Summer Triangle : The country of Alan Jolis’ childhood is gone forever : SPEAK SUNLIGHT,<i> By Alan Jolis (A Wyatt Book for St. Martin’s Press: $20.95; 177 pp.)</i>

Sometimes, outside schools in Beverly Hills, one sees members of household staffs waiting for the young children of the wealthy to be let out. The women wear pink or blue uniforms, the men usually wear black trousers and white shirts. Watching them swing the keys to the expensive cars they use as everyday shuttles one admires the ease, even aplomb, with which they’ve adapted to a certain segment of American life; at the same time one senses the awkwardness they feel at being surrounded by waiting parents who, at the very least, share the bond of language.

It is the children who make the social boundaries disappear when they come out of school and run toward the cars, shouting with obvious love, “Rosa!” “Maria!” “Pedro!” in Spanish accents that are starting to be perfected.

Alan Jolis’ lyrical memoir, “Speak Sunlight,” is a window into the world of these attachments, where servants are not only extensions of the family but also mentors and co-conspirators. In Jolis’ case, the location is not Beverly Hills but upper-crust Paris and the staff is not Mexican or Central American but Spanish. Young Alfonso--his childhood name--is the son of Americans living in Paris in the 1960s. He is a boy of the elegant quartiers. He plays with toy boats in the Bois de Boulogne. He knows when his parents’ dinner parties are going as smoothly “as a rip in a silk stocking.”

Maruja, the cook, and Manolo, her husband the butler, are childless Spaniards, and it is both Alfonso’s fate and his luck to be semi-adopted and fully appropriated by them, a grinning stand-in for the child they don’t have.

Writing about childhood servants, one runs the risk of remembering a sense of solidarity that the servants might not necessarily have shared. But this trio is united, first in the elegant home in Paris, where stage and backstage are separated by the kitchen door, but even more so away from the parents, in Spain, on the yearly vacations on which Maruja and Manolo insist Alfonso accompany them.

Maruja is the book’s main character. This woman with the constitution of a tugboat drags everyone in her wake. She would have been a demanding mother. In charge of her employers’ son in a foreign country, she is a force of nature. “Veeennn, Nino!” (“Come, boy!”) her voice booms over the heads of other returning immigrants at the border station. One imagines Alfonso, eyes as big as saucers, watching Maruja and taking it all in.

At customs, she tears open a chosen suitcase containing bras “as big as a catcher’s mitt,” rendering the agents too slack-jawed to open the other suitcases, which are stuffed with coffee and chocolate for relatives. She body checks anyone who gets between her and the connecting train and, once seated, straightens her skirt and daintily smokes the menthol Kools that she finds so choice.

What starts as the account of one visit to Spain soon crystallizes into memories of many summers. During these months, Alfonso is both at home and a stranger--the American boy everyone is curious about and just another kid in the plaza. Jolis’ Spain is sensually vivid. We absorb everything as if through our own eyes, ears, skin--the way churros fry in vats of olive oil, the excitement in a child’s heart at the first firecracker announcing the start of the village fiesta, the way a Madrid senorito enters a tapas bar “like the heir apparent to the Spanish throne.”

As Alfonso grows from childhood to adolescence, he becomes aware that this country he has come to love is a political dictatorship. It is here that Jolis is faced with the liberal dilemma in which, despite oneself, one feels nostalgia for a time of oppression. This, indeed, is the background to the book: the Franco dictatorship and the incredible poverty of Spain in those years, particularly of the barren north Atlantic headlands of Galicia where Maruja--as well as Franco--came from.

Go to Buenos Aires, go to Havana, go to Mexico City and you’ll find immigrants from Galicia. “Go to the end of the world,” said John Dos Passos, “and you’ll find a Gallego.” During one of their vacations, Alfonso accompanies Maruja on a donkey up a mountain, to a shack where her sister is dying. As she says goodbye for the last time, Alfonso realizes that this is the squalor Maruja has escaped. It was not curiosity that made her go to Paris, it was poverty, and for the first time this poverty has been made real to him.

Most of the time, the book is not so dramatic. Alfonso wakes up in Maruja and Manolo’s bed. He spends hours swimming in mountain pools with Manolo and endless hours with him doing absolutely nothing, because for both of them simply being out of Maruja’s orbit is an activity in itself. Until they miss her. And there are chapters on Alfonso’s four lovely cousins, whom Maruja takes on as added charges for periods of the vacation. He’s in love with each one, though oblivious of their love for him until one night--watching the Beatles’ “Hard Day’s Night,” subtitled in a provincial cinema, with everyone chomping on dried sunflower seeds--each girl takes the opportunity to grope him, unaware that the other three are doing the same.

It is pure innocence. These are giggling girls in frocks and patent leather shoes. But for anyone who comes of age in the transition from dictatorship to democracy, emotional development is not only personal but historic. The girls grew up. And so did Alfonso, to become a graduate student in Washington, D.C., a journalist covering Spain, the father of a 3-year-old child. And Spain changed also. Franco did finally die. In the euphoria of the first elections, Jolis observes, there seemed to be one political party per voter. Spain became a strange mixture of medieval theme park and post-industrial apocalypse. Suddenly, a Castilian shepherd could have an indoor toilet and a child with a heroin problem.

In countries where neo-fascist groups still regularly demonstrate, one is careful around words like “nostalgia,” since turning back time is their mission. But Jolis’ memoir is personal, and when he captures the past, it is a past beyond politics. There is, for example, a scene that takes place during the last summer at a restaurant at the end of the beach. Here the waiter has attacks of flamenco passion, the cousins clap Sevillana songs and Maruja herself, resplendent in a one-piece swimming suit from les Magasins Reunis in Paris, manhandles Alfonso into the right way to square his feet to dance like a macho. But he is becoming a man without her. “Veeennn, Nino!” is a memory. At such moments, Jolis achieves what is so rare: He makes time stand still and fills us with regret for people who have helped us become who we are, like a forgotten tune, like music coming from a restaurant at the end of the beach.