By Nicole Falco
This fairy tale began in September 1982. Lorraine Surace, a Valley Stream resident, was vacationing in Spain with her sister, Angela, when, on the last day of the vacation, she met matador Julian Ruiz Bustos.
"Have you ever felt like someone's eyes are riveted on you?" Surace asked. "I could feel him looking at me."
Surace and her sister had just spent the afternoon watching a bullfight and had stopped nearby for drinks with others from their tour group.
"All I can say about him is that he was drop-dead gorgeous," Surace said.
Friends Surace made on the tour asked, "Where did you find him?"
The two shared a dance, a drink and conversation limited by their language barrier, spending several hours together. Ruiz Bustos took Surace back to her hotel and promised to see her to the airport the next morning.
Surace and her sister waited and waited for him to come the next day, but he didn't show -- fearing, he says today, that saying goodbye would be too emotional. "We were the last two people to board the plane," Surace said.
The two were taking a DC-10 Spantax charter flight back to the states along with 400 others, many of whom were friends they had made on the tour. Immediately after takeoff there was chaos, as the back of the plane caught fire and the craft crash-landed in a sugarcane field, killing more than 50 of the passengers. The tragedy made news around the world.
"I got out of there," Surace said. "I just kept running and running. I thought the plane was going to explode."
Surace and her sister credit fate with saving their lives. The two believe that had they not been waiting for Ruiz Bustos they would have boarded the plane sooner and taken seats in the back with friends, some of whom died in the crash.
"I have to feel in my heart of hearts that my fate would have been totally different," Surace said.
The survivors eventually made it home on an Iberian Airlines flight 12 hours later. Unbeknown to Surace, Ruiz Bustos had watched the disaster on the news and rushed to the airport to help.
"I was trying to get in touch with him, not knowing all the time he was looking for me," Surace said.
The two did not meet again that day. Life took them in different directions. They would not communicate again for 18 years, though Surace, who has since retired from her career as a traffic manager for an import-export company, made several attempts. Just before Christmas 2000, she mailed a letter to Ruiz Bustos's brother, the only address she could find.
That Christmas morning she got a call from Ruiz Bustos. Neither had learned any more of the other's language, so the two could barely communicate. Eventually Surace's neighbor, a Spanish teacher, became their interpreter.
"I always thought of her," Ruiz Bustos said in heavily accented English. "All these years I never forgot her."
In March 2001 Surace tackled her fear of flying -- she had not stepped on a plane since the crash -- and set off on a three-week vacation in Spain to reunite with Ruiz Bustos, despite the fact that many of her friends thought she was foolish. Since then, Surace has taken other trips to Spain and has met most of Ruiz Bustos's family and friends. He came to Valley Stream in July 2002 and returned this Thanksgiving.
"Since we've been together he's learning [English] from me and I'm learning [Spanish] from him," Surace said. "We understand each other perfectly."
Ruiz Bustos and Surace will be together through her birthday in January and are already planning her next visit to Spain.
"I'm so glad I didn't listen to anybody," Surace said.
