fiddled with the broccoli leaves.
‘Don’t say you’re not sure because you want to stop me going,’ I said. ‘I feel like your friend would be willing to help us, wouldn’t he? If I say I know you.’
Víctor creased up his eyes.
‘Maybe I just don’t want to lose you,’ said Víctor. ‘After all, I’ve only just got you helping up here, driving the van for me …’
His voice petered out.
‘You will give me his name and number, Víctor, won’t you?’ I said. ‘It feels like the whole plan is coming together.’
‘Well,’ said Víctor, ‘maybe our first job is to teach you Spanish. You’ve got English under your belt already …’
‘That was my father,’ I said. ‘And the Baptists …’
‘And Spanish is pretty similar to French …’ said Víctor.
‘So can we start now?’ I said.
‘We’ll start with the verbs,’ said Víctor.
‘Pa said I learnt quickly,’ I said. ‘He said I was like a sponge.’
This was true – if I set my mind to it, I could keep going for hours, and if I kept on repeating things, they seemed to stick.
The chickens went on clucking, and Víctor went on gardening, and the blind children went on swinging their sticks in the yard, and I sat under a eucalyptus tree, with hope in my heart, saying, ‘Hablo, hablas, habla, hablamos, habláis, hablan.’
Mr Sánchez gathered himself together.
‘In a performance of flamenco, duende happens when all the conditions are right – the guitar, the voice and the dance somehow melt into the clapping of the audience and the heat of the night and, sometimes for a moment, like a firework almost, except better, there is an intoxicating energy, and the atmosphere changes. And somebody near you might very quietly, under cover of dark, from inside the spell, murmur Olé.’
I thought duende had possibly come through the grey walls of the classroom, or under the door. The atmosphere had changed, and everyone was dead silent. We sat staring at Mr Sánchez as if we were in a trance.
The silence drained away, and the tiniest whisper of noise came back, like butterflies’ wings.
I put up my hand.
‘And the word for butterfly?’
But my voice had gone funny.
All I could think about was duende.
‘Butterfly – mariposa,’ said Mr Sánchez.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
Because if you say mariposa – try it – you will find that a butterfly has flown out of your mouth.
‘Let’s all say it,’ said Mr Sánchez.
Mariposa mariposa mariposa.
Butterflies flew around the classroom like thrown confetti.
‘What’s the Spanish for spring?’ I said.
‘Spring?’ said Mr Sánchez. ‘Primavera.’
Primavera primavera primavera.
I liked making up Latin sentences, and in fact I was trying to write some of my diary in Latin. I didn’t tell anyone in the family as they all thought I was mad enough already.
Primavera.
I could hear Latin underneath the word.
Primum – first.
Verum – truth.
I put up my hand.
‘Mr Sánchez,’ I said. ‘The word for spring sounds like first truth.’
Around me people got that expression they always got around me.
But Mr Sánchez nodded.
His face looked so thoughtful and sad and I wondered why.
‘Spring,’ he said, with his eyes as doleful as that sad cow the Hendersons kept in their field for no reason. ‘Spring – the first truth. Yes, yes, probably.’
Again, the classroom went silent.
As if duende had come back.
Mr Sánchez was the only teacher I’d ever had who could make silence out of his own silence. Most teachers had to wave their arms around and shout and make threats.
‘Spring,’ he said again. ‘The first truth.’
It seemed impossible but the bell went.
Mr Sánchez jolted.
I later found out that he’d lost his wife, who was called Leonor like the wife of the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado. She’d died in the spring. As she lay bald and fading to nothing in the English hospice, the apple blossom fell past her window and rotted in the grass.
‘We must have spent a long time handing all the books out at the beginning,’ said Mr Sánchez. ‘I can’t think where the time went.’
‘Where it always goes, Mr Sánchez,’ I said.
He laughed.
Then he stopped and looked as if he was about to cry.
‘So where is all that time, Augusta?’ he said.
‘Perhaps we’ll find it in heaven,’ I said, which was a surprising thing to say, and came out of my mouth without me thinking about it.
‘Or would it be hell?’ said Mr Sánchez. ‘If you found the past, all piled up by the side of the road. All the things you’d ever said. All the things you’d ever thought. All the things you’d ever done.’
That was one of those questions that Mr Sánchez asked that made you stop dead, as if the question had shot you through the heart.
As we all stood up to leave our first ever Spanish lesson, Mr Sánchez said, ‘Of course, Spanish is the language of Miguel de Cervantes, Federico García Lorca, Gabriel García Márquez, Isabel Allende, not to mention Picasso, Dalí and Velázquez.’
The sounds of their names!
That’s my heaven.
All of them sitting together under an eternal palm tree discussing important things forever, in gorgeous Spanish, like gunfire and joy mixed up together.
We all filed out of the room, but I stopped and said, ‘Thank you so much, Mr Sánchez. That was the best lesson I’ve ever had – and please may I borrow your book on Duende?’
He nodded and stroked his beard as if he had just had a great shock, and all I could think of was how desperately I had to get to Spain.
To España.
I told Víctor I was planning to be a teacher or a doctor, an artist or a poet once I made it to Spain.
‘Well let’s start with the art,’ he said. ‘I can help you with the art.’
He went and got an old easel and a case of mucky paints and sketching pencils from a store cupboard out at the back of his little house.
I started off copying great Spanish artists from his History of Art book in pencil. We moved