Gazpacho
By Jory Pomeranz
It would have been easy to mistake the wisps of earth drifting around for sand. The wind in Seville only carries around parched dirt, the dust of all the city buildings corroding for the sake of tourism. The cathedral, which is the centerpiece of Seville’s tourism, has a small orchard of orange trees in the courtyard. It’s one of the only cathedrals in the world with a minaret on the belltower. The Christians took it over from the Moors and plastered Jesus everywhere. The Moors then took it back from them, replacing Jesus’ face with elaborate geometric designs and symbols. They fought back and forth like this for centuries, children exchanging rooms and putting up their own works of art or posters of religious rock stars, then tearing it all down again upon driving the other out. The orchard of oranges was the exception between them; Muslims and Christians alike had taken care of the bitter orange trees. The Christians planted the trees, admiring their plumpness and fertility in a barren landscape. The Moors came in and burned or broke everything inside, but to the orchard they added irrigation into the form of mazing patterns to corral rainwater toward the roots. The friars returned and they replastered images and statues of Jesus everywhere, but to the orchard they constructed a surrounding wall to protect from pests and thieves. I wonder whether upon exchanging territory, one or the other had the privilege to stop and appreciate their reciprocal love for the fruit amidst their bedamning of one another. If only we all worshiped oranges. The skins are resilient to the dust, and they appear iridescent in the sunlight, and I see them on my route home from classes.
The streets are cobblestoned, and dust fits in between the bricks. Taxi drivers will occasionally hit a brick loosened by the last century, and a plume of dust will pit up into the air. The wind will carry gusts of fine dirt in the afternoon, burning the nostrils of many people in the street walking without kerchiefs to guard their faces from it. Many of the people walk in the shadows of buildings to avoid the brutal, browbeating sun. Upon coming to the edge of the street to turn, they have to look for the shadowed part of the street again, and cross wherever there is another shadowed island toward their destination. It was common to hold a barrier over one’s eyes, shielding oneself from the sun to only view several feet in front of one’s steps, dancing in and out of the shadows, hearing the rhythm of the footsteps of strangers passing by doing the same, protecting themselves in the shadows while listening, narrowly avoiding collision with one another by hearing the musical gait of the drumming feet on the stoneways.
--
Her name was long with a lot of accent marks, María José Carbó-Martín, the mother I spent the summer renting from in Seville after high school. In the apartment, I could always hear María’s flip-flops as she scampered around the house cleaning—CLACK! Clack, clack, clack. María had some peach fuzz on her head; otherwise, she’d have been completely bald. She wore glasses sometimes. She was dying of a cancer, but it rarely came up in conversation. I never saw her go to the hospital, she seemed determined to be free of all of those appointments and contraptions. She just took pills. Sebastian, her son, was studying to be an electrical engineer at University of Seville, and profits from two spare bedrooms she rented out to tourists offset her son’s tuition.
She didn’t like her shoes getting dirty from the soot and dust coming in from the street. The windows being closed was a more odious offense. The air coming all the way from Gibraltar over one hundred miles away was refreshing, so she resolved to sweep every day instead of keeping the windows closed to keep out the dirt it tracked inside her home.
She was always watching television or sweeping around the kitchen as if she were chasing a cockroach. Clack! Clack clack! Clack clack! Clack! We sat on her couch for most of the afternoons of that summer, sipping gazpacho she kept in a pitcher that beaded moisture inside the fridge. Even the fridge felt hot to the touch as if it were running a fever. We watched Turner Classic Movies. The only black-and-white films I’d seen were It’s A Wonderful Life and To Kill A Mockingbird starring Gregory Peck. By sitting with María, we both avoided the blistering sun, and she would herself, fidget opening and closing the fan, occasionally look out past the courtyard to see who was using the apartment building’s afternoon shadow for a brief sanctuary.
There was another student living in another spare room. He went by “Uncle Buck,” even though he wasn’t an uncle nor named “Buck.” His real name is Jeremy Bucalo. He’d started college late, and additionally he was taking a fifth year at University of Richmond. He wore Tommy Bahama sunglasses. Most greetings started with “dude” and ended with superlatives. Uncle Buck was like most Americans studying abroad; his goal-set was get soused, then laid, and to receive a foreign language credit for college. He succeeded at all of these things, and he thought of me like a protégé, or a younger brother, without my consent. When I wasn’t in the living room sitting with María watching classic movies, then I was lying on my bed reading while Uncle Buck was recounting his imaginary memoir, self-titled Spanish Conquests and written by Uncle “Don Juan” Quixote. I️ wondered what ever had happened to the name Buck, but I ️guess there never truly existed a “Buck” in the first place. I was a virgin and I really didn’t have enough experience to know what he was talking about half the time. I just nodded along to whatever he was saying like Dopey from The Seven Dwarves, as if I, too, knew how “easy” it was to get girls here. He came home in the early morning zonked from too much sangría. I could hear his sandals in the hallway—flop-FLOP, flop-FLOP—as he passed by my closed door.
Then I heard María get up and walk softly, headed to the bathroom—clack…clack…clack… —she went to vomit, then headed back to bed. He’d always wake her up by coming home at those hours. One night he even snuck in a girl named Claire right into his room. She was a student from the University of Southern California studying Spanish abroad. When María got up to use the restroom, I assumed she’d heard four pairs of feet, the clickity-clickity of high heels and the flop-FLOP flop-FLOP of “Buck’s” shoes. She didn’t head to his room to tell him off. She had her customary vomit and then went right back to bed, without realizing he’d broken the rules she’d laid out on the first day: no guests.
The girlfriend left right out the front door—clickity, clickety—passing right in front of María sweeping in the kitchen. I was brushing my teeth the next morning when he came into the bathroom with his shirt off and his sunglasses resting on top of his head. We were indoors. He put his unwashed right hand under my nose to prove his manliness.
“Euf—gah! What’s that?” I️ said.
“There is only one word for that my friend… Pussy.”
Then he washed his hands and went out to eat breakfast, where María started yelling at him for bringing that “whore” into her house, as she put it.
--
María and I cooked gazpacho together, because I asked her to teach me. She added crusty bread, tomatoes, peeled cucumber, chopped onion, olive oil, sherry vinegar, salt, garlic, pepper.
“That’s it,” she said. “You want it to bite more, add more garlic; you want it a little smoother, add more olive oil; the cucumber is refreshing; it balances everything. Always serve it cold on a hot day, unless you want it regardless.”
The afternoons before we watched Turner Classic Movies, she’d ask if I wanted to make it. My sneakers would squeak—squeak, squeak, squeak—on the kitchen floor moving around to collect the ingredients. I’d peel the cucumber and pare away the rotten parts of the tomatoes, add all the ingredients up; then I’d buzz the blender until it was smooth. Then I’d put it in the bowls and add a slice of baguette to sop up the dregs of the bowl.
“Too salty” or “more garlic,” she’d say invariably.
She’d take my bowl and hers, dump them back into the blender with an operatic gesture of disapproval, then remake it herself. I’d unknowingly enlisted myself to be instructed harshly on a simple puréed vegetable soup. One day I confronted her and said, “Why don’t you make it, since you know the way you like it.” She looked at me like I’d pissed in the olive jar on the kitchen counter.
--
In this way we began to habitually argue with one another in Spanish. We started bickering with each other like brother and sister with at least forty years between our ages. Gazpacho was the start of it—clack, clack, clack! Her sandals would discipline the ground on the way back to the kitchen to remake our soup. One day I decided I would tease her, “This kitchen is as dirty as your feet. I’ll get the broom and clean it up,” and she was livid. Since we were both in the kitchen, I ️swept, and she taught me how to sweep, how to pressure down the head of the broom and where dirt hides in the corners, and it became a part of our routine as a young man turned spinster sister on hot afternoons. I️ cleaned under the lip of the countertops because that’s where the crust was hidden, and thereby a place for cucarachas, cockroaches that would scurry away to hide: tic-tic-tic.
Sebastian, her son, started to come home and sit with us. I would ask him questions because my Spanish had gotten quite good from discussing Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson. We watched Giant with James Dean at least six times. Sebastian would respond to my questions, and debate with his mother about the veracity of his answers. They would argue with more flamboyant disgust, and even more emphasis on the accents of each other’s names. But it was all an opera of affection. People dancing around one another with words and expressions, changing the pitch of their voices to seem more threatening or condescending. People are inclined to be more stubborn, more brutally honest, more unforgiving with family. It’s one of the ironies of caring about other people. Watching them bicker was absurd but ultimately ineffectual. I was amused. It felt like peeling a hardboiled egg with a solitary thumb. Afterward, no one had any recourse but to laugh about it.
María seemed embittered by her failed marriage, which we never talked about once that summer, except that she’d been divorced and now her husband was dead from a heart attack years earlier, but she was still angrier than a radish at him. He’d just left one day. She was soured by having to use the coda of her life to pay for her son’s tuition. He wasn’t married like the sons of her neighbors.
A little plume of dust punctuated her step when she argued with her son—clack-clack—working herself into a pithy rage of circles on the ground of the living room of the small apartment. He’d turn immediately away after making a convincing point to storm out of the room in his boots—tuc-tuc-tuc! Then she’d chase after him with a last retort—clack-clack, clack! His counter unpunctuated by her retort, he’d be dragged back, back into the living room dance again.
It went back and forth until someone eventually made it to their own room and managed to get the door fully closed before the other’s antiphon. All parties thoroughly enjoyed themselves. We’d all eat breakfast together the next day as if nothing had happened between us. My Spanish improved quite a bit because arguments are lexically demanding, and they require an immediate response in order to not lose them. It all reminded me of a black-and-white film where Elizabeth Taylor and her lover storm about the mansion, chucking vases, then sallying up to one another moments later, except there was nothing sexually charged about it. Before I moved into the apartment, Sebastian apparently hadn’t been speaking with María much anymore. The demands of his schoolwork had pinched any flame of social interactions between the mother and son. It had apparently started earlier when the father left them, and it struck me as odd the patriarch of a family leaving would drive a mother and son apart from one another. Unknowingly, I had become some kind of conduit for conversation between them. By following the stupidity of my curiosity, María began to tell us both stories about Sebastian’s father that she had never told him before…
One day after an argument, I found Sebastian leaning with his face on his bedroom door. Both feet were touching the bottom threshold; he had his eyes closed and his forehead leaning against the closed door, bated breath. I thought maybe it was a coping mechanism. He must have found it a soothing position to decompress himself.
--
María and I continued to watch our black-and-white movies in the afternoons, exchanging barbs in good fun and sipping gazpacho.
“You should go out,” María said one day.
“You should go out,” I said.
“No, you are young… you need to explore.”
“You’re gonna die soon. What do you have to lose?” I said.
She choked on the laugh that came up while she was bringing a cold glass of gazpacho to her lips.
“I don’t get anything from your company,” she said in jest. “Maybe there is a woman who does… It’s unlikely but you should find out now before you are older.”
So I ️ got in the habit of walking around Seville at night after the sun had parched the landscape. The winds had tapered the sun’s heat. The ground still felt warm near one’s feet earlier into the evening as the dry earth and concrete unscorched into the night. A wind came into the city at nighttime, unfettered by the smog of the cars, and it carried with it the light smell of sea salt from Gibraltar’s strait. I would circle over the Isabel Bridge and make my way up Calle Reyes Católicos; then I’d cut across town to the cathedral’s courtyard to check on the oranges hanging silently in the dark. Then I’d make my way back toward the south, people-watching the outdoor seating at the cafés and bars until I came across the Guadalquivir River, a profound shade of dark green that looked as though Houdini would have hidden in chains within it. I walked the boulevard running alongside it back to the bridge of Isabelle and crossed it toward home.
In August walking back one night, I took a turn onto Calle Callao, and I was stopped by movement in the shadows of the apartment building. Outside the courtyard gate of María’s building was something hidden in the dark. I leaned against the cornerstone at the end of the sidewalk where there was a streetlight, and my eyes adjusted to the darkness. A man was pushing another person against the stones of the building. I thought it was a thief. It was two men. I couldn’t tell whether they were fighting. Maybe one was getting robbed. I strained my eyes to probe the shadows. The man against the building was taller. He appeared to tower over the smaller one, who was forcing him against the stone wall. Their faces were so close to one another. I realized they were lovers. For all the deadness and desert that the city had smothered over with buildings, there was a crippling hunger in its place. They were kissing each other ferociously; one man had his hand looped inside the other belt as if he were pulling him by a rope. The other hand was lost in the locks of black hair of the shorter man. They were kissing each other like each other’s lips were the only water for miles.
I stepped to the side of the building’s shadow and stayed silent. The shorter man had his hand shoved down the pants of his lover against the wall, gripping the nape of his neck in his hand. It was impossible to say who was in control, they wanted so much from one another. Suddenly they stopped. One pulled away. Sebastian looked up at me from the edge of the shadow. He straightened out his clothes in the light of the eave of the building and opened the gate to go inside it. The lover went down the street without turning back, without so much as a word spoken between them. Later I would realize, Sebastian had been imagining pushing his lover against the wall in the shadows. He was taking a bitter moment with his mother, and imagining something sweet to calm himself from his anger. Before coming up, I waited for the sound of his boots to fade going up the steps: Tuc. Tuc. Tuc.
--
At the end of summer, a flamenco competition was to be held on a platform on the southern side of The Bridge of Isabel. The bridge, constructed from concentric circles of wrought iron, was a stunning piece of architecture spanning the river since 1852. As I pushed my way through the crowd trying to get to the other side of it, I contemplated walking the extra mile to another bridge, it was so thick with people, one farther down the Guadalquivir. I pressed against the railings to move horizontal to the crowd, then stopped as they announced the judges for the dance tournament: a local news anchor, a soap opera actress, and María José Carbó-Martín. She was dressed in high heels and a lavish purple and black summer dress. It covered her shoulders and arms loosely to the hilt of her hands. Her rosy glasses sparkled under the brim of a black pork pie hat to cover her bald head. She used a cane to get to the judges table, where the other celebrities were seated, but unlike home she didn’t look feeble and filled with anger all the time. She stood proudly on stage as if she could beat anyone with the stick she carried in her right hand. A smile both coy and mischievous was spread across her face, and it was lovely to see her looking so daring in front of the mob of dance lovers and tourists. She had been one of the most decorated flamenco dancers of Seville, someone in the crowd was saying to another. I couldn’t believe she’d never told me about her career as a dancer. Her husband had been her partner.
One of the audience members, I could overhear him, “She is a recluse, no?”
His friend replied, “She looks like a recluse…barely been outside in five years.”
Sevillians can be brutal. I laughed at the comment, thinking María would have, too.
As the dancing began, I watched her eyes dart up and down lovers clicking their shoes against the platform, spinning and pushing the musical and emotional intention through their feet, their hands framing the dry, empty air around them as if they had grasped each other’s desire in their hands above their heads, the energy spinning off them like invisible ropes entangling one another yet constantly escaping. It was powerful to see lovers engaged in one another, enraptured by each other’s movements, yet resolute in their independence of being. María clapped at every performance, and I presume she judged them all fairly.
That night she came in late afterward. I heard her shoes clapping lightly on the courtyard stone. She went right to bed. I don’t remember her waking up in the middle of the night. I believe she slept fitfully after the performance.
--
The next day we were sitting on the couch watching El Gigante, The Giant, with James Dean. She shrugged her shoulders at my mentioning her dancing days, and we sipped gazpacho and talked about Elizabeth Taylor’s life instead. A few days went by and we were back to our bickering selves.
--
On the day I was set to leave, we’d had another argument. I was curt with her. She was terse right back. We both stomped off to our rooms. I let my anger bake on the pavement overnight before my flight in the morning. I couldn’t let go of what she said, and now years later, I can’t even remember what had made me so angry. Then as I was going down the steps to the taxi the next morning, she stopped me in the doorway. She kissed me on both sides of my cheeks and said, “Goodbye, Jory.” I was still feeling angry, and I returned the gesture and kissed both cheeks in a perfunctory way, not telling her I loved her too, an insipid look on my face. Then I hurdled down the steps since the cabbie was honking. When I was fiddling with the gate of the courtyard, she stopped me again; she came down the stairs and into the courtyard light.
“Jory, goodbye,” she said.
And this time, I knew what she was saying.
“María, goodbye,” I said.
I cried all the way to the airport. The dust from the city stuck to my cheeks, and I had to wipe it away with my sleeve covering it. After crossing the bridge, we passed by the courtyard of the cathedral, and the oranges were gone from all the branches. The old trees and young fruit had matured over the summer, and it was time for them to let go of one another.
END