Sun falls in flickering lines and patches on the second story terrace through waving fans of palm leaves and the slats of the bamboo awning. Below is the widow’s garden, with dry dusty soil from which sprout bright red geraniums, white daisies, and roses; spined cacti in reddish earthenware pots line the flag-stone paths. Two blue-painted chairs and a blue table are set under the fig tree in the backyard in the shade; behind the house rises the rugged purplish range of mountainous hills, dry sandy earth covered with scrub clumps of grass.
Early in the morning, when the sun is still cool, and the breeze is wet and salt-fresh from the sea, the native women, dressed in black, with black stockings, go to the open market in the center of town with their wicker baskets to bargain and buy fresh fruit and vegetables at the stalls: yellow plums, green peppers, large ripe tomatoes, wreathes of garlic, bunches of yellow and green bananas, potatoes, green beans, squashes and melons. Gaudy striped beach towels, aprons and rope sneakers are hung up for sale against the white adobe pueblos. Within the dark caverns of the stores are great jugs of wine, oil and vinegar in woven straw casings. All night the lights of the sardine boats bob and duck out in the bay, and early in the morning the fish market is piled high with fresh fish: silvered sardines cost only 8 pesetas the kilo, and are heaped on the table, strewn with a few odd crabs, star-fish and squid.
Doors consist of a swaying curtain of long beaded strips which rattle apart with the entry of each customer and let in the breeze, but not the sun. In the bread-shop, there is always the smell of fresh loaves as, in the dark windowless inner room, men stripped to the waist tend the glowing ovens. The milk-boy delivers milk early in the morning, pouring his litre measure from the large can he carries on his bicycle into each housewife’s pan which she leaves on her doorstep. Mingling with motor-scooters bicycles and the large, shiny grand tourist cars are the native donkey carts, loaded with vegetables, straw or jugs of wine. Workers wear sombreros, take siesta from two to four in the afternoon in the shade of a wall, or tree, or their own carts.
The widow’s house has only cold water and no refrigerator; the dark cool cupboard is full of ants. A shining array of aluminum pots, pans and cooking utensils hang on the wall; one washes dishes and vegetables in large marble basins, scrubbing them with little snarled bunches of straw. All cooking—fresh sardines fried in oil, potato and onion tortillas, café con lèche—is done on the blue flame of an antique petrol burner.
Benidorm: July 15:
We met Widow Mangada one Wednesday morning on the hot crowded bus jolting over the desert-dusty roads from Alicante to Benidorm. She heard us exclaiming about the blue bay and turned from her seat in front of us to ask whether we spoke French. A little, we said, whereupon she broke explosively into description of her wonderful house by the sea, with garden and balcony-terrace and kitchen rights. She was a small, dark woman of middle age, stylishly dressed in white knitted lace over a black slip, white heeled sandals, terrifically comme il faut; her coal-black hair was done in many waves and curls, her saucer-black eyes were emphasized by blue eye-shadow and two startling black eyebrows pencilled straight slanting upwards from the bridge of her nose to her temples.
She bustled about getting native boys to put her baggage on their hand-drawn carts and hustled us to the main road, trotting slightly ahead and babbling in her peculiar French about her house, and how she was lonely and wanted to let out apartments, and she knew right away that we were ‘gentil’. When we said we were writers and wanted a quiet place by the sea to work, she jumped to agree that she knew how it was exactly: ‘I too am a writer; of love-stories and poems.’
Her house, facing the cool blue blaze of the bay, was more than we had dreamed; we fell in love immediately with the smallest room, its french window-doors opening onto a balcony-terrace, perfect for writing: vines wove green leaves in the railing; a palm and a pine tree grew alongside shading one side, and a slatted bamboo awning could be drawn out to form a little roof as shelter from the direct noon sun. We knocked her down from the first price to 100 pesetas a night, figuring we could save im mensely by doing our own marketing and cooking. From her rapid babble of French, mangled by a strong Spanish accent, we gathered that she would trade Spanish lessons for English lessons, that she had been a teacher, and lived in France for three years.
As soon as we moved in, it became clear that Madame was not used to running a maison for boarders. There were three other empty rooms on the second floor which she evidently hoped to let out, for she spoke continually of how we must manage for ‘les autres’, when they arrived. She had amassed a great quantity of white china plates, cups and saucers in the formal dining room, and an equally large amount of aluminum pots and pans hung on hooks lining the kitchen walls, but there was absolutely no silver tableware. Senora seemed shocked that we did not carry knives, forks and spoons about with us, but brought out, finally, three elaborate place-settings of her best silver which she laid out, saying that this was only for the three of us, and she would soon go to Alicante to buy some simple kitchen silver for us and put her best silver away. Also, the problem of a small bathroom, fine for the two of us, but hardly fitted for eight, and the trouble of arranging cooking and dinner schedules on one petrol burner, seemed not to have occured to her either.
We held our breath and wished fervently that she would have no customers when she put up the sign: Apartments for rent, on our balcony-terrace. We had, at least, made sure that she would not use our balcony, which adjoined another larger room, as a selling point, by explaining that it was the only place we could write in peace, since our room was too small for a table, and the beach and garden were fine for vacationers, but not for writers’ workrooms. Occasionally, from our balcony (where we soon took to eating meals: steaming mugs of café con lèche in the morning, a cold picnic of bread, cheese, tomatoes and onions, fruit and milk at noon, and a cooked dinner of meat or fish with vegetables, and wine, at twilight under the moon and stars—) we could hear Senora conducting people around the house, speaking in her rapid staccato French. But during the first week, although she had conducted several potential roomers about, no one had come. We had fun hazarding on the objections they might make: no hot water, one small bathroom, only an antique petrol burner—with such modern hotels in town, probably her price was too high: what wealthy people would be willing to market and cook? who but poor students & writers like us? Perhaps the roomers might decide to eat out in the expensive restaurants; that was a possibility. We had found out, too, that although she had made wild, extravagant gestures when showing us about the house—pointing to an empty ice-less icebox, motioning out an imaginary electrical machine for making the freezing shower-water warm—that none of these comforts were forthcoming. We found the water from the taps was unpalatable and strange to taste; when the Senora miraculously produced a glass pitcher full of delicious sparkling water for our first dinner, we asked incredulous if it came from the taps. She burbled on evasively about the health-giving qualities of the water, and it was a full day before I caught her drawing up a pail of it from a cistern sunk deep in the kitchen, covered by a blue board. The tap water, it turned out, was non potable.
The Senora was a fanatic about the house being propre for her prospective lodgers: we were to wash all dishes after meals, put them away, keep the bathroom tidy. She gave us two dishtowels to be hung behind the door, and hung up several decoy clean towels on the wall for les autres. We were also to have a small petrol burner of our own for which we should buy petrol and matches, another dent in our desperate food budget of 40 pesetas a day for the two of us. In spite of her concern for the propre condition of the house, Senora washed her greasy dishes in standing cold water, often dirtier than the dishes themselves, scrubbing them with frayed tangles of straw.
Our first morning was a nightmare. I woke early, still exhausted from our continuous traveling, uneasy at the strange bed, to find no water in the taps. I tiptoed down the stone stairs to turn on the peculiar machine with odd blue-painted sp
igots and wires jutting out which the Senora had said ‘made water’, turning the switch the day before, upon which there was a convincing rumble as some complicated machinery started up. I turned the switch; there was a blue flash, and acrid smoke began pouring from the box. Quickly I shut off the switch and went to knock on the Senora’s door. No answer. I went upstairs and woke Ted, who was burnt scarlet from the day before in the sun.
Sleepily, Ted came down in his bathing trunks to turn the switch. There was another blue flash; no sound. He tried the light switch. No electricity. We pounded on the Senora’s door. No answer. ‘She’s either gone out or dead,’ I said, wishing for water to make some coffee; the milk had not yet come. ‘No, she’d have turned on the water if she’d gone out. She’s probably lying in there refusing to get up.’ At last, grumpily, we went back upstairs to bed. About nine o’clock we heard the front door open. ‘Probably she’s sneaked around from the back to come in as if she’d been out all morning.’ I padded barefoot downstairs where the Senora, crisp in her white knitted dress, freshly made up black eyebrows, greeted me cheerily: ‘You slept well, Madame?’ I was still smouldering: ‘There is no water,’ I said without preamble. ‘No water to wash or make coffee.’ She laughed a queer deep laugh which she used whenever anything went wrong, as if either I, or the water supply, were very childish and silly, but she would make it all right. She tried the light switch. ‘No light,’ she exclaimed triumphantly, as if all were solved. ‘It is so in all the village.’ ‘This is usual in the morning?’ I asked coldly. ‘Pas de tout, de tout, de tout,’ she rattled off from under raised eyebrows, apparently just noticing my cool irony. ‘You must not take it so hard, Madame.’ She bustled into the kitchen, lifted the blue-painted lid by the sink, dropped a bucket on a string and drew up a sloshing pailful of clear water. ‘Plenty of water,’ she gurgled, ‘all the time.’ So that was where she kept her store of healthgiving water; I nodded grimly and began to make coffee, while she ran next-door to investigate the state of affairs. I was pretty sure, that with my native inability to manage machines, I had ‘fused’ something and blasted the whole water and electric supply in the town. Evidently it was just local, for the Senora fiddled with the machine, crowed that water was coming everywhere, and said never never to touch the machine but to call her immediately when we were worried about the water. She would fix everything.
We also had trouble with the petrol stove. For our first dinner I planned one of Ted’s favorite suppers: a platter of stringbeans and fried fresh sardines which we had bought early at the fish market for 8 pesetas the kilo and kept cool in a home-made water-container of several pans covered with a wet-cloth and a plate. I put the beans on to cook, but after 20 minutes they were still as hard as they had been at first and I noticed the water wasn’t even boiling; Ted doubted if there was any heat and said maybe the petrol was used up; he turned the heat higher and the flame burned a thin, smoking green. ‘Senora,’ we called. She came rushing in clucking from the living-room, whipped off bean-pot, cooking-ring and burner to reveal the damning sight of over an inch of frayed, burnt wick. We’d turned it up too high and the wick itself had been burning for lack of petrol. After filling the tank with petrol, messing about with the wick, raising the fresh part left, Senora started the burner again, tested the beans. She was not at all satisfied; running out of the room, she came back and tossed in a handful of powder which fizzed and foamed. I asked her what it was, but she just chuckled and said she had been cooking a lot longer than I and knew some ‘petites choses.’ Magic powder, I thought. Poison. ‘Bicarbonate of soda‚’ Ted reassured.
Senora, we began to realize, had been accustomed to a far grander scale of living than her present circumstances. Each evening she set out to town to see about a bonne for cleaning house; the little girl who had been scrubbing floors the day we arrived had not showed up since. ‘It is the hotels,’ the Senora told us. ‘All the maids go to the hotels, they pay so much. If you have a maid, you must be very nice and careful of her feelings nowadays; she breaks your best china bowl, and you must smile and say: do not trouble yourself over it, mademoiselle.’ The second morning I came down to make coffee, I found the Senora in a soiled towel bathrobe, her eyebrows not yet drawn on, cleaning the stone floors with a wet mop. ‘I am not used to this,’ she explained. ‘I am used to three maids: a cook, a cleaner … three maids. I do not work when the front door is open, for the public to see. But when it is shut,’ she shrugged her shoulders, gestured comprehensively with her hands, ‘I do everything, everything.’
In the milk-shop one day, we were trying to explain where we wanted our two litres a day delivered. The houses on the Avenida were not numbered, and it was impossible to make the delivery boy understand our elementary Spanish; finally a French-speaking neighbor was called in. ‘Oh,’ she smiled, ‘you live with Widow Mangada. Everybody here knows her. She dresses very stylish, with much make-up.’ The woman grinned as if Widow Mangada were a town character. ‘Does she do the cooking for you,’ she asked curiously. A kind of instinctive loyalty toward the Senora and her straightened circumstances sprang up in me. ‘Oh of course not‚’ I exclaimed. ‘We do all our own cooking.’ The woman nodded and smiled like a cream-fed cat.
Rose and Percy B
(1961/62)
Retired Londoners, our nearest neighbors, live on the steep rocky slant of our driveway, looking into our high side hedge through the small front windows. The cottage joined to the Watkins’ cottage on the corner, joined in turn to the tiny white cottage of humpbacked Elsie fronting the street. A wreck when they bought it: hadn’t been lived in for two years, all muck and falling plaster. They worked it to comfort all themselves. A telly (on hire purchase, almost paid off), a small back garden under our thatched cottage and strawberry patch, hidden by a dense screen of holly and bush there, and by a wattle fence and homemade garage on the drive-side. Tiny rooms, bright, modernish. The typical British wallpaper—a pale beige embossed with faintly sheened white roses, the effect of cream scum patterns on weak tea. Starchy white curtains, good for peeking from behind. A stuffed, comfortable living-room suite. A fireplace glowing with coal and wood block. Pictures of the three daughters in wedding dress—an album of the model daughter. In modeling school they stole an expensive sweater her mother bought. Two grandsons, one from each other daughter. All daughters live in London. A side room full of gaudy satin materials the first day I came to visit, and a sewing machine on which Rose runs up mattress coverings for a firm in Okehampton in cerise and fuchsia shiny stuff with lurid sprawling patterns. Percy ‘caretakes’ a firm one day a month. Upstairs, a pink bathroom, floors all sealed with new lino, flounces and mirrors and chrome. A new cooker in the kitchen (the other hire purchase item), a cage of pistachio and pale-blue budgies creaking and whistling, up a step from the living-room.
First encounter: Rose brought a tray of tea for us and the workmen the day we moved in. A lively youngish looking woman, brim full of gabble, seeming to listen not to you, but to another invisible person slightly to one side who is telling her something interesting and a bit similar, but much more compellingly. Her lightish brown hair, smooth face, plumping body. In her middle 50s? Percy seems twenty years older, very tall, spare, almost cadaverous. Wears a blue peajacket. A weathered, humorous wry face. Was a pub keeper in London. South London. Oddly sensitive about Frieda and the baby. Asks very right questions. Sings to Frieda. Eye running, losing weight, no appetite, depressed after Christmas. Mrs B caught Dr Webb coming down from me one day. Got Percy a checkup. An X-ray. He was coming out with others from their X-rays but, unlike them, had no chart. ‘Where’s your chart, Perce?’ Oh, the nurse said, he’s to come back for another after lunch. Now he is in Hawksmoor Chest Hospital in the hills in Bovey Tracy for a fortnight. Rose’s ignorance—why a 2-week checkup? Is it a checkup or a treatment. She says she will ask tomorrow when the Gs drive her out for a visit. My startlement: these people ask nothing, they just ‘go to be treat’ like mild cows.
Have
been to church with Rose and Percy—the rector put me on to them. Percy the church-goer. Rose not so much. They go every few weeks, sit in the same pew in the middle on the left. Rose’s series of smart hats. She could be in her late 30s. Other encounters—to tea with them with Ted and Frieda. A smart tea—hot herring on toast, a plate of fancy tea cakes, all sugar and frosting. Frieda flushed from the fire, shy enough to be good. Everybody barking at her to stay away from the huge blue-glazed eye and gold buttons of the telly in the corner, the great fancy silent companion, she burying her head in tears in the armchair cushion at the sharp voices, for what reason? Looked through album of all daughters—bright, lively, pretty, with handsomeish dark husbands. The model daughter fancily posed before a traditional weddingcake. The sideboard and telly and threepiece suite take up every inch of space. The cramped, steamy cosy place. Then they came to tea with us. Percy much later. Rose dressed up but deprecating ‘Ooh, look at these stockings, Sylvia,’ whipping up her skirt to reveal a shabbyish pair of thick stockings. ‘Percy said my suit had the seam open down the back when it came back from the cleaners, but no matter.’
The last time Rose came to tea I had a big fancy sponge cake made with 6 eggs I had meant for the S’s on Sunday, but they didn’t come, George had stayed in bed. I broached it for Rose. She made a praising remark. Gobbled it. Seemed very nervous and flighty. Talked on about pensions—Percy had been ill one year and hadn’t paid it, now their pension was forever cut short (she got 29s a week instead of the full 30s) and they couldn’t pay up the year (‘Oh,’ said the nasty official ‘everybody would do that if we let them.’ And why not?) Shocking. How to get on on a pension. They rent their London house to one daughter. Can’t buy much—not on hire purchase. It’s all right to do that if you’re young. After little more than half an hour, Rose jumped up to a knock at the back door. ‘That’s Perce.’ A garbled excuse about going off with the G’s somewhere. The G’s (William’s parents) very fancy, have, it seems, much money, a house on the hill, a brand-new car from their firm. I resentful. ‘You didn’t mind my coming?’ Her slippery eyes. She repeats everything I say to the G’s. My repeating the rector’s ‘We can see everything that goes on in your house’ in innocence turning into a bad bedroom joke and getting repeated back to me by Mary G.