"Paddling into the wave," he shouted.
"You must…" Again he was stymied. He pushed the tip of his board below the water.
"Push the tip of your board beneath the wave?" I said.
He nodded. "Push the tip of board ..." He looked at me, pleadingly. "Beneath it?" I said.
"Beneath it," he said, then grinned. One of the Dutch kids, who had been trying to translate Julen's English back into Dutch or possibly German, failed to see the wave rising behind him. It caught the tip of his board and hurled it straight up into the sky. The kid back-flipped in midair, like a circus clown, and came up spluttering.
"See! See!" shouted Julen. "If you not do this you &" He made a motion as if his head was in a noose.
"Die?" I said.
"Not die," he said.
"Break your neck?" I said.
"Yes!" he shouted. "Break your neck!"
Julen kept up this running commentary for the 20 minutes it took to reach the big waves. In a brief moment of calm, we swiveled our boards around in an undignified dog-paddling motion and waited. Julen floated behind me, one hand on the back of my board.
"Michael, if you feel the wave…" he shouted. Then he went silent.
"If I feel the wave what?" I asked. I glanced around and saw him treading water, his mouth a perfect O. He couldn't find the words for what I was meant to do when I felt a wave come.
"WHAT???" I shouted. Behind him I saw the tsunami rising out of the sea.
"No English," he said. "I'm sorry."
The next six seconds were a blur. The wave probably wasn't more than six feet, but the force of it hurled 170 pounds of middle-aged male flesh straight up into the air and then straight down into the sea. I came up choking on seawater and sand. Julen waved and shouted.
"Run!" he said. "If you feel the wave, run."
We repeated this brutal exercise 40 times that day, each time with exactly the same result. Then we did it again five days more, 40 times each day, still with no luck. Even on that first day, I could see that surfing wasn't like basketball or even skiing. It was more like breathing. Either you could do it, or you couldn't. Either you were blessed with a mind that accepted the notion of balancing on top of tipsy fiberglass while all hell breaks loose behind you, or you weren't.
Surfing, it turned out, was the price of having an excuse to spend a week in Zarautz. To the eye of a tourist, Zarautzian life has two delightfully simple rules. If you are under 22, you surf all day and dance all night. If you are over 22, you sleep all day and eat all night—which is one reason your body is not designed for surfing. Anyway, the American friend who told me that Zarautz was the best place on earth to learn how to surf also had a friend over 22 who lived in Zarautz. His name was Pedro.
Pedro Corral and his wife, Fernanda, had settled into a condominium with big picture windows overlooking the beach. Pedro turned out to be a Basque Ed McMahon, one of those people created, physically and temperamentally, to make sure everyone else drinks deeply of life. He ran the sales department of a Basque owned and operated car manufacturer that sold its products to eastern Europeans and Southeast Asians. Pedro spent most of his time making sure that visiting Asian and eastern European businessmen had something to feel guilty about when they left. Now he turned his attention to us.
On our first night out, Pedro took us into San Sebastián, where he introduced us to a favorite pastime of middle-aged Basque males—cruising for tapas. Not since high school had I approached the world in such a promiscuous spirit as I did with Pedro that night. It wasn't girls we were after; it was appetizers. As Pedro explained, there are two San Sebastiáns. One is the beach resort for European lounge lizards. The other is a kitchen for the locals. Behind every fourth door, from one end of San Sebastián to the other, lies a bar or restaurant. And every one of these places offers a gorgeous assortment of hams and cheeses and breads and seafoods. We grazed our way from one end of town to the other until, at midnight, certain we couldn't eat another bite, we went out to dinner.
The second night, Pedro invited us to join him at his eating club. Most Basque men belong to eating clubs and most Basque eating clubs exclude women. Once a week, the guys get together in a private dining room, make their own chow, and, presumably, complain about Basque women and the Spanish government. Pedro's eating club was coed. The wives were allowed to come and do the work. While Pedro and his male friends sat draining bottles of Rioja and complaining about the government, the women clustered around the stove. It was here that Pedro confessed he was mystified by my choice of Zarautz as a vacation spot. He understood that Americans liked to visit the Guggenheim in Bilbao; he knew that San Sebastián attracted Eurotrash. But American tourists didn't go anywhere near Zarautz.
"I heard about the surfing," I said. "About how the waves in Zarautz were the perfect size to learn on, and the teachers the best in the world."
"Hmmmmm," he said, and poured another glass. The second bottle of Rioja vanished and the third appeared. We ate and drank and drank some more. Pedro looked at me harder. "Michael," he said, as the women cleared the plates. "Listen to me: Why you really come here?"
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