Welcome back to you’re listening to radio revel and the new season, Mature Audiences Only. There’s a real episode coming up soon, but for now I still want to get some of these stories on the air. This week’s story, Ávila and the Santa Teresa, is what I’ve got to offer.
So, back in 1984 or 1985, I did some volunteer work in the costume shop for a production of the Virgil Thomson / Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts. It was this volunteer work that hooked me up with my elderly friend Madeline, who later became a main character in my story The City of Towers. This was also the volunteer work that found me in a real-life Bonfire of the Vanities scene when the costume designer, who had offered me a ride home from Brooklyn, took a wrong turn and we found ourselves who knows where, under an overpass, 55-gallon drums burning, dark, hooded figures wandering around like zombies.
Four Saints in Three Acts pretty much tells the story of Saint Teresa of Ávila, (or sometimes known as Saint Teresa of Jesus) a kind of whacked-out nun who wrote about her spiritual experiences while serving her vows at a Carmelite convent in the walled-in city of Ávila. Stein’s whacked-out poetry fit the bill for a surrealistic romp through the life of the Saint:
If to stay to if to stay to if having to stay to if having to stay
If to cry to stay, if to cry stay, to cry to stay
and I finally came away from the experience with another show to rack up on my resume, a new friend, Madeline, a CD recording of the performance and a chance to meet a doddering Virgil Thomson who showed up at a rehearsal for a TV arts report “interview”. Oh, and that spine-tingling experience under an overpass in Brooklyn, of course.
Let’s fast-forward a decade, it’s 1991, I’m working at a language academy in a largish bedroom city near Barcelona, staying with my mate in the flat of a speech therapist who had an office in that same academy. We called that man, Javier was his name I think, el cerdo, or “the pig”, not because he was dirty, he was quite the contrary, kind of obsessed with cleanliness; rather because he was charging us a fortune for one bedroom, limited access to the living area or the kitchen and was kind of a dick. It’s Christmas time and both my mate and I are eager to get away for the holiday.
Now sometime between October when we moved into Javier’s flat and December when we took our holiday trip, we had decided that we wanted to get out of the city, out of urban life. We’d actually talked about getting back to our more rural roots, or at least mine, my mate was a small-town boy, rural is very different in Spain than in the States. We’d discussed this frequently since we met back in July. My mate did some research and found the community with the least population per square kilometer and we bought train tickets and headed to Ávila.
Ávila is the capital of the province with the same name: Ávila. At 1.130 meters above sea level, it is also the highest provincial capital in Spain. It’s known for the totally intact city wall that dates from between the 11th and 14th centuries, the innumerable churches, the dry climate and frigid winters, and, of course, Santa Teresa. Yet, once we had done all the touristy things there were to do, which took about a day, we found ourselves investigating the town as a place to live, and playing Parchisi in a central bar.
After making contact with an association of young farmers, we decided that Ávila would make a good place to start our adventure of returning to those rural roots. It was far away from cities that had suffocated us for years. We returned to the east coast, I gave my notice, and in February of 1992 we loaded a van with our stuff and moved west to Ávila.
Neither one of us can remember how we got the apartment. Could have been found and reserved before we left that Christmas. Might have been that we were lucky enough to rent the flat the day we arrived with the rented van full of our stuff, mostly books, a futon and a rug we’d purchased, and a new Singer sewing machine. The flat was in a newer building with only two flats, the guy who lived below us on the first floor and us on the top floor.
We both got jobs nearly at once in a newly opened musical bar that was within the city wall. Not just in the old town that one entered through the once fortified city gates, no, this bar had been built within the structure of that mediaeval wall, in an area probably dedicated to grain storage in the olden days, the decoration taking advantage of massive stones and arches and the like. It was a two-floored disco bar, had regular customers during the day, the kind who came in for a coffee or a beer with a piece of Spanish potato omelet, and at night turned into a city hot-spot for the young. We worked the day shift, went home and took a nap, then worked the night shift.
The boss was a moderately wealthy man from Madrid. Madrid was only about an hour and a half away by car and there were plenty of people from Madrid who drove up to Ávila for weekend getaways. I don’t think the people of Ávila liked those people from Madrid, but then I don’t think people of Ávila liked anyone who was not born in Ávila. I remember a woman at the central market asking me while bagging up the vegetables I’d just bought from her: where I was from, how long I’d been in town and when I was planning on leaving. Anyway, this man from Madrid, Antonio, was mixed up in a lot of shady business and mafia-like activity, there were always odd characters in suits visiting him, he’d often lock himself into his office with them for hours.
He’d tried to up the prestige of his bar by buying a very expensive billiard table. Now remember that billiards is not pool. I never got the rules down completely, but there’s only three balls and the point is to knock the white ball against those three balls in some order or pattern. There were no holes for the balls to fall into, just knock the balls around the table. This table was on the second floor, which was my domain as waiter, I had to manage the reservations for game play, which was usually limited to Antonio and his suited friends. I’m pretty sure a lot of money was moved from one grasping palm to another and, by his foul mood, I figured Antonio wasn’t very good at the game.
So one night some younger guys asked for the balls to play billiards. The table was covered and not used during the later disco hours, but there was about an hour before I put the table to bed, so I gave them the balls, the sticks and noted their game play to later charge them for the time. They played for a while, came to pay up for their drinks and the game and left the bar. I had some other customers around tables and didn’t get to covering the table right away. When I did, I found that there was a long tear in that green felt, right in the middle of the table.
Jeeze. I’d have to tell Antonio about that.
Antonio came out of the office to inspect the damage. He was not at all happy. Recovering the table, which was brand new, would probably cost him a million pesetas, maybe around 13 thousand dollars today? That seemed an exaggeration to me. Antonio asked me if I thought I would recognize the three young men who had been playing earlier. I told him I might be able to. He dragged me down to the downstairs bar where my mate was working and had me sit there. I had time to tell my mate what had happened upstairs when Antonio came out of the office, more than a little coked up, told me that we were going to drive around town looking for those men. My mate was making frantic gestures that I shouldn’t go, but Antonio was the boss.
We whisked around Ávila in his Mercedes, especially exciting was the narrow road that ran around the outside of the city walls. While he drove way too fast for the curves, he told me just how many enemies he had in Ávila, how they wanted him out of town, but he wasn’t going anywhere. We stopped in a dozen night spots, walked in, Antonio ordered us drinks and we scanned the clients. “Do you seem them here?” he’d ask me. I would always say no, I had realized before the third stop that it was probably better that I didn’t identify them, Antonio was really off his head about that damaged felt, and pretty paranoid about who had sent thugs to rip it. Good thing I realized this, as at the third bar we entered I saw those three guys at the bar, we actually stood next to them as we had our drinks. I figured that if I didn’t identify them and they saw that I hadn’t, I’d probably be saving my own skin, which turned out to be true. Later, when we headed back to the bar, my mate took me aside and told me that he thought he had seen a pistol tucked into Antonio’s waistband as we left.
Not too long after that, we had a surprise work inspection visit. Since I didn’t have a working permit for Spain, I wasn’t supposed to be working. The inspector asked for my permit and I told the lie we’d worked out between Antonio and me. I was just a visiting friend who was hanging out, I didn’t work there. The inspector spent some time in Antonio’s office while I sweated it out at a table outside. There was supposed to be a hearing, I would have to show up with Antonio with my passport, but the lawyer did something and that never seemed to take place. Antonio decided that I shouldn’t continue working for him. My mate ended up quitting about a week later.
You see, Ávila was a really small town. just under 47.000 souls. Everyone knew everyone else and everyone seemed to hate Antonio and his big city ways. That hate was generously spread around to anyone associated with Antonio.
Ávila is also one of the coldest provincial capitals in Spain, the average winter temperature doesn’t get much above freezing, the average yearly temperature in 1992 was just 4º Celsius. That’s around 39º for the rest of you. So, central heating was important in all flats in Ávila.
Ours was an old gasoil boiler located in the kitchen. The landlord showed us how to light it up, first you had to make sure there was gasoil in the deposit, then you had to pump a little into the lower pan with this valve here. Then you had to let it sit for a minute or two until it began to evaporate. Then you took a cotton ball, doused it with rubbing alcohol, lit it and dropped it down into the pan. The gasoil fumes should catch, you shut the lid and within half an hour the radiators would be good and hot.
So, one evening I set about lighting the boiler. It was about half the size of a normal dishwasher, nestled between the sink and the outer wall. I pumped the gasoil, doused the cotton ball, lit it up and dropped it in and the thing kind of exploded at me. Fire gushed out of the top, didn’t burn anything, but gasoil is a greasy burn and everything in the kitchen was covered with slimy black soot.
We’d called the fire department, who arrived after I’d been able to smother the flame with the lid of the boiler. The landlord’s daughter happened to see the fire trucks, called her father, he inspected the situation, decided that it wasn’t that big of a deal and told us to be more careful lighting the thing in the future, it had a tricky valve and sometimes gasoil fumes would build up between burnings. The guy who lived under us commented that he’d been after the landlord for years to change his boiler and finally had to change it himself, it was just too old and tricky to be relied upon.
We spent the rest of our time in Ávila realizing that Ávila was not the place to get a start on our return to rural life. We were not at all accepted in the community, we’d worked for that Antonio guy from Madrid for about a month. My mate got a job in another bar, a normal bar in the main plaza, but that lasted just a couple of days, long hours, poor pay, demanding boss. I tried to get work as an English teacher, but we didn’t have a phone, mobile phones were not yet a thing.
We had put an ad in the local daily shopper and this guy shows up in answer to the ad. What we wanted was for him to take calls from people who wanted English classes with me, take their numbers and give those to me so I could contact them. Just a basic answering service thing. I gave him 1.000 pesetas to start the deal, about $12, and he went on his way, but not without first asking me if my legal status in Spain was in order. Once he left, my mate and I looked at one another and immediately regretted having made contact with this guy. That work inspection at the disco bar was a recent event for us. Though they were actually after Antonio and I hadn’t gotten in trouble, this second scrape with being an illegal immigrant was less than welcome.
We didn’t know what to do about the situation right then, but there came a knock on the door and it was that guy, he returned the 1.000 pesetas and said that when he had told his mother about the gig she refused to let him do it, she didn’t want strangers calling at all hours, they didn’t know who I was, and the whole work permit thing made the guy very uneasy, he was studying to become a civil servant, had to keep his record clean. When he left, my mate and I sighed in relief and within minutes had made an important decision.
After just five months in Ávila, we packed up our stuff and moved back east. We stored that stuff in my mate’s brother’s father-in-law’s outbuilding, packed our bags and, totally contrary to our rural roaming, caught a plane to New York City.
But that’s a story for a future episode. Despite the stop in New York, we did get some rural time in. And we’d avoided the entire Barcelona Olympics show as well!
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