ingredients she needed to make the world’s best paella feast for her family. At other times she slept deeply, dreaming of a new apron.

Each morning she awoke refreshed and made her commute to work down the long hallway and into the kitchen, often stopping to pick up her daughter’s red robe from the floor, then going forward when she saw her husband’s green sweater just a few steps ahead.