Before leaving the mechanic’s garage where I’d gone to inquire about a car problem, I asked the man I’d been consulting with for his name. He was between 60 and 70, I’d guess. “Guillermo,” he said, and then added helpfully, “William.”
“I know! It was my father’s name!”
Then I walked with a light step back to my house on that gray and humid Wednesday morning in late July. On the way I happened to meet some acquaintances. “Where are you going so fast?” they asked.
I explained about the car, the trouble with it, and the difficulty of finding a mechanic with time to look at it. The garage I’d just visited had no appointments available before late August.
“Then why do you look so happy?”
“The mechanic! Charming, just charming!”
It wasn’t really the mechanic but the mechanic’s father I’d spoken to, the only person at the garage when I’d arrived shortly after it opened. “Hello?” I’d said into the cavernous space. “Hello?” came the answer from behind me as a man strolled out of the office. I took a breath, then explained that I’d bought a used car for my son in anticipation of a job he might get, and the very first day he’d driven it, a problem had developed, a strange noise and lack of response when he gave it gas. “He was in Llanes,” I added, naming a town two hours away. “He had the car towed back to town, and now it’s just sitting, and I have no idea what’s wrong. My son doesn’t either.”
The man listened attentively, his head slightly cocked as if he were imagining the sound of the engine. “A blowing noise,” I clarified. To get the car closer to my house, I had driven it myself three blocks from where the tow truck had left it. I hadn’t noticed anything amiss.
“What make of car?” the man asked.
I told him it was a 2001 Toyota Yaris.
“Gas or diesel?” he inquired.
Diesel, with 228,000 kilometers. It was the first car we’d looked at, I said. “Buying the first car is a mistake, I know.”
“Not necessarily,” he said. “The Japanese make good cars. Toyota is a good company. Very good.” He told me that the electronics are excellent, and even the screws used in a Toyota are better quality than what you find in a French car. It sounded to him like a tube had come loose or had broken. He said that his son, who was the mechanic at the repair shop, was snowed under with work. The first opening was in three weeks.
Not a problem, I said, because the job had fallen through.
What I should do, he continued, was call the seller. All sales are guaranteed by law. A year for a car from a dealership and three months for one from a private seller. The guarantee applies even if the sale stipulates no guarantee. No private agreement supplants the law.
I thought my son had driven the car fast, maybe quite fast, I said, and I didn’t know if the problem existed when the car was purchased or if straining the motor had caused it.
“A car is meant to be driven,” the man said, “even driven hard. Beware of an old car with low kilometers. That car has not been used.” The man offered an analogy of a person keeping fit by exercise.
“Use it or lose it,” I chimed in, thinking of all the people I knew intent on exercising every day just to keep on their feet.
“If you love the car,” he continued, “you must drive it hard.”
“I hope you don’t use that philosophy with your wife!”
He smiled and said he had been happily married for 40 years. Then he held up his finger and chuckled. “I have been happy,” he said smiling, “and I hope she has.” Then he recounted advice he’d given his son when the son had told him he was taking a new girlfriend to a nice restaurant. “Be careful,” the father had warned. “Pamper her now and she’ll expect it forever. Forty years later, she will still remember the time you didn’t bring her flowers on her birthday, or when you forgot to give an anniversary present. She will remind you.”
I asked him if he was speaking from experience. He chuckled again.
“Where are you from?” he asked me, and I told him.
We continued to chat amiably for another 10 minutes. His son appeared and got to work, and a client came to leave his car. My companion confided that clients get their cars to the shop early. “Do you know the saying, Quien fue a Sevilla perdió la silla?” he asked. I did. Anyone around kids would. It means if you vacate your seat, you lose it. “We have a different version in the business,” he said. “Quien fue a Aranjuez perdió la vez.” If you leave, you lose your turn. He also pointed out a car in the garage with the hood up. It belonged to a man whose father had first come to the repair shop 35 years earlier, when it was located across town in a single garage space on a narrow road leading into the hills. I told Guillermo that I had seen that garage with the shop name painted across the door. I guessed that he had been the mechanic until retiring and turning the business over to his son.
What else made the time I spent talking with Guillermo so special? He mentioned another client who apologized for stopping by only when her car wasn’t working. He’d told her, “If I had a restaurant, would you apologize for coming when you were hungry?” She was an American, like me. Our accents were the same.
The man was so affable, so companionable, that without a tinge of remorse at the betrayal of my faithful Peugeot, I told him that my car was one of those unreliable French cars with cheap screws and bad electronics. The gears were giving me trouble, I said, and I’d like an appointment to get the car checked out. We looked at the calendar. I chose a date in September, a few days after I was to return to Spain following a month in the United States.
I prepared to go. He reminded me to call the seller of the Toyota. “Come back to see me if that doesn’t work,” he said, his voice a smidgeon lower and his kindly face serious. I promised I would. Either way, I’d be back.
