The Sisterhood (9 page)

A woman from Sarah-Lynn’s Bible study class brought over an old-fashioned guidebook to Spain, published by a Christian publishing house, for Menina. Menina thanked her lethargically and put it on her bedside table.
That
was staying here.

Virgil stopped making jokes the way he usually did, while Sarah-Lynn’s avoidance of anything to do with weddings was painful. Menina was too depressed to look forward to the trip, but by the end of the week she thought Spain couldn’t be any worse than home.

On Saturday afternoon the Walkers drove her to the Atlanta airport. Menina boarded and slipped into her window seat, and after the plane had filled up, a last-minute arrival flung herself into the aisle seat. Menina was glad to see there was a vacant seat between them. She didn’t feel like being elbow to elbow with another person. Soon the Atlanta airport was rolling by outside Menina’s window—slowly, then faster, then dropping away as the plane lifted off, banked and climbed. Menina watched the evening lights of greater Atlanta grow smaller and smaller below, feeling cut adrift from everything she knew. Before long a flight attendant came down the aisle pushing a drink cart. “Would you like something to drink?”

Menina managed a tight smile and said, “A Coke, please. No. Wait…maybe…bourbon. A big one.” Virgil drank bourbon. When Sarah-Lynn wasn’t watching.

“Big bourbon it is. And a splash?”

“Oh. You mean water. Thanks.” The attendant smiled and rattled ice cubes into a glass, emptied two miniatures into it and added a little water from a big bottle. She handed it over with a
handful of extra little bottles and a conspiratorial wink. “You must be with the bachelorette party. Like I told the others, might as well start the party now.” Menina had been about to refuse the miniatures. Now she took them and forced a smile. “Thanks. How did you know?”

“Spain’s real popular for bachelorette parties, you know—sightseeing, great bars, great shopping.” The attendant grinned. “And a
long
way from anybody who might care what they’re up to. Y’all have a great time.” Then she turned her attention to the woman in the aisle seat, who waved her away.

Menina stared at her glass. She had drunk perhaps a dozen glasses of wine in her life and didn’t care for alcohol, but the smell of bourbon reminded her of her father. She took a big gulp, then gagged. The vile taste seemed appropriate. Menina poured another two miniatures into the melting ice, and downed them determinedly. After a while she had another miniature.

She shook her head when dinner was offered. She felt better—but worse, too; everything was blurry. She must be drunk. She drank the last two bourbon miniatures straight from the bottle. She no longer cared about anything. She could no longer taste anything. Becky had been right, this was a good idea, Menina thought, and passed out cold.

She came to, disoriented and feeling worse than she ever had in her life. Sun streamed through the plane window and Menina blinked, piecing yesterday together with a growing sense of horror. The pilot said they were holding to land at Malaga airport. She turned to the woman in the aisle seat and croaked, “
Malaga?
Aren’t we going to Madrid?”

The woman looked up from something she was writing and gave Menina a funny look over the tops of the wire-rimmed glasses that had slid halfway down her nose. She was middle-aged and
rather striking, with a distinctive streak of gray in her black hair. Despite a night on the plane, she looked elegant in a black cashmere sweater and jersey skirt, accented with a modern silver necklace and bracelets. Menina realized to her horror this was the tour organizer. Her photo had been on a welcome message with the tickets. Professor Serafina Lennox, professor and author, the Spanish art expert—the one person in the world, in fact, who might know about Tristan Mendoza. Her heart sank. “You’re Professor Lennox, aren’t you?” she asked weakly.

The woman raised her eyebrows as if to ask what on earth Menina was doing on the tour, extracted a card from her handbag, and gave it to Menina. “Yes. So nice to get acquainted with students. I don’t recall you from any of my classes. You are…?” Menina mumbled her name as she put the card in her jeans pocket, wondering how to explain what she was doing here. She couldn’t think of a good way to do that just at the moment.

Professor Lennox said, “We’ve been diverted to Malaga because of bad weather. You were…er…asleep when it got rough, so I pulled your seatbelt tighter and I noticed your lovely medal. Is it old?”

“Actually I don’t know much about it. I’m sorry.” It hurt to talk, and Menina didn’t feel up to explaining about the medal or her thesis. She turned away and peered out the window. After the storm, the air was clear and bright and below them dark-blue mountains were topped with snow. As the plane descended, Menina could see the coast in the distance, and beyond it, the gray-blue Mediterranean. Her hand closed nervously around her medal as the plane sank lower and lower, the wheels hitting the tarmac with a thud that made her aching brain bounce.

“Welcome to Spain,” said Professor Lennox dryly.

Spain, Holy Week, April 2000

Malaga was airport hell. Menina lost track of Professor Lennox, the only person she recognized from her flight. At the information desk where Menina tried to find out when her flight to Madrid would leave, a harassed young woman threw up her hands. “Nobody knows about your charter. Is
Semana Santa
! I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t go today. You must wait over there.” She pointed vaguely toward the departures hall, another heaving mass of people. Menina felt she either had to lie down and die from her hangover or get herself to Madrid somehow and meet her group at the hostel.

“Is there another way I can get to Madrid—a train, or a bus?”

“Trains impossible this week unless you have a reservation, is
Semana Santa
, but you can take a bus from the airport. There, past the telephones. Longer than train but nice sceneries. You get there tonight.”

Next Menina tried to call her parents on a pay phone. It wasn’t easy. The operator’s lisping Spanish sounded different from the Latin American accent she was used to, and when she couldn’t understand the operator finally hung up. An elderly woman stopped and showed her what to do, and finally there was a ringing tone and her father answered. Sleepily. “Menina? You OK?”

No, not really. “I’m fine. Sorry, I forgot about the time difference. It must be four thirty in the morning…”

At the other end Virgil yawned. “Naw, it’s OK, honey. Glad you got to Madrid in one piece. Make the most of it. Go shopping with that new Visa card. Get your mother a pocketbook; I hear they got nice leather in Spain. Don’t worry about anything else. By the time you get home the whole mess will have blown over.”

“OK, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it…but I’m not in Madrid yet, Dad. There was bad weather and we got diverted to Malaga. It’s kind of crazy at the airport, and nobody knows when there’ll be another plane to fly us up to Madrid. Rather than sleep on the airport floor I’m taking a bus up to Madrid. I’ll get there tonight.”

“You be careful. Don’t go talking to strange men!”

“Strange men!” Menina couldn’t help laughing. “I’m not five years old.”

“By the way, speaking of strange men, last night after we got back from the airport a man and a woman, nice couple, rang the doorbell, looking for you. They’d seen that article in the paper—well, you know the one, it was in yesterday—anyhow, they had had something to do with the Catholic Church and the adoptions of you hurricane kids. Your mother served them cake and coffee and we showed them your file for old times’ sake. They said they’d love to see your medal, it was supposed to be real old, and asked when you’d be back. I told them not for a while, you’d just gone off to study some old painter in Spain, and they…”

The phone made a pipping sound. Menina found she had no coins left.

“…They had some idea our last name was Smith, asked when we moved here from Chicago—don’t know where they got that—but we straightened that out and…”

“My money’s run out! Bye, call you when I…” and the line went dead.

Menina hung up and picked up her backpack. It weighed a ton. She hadn’t paid attention to that in Atlanta, but now she opened it to see why. In case the airline lost her bag she had put in a sweater, a spare T-shirt, a change of underwear, clean socks, tampons, and the velvet bag that contained the old book from the nuns because she really didn’t want to lose that if her suitcase went missing. She had tossed in the small Latin dictionary she had used in high school, too, in case she needed to tell the people at the Prado what the Latin part was—it seemed too short to be a prayer book. They could figure out the Spanish part themselves.

She dug deeper and found the miniature toiletries, and aspirin, some small towels that expanded when wet that Menina had once used at summer camp, and a new travel bathrobe, all stuffed in by her mother. Then she exclaimed, “Oh no!” At the very bottom, her mother had hidden the heavy old guidebook to Spain that Menina had tried to leave behind. In the side pocket Sarah-Lynn had put in a couple of spiral notebooks, ballpoint pens, and Menina’s favorite Hershey bars. In another side there were two bottles of water Menina had bought at the airport in Atlanta.

The woman who sold her a bus ticket said, “Is
Semana Santa
,” and everything was crazy; there were no direct buses. She would have to go toward Ronda, then change. She gave Menina a bus schedule, pointing at a stop where she would have to transfer. And Menina mustn’t miss it; there was only the one bus a day to Madrid from there.

The bus driver, a swarthy man whose stomach hung over his waistband, stood by the open baggage hold sucking a toothpick. Menina showed him her ticket and the name of the place she was supposed to change buses for Madrid. “
Si! Le dire.
” I’ll tell you. The driver smiled, flashing a gold tooth before throwing her suitcase
in. He held out his hand for the backpack but Menina shook her head. She’d take it to her seat and read her guidebook.

Menina found two seats to herself, took two aspirin and fished out the guidebook. Fifteen minutes later the bus pulled out of the airport, going west along a coastal highway dotted with construction sites and new holiday villa developments. Out to sea an oil tanker hovered on the horizon, sun danced on the waves, and a gleaming white gin palace motored closer to shore as they wound along the coast.

Then the bus turned inland and the villas gave way to new-planted fields and an occasional old farmhouse with wooden lean-tos added on the back. Sun shimmered on the silvery leaves of olive trees planted in rows on walled terraces. Plodding horse-drawn carts laden with firewood, women in black stockings and cardigans and faded headscarves carrying loaves of bread, an elderly couple leading a donkey with wicker-clad wine jars on its back across a field where wildflowers rippled in the breeze.

Menina opened her guidebook. Andalusia, it said, was derived from Arabic, “Al Andalus,” and traces of the Moorish civilization that flourished in the Iberian Peninsula between 711 and 1492 could be seen everywhere. “Look closely and you will see the footprint of the Moors—terraced fields, fountains and arches, orange and almond trees, and even churches that contain traces of the mosques they once were. The modern road follows an ancient way linking the mountains to the coast. It is possible to see the white stones that mark it, and it is still used by people who live in the mountains. Archaeologists have found shards of pottery stained with the purple dye from Tyre, and half-buried altars dedicated to the Phoenician goddess Astarte, suggesting the Phoenicians had traveled into the mountains from the coast before the Romans colonized the Mediterranean. This pre-Roman route continues east into the mountains, probably to France.”

The guidebook drew the reader’s attention to the white villages clinging to the mountain face. These dated from the time of the Moors. Even so many hundreds of years later, old customs, legends, and superstitions lived on in them.

Menina found something soothing and reassuring about this history, about the fact time moved on, life moved on. Maybe eventually it would move on for her, too.

She read on about the
Semana Santa
celebrations that had drawn travelers and pilgrims to Andalusia for hundreds of years, still held in many of the villages. They were part religious, part fiesta, and part drama, designed to advertise the Christian triumph over the Moors to the populace. Most involved decorated floats, some centuries old, that carried images of the crucified Christ, the Virgin Mary or saints, or sometimes saints’ relics—bits of bones, dried blood or desiccated body parts, often believed to have miraculous powers—in jeweled containers. Everyone joined in the procession: priests and acolytes and local dignitaries in their medals and decorations at the head, followed by religious brotherhoods called
confraternidads
, nuns, laypeople, and often a special contingent of children. Processions usually took place at night, through torchlit streets and with all the participants carrying candles. Afterward, fiestas went on until dawn, with wine and singing and dancing, special food, and people dressed up in traditional costumes. Gypsies traveled from near and far, setting up market stalls, selling horses on the side, and singing, adding to the ceremonies with their unique laments for the dead Christ and his grieving mother, another centuries-old tradition dating back to the
Reconquista
.