Tough times hitting hard.
The hard drive in the Mac decided to die, on the exact same day its warranty died. I am suspicious and peeved and in withdrawal, back to writing this in the same smoky cybercafe we inhabited through our first six months of life in Moratinos.
Circles, I guess. I have become spoiled. It could be a lot worse.
The phones work only sporadically. My son Philip, who is supposed to come here the first week of December, just discovered his passport is expired!
I took the tip off my left index finger, using a hammer. It now has two fine stitches in it, and it hurts like the devil. It´s been a tough year for fingers!
My final "on the streets" driving test is set for Monday. Let´s hope the moon phase shifts before then.
Meantime, all the animals are healthy, and I´m slowly planting a great mountain of spring flower bulbs, and I had two batches of fine pilgrim boys (Oh, how the neighbors must be talking, what with Paddy being gone!) .. .and Paddy came back! The security people in London deemed our two containers of Thai curry paste and the jar of peanut butter much too dangerous to leave the UK via aircraft, but everything else got here OK. So there are things to be happy about.
I will return to being literary later on.
Now I have to get back to living like our parents lived, like we lived up til about 10 years ago: No telephones, no answerphones, no email, no cyber nothing. Aieee, how did we do it?
A little Bulgarian boy is dying to use the time I have left on this computer terminal...he keeps asking me (in perfect Castellano) when will I finish? I am so jealous, I may just have to wander the web a while!
Thursday, 16 October 2008
Sunday, 12 October 2008
Thursday, 9 October 2008
So Long Victoriana
In the corner house in the Plaza Mayor, Victoriana is dying.
It´s not a surprise, her son Celestino said. It´s no good feeling sad. She is 94 years old. She´s in her home, in her own bed. Four days ago she turned her tissue-paper face to the wall. She has not moved since.
Victoriana whitewashed that wall herself many times, many years, right after Holy Week, when women whitewashed entire houses with their own hands. It was women´s work then, plastering and patching the adobe, painting and slaking lime.
In that room she gave birth to Celestino. She had nine other babies, and eight of them still live – most of them are grandparents now. They are hovering, drifting through the rooms of the big corner house. They are waiting for her.
The other bedrooms are smaller than hers, as is fitting. In her own corner of the house she has her own double-size bed, separated with double doors of glass from her private sitting room. There are windows in her rooms, to let in the sunshine, and the children indulge her, risking chills each morning by opening wide the windows and letting the breeze billow the drapes. Victoriana is dueña here still, even as her body shrinks down, her mind moves on to things more lofty than soup, milk, mending, and laundering, and the kittens yowling in the patio.
There was a bar here once, in the big room now given over to two long plank tables and family gatherings. Used to be men in there at all hours, between their plowing, sowing, carting and grape-pressing. She made the orujo they drank there, she crushed the garlic for their soup, she counted the brown coins at the end of each day, sending the babies to bed to the sound of copper against copper.
The babies grew up, left the pueblo, went off to Vittoria or Madrid or San Sebastien to drive trucks or marry good-looking soldiers. Milagros stayed, though. She and Esteban and the chicos are still here in the village, still working the fields, but with tractors now. The mules went, the beautiful, noble mules, all gone so long now.
Mules, donkeys, milk cows, and now even the sheep all are gone. The streets are paved, and the big laundry trough, the springs that used to bubble up across the Calle Frances and send up every kind of little flower are tamed now too, shut up inside little buildings. The bodega collapsed, her father´s father´s father´s cave, the big one where bored men gathered under oil lamps in the winter afternoons for a game of Mus and a bottle or last year´s tinto. When she was a girl, before the bar, before the babies, before the war took so much away, her father hung up the cheeses and hams and sausages in there. He laid up the jars of oil, and sometimes other things. Secrets. Men keep secrets in the bodegas, especially during the war, but before that, too. Things that girls and women cannot ask about, and best not consider.
Victoriana minded her business. She kept quiet. She keeps quiet now, curled up like a baby in her bed.
Outside her windows, out in the campo her grandsons are plowing, planting. They´ll stop when they hear the church bell tolling. All the Moratinos men will turn their tractors to home then, take off their hats, lower their gaze for a couple of days. The seeding will wait that long. The harvest will be the first in almost a century that Victoriana will not see.
It´s not a surprise, her son Celestino said. It´s no good feeling sad. She is 94 years old. She´s in her home, in her own bed. Four days ago she turned her tissue-paper face to the wall. She has not moved since.
Victoriana whitewashed that wall herself many times, many years, right after Holy Week, when women whitewashed entire houses with their own hands. It was women´s work then, plastering and patching the adobe, painting and slaking lime.
In that room she gave birth to Celestino. She had nine other babies, and eight of them still live – most of them are grandparents now. They are hovering, drifting through the rooms of the big corner house. They are waiting for her.
The other bedrooms are smaller than hers, as is fitting. In her own corner of the house she has her own double-size bed, separated with double doors of glass from her private sitting room. There are windows in her rooms, to let in the sunshine, and the children indulge her, risking chills each morning by opening wide the windows and letting the breeze billow the drapes. Victoriana is dueña here still, even as her body shrinks down, her mind moves on to things more lofty than soup, milk, mending, and laundering, and the kittens yowling in the patio.
There was a bar here once, in the big room now given over to two long plank tables and family gatherings. Used to be men in there at all hours, between their plowing, sowing, carting and grape-pressing. She made the orujo they drank there, she crushed the garlic for their soup, she counted the brown coins at the end of each day, sending the babies to bed to the sound of copper against copper.
The babies grew up, left the pueblo, went off to Vittoria or Madrid or San Sebastien to drive trucks or marry good-looking soldiers. Milagros stayed, though. She and Esteban and the chicos are still here in the village, still working the fields, but with tractors now. The mules went, the beautiful, noble mules, all gone so long now.
Mules, donkeys, milk cows, and now even the sheep all are gone. The streets are paved, and the big laundry trough, the springs that used to bubble up across the Calle Frances and send up every kind of little flower are tamed now too, shut up inside little buildings. The bodega collapsed, her father´s father´s father´s cave, the big one where bored men gathered under oil lamps in the winter afternoons for a game of Mus and a bottle or last year´s tinto. When she was a girl, before the bar, before the babies, before the war took so much away, her father hung up the cheeses and hams and sausages in there. He laid up the jars of oil, and sometimes other things. Secrets. Men keep secrets in the bodegas, especially during the war, but before that, too. Things that girls and women cannot ask about, and best not consider.
Victoriana minded her business. She kept quiet. She keeps quiet now, curled up like a baby in her bed.
Outside her windows, out in the campo her grandsons are plowing, planting. They´ll stop when they hear the church bell tolling. All the Moratinos men will turn their tractors to home then, take off their hats, lower their gaze for a couple of days. The seeding will wait that long. The harvest will be the first in almost a century that Victoriana will not see.
Monday, 6 October 2008
Heaven Half Way
I took down the original post because it sounded so damn smug. I´ve left the photo of Anna with the critters, just because it is so Peaceable Kingdom.
Meantime, here are some more pictures. People love pictures, no? These are places we´ve visited over the weekend, in Fromista and Poblacion del Campos, two towns to the east of us. We have a friend who wants to buy a place over there, so we´re doing some "legwork" for him. There´s a lot of empty real estate around. Some of it is even posted as For Sale. But just TRY to find a "motivated seller!" Even after phone calls and appointments and a blizzard of emails, we have yet to see inside any of them!
The last one is our living room, before we put up the pictures and "fine art." We´re doing a lot of living in there lately, as the under-floor heating system works very well!
Some people want to know the Prosaic Life Details around here, so here goes: (I will wax rhapsodic again soon, I promise.)
I´ve been communicating (well...sorta. In Castellano emails) with the hospitalero people at the Federacion del Amigos del Camino in Logroño. Seems there are several folks who´d like to take their training course and become volunteer hospitaleros at Federation albergues (like the things I´ve done in Salamanca and Ponferrada), but they can´t come to Spain or Canada or the USA or England for training sessions. They are in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. So I think it´d be interesting to fix up some sort of Online hospitalero training course for them, in English, using materials drawn from existing and accredited training courses in UK and North America. We have a web host, (at http://www.pilgrimage-to-santiago.com ) and an experienced corporate trainer who knows all about adult curriculum, and some other people who can translate between English and Castellano.
I don´t know why it shouldn´t work. There´s a meeting of Federation hospitalero muckety-mucks in Sahagun this weekend, so I will do me some buttonhole-ing. (It´s not for nothing I was a reporter all those years!)
Oh, and the new Confraternity of St. James Guide to the Camino Ingles is now "live" and online and available for download at the CSJ website. It´s not written in my usual style, but it´s nice to have had a hand in a useful document.
And that (along with an interesting Sunday drive north into the mountains) is what we´ve been up to, when not wrestling with our inner Smug.
Wednesday, 1 October 2008
Barter & Bob
It is late. I am not getting enough sleep.
But we´ve got Pilgrims, good ones.
Yesterday afternoon I was settling my brains for a late afternoon nap when I heard Paddy´s mobile phone bleating the electronic overture to “Carmen.” The phone was deep down in the many zips and pockets of Paddy´s favorite shorts, which were lying in a heap on the floor. (Paddy was not in them at the time.)
(Whenever I phone Paddy, I can usually count on his telephone being somewhere other than on his person, so this is not unusual. And as long as men sport shorts, vests, and pants with multiple pockets, they cannot rightfully criticize women´s bottomless handbags, can they?)
Anyway, the person on the phone was called Chris, and he and his three friends were 4 km. away in Terradillos, and Jesus in Logroño had told them about our place, and could they come over and stay?
Frickin´ Jesus. Still, he´s not sent us a bad pilgrim yet. (a couple of weird ones, granted... including The Spiritual Christ from Germany...) So of course I said OK.
I got up. We gave the place a quick cleanup, figured out what was available dinner-wise, and were ready when they rolled up to the door about an hour later.
They were delightful, useful, fun, refreshing, and a bit exhausting: Monica the little Italian hairdresser (with bright raspberry-colored locks); Chris from Seattle, a tall and soft-spoken landscaper; Chris from Atlanta, a Buddhist vegan soul-searching revolutionary; and Carolyn, a worn-out Quebecois a bit overwhelmed by all the rapid-fire American English. (I haven´t spoken American for a VERY long time, and only realized it when the boys opened their mouths.)
We ate peanuts and olives and drank harsh local wine and chattered right into the evening out on the patio. Chris the Vegan made dinner for us: veggie pizzas and salad (Paddy made some of his fabulous rice/cheese/spinach for the Regular Ol´ Vegetarians. Vegetarians are cool, but I find Vegans sometimes rather high-maintenance… what, no eggs, even? No fish? No cheese??? What is left? So when Vegans stop by, we usually ask them to do the cooking. And they usually oblige beautifully, proving that you can make a lot of pretty good grub using nothing at all.)
Maybe best of all was having Monica give me a haircut.
I have been letting my hair grow longer for several months now, and it´s gotten well out of control in recent days. With the snake´s nest pulled back under a bandana I´ve driven past multiple beauty salons and barbershops and chainsaw dealers in recent days, contemplating just how to tell the professionals inside in Castellano that I don´t want to lose the length, I just need to have it shaped, have the different levels blended into one another, have the long stringy bits out front removed from before my eyes. Even in English I find such concepts impossible to communicate, with my eternal short haircut as instant evidence.
But here was an ebullient young haircutting professional, who understood English well enough to have worked for two years in a salon in London´s Knightsbridge neighborhood – a brutally posh place where bad beauticians are toasted on their own curling irons and shipped back to Fiorenza in a matchbox.
So we hunted up the shears we use to trim Tim, and the meat scissors, (the only really sharp ones in the place), and the secateurs we use on the trees and bushes. We found a big plastic garbage bag and cut a head-hole in the bottom and used that for an apron. And out on the patio Monica gave me a lovely haircut I´d pay 40€ and up for in a city salon.
A good haircut always makes me feel great, and this one was followed by a tip-top meal, music, Tarot-card readings, and general good will, all of it in English! Woohoo! They all stayed up too late for me. I had to rise by 7 a.m. to go driving, so I missed saying goodbye.
When I returned home in this afternoon all the happy party was gone down the Camino. The hair clippings were swept up, the dishes done, and the secateurs taken up by the Landscaper Chris. He´d gone out into the bushy, brushy huerta and gave the apple, fig, and spruce trees a thorough pruning! Woohoo x 2.
I like hosting pilgrims, and I´ve learned not to say “no” when they offer us money to help meet expenses. But I especially like the ambitious Barter Economy pilgrims, the ones who meet our dinner-and-a-place-to-sleep and raise us a haircut or a pruning, a dish-wash or drawing or song. There´s something so fundamentally right and human about skipping over the currency and trading in goods and skills.
… And then there are pilgrims like Bob Spenger.
Bob is an athlete, a minor Camino celebrity. He showed up at The Peaceable late this morning, having walked here from LePuy en Velay, France... a trip of about 1,200 km. (he´s only got about 300 km to go to reach Santiago.) This is the third time he´s walked the Way in the past 8 years, and when he´s finished he´s off to England to compete in a world-class rowing competition. He´s a Californian, a retired chemistry professor, a gold-medal, record-holding athlete, a war veteran, storyteller, and world traveler.
Oh, and Bob is 84 years old. Look him up on YouTube and get inspired... YouTube´s not letting me post here today, for whatever reason.
He is taking the Camino easy this time, in reasonable 20 to 25-km days (that´s about 12 to 15 miles, every day for two months or so.) This will probably be his last long-distance hike, he says. His knees are starting to hurt.
We are honored to host him. Pilgrims like Bob Spenger can hang out here whenever they want, for free. Long as they´ll tell us a story or two.
But we´ve got Pilgrims, good ones.
Yesterday afternoon I was settling my brains for a late afternoon nap when I heard Paddy´s mobile phone bleating the electronic overture to “Carmen.” The phone was deep down in the many zips and pockets of Paddy´s favorite shorts, which were lying in a heap on the floor. (Paddy was not in them at the time.)
(Whenever I phone Paddy, I can usually count on his telephone being somewhere other than on his person, so this is not unusual. And as long as men sport shorts, vests, and pants with multiple pockets, they cannot rightfully criticize women´s bottomless handbags, can they?)
Anyway, the person on the phone was called Chris, and he and his three friends were 4 km. away in Terradillos, and Jesus in Logroño had told them about our place, and could they come over and stay?
Frickin´ Jesus. Still, he´s not sent us a bad pilgrim yet. (a couple of weird ones, granted... including The Spiritual Christ from Germany...) So of course I said OK.
I got up. We gave the place a quick cleanup, figured out what was available dinner-wise, and were ready when they rolled up to the door about an hour later.
They were delightful, useful, fun, refreshing, and a bit exhausting: Monica the little Italian hairdresser (with bright raspberry-colored locks); Chris from Seattle, a tall and soft-spoken landscaper; Chris from Atlanta, a Buddhist vegan soul-searching revolutionary; and Carolyn, a worn-out Quebecois a bit overwhelmed by all the rapid-fire American English. (I haven´t spoken American for a VERY long time, and only realized it when the boys opened their mouths.)
We ate peanuts and olives and drank harsh local wine and chattered right into the evening out on the patio. Chris the Vegan made dinner for us: veggie pizzas and salad (Paddy made some of his fabulous rice/cheese/spinach for the Regular Ol´ Vegetarians. Vegetarians are cool, but I find Vegans sometimes rather high-maintenance… what, no eggs, even? No fish? No cheese??? What is left? So when Vegans stop by, we usually ask them to do the cooking. And they usually oblige beautifully, proving that you can make a lot of pretty good grub using nothing at all.)
Maybe best of all was having Monica give me a haircut.
I have been letting my hair grow longer for several months now, and it´s gotten well out of control in recent days. With the snake´s nest pulled back under a bandana I´ve driven past multiple beauty salons and barbershops and chainsaw dealers in recent days, contemplating just how to tell the professionals inside in Castellano that I don´t want to lose the length, I just need to have it shaped, have the different levels blended into one another, have the long stringy bits out front removed from before my eyes. Even in English I find such concepts impossible to communicate, with my eternal short haircut as instant evidence.
But here was an ebullient young haircutting professional, who understood English well enough to have worked for two years in a salon in London´s Knightsbridge neighborhood – a brutally posh place where bad beauticians are toasted on their own curling irons and shipped back to Fiorenza in a matchbox.
So we hunted up the shears we use to trim Tim, and the meat scissors, (the only really sharp ones in the place), and the secateurs we use on the trees and bushes. We found a big plastic garbage bag and cut a head-hole in the bottom and used that for an apron. And out on the patio Monica gave me a lovely haircut I´d pay 40€ and up for in a city salon.
A good haircut always makes me feel great, and this one was followed by a tip-top meal, music, Tarot-card readings, and general good will, all of it in English! Woohoo! They all stayed up too late for me. I had to rise by 7 a.m. to go driving, so I missed saying goodbye.
When I returned home in this afternoon all the happy party was gone down the Camino. The hair clippings were swept up, the dishes done, and the secateurs taken up by the Landscaper Chris. He´d gone out into the bushy, brushy huerta and gave the apple, fig, and spruce trees a thorough pruning! Woohoo x 2.
I like hosting pilgrims, and I´ve learned not to say “no” when they offer us money to help meet expenses. But I especially like the ambitious Barter Economy pilgrims, the ones who meet our dinner-and-a-place-to-sleep and raise us a haircut or a pruning, a dish-wash or drawing or song. There´s something so fundamentally right and human about skipping over the currency and trading in goods and skills.
… And then there are pilgrims like Bob Spenger.
Bob is an athlete, a minor Camino celebrity. He showed up at The Peaceable late this morning, having walked here from LePuy en Velay, France... a trip of about 1,200 km. (he´s only got about 300 km to go to reach Santiago.) This is the third time he´s walked the Way in the past 8 years, and when he´s finished he´s off to England to compete in a world-class rowing competition. He´s a Californian, a retired chemistry professor, a gold-medal, record-holding athlete, a war veteran, storyteller, and world traveler.
Oh, and Bob is 84 years old. Look him up on YouTube and get inspired... YouTube´s not letting me post here today, for whatever reason.
He is taking the Camino easy this time, in reasonable 20 to 25-km days (that´s about 12 to 15 miles, every day for two months or so.) This will probably be his last long-distance hike, he says. His knees are starting to hurt.
We are honored to host him. Pilgrims like Bob Spenger can hang out here whenever they want, for free. Long as they´ll tell us a story or two.
Saturday, 27 September 2008
Septembering
I´ve been snapping pictures all week, when I´ve not been driving. (I try not to combine the two activities too often.) With the world economy teetering on the brink, the USA elections coming up, and the demise of Paul Newman hogging up all the printers´ ink, I am left with little of significance to tell my readers, (´cept maybe get your money out of the bank NOW and hide it somewhere no one will ever look. Millie Benson, a cunning old lady of my acquaintance, throve through the Great Depression because she saw it coming, got her money out in cash, and stashed it away safely in the tubes of her xylophone.)
Anyway, this week included the fiesta over at San Nicolas, complete with three giant paellas and several botas of very nasty wine:
The boys from Barrunta catered it, and as they traveled down the street to the teleclub porch, the fragrance brought out the citizenry in droves! The pipers played, the paella was et, and I met a couple of guys there from Saldaña. Their sister lives in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. You can leave the Burgh, but it never leaves you!
Signs of the changing seasons are all over the place. Victor over in San Nicolas is stripping out his beehives, spinning the honey, drying the wax to sell for candles. The grape harvest starts this weekend, and the vineyards are being watched-over by scarecrows of many apparent ethnicities and stripes. The farmers are wonderfully
creative, but I don´t think the crows are fooled for a minute. (It´s startling as hell when a windy day blows down a scarecrow or two into a ditch. Viewed from a distance, well...it´s scary!)Paddy´s off to London in a couple of weeks, with plans to visit lots of old friends. This is why I need to take lots of pictures of our house, and upload them to Picasa... so they can see what Paddy´s been doing, and so he doesn´t have to take the computer along with him when he goes! I am envious, but it really IS his turn to take a break. Here are some of the nicer ones, of critters enjoying Their Favorite Things:
Meantime, we met up with a law professor from Illinois (now a pilgrim) over in Leon and went to see San Miguel de Escalada, a breathtakingly old and lovely monastery out in the middle of nothing at all. Such a treat, having thousand-year-old things around!
And then we went back into Leon and ate pizza!
So it´s been a whole spectrum of goodies, under a sky amazingly blue. Somehow it makes me miss Libby and Philip, my children. And nachos. And the Pittsburgh Steelers, my football team. And Mom. Just a little.
Just until someone asks if we want the last bits of paella.
Wednesday, 24 September 2008
Mean Streets and White Knuckles
Suddenly everyone wants to get up early, an extremely un-Spanish phenomenon far as I´m concerned. This week I started my "Practicas," actual behind-the-wheel driving lessons. This consists of meeting Santi, the teacher, over in Sahagun at 8 a.m., then spending the next 6 hours in the little car with the extra set of pedals on the passenger side, along with two or three other student drivers.
We students take turns driving. First up yesterday was young Nestor, a teenager from Melgar de Arriba. He drove us happily and contentedly to inner-city Leon. We stopped at Trafico HQ for Santi to drop off some paperwork. While we waited outside I congratulated young Nestor on his skills. "You´re almost ready for the exam, no?" I said. "Almost," he said. "I still have some work to do."
Santi came back, Nestor got back in the driver´s seat and was directed into the teeming narrow backstreets of the city, which are invariably parked tight on both sides.
I will not go into details of the series of near misses that ensued, only to liken it to the violent "Grand Theft Auto" video games, or perhaps the old "Herbie" series of Disney laff riots involving a free-will Volkswagen. Nestor and Santi stayed outwardly calm as we swung wide into tiny plazas, skated a good half-inch away from the sides of moving buses, and even once clipped the wing mirror of a parked Mercedes. (I was sitting on the Mercedes side, and watched as it folded closed in slo-mo. They manufacture cars here with the side mirrors on hinges, because they know this is going to happen...the backside of everybody´s mirror is etched in several paint colors.)
Then Nestor left a roundabout at a good clip and wheeled us neatly over a crowded crosswalk and head-first and wrong way up a congested one-way street. Half onto the sidewalk we went, and we´d have headed right up the block that way if Santi hadn´t finally slammed on his brake. The little Renault just about stood up on its nose.
"If this was the exam, you´d have failed just now," Santi said calmly.
We sat a minute, regaining our breathing skills. Santi made sure we were OK. And as young Nestor reversed the car back up the sidewalk and through the crosswalk, Santi gave him The Lecture: "Driving is one of the most dangerous things you can do. You can kill people. You have three other people in this car with you, and maybe they have worthwhile lives. Think about the other people in this car."
No mention was made of the heaving crowd out there on the sidewalk, which parted slowly as the backside of the Renault came at them. Nestor´s hands were shaking, but he said nothing. Santi directed him to a newer part of town, with wider streets. He told us crosswalks give the pedestrian the right of way, but only if the pedestrians are women -- men get a pass only if they´re accompanying children, or leaning on a cane. Yellow lights supposedly mean slow down or even stop, but if there´s a red light attached, the yellow just means "hurry up." These are practical instructions, he said, "the real life of the road." All the volumes of theory and traffic law we´d ingested over the past weeks were "just theory," he said. "This is Spain, the streets of Spain. Ain´t no theory here."
Finally Nestor was allowed to park the car to give another driver a turn. He didn´t get in the back. He bid us all a breathless "good day" and said he´d catch the train back to Sahagun. He turned and fled on foot into the Streets of Spain.
Susana is still mastering the clutch, and stalled the car several times at critical highway merges and often in the path of oncoming trucks and ambulances. (Automatic transmissions are still considered luxury options in Europe.) She was especially conscious of the pedestrian crowds who seem to gather at such places to gawk at the cars with their Driving School insignia on top. (Sometimes a Guardia Civil patrol parks there, too, just to add some frisson.) Poor Susana, her mobile phone kept ringing from inside her front pocket, filling the car with a tinny top-40 ditty that intoned, over and over, "no, no, no."
Santi said his job doesn´t get on his nerves, but I´m not buying it. As the hours went on and the traffic thickened his deodorant let him down. You could smell the fear.
Me, I did pretty well, considering I´ve been driving almost every day for 23 years. I have some bad habits, Santi said, but in all I drive with more self-control and discipline and precision than he does. I come from a more controlled and disciplined race of people. He said all this to my fellow students, with the unspoken assurance that I could not understand a word. Although I used pretty OK Castellano to tell him of my driving history and to explain that my lessons are in both driving and language, and that he may have to speak more slowly than usual to me... he evidently concluded that I am a retard. He started our instruction by telling me, "This structure over the road is called a bridge, or sometimes a viaduct. Bridge."
Driving Mister Rodgers. OK. I´m getting used to Square One, and it´s not always a bad place to be. I already know how to drive, thank God. And it won´t be me who gets us all flattened beneath a frozen-foods truck.
We students take turns driving. First up yesterday was young Nestor, a teenager from Melgar de Arriba. He drove us happily and contentedly to inner-city Leon. We stopped at Trafico HQ for Santi to drop off some paperwork. While we waited outside I congratulated young Nestor on his skills. "You´re almost ready for the exam, no?" I said. "Almost," he said. "I still have some work to do."
Santi came back, Nestor got back in the driver´s seat and was directed into the teeming narrow backstreets of the city, which are invariably parked tight on both sides.
I will not go into details of the series of near misses that ensued, only to liken it to the violent "Grand Theft Auto" video games, or perhaps the old "Herbie" series of Disney laff riots involving a free-will Volkswagen. Nestor and Santi stayed outwardly calm as we swung wide into tiny plazas, skated a good half-inch away from the sides of moving buses, and even once clipped the wing mirror of a parked Mercedes. (I was sitting on the Mercedes side, and watched as it folded closed in slo-mo. They manufacture cars here with the side mirrors on hinges, because they know this is going to happen...the backside of everybody´s mirror is etched in several paint colors.)
Then Nestor left a roundabout at a good clip and wheeled us neatly over a crowded crosswalk and head-first and wrong way up a congested one-way street. Half onto the sidewalk we went, and we´d have headed right up the block that way if Santi hadn´t finally slammed on his brake. The little Renault just about stood up on its nose.
"If this was the exam, you´d have failed just now," Santi said calmly.
We sat a minute, regaining our breathing skills. Santi made sure we were OK. And as young Nestor reversed the car back up the sidewalk and through the crosswalk, Santi gave him The Lecture: "Driving is one of the most dangerous things you can do. You can kill people. You have three other people in this car with you, and maybe they have worthwhile lives. Think about the other people in this car."
No mention was made of the heaving crowd out there on the sidewalk, which parted slowly as the backside of the Renault came at them. Nestor´s hands were shaking, but he said nothing. Santi directed him to a newer part of town, with wider streets. He told us crosswalks give the pedestrian the right of way, but only if the pedestrians are women -- men get a pass only if they´re accompanying children, or leaning on a cane. Yellow lights supposedly mean slow down or even stop, but if there´s a red light attached, the yellow just means "hurry up." These are practical instructions, he said, "the real life of the road." All the volumes of theory and traffic law we´d ingested over the past weeks were "just theory," he said. "This is Spain, the streets of Spain. Ain´t no theory here."
Finally Nestor was allowed to park the car to give another driver a turn. He didn´t get in the back. He bid us all a breathless "good day" and said he´d catch the train back to Sahagun. He turned and fled on foot into the Streets of Spain.
Susana is still mastering the clutch, and stalled the car several times at critical highway merges and often in the path of oncoming trucks and ambulances. (Automatic transmissions are still considered luxury options in Europe.) She was especially conscious of the pedestrian crowds who seem to gather at such places to gawk at the cars with their Driving School insignia on top. (Sometimes a Guardia Civil patrol parks there, too, just to add some frisson.) Poor Susana, her mobile phone kept ringing from inside her front pocket, filling the car with a tinny top-40 ditty that intoned, over and over, "no, no, no."
Santi said his job doesn´t get on his nerves, but I´m not buying it. As the hours went on and the traffic thickened his deodorant let him down. You could smell the fear.
Me, I did pretty well, considering I´ve been driving almost every day for 23 years. I have some bad habits, Santi said, but in all I drive with more self-control and discipline and precision than he does. I come from a more controlled and disciplined race of people. He said all this to my fellow students, with the unspoken assurance that I could not understand a word. Although I used pretty OK Castellano to tell him of my driving history and to explain that my lessons are in both driving and language, and that he may have to speak more slowly than usual to me... he evidently concluded that I am a retard. He started our instruction by telling me, "This structure over the road is called a bridge, or sometimes a viaduct. Bridge."
Driving Mister Rodgers. OK. I´m getting used to Square One, and it´s not always a bad place to be. I already know how to drive, thank God. And it won´t be me who gets us all flattened beneath a frozen-foods truck.
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