Notebook

Not Writing in Spain

By the beginning of June, my daughter, Xan, is ill with gastroenteritis and tonsillitis. Too many times I’ve had to call the English speaking Dr. Brioso to the flat on Avenida Ciudad de Ronda. He brings her sweets and tells me to give her coca-cola—anything to get her to eat and drink. Nothing he does seems to help. I watch him wipe his sweating forehead with a handkerchief, and raise his bulk from the dining room table where he has been writing out, on thick embossed stationery, yet another receipt. His stories of treating the stars—Ava Gardner, for one—and his liquid oxford accent no longer comfort me. Xan is thin and has lost a great deal of weight. She had told me, just when she was getting sick, that she has been lost somewhere in the world. She is only three years old, but she has already learned to find, even at night, a basin to vomit in and a cloth to clean herself with afterwards.
Most nights, now, I sleep on the floor beside her bed.

I no longer try to find play groups or Guadarias for her, as I had done when we’d first arrived in Seville. It’s clear to me that she’s better when I’m looking after her myself. We spend our days by ourselves going out to parks, playing on swings, or with our friend Cati, a painter, and her son of about the same age, Javier. Still, from time to time I try to write. An American girl, Megan, takes Xan to the park for two hours so I can finish a review of a Carmen Martin Gaite novel. Then there is Fina, former nanny of my other friend, Sandra—she’s perfectly willing to help, but the trouble is that Xan doesn’t like Fina, even though there is a great deal of excitement surrounding Fina’s forthcoming wedding. Once or twice Xan has gone to Fina’s apartment to watch Fina and her bridesmaids try on dresses. Now she wants to know who she—Xan—is going to marry. She wonders if it could be daddy or granddad or grandma, and I explain that she has to find a boy her own age. This morning she looks at a pair of Javier’s sandals that Cati has given her.
“When I get big, Javier will get big too. He is a boy. I could marry Javier. This is what I would like to do. I am going to marry Javier. Mummy, how do you get married?”
I tell her that you have to make promises.

The maid, Maria Luisa seldom turns up and never on Mondays. This time it’s because of a problem in la boca and having to go al medico. Maria Luisa cannot tolerate children, but for the moment, because of the constant wind that blows a coating of red dust over the floors and walls and furniture every day, and thus the necessity of constant cleaning, I am prepared to tolerate her. Our friends tell us, too, that it will look very bad if we don’t employ a maid. It’s our social duty. Besides, Maria Luisa came with a recommendation from the nuns. Cati is away in Madrid where her brother, a rock star, hosts a television show. She phones to say that Javier has flubbed his television debut on “Sopa das Gansas”. Although he has a loud foghorn voice—strange in a little boy—he would only mouth the words he was supposed to say and he refused absolutely to sing. She thinks they’ll return soon to Seville because there is a big dog in the house where her brother lives with his new Argentinean girlfriend...

With Michael in Prague, Maria Louisa absent and Xan having surfaced from another episode of acute tonsillitis, I accept Cati’s invitation to go with her and Javier, to Los Canos de Meca, a beach village, at Cape Trafalgar. I’m excited by the idea—maybe I’ll be able to write something about the battle area? I do some preliminary research at the English library, taking an entire afternoon, with several café stops on the way, with Xan. In the library itself, deep inside the Barrio Santa Cruz, I settle Xan with a colouring book and crayons.
“Just before the battle started, Nelson had written out a prayer for victory in his cabin: To Him I resign myself and the just cause which is entrusted to me to defend.” ‘Then Nelson sent his famous signal: “With an air of boyish cheerfulness he called to his flag lieutenant: ‘Mr. Pasco, I wish to say to the fleet, England confides that every man will do his duty. You must be quick, for I have one more to make, which is for close action.’ Pasco asked to be allowed to use expects instead of confides because expects was in Popham’s signal book, but confides would have to be spelt out. ‘That will do, Pasco, make it directly’, Nelson said. And at 11:35 the most famous battle signal ever made was hoisted to Victory’s yards and mastheads.
I like the notion of this careful consideration of words under duress. I like the next bit I read, too:
‘To tell you the truth of it’ wrote one of Collingwood’s sailors, an Oxfordshire youth named Sam, ‘when the game began, I wished myself at Warnborough with my plough again; but when they had given us one duster, and I found myself snug and tight, I bid fear kiss my bottom, and set to in good earnest, and thought no more about being killed than if I were at Murrell Green Fair, and I was presently as busy and as black as a collier.”

Jenny picks the four of us up near Cati’s apartment the following afternoon. Jenny, whom I assume to be Cati’s friend, seems cross when we get in. There is a rapid discussion about money and Cati whispers that I’ll have to give her some, which I do. Jenny’s little girl shares the front with her, and the rest of us cram in the back. It is terribly hot. The children, each in turn and never in concert, keep having to stop to pee—not surprising considering the amount of juice and water we are making them drink to keep cool. After the second stop, Jenny’s rage is barely contained and Javier—big for his age and unused to sitting still, —is virtually out of control. Still, during the remainder of the two and a half hour drive, I see the outskirts of Cadiz, the great salt pans along the shore, the agglomeration of modern industrialization and tourist services and traditional Andalusian culture (horseback and donkeys) that characterizes the area. Jenny unbends enough to explain that many of the houses in the area have been built with remains of Battle of Trafalgar ships. She points some of these out to me.
I’ve been to the east—the other side of Trafalgar before the land between it and Tarifa consists of uninhabited pine covered slopes, steep cliffs, and sweeping sand dunes. Much of this land is occupied by the Spanish army. Only the hardiest venture on the beaches because of the notorious Levante wind. For some reason, the pockets of stalwart individuals are inevitably nudists. I suppose, as I gaze out the window, trying to ignore Javier’s flying fists, his refusal to stay in a seatbelt (“Maraleen,” Cati says, when I insist about the seatbelt, “you are so German!”) that I’m ready for anything. This approach from the west would be the direction that Nelson came.
We arrive at Los Canos de Meca, a tightly connected mish-mash of white-washed and palm-frond beach dwellings, and make our way to the house of Cati’s’ friend, Maria del Mar and her German boyfriend. There is no one home, no food in the house, no sign at all that we are expected. Cati has brought a bag of zucchini with her. We boil these and serve them with mayonnaise for dinner. Both children are ill. We spread blankets on the floor of the main room and try to sleep, but Javier has a cough and he coughs until he vomits. He does this eight times during the night, all over the blankets, each time waking up Xan who cries from the pain in her throat and her ears. She has a fever and a sore stomach. We are tormented by mosquitoes. I finally put her on a little couch and lie there holding her.
Sometime in the darkness, the owners return. I open my eyes to see them peer at us, say, Oh! And go upstairs. It’s utterly clear that they aren’t expecting us, and perhaps have no idea who we might be.
“Maraleen!” Cati says in the morning, “I have had a dream!” It’s about Xan—she is about ten years old and is having a baby. She is all by herself in a great big hospital where rows and rows of women are giving birth. But she is unconcerned, reading magazines. Cati is trying to find a bed so she can be near her. In the dream I say to Cati about Xan’s nanny, “She hasn’t been doing a very good job of looking after her.”

We leave the house while the owners are still asleep, scuff through sand, and climb dune after dune, the children struggling through each step, the wind blowing sand into our faces, pitting into all exposed skin. When we finally reach the turbulent blue-green sea, Xan sits, huddled in a blanket despite the heat, and refuses to move. The sand blows so hard at us, we have to keep our eyes closed. After an hour or so, we walk to a café where Javier spots a billiard table. He picks up a cue and starts hitting the balls on the table, completely disrupting the game in progress. I take the cue away, and then he and Xan attack the video machines, trying to activate the games by brute force. When our drinks arrive, we go outside—I’m anxious to get away without further disaster—but as Javier passes a table he sweeps his arm across it, taking all the glasses onto the cement pad and breaking them. The people at the table—horrible people, Cati says—shout at us.

The house owners aren’t getting along with us or with each other, so we stay that night in a little unfinished shed nearby. It’s open to the weather—which is pleasant—and its cane and frond roof clicks cheerfully in the wind. After another dinner of boiled zucchini, when the children begin to settle down, Cati tells me the story of G. whom she fell in love with in London, of her affair with him, and of his promises of marrying her. When she became pregnant, he told her that he was already married but that he was getting divorced. They arranged to marry, she went home to Seville to get ready, then he phoned and said he had AIDS. She got herself tested—it was negative. She was the first person in Seville to be tested for AIDS. I know something of Cati’s background: this is no small matter.
When the baby was born, she was taken in by Michael and Kitty for whom she’d been cleaning. One morning they found her saying that she was going to kill the baby. They called Cati’s mother who arrived from Spain and took her home. The story does much to explain the tensions I’ve felt in Cati’s parents’ apartment, and why her mother is so reluctant to let Cati live on her own. Gradually though, my friend is turning her painting studio into living quarters. Recently she’s made a ‘bedroom’ for Javier out of a tent set in the middle of the floor.
It so happens that I’ve met G. He came to Seville to see his son for the first time since Cati had left London. He insisted on meeting him before agreeing to pay child support. He watched Javier interact with the other children in the square near where we live, turned to me and M. and said, “I’m afraid of him.”

I wake up about five in the morning and look around. There is Xan, there is Cati, but where is Javier? I look out the window opening and see him, about 300 metres away, just disappearing over the top of a sand dune in the direction of the beach. I pause for two seconds—the thought comes that I could just let him go—but of course I leap up, run after him and persuade him to come back; then I try to stay awake so that he won’t slip out again as he wants to. Where does he think he is going?

The path out to Cape Trafalgar runs nearby Los Canos de Meca. I can see how to get to it and calculate how long it would take me to walk to the end—maybe an hour or so—but moment by moment my hope of actually getting there diminishes. Xan is too sick, Javier too badly behaved. We have got to go home. The German boyfriend, Rudiger, who has warmed to us, agrees, when I ask, to drive us to Barbate, an ugly tunny-fishing village, where we can catch the bus. Maria del Mar does not speak to us at all. To keep the children in their seats as the bus puffs and wheezes along little back roads, stopping at all the villages, we sing Sana, sana, culito de rana, si no se te cura hoy, se te curare manana—all the long way home.

About a month later, I see Rudiger in a bar near my house in Seville. He is upset and morose. Maria del Mar has been found in flagrante delicto with an Englishman in a hotel. He is desolate. He is going to the Canary Islands to work as a hotel recreation director. They do not know if they can keep their house at the beach. The government wants to take it over as a park. They are protesting, but it is true they are squatters.

Of course I’ve written nothing about Trafalgar since our visit, and little else of any note. But Xan is getting stronger. Some days Cati takes her to the Tennis Club where she and Javier swim in the pool and I try to work a little on my novel set in the Arctic. Sometimes we visit galleries, or have coffee in Cati’s studio. One day she even tries to teach me to paint; but most days the four of us walk to the little working class neighbourhood pool of San Bernardo and just try to keep cool.

*Material about Nelson is taken from Lord Nelson, The Immortal Memory, by David Howarth and Stephen Howarth, Viking, 1989, New York.