The Fallen Angel

By Diane Kendig

I have no sense of direction. As my father so well puts it, his eldest daughter could get lost in a funnel. Along with my lack of direction, I’ve been blessed a sense of place so strong I can recognize most plots of ground I’ve ever stood on. Even if it’s years later and the restaurant on the corner of Flatbush and DeKalb has been gutted by fire and you bring me by a roundabout route, I’ll say, “Oh yes, where we had cheesecake the second time I cane to New York while you were still living in Brooklyn.” And I have cultivated that sense of place ever since the time it saved me from my directional ineptness.

I was in my early twenties, a college student studying in Segovia, Spain in the early 70’s, and intent early one fall on seeing the rose garden in the Retiro. My friends, who knew my capacity for getting lost on weekend jaunts, could go but helped me by writing out instructions beforehand on how to get there. And I’ve never found any place so efficiently s I found the Retiro. I set off through the park carrying the instructions and the knitting I had brought with me for the two-hour train ride I had to get to Madrid. I was make a green afghan for a friend back home, hoping to be able to have it finished by the time the semester was over and I was going home.

I hadn’t counted on everything being so deserted that early Saturday morning, though. A kiosk marked “Bicicletas” was boarded up. There were no vendors, and the few people who shuffled down the paths were not the sort one would ask for directions. Finally, I dragged out James Michener’s Iberia, which was my travel guide. In the index, I found a reference to the Retiro being on page 397, but I turned to that page go find only a full-page picture of a Spanish mother and daughter. I checked the index again: Retiro, 397.” I rechecked 397: photo of mother and daughter. Maybe I had read about the rose garden somewhere else. No one had told me about it; as a matter of fact, when I asked the people in my town about it, none of them recalled any such thing. So now, I began to have doubts that the garden existed and thought how my parents had told me for years that I took books, all books, too seriously.

“Only believe HALF of what you read,” my father said when I was eleven after he came upon me crying and found out why. I had come across the copy of a book titled None Dare Call It Treason, a book, which as I remember it now, suggested that was a Communist—an evil child-devouring race of people—under every bed. I became obsessed with the idea that Communists were everywhere, and then a speaker, who had been a spy in Russia, spoke to us in a fifth grade school assembly with a similar message. Communists were everywhere, and we’d better be on guard. That night, I broke down sobbing and when my father asked why, I confessed all my newfound fears about Communists being under the beds. When my father said it was nonsense, I showed him the book, which someone in my parents’ card club had given him, along with one about how Catholics were taking over America. (The latter worried my father much more, and when he cast his vote against John Kennedy for that reason, it was the first and the last time he ever voted for a Republican in his life.) My father shook his head and said, “Diane, how many times do I have to tell you? Don’t believe everything you read in books.”

My mother wasn’t so convinced that I believed too much as she was that I read too much to begin with, and she chimed in saying so right then. But my father dismissed that notion and repeated that I should only believe half what I read.

I thought, “A Communist under half our beds?” But I knew better than to say that out loud, knew my father, himself the master of hyperbole, wanted me not to take everything so literally. About that much, he is right.

Sitting on the park bench that fine Saturday morning, poring over the map, I recalled too that my father had told me often before that night he found me crying was that I needed to questions things more. Surely I should have questioned where I had read about the road garden. Maybe a rose garden had bloomed five years ago when some author was preparing a tour guide, but that didn’t mean it still existed. I had nearly convinced myself that not only was there no such garden but that I was an utter tonta, a fool, for traipsing off to try to find one.

I was, in short, in the perfect condition to be rescued by the handsome young Spaniard who appeared just then. For al I know, he may have watched me wandering in circles until I had reaches this moment of obvious defeat. As I got up to leave and spend the day cheering myself up in El Corte Ingles and the Rastro, he joined me and walked beside me. I kept walking.

“Pérdoname,” he said. “Es usted Espanola?” I shook my head coolly.

“Parle vous francais?” I shook my head again.

“Inglesa? Portuguesa?”

I was enormously relieved he hadn’t taken me for an American. To be taken for an American meant to be taken. It meant being dogged with promises of drinks and company. It meant coercion and murmurings. I had once led me to stand in a street with a metal lunchbox held high, threatening to break the windshield of a man who had been following me and whistling at me for half a mile.

To be taken as an American felt like being taken as game, as I learned from one of my friends, a typical American youth abroad with her jeans, tennis shoes (as we called them then), and backpack. However, she had been raised in Mexico with one Mexican parent, and she has a flawless accent. Followed closely by a male admirer one day, she ignored him as long as she could, then whipped around and pronounced most natively the equivalent of, “Leave me alone, please.”

The man backed away, his eyebrows shot up, and he apologized over and over saying that just for a moment, he had mistaken her for an American! Ever since she had told me that story, I practiced saying, “Leave me alone, please, sir” careful to mimic her accent as closely as I could for just such an occasion as the one I was facing. When I delivered my line, the man smiled and asked me more politely if I were lost.

I hedged. Not exactly. I was looking for the rose garden in the Retiro and just couldn’t seem to located it—did he know where it was?

“Ah, sí.”

Sí, he knew exactly where it was. But it was quite far away, really, too far to walk. But his car was there, and he was heading that direction if I wanted a ride.

If you didn’t know Spain in the 60’s and 70’s, you are probably thinking, “No, no! Don’t! Hasn’t your mother told you never to accept rides from strangers?” But really, any mother who would worry about her daughter’s reading habits would worry about her riding habits. But if my mother despaired of my sensibility in reading, she had no doubts about my integrity in riding. I had never accepted a ride from a stranger in my life. Of course, I had never been offered one ever before, either.

But more recent memories surfaced than motherly warnings. In those days, cars were relatively few in Spain. In the town where I lived, I knew no one with a car: none of the families that any of us lived with, none of our professors or neighbors. The people who owned cars seemed, compared to back in the U.S., very generous with rides. We seldom walked anywhere outside the town walls without someone stopping to offer us a ride. Once when I was out hiking with two friends, a driver going in the opposite direction stopped, turned around, and offered us a ride wherever we need to go. We said no thank you, and he seemed extremely miffed. So although what I am going to tell you sounds like I am inordinately naïve and stupid, I was in Rome doing as the Romans did when someone offered them a ride in their chariot, I guess.

And what finally tipped the balance was the man’s deportment, for where the other men had been overly friendly and affectionately and oily, he was very politely distance. He had not even suggested that we could go get a drink afterward. Actually, the expression in Spanish equivalent for “get a drink,” or “go get something to drink (or eat),” is tomar algo, “to take something,” and the literal translation has always made me uncomfortable. This man, though, seemed to be sensible and sensitive, someone who could appreciate roses, not a guy who was into taking things—like liberties.

When I accepted his offer, he led me to his car, just a few yards away, and off we went. As he drove, we introduced each other. I still don’t recall his name, perhaps because in that moment I was noticing the name of the café at the corner as we pulled away, El Angel Caído, the Fallen Angel. It seemed a pretty melodramatic name for such a small unassuming place, but then, I thought, maybe they don’t read much Milton here.

In moments, we were on a freeway. The man was speeding, taking turns manically. In short, he was driving like most Spaniards did then. It was frightening, but even more disconcerting, he kept getting on and off exits in such opposite directions in such quick succession that even if I had had a sense of direction, I would have lost it by then. I could not tell if the lurching I felt was due to the motion of the car or fear in my stomach.

“Where are we going?” I shouted.

“To the rose garden,” he yelled back unconvincingly.

“On a superhighway??” I shouted back more loudly, really screeching now.

“Don’t worry. I know where I am going,” he smiled.

That was precisely what worried me, and when we had traveled for ten minutes this way, I imagined how easy it would be to be kidnapped this way. The first thing he would do would be take my passport—we had been instructed that losing that would be akin to losing one’s identity, one’s birthright, one’s sanity—rape me, and pushed me out into Basque country, from where I would have to make my way back to Castilla on foot because I would never ever accept another ride from a stranger.

Or this: he would plant marijuana on me and take me to the police, who would throw me in jail where I would rot like all the other Americans who had been caught with drugs in Spain. Sad stories of their pathetic conditions and the uselessness of American lawyers, of any lawyers or parents or money, really, circulated among the students. This was the Spain of Franco, where there was no due process.

As I considered these possibilities, we exited and turned away from the freeway and onto a shady boulevard. I wondered if we were still in Madrid.

Then I saw, far off, in the opposite direction from where I had first seen it, The Fallen Angel. I had only known of it for fifteen minutes, but it seemed like an old friend. I knew where I was. Right where I started. I relaxed for the first time since I got into the car.

“Señor, really, since you don’t want to go to the rose garden, I simply must leave,” I said in Spanish that sounded about that stilted, as I tried to sound more formal than my weeks of using “Tú” and “Vosotros” with nearly everyone.

“But we are here!” he said.

I pulled on the door handle. Locked.

He reached for me and pinned down my hands. Then he kissed me, and continued kissing. It was awful, like being kissed by an octopus, not only because he seemed to have more arms than I, but also because he had all this suction, like all the little suction cups that an octopus has. Then he made the mistake of releasing one of my arms so he could grab my thrashing face. Instead of futilely slugging him, I reached for the knitting at my feet, grasped the knitting needle, inched it to his throat, and applied pressure. When he tried to look down, I applied more pressure.

“Will you please open this door before I have to kill you?” I asked, feeling like Zorro or something. He scowled and reached across me, muttering a curse about she who breeds like a rabbit, as he opened the door. In that split second I bolted from the car. Once out, I felt bold enough to reach in and scoop out my knitting, too. I shook the bundle of bulky green yard, loose ends snaking out like spinach spaghetti.

“Tonto!” I scolded. “Did you think you could drive past a place called The Fallen Angel twice without my noticing? I am no rabbit, señor, but you are the devil!”

I slammed the door and left the park for the train station, hours before my train was due. Too proud and scared to see if he were following, I didn’t turn around for a long time, part of which time, I ran. So I was quite a ways away when I realized that the yarn I had been knitting with had caught on something as was unraveling as I went. I wound it up, stuffed it in my bag and reknitted it all back up from my bench in Atocha Station.

I have been lost many times since then but never in a stranger’s car and always paying attention to my surroundings. Juliet may not have found anything in a name, but I found that a rose by any other name might be a Venus flytrap.

(This story was first published in the chapbook of The Kentucky Women Writers Conference, which awarded it second prize.