Spanish Lessons

A Taste of Oranges The two civil guards wore black tricorn hats, capes and olive green uniforms. And although they were mounted on angular bicycles they looked as sinister as their predecessors had in the civil war that had torn Spain apart in the 1930's. It was late December and the citrus trees that covered most of the plain separating the Mediterranean from the mountains on the Costa Blanca of Spain were heavy with oranges, lemons and grapefruit. They looked so beguiling that Diane and I stole a couple of oranges. We were eating them, juice trickling down our chins, in our venerable, chocolate-brown Jaguar when the two Guardia Civil stopped beside us. Maybe pinching oranges was a heinous crime in Spain. Tales were still rife after the death of the dictator General Francisco Franco of foreigners being imprisoned for years without trial for unspecified offenses. I imagined us lying on straw mattresses in fetid cells miles apart while rats snatched food from our eating bowls. Or perhaps we would be deported and declared persona non grata, a preferable scenario but nonetheless a depressing one because it would mean that the vision we had shared when we first met in Africa would be aborted before it even got off the ground. Diane, a Canadian air stewardess with blonde hair and eyes the color of the sea before a storm, had told me on our first date in Nairobi that, having experienced a couple of scary landings, she wanted to quit flying and start a new life. So did I. I was a journalist, in my forties, a foreign correspondent, and I wanted to become a novelist: our meeting was convened by the gods. But supposing the gods had now turned against us, snitched on us to the Guardia... Diane offered the two of them a brilliant please-fasten-your-seatbelt smile while I stuffed incriminating orange peel into a plastic bag. "What can we do for you?" she asked--she had been brought up in Paris and Rome, had studied Spanish and in any case picked up languages as easily as children catch measles. One of the Guardia, young with a downy mustache, dismounted. "Are you lost?" he asked, peering into the aristocratic but doddery old Jaguar as I tried to back-heel the plastic bag under the driver's seat. "No," Diane said, "we're just admiring the view." It was worth admiring. Lizard gray mountains on one side of the citrus plantations, the sea beckoning in the cold sunlight on the other. Here and there a field of leafless grape vines; almond and olive trees and carobs with trunks like fairy tale witches. The Guardia, who seemed to have exhausted his English, produced a creased booklet from beneath his cape and read from it. "I am so pleased you are admiring our territory." Diane tried a few phrases in Valenciano, the regional language that confuses tourists who have studied orthodox Spanish, but he held up one hand and again consulted his phrase book. "Please, I do not understand, I am from the north." His colleague, a sad looking cabo, a corporal, who looked like a long ago Hollywood actor, Adolph Menjou, joined him. "Do you have any papers?" he asked, that disturbing generalization that can embrace anything from a visa to a last will and testament. Diane told him in English: "We might settle in the area." True enough--we were looking for a village so ordinary that it would bring us into contact with people remote from the cliches of Spain--flamenco, sangria and bullfights--and define the changes that had taken place since Franco's death in 1975 so that I could write about them one day. Her statement perturbed the cabo. He spoke with one hand, flapping, prodding and clenching it. Endless complications his hand said. Bureaucracy, papers... Diane searched for some sort of ID in the chaotic contentLambert, Derek is the author of 'Spanish Lessons' with ISBN 9780767904155 and ISBN 076790415X.