Two Old Fools in Spain Again (26 page)

“How lovely to see you both!” I said in surprise and gave the pair of them a hug. “How tall you’ve grown! Look, Joe! The Ufarte twins are back!”

“
Tío
Joe, can we go looking for those sabre toothed tigers you said live in the woods?”

“We’re big now, so we know they don’t really exist.”

“But we could go and look, just in case.”

“Of course we can!” said Joe.

“Is your whole family here?” I asked.

“Yes, Mama and Papa are up ahead.”

“And our brothers are kicking their silly ball. Look, they have reached the shrine already.”

“And your
tía
, Lola?”

“
Tía
Lola has gone away.”

“Mama says
tía
Lola is catching fish in another country.”

“And she won’t be back for a very long time.”

“And Fifi?” asked Joe casually.

I smiled to myself. We may have missed the Ufarte family, but Joe certainly hadn’t missed being a target of Fifi’s nips.

“Fifi is down below in our house.”

“With our
abuela.
”

Joe relaxed a little. His ankles were safe for the moment.

The twins raced away to renew other acquaintances and we carried on climbing the path to the shrine.

It had been a good day. The village was reunited and it certainly looked as though the Ufartes were back together again. All was well in El Hoyo and with the world.

But time doesn’t stand still and the next month would bring many surprises, both good and bad.

30. Ups and Downs

W
henever the phone shrilled very early in the morning, it was almost always Karly ringing from Australia. As she was finishing her day, we were beginning ours.

“Mum, you’ll never guess what… I’m pregnant again! Indy’s going to have a new baby brother or sister!”

“Oh my, oh my, oh my!”

I shrieked the news to Joe.

“Karly, are you quite sure?”

“Yes, positive. It’s really, really, really early days yet, but I’ve done the test three times and they all showed positive.”

“Oh, that’s just fantastic!”

“And you know what that means? When you come over next winter, you’ll be here when the baby’s born! Perfect timing!”

“Have you told everybody?”

“No, you’re the first. We’re going to wait just a little longer in case anything goes wrong. We’ll just tell close family for the moment.”

When we had something to celebrate, Joe and I would often take an evening drink up to the roof terrace. Nights were still cold, but it was a pleasure to survey the village and valley and watch the stars come out. Smoke curled from our chimney and from a couple of others.

“Looks like Uncle Felix hasn’t got his fire lit,” I observed. “But I can see Geronimo’s and Marcia’s.”

“And the Ufartes are in, that’s good.”

“So, there will be
two
babies when we go over to Australia in November.”

I had to keep saying the news aloud to myself, to help me absorb it.

“And we’ll have Christmas in the sun and swim on Christmas Day,” remarked Joe.

We finished our drinks and went back inside our warm house, still making plans for the following winter. Nothing would stop us this time.

The next day, somebody knocked on our door. It wasn’t a familiar knock. We would have recognised Marcia’s walking stick tap, or Geronimo’s distinctive knock. It certainly couldn’t be Paco who always pounded with his fist and shouted “English!” at the same time. My heart sank. I was convinced it was Pancho, intent on pursuing his English lessons.

But it wasn’t Pancho, it was our neighbour, Paco. I’d never heard him knock so lightly and I knew immediately that something was wrong.

“Paco?
¿Qué pasa?
”

This wasn’t the Paco that we knew and loved. His usual exuberance had disappeared and his expression was solemn. There was no sign of the customary twinkle in his eye. He walked slowly into our house and sat heavily on one of our kitchen chairs.

“Paco? Is something the matter?”

“I thought you would want to know. Uncle Felix passed away yesterday.”

“Oh no!”

“He was an old man. It was expected.”

Joe and I stared at Paco in silence.
That explained why there was no smoke curling from Uncle Felix’s chimney,
I thought.

“That’s very sad news,” I said at last, as Joe poured us all a brandy. “Was he sick? How did it happen?”

“No, he was not sick. He died peacefully in his cottage. Geronimo found him. Felix was sitting in his armchair watching his big TV.” A smile flickered on Paco’s lips. “He was probably watching his favourite matchmaking show.”

“Poor Uncle Felix,” I said. Fond memories of the old man crowded my mind.

“He never had a woman,” said Paco and pulled a rueful face.

Would Uncle Felix never again sit in the shade outside Marcia’s shop? Never again supervise the pruning of our vine? Would we never see him and his beloved mule passing the house, or in the distance as he tethered her on the lush mountainside to graze? A thousand memories played in my head. A lump was forming in my throat and I was finding it difficult to swallow. El Hoyo without Uncle Felix? It was unthinkable.

“What about his mule?” asked Joe, voicing the question at the forefront of my own mind.

“Geronimo has taken her. She will be fine.”

But Uncle Felix’s mule wasn’t fine. Geronimo did his best but the mule was pining and inconsolable. As fast as he tethered her, she’d pull the stake out of the ground and trot back into the village, searching for her master. And when she didn’t find him, she would stand quietly outside Marcia’s shop, her head hung low, looking up only when she heard footsteps, always hoping her beloved master had returned. She stopped eating and lost weight.

“Poor old girl,” I said, as I patted her head. “I wish I could bring him back to you.”

The mule’s large, liquid brown eyes just stared at the ground. I doubt if she even noticed me.

The month had started well with Karly and Cam’s baby news, but the loss of Uncle Felix was a blow and hard for the village to bear. The funeral was a sad one and Felix was the first villager to be laid to rest in the new part of the cemetery.

Uncle Felix’s death seemed to herald a string of unhappy events, both minor and major. I was already sad at the old man’s passing and the fact that we hadn’t travelled to Australia that winter.

We should have seen the next domestic catastrophe coming; we’d been warned after all, but I don’t think anybody really believed it was going to happen. But it did.

When we arrived in Spain 10 years earlier, we were delighted that, with the correct viewing equipment, we could watch all the British terrestrial channels on TV.

Then, one day all the BBC channels simply vanished from our TV screens. One could almost hear the howls of anguish from expats across Europe and Joe’s was probably the loudest.

“No BBC1 or BBC2?” asked Joe, desperately punching the buttons on the remote control, scrolling through the channels. “No BBC3? Or 4?”

NO SATELLITE SIGNAL IS BEING RECEIVED advised the message on the otherwise blank screen.

“No news? No
Match of the Day
? No golf? No rugby? No
Pointless
?”

“All gone,” I sighed. “I understand they’ve replaced the old Astra satellite, which means UK residents will get a better picture, but the footprint is smaller. Viewers in Spain and the rest of Europe won’t get anything.”

“No darts, no tennis? No World Cup soccer?” Joe slumped back on the cushions in despair.

“Well, at least we have all the ITV channels,” I said. “And maybe it’ll force us to watch more Spanish TV, we’ve always meant to. It’ll help improve our Spanish.”

I won’t reproduce Joe’s reply here, it might offend. The independent channels were awash with advertisements, which Joe hated. But even he agreed that ITV was better than nothing, despite the adverts. But the loss of all his favourite sports channels didn’t do his blood pressure any good.

I was already aware of Joe’s high blood pressure. We discovered the problem in Bahrain but now, back in Spain, he refused to do anything about it even though the health system was excellent. However, to my relief and after constant nagging, I finally managed to steer him to a doctor to have it checked.

It was an evening appointment and Joe had the doctor’s address scribbled on a piece of paper. Eventually, he located it. The surgery was on the ground floor of a large block of apartments.

He rang the bell and the building’s main entrance buzzed open. He stepped inside and the door snapped shut behind him. He found himself in a large foyer with a communal table set against one wall and a fake potted plant alongside another. Four doors led to ground-floor apartments.

Before he had time to discover which was the doctor’s door, the lights suddenly switched off leaving him standing in pitch darkness. The lights were the energy-saving kind and designed to switch on for a few moments when the main entrance was opened. He fumbled up and down the nearest wall, feeling for a light switch but found nothing. So he opened the main door and the lights came on again. He spotted the light switch on the wall opposite and reached it just before the lights switched off again. But the light switch didn’t work.

Well, I’ll just have to feel my way around
, he thought.

Joe had no idea which door belonged to the doctor. He walked around the wall, feeling his way.

“Ouch!” he exclaimed as he tripped over the communal side table. And, “Oh, for goodness’ sake!” when he stubbed his toe and became entangled with the large fake potted plant.

Having reached a door, he listened carefully. He could hear children’s voices and a distant TV, so he was pretty sure that this wasn’t the doctor’s surgery.

He felt his way to the next door and laid his ear on it, listening intently. He could hear nothing, so he crouched down to peer through the key hole.

To his embarrassment the door swung open to reveal a nurse. Joe quickly straightened and stepped back.

“Señor Twead?” she asked.

“Yes, I was just checking to see if I had found the right place,” he explained. “The lights in the hallway don’t work.”

“I know,” she smiled. “They never have. The doctor is expecting you.”

The doctor examined him thoroughly. Of course by now, Joe’s blood pressure was through the roof.

“Your blood pressure is very high,” said the doctor.

He made copious notes, then presented Joe with two huge plastic containers.

“What are they for?” asked Joe.

“You must collect all your urine for 24 hours. Then you must take it to the hospital for testing.”

“Really? Well, I won’t need both of these containers, will I?”

But he did.

On his next visit to the doctor the lights in the hallway still didn’t work, but he remembered which direction to head for and fumbled his way to the correct door quite quickly. The nurse, who turned out to be the doctor’s wife, let him in and the doctor examined him again.

“I have something I want you to wear,” said the doctor, unpacking a box.

This time Joe had to wear a ‘halter’ for 24 hours. A band was wrapped around his upper arm and attached to a little machine at his waist. At half-hour intervals the machine beeped shrilly, the band inflated and his blood pressure reading was recorded.

“I have to do some shopping on my way home,” said Joe.

“That is okay, you must carry on with your life as normal for 24 hours.”

As Joe stood in line at the supermarket checkout, the machine beeped and his fellow customers looked around, wondering where the beeping was coming from.

“Madre mía,”
said the cashier and checked her till, convinced it was malfunctioning.

It was an uncomfortable day and a bad night for Joe. He tried hanging the machine over the bedpost but ended up tying himself in knots. It was a great relief to both of us when the 24 hours were over.

He returned to the doctor, who analysed the readings and prescribed tablets. A couple of weeks later he measured Joe’s blood pressure again and was pleased with the results.

“The doctor said I need to keep taking the tablets, but he said they are working well and my blood pressure is nearly normal.”

Of course I was delighted.

One might think that our lifestyle wasn’t very stressful. After all, we were retired and no longer went to work. But there was always something to sky-rocket Joe’s blood pressure to dizzying heights. And sure enough, he was about to be dealt another blow.

Ten days after losing all our BBC channels, Joe switched on the TV to watch the early evening news. We’d adjusted ourselves to watching the independent channel, ITV. Joe hated the advertisements with a passion but he’d accepted them as a necessary evil and at least he could watch the British news and some sports events. Now he stared at the screen in disbelief.

NO SATELLITE SIGNAL IS  BEING RECEIVED.

Joe’s roar could be heard several villages away. “WHAT? Have they taken away ITV too?”

Sadly, it was true.

I was very pleased that Joe’s blood pressure had been stabilised with medication. Without the tablets, I think that final blow may have sent it over the edge.

Although the loss of all our TV channels was lamentable, that paled into insignificance when compared with the next loss. Early in the morning the telephone rang again. It was Karly and her voice was small and sad.

“Mum, we’ve just come back from the hospital. Bad news, I’m afraid. They couldn’t detect a heartbeat. The baby died.”