Guess Who´s Coming to Dinner

And if I may use another cliché, "Watch what you ask for. You might just get it."

According to the lovely linen letter that arrived today, Don Miguel Angel Moratinos, the Secretary of State for Spain, accepts my kind invitation to visit his namesake town. He can´t come for the fiesta in August, but he asks us to phone his office to set up a mutually agreeable date for him to come over for a roast lamb and a nice sit-down chat with the folks from hereabouts.

To which I reply, (with a flash back to my Pittsburgh roots):

Holy Frickin´ Shit. He said YES.

I don´t have china, I don´t even have a full set of plates or silverware. I don´t have a dining table, or chairs, or a kitchen. My dogs are rude. I don´t know how to roast a lamb the way they do here. I have never played hostess before to an international diplomat. (When I meet high-ranking politicians I instinctively begin lobbing impertinent questions at him/her.)

And I don´t have a thing to wear. (I have a nice apron, though.)

Still, I am most pleased. I´ll talk to Estebanito, the alcalde, about dates, and locations, and about keeping this very, very small, and as informal as possible. (He´s already said he wants to show off his family´s big bodega...and we already know that lambs roast wonderfully well in there!)

I have yet another good reason to pound those Spanish verbs, and get this house into some kind of shape! I will consult with everyone I know who´s shmoozed with these types before. He shouldn´t be too hard to handle, seeing as he IS a diplomat. I wonder if they´ll let us have some random pilgs in for the feast, too?

The Foreign Minister is coming over. Holy moley. I may speak Spanish like a dim child, but I must be able to WRITE it convincingly enough!

Sense and No Nonsense

The last few days have been a delight, to both the sensible and no-nonsense sides of me.

The sensible, sensitive, sensuous stuff: bright blue skies, soft breezes, temperatures way up into Springtime levels. Veg grilled over a wood fire, eaten out on the patio; fresh cheese, a really good new pasta recipe, perfect for feeding to pilgrims. Chickens wandering through the yard and house, singing their odd songs, getting underfoot, just generally wanting to be in on the action.

And the walk... on Sunday we discovered a delightful new place for long or short distance hikes... the Canal de Castilla. It´s a couple of hundred kilometers of 18th-century canal that snakes down from the Palentine mountains near Aguilar de Campoo (yep, that´s the place´s name) across the Camino at Fromista, and on down to Valladolid and Medina de Rioseco. It spans the treeless Tierra de Campos region with a ribbon of greenery, and the trails are pounded down on both sides by horses, sheep, and people. We drove south to hook up to it, to Becerril de Campos. We walked about 5 km. to Villaumbrales, where the main canal forks into two smaller ones. We and the dogs had a beautiful walk, and checked out two beautiful, neat, ancient towns, one at either end of the hike. We live in such a cool place, even if it really IS fly-over country!

My practical side was well sated on Saturday, when we worked/toiled/labored for about six hours straight, moving piles of scrap and crap from where they were to somewhere else. It was heavy, dirty work, but the place looks marginally better for our efforts, and now we know where to find some things that were scattered akimbo before.

I think, now that the house is coming along so well, our nesting instinct is kicking in! (Paddy is actually taking an active interest in choosing tile for the bathrooms and kitchen, and all the floors downstairs. It is amazing! And lovely too, because choosing so many things at once, with such a long time to regret it if you make the wrong choice, is too much for one person to have to do, methinks. Even if it IS girly girl stuff.) In any case, my Protestant Work Ethic got a nice fill-up. If I die today I will go straight to Calvinist heaven, where the sun always shines and the righteous work never ends.

And we are off again today to Palencia, to choose the tiles for all the floors downstairs. Seeing as we´ll be in the Big City, we will stop at the hipermarket where we can find Rooibus tea and taco shells! And if there´s time, we´ll stop again in Becerril and see their museum of religious art. (It is Monday, The Day Without Museums. But you just never know.)

Life is good, out on the perimeter. Especially when Springtime happens in January.

Fran the Puzzler

The latest challenge here (aside from intestinal flu) is Fran.

Here is an exerpt from an email I got recently from Mirjam, our very good Swiss pilgrim who was here in November. She describes what happened to an American pilgrim she met on the trail:

"After Teradillos de los Templarios and before Moratinos, A man in his 40/50s, who was not dressed as someone from the village, kept walking with her and saying stuff like: You're all alone. No one will hear you. He then showed her a knife that he held in the hand. The pilgrim (suffering from shin splints, so even more scared as she couldn't run) remained calm..."

That man was Fran, without a doubt.

Fran lives here in Moratinos. He was born and raised here, he´s Julia and Pin´s brother and Paquito´s brother in law. Everyone knows Fran, and everyone knows he lives in his own world. "He is harmless," Julia says. "He´s like a little child." I have no good idea what is wrong with Fran, but it´s some kind of mood disorder combined with retardation. He can talk in clear sentences, and sometimes can be very funny: he once told me I have a nice head! He does many kinds of simple chores -- Paquito would be hard-pressed to keep the farm going without Fran there to open and close the gates, haul water from the spring, and chop wood for the gloria.

Fran is usually nattily dressed, compared to the rest of us. He carries wads of string in his pockets, which he knots and unknots and wraps around his hand, over and over. He uses it to measure all the windowsills in the plaza, each of the bricks on the church wall, and the width and depth of the pilgrim benches. He carries a pocket knife, like all the men do. He is at Mass every Sunday, reciting all the creeds and prayers and responses perfectly and at breakneck speed, sometimes a couple of beats ahead of everyone else. And he sings.

Fran has a full repertoire of songs he learned as a child: themes from Franco-era TV sitcoms, folk tunes, old radio hits about lonesome cowboys and broken hearts, and Christmas carols galore. He will sing the same song, over and over, for weeks at a time, sometimes at full volume. (Modesto says he can hear Fran coming. Last summer he put his stereo on volume 10 and routed it through a set of old PA speakers mounted in his garden. So for an afternoon we had Fran going full-throttle on "Noelia Noelia Noelia," and Julie Andrews´ belting "Raindrops on Roses and Whiskers on Kittens" -- all of it echoing down the empty streets of our dusty little town. These things make me understand the Spanish roots of Surrealism.)

Then there´s The Other Side of Fran, the sullen, quiet, brooding man. This must be the Fran the peregrina encountered out on the camino. This Fran is attracted to pilgrims, and will stride up to unsuspecting hikers and chatter incomprehensibly -- usually to the women. He´ll follow them along, measuring their backpacks with his string. He might sing to them. He might smile menacingly into their faces. He´s not a big man, but he is wiry and strong and fast. He can be very scary. I know this, because Fran "likes" me very much. I am careful to treat him with respect, but happy that when I am with him I am almost always outdoors and almost always accompanied by the dogs, who keep themselves positioned between us. (Fran does not like dogs. Dogs know that.)

So... what can we do? Thousands of new pilgrims are on their way to and through Moratinos, and I´d like to let them know Fran is here, this is his home, and he´s never hurt anyone -- that yeah, he´s creepy sometimes, but they shouldn´t be afraid of him, and they especially shouldn´t be mean to him. But is there a graceful way of doing this, that will not offend his family or rob him of his dignity, or bring some social service agency crashing into the situation? What would you do, Gentle Reader?

Evidently there already is some awareness of these things among the neighbors. Things turned out OK for our American pilgrim, as Mirjam told it:

" A tractor appeared. The farmer seemed to have noticed her fear. Other tractors kept circling as if the farmers were keeping an eye on her, escorting her until the guy left. The pilgrim lady said something wisely: The men are the problem. But they are also the solution to the problem."

So maybe I should just relax and let St. James sort it out. After all, he was a man, too.

A Hard Day´s "Community Building"

The last post carried on into this one like clockwork. We indeed trimmed trees, and stacked up switches, and bound them into bundles custom-shaped to pitch neatly into a glory-hole under-floor furnace. We grabbed three bundles before they vanished... it was a firewood free-for-all there for a little while! Hard work, best shared among many. I figure we all dance under these trees in August, so it´s only fair we all help trim them back and maintain them in January. (In America we´d call it a "community-building exercise" and apply for a grant. The crafts vendors would follow quickly.)

In the wintertime you can really see how tortured are the plane trees of Spain´s plazas. They have to chop down all the year´s new branches so the trees will somehow grow "flat and together and leafy." I think they´d be a lot more leafy if they left them alone, but what do I know from plane trees?

I do know how to snip roses back, though, and luckily I brought along our nice secateurs. You´re only supposed to trim roses on Three Kings day, I was told, but somehow the little garden in the Plaza was overlooked. (Like the rose bushes in our patio. I gotta trim them too!)So I did do something useful. The rest of the event was a hair-raising display of ´boys and their toys,´ featuring five ladders, two front-end loaders, a huge bale of straw, two kinds of chainsaws, three hacksaws, four hatchets and an ax. No blood was shed, but Estebanito got a poke in the eye from a falling branch, and Pin went away mad after a shouting match over which chainsaw is the most dangerous. (I am glad it did not get beyond the shouting stage, what with all those sharp instruments around. Spaniards are very loud, but they´re not, generally speaking, violent.)

The best part came hours later, after our backs got a chance to realize what we had been asking of them. It was 8 or so PM, and the fog came back with the dark. We took the car over to the plaza, to better make our getaway. (I was feeling poorly.) Lights were blazing, but no one was in the house on the corner, the one where all the gatherings happen. We heard noises, though, and followed them into the dark.

And there in the soft night shone a fuzzy oblong of orange light -- a half-open bodega door, with a laughing Edu silhouetted within. This merienda was a classic Castillian bodega bash, a soft spot of warm light in the foggy dark.

The Milagros have one of the finest bodegas in town, dug deep and high and wide into the hill with a big fireplace, a long trestle table, and vats of wine all around. The three electric bulbs are powered via a precarious system involving jumper cables and the house next door. On the fire were racks of lamb chops and red peppers, roasting. On the table were plates of prawns and big green salads. Carlos, Leandra´s husband, was cutting up sausage and cheese. And oh what a party we had, with merry souls and tired muscles and warm hearts. (my feet, however, were frozen!) The lamb was delicious, what I had of it. I didn´t try this year´s vintage. My poor stomach.

Paddy, however, helped Esteban take on a 10-year-old brandy. Everyone else had liquor made with hazelnuts, which I think would be lovely over vanilla ice cream. I was informed that the thick fogs are normal for this time of year, but only for a few more days. They will stop on January 25, Edu says. Everyone else nodded. So it´s gotta be true.

And so it went, and so we went home. Nice. None of the photos turned out, so I am glad I didn´t take too many. Some events are better kept on the internal hard drive.

And today, I feel much better. But now Paddy has the stomach lurgy. I am taking him back to Sahagun and putting him to bed.

Schemes & Plots

There´s lots to look forward to here. It´s not very Zen to look forward to things, but I can´t help it. It´s January. Not a whole lot of "here and now" is here right now!

Tomorrow is the big Moratinos Cleanup in the plaza. We are very behind on this particular item... it´s usually done just after Christmas, but the weather´s been bad, and Pin, the guy with the chainsaw, has been on holiday, and Leandra, the lady who makes the best tortilla, asked them to wait til next week... Anyway, the notice went up two days ago, a handwritten and officially-stamped declaration that the plane trees and flower garden remains will be duly trimmed and hauled away "Lunes tarde." Which means anytime after noon on Monday, just listen for the church bell. The traditional "merienda" will follow. (A merienda is a snack, but last year this consisted of a roast lamb, paella, tortilla, garlic soup, and a big cake.) After eating everyone will be given their bills for 2007: water, sewage, and use of the municipal drive-over crop-weighing truck scale.

We don´t use the scale, so Estebanito told us 40 Euros oughtta cover us. (The city water comes from a big Artesian well by the Plaza Mayor. The sewage is a relatively new system of pipes they put in seven years ago, when they finally paved the streets. Everyone´s sewage goes into a malodorous common ditch just outside town, toward St. Martin...both our dogs have taken swims in it! I don´t know what happens to the sewage after that, but I think it makes its languid way to the Rio Templarios eventually.)

No word on just when all this commences, or where to bring the food. We are making the tortilla today... a two-inch thick omelette of sliced potatoes, onions, roasted red peppers, and eggs. Paddy´s got it mastered! We will bring that, and a bottle of good brandy. The men are bringing samples of this year´s home-brew, and we have nothing like that to share. (And this way, we know there´s a non-poisonous option available, should we want to partake.)

So. Tuesday or Wednesday we meet Jefe José Castro down in Palencia. We are picking out the tiles for the bathrooms, and maybe meeting his wife... she´s from Texas, USA. I think he´d like to use her translation ability to make sure we all are on the same page. I know I´d like to! And I would like to have another woman along for tile-choosing. I know this seems very girly-girl of me, but hey. We have to live with these tiles for a very long time, and if I left it to Paddy he might just point at the first thing he saw and say ´that´s fine.´ Evidence of that kind of decision-making lives on in lime-green loos the world over.

And farther out into the future (August) I am plotting something most fun: a custom-built guitar for in our house, and a very good guitarist to play it for an Open House party. Both of them are flamencos, and both are from Madison, Wisconsin!
It is all very up in the air, so I won´t go into details. But it is very fun to think forward thoughts.

Death Comes for the Weasel

Today is death and life and forgiveness. First, death.

While out in the wilds of the Promised Land this morning, the dogs flushed out a Least Weasel. They did a perfect double-team job on the little guy, and killed him dead.

Paddy hadn´t seen a Least Weasel before, and until the last moment assumed the dogs were hunting a rat. The three of them (the dogs and Paddy, sans weasel) came back to The Peaceable all tired out and rather solemn. Paddy said it´s a good thing I didn´t go along. (I was cleaning up the chicken house and coddling the hens, if not the eggs.)

Somehow, having the dogs kill a rat is okay, but a small, fierce, seldom-seen, ferret-like creature? No. We both felt pretty bad about it. We were lucky enough in the past to keep Sid Vicious and Cootie, two fine pet ferrets, so we have lots of respect for them and their near kin.

Even as we discussed these things, Paddy was cleaning and chopping up several fat fresh chipirones -- squids -- for our lunch. How is killing a Least Weasel any different from killing chipirones? I was saying. And just then he sliced one longwise, and inside he found... a little fish. How positively Lao Tsu!

We are talking more about profundities these days, perhaps because we are reading Camino documents. Paddy´s going through the latest John Brierly guide to the Camino de Santiago,lots of pilgrims are recommending it. There are lots of great maps and pictures, but Paddy says it gets a bit ´poncy´ with statements like "El Bierzo: taste of the fruit of its vineyards, bask in the effulgent rays of its sun..." that sort of tourist-office dreck that kept food on my table for a while, and which Patrick greets with a Bronx cheer. But he reads on, until tempted away by the decidedly non-ponce but deeply profound Brothers Karamazov.

I have managed to get, online from the University of Toronto, a copy of a 1919 art history treatise on the Camino, written by a North American professor who was full of wonderful opinions and observations. It´s in English, but with passages in French and Spanish and Latin. Lucky me, now that I´m reading Spanish all the time I can pretty much make out the other two! Yay! I´ll post links when I figure out how.

And so to Forgiveness. Jose Antonio Castro, our building jefe, gave us an estimate of how much work the Bozos did for us, so we can have a Euro figure to pursue them with legally. All that demolition, then the steel, concrete, masonry, and heavy labor? A house this size? Eighty, he said. Eighty thousand Euro!

So, if Castro is right, (and if we clearly understood what he told us) the Bozos did a good 14,000 Euros´ worth MORE work than we ever paid them for! They vanished because they´d way oversold what they could do, and they were losing money every day they showed up and worked... and we´d stopped paying them until they "caught up!"

So. We need to get this in writing first, then call off the attorney. And me, personally, I need to consider the magnitude and enormity of my presumption, overreaction, and rage. I assumed the Bozos lied, cheated, ripped us off, and walked away laughing at our stupidity, and I was ready to hunt down that weasel Mario to get back what I though I was owed. I was wrong, wrong, and wrong.

The actual work they did was pretty good, we are told. We still have a good case for the consumer advocacy process, seeing as they did lie like rugs, break their contract, trash our place, damage our barn roof, and create some lasting harm thereby. So we´ll let that process roll... if it is indeed rolling. (Spanish bureaucracy moves at glacial speed.)

I am very glad, really, to let this one go. Being that peeved takes an awful lot of energy. We must accept that this house is simply costing a whole lot more time and money than we ever guessed... and hopefully we have enough of both to not worry too much, now that progress is continuing apace. We are a mere year behind the schedule we so blithely set for ourselves!

And now I have to forgive myself for behaving so foolishly, mistaking a rat for a weasel.

Moonshine in the Morning

It´s always all or nothing around here... or sol y sombra if you prefer. Today is one of those days when, after weeks of not a whole lot happening, all the stars align and everything and everyone descends at once.

First I met an Aussie pilgrim outside the Sahagun refuge this morning, a real ray of sunshine. I told him ´buen camino,´ and he said, ¨thanks, g´day to you!¨ He was alone all night in the huge hangar of a refuge, but he slept just fine, he said...he had spent his evening watching football in the Irish pub, drinking Guinness. He called it "Irish lullabye."

Here at the Peaceable, the Josés showed up and broke through the back wall to the yard, and discovered what we thought was going to be a step out onto the porch floor opens into earth, right about chest level. Our house is dug that deep into the ground! So our double doors to the back yard will now be a big window instead, still giving some light to the room while offering our chickens a panoramic view of our salon and kitchen. The men thought it was kinda funny, except they put so much work into it already. But no one could tell, really, where the ground was. This is what happens in a house built piece by piece over many years. It may turn out to be rather weird, the fruit of poor communication skills, mixed signals, and sheer bull-headedness. But it will be home. And it will have lots of sunlight!

The plumber arrived. His name? José Franco. We´re calling him just Franco. Jefe José Antonio asked us where we´d put the bath fittings: the showers, bathtubs, toilets, etc. We don´t have any yet. Get em here by tomorrow, he said. So this afternoon we´re off to the builders´ supplies places, measurements in hand, to see who can deliver the stuff promptly tomorrow morning at a do-able price. It´s all so on-the-fly, it makes me very nervous! We didn´t know. How could we have known? So I likely will not get the cool bathroom sink that looks like a deviled egg. Oh well.And we won´t have exposed beams in the kitchen area, because all the bathroom pipes from upstairs will have to be hidden in the ceiling.

Meantime, Just Franco´s getting down to work with a big pile of pipes, joining up the plumbing for the kitchen and upstairs bathroom, generally doing whatever it is plumbers do.

The hero of the day is José de Moratinos, our Milagro Boy, who wove himself quietly around the morning´s events, argued a little with José Antonio about where to put the gasoil tank, advised on water pressure and pipe circumferences (he´s the local water warden) and generally inspected the works and ran interference with all this fast-demand decision-making. (Jefe José suggested we call him ´Joselito,´or ´Little Joe.´ But our José told him, ¨Soy DON José.¨ ¨Call me SIR Joseph!")

(I hope that makes sense.)

He then took us over to the family compound on the other end of town to show us the project he and his dad have going, out in the garage: they´re making moonshine.

They have it all over there, inside one of the barns behind the combine: copper kettles, a butane gas ring, rubber gaskets, hoses for cold water and drainage, coffee filters, a specific-gravity meter, and big 5-liter demijons of last year´s red wine and this year´s rotgut. I won´t take you through the whole process, as it takes five hours or so, and about 25 kilos of grapes slogged out of a barrel. But now I know how to make aguardiente! (aka "fire water").

This stuff is the base for orujo de hierbas, another local specialty that´s colored golden yellow with saffron and is sweet enough to suck the fillings out of your teeth.

What a day! And it´s only 2:30 p.m.!