Sanibel Scribbles (40 page)

She couldn’t argue. They did look like a country in style!

They entered the dark movie monster room where the damp coldness reminded Vicki of a cellar. They were the only ones touring, and she wished the museum had more customers. As Rafael took hold of her hand tightly, she felt sudden fear. Not from the mummies and monsters, but from the man wearing glasses, walking by her side and now holding her hand, the man wearing cologne she had never smelled before, a scent that said this man liked fine dining, red wine, and conversation, and romance to go along with it all. She could always tell much about a man based on the cologne he chose to wear.

Who was he? Why did she get in the car with him in the first place? How did it all start? What if he were married? Well, if he was, this luxurious man was a Titanic heading for disaster. Suddenly a sharp pain struck her chest like an iceberg. She couldn’t breathe, and her legs shook. Her vision
blurred, and she knew she was losing the mind-over-matter battle once more.

Her panic attack had begun. It would be a matter of minutes before she would start to hyperventilate. She tried to listen to Rafael’s slow, clear Spanish narration of the tour. He knew a lot about wax figures, but did he know CPR? She dropped her purse so she could bend down and catch her breath, but Don Rafael insisted that he be the one to pick it up. She didn’t want to die, not here in the wax museum, not here in Spain. The figures around her looked real—real and dead, as if they should be resting in coffins instead of standing around in a basement, staring into space.

As they entered another political room, Rafael’s voice grew louder, filled with excitement. “El
es un amigo de mi padre, muy especial, Victoria. Y el tambien.”
He pointed to a wax person. “Once, he and my father were friends, and look there! They too were friends! Now, they are dead. Now, they are wax sculptures in a museum.”

She knew Rafael’s father had important friends. Anyone made into wax after death is important. She knew Rafael’s father was important. Anyone who is merely friends with wax sculptors must be important himself. She wanted to know more, but at this point she was only half concerned with the stories of the wax figures. Most of her attention went to talking herself out of a panic attack in the cold, dark, creepy museum. Not only was she standing in a spooky-looking room with a mysterious man, but she was with a man whose father had friends turned into wax!

She felt relieved when the tour ended, and they drove away. After a while they parked the car and walked to Café Gijon, located near the Plaza de Cibeles at the edge of the prestigious Barrio de Salamanca, a wealthier part of town. It was a chilly night, so once inside the warm café, cozily designed with polished paneling and gilt mirrors, Vicki didn’t want to leave. It didn’t matter that they both had already drunk two espressos. Neither felt ready to venture out into the windy night, and something about the century-old café stirred a desire for fine conversation.

They stayed in the café with its black and white tabletops for almost four hours, discussing a 1942 novel Vicki was reading for her Spanish literature class.

“So
Pascual Duarte
is your favorite novel,” said Vicki. “I could hardly understand the plot, themes, and characters, but now it all makes sense to me!”

“Camilo Jose Cela won the Nobel Prize for literature back in 1989.” Rafael waved his hands as he spoke, as if his gestures were part of Spain’s language and as important as words. “It is my favorite book, and I’ve read it several times.”

“I stayed up until three in the morning trying to make sense of it all,” said Vicki. “I found it so sad.”

“It is written in a type of realism known as
tremendismo,”
said Rafael.

“Do you know what
tremendismo
means,
Victoria
?”

“No, ¿
que significa?”
she asked.

“It features the antihero and an insistence on the ugly, harsh aspect of life.”

“Why do you love such a depressing novel?” she asked him in Spanish.

“Porque.”
He looked down. “I have had several depressing moments.”

“Digame.”
She told him she wanted to know more.
“Mañana, mañana.”
He told her he’d tell her another time. “That means you’d like us to meet again.”

“Si, si
. But we must carefully choose our cafés,” he whispered, looking around at others who were sitting at nearby tables, some holding books, others looking over a stack of paper that looked like a manuscript.

“¿Por que?
Why do we have to choose carefully?”

He shook his head.
“Victoria
, choosing a café in Spain is like favoring one political party over the other. Cafés have reputations. There are right-wing and left-wing cafés, cafés for artists and cafés for writers. There is a café for everything.”

“Just like there is a time for everything,” she added.

“Claro.”

“So what is this café known for?”

“What did we just discuss?” He asked in Spanish, but Vicki understood it like English. “Literature.”

He smiled, giving her a nod of approval, then responded slowly, “You have your answer. Hemingway loved this café.”

When it came time for them to part, Rafael insisted she tell him where she was living so he could properly drop her off on the sidewalk below, but she refused. Despite the wonderful evening she had, she wanted to retain her privacy and that of her Spanish family, just in case, so she had him drop her off on the same corner where he had picked her up earlier that night. It was only a couple blocks from where she lived, and she never minded walking the city alone at night. In Madrid, a night without the moon meant nothing, thanks to the city lights.

“Then we meet next week, same time, same place,” said Rafael.

“Yes, I will be here,” she said. “And I will try
not
to be early this time.”

Her fingers went numb as she climbed under the covers and lit a gardenia-scented candle beside her bed. The tiny apartment felt cold this late at night, but she couldn’t resist. She had to write about her conversations with Rafael to her grandmother.

Dear Grandma
,

I’ll call him Rafael de España. He transforms Spanish into more than grammar off the pages of a book. He brings it to life for me. He takes the language barrier away. As he speaks to me, slowly and without shouting, I feel way beyond the culture shock and, I think, homesickness. I think it’s time to stop crossing off days in big black marker on my calendar. As I lie in bed and hear his views of Spain and fashion and his people in my mind, I am glad to be here. There is no place I would rather be at this given time. I love this country now. I started loving it the moment I started breaking the language barrier. I
love it a little better now that I have Rafael as a friend. This may sound dramatic, Grandma, but I know you love reading romance. And I don’t mind living it
.

P.S. Is there really such a thing as soul mates?

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

ON JULY
18, 1936,
MANY
painful letters were written. The rightist revolt had been launched. The National Socialist parties of Italy and Germany fully supported the army and had decided to seize power and destroy the Second Republic. This decision began the Spanish Civil War. The Republicans set up camp in the urban areas of Madrid. The rebels, who called themselves the Nationalists, moved in from Morocco. They were led by General Francisco Franco as they entered Barcelona, establishing themselves in the provinces of Catalonia, Murcia, and Valencia
, explained the professor.

Like armies of rebels, ants moved their way through the veins inside Vicki’s left arm, heading toward her shoulder. Then the professor explained that the death toll, an omen of sorrow for the Republicans, sounded early in 1939, when Franco’s forces, after weeks of bitter siege, entered Barcelona.

A bow and arrow—no, it was a sword. No, the date was 1939. A
bullet
struck Vicki in the heart, and she bent over at her desk to catch her breath. She declared herself crazy. How could a lecture alone cause a panic attack?

The professor continued.
The Nationalists had control. They had disciplined, well-armed troops. They were led by experienced generals and had plenty of materials from abroad. Writers have described it as if they were on a sort of Holy Crusade to crush the infidels as they chanted, “Long Live Death!
”

Vicki’s attempts to catch her breath became loud sighs of frustration
and forced yawns. Sweat formed on her forehead, and she could no longer decipher the giant map of Madrid on the board in the front of class. The only thing that looked somewhat normal was the Pablo Picasso painting hanging on the wall next to her desk, and the more she listened and the worse her anxiety grew, the more his Cubist art made sense.

The battle lost, she nearly collapsed on the floor as she ran out of the classroom door, her conceived escape route. Alone on the sidewalk outside, perhaps where the Republicans once established their base of support, she felt ridiculous that such symptoms could be coming from her mind. These panic attacks were becoming a bad habit. Like a soldier wounded while simply listening to the history of the Spanish Civil War, she started running toward the big hospital she had seen a few blocks away. She allowed no time to talk herself out of this one. She was dying. Her mind had convinced itself of that.

She knew the word
corazon
meant heart, but her Spanish came out broken under pressure, as she explained her pain to the nurses. After sitting in a crowded waiting room for a good hour, the nurse led her into a bigger room with other sick people lying on beds, then told her to take her shirt off.

“I need a curtain, a door, a private room,” she said, glancing around at the crowded room filled with dark-haired men. They wheeled in a divider.

A doctor with messed-up hair appeared completely overburdened with ill people seeking free medical care. Vicki felt like a pathetic character in the musical
Jesus Christ Superstar
—just one more body demanding the doc’s attention. “Heal me, I’m hurting. Heal me, I’m bleeding. Heal me, I’m dying.”

Unfortunately, none of the doctors on duty spoke her native language, and in a time of crisis, English would have been comforting.

The doctor’s assistants hooked the ECG up to her chest. As they rapidly talked medical terminology, she lost all capacity for translating. Abducted by outer space aliens, she lay on the cold table looking up at the bright fluorescent light. Speaking their own language, they poked her and stuck her with things, then debated amongst themselves.

After the ECG, they led her in a wheelchair into a waiting room. An
unfamiliar-looking man in a white coat asked her questions. He wanted to know her symptoms. She had a perfectly fluent Spanish conversation with Rafael, so why couldn’t she have one now? Why hadn’t she read the Spanish version of those medical encyclopedias? She had no idea how to say heart attack in Spanish. Then again, she did just leave the Spanish Civil War lecture, in which the professor used the words
golpe
for military attacks and the word
guerra
for war. Close enough. She’d give it a try.

“Tengo un dalor en mi corazon, como un golpe o una guerra. Si, tengo un guerra en mi corazon.”

She judged the doctor’s silence as poor bedside manners. Then he started to laugh. He laughed from his gut, and tears streamed down his face. She lay on the hospital bed with stabbing sensations piercing her heart. She knew what she had said. She had told the young Spanish doctor that she had a war or militaristic attack on her heart. The more the doctor laughed, the younger he looked.

“Well, good, I’m glad I’m a stress relief for you. So can you treat wars of the heart, Doc?” She said it in English but didn’t care. She cried, while the doctor laughed. “I’m feeling better, Doc. You must think I’m a hypochondriac wanting attention, and the hospital is the only place for me to get it.”

Finally, he managed to pat her on the knee and ask her slow, simple questions requiring no more than a yes-or-no answer. She must have answered one too many no’s because he then wheeled her into the same ECG room that she had been in with the nurses and began hooking her up again.

She felt like a child on a merry-go-round, lying that she had not yet been on the ride, and she felt guilty, but didn’t know what to say to stop the ride from starting. It was too late to admit she already went through the ECG with the other little people in white suits.

“Worry no. I explore you,” the doctor said in an attempt at speaking English.

“Explore me? Goodness, Doc, that’s worse than me having a war of the heart.”

Just then the nurse who hooked her up to the ECG the last time, returned.