I was up early the next morning, and by six o'clock I was on my way to Coin
and Alora, two villages on the coastal slope of the Sierra Bermejas mountains.
Pepe's restaurant was not yet open for breakfast, so I stopped at a little stall
on the main plaza in Torremolinos where I saw a cluster of people buying
fresh churros, the Spanish equivalent to donuts. Using a reed, the woman
in the stall tied the churros together, and carrying them with me I
walked to the Bar Central to order a cafe con leche.
Two or three other people were sitting at the tables. I noticed that the
mother of the Algerian, mother, daughter, refugee couple was sitting with a
bronzed, nordic God, and I guessed that he must be her lover, Jurgen. They were
having an argument, and the woman was crying. I wondered if she had learned that
she was sharing Jurgen with her daughter.
I had been in Torremolinos less than twenty-four hours and already, thanks
to Marge Winslow, the people had taken on a flesh and blood significance for me.
I knew a piece of their story. They were not just bodies and faces in a cafe.
A willowy, long legged, suntanned Scandinavian woman wearing a white tennis
dress, and carrying a tennis racket walked by the cafe. She smiled, and I
smiled back. The thought crossed my mind that she could be Marge's friend
Birgitta. At least I hoped she was. She was as much a Nordic Goddess, as Jurgen
was a God.
I finished my churros and coffee, paid the bill and walked back to
the embassy Peugeot to go to work, but my heart was not in it. I would have
preferred to play tennis with Birgitta, walk on the beach, or just sit in the
Bar Central. I was in a mood to play, and I felt a twinge of envy of the people
who lived in this self-fulfilling environment, free to do what they wanted. They
seemed able to create the values they wished to esteem on a day to day basis,
and were not hampered by the need to work, nor the psychological shackles of the
American protestant work ethic. I wondered how they did it? How did they pay for
it? Later I would learn that most of the women had husbands or at one time had
husbands and now received alimony. A few of the men were retired from government
jobs back in Paris, London, Stockholm and Copenhagen, others were artists or
writers, and some lived off the women. But always, somewhere in the background
of either time or space, there was a man who worked or had worked. Almost
everyone lived off the sweat of some man's brow.
I went on to Coin, and using my forest of pencils reports, I tracked down
beneficiaries and parish priests, but I only half listened as the clergymen
explained their programs to me. In my mind I was back in Torremolinos. None of
the priests were as imaginative or resourceful as Father Dino Garibaldi, so I
told them how Dino was using the flour sacks and left over tin from the oil and
cheese cans as raw material for his cottage industry. They seemed interested,
and volunteered that they would look into Dino's activities to see if they could
be replicated in their villages. That's the way technology is transferred, I
thought, and remembered my introduction to economic development lecture at the
Foreign Service Institute. Replication and the multiplier effect are the keys to
successful development projects, they had told me, and I wondered how Father
Dino would feel about the competition. Which of his philosophies would prevail?
His training as an Harvard MBA, or his priestly, good shepherd, desire to
"leverage up the people?"
I gave Dino the benefit of the doubt and decided that he did not have a
large ego investment in his projects. He would be happy if the people benefited
from his ideas whether he had a hand in it or not. "Enough that the work be
done, let the recognition go to others," I imagined he would say.
After lunch in a small country inn, I headed back to Torremolinos, and
arrived at the Playa Monte Mar about four in the afternoon. I changed to my
bathing suit, took a swim and a walk on the beach, then had a long
siesta. At eight o'clock I left the hotel to drive to Marge Winslow's house.
The maze of narrow twisting lanes at the base of the Bajondillo were
jammed with parked cars. There were a couple of Porsches, a Mercedes 220 sedan,
one or two Volvos, a BMW, and a covey of Spanish Seat 600s. Most of them, except
the Seats, had Scandinavian license plates, and Marge's funny little grey
Citroen had red French TT plates.
I had to park my embassy Peugeot a block away from her house, but I could
hear Chubby Checkers pounding out the Peppermint Twist from the moment I climbed
out of the car. The street in front of Marge's house was filled with children
twisting to the music that boomed from inside.
Walking through a small garden, I entered the house and found Marge talking
to the least attractive woman I had seen in Torremolinos. She had been with the
polyglot group the evening before at the Bar Central. She had been drunk, and
argumentative, and I hoped that she was not Marge's friend, Birgitta. I looked
around for the Nordic Goddess I had seen dressed in tennis clothes that morning,
but I didn't spot her.
"Pete, hi!" Marge said. "You made it!" She threw her hands into the air,
then embraced me and kissed my cheeks. "I was afraid you weren't coming. This is
my friend Nannette, she's just leaving." Marge turned to look at her guest.
"Sure you won't stay a while longer, Nannette?"
"No, Marge, really, I have to go," Nannette looked at me and tried to smile.
"How do you do, Nannette," I said and took her hand. "My name's Pete. I saw you
last night in the Bar Central."
"Oh God!" she said and put her hand to her face. "Did you have to remind me.
I've got to go, Marge, before anybody else reminds me of last night." She turned
to leave. "Bye bye. Nice to have met you, Pete," Nannette said, and walked
through the garden to the street.
"I didn't get off to a very good start with your guests, Marge. I'm sorry,"
I said.
"Not to worry," Marge dismissed my faux pas with a wave of her hand.
She wore rings on every finger. "That's just Nan. Sometimes she drinks too much
and it takes her a couple of days to get over it. She's recovering from a broken
heart. Come on let's find Birgitta, I told her you were coming."
Looking over the faces for the woman in the white tennis dress, I followed
Marge across the room to a garden in the back of the house. Standing alone in
the garden was the young tennis player.
"Birgitta," Marge said. This is my friend, Pete."
I offered my hand. "Hello, Birgitta, I saw you this morning in the plaza.
Did you have a good tennis game?"
"Yes." Like Ingrid, she inhaled when she said yes, so that it came out like
a little orgasmic gasp. "And I saw you eating churros and drinking coffee
in the Bar Central," she said.
A bearded, suntanned young man, who I thought looked English, pushed through
the crowd and took Marge's hand. "Come on Marge, let's do the twist," he sang
and pulled her toward the house.
"Bob, wait!" she squealed. "I want you to meet, my friend Pete. He's another
Californian."
"Hi, Pete. I'm Bob Balzac, no relation to the man of French letters. That's
my wife Cyn over there twisting her ass off. We're both from L.A." He offered
his hand then tugged on Marge. "Come on Marge, let's do the twist," he sang
again, and pulled her to the dance floor. Marge seemed more than willing to
dance.
"Marge tells me that you live in Madrid," Birgitta said.
"Yes, I work there."
"In the American Embassy?" she said.
"Yes," I replied and smiled at her. I inhaled to mimic her Swedish way of
speaking.
"How exciting. Are you a spy?" she asked and smiled, but she sounded as
though she were serious.
"If I were a spy, you wouldn't know that I worked in the embassy. Spies have
deep covers. They don't tell people they work in the embassy," I replied and
laughed at her innocence.
"My husband says that everybody who works in an embassy is a spy." She still
sounded serious.
"I don't want to argue with your husband, but he's wrong," I said.
"You may be right," she shouted over Chubby Checkers' voice blasting from a
stereo speaker at near full volume. "My husband is wrong about a lot of things."
I reached out and snatched a drink off the tray of a passing waiter, then
tasted it. It was rum and soda. "How about you? Can I get you a drink?"
"Thank you, no. I don't drink much alcohol," she said. "Sometimes I drink a
little wine with dinner, but that's all. I don't like the taste. Maybe we could
go into the kitchen and find a soda."
"Let's try." I said and took her by the arm. We went into the house to shove
our way through the room crowded with dancers amid the conversation clusters.
We pushed through a swinging door to the kitchen, and it was a relief when
the door snapped closed. I opened the refrigerator to look inside. "There's
Coke, Kas and Orange Crush," I said.
"I'll take a Coke, please," she said.
"What does your husband do?" I opened
the bottle and handed it to her.
"He's a journalist," she replied.
"And you just came down here to get away from the cold and find some sun?" I
asked.
"No, not exactly. He moved in with another woman," she said. "I think she's
someone who won't argue with him about some of his crazy ideas the way I do."
She put the coke bottle to her mouth, and tipped it up to drink.
"Such as his idea that everybody who works in an embassy is a spy?" I said
and laughed.
She laughed along with me. "That and other things. We march to different
drummers."
"I know the feeling," I said.
"You have a wife, don't you?" she said more as a statement than a question.
"Marge told me."
"Yes, and we march to different drums, too. I guess you could say that we're
separated. She's in the States with our children right now." I took a swallow of
my drink, and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. I offered one to her. "Do you
smoke?"
"No thanks. I don't smoke, but you go ahead."
I lit the cigarette. "So much for our husbands and wives. Let's talk about
you. What do you do down here in Torremolinos?"
"I read a lot, play tennis, swim, take care of my two children, and go to
parties." She shrugged her shoulders. "I don't know, I just live here. Marge
thinks I'm wasting my life, but I tell her that I'm happy."
"I think Marge is a high energy person. She likes to be always involved,
moving, twisting," I said.
"Yes," she inhaled again with her little orgasmic gasp. "Marge likes you a
lot. She said if she weren't going to marry Ralph, she'd go after you."
"I like Marge, too, but I think she's too old for me," I said.
"How old do you think Marge is?" she asked.
"I don't know - forty maybe?"
"She's fifty, but don't tell her I told you. Marge is like a lot of American
women. They always look and act like they're about thirty five. Do you play
tennis?" she asked.
"Put it this way, I own a tennis racket, but I don't have it with me," I
replied.
"If you'd like to play someday, I can borrow one for you," she said.
"I would like to play," I said. "I have to work tomorrow, but I could play
in the afternoon. How would you like to go with me to Ronda tomorrow? I have
some work I have to do up there," I said.
"To do some spying?" she asked and smiled at me.
"Sort of," I laughed. "Spying on priests and poor people."
"I'd love to go with you," she said and took my arm. "Come on let's go back
to the party. I'll introduce you to some of the people."
We walked back out to the garden where Marge was talking to Balzac and his
wife, Cyn. Birgitta already knew the Balzacs, so I introduced myself to Cyn.
"So you're in the embassy in Madrid, Pete. Fantastic!" Bob Balzac said. "Cyn
and I live in Madrid, too." He reached in his pocket, pulled out his wallet then
handed me one of his cards. "Do you have a card," he asked.
I pulled out my wallet, removed a card, and gave it to Balzac. He read it
aloud. "Pete Tristan Stuart, Second Secretary." He rubbed his thumb over the
engraved print. "Impressive. Who's the First Secretary?"
"There are several," I replied.
"What do you do as a Second Secretary?"
"I do the typing. The First Secretary takes dictation," I said and Balzac
laughed. "The Second Secretary is just a rank, like in the military - Major, Lt.
Colonel, Colonel and so forth. It doesn't mean anything. I'm in the Economic
Section," I said.
"A Second Secretary is like a Second Lieutenant, then?"
"No, that's a Third Secretary. They serve the coffee," I replied.
They all laughed. "That's great!" Balzac said. "I'm a painter, but I work
for an advertising agency, and Cyn is a sculptress. Let's get together in
Madrid. We're going back in the morning. Call me or I'll call you." Bob pulled
Cyn toward the dance floor, and Marge moved on to another group of people.
Sometime later Balzac did call me, and we all turned out to be good friends.
I eventually came to see that the Balzacs collected people the way that some
people collect, baseball cards, buttons, or matchbook covers. They didn't have
an embassy person in their collection, so I was a rare find for them. I always
thought that Cyn was a better artist than Bob, but they were both good.
"Can I have one of your cards?" Birgitta asked.
"Sure," I replied and gave one to her.
She looked at it. "Your middle name is Tristan. It's English," she said.
"Are you English?"
"No," I replied. "I think I was named after my mother's father. He died
before I was born."
"That's sad," Birgitta said.
"I know," I said.
"But you're not sad are you?" she asked.
"No," I replied. "I'm not sad."
"Good," she said. "I'm not sad either. That's my husband's problem. He's
gloomy and heavy, and you don't know what gloomy is until you've seen it in a
Swede. He thinks another woman will fix him."
"I can see that you're not gloomy and heavy," I said. "You're light and
air."
"I try to be," she said and smiled. "I have my days though. After all, I am
Swedish, and we all have a streak of melancholy in us." Birgitta took me in tow
to circulate through the party and introduce me to people. Jurgen slipped
between his mother and daughter lovers with skill, and they all seemed happy.
What ever problem the mother was having in the morning seemed to have passed.
I met Christian, a Danish music composer, and Birgitta whispered to me that
he was Nannette's last lover, then we talked to Yvette who was Christian's
current interest.
Birgitta had a little piece of gossip to tell about everyone we met, and as
it got near ten o'clock I asked her if she was going to dinner.
"Not unless you invite me," she said.
"I invite you," I said. "Where would you like to go? The only place I know
is the Playa Monte Mar where I'm staying."
"That's the best restaurant in Torremolinos, but since you've been there we
can go to Manolo's on the Calle San Miguel. They have good fish. Does
that sound all right?"
"That sounds fine," I said. "You lead the way."
She took my hand and we pushed our way toward the door, but the party looked
as though it would continue for several more hours. We stopped to say goodnight
to Marge, and she was pleased to see that Birgitta and I were leaving together.
"I see I made a good match," Marge said and kissed us both on the cheeks. "Don't
do anything I wouldn't do," she said and laughed. "That gives you a lot of
latitude. Come back and see me, Pete, or maybe I'll see you in Madrid one of
these days."
"That sounds great, Marge. Thanks a lot for the invitation," I said and
kissed her cheek.
Birgitta and I walked out of the garden down the street to my car, and I
opened the door for her, then walked to my side. By the time I got to the door,
Birgitta had reached over to pull up the lock to let me in. That was the first
time a woman had ever done that for me, and I was touched by her consideration.
This simple gesture of courtesy was, I would learn, common among Continental,
Scandinavian and English women. It had not been widely adopted by their American
sisters in the States, however.
