Short Story: The Gardener

Short Story: The Gardener

It was spring again. The swallows were twizzling and chirping in the courtyard as they repaired last year’s nest. White wisteria clambered up the stone wall and was bursting into bud. Yesterday, leaning her gnarled hands on two sticks, Lula had taken a short and very slow walk along the lane between green fields out towards the cemetery. She supposed that this lane would be the scene of her last journey and she rather hoped that the journey would take place soon. She liked the simplicity of the cemetery in el Castaño de Guzman, where, rather than being crammed into her family’s pompous crypt in a cemetery which had long been enveloped by low-class flats and a car-parts factory, she would be walled up with the simple people of the village. She spoke of this often, glossing over the sad truth that she had fallen out with many of the villagers because of her difficult and eccentric ways.

When she told people of her desire for death, she fervently hoped that she did not bore them - there was nothing worse than a bore - but she was sick of this disintegration. Her once beautiful legs seemed now to be wrapped in tissue paper rather than skin. Twice a week, Carmen came in to lend her a hand, and if Lula was in a good frame of mind, she would allow her to rub almond oil into her dry limbs. Some mornings she was so disagreeable and obtuse that she would not let Carmen near her and some mornings it was almost an hour before she could warm her joints sufficiently to move without grimacing. She also hoped (more secretly and triumphantly perhaps, for she did not speak of this hope) that she would be remembered as a walking scandal.

In the lane which led out towards the cemetery, broom cascaded over the dry-stone walls. In this part of the country they called it “Zapatos de Jesus”, “Jesus’ Shoes”. Its flowering heralded the coming of Holy Week.

Now she sat in a rickety chair on her terrace, sipping at a twinkling glass of fino sherry and nibbling on fried almonds as she allowed the sun to warm her old bones. Spring! Soon it would be the Feria de Sevilla. She hated the Feria now, with its garish nylon flamenco dresses and the electronically-engineered songs which she avoided at all costs when played on the radio. She remembered her first year as a young woman at the Feria de Sevilla. The horses, the equipages, the elegance of it all. She had writhed discreetly in the carriage beside her mother; the thrusts of her slim haunches preparing for the real thing. The beauty of men. Their throats. Their waists. Flat bellies. Strong sinews of arms. Dark hair tossed back, daring shameless eyes, looking down from the back of a horse. Lust had hit her like a tidal wave.

Then she had been one of the most beautiful girls in Sevilla. The most beautiful to tell the truth. Men’s dark eyes hungered for her. Voices called after her in the street. Her mother had not known what to do. She was not allowed out unaccompanied but there were ways to slip a chaperone. She knew she had power over men. Her mother hoped for a good marriage. They lived in a small, privileged society.

Lula’s longing was for a working man. Any rough beauty mending the roads on a warm spring day, stripped to the waist. But she couldn’t, could she?

She could. How she had reached seventeen without being taken was a miracle. She charmed and beguiled her mother throughout a secret torrid affair with a male beauty of almost thirty whom she had found knocking oranges off one of the trees planted along the sides of the streets. The oranges were knocked off every spring. They were the Sevillian kind, grown for ornament and much despised for their bitterness in a land where the love of sweet things was a bequest of the Moors.

Her mother had been delighted with the oranges. She liked English things and she liked to make marmalade. Even so, she did not need quite as many oranges as the young man brought to the house on varying occasions, and when the oranges were finished, he was most helpful in the patio, setting out the pots of agapanthus and clivia, pruning the plumbago. Her mother liked to have him around and offered him the job of gardener which he had accepted with alacrity.

Lula vividly remembered the way he stood, legs locked, hips thrust forward, one hand carelessly on his waist in that Andalucian way, when he was spraying the albero floor of the patio. He held the end of the hose shut, just so, with his tanned thumb, so that a fine fan of water spurted out over the yellow sand.

She still remembered the thumb, and his strong hands running over her young skin, and the gentle use he made of his fingers. It had all seemed like a thrilling game. Furtive glances, a quick touch in the colonnade, almost an accidental brushing past him, full of electricity. On the laundry maid’s evening off, Lula’s brother, looking for a freshly ironed shirt, had found her with her legs locked around the gardener in the little laundry room off the kitchen pantry.

That is when it had all started, this moving on and on from pillar to post (had she really used that expression in her thoughts?) She laughed dryly, and took a good swig from her icy glass of sherry.

Quickly quickly she had been taken to Madrid, out into society where the talk of her beauty had long preceded her. Quickly quickly she was married to the forty year old man, the great poet, lover of beauty. She had faked the pain of a virgin on her wedding night. Her mother had provided a small flask of chicken’s blood. Thus were faces saved.

She still liked to remember the gardener, her first lover, and every time she looked out over the orange tree in her small rocky courtyard, she was reminded of him, knocking the oranges into a wheelbarrow in a street in Sevilla.