‘One more thing about Catalonia … there is a special patron saint for the region — you may recognise him. St Jordi? Is he ringing a bell?’
‘Not really.’
‘He killed a dragon, like the English St George. They are in fact the same person.’
‘I never knew that.’
‘One saint for two countries. More than two — St George is also patron of Greece and of Georgia. But the official patron saint of Spain is Santiago. Santiago of Compostela. St James the Greater. Saint Jordi is a forbidden saint, thanks to that whelp-of-a-hound Franco. Parents are not allowed to baptise their sons Jordi. Imagine not being allowed to name an English boy George!’ This would indeed be a strange embargo, though George was not at the time a fashionable name.
If María Paz had happened to mention that St James the Greater was also the patron saint of vets and of arthritis sufferers, as he is in his spare time, then I might have rocketed off into Catholicism and not taken my present course. There are other saints with arthritic responsibilities (take a creaking bow, St Colman, St Alphonsus Maria de Liguori, St Servatus, St Totnan, St Killian) as well as others who watch over vets (St Blaise, St Eligius), but St James the Greater is the only one to hold down both jobs.
The devil smokes black tobacco
Even without knowing about the broad portfolio of St James the Greater’s patronage, I was thrilled by the oppression of the Catalans and the whole idea of a forbidden saint. I would name my first-born Jordi — boy or girl, the name worked as well for either. My first-born, or my first cat.
María asked for the poem and read it in silence. She stopped after a few seconds to light an unfamiliar-looking cigarette, its tobacco oddly dark. She inhaled the smoke through her mouth and expelled it thoughtfully from her nose. Dad smoked as if it was a military drill, a form of exercise for the lungs, while Mum smoked du Mauriers with her nerves (it was never just ‘a cigarette’ any more than the Relaxator was ever just ‘the lounger’). It was easy to think that María Paz drew smoke directly into her brain, bathing her cerebral involutions with the cigarette’s piquant incense.
She saw me studying her and asked me if I would care to try one of her cigarettes. ‘I know it has a rather acrid pong, but is really very gentle and smooth,’ she said. ‘I depend on my Ducados. Michael gets them for me from Spain when he goes there.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘To be honest, if all I could get was English cigarettes I wouldn’t go to the trouble of smoking at all.’ Sycophantically I agreed with what she said about English cigarettes. It tickled me that my guardian angel brought temptation as well as rescue, making her a sort of double agent. Surely only the devil would smoke black tobacco.
Thanks to the family’s birthday and Christmas protocol, I was neither an addict nor altogether a novice when it came to cigarettes. I accepted her kind suggestion. After she had offered me the packet and while she was still brandishing her lighter, she mentioned that she had a cigarette holder somewhere, which might make my first Spanish cigarette a little kinder on my inexperienced throat. ¡Tactful María! She must have noticed that my lack of flexibility would make it awkward for me to bring a cigarette to my lips. Not impossible, but awkward — a certain amount of the movement would have had to come from the neck. It was really my bones and my blushes she was sparing, rather than my tender throat.
The cigarette holder, when it was installed between my lips, gave me a feeling of baleful sophistication, either a matinée idol’s or a Bond villain’s. I was Noël Coward or else Goldfinger. With our Ducados safely lit, we began the seminar. I would need all available forms of sophistication to cope with the information my guardian angel had to offer.
‘John,’ she said, folding her arms. ‘No one will ever understand this poem without knowing that Lorca was jomosexual. ¡It is an elegy for his lover, who was killed in the bull ring!’
It’s true that on the qwerty keyboard the letter h snuggles up to the letter j, but María’s delivery wasn’t any sort of metaphysical typing error. The Spanish j converges on the English h sound, but is much raspier, as different as panellet is different from Victoria sponge or a Ducados from a du Maurier. When Mrs Paz Binns told me that Lorca was jomosexual, the Spanish j came smokily from her lips with just the same passionate and committed intonation that Eckstein had used, when he told me that ‘joder’ was a third conjugation Spanish verb.
My modest physical size makes any drug work on me rather powerfully. I think I managed to conceal from my hostess the intensity of the nicotine intoxication I was receiving from the Ducados, though at one point I came close to jabbing myself in the eye with the cigarette holder.
María spoke with passion, reverence and proud humility as she explained the fierce national temperament. Bull-fighting was the heart’s blood of Spain. She said the first word anyone should learn in Spanish was duende, about which Lorca had much to say. Only with this background knowledge could the reader begin to know the way Lorca had felt about his lover Ignacio Sánchez Mejías.
Background knowledge about Spanish culture was exactly what I lacked, and I was particularly hostile to bull-fighting. ¿How could I not be, when even the jar of Bovril in Mum’s larder, that nightmarish concentrate of abattoir run-off, filled me with horror and disgust? Still, by the time she had finished speaking and I had taken a final puff on my Ducados, whose butt I jabbed out in the glass ashtray which she held up for me, we agreed that I understood Lorca very well. Also that I should never waste my time with English cigarettes.
Before I left, I asked María to read the whole poem aloud to me. While she spoke I kept my eyes closed. She made the repeated lines pound in fatalistic rhythm, like a funeral train. My mouth was sour with cigarette smoke, but I could still taste the panellet, infusing my saliva with its aromas. I sat there concentrating on María’s diction, and the exact flavouring of her Spanish vowels and consonants. There’s no way you can be sure in advance that any individual native speaker will be a suitable model for your own accent, but for now I would trust my guardian angel to guide my tongue.
When Mum asked me how my lesson with María had gone, I didn’t have an answer ready. I had been so busy mulling over the new flavours I had learned, and the problem of forging within my soul a vegetarian duende, that I hadn’t remembered to concoct an innocent version of the seminar for parental consumption. I certainly didn’t want to mention the sexual secret that María had shared with me, nor my adventures with Spanish cigarettes, so I simply said that she was very nice and very helpful, and had given me some nice home-made cake.
I could hardly have been more stupid. Mum might have been troub led by Spanish cigarettes and the discussion of jomosexuality, but she was certain to feel the threat if I touched another woman’s cake. It pierced her in her inner core of catering. She grilled me about the cake’s texture and probable ingredients. She was keenly competitive when it came to cooking. Her soufflés always rose and stayed risen, unlike those of some neighbours in Bourne End. She even borrowed a trick from Fanny Cradock by playing an electric fan on the fluffy ramparts of the finished soufflé before serving, to show that it wouldn’t collapse. It wouldn’t dare.
I said that the cake was low to the plate, as if it had hardly risen or not been made with flour at all. It certainly contained almonds, vanilla, perhaps some orange or lemon essence. I didn’t quite play into Mum’s hands by mentioning the potatoes. She seemed mollified and snorted that it didn’t sound like much of a cake, but I wasn’t sure I had fully made amends for my cake adultery in the kitchen of María Paz Binns.