Short Story - A Lunch Less Ordinary
It was almost siesta time in my little Salamanca flat. "Los Simpson" chirped away in the background as I prepared my lunch. Could
I even remember what they sounded like in English any more? In my hunger, I was starting to resemble Señor Simpson myself.
“Mmm, donuts”, Homer, drooled from the TV.
“Mmm,
pasta!”, I echoed, considering that sometimes the translation team didn’t need to work so hard.
"Not long to go now, though", I thought, as I threw the crudely chopped garlic into the sartén.
I cook a rudimentary ragù by anyone´s standards but a steaming bowl of pasta and an iced glass of pineapple juice would definitely hit the spot before
my lunchtime snooze.
“Tomate? check. Atún? check. Cebolla? check. Tabasco? check.”
Everything I needed to whip together a spicy bad-boy of a salsa!
I
stood impatiently over the hissing ajo. Serpentine tongues of blue gas caressed the edge of the small pan and wafts of heat drifted up into my face. The rising temperature of the oil was discernible.
“As if this place wasn’t already like an oven” I exclaimed
"I can’t believe those cheapskates in London stuck me in a flat with no AC in the middle of June".
“Cabrones!”
My morning work-shirt was already discarded inside out, thrown onto the sofa-bed
in a sweaty, crumpled mess. I considered ditching my cargo shorts too, but with the balcony doors thrown wide open, the abuela opposite could peer right inside.
“No queremos que sufras un infarto, Pilar!”
I took a step back as a globule of aceite leapt and slapped into my bare chest. “Ouch!” It was as if the sizzling garlic
was scolding me; demanding that I stop staring at it so impatiently. I estimated another minute or two before I could toss in the onions.
“F£@k
it, I’m going to stick the washing on.”
"At least get something productive done here. This waiting is torture".
If I hurried I’d have time to run downstairs to the communal washing machine in the basement. I figured that the ciclo rápido would dovetail nicely with my lunch and siesta. I could hang the clothes out to dry on the roof terrace before I left again and they’d be bone dry by tonight.
“Let this infernal heat serve for something”, I mused.
An enormous Lidl bag was acting as my ad-hoc laundry bin and I discovered it, as always, overflowing onto the floor. Annoyingly, the plastic handles had broken, but I managed to scoop up the hulking mass of clothes with
one arm and close the apartment door behind me with the other. Then, with my Havaianas clapping on the marble, I toddled down the stairs, semi-blinded by yesterday’s gym gear, which sat atop the pile, angled against my face.
“Jeez,
that smells rough!”
Just as I finished stuffing the last of my faded T-shirts into the washing machine I was hit by a sudden wave of nauseating panic.
“Oh”
Something was terribly, terribly wrong. My shorts felt unusually light - horrifically light - as if
there were very little in the pockets... and there was only one thing that could mean...
“Oh, God, no!”
Like
a cowboy engaged in a high-noon shoot out, my hands leapt to my sides. But is wasn’t my pistols I so desperately wished to encounter.
“Please
keys, please keys, PLEASE KEYS...”
My anxious fingers grasped around the only object to be found at the bottom of either of the cotton pockets - a tablet of Persil washing up powder, already starting to crumble and disintegrate in my grip. And nothing else.
Whiter than white, it had said on the box of detergent. But my pants were already brown.
Racing back up the stairs I slammed my palms against the firmly closed door of my apartment, beating against it in a manner not unlike Dustin Hoffman in the finale of The Graduate. I let out a pleading cry of anguish.
“Nooooooo! Dammit! Opeeeeen! Pleeease!”
I hammered the door with my fists, imploring the timber to give way. Instead it emitted a booming echo of solidity which thundered through the communal stairwell.
My nostrils twitched. One thing was managing to breach this unmoving barrier, this immovable object - the sweet aroma of frying garlic that emanated from the other side! In my famished state it should have smelt delicious. Instead, only one thought raced through my brain:
“Oh Jesus, the f£@king oil is going to catch fire!”
I stood there for a moment, unmoving, staring at my front door in a state of quasi-religious stupefaction. My body had frozen in horror, statuesque, but my mind was performing
somersaults, searching desperately for a course of action.
And then a strange thing happened.
I heard the sound of another door opening! The latch downstairs turned and, a moment later, the building’s main door slammed shut, reverberating on its hinges. One of my neighbours had returned home. Footsteps were approaching, coming up the stairs.
Now, one would think - things being as they were - that my brain might have already shut down the part of the pre-frontal cortex that relates to falling in love. I’m no expert on Darwinian evolutionary theory, but wasn’t 100 percent of cerebral CPU required by the rapidly escalating life-threatening emergency?! However, the fact of the matter is this. One moment I was scrambling to work out how to explain to a mystery neighbour - in as cool and casual a fashion as possible - that both of our flats risked imminent incineration. The next, having turned around, I was struck dumb in my realisation that there were now two things in my close vicinity that were smoking hot.
The girl from the top floor had chestnut eyes, long coal-black hair and a curious smile. Strangely, she didn’t seem overly alarmed that a wide-eyed, shirtless foreigner
was now staring at her, opening and closing his mouth like a fish out of water. Finally I found my tongue.
“Uh, ...Hola...Pues es que tengo un problema....”
As I wrestled to rationalise the increasingly surreal situation, it became clear that there were only two options. Either I had to knock down my apartment door or I had to somehow enter the apartment through the first floor balcony.
There was no time for further explanation. I turned heroically to whom I now knew to be the mother of my future offspring and, giving up on Spanish, uttered the immortal words:
“Stand well back”
She needn’t have worried. My new love´s physical well-being was not endangered by an explosion of splintered wood as I had envisaged. On the contrary, I proceeded
to demonstrate that breaking down a door is not as easy as it appears in the movies. Maybe I should have taken a longer run up... or maybe it’s simply that Gerard Butler and Jason Statham attend the gym with more frequency
than I do. After three fruitless charges it was abundantly clear that the door was going to break me long before I was going to break it.
“¡Ay! ¡Cuidado, tío! ¿Estás bien? ¿Te has hecho daño?” she sympathised.
Pretending that my possibly dislocated shoulder was not at all painful, I quickly explained to Karen (sometimes the hero does get the
girl) that I was going to get a ladder and enter via the balcony. It was – as they say in Star Wars – my only hope. Leaving my intergalactic Princess Laia somewhat bewildered on the landing, I dashed downstairs.
I
surged into the Don Quijote café opposite my apartment and, before the bemused, balding owner could object to my semi-nakedness, had already made my imploring petition.
“Escalera!
Una Escalera! Tienen una que me puedan dejar prestada? Es una emergencia!”
Miraculously, the flustered camarero did have a ladder in the storage room - and it was a decent size!
“This could just work” I thought.
The only question now was: would it reach high enough? I rushed back outside. I was about to find out.
As I struggled to adjust and position the ladder, the people eating lunch on the café’s pavement tables all turned to fix their eyes on me. Just what on earth
was this deranged guiri doing?!
“¿Pero que diablos hace este chico?”
“Shit!”
The fully-extended ladder wasn’t far off the balcony but there was still a sizeable gap. I took a deep breath. This was going to require some monkey skills that I wasn’t sure I possessed. As I shakily climbed each aluminium step (still stupidly wearing my flip-flops) the café owner’s wife cheered me on from below.
I didn’t catch her exact words but if this scene had been playing out in Scotland, and not Spain, I imagine she would have said
“On ye go son. Jus grab on thae bars an haul yersel’ up”.
Letting go of the relative safety of the ladder’s uppermost rung, I thrust my hands skywards and grasped the lower section of balcony’s metal railing.
“Jesus, how much weight can this thing take?”
For a moment I flailed upside down on the overhang, simultaneously mortified with embarrassment at the indignity of the situation, but also terrified by how dangerous it was.
Dangling perilously twelve feet above the asphalt, with the señora’s shouts of encouragement ringing in my ears, my mind dug up scenes of a film that I had watched the night before. "The Sea Inside" was the story of a Galician man - played by Javier Bardem - who is paralysed from the neck down after diving into shallow water at the beach.
“It’s funny how the human mind works” I thought to myself for the second time in five minutes.
I’d like to say that I hauled myself over the balcony railings a la Bruce Lee but it would be more accurate to say that I crawled over with all the dignity and grace of Jarvis Cocker on an army assault course. But it didn’t matter. I was
finally in!
“¡Así! ¡Así se hace! ¡Bravo, joven!”, I heard from below.
In three strides I bounded across the apartment to the stove and flicked off the still roaring gas. No fire, no flames, no disaster. Just a studio-full of pungent black
smoke and the foul smell of burnt garlic. Nonetheless, it was over!
“Dios mío, that was close”
Returning to the balcony, I gave a wave to the still fascinated audience on the terrace below, indicating that all was now fine. A small round of applause broke out.
“¡Gracias! ¡Todo controlado ahora!”
With a final
sheepish smile and nod to the café owner and his wife (she looked as proud as punch) I retired from view.
I scraped the charred mess that had once
been garlic into the bin. Filling the blackened pan with water, I left it in the sink to soak, but it seemed unlikely it would ever be the same again.
“Pfff,
I guess I'm eating lunch out today”
I grabbed my shirt from the sofa-bed and threw it over my head. My keys lay mockingly on the sideboard,
alongside my wallet. I picked up both and stuffed them in my pocket.
There was no sign of the girl when I opened my front door to leave. Had she really
been there at all? Had I imagined her?
“Man, what a goddess.”
After giving my pocket a reassuring tap, just to make absolutely sure that I had the keys, I closed my assuredly robust door and left the
flat to empty itself of the reeking stench.
I treated myself to a menu del día for lunch. I’d chosen a place well away from the drama of my apartment. After three fine courses and half a bottle of tempranillo I felt rather better. I wasn’t going to have time for my siesta now, and my nerves were still somewhat frayed, but at least my hunger had finally been satisfied.
“Cuánto es, por favor?” I said to the moustachioed gentleman standing behind the prehistoric till.
“€9.80 señor”
As
the waiter watched on, I pulled my wallet out of my pocket and opened it. A miniature avalanche of white powder fell from between the credit cards and settled on the black serving counter. The waiter’s eyes opened wide
but he didn’t say anything. It was of course, just the remains of the washing detergent tablet which had disintegrated in my pockets during my exploits. But by then I was done explaining.
I
extended a ten euro note and he accepted it with a nervous smile.
“La comida estuvo muy bien”, I said.
"Me alegro que le haya gustado, señor"
"Pues, hasta la próxima"
"Hasta la próxima señor"
But
I wasn’t sure he wanted there to be a “next time”. I doubted that dishevelled, foreign, cocaine dealers were welcome custom. Especially ones who stank of smoke, stale sweat and burnt garlic. Most especially
those who left a measly 20 cent tip!
“Vaya día”, I muttered to myself, as I closed the restaurant door firmly behind me.
