There was a waterfall. Our waterfall. I was sure—naked, sun-dappled, still high from the after-lunch smoke-up, the two or three cognacs (damn, I could hold my liquor in those days)—that we were the only two living beings who’d ever seen it.
Me, Husband #1 (though he was not that yet, not quite yet), wild nature and a few controlled substances. July, in the mountains around the sweet little town of Ávila, in the still-sweeter and still smaller town of Sotillo de la Adrada, we lived our idyll.
We lived, for about two weeks (I think…), with Husband #1’s painting professor, in a low, snug little house—pitched roof, timbers and stucco, oddly Alpine—perched on the side of a craggy mountain. It looked impermanent somehow, like a mountain goat stopping to rest on its way up or down, like the next time you looked, it might just be gone.
Like that, like magic. Like the incremental part of hallucinatory fairly land that it was—those two weeks in themselves one long hallucination, one long, great dream. Unreal even as you stared straight at it. I’d wonder later, lost in the bleak wilderness of a married life into which I had somehow stumbled–though there were clear steps along the way: they are traceable, and I will trace each and every one of them for you, dear reader, all in good time, right here on this intimate little blog of Bad, Bad Love. I would wonder if I’d ever actually seen that house. Really lived those two weeks. Wonder, as I glanced across the table of our miniscule West Village apartment at this unknown being who, last time I checked, had been Husband #1, if any part of our very own Midsummer Night’s Dream had ever happened at all.
Our mornings started late—the first smell of coffee crept beneath the doorway into our airy room around ten. Breakfast around the crumb-strewn table, with whoever happened to be around, and up. Painting Professor, Painting Professor’s paramour du jour (they varied, but they were all the same, willowy and blond, Norwegian or Danish or Dutch, occasionally German; we were never sure where he got them, because he didn’t go to Madrid very often; maybe they were nymphs, wandered in through the always unlocked door, and fell asleep in his bed). Painter friends from down the way, someone who had picked up pastries or a baguette at the bakery in town. Some homemade jam from the market. Butter. An endless supply of café con leche—there was a battered old blue bowl on the counter, where people tossed in whatever pocket change happened to be weighing them down.
Then we all worked. I, brushing crumbs from the table with my hand, set up my Arabic dictionaries and translated. Woodlands through the window became the perfumed gardens of 9th-century Baghdad, populated by devastatingly lovely (and therefore deadly) androgynous cup-bearers, who, if you turned your back for a second, might just become ban trees or fields of laughing daisies. Husband #1 and Professor painted, in the front-room studio, light streaming in through the open windows. Their backs to one another. Easels facing off as though preparing for a duel. Professor liked dark and tortured, a figure occasionally seeming ready to emerge from the roiling cloudscapes before disappearing back into the billows. Husband #1 was more decidedly figurative. Café scenes, backyard asados (all of his paintings were set in his native Argentina, which was as big a red flag as ever was waved before a myopic matador, and of course I didn’t see it, whether I’d popped my contact lenses in or not). Friends, many of whom were women, all realistic but with the perspective ever so slightly off, the colors electric, jarring, fauvish, with heavy black outlines pushing back against the three dimensions of painterly space. Friends whom Husband #1 missed. And would miss ever more… but that’s another post for another day.
Painting Professor and Husband #1 consumed endless streams of mate, out of carved wooden cups and through the classic silver straws (another thing I’d grow to hate, eventually, though during our midsummer interlude I reveled in the newness). They argued, threw an occasional paintbrush across the room. Hugged, knocked off early for the sacred pre-prandial cerveza, while I dressed in the bedroom.
Then we’d all drive down the hill in Painting Professor’s Jeep, leaving our little mountain-goat house perched behind (maybe it would be there when we got back, maybe it wouldn’t), to the restaurant where we, along with the rest of the intellectuals of Sotillo de La Adrada, almost all of whom were Argentinians in self-imposed exile, had lunch.
I think the restaurant was named Gredos, but I wouldn’t swear to that. It’s been a while. Our lunches, though, were a daily event; a back room reserved, always, for us.
Actually, lunch doesn’t even begin to cover it. Aperitivos and tapas, patatas bravas and pulpo al gallego, sardinas, escabeche. Olives and bread and manchego cheese. Gazpacho. Fish courses, meat courses. Flan and fruit. Bottle after bottle of red wine (I remember putting money into a fondo en común, but no way enough money to account for our part of the daily Bacchanal).
Then coffee after coffee, and brandy, or orujo (¡invita la casa!). Heady discussion and debates, art and politics and books and social justice, and missing Argentina (Argentinians always, always miss Argentina, worse when there’s a bunch of them together), for hours and hours and hours. Our ‘lunches’ usually broke up around five or so, when Husband #1 and I would wander off to our waterfall to have sex on the mossy ground, or against a tree (the rough bark against my skin, moss is so soft), and try to sober up for the evening’s activities.
Which meant convening at the sprawling home of a jolly, Frans-Halsian Drinker of a man named Federico, some distance out of town. Federico was a journalist who’d narrowly escaped the death-prisons of the proceso militar (his wife had not; she’d suffered an unspeakable fate similar to the ends met by people known and loved by every person around that groaning lunch table, every person who later showed up at Federico’s for drinks and tapas. I was unable to take in the ramifications of such collective trauma at the time, but I’ve had plenty of time to think about it over the last twenty-five years or so, and we’ll hear more about it in future posts).
But for now, let’s stay with the good times, at Federico’s. He was semi-in love with me, which I enjoyed, because he was brilliant and he praised my Spanish (and Husband #1’s taste in women). He was sexy in a too-big, over-ripe, bearded way that some men manage to manage, despite features that might objectively be qualified as physical defects. The kind of sexy that lasts, like a good wine, into late middle age and even beyond. He was an unabashed hedonist. He spoke flawless French, and he enjoyed speaking it with me. I was never sure where he got the money he seemed to throw around so freely. Probably not from the op-ed pieces he wrote for journals back home in Buenos Aires.
Federico had a pool, in which he encouraged me to skinny dip, or at least to swim in my underwear (I frequently obliged), and a rambling garden covered over with grape arbors he’d let run wild. He had extra bedrooms, where Husband #1 and I slept more than once.
He was an astonishingly good cook. He taught me the vital importance of béchamel, and he taught me how to make it. Now that I think of it, if I’d had a lick of sense, I’d have moved into that beautiful rambling house with Federico (as he invited me—jokingly, but behind every joke likes a little, tiny truth—dozens of times to do). I’d probably still be there.
Instead, drunk on nymph-and-satyr love beside our own private waterfall, I listened to Husband #1. I let him move with me back to Granada, and eventually to Manhattan.
Because cohabitation in tiny apartments on, like, no money would without a doubt be exactly like our midsummer idyll. Just as good, in every way. Right?
Umm, right.
But we’ll get to that next week (or the next – I think my mother might be trying to come back for the next post, we’ll see). For now, I’ll wave good-bye to you from my seat at the raucous lunch table at Gredos, from within a cloud of smoke (because of course we all smoked, a lot), raising my glass of post-prandial brandy in your direction, as I return Federico’s sly wink.
He really was an extraordinary man. Much more so than Husband #1.
Catch you next week…