Authors: Christine Lemmon
They took the metro, then the
autobus
to the
pueblo
. With three hours until the concert, they drank wine and ate bits of skewered meats, omelets, olives, and ham in a nearby, noisy bar. Waiters were clinking glasses. Everyone was heavily engaged in laughing and shouting. The television in the corner served no purpose, but it stayed on, adding to the noise.
“What’s up with your girl?” Nacho asked his friend, sitting next to him.
“She told me ‘no,’“s shouted Michaelangelo to the group. “I asked her to marry me, and she declined again.”
“You two have more love than a flock of lovebirds. Did she tell you why she refuses to marry you?” asked Javier in Spanish.
“I didn’t say she ‘refused’ to marry me. I said she said ‘no.’ There is a difference.”
“Did she say why she said ‘no’ to marrying you?” asked Nacho.
“Si, si
, she told me why.” He wiped a tear from his face, and then bit the head off a sardine. “Her career. I get in the way of her career.”
“I don’t get it,” said Jesus. “Men work, and they get married. They’ve done this for centuries. Now women want to work. Why don’t they want to get married and work? They can have both.”
“It’s not marriage that gets in the way,” added Javier. He had brown, curly hair, huge brown eyes and wore a yellow-flowered tie under his navy suit. “It’s the babies.”
“Why can’t she marry you and wait a few years to have babies? Women are having them now in their forties,” said Vicki.
“How could she wait that long? I would get her pregnant before then.”
“What about birth control?” asked Vicki.
“Speak up,” whispered Michaelangelo in her ear.
“Si, si
. We can’t hear you,” shouted Javier.
“I said, what about birth control?” she yelled across the table.
“She doesn’t believe it’s right. She says if God wants her to have a baby, she will get pregnant. If He doesn’t, she won’t. The only way she thinks she can control it is not to marry me yet.”
“So she still wants to marry you,” said Nacho.
“Si, si
, of course,” he added. “Once she gets her job and works it for awhile.”
“How long?” asked Vicki, pushing the platter of sardines away from her and down the table toward Nacho.
“I don’t know. I don’t think she knows. A year, five years.”
“How long does it take a woman to tire of what she’s doing? How long until a woman gets tired of the world out there and feels like having a husband, and staying home to take care of a baby?” asked Michaelangelo.
“Well, don’t look at me,” said Vicki. “I don’t have the answers. I am, however, wondering about something. Who is this love of Nacho’s life
that I’ve heard much about but never met?”
For a moment, no one said anything.
Nacho rolled his eyes at her. “I told you, Vicki,” he said. “I love her dearly. We were becoming too emotionally connected and needed time apart. There’s nothing more to it.”
“That’s right,” added Jesus. “Nacho was no longer spending time with all of us. We’re glad to have him back for now.”
“For now,
si, si,”
said Nacho. “I am back for now, but a part of me is missing. It’s only a matter of time before I return to her. Enough of this talk.”
“So what can I give her to make marrying me, having a baby, and staying home sound good to her?” asked Michaelangelo.
“Can you give her a prestigious title, a salary higher than your own, and the respect that comes from operating a priceless corporation?” asked Jesus. “And a chef and a maid to go with it all?”
“She doesn’t want you giving her anything,” declared Nacho. “She wants to go out there and get it for herself.”
“Es la verdad,”
said Vicki. “There are things a woman wants in life. Things she wants from life and from herself, and they are things she must go after herself.”
“Then where does a man fit into it all?” asked Michaelangelo. “And what about babies?”
“A woman is a remarkable organizer,” said Vicki. “She’s just got a lot to organize right now, and all at once.”
“So what are you going to do now?” asked Nacho.
“I’m going to ask her to marry me tomorrow,” answered Michaelangelo.
“Mañana
. But it’s time. We must warm up.”
Outside, the stage stood decorated in festive, brightly colored paper ornaments. Sausage and tortilla
bocadillas
were being prepared on an open grill and three hundred-year-old-looking women were dancing hand in hand next to a group of young, rowdy teens. Two little boys were throwing a dried chicken foot at a screaming girl, who picked it up and whipped it back. The men in the navy embroidered suits took their places on the stage, and soon everyone was singing, dancing, and clapping to their
music.
They pulled several people from the audience up on stage, and an old woman caught in the crowd grabbed onto Vicki’s sleeve, pulling her along. They tried publicly teaching her how to flamenco dance to their modern Spanish rock, but she had never moved her body in these contortions before and felt her face turning red hot.
“The apple concept,” she heard from a male voice. “It’s the apple concept.”
She glanced down and a redhead standing on the ground, directly below where she was on the stage, caught her attention immediately. He stood out like a carrot in a pitcher of sangria. “Are you American?” he asked as she managed to bend down long enough.
“Yes, from Florida. Well, Michigan,” she shouted.
“Me, Connecticut. Listen, flamenco is as simple as reaching up to pick an apple, then twisting and bringing it down toward your mouth, taking a bite, then another twist, and tossing it to the ground. I’ve been pulled up on stage many times, and it took me much embarrassment to learn.”
“Wait, pick apple, bite apple, toss apple to ground?” she repeated.
The century-old grandmother yanked her upward, and the crowd cheered as Vicki made sense of the apple concept.
Pick, twist, bite, twist, and toss
. It was that simple. Together, everyone picked, twisted, bit, twisted and tossed over and over again until there couldn’t possibly be any apples left. And if there were, she surely couldn’t bite another. By the time she made her way off the stage, she looked around for the American. She felt a patriotic unity with him and wanted to thank him for helping her, but she couldn’t find him.
As if the hours of pigging out and dancing weren’t enough, after the concert at around one o’clock in the morning, they caught a taxi to Palacio de Gaviria, an aristocratic, nineteenth-century palace converted into a
discoteca
, where they met up with more friends. As they stood in a long line for one club, Vicki noticed her Spanish sister Isabella and a man getting into a taxi.
“Wait, Isabella, Isabella,” she called out.
Vicki was positive she saw Isabella turn and look at her, and for a moment,
the women stared eye to eye, then Isabella hopped in the taxi and drove away.
“Do you and your friends ever tire?” she shouted to Nacho in the middle of the dance floor at three o’clock in the morning. He pulled her aside and asked if she felt tired.
“¿Estas cansadas, Victoria
?”
“No, estoy bien. Me gusta la noche.”
They wandered through a sequence of extravagant Baroque salons, part of the dance club. “La
madrugada,”
he shouted.
“La
what?” she asked.
“La madrugada
. It’s what Spaniards call the hours from midnight to morning.”
“Oh.”
“Do you like it?” he asked in Spanish.
Of course she did. Once a woman lying in bed staring up at a ceiling, and now a woman picking apples on stage and dancing all night.
What was there not to like?
“Often, when
la madrugada
passes unnoticed into
la mañana,”
he added, “there’s no point going to bed.”
When they walked out the door of the
discoteca
, the city street was alive with music and laughter, and there was hardly an empty taxi to be caught anywhere. At four o’clock in the morning there were traffic jams, so they walked to the Chocolateria de San Gines and ate strips of fried dough called
churros
dipped in melted chocolate. When they left the
chocolateria
, the city street was quiet again, and each caught their own taxi on their first attempts and rode away: one toward the east and the rising sun, one toward the west where it had set the night before, one toward the north, and one toward the south.
Isabella pulled up to the apartment in a taxi at the same moment as Vicki. Her eyes were red, and Vicki asked if she was okay, but Isabella signaled for silence. The women said nothing as they quietly tiptoed up the wooden stairs to Isabella’s parents’ apartment. The exciting night had ended, and they were tired.
Siesta time came every day at the same time, as predictable as Florida’s
daily summer rain. No one dared to control it, or alter the details of this national tradition, but instead respected it and closed down shop and halted business until it ended each day. Vicki respected the siesta in Spain and always dozed off as peacefully and simply as a person put to sleep by falling rain.
She needed this hour of sleep. It became the momentum necessary to stay awake through the nights in Madrid, a city that possessed two personalities, and she didn’t know which she liked better: Madrid by day or Madrid by night, the siestas or the fiestas. A night out with the Spaniards felt like getting sucked up in a tornado and blown through the city streets in a sensational pattern. Madrid’s younger generation, which had enjoyed a new period of personal and artistic liberty after the death of Franco, termed it
la movida
—the late-night scene. They took their nights of eating, drinking, talking until sunrise, dancing, and riding the streets in taxis seriously, probably more so than their next day at work. But they never got drunk or did anything illegal or stupid. They lived the nights like storm chasers, lustfully and passionately, making the most of such fast-passing moments.
As sure as a tornado warning, she knew
la movida
would suck her up again, and it did. Nacho picked her up at seven o’clock, and they spent time sipping espresso and talking at a small table outside in La Puerta del Sol, an oval plaza surrounded on all sides by cream-colored eighteenth-century buildings and the most popular meeting spot, basically, of the café society of Madrid. It was noisy and crowded, but she liked it. Ben would like it too. Maybe someday they might find themselves standing under the same clouds and in the same rain again. She missed him.
Later, they walked the
tapa
circuit, all the way from La Puerta del Sol to the Prado Museum, and down the streets Carrera de San Jeronimo and Atocha, stopping along the way and chomping on bloodred
chorizos
, mushrooms in oil, potatoes with garlic mayonnaise and manchego cheese.
Afterward, they drove to Old Madrid and walked along the narrowed cobble streets lined with wrought-iron balconies until they came to a cave-like neon-lit bar. Inside the bar, the whites of everyone’s eyes, as well as the drinks, glowed a shamrock green.
Nacho started a game of pool with a stranger, and Vicki leaned against the brick wall, studying his face and his constantly twitching black eyebrows.
As she watched him hit three solid balls into some holes, she wasn’t ill or tipsy, but felt dizzy and confused to the point of frustration thinking about how Howard must have known Nacho’s family. Had Nacho lied to her? There was no reason for him not to remember an American friend of the family. As much as she tried telling herself it didn’t matter anymore, it drove her crazy, and her frustration clashed with the black-and-white checkered floor beneath her pointy, black, buckled Spanish shoes. The beat of the music made her mind jump back and forth, rehashing every word Howard had said to her, trying to pin down some sort of clue.
Nacho studied the table seriously, but glanced at Vicki each time before shooting, raising an eyebrow without a smile. She started fidgeting with a gaudy silver ring she had bought in Toledo when suddenly it hit her, the way the blue ball had just hit the red ball. The piano! Howard had said she must ask Nacho to play the piano for him! It was around three o’clock in the morning when she yelled out,
“El piano,”
and Nacho hit the red ball so hard it flew across the room and cracked down onto the floor.
No one picked it up. Instead, he signaled her to follow, and they headed for the door. Outside she asked Nacho if he was any good at the piano. His demeanor signaled the mysterious rush of a category three hurricane making a dangerous turn at the last moment. “Yes, I am good,” he answered brusquely. “Why does it matter you?”
“Wait a minute, Nacho! Did you just say that in English? No? Yes, I think you did!”
“Si, si
. I speak very little
inglés.”
“Little? No. I don’t think so. You speak fluent English, don’t you? I mean, that sounded pretty good to me.”
“No, please, don’t compliment.”
“Nacho! How
could
you not tell me something so important? You said you don’t speak any English. Why would you lie to me about that?”
“In my country, we speak my language. If you don’t learn the language, you don’t learn the people,” he shouted behind him to Vicki, who was almost
running down the cobblestone street to catch up.
“I’ve hardly said a word in English to anyone since I’ve been in Spain,” she said in English. “I’m learning your language, and I’m learning about nights in Madrid. I’m getting to know the people, Nacho. But I don’t know you. You are a stranger to me.” There was silence, and they kept walking. “Did you understand what I just said?” she asked.
“No.” He stopped and turned around.
“Si, si
, I understand you very good,” he said with a smile.
“Nacho,” she called out to him, nearly out of breath. “Just think of all the good conversations we could have had by now if you had only told me sooner you speak English.”