“Relax — that’s what!” By this time Edna Calkins had her heart set on the trip and nothing would dissuade her. “Get away from all the New York bustle and forget about the office for once.”
“We do that every summer in the Hamptons.”
“Arthur, in the Hamptons you see all the lawyers from the firm. We sit around drinking and discussing the business you left behind in the city. I want to do something different this summer.”
“Well,” he said, knowing he was beaten as soundly as any opposing counsel had ever beaten him in court, “I’ll admit their prices are reasonable for three weeks. I doubt if we could find anyplace else in Europe as inexpensive.”
“Then we can go?”
“Three weeks,” Arthur Calkins mused. “That’s a long time. The place probably doesn’t even have a tennis court.”
“Oh, damn!”
“All right, all right! We’ll go!”
It was a hot July afternoon when they arrived in Latigo, a quiet little town tucked away in a corner of the country where the local bus stopped only twice a week. Edna could see that Arthur was already regretting the trip as their rented car came to a stop before the only official-looking building on the main street.
“It’s siesta time,” he grumbled. “They’re probably all asleep.”
“No — there’s one!”
The man who appeared in the doorway was wearing a wrinkled white coat that didn’t button over his protruding stomach. His black moustache was flecked with grey and his eyes were tired. Perhaps, Edna thought, he had been sleeping, after all.
“Buenos dias,” he greeted them, and then immediately switched to English. “You are driving through on a tour of our countryside?”
“No,” Edna informed him, leaning her head out the car window. “We’ve come to stay.”
“For three weeks,” Arthur added.
“Ah! You must be the Americans Mama Lopez is expecting. I am José Friega, the mayor of Latigo.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Edna responded, holding her hand out to shake his. “This is my husband, Arthur Calkins. I’m Edna.”
Mayor Friega bent to get a good look at Arthur. “You are a fine strong-looking man. You exercise, no?”
“I jog a bit.”
“Ah, well. Here in July it is too hot to jog. You get sunstroke.”
“Which way to Mama Lopez?” Edna asked a bit impatiently.
“Ah! Straight down the street to that gasoline station, then turn right. It is the fifth house.”
“Which side of the street?”
He smiled apologetically. “There are only houses on one side. We are not a large town.”
And in truth it wasn’t. The gas station, when they passed it, had only one pump and there was no attendant in sight. The road was narrow and rutted and, as Mayor Friega had said, there were houses on one side only. The other side was mostly barren, though there was one round fenced-in structure that could have been a ball park.
“Fifth house,” Arthur said. “Here it is.”
The house itself was quite nice, Edna was pleased to see. It was the best on the street, probably the best in the town — pink-painted stucco, with flowers growing in the front yard. She’d seen houses like it in Los Angeles, but had never imagined one halfway around the world in Spain. “Isn’t it lovely, Arthur?” she said.
“Yeah. Just like home.” He got the bags out of the trunk while Edna went up to the door.
It opened before she could knock and a slim dark-haired woman greeted her. “Welcome to my house. I am Mama Lopez.”
“Oh! I’m Edna Calkins. I guess you’re expecting us. That’s Arthur with the bags.”
“Come right in. My home is your home, for the length of your stay.”
Arthur had to admit grudgingly that their room was nice, with a lovely view of the mountains. After a delicious dinner served by Mama Lopez they learned a little about her and about the town. Her husband had died long ago, during the Civil War, when most of the young people left Latigo for good. She had stayed on because she was expecting a child, a girl who was now a woman of thirty-nine, and lived in Madrid.
“The children nowadays,” Mama Lopez complained. “They live together without marriage, they have no children. They have no religion, even! It is not like the old days.”
“Do you have a church here?” Edna asked, recalling that she had not seen one as they drove into town.
Mama Lopez shook her head. “It was bombed during the war. Many people took it as a sign that God had given up on Latigo. That was when many left. But I stayed, and Mayor Friega, and some others.”
“We met Señor Friega. How long has he been mayor?” Arthur asked.
“Who knows? No one bothers with elections here any more. He serves as long as the people do not tire of him.”
“It would seem a younger, more progressive mayor might breathe some new life into the town. You attracted us. You could bring in many more tourists if you had facilities for them.”
She shrugged helplessly. “I am an old woman, Señor. You tell the mayor this. Do not tell Mama Lopez.”
Later that night, as he and Edna lay in bed, Arthur wondered about this odd woman who was their hostess. “Do you think she dyes her hair?” he asked.
“What for, out here in the middle of nowhere?”
“She must be about sixty if she has a thirty-nine-year-old daughter. I can’t believe her hair hasn’t started turning grey.”
Edna turned over in bed. “People lead a simpler life here, Arthur.”
“I guess so,” he agreed.
The following morning Mayor Friega himself arrived to show them around the town. Their first stop was across the street, at the circular structure Edna had taken for a ball field.
“What is it?” she asked as they strolled out into the open space surrounded by a low grandstand.
“A bullring?” Arthur ventured.
Mayor Friega nodded sadly. “Once, long ago, there were bullfights here on Sunday afternoons, as there are throughout Spain. But then the people left and the matadors stopped coming. No one will perform for a town of fifty-eight people.”
“Fifty-eight? That’s your population?”
The mayor nodded. “It was sixty until last month, when the Rozeris brothers were arrested in Saragossa. Now they’re away for a year.”
“What did they do?” Edna asked.
“A drunken brawl. Someone was knifed. They’re good boys though. They should be back in a year.”
He drove them down the town’s meager streets, pointing out the place where the church had once stood, the site where a railroad station was to have been built, the corner where the twice-weekly bus stopped. After a time Arthur asked, “Aren’t there any side trips we can take away from here?”
“Certainly, Señor. There is a fiesta next week in a neighboring town. And we have one here ourselves on the last weekend of your stay.”
“A fiesta for fifty-eight people?”
The mayor shrugged. “A small remembrance of the old days.”
He introduced them to virtually every resident of Latigo that day, including Doctor Manuela, the physician, and a deeply tanned young woman named Rita who worked at the local store.
“Funny,” Edna remarked to Arthur later, “she doesn’t look Spanish.”
“Who, dear?”
“That woman Rita at the general store.”
“I don’t know how you could tell behind that tan.”
“She almost looks American.”
Arthur shrugged. “Maybe she is, though she didn’t say more than a couple of words.”
They journeyed to a neighboring town the next day, and welcomed the brief change of scene. The countryside seemed greener and lusher away from Latigo. Edna would never admit it to Arthur but she was beginning to regret their decision to spend three weeks in this out-of-the-way corner of the world.