I pointed my meter at the wall, at a man in a bag. His arms were together in front of him, his head slumped forward. I could feel him decaying. The cold room smelled sweet and stale. Concentrating on my work, I moved inside, squeezing between gurneys. The meter said it was real dark; I would have to use a slow shutter speed. I took a couple of shots of the man. I thought I saw his face move when the shutter clicked. My hand brushed a sheet and I felt heat. I jerked away and looked at Preble. “This one’s still warm!”
He nodded, pulled down the sheet. I saw a little girl, about twelve, lying in the death light as though she were asleep. “Want to—”
“No,” I said quickly. I was suddenly overcome with the same horrible feeling that I’d had in Vietnam, that I was violating privacy. I had taken one picture of a dead grunt and agonized about it for years. I could hear the people in this room telling me, whispering: This is private stuff, Bob. “I think I’ve seen enough.”
Actually, more than enough. I was a wreck for days afterward. I never printed the photographs and got my first C in photography.
Near the end of my third quarter I got a letter from a friend of ours, Frank Aguilera, an anthropology student who was studying a remote country village in Spain to get his Ph.D. Frank said to come see him and his wife. Barbie. The idea that school would get me back on track was proving to be wrong. The graph of my grades was diving southeast. Grissom was disgusted with me. I decided to drop out at the end of the quarter and go to Spain for a while.
Patience was terrified. Just pick up and move to Spain? Now? No!
I told her I had to do something, school sure wasn’t working. She eventually agreed. With the money the VA sent me and that which we gathered by selling our car and other belongings, I got together the sum of $1,654, enough to get the three of us to Luxembourg, where I’d buy a used car and drive to Spain. Once there, I figured we could live in Spain on my disability payments of $145 a month. Hell, we might never come back.
CHAPTER 3
March 1969—Luxembourg. Kicking tires at used-car places, I found a brown 1954 Volkswagen, rumpled, ancient; but the engine sounded good. Needed tires, but I thought they’d get us to Spain. By the time we got to France, we had named it the Roach. We drove to the village of Almonaster la Real, Spain, in two days.
Frank and Barbie were happy to see us and we stayed up late talking about the old days at the University of Pennsylvania, where I’d first met them while visiting Patience. Actually, I was visiting Patience’s boyfriend, James Elliott, a friend I’d known in Florida. I was a drifter then, a college dropout living in a Chevy panel truck, and they liked me anyway. Patience had introduced me to her friends, who included Frank and Barbie and Bill Smith and Emily Arnold, each couple now married.
When Frank and Barbie asked me about Vietnam, I said the Army really was like Catch-22 and told them about Mo’Fuck the mongoose who used to fly around with us and earned several air medals. Funny stuff. I didn’t want people, even friends, to think I was affected by Vietnam. You ever see a picture of John Wayne having problems after any of his wars?
I loved Almonaster la Real. Nothing about it reminded me of anything I’d ever seen before. The place was ancient—Frank showed me records of the village putting in their water system before 1490. The adobe walls of the white buildings were crusted thick with centuries of continuous whitewashing. The stones in many of the narrow streets were the same stones the Romans put there—the wonder of it: imagine, an actual Roman put that very stone right there. The houses were dimly lit with one or two fifteen-watt light bulbs because people had yet to become dependent on electricity. There were only a few televisions in the entire village of four hundred people, one of them at Bar Buenos Aires, where a crowd gathered every night to watch Mission Impossible and I Love Lucy in Spanish.
That first night, Frank took me to the Casino, a private club at the center of town, which, as far as I could tell, was open to anyone who had money for a drink unless the person was a Gypsy or a woman. He introduced me to the village’s busiest entrepreneur, Jose Garcia Romero (Pepe, for short), who operated two bars, the butane distributorship, and anything else that turned a profit; Pepe’s friend Crazy Marcus; Jose Maria (Maria Jose’s brother), who wanted to do construction work in Germany; Juan Picado, the stonemason; Pepe Hole-in-the-Head, who actually had a nickel-wide crater in his forehead from having a tumor removed; Fernando the incredibly naive teenager; Don Blas, the doctor who could read English but not speak it; and more. They invited me to eat some tapas of ancient ham (some hams are twenty years old or more; I actually ate some hundred-year-old ham that had crystallized) and drink some of the region’s favorite booze, aguardiente, which Frank told me (Frank translated for me because I speak Spanish worse than you do) meant “firewater.” Frank warned me about it, which only piqued my professional interest. Pepe poured some crystal-clear aguardiente halfway up a small glass and filled the rest with water. When he added water, the aguardiente turned milky white. The stuff tasted like licorice, and I really wanted bourbon, but bourbon was unknown here. After the first one, I slugged down the drinks as fast as they served them. Soon I was having fun. I got along fine with the people. They were impressed at how badly I spoke Spanish and how much I could drink. When Frank and I left, I was staggering drunk. When we got back to Frank’s place, I walked through his house, out onto the back veranda, and puked over the railing.
In a few weeks, my friends at Almonaster la Real learned to understand my version of Spanish. I could follow their conversations pretty well, but couldn’t say much back without a lot of pantomiming and multiple-choice guessing.
Frank and I went to the Casino every night. He was working on his doctoral dissertation, documenting everyday life in the village. I was just there trying to be a Spaniard. Pepe usually tended bar. Men would gather after dinner and swap gossip, brag of adulterous adventures, and spin stories.
Fernando the incredibly naive teenager came in one night and said “I just discovered something you won’t believe!” his face bright with wonder. We thought he’d discovered gold, found a diamond, won the lottery or something. He got everybody’s attention and explained to us his discovery: if you hold your dick just so, said Fernando, and then rub your hand up and down, like this, it will get real hard and then, if you keep doing it, you will feel a very wonderful feeling, he said, a feeling so good it’s impossible to describe! It will make your eyes pop! People looked around, the Spaniards shrugging at Frank and me, hoping we wouldn’t make generalizations of the Spanish based on Fernando, and then everybody burst out laughing. We bought Fernando drinks and said he’d discovered a mighty fine thing all right.
The villagers were also very fond of tricks, what I call after-dinner magic. Pepe had a trick. He would invite the crowd to arrange all the dominoes in the box on the bar in a legal array—only matching numbers touching each other—while he was out of the room. When someone shouted that we’d finished, he’d call out the beginning and ending domino faces of the chain. It was a terrific mind-reading routine, a simple trick that I never figured out until Pepe told me: he took one of the dominoes with him. The two faces of that piece would necessarily be the two ending faces of the domino chain we’d constructed because of the way domino sets are made.
Pepe’s best, though, was this: he swiped a fly out of the air and put it into a glass filled with water. He turned the glass upside down on his palm and the fly floated up to the bottom of the glass.
“The fly is drowning,” he said with the voice of a man twice his size, looking sad, his wiseass expression shining through.