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RUDI SINGS FOR THE CROWD



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WE RE-GROUP AFTER THE ACCIDENT



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THEY HAD NEVER SEEN ONE



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THE GLEANERS by JEAN-FRANCOIS MILLET, -1857

My Story # 31

Monday was our last day in Madrid. Before leaving town, we checked the post office where I found a letter to us from the central Vespa factory headquarters in Genoa, Italy. I had written them when we were in France, reporting that we were touring the world on a Vespa. I thought they might want to publish the news in their trade magazine. They thanked us for the story and even included a letter of introduction for us that we could use in our travels.
“Say, this is a good thing!” I said to Rudi, showing him the letter from the factory. “It asks the Vespa people around the world to give us any aid they can.”
“Well, things look bright again, Mr. Engh!” Rudi always called me Mr. Engh when he was in a especially good humor. The local Vespa factory in Madrid had run our machine through a fine-tuning process and our scooter felt brand new.
“Portugal! Here we come!” I smiled, as I looked down the main boulevard of Madrid, I thought I could see Gibraltar and North Africa off in the distance.

Somewhere beyond the great Toledo Mountain range that stretched out before us on the road to the west was the land of Portugal.

Portugal! Who knows anything about Portugal? We never heard anything about it back in France or Spain. No one asked us, “Are you going to Portugal?” It was almost like Portugal was left out of our history or geography books back in Maryland. It was almost like Portugal wanted to forget that it was once a powerful empire in Europe and in the world for that matter. We were going to the country that had once sent Vasco Da Gama to India, Ferdinand Magellan around the world. Portugal with its grand daughters in South America and Africa, the great commercial giant of the fifteenth century. And don’t forget Brazil. The whole country speaks Portuguese. What kind of language is that going to be for us?

The further we drove from Madrid, the more poverty we met when it was time to ask for a night’s lodging. Some farmers in western Spain, unaccustomed to seeing itinerants or anyone who traveled, like tourist people, simply couldn’t understand why we were asking to sleep in their barn or shed. Often they thought we were thieves, and refused to talk with us. I would show them my Diary and the newspaper articles –but they couldn’t read. The only people who could read were the children who had gone to school and were out in the fields working somewhere.
Other times, when they did give us lodging, they were suspicious until the moment we left. In some cases our music held fascination for them, and they thought to ask us if we’d had a meal. Other times, we would carry half a loaf of bread with us to a farm and ask if they could sell us some cheese or butter. This put us on an economical level lower than they, and they didn’t feel ashamed to invite us in for their evening meal, usually taken in a spare room with a hard mud kitchen floor.
We would sit on wooden stools with the light of a candle in the small adobe room, and share porridge and bread with them, and then retire to a sheltered stable until dawn. They spoke a Spanish dialect that was nothing we had ever heard. The only communication we could have with them was our guitars. Our music was our introduction but also something else we were to learn that we had to depend on when we got over into North Africa and the Arabic people and then later on down into black Africa and that was trust.
Yes, there may be cultural differences everywhere, but trust runs through them all. That’s what we found.
Now I can’t tell you how to look trustworthy. Maybe your mirror can do that for you. Sure, people who we thought deserved our trust have fooled us all. But whatdaheck, you win some and you lose some. The both of us must’ve looked trustworthy. Or we were mighty lucky.

The people we met in the countryside midway between western Spain and eastern Portugal seemed to be an angered people, almost bitter, just about to give up their struggle against nature. There didn’t seem to be much room for fun in their lives.
Since there was no fun to be had with the peasants, I thought of some fun I could have with the animals. We were on the long road to Lisbon, and I had spotted a field of grazing arena bulls. Yes, the kind Alfonzo had faced back in the bullring in Madrid.
We stopped near the wire fence, and I dismounted and took a couple of photographs of the rugged creatures out in the field grazing. Then I got the idea to try my luck at attracting a bull over to me at the fence. There were some field workers across the road and they stopped to see what I was doing.
I tied two of my red kerchiefs together, and stuck them in my back pocket, secretly hiding my red flag from a group of nearby bulls about ten yards away. One was nearby. On ground level with the animal, I could see he was almost as high as a horse and twice as wide! I imagined myself a matador, standing in the path of such a menacing animal that was charging at me and then I would swiftly but gracefully step to one side to let the death-dealing horns of the bull pass within inches of my body. The thought made me weak, and I silently complimented the courage of the matadors who had risked or given their lives for such a unique art.
“You better get outta there!” Rudi shouted. “He might see that red bandana, and that’ll be the end of you.
“Now just keep cool. I want to make an experiment.” I shouted to Rudi. I wanted to experience the feeling of being in the path of an onrushing bull. I was going to make him charge and then I’d run for the protection of the motor scooter.
“Keep that motor going, Rudi!” I yelled over to him. I cautiously drew the red cloth from the back of my pocket and then quickly waved my homemade flag at the nearest bull. He had been staring at me the whole time, and as soon as he saw the motion of my flag, he gave a quick snort and a start. My reflexes jumped to attention much quicker than I had anticipated, and I turned to flee at the same time the bull reacted. But the flash reaction of my brain had not synchronized with my legs, which tangled into a pretzel when I turned to sprint the distance between the scooter and me. I fell flat on my face, and lay there motionless, with my ear close to the ground. I could hear the stampeding hoofs of the charging bull. I imagine the bull crashing the fence, trampling me, and jolting Rudi and the scooter to the other side of the road.
When the charging echo had subsided, I could hear the sound of Rudi’s laughter. I looked up to see him shaking his head and pointing to the bulls, which had all stampeded to the other side of the field, apparently frightened by my red flag!
“C’mon, jump on here,” Rudi shouted. “Before they change their minds and come back after you.”
As we took off, the group of Spanish fieldworkers that had been watching me didn’t move. They just stared at us, especially at me, not daring to laugh, not daring to smile, they just stared.

On the following day Rudi and I had our first accident. Roads in Spain aren’t the worst we encountered in Europe, but few roads in Spain get much maintenance. They don’t need to. There just aren’t that many cars around.
About a hundred kilometers out of Madrid, on the road to Lisbon, out in the rolling hills of wheat and oats, we came upon a small grade. Traveling at about forty miles-an-hour I sped up over the top as usual, only to find a construction site on the other side. No warning! One half of the road was free, no cars coming, and I could have passed the barrier easily, except for a wandering donkey that was squarely in the middle of the open free passageway. There was no time to put on the brakes, and I elected to bypass him by going over to the side shoulder. The front wheel of the scooter sank into deep gravel and it whipped the scooter and us sideways and shot us back onto the road again. We slid sideways to the pavement making a loud metallic screeching noise and tumbled us about ten yards down the road We finally halted in the center of the macadam road. Like in the pileup of players on a football field, we lay in the debris a few moments and then got up from the entanglement. We didn’t say much. The little donkey made his braying noise as if to say “Whatdahell was that!?”

No one was bleeding profusely. No broken bones.
Rudi mumbled something but I wasn’t listening.
I got out out First Aid kit, and limped to the shade on the side of the road to doctor my bruises. Being in the front, I had received most of the impact. Rudi had fallen on top of me and only had a few minor bruises on his knees and fingers. His foot had dragged at the side of the scooter at 40 m.p.h. and the leather on his left shoe was worn paper-thin.
My face had hit the ground, but luckily the windshield lay between the road and me as we slid along. My right knee was forced against the steering column of the scooter with so much impact that it broke off the Vespa key in the lock. Rudi’s weight and mine had landed on my left elbow, which had scraped along the ground, tearing away the sleeve of my coat grinding debris and gravel into my arm. I could see the white of the bone.
I wasn’t wearing gloves. My left hand had been caught under the handle bar grip and that’s what slid along the road pavement. I was left with no skin and membrane on the top of my left hand.
I had just got out our First Aid kit and was leaning on the edge of the road, dazed and looking at the overturned motor scooter, when a young, slender, barefoot figure appeared over the grade. She was out of breath and must have run quick to us from the field where she was working when she saw the accident.
She was about seventeen. I guess she expected to find us knocked out, unconscious or at least barely breathing so she was embarrassed that she had discovered us conscious and even smiling. She didn’t know if she should turn and run back. It surprised her. In other words, rural Spanish girls are not supposed to be approaching boys who are not unconscious, lying on the ground, or moaning and in need of serious help.
So, she found herself looking at two young men from some place other than her rural Spain surroundings. She had probably seen people like us pictured in a schoolbook, if she had gone to school, or a newspaper or a magazine. So this is what they looked like. They had blue eyes, and light skin and they could smile.
On her head she was wearing a wide-brimmed white hat that protected her from the sun and a loose black shawl that disappeared into her work smock at the neckline. Like most Spanish girls she had coal-black hair all wrapped up behind her head.
She still carried the sickle she had been using in the fields. She reminded me of one of those field women in a Millet painting, “The “Gleaners”, done just about exactly a hundred years ago. Nothing had changed. She was well suited for fieldwork, not muscular, but slim. And yes, she had those chestnut-brown dreamy Spanish girl eyes.
She advanced to us slowly, one barefoot at a time, cautiously, as if she were approaching a fallen fox or deer. When she saw my arm was all red and the skin torn and raw, she came forward, and kneeling in front of me began cleaning the gravel from my wound on my hand with our gauze and water from my canteen, the same way she might do if her pet lamb had suffered an accident at the farm.
Now this was different. In rural Spain when we left Madrid, the people were not really very friendly. I sat there dumbfounded and watched her as one watches a butterfly that alights on you and remains until it discovers you aren’t a leaf. Her dark brown eyes sometimes would look up at me periodically to be sure I was not in pain from her treatment, and under the sun hat I saw an august-tanned, almost Moorish face, with those brown eyes that were alive and warm, and pale lips that were quietly closed at her work on my hand and sometime softly smiling if I winced.
She said nothing. I looked at her. She was tanned on her high cheek bones from today’s work in the wheat field. She has some of that wheat chaff in her hair. A strand of dark hair fell across her forehead, and with my other hand I placed it under her sun hat again as she manipulated the bandages with slender brown hands that did not seem like one’s that had been stacking wheat and chaff in the field all day.
And then I began imagining. I imagined her taking a shower after a day’s work. And then drying off and looking like the quaintly-dressed girl pictured on the grocery store raisin box, but in the nude. The shawl she wore about her head now covered her breasts. The shawl intrigued me. It seemed uncommon, as though she might be some enchantress, who at the mysterious call of some other mystical being, would draw her shawl across her lips and then disappear, like a magic Cinderella.
But no mystical being beckoned her, only Rudi who shouted over, “Ask her to look at my hand too, Engh!”
And to interrupt the whole wonderful spell, all of a sudden her father and brother arrived. Well, they didn’t arrive and come close. They stayed back on the edge of the road. They must’ve been working together with her somewhere in the field, too. They stood standing, each with their sickles a good distance away on the road bank and called to her, and she rose and ran to them. She pointed to me and the Vespa and Rudi and all of our belongings strewn about the road. They had a short conversation, and then they turned and walked back to the field. As she disappeared over the hill, I thought I saw her turn and wave.
“I wonder what her name was,” I muttered to Rudi as we went about gathering up our gear.
We had the scooter in working shape again in a half an hour. All through the ordeal I kept thinking of her. I made up a name for her. Felicia, that‘s what I called her. And like all young men my age, I imagined the romance that would have developed. She would have led Rudi and me back to their farm beyond the next hill where her cordial parents would’ve treated us as celebrated guests, a glass of wine, a bath, bread, and a bowl of gazpacho. A message would’ve spread around the locale in the same speed that their ancestors drew on a hundred years ago to announce the arrival of curious guests. Neighbors would have gathered at the farm, some of the men bringing guitars, and some women bringing castanets. All this exploding into a raucous fiesta of music and dance. Felicia and I would have slipped off to the hayloft with an extra bottle of wine and eventually fallen asleep in each others arms. In the morning Rudi and I would have slipped away, just at dawn with me looking back over my shoulder to a lone silhouette of a girl’s figure standing on the horizon.

Back to the real episode, our accident. I caught myself dreaming as I picked up the last item, a tube of toothpaste that had fallen and bounced into the roadside weeds. “Hurry up, Engh. Let’s get this show on the road.! I thought I heard Rudi shout.
But my mind was somewhere else. My mind switched back to Felicia and the real story of Felicia. It is a sad story. She will secretly spend many thoughts wondering about me and remember how I winced when she pressed too hard while cleaning my open cut. I was a foreigner she had touched. Spanish girls don’t touch foreigner boys. Not out in the rural Spanish countryside anyway. She saw a tanned blonde-haired guy who smiled at her and who might have taken her into his arms and kissed her and given her fulfillment that she most likely will never know in her life. Instead, she will return to the wheat fields and the harvesting process and to her meals of porridge and bread and to her one pretty white dress for Sunday that she will wear to mass where her parents will encourage her to marry the eldest son of the family that sits in the eighth row pew number 14 and in her lifetime will produce four children and they will all help in succeeding crops of wheat, barley, and oats. And one day she will find herself to be a matron, and absent-mindedly fix her a gaze on her own teenage daughter, as they work in the wheat field. She will hear herself relating a story to her young daughter, how, over there, pointing across the field she was working one day like they are working today in the field and she heard the sound of a crash and as her catholic church instructs, she ran to see if she could give help to a stranger in distress as a Good Samaritan and she did.
But she will not reveal to her daughter her actions next when she invited the young foreign boy to her hayloft while her parents worked a different field. She will not reveal this to her daughter because she has repeated the fantasy to herself so often in her own mind that she can no longer recollect if the encounter was real or not.

Rudi looked at my hand. “That thing’s starting to swell up!”
We had finished re-packing the Vespa. “I said, yes, and with my hand like this you are going to have to do most of the driving for a while.”
Rudi up to now had driven the scooter very little, but with his bicycle experience, it wouldn’t be too much of a problem for him. We mounted the scooter and were off, and in a few hours Rudi was driving like a professional.
As a result of the accident, I had become wary of the scooter. Almost afraid. And, a strange fear of driving it overcame me during the next few days. Perhaps my feeling of fear was a result of not being able to take over the driving immediately after the accident happened, and with my arm and hand in a sling, I was subject to watch someone else drive the Vespa, and not be able to control the machine myself. I wondered if I would ever have the courage to drive again. To add to my anxiety, a few days later we were descending a steep grade, and Rudi, who was now accustomed to the scooter shouted back, “Let’s see what the top speed of this Vespa is!”

NEXT: On to Portugal