Las Cartas
I have come to visit Esperanza again, to practise my Spanish. She greets me at the door with a huge bear hug and two kisses, the kind that leave indentations in your cheeks.
“Hola, nena,” she says, beckoning me with wide, open arms, too wide for the narrow hallway, yet somehow she fits.
In the sitting room, the shutters are closed against the midday sun. The room is cool, and as my eyes accustom to the light, I spy children scattered around the room like cushions. I find a space at the table, listening to the voices in my head as they gather the words together to say, “How are you?” ¿Qué Tal? ¿Cómo va? ¿Cómo estas? I can’t decide. A deliciously meaty smell comes from the kitchen, and the scent of freshly brewed coffee sets my mouth prickling with saliva.
Esperanza chatters to the children in low tones. I sift through her words as though they are tiny pieces of a mosaic to be de-coded and re-arranged, but she speaks too fast. I pick out names; Alejandro, Angelito, Maria. Catch odd words; tareas, deberes, ¡ahora! Esperanza’s instructions to her offspring come thicker and faster. I am adrift in this sea of sound, comforted by the rise and fall of her voice. When the children have gathered their belongings and disappeared to unknown recesses of the house, Esperanza turns her attention to me.
“You’re hungry,” she says.
Ashamed, I look for the words to say I’m fine but she’s in the kitchen before I find them.
“Muy flaka,” she says as she returns carrying a basket of roughly hewn trozos of bread and a bowl filled to the brim with Manteca Roja. “You’re losing weight. You need to eat more. Proper Andalucian dishes, too, not that English rubbish.” She shakes her head. “How’s the bar job?”
“Very bad.” I shake my head. I’ll need a new job soon, I think, or face going back to England. The thought makes me shudder.
Esperanza purses her lips and pours two coffees, adding hot milk from an earthenware jug. “I don’t know how any of us survive in this place,” she says.
The Manteca Roja is exquisite as always. Chunks of dark meat steeped in garlic and peppers, set in cooked lard, stained orange-red. My stomach cramps in anticipation, as I dip the bread into the rich mixture.
“It’s not much,” says Esperanza, apologetically, “But it’ll put some meat back on those bones.”
After lunch we clear the table, naming the things in the kitchen. Platos, cuchara, cuchillo.
“Your Spanish is improving,” says Esperanza.
I’m hoping it can improve enough to enable me to find a decent job, but know I still have a long way to go.
“Come, talk to me in here. I’ve got to get this quilt finished before Carmen has her baby.”
She reaches into one of the bustling cupboards in the sitting room and pulls out a huge bag of fabrics. She empties it out on to the sofa, a riot of colours and patterns. From under the table she retrieves her sewing basket, and hands me a pair of scissors, waiting for me to name them.
“Tijeretas?” I say.
Esperanza laughs and makes a crawling motion with her hands. That’s a bug,” she says. “You want the word scissors!” She repeats it. Tijeras.
“Tijeras,” I say, pronouncing the ‘j’ like a ‘k’.
Tijeras. She repeats it again, accentuating the throaty cough of the ‘j’, like the end of loch.
I try again, and she bursts out laughing. “Better,” she says. She hands me a small rectangle of cornflower blue cotton, and points towards the sofa. “I need twenty more like this.”
I am familiar with this request now. I search through the swathes of oddments, looking to match the blue. There are bits of things: worn out dresses, a tablecloth, baby-grows. Eventually I find a large piece of the blue cotton, and bring it back to the table, ready for cutting.
“You know I wore that skirt when I first met Pepe!” says Esperanza with a girlish giggle. Then she picks up her needle and thread, and sets to work.
Sometimes Esperanza tells me stories. She sits and sews, and as she sews she looks for simple words, like she’s looking for a piece of fabric; something easy that I can manage. When I’m really stuck, the heat rising in my cheeks, she draws pictures. Rough sketches. And she will use the now familiar phrases esto es un --- or este se llama una ---. This is a ---. This is called a ---. And the lights will go on in my head as I struggle to commit the new sounds to memory. Sometimes, when I’m talking to someone, I see Esperanza’s sketches, and the word I am struggling to find will appear as if by magic. But today she doesn’t tell me a story. Instead she says she wants to hear mine.
“What brings you to live in Spain?” she asks.
I keep cutting out my little blue squares. Stack them one upon the other. The room feels smaller and smaller, the walls closing in. Esperanza rests her needlework on the table, waiting. She is fixed on me now, piecing me together like one of her quilts.
“There was this man,” I begin, “When I have 20 years.”
“Always a man,” she says. Siempre un hombre.
“And your parents?”
I search for words, stacking them up for later use, like rectangles of fabric waiting to be sewn together. Marido. Violento. Miedo. But it’s no use. I’ve only the simplest of words, for the most complicated of situations. I need tenses for my verbs, the nuances of should, and could, and might. I’m afraid she’ll think badly of me, that she’ll think I’m just like every other Brit I’ve met in the last four months, running away from a sordid past.
I wring my hands together, my throat tightening. “It’s hard,” I say in English. She lays a hand on my arm. There is no judgement in her eyes. I try again.
“He nice first,” I say. “But—. ” I think of all the softly spoken words, all those exotic gestures. And then so much comes flooding back that I feel the backs of my eyes stinging, the hairs standing up along the length of my arms. How can I tell her everything? About how I left university to get married to a man I hardly knew? Who didn’t even speak my language? How can I admit to having married him without even telling my parents? It broke their hearts. I deserved all those nights I spent watching at the window when he didn’t come home, or the times he threw the dinner at me because I’d overcooked the couscous, or hadn’t wrapped the dolma properly. All those years of being ordered to speak in French, of being sworn at in Arabic. How can I admit to being so stupid? Nothing but a stupid child?
I want to go home, and yet Esperanza is waiting. Waiting for me to speak, and in the silence I can feel the weight building, like water against a dam.
“It is late,” I say, looking at my hands, clenched together.
“You don’t have to tell me about it,” she says, tying off the thread and cutting it free. She lays out a finished section of the quilt. “Look, that’s the first section nearly finished.”
It is beautiful. I look down, shame-faced at the tear-stained linen on my lap.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “I hope Carmen likes it. She hates old-fashioned things, but I told her, tradition is important. To remember where you are from, helps you to know where you are going.” She sighs. “I’ve tried to make it modern.”
“It’s very modern,” I say. How could she not like it? But I’m thinking of my own mother, how she used to knit jumpers for me. How I used to bury them in the back of the wardrobe because I thought hand-knitting was so old-fashioned.
“Can I do something for you?” asks Esperanza, suddenly standing up. Come. I want to read your cards for you.”
At first I don’t understand. She leads me deeper and deeper into the back of the house to a room I haven’t seen before. It is as cluttered as the sitting room, but there’s a feeling of calm I can’t put my finger on. A picture of Jesus with his bleeding sacred heart looks down from the wall, a small tea-light glowing red beneath him. Esperanza makes the sign of the cross. She lights a candle on the table and pulls down the blinds. She pulls out a chair and I sit down, not sure what to make of it all. She takes a piece of muslin from a drawer and brings it over to the table.
“You must give me silver,” she says. “A duro will do. Otherwise, it’s unlucky.”
In my pocket I find a single 5 peseta piece and hand it to her.
She unwraps the cloth to reveal a deck of old playing cards, and gives me an instruction I don’t understand. She makes a shuffling motion, and the penny drops. The cards stick together in unruly clumps in my hands, but once shuffled, Esperanza takes the deck from me and spreads it out across the wooden table. She points at the face-down cards. “Take seven.”
She arranges the cards on the table in a circular pattern.
“Ah,” she says with a smile. “You did right to come here. Many good things will happen here, in Spain. She speaks very slowly, checking I understand each word before she moves on. “This card here means darkness, but it can also mean secrets. This man - your husband - he had many secrets.”
Esperanza looks at me. “Ay probresita,” she says. “I am so sorry you lost the baby, but it was for the best.”
I am cold, now, my skin turned to goose-flesh.
“This card tells me that you are clever, but you feel stupid. You shouldn’t feel that way, Ella. It’s not good for you.”
I laugh in spite of myself.
“Ella,” she says, very seriously. “I have to tell you this, and you might not like to hear it. And things change. They can always change.”
“What?” I ask. My stomach is clenched. She’s scaring me, now. It’s all rubbish, I tell myself - a deck of cards, candles, theatrical displays – like the gypsies who set up a tent when the circus came to town.
“You can’t stay here,” she says. “You have to go back to England.”
I shake my head. There is no way. “I have to stay in Spain,” I tell her.
“I know,” she says, “but you have unfinished business. I’m only telling you what I see. And I see that you can’t stay here.” She smiles at me. A deep, warm smile.
“Ella, you have to be careful,” she says, stroking my arm, “but things will be okay with your family again. Of this, I am certain.”
I am not sure how to feel as I walk back into the sitting room. Extinguished perhaps, like the candles, billowing fine lines of smoke into the air in the now empty parlour. Don Pepe is at the table. He brushes the sewing materials away to the side, says hola and begins talking to Esperanza. I am too tired to translate. Too tired to think. “I have to go,” I say, “I have to go to work. Thank you. For everything.”
“Come and see me soon,” says Esperanza. “I need you to help me finish the quilt!” And as I walk down the narrow street that leads from her door into the church square, I am thinking of all she said, and of the unfinished quilt laying quietly on the sofa amongst the chaos and the mess, a tiny fragment of the whole, standing proud.
