COMING TO CONCLUSIONS

The Autobiography of Peter Tristan Stuart

by

Gene C. McCoy

CHAPTER 4

Leaving Barcelona the next morning the air was fresh and cool, and I wore a heavy sheepskin car coat and a wool visored cap as protection against the cold. Once out of the city, on the open highway to Madrid, I let my mind wander. I tried to assimilate all that had happened to me in the short span of a few weeks. My mind wrestled to grasp, label and pigeonhole the people who I had met that did not fit the preconceived stereotypes that I carried in my head. Merche did not fit my notion of a maid; Andre did not fit my mental mold of a Christian missionary, and Rosa Mercedes Serrano did not fit my idea of a prostitute. I didn't know how all of what I was experiencing fit with U.S. foreign policy, but I did not think too long on that anomaly. I did not want to think about it. If anything I hoped that my superiors would not discover that my job assignment had very little to do with American foreign policy and assign me to some dull routine of researching and writing economic reports on balance of payments, GNP, trade and commerce.

Everything seemed too good to be true as I drove across the Spanish countryside. Only someone who has had a dream come true, realized a fantasy, made the ideal real, can know the bliss that I experienced that morning. I was totally absorbed in the now and reveling in every second of it. I could not have felt any better if I were having an orgasm.

By noon I was in Zaragoza and I pulled into a CAMSA gas station for gasoline. I inquired about the best place to eat lunch and was told that there was an inn on the other side of town that was quite good.

The restaurant, a small whitewashed, red tile roofed roadside place was about five miles up the highway, and was called La Venta del Gitano Cojo, The Inn of the Crippled Gypsy. It was run by Manolo el cojo, a retired gypsy flamenco dance coach who had been a teacher for several famous women dancers. The walls were covered with photos of Manolo with some of his famous proteges in various seductive, flamenco poses with outstretched, bare arms and castanets dangling from their fingers.

Manolo was friendly and spoke with a raspy, cante hondo, singer's voice. He welcomed me to a table near a fireplace, and recommended the special, cordero asado, roast lamb, then placed a pitcher of red wine on the table.

I ordered the special then picked up the pitcher and filled my glass. The meal was excellent and along with the environment in the restaurant seemed almost as though it were part of a script that I had written in my dreams. Just two years earlier I had been living in Connecticut, and as autumn came on and my thirtieth birthday approached I had been depressed. On my birthday I had raked and burned leaves then mixed a large pitcher of martinis, and cried that life had passed me by. Now, practically on the eve of my thirty-second birthday I was full of expectation as to what life held for me.

This was an exciting time to be working for the government. The idealism of the Kennedy administration was manifesting in the forming of the Peace Corps, and the Alliance for Progress. In Spain, even though Franco was clearly in charge, U.S. policy was not to just build military bases to fight the Cold War. We were also interested in humanitarian concerns, economic development and a "long twilight struggle, year in and year out, 'rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation,' a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself." Spain was the ideal place for a born again, knee jerk "For Whom the Bell Tolls" liberal like me.

Shortly after I got back to Madrid our household effects arrived from New Jersey, and we moved into a large three bedroom apartment about two miles from the American Embassy. My Daughter Laurie started school in a small Spanish kindergarten, Drew became fast friends with Vincentin, the son of the local butcher, and both of the children began speaking Spanish as their first language. With an apartment, a car and servants we were ready to begin our lives as diplomats in Spain, but Marsha was less enthusiastic about it than I. Marsha wished that she were back home in La Crescenta with her friends and her mother.

I tried to go about my business, enjoy the new life and people we met, and I hoped that Marsha would eventually come around, open up, and share some of my enthusiasm.

We were having breakfast together one morning, and I encouraged Marsha to get out of the house and talk to someone. She said that everyone was always too busy.

"Maybe if you got busy on something, you might find that you liked Spain as much as I do," I said.

"I don't need you to tell me how to live my life, Pete, and tell me what I should be interested in."

"That's true, Marsha," I said and left to walk to the embassy.

Even though my job would require frequent travel throughout Spain I was still getting settled in at home and reviewing files in the embassy, but in just a little over a month Tom Blacka called me into his office.

"How are things going?" he asked and gestured for me to sit down in one of the leather chairs pulled up around a coffee table. Tom's secretary served coffee to both of us.

"Fine," I said. "I'm beginning to get a handle on the program, and I'll be ready to get into the field soon."

"That's what I want to talk to you about," Tom said and sipped his coffee. "I don't know whether you've run across it in the files, but we've had a lot of reports that the parish priests down south in Andalucia have been charging for the food we give them when they distribute it to the people."

"That's against the law and the bi-lateral agreement," I said. "Right, but I think they do it anyway. We've never been able to prove that they use the money they get for personal gain. For the most part they use it to buy medicines and other things the poor people need. Nevertheless, we can't allow then to charge for the food."

"I agree with you," I said. "It would be bad news if the press picked it up, and it's just not right that they charge for what we intend to be given free."

"You've got the picture," Tom said, then handed me a letter. "We got this letter from a woman down in the province of Granada,"

I took the letter from him and read it. Written in Spanish in a belabored, childish scrawl it was addressed to the ambassador, and said that the priest in her village was charging for the food, which in her words was "donated by the people of America to the poor people of Spain." She had complained to the priest about the charges, and he had cut her off from the donations. She did not think that the priest had done right by her. The letter was signed Manuela la Cabrera, Viuda de Sanchez, Manuela the goat herd, widow of Sanchez.

"Do you want me to turn this over to Andre and ask him to look into it?" I asked.

"No, I want you to take a long trip through Andalucia, and stop in to see this woman. Find out what's going on. After you get back and have some evidence, we'll talk to Andre."

"Fine," I said. "I can leave in the morning."

The next morning I took a small Peugeot sedan out of the embassy motor pool and headed south toward Granada and Andalucia.

* * * * *

Andalucia is a cultural tidelands where over the centuries Celtic, Phoenician, Greek, Carthaginian, Roman, Visigothic and Arabic civilizations have flourished and faded, but each has left its imprint in the faces, figures and culture of the people.

Andalucia is the place where the Arab's love of symmetry and the Spaniard's passion for a romantic setting found one another and gave birth to a style of architecture that the Spanish carried to the New World where it persists even today.

Andalucia is rich in folklore, and tradition. It is both stark and majestic, and the peasant women of Andalucia are flesh and blood examples of the beauty produced by the thousands of years of breeding and mixing of Mediterranean cultures and genes. They are tall, big boned, broad hipped and full busted with long black shiny hair, and their arabic and gypsy roots can be seen in their high cheek bones, aquiline noses and olive complexions.

I had seen what had been carried forward by the conquistadores from Andalucia to the New World. I had seen silent testimony to the persistence of Spanish Andalucian culture tucked away in the patios of red tile roofed, whitewashed houses in the dusty villages that cling to the sides of the high mountains in Mexico.

The air was cool and crisp. The sky was a Velasquez blue, and the olive groves and grape vineyards seemed to stretch into infinity.

It was late in the afternoon when I turned off the main highway between Granada and Malaga to head through vineyards, olive groves and pastures into the Sierra Bermejas mountains that rise up behind the Mediterranean sea. To the side of the road peasants were trudging homeward from the fields. The men, dressed in black smocks and wearing black berets or soft wool visored caps, walked beside their ox-drawn carts while the women and children rode atop the loads of hay. Occasionally there were groups of three or four horsemen, vaqueros, wearing the flat crowned, sombreros cordoveses, that are as much the trademark of an Andalucian cowboy as the Stetson is of their American counterparts. In the pastures herds of broad shouldered black fighting bulls grazed with an air of serenity that belied their fierce, wild animal nature.

The sun was low in the sky when I crossed a small bridge over a fast running river to enter the village of Rio Frio. Narrow cobbled lanes zigzagged up the slopes through the whitewashed, red tiled village clinging precariously to the side of the mountains.

Stopping the car, I checked the letter for the address of Manuela la Cabrera's house. It was number seven on La Calle de la Vida y la Muerte. I asked a peasant for directions and continued on my way to finally pull up in front of a typical whitewashed Andalucian village house.

The hill was steep, and I turned the wheels of the car into the curb then climbed out. A tiger striped cat seated beside potted geraniums on the window sill at the side of a pair of hand carved wood doors blinked his eyes at me. The air was filled with a mixture of the fragrance of wood smoke, orange blossoms, garlic and olive oil. I rang the bell and waited.

The door opened; I was stunned by the majesty of the woman who stood before me, her arm hooked around a child straddling her broad hips. Tall, full busted and dressed in a long, faded cotton skirt, a khaki shirt and a pair of blue canvas, rope soled alpargatas, Manuela la Cabrera looked like a Sorolla portrait of a Spanish peasant woman.

"Es usted Manuela la Cabrera?" I asked.

"Pues, si,señor, a sus ordenes," she answered in a clear firm voice.

"I don't want to frighten you, but did you write this letter to the American Ambassador?" I asked and held out the letter to her.

She looked at me then at the letter. She was suspicious.

"Don't worry, no harm will come to you." I tried to reassure her.

She took the letter in her hand and nodded her head. "Si, la escribí." Yes, I wrote it. She handed the letter back to me.

"My name is Stuart, and I'm from the American Embassy in Madrid. May I talk to you for a moment?" I said in Spanish.

"Pues, sí, señor, pase usted."

I stepped through the doorway into a patio that was a painter's pallet of color with red and pink geraniums, purple bougainvillaea, green ferns and philodendrons all shaded by a gnarled and twisted olive tree. In one corner a fountain gurgled softly. Chickens pecked at the chafe on the hard earthen floor. I asked Manuela if she liked the food that the Americans gave to Spain.

"Pues, si señor, porque hay mucha hambre en esta casa." Yes, sir, because there is a lot of hunger in this house, she replied in her clear steady voice.

I looked down at the five other children, dressed in clean but ragged clothes, who had come out of the house to hide behind her skirt while she talked to me, and I was touched by the simple eloquence of her reply. I was reminded that in Spanish very complicated, gut wrenching, issues can be expressed in very simple words.

Manuela told me that the priest in the village was mad at her because, even though she was a widow, she kept having children, and that is why he cut her off from receiving the ayuda americana.

"I don't mind paying the five pesetas the priest charges for the food, but I won't let him tell me what I can do with my body. That's really why I wrote the letter," she said. "Why doesn't he tell me how not to have babies?"

I thought that the priest probably had told her how to avoid having babies, but his solution was not the one she wanted to hear, so I ducked her last question. I told Manuela that the priest had no right to charge for the food, and that without mentioning her name I would talk to him. I told her that she should go back to the priest the next day to request the regular ration, and that If he didn't give it to her she should write to me again. I gave her one of my business cards.

"Won't you take a coffee? she asked and gestured toward the door of the house.

"Thank you, no," I replied. "I want to go to the church to see the priest before mass. I thank you very much for your time." I turned to walk toward the door.

"Es por nada," she replied. "Vaya usted con Dios."

I left the house and walked down the hill to the church where I entered and found the priest lighting the candles in preparation for the evening vespers. I walked to the communion rail. "Are you the parish priest," I asked in Spanish.

The priest turned and looked at me then walked to the rail. "Yes, I'm Father Juaquin Murieta," he said and offered his hand.

"My name is Pete Stuart, and I'm from the American Embassy in Madrid. May I talk to you for a few minutes, Father Juaquin?"

"Yes of course," he said. "You're from the American Embassy in Madrid?" he asked. His voice had a tone of shocked, incredulous disbelief.

"Yes," I replied and removed the red leather diplomatic carnet issued by the Foreign Office, and offered it to him. The priest waved the carnet aside. "Oh, I believe you, but I have never seen an American in this village, and its hard to imagine that one has come all the way from the American Embassy in Madrid. Will you come into my house for coffee?"

"No, Father Juaquin, thank you. I know that you are getting ready to say mass, and I don't want to take up too much of your time."

He came down the stairs and together we walked out of the church into the courtyard.

"Please don't worry about my time. I'm honored to have a visit from the American Embassy. What can I do for you." He pulled a soft black beret out from under his cassock and slipped it on his head.

"Father Juaquin, I'm on an inspection trip of the parishes which receive the American food aid, and I must tell you that we have received reports that some priests are charging the people for the food. I think you know that charging money for this food is not allowed."

"Oh, yes, of course, I know that. No charge is allowable."

"Nor is it permissable to deny food to peo ple because they don't go to church, or don't live by the sacraments," I said.

"Oh yes, I understand that, too," he said. "Can you take just a moment to let me show you where we have the food stored?"

"Yes, I can, Father. You lead the way." I followed him to a doorway in the house on the opposite side of the courtyard. He opened the door, reached inside and turned on a light, then stood aside and gestured for me to enter.

Inside was a neat, well swept room. Stacked on pallets were several bags of powdered milk and wheat flour, and on the shelves against the wall were cans of cheese and cooking oil. All of the bags and cans bore the inscription "Donated by the people of the United States of American - NOT TO BE SOLD." On the shelves, beside the food there was a variety of bottles and small boxes containing drugs and pharmaceuticals. "In addition to the food, I have these few drugs that I can give to the people when they are sick," he said with pride.

"Where do you get the money to buy the drugs?" I asked.

"From donations by the people," the priest replied.

"But the donations are not made in conjunction with the American food?" I asked.

"Oh no, the food is free to everyone who is needy," he said. "And in this village everyone is needy."

"Good," I said. "I mean good that the food is free, not good that everyone is needy."

The priest laughed. "I understood what you meant," he said.

We walked back out to the courtyard. "Since the entire village is needy I suppose that everyone receives food?" I asked.

"Oh, yes. Practically everyone."

"Good," I repeated. "You know if we receive complaints that the food is not given freely to anyone who needs it, the program could be terminated." I offered my hand to the priest. "I thank you very much for your time, Father Juaquin. I think I better get on my way."

"I understand," he said and nodded his head. "Thank you for coming by, Mr. Stuart. I hope you will come again sometime. God bless you, my son."

"Thank you, Father. Goodbye." I turned and walked out of the courtyard back to where the car was parked. I had completed my first diplomatic mission, and it had not been what in my fantasies I had imagined it would be. Nevertheless I felt good, and I was pretty sure that Manuela would once again receive her regular ration of food.

* * * * *

I spent the night in a small pension in Granada, and over the next four days I worked my way west through the villages of Santafe, Loja, Antequera, and Moron de la Frontera toward Sevilla. In each of the villages I talked to the parish priests, and many of the beneficiaries of the food aid. By the time I got to Sevilla I was certain that there was a regular pattern of charging small amounts for the food, but I was convinced that the money collected was used to buy drugs and medicines for the people. In my mind I was not clear as to what was right. The charges for the food were nominal, and the collections were put to a good use. But in a strict interpretation of the law they were illegal. Maybe the law should be changed, I thought.

It was late Friday afternoon when I arrived in Sevilla to check into the Andalucia Palace Hotel. After a shower to wash away the dust that seemed to have accumulated in every pore and orifice, and a light supper I crawled into a big feather bed and slept a trouble free sleep until the next morning when I was awakened by the sound of church bells.

Gene McCoy © July 1998

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