Sanibel Scribbles (39 page)

She closed her eyes and felt a cool, autumn Madrid breeze tickle the hair on her arms. She felt alive and in love. Yes, in love with life. She promised herself that when she returned to the United States, she would carry a blanket in her car at all times, and stop and sit in parks whenever time allowed.

Oops! Time would
never
allow such a thing, so she would have to
make
time instead. Sitting in a park would be a priority from now on, and she would cook more than microwave entrees. She would use fresh basil and olive oil and no more garlic powder. She would take time to use the real thing, to peel, then mince or chop or thinly slice its cloves, depending on the degree of flavor she would want. And she would walk into a church and pray, or take a long walk and pray. She would do all of these things and more. Now she knew why people said, “I’m going to
take
time and go on a vacation.” They never said, “Time is
giving
me a vacation.” So she would do these things, not because time had become more generous, but because she would become a bit more selfish and take a larger piece of time. No one is
given
time. It’s up to people to find it, grab it, and take advantage of it in a wonderfully outlandish and selfish way.

Her daydreaming relaxed her like a catnap as her eyes settled on the white pillar of the museum, and she remembered that life was but a passing mist and nothing lasts forever. Sadness, anger, resentment, and worry pass like the clouds—some are just slower-moving storms.

“I’ve got no money,” she said to a homeless man who sat down next to her.

“I have no intention of begging for
dinero
from you,
Americana,”
he replied
in Spanish. “Although I feel I am entitled to it.”

“Oh? And why do you feel you are entitled to money?” she asked.

“I have a noble title in life,” he boastfully claimed in a blend of Portuguese and Spanish. “My nobility dates back to the Middle Ages, to the time the Christians started reclaiming land from the Arab invaders.”

“Then how can someone so noble end up homeless?” she wanted to know.

“Aye
, everyone grabbed on to some noble title back then,” he admitted with a grunt.

“You believe that every person in Spain has some nobility?”

“Si, si.”
He nodded, then inched his way closer to her on the bench.

“It’s hard to compete when the whole country is noble. This is why I am left homeless,” he said. “I am homeless because I do not believe someone of noble title should work.”

Having never met a more arrogant but charming bum, she got up and walked inside the museum for her fifth time that semester. Each time left her more entranced, more invigorated with confidence, determination and inspiration to accomplish something significant in life, but at this stage, she didn’t know what. She refused to worry about her future now. She was in the moment, and the moment meant Spain. When it came time to do something significant in life, she would know. Ideas would come to her, doors would open, and people with a purpose would pop into her life. She would be ready, but for now, for today, she could only think about the moment, and the moment wasn’t picking apples from an orchard in Michigan or eating a piece of Red Velvet Cake at the Bubble Room on Captiva Island, although she wouldn’t mind a quick moment of that kind. Her moment was Spain—where her greatest present accomplishment might be doing laundry.

After spending hours in the museum, she walked the several miles back to her early-evening economics class. By then she had a decision to make. Either she could return to the apartment, or she could walk back to Calle Preciados and drop by the corner of El Corte Inglés at around six-thirty and see if a black Mercedes had showed up. After all, today was October fourth.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

SHE CASUALLY STOOD OUTSIDE
the doors of the crowded department store, which sold Levis for about ninety-three dollars a pair. Feeling indecisive, like a woman impulsively ready to spend money but also fearful of wasting that money, she started to walk away, then turned back once more, as if giving the black Mercedes one last chance. She remembered its driver saying that if the corner looked busy, he wouldn’t park the car but would instead pull up along the curb so she could hop in. Did she really want to step into the car of an unknown foreign man? What would it cost her? Was there a return policy? Would he return her to the curb if things didn’t work out?

Suddenly, she didn’t want to invest anything of herself with this stranger, and she started to walk away. She felt proud and without regret, a woman choosing to leave the expensive clothes behind. Then she noticed the old woman in the same gray rags she had seen earlier., She was still sitting on the same piece of sidewalk square. Vicki changed her mind.

“Have you seen a man in a black Mercedes?” she asked in Spanish.

“No,” replied the woman.

She wanted to better describe Rafael but didn’t know the Spanish word for dimples, so, instead, she sat down next to the woman to wait, listening to the sound of coins dropping into the bucket every couple of seconds. Some coins landed with a splash. Others sounded like a single droplet of light rain. The bucket never went dry. The people of Spain wouldn’t allow
it to, and the old woman, probably noble, surely seemed to be surviving off a country that cared.

Vicki looked up as if giving Rafael one last chance. “He is just a man, a stranger,” Vicki told the woman.

“Why would I get in a car and drive away with a man who doesn’t speak English?” she asked, then, feeling horribly foolish for making plans with him in the first place, she quickly squeezed the cold hand next to her, stood up, and started crossing the street in the direction of the apartment. Why, of course he had forgotten about her, their encounter, their plans to meet on a crowded corner of all places! And she too would make it a forgotten moment, and him, a forgotten stranger.

As she reached the other side of the street, she felt someone yanking her sweater from behind. Her heart made a record-breaking leap over the high jump as she whirled around, ready to protect herself with a fist, but she couldn’t hit the little old woman under the gray shawl, frantically flinging her cane in the air and pointing it toward the department store.

“El hombre, el hombre,”
she cried.

“Gracias,”
said Vicki.

“Vive!
” shouted the woman.

A black Mercedes had parked along the curb, and Rafael stood with a bouquet of purple, yellow, and red tulips on the corner. He held the flowers as if he understood where the American woman came from, as if he knew that tulips made her want to dance and scrub streets with buckets of cold water and old-fashioned brooms, and that tulips marked every corner of her hometown, and that now they might make her homesick. He formally held the flowers, yet casually looked around as if his fifty-five minutes of tardiness meant nothing at all.

The two women re-crossed the street together. The older took her seat on the sidewalk corner. The younger accepted the bouquet of tulips and got in the car.

They drove ten minutes to what Rafael kept calling
el museo de cera
. Vicki had no idea what the words meant nor where they were going. She didn’t care as she softly caressed each of the silky petals.

“Me gustan,”
she told him she liked the flowers. “How did you know
that tulips are my favorite flower?” she asked in Spanish.

“Son preciosas como ti.”
He told her they were as precious as she was. Then, he asked slowly in Spanish. “Of all the flowers in
el mundo
, why are they your favorite?”

She carefully laid out the correct Spanish words in her mind before speaking. “I’m from Holland, Michigan. It’s a
ciudad en los Estados Unidos
that holds an entire festival for tulips.”

“A festival of tulips? I’ve never heard of such a thing,” said the Span ish stranger next to her.

She paused a moment to translate his words, then responded slowly. “People have been celebrating the flowers for hundreds of years, since 1632, when the interest in tulip growing exploded over in Holland, the country,” she added, and tried hard to remember the words of her professor when he had lectured about the flowers.

“Tulip growing developed into a craze, and there was wild activity in tulip stock. People asked outrageous prices for a single bulb.” She noticed him staring more at her than at the road he was driving down, so she stopped talking.

He waved for her to continue.
“Mas, mas. Quiero escuchar mas.”
He said he wanted to hear more.

She continued in fluent yet slow Spanish. “The tulip situation got out of control, and finally, after many Dutch people went bankrupt, the government stepped in to regulate the tulip trade.”

He smiled and said in his native language, “And
Victoria
, after all of that, the tulips survived and still stand proud every spring.”

“Si, Si,”
she answered.

Following their drive, Rafael parked and they walked into a building where they were greeted by the king and queen of Spain. Vicki peeked into an anteroom and noticed Michael Jackson standing as he had on the cover of his
Thriller
album, then John Wayne. A distance away she noticed Mother Theresa. Had Vicki died and gone to Heaven? Then she glanced much further and saw Hitler! No, Hell. It struck her like a matador strikes a bull.
El museo de cera
meant wax museum.

They began their tour in the political room, walking past Hitler and
other political figures, then they stopped in front of Franco.

“I was talking to a
señora,”
said Vicki. “And she was telling me she missed Franco as ruler, that his collapse triggered a sort of social and sexual revolution, a downfall of morals.”

“Si, si,”
answered Rafael. “Divorce, birth control, abortion, homosexuality, and adultery were all illegal under Franco.”

“Digame,”
she said, wanting to know his views of this stern ruler.
“Rafael, ¿que piensas de Franco
?”

He spoke clearly and slowly, and it only took her mind a second to translate his Spanish words into her English words. In fact, she heard his Spanish words as English in her mind. He was better than any history book she had ever read and more interesting than any class she had ever taken.

“When Franco died, our country was reborn,” he said, staring Franco in the eyes. “With his collapse, Spain jumped from dictatorship to democracy overnight,
Victoria.”
As he spoke, he looked back and forth between Franco and his American guest. “It marked the last Fascist regime in Europe.”

“Mas, mas. Quiero eschuchar,”
she said. “I told you about tulips. Now you tell me about Franco.”

“Forty
anos
of dictatorship and order at the expense of freedom,” he said, shaking his head as if scolding the wax figure in front of him. “My father, my cousins, anyone who protested against the restrictions on speech and press and assembly were disciplined.”

“Your people must have been furious,” she commented.

“Si,
la gente de mi pais
were afraid. You would be too,
Victoria
. But Franco had power, too much power. He was empowered by the army, church, and the Falange Party.”

She knew now that Rafael and Rosario had different perspectives. Rosario missed the stern order Franco insisted upon for Spain. Rafael despised the man.

“¿Su vida esta muy diferente sin Franco, no?”
She wanted to know if and how life changed when Franco no longer had power.

“Ahhh, si, si,”
he replied. “Franco limited the cultural and intellectual
aspirations of my people. With Franco gone, the fashion industry flourished. Women used to wear mostly black. Without Franco, they immediately started wearing some of the most daring colors.” He laughed. “What a statement—so modern—the models made as they walked down the European runways in wild colors for the first time.
Las mujeres
mostly dress daring in the city. Countrywomen are still conservative.”

“¿Por que?”
She wanted to know why they dressed in black in the country.

“La
muerte,”
he said. “Death is all over,
Victoria
. In the country, they mourn for several years after the death of family. Because they have such large
familias
, they’re always mourning someone and always wearing black.”

Might wearing black actually help someone overcome grief? Maybe she should have worn her black dress instead of that pastel bikini right after Rebecca died. Then again, neither Rebecca nor Grandma would have wanted her to go around wearing black for months. Rebecca once said that black darkened her eyes, and Grandma, well, she only wore purple.

“Estamos de moda, Victoria,”
Rafael declared proudly, as he turned and walked toward the next room.