Ad Deum qui lætíficat juventútem maem
by
Peter Rodman
©2016 Peter Rodman
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For Generalísimo Francisco Franco, whose rule stunted the Spanish economy and demoralized its people for decades. Rot in Hell.
Ad Deum qui lætíficat juventútem maem*
The Air Force had not completed base housing when we arrived in Spain. We had no place to live. They gave my father a housing allowance, and helped us find a place to stay.
The country was so poor that the housing allowance allowed us to rent a sprawling 4-bedroom brick house with a heavy tile roof in a village at the outskirts of Madrid, hire a gardener, Galan, and maid, Maria. The house sat on three acres and was surrounded by a high brick wall with broken glass set in the mortar on top. In one place, as far away from the house as you could get on the land, were the vegetable plots Galan the gardener tended, and beyond that, a part of the wall had broken down and crumbled, so an eight year old could step over the notch in the wall and be off the property.
It was a foreign house. It was heated by radiators weakly filled by moaning steam from a kerosene stove. There was no hot water. The bedroom doors were all wooden, each inset with a large pane of pebbled glass that gave a watery view of people on the other side. A pair of black iron gates blocked the driveway. Our Chevrolet station wagon was so wide that my mother had to get out of the car and guide my father through the gateway the first few times: the car's door handles almost scraped the gates.
Eight American families lived in the big houses scattered through the village. Most of the houses had walls around the property, some had swimming pools. At night, assuming you could get up high enough to see over the walls, it was easy to pick out the houses of the Americans; they had lights. Most of the village had no electricity or tap water. People went to bed at dark and carried water home from the central fountain in clay jugs. All the streets were a hard, clay, dirt, and had been for hundreds of years.
None of the villagers spoke English; none of the Americans spoke Spanish. I made my friends at school. The English-speaking children around Madrid were bussed to school from the base or from scattered villages around Madrid. None of my friends from school lived where I did. The other American kids in the area were all older, went to other schools, and didn't play with "little kids."
We were taught Spanish in school, but that didn't help. Although I could say a few things, even if I said, "Hola, como se va?" I quickly ran out of things to say after the person replied, "Muy bien, y tu?" and if the person was "Malo," and started telling me about it, I was completely lost. I mainly used, "No comprende Español," spoken with pride and bluster to hide my embarrassment.
Though I didn't know enough Spanish to make friends among the local kids, I was able to make an enemy, and didn't know why. I called him Pablo. I had never actually gotten close enough to Pablo to ask his name, it seemed we were enemies from the first time we met.
Pablo was a "big kid," at least eleven years old. He ran around in a shapeless white shirt and thin brown pants. His shoes were plastic Spanish tennis shoes. He was skinny, had a mop of straight black hair, and dark Spanish skin. The first time I saw him, Pablo was jogging after a stray dog and throwing rocks at it as he ran. It didn’t seem as if Pablo was trying to hit the dog, just keep it running down the street. He would pluck up a rock when he came across it as he ran and never break stride. From the notch in the wall, I watched him coming towards me down the street guiding the dog along. I actually admired the Spaniard for his skill. When Pablo came closer, I saw how he was dressed, and felt sad for him because he didn't have a tee-shirt, blue jeans and Converse All-Star Hi-tops. At that moment Pablo noticed the me, and his face immediately twisted up with anger. Instead of throwing the rock in his hand at the dog, he threw it side-armed at me. It hit the wall beside me, and I ducked behind the wall and ran away.
Pablo just didn't like me. Whenever Pablo saw me on the street, he would first shout something in Spanish—I had no idea what, but it didn’t sound like “Aqui es mi casa,” or anything else we learned in school—then went to pick up rocks. I would take off running for home and Pablo would trot after me, tossing rocks beside or behind me so they would skitter beneath my feet, never actually hitting me, and never running me down, though he had longer legs and could have caught me easily.
He chased me all the way home from wherever he found me. Either through the black iron gates that blocked the driveway, or through the collapsed notch in the brick wall at the back of the property. Sometimes Pablo just vanished then, other times he stood a ways from the property and shouted things. I understood none of it. But once I had the nerve and anger to shout back “Y tu!” a couple of times to Pablo, so we had a sort of conversation until the Spaniard caught on, shouted something, and then when I said, “Y tu,” yelled back, “Gracias,” and broke up laughing at me.
The family usually went to Sunday Mass on base, where the priest was American and the altar boys were grown-up airmen. When my father had to work on Sunday, my mother still made us go to Mass. In the village. I hated it.
We had to walk to Mass through the village, there were no sidewalks, and none of the streets were paved. If it had rained, I had to wear my clunky rubber boots. I didn't like walking down the streets with my family and getting stared at by the Spaniards. It also made me a little sick to look in the open doorways of the houses and see that many of the people didn't have floors. The mothers would be sprinkling the bare dirt inside the houses with water and sweeping the dirt with big brooms made of twigs. That was their floor. They washed their laundry on the rocks at the edge of the creek, and dried everything by spreading it on the tops of the grass and brush all along the road. I hated they had to be so poor, hated that I had to see it.
I also hated their Mass. The church was cold and dark. There were no pews, everyone stood the whole time except to kneel on the hard tiles to pray. The Mass was Latin, so I could almost follow it in my Missal, but the priest pronounced the Latin funny, and the Latin words were spelled weird, so when I got lost, I never found where the priest was again. The priest’s sermons were in Spanish, and way too long. It seemed the Spanish altar boys liked to chop me in the neck with the edge of the gold disk they used to catch the crumbs of the host at communion.
One Sunday morning everything I hated ca
me together at once. Me, my mother, my brother and three sisters were walking into the morning sun to Mass and coming towards us down the road was Pablo. He had a stick and was swishing it through the air. I tried to drop back behind my mother and sisters, to keep them between Pablo and me, but my mother noticed and told me, “Don’t slow down, we’ll be late, and Mass won’t count,” so I had to keep up and walk beside her.
Pablo didn’t turn aside or even stay to his side of the street. Instead, he seemed to be walking to meet us. When he came up to us, he said to my mother, “Buenos dias señora,” and smiled.
“Buenos dias,” my mother said. That was almost all the Spanish she knew.
Then Pablo looked at me, and said a bunch of Spanish to me, all smiling and friendly, as if bringing me up to date on some piece of news. I was stunned and wary; I said nothing. Pablo just walked on past and did nothing.
“Who’s your friend?” my mother said.
“Uh, just a guy who lives around here.”
“Good. It’s good you’re making friends.”
It was a trick, of course. Pablo still chased me and threw rocks, just not while my mother was around.
At the beginning of November Galan and I planted the winter garden. He was a quiet old man, older