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A SPANISH INTERLUDE
By: T.R.KEngland has a large invisible army of workers whom you rarely see during working hours in a capital city like London. Some of these are like a secret army going about the skyscrapers of the City of London, with brooms, buckets and polish. Once in a while there is a scandal about illegal immigrant workers from Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal, working in the wee hours to keep the brass, marble and the carpets of our corporations shining. Some of them, quite legally, come from that part of northern Spain near La Coruna that populates our newly fashionable Spanish Tapas bars and their kitchens, and our hotel basements as porters who moonlight as cleaners, plumbers and builders and furniture restorers, turning a dab hand to anything that needs refurbishment. Manuel was a shining example of such a Spaniard, with an unbridled spirit of free enterprise.
I remembered Manuel today quite suddenly when some of our book shelves started to come off the wall. If Manuel, our all-purpose man-about-the house had not gone back to Spain so irrevocably, he would have been there, at some ungodly hour of the day or night with an unsuitable suite of tools and a grin on his handsome youthful face. "Your shelves in trouble, innit?" he would have said with a passable adaptation of his favourite estuarian bi-syllable, with which he ended all his speculative statements. My wife, a cultured French linguist, came so close to using this dismissive word herself in all her conversations with her peers that I was afraid she would soon be mistaken for a continental charwoman posing as a translator. Now and then, in moments of stress or when no other word would be emphatic enough, I find myself using this book-end of a word.
Manuel was a stocky, broad-shouldered Spaniard with mongrel blond hair and eyelashes, from that part of Northern Spain near La Coruna that populates our Tapas kitchens with chefs and our Hotel basements with porters. He arrived on the doorstep of our Dulwich home early one morning, shadowed a few paces behind by a tall rangy black young man wearing wire-rimmed glasses that enlarged his eyes and swept the lenses with a close up of his eye lashes whenever he blinked. The soft exterior of Manuel running to fat belied several horse power of brute strength, as we discovered when he ferried what seemed a quarter ton of loose bricks on his back in a broken dustbin, or when he bent a metal pipe thick as a man's wrist on his knee. If application of excessive force would do a job, Manuel did not use any tools. If objects under such bald treatment balked and spat back, Manuel would swear "---ing stupid innit?", lick his bruise, re-adjust his hold and carry on as before. Many times I came across him poking his ambidextrous extremities into an assortment of electrical fuses and wires exposed for close inspection. Whilst he went about this, swearing softly under his breath, he had the heroic aspect of a young James Bond debating to himself in guttural Scots tones, which wire to cut to de-activate a device that is about to nuke the Western World.
Desmond, the young black man who followed his master's injunctions to the letter, turned out to be a surprisingly knowledgeable autodidact with a secret passion for obscure ideologies. He was studying sculpture at the London School of Printing and Arts in Southwark. A youth of few words, he would turn on the radio that never left his side, as soon as he picked up the first tool of the day and listened to Radio 4. As the day wore on the soft drawl of American economists like Galbraith would be replaced by the cut-glass tones of an English musicologist talking about medieval instruments. Then there was the unaccustomed rural sounds of the Archers, filling our home with an unselective trawl through a sea of radio-speak.
The other part of Manuel was his unbridled admiration of wealth and class. In a strange sort of way I was one of his heroes. Undoubtedly he believed that through all the absorptive adulation of the paintings on our walls and the furniture in our home and cars in our drive, he would bask himself some day in the glow of such possessions.
One a Sunday he rang our bell at six in the morning, bearing a gift wrapped in several empty brown paper sacks that had formerly carried a load of Pentland Javelins.
"I've brought you something" he said without apologies for getting us out of bed, "I know you'll like it, innit?", with a grin of someone bent to please at any price. He unravelled an antiquarian picture frame, perhaps worth something, if only he had not thought of burnishing its appearance with a thick coat of brown Dulux gloss paint. I was speechless. As I bundled Manuel and his picture frame back into his van, I could not have hurt a more generous friend. Over the years he kept bringing me these perfectly useless pieces of kitsch, some which I could not refuse.
Manuel managed to acquire a large terraced house behind Warren Street and immediately set about tearing it down and re-building it with a grant from the local Council. Desmond and Manuel began removing load-bearing walls and excavating the basement to enlarge its appearance. He sublet several rooms to indigent students in the meantime, whilst truck-loads of cement and bricolage and giant industrial skips stationed themselves on the street overnight, bringing a gaggle of building inspectors from the Council to his doorstep. His tenants found they could not go out for a time, except by creeping along a ledge on the roof and climbing down a neighbour's fire escape into the well of a back yard which had further walls to be scaled to get to street level. Desmond meanwhile drilled into a major electrical cable in the basement and nearly fried himself to a frazzle. Manuel took to storing the giga-weight of his builders' material on the fourth floor to pre-empt theft and the scrutiny of Council inspectors. Not much later, the fourth floor caved in and slipped all the way in to the basement, burying his electrical sparkler.
I visited Manuel just once in his first floor flat in this dangerously deshabille house near Warren Street. His wife opened the door, a drink in her jewelled hand. She was an impeccable diva, hair coiled and piled in a delectable meringue of gold and lacquer and her very Spanish features covered in a Max Factor mask. She was dressed in a toga, made it seemed of red and gold Moorish rug. I stepped into the room and gasped at the sheer daring of the largest collection of repro-kitsch I had ever seen in one place since my brief stay in a downtown Las Vegas Hotel.
Manuel decided to pack it all in, and at least for a while go back to Spain and "re-build his house". He came to see me dishevelled but composed with his usual grin to collect some money that was long overdue. He expressed his trust in me simply: "Rich people always pay, innit". He had a large bag of new potatoes as a going-away present for me. He had it seemed, walked a long way with them. "It is my ---ing Van" he extrapolated," it caught fire, innit? You can't depend on these ---ing Ford Transits.", he beamed. He explained that he had abandoned his incandescent Transit van in the middle of a road somewhere and walked the rest of way with a sack of potatoes to complete his mission.
I never saw Manuel again. Desmond took off next summer to help him build his dream house near Santander. Manuel had always dreamt of owning a large house signalling his changed status to his peers who had never been abroad. After some contemplation on issues of design and the imperatives of size adequate to impress, Manuel conceived a unique design solution. He encased his small house with its mud floors and minute rooms in a large facade of outer walls and blind windows, giving the appearance of a substantial and affluent villa. This was Manuel's act of genius. Desmond played Sancho Panza to Manuel's Quixote.
Desmond told me that he was moved to indignant tears when he witnessed this broad-shouldered Spaniard, who could bend a metal pipe between his teeth or play a deadly end-game with fuse boxes with his bare fingers, lose his nerve completely when he was half-way through decapitating a large cockerel for a celebratory dinner. He dropped his butcher's knife swearing:" ---ing tough Cock, innit?" and stalked off to the local village bar for a drink, leaving his Desmond to finish the be-heading.