Sanibel Scribbles (48 page)

“You cannot have me, Rafael. You cannot love me.”

“¿Por que? ¿Por que?”

“You are married. You are not mine to take. I’m certainly not going to influence something so significant. I don’t want to live with that burden.”

“But I do not love her,” he replied.

“Then be a man and do something about it.”

“I will. I want to, but not now. Now I am with you.”

“Well, don’t think you can go on living in a miserable marriage while wining and dining me on the side. Forget it.” She had said it all in Spanish, and gave credit to the Spanish soap opera she had watched so many times with Rosario.

“Ahora, ahora, te quiero.”
He still wanted her.

She allowed him to kiss the back of her neck, and it sent chills down her spine, the kind that, in a romance novel, would sweep a woman off her feet and right into mad passionate love for endless hours, only to be left both spent and content. Grandma would be skipping ahead a few pages just to get to the steamy part of this letter. But this wasn’t a romance novel. This was life, her life. She couldn’t help it that she viewed marriage as sacred, as Rafael began to slowly unzip her dress, kissing further down her back. He then pulled it down off her waist. Her mind raced. This was her life, no one else’s. Why would she let a few romantic moments in Spain screw up her entire life to come? Then again, it might add incredibly dramatic colors to her canvas, but what would it do to someone else’s canvas?

She stepped back several feet. “No, Rafael. No,” she said as she reached for her jeans on the ground. “Please wait for me in the car. I want to leave now.”
On the corner of El Corte Inglés, he said there was nothing sacred about his marriage arrangement and, had he known back then that his wife would take a malicious turn in life, if he had seen through her insincerity, he never would have married her. He had tried every attempt imaginable at making the marriage work. He would never break a commitment without first trying everything to save it.

“No,
Rafael de España
, no,” she told him, and got out of his car.

She didn’t know what else to say and didn’t want him to see her cry, so she put her sunglasses on, although the sun had gone down. She knew he wasn’t about to smile, and she was glad because she couldn’t stand to see those dimples one more time.

She also couldn’t stand to see him without his smile, so she turned her back to him, kissed her two fingers, extended her arm back and started to wave, without turning to peek. She could see him in the reflection of the department store window, just as she had the first time they met. He didn’t know she could see him as he wiped his eyes on his sleeve and made the sign of the cross. She started to walk away, but kept waving. She walked with a purpose. What purpose? She didn’t know, just the sort of purpose that says this good-bye is forever. She heard his car drive away, and as badly as she wanted to turn to look one last time, she didn’t. The backward good-bye wave would have to do, and she felt like a hummingbird that flies backward to move away from flowers whose nectar they’ve been sipping. Just like these small birds, her legs and feet felt too weak to walk, but she had to. She couldn’t fly.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

MAÑANA CAME ALL TOO
soon. Sure, there’d be another tomorrow, but it would be a tomorrow in the United States, not Spain. Vicki wanted to stay anchored there a little longer, in the country that lusted for life and stayed up all night. She wasn’t ready to pull up anchor, yet her life and school were calling her back.

Maybe someday she would return to Spain to operate a bed-and-breakfast in the mountains, live on a yacht in Barcelona, or rent a tiny studio apartment near her Spanish family and turn her letters to Grandma into a novel of some sort.

On her hands and knees and in a temper, Rosario scrubbed the wooden floors for hours, moving Vicki’s heavy suitcases over so she could clean the floor under them. It took no words to understand her loss. She had allowed a stranger into her home, her kitchen, the most private and intimate aspect of her life, the part that now smelled of paprika and garlic-scented
chorizo
, slowly simmering on the stove, and now that stranger was leaving.

At quarter to nine, she kneeled down next to her
señora
to rest before her flight, and placed her hand on the woman’s hands, blistered from cleaning. Rosario stopped, and for a moment the two sat in silence on the floor, listening to traffic and voices from the street below. They didn’t need or attempt to talk. The woman handed Vicki a sheet of stationery. There was a quote scribbled in English, and Vicki knew Rosario had gone
to great lengths to get this translated. It read:

What do you have to fear? Nothing. Whom do you have to fear? No one. Because whoever has joined forces with God obtains three great privileges: omnipotence without power, intoxication without wine, and life without death
.
—St. Francis of Assisi

Isabella had left the apartment earlier in the evening because she had weekend social plans brewing in the streets below, and Vicki knew they were probably with Ron. Lorenzo went to mass but hugged Vicki tightly before he left.

Together the women dragged the luggage down the flights of stairs to the street below, and Rosario flagged down a taxi. She kissed Vicki on both cheeks, closed her eyes, and made the sign of the cross, and then blew a kiss as her American daughter climbed into the taxi and drove away.

The taxi headed down the narrow street, and Vicki didn’t trust herself to turn around to see the
señora
standing alone on the curb with her dirty apron and strands of hair falling from her bun for fear she would burst into tears. She did, however, catch a glimpse of Lorenzo, standing in a bakery window eating a huge cream puff. She laughed at the man who claimed to be at mass.

Next, the taxi stopped in traffic at the El Corte Inglés corner. Cars were honking, and one man got out of his car to yell at someone in another car. She ignored the scene and instead watched a homeless woman, sitting on the pavement outside the department store. People were dropping coins into her bucket, but the old woman never smiled. Then a man dressed in black pants and a black turtleneck walked over to the woman and handed her what looked like a cup of something warm to drink, still steaming. He sat down next to her and opened the woman’s hands, placing the mug between her palms, and held them for a moment.

Vicki tried unrolling the window of the cab, but it must have been on safety lock. She tried opening the door, but the cab started to move. She
pounded on the windows. One more smile, one more wave. She had to tell them both how much she loved them. She wanted now to tell Rafael how she appreciated him, and that of all the Spaniards she had grown to know, she loved him the most. She wanted to thank this man for teaching her about the Spaniards from the inside out. She wanted to remove the excess sweaters that had crowded her suitcases and wrap them around Triste. She loved this country, and she loved its people. She loved Rafael. If she could only stay a little longer.

“Wait. Let me out.
Stop!
” She cried either out loud or to herself, she didn’t know which.

The taxi driver stared in his rearview mirror and kept driving. She felt like an animal in a cage being taken away, somewhere. She was leaving the country she now loved, the country that taught her to live life and not fear death at a time in her life when she needed that particular lesson.

As she watched out the back window of the cab, the gray bundle and the black velvet next to it grew smaller and smaller, as did the Spanish city, located at the foot of the Guadarrama Mountains. She didn’t want to leave and found herself already mourning this country, bordered by the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. She didn’t know which she loved more: the people or the place. The tears in her eyes clouded her vision, turning the scene behind her into a Salvador Dali surrealist painting.

At the airport, she had a good hour before her flight. Vicki felt an adult butterfly emerging in her stomach, pumping body fluid through its soft veins and expanding its wings.

Dear Grandma
,

TIME, WEATHER AND DEATH—these three words transcend any culture and language. These three things are completely out of our control, yet everything is planned around them. Even if a fiesta is planned for mañana, TIME moves on at its own pace, turning that fiesta into nothing more than a memory. WEATHER behaves rudely
,
when it likes, pouring rain on the guests of the fiesta. DEATH, should it be told, shows up just before the fiesta. And for that person, who may have been living in a countdown of anticipation, the fiesta never comes. This is why people fear death. They cannot control it
.

P.S. Please give Pooch a hug for me, Gram. I’m assuming dogs make it to Heaven? They must!

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

HER BREATHING AND CHEST
pains still teased her every so often, even though she anchored herself securely in a familiar place—an old rental home with mutual friends in Saugatuck, not far from campus. It was the house she and Rebecca had picked out together and planned on sharing after they returned from Spain.

Vicki needed to study and to attend a class, but none of that mattered at the moment.
Mañana
, she told herself. She could always go to class and study tomorrow.

Today, she decided to place the important things at the top of her list. And this meant she had choices, several stages, just as a woman at the beach could choose to take her shoes off and safely walk along the shore with nothing more than her toes getting wet. She could further choose whether or not to take her clothes off and tread the chilly water waist-high. After that, she might shuffle her feet fearfully, paranoid of jellyfish or stingrays. Or, she could choose to dive under, getting her hair wet, forgetting about her makeup. Yes, a woman could choose to go only as far as the white, shallow waves washing gently against her, or she could ride the waves and risk being dashed on the mammoth spikes barricading the great ocean beyond.

Aware now of her choices, the degrees to which she could participate in daily life, Vicki refused to bury herself in the sand of all her daily lists of things to do. Granted, she would not ignore responsibility or productivity,
but she would transform a tedious list of errands into a life-changing map simply by adding one magnificent thing a day, something that might bring significance to her day. She promised herself she would start the New Year facing the wind like a windmill, with sturdy arms embracing the winds and generating beautiful and unlimited energy. And as the wind died down she would rest, knowing with fresh faith that it would soon start up again.

Spain, Tarpon Key, and the Till Midnight café with Rebecca were moments she could never forget. They had introduced her to vessels, magnificent vessels, the likes of which she might never cross paths with again. In fact, her life might never be that exciting again, but it didn’t matter. She no longer feared death. Her anxiety attacks returned every so often, but not concerning death. She knew at once that they had turned into a bad habit, started by her mind. Anything could trigger them. She only needed to break the mental habit now, and she would. She would conquer it at her own pace, not on a deadline.

She remembered what Nacho once said, “Go to the symphony.” Well, she couldn’t. She had no cash, nor a sufficient block of time, nor information about any symphony. So she bought Ludwig Van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Opus 125, and played the cassette in her car as she drove to Holland and around campus. Her mind traveled farther than campus, farther than Tarpon Key, farther than Spain. How could it not? She was appreciating one of the highest artistic achievements of the human mind. As she listened to the sweeping majesty of Beethoven’s greatest work, the campus changed before her eyes. It became more cultural, more beautiful. Just because she didn’t have a lot of money or time or resources, didn’t mean she couldn’t add a few sparks to her now-ordinary life. Even in winter, she could find creative ways to feed on the nectar of flowers.