Breakfast at the hostel is too far away, but I go thinking it will be better than cardboard cereal from a cardboard bowl with room temperature milk. I chew up and down until it all forms a paste smooth enough to swallow. Then I pour black drip filter coffee into the last clean cup, put my head over the steam, add sugar and drink.
If she ate here she is gone. Fanny. It is hard to know when someone will eat a cardboard breakfast when they only tell you ‘maybe tomorrow’ the night before. Still, l rue missing the chance to see to someone I’ve decided I could fall in love with …
Maybe …
… even if it was only a twenty minute talk the night before – altogether that is: ten minutes with her, and then the rest when everyone was speaking English at the same time. For those ten minutes alone, she was standing at the high wooden bar of a tapas place looking wistfully the ceiling:
‘You look disinterested,’ I say, finishing the last of my wine.
‘No, I’m just looking at the place here.’
‘What do you see?’
‘Nothing really. I’m just taking the place in.’
I look around. Really, nothing? Not a picture, not a shred of peeling paint, not a crack. You couldn’t pick out one detail just to talk?
‘How long are you here for?’
‘Until Monday.’
Pause. Pause. I hate these pauses. I’ve never filled silences with mundane questions well.
‘What did you come here to see?’
‘I only had to take one week’s holiday, and I had no-one to come with me this time, so I came for a week to see Granada and Seville because I have never been here.’
‘Is travelling by yourself something you would normally do? Do you have a friend you usually travel with, or a boyfriend back in Geneva who couldn’t come this time?’
I can see no-one ever asks her this, but I don’t flinch.
‘Do you want a beer?’
So, she doesn’t want me to know she doesn’t have a boyfriend then.
‘Sure. But I’ll have some wine instead.’
Then, we both have wine. Then, we both pay separately. I’m still optimistic enough to think all her signals are mixed – the wistful way she waited for me to talk to her at the bar, her inability to think of anything interesting about the roof, her getting out of an embarrassing question about her love life by letting me pay for my own drink, the way she speaks in English.
… Tomorrow, which is already today
It doesn’t seem fair a girl who spoke English to me the night before should be done eating breakfast before the bells ring eleven.
I drag myself back to bed and the bells ring twelve and then the bells ring one and I shower long and step my way down to another World Heritage Listed Cathedral before the bells ring two, my body empty and aching. I stop and eat salad and pork casserole and blood sausage and drink two bottles of tonic water at a restaurant where I sit on the street so I don't have to look through a window to the street.
After a while get up and go and pay my eight Euros into the Cathedral without telling my echoing, all-over pain that even I am not sure why I am here. Right now I prefer e.e. cummings’ poetic maxim that a pretty girl who naked is is worth a million statues.
But there is no pretty girl, not even a naked statue. There is just this cathedral, cavernous and vast with high walls and perfect ornate vaulting. What a sight! Its Baroque drama built up from the floor with the caged quire and the high altar – a spectacular cage of gold statuary – pincering the space and making a criss-cross of naves and transepts that are bordered by a concatenation of caged chapels around the exterior walls. It leaves me wondering where God really is.
Looking down one the transept between the quire and the altar is a statue bearing one corner of Columbus’s tomb, charging forward with a crucifix held up to the sky as though he is running the world through with a lance. Columbus, who started to unroll the carpet of death and slavery on the Atlantic west coast, where nowadays almost everyone is Catholic. I see no monument to those, whose miserable deaths paid for this Listed church and its wall of gold statues.
The eternal feminine
After some hours I walk out and sleep and come out again in the dark early warm evening streets. The third full moon since I left Melbourne shines white into the city and turns the sky pale black. I think again of Oscar Wilde, this time the last lines of his Sonnet on hearing the Dies Irae sung in the Sistine Chapel:
Come rather on some autumn afternoon,
When red and brown are burnished on the leaves,
And the fields echo to the gleaner’s song,
Come when the splendid fullness of the moon
Looks down upon the rows of golden sheaves,
And reap Thy harvest: we have waited long.
Come … Come …
For anyone who has sung in a performance of Mahler’s eighth Symphony, and thought about an autumn leaf, Wilde’s invitation to ‘come’ is like a deep bell ringing in a new, incomprehensible hour, and every leaf is an already decaying pendulum that will disperse into the air it falls through.
The symphony is for as large an orchestra as ever existed, two adult choirs, a boy’s choir and eight soloists. Its two movements take an hour and a half to perform. The last movement sets the final scene from Goethe’s Faust. Faust promised the Devil, Mephistopheles, his soul to perform miracles on Earth. But Mephisto misses out at the end because Faust repents all the stupid things he has done to people along the way – especially Gretchen, who pines for him in love, spinning wool at her wheel, like a seamstress these days might push the material through the blur stabbing needle of the electric sewing machine.
In the very last scene, after Faust has died, his soul wakes up in the after-life. Another character, Mater Gloriosa (Glorious mother), a soprano and the symbol of heaven, calls Faust on: Komm, she sings (at 5 minutes in the link). The Chorus repeats in a soft and gentle tone: Komm … Komm!
Mater Gloriosa is a symbol of what Goethe called das ewig Weibliche – the eternal feminine – a term he introduced in the the play’s final lines, which are spoken by a Chorus Mysticus. The Chorus begins with the words Alles vergängliche – everything disappears. A few lines later, at the very end of the drama, Goethe says the ewig Weibliche draws us up to heaven.
The eternal feminine and all things transitory swirl around a tangle of thoughts and I walk some more and go to the Bar Alfalfa in the Plaza of the same name where I stand and drink a glass of red wine and eat small plates of jamon and cheese and watch people walk past and think about two emails from the morning about the Basel photos: Sami is proud of his beautiful city; Bettina in Toronto asks if I know photography is in my future.
After more than two months of walking a hooked trail of cities from the San Andreas Fault to the Iberian Peninsula, and many years besides, I have one of those thoughts that is either sane or one you invented in the moment before you go mad.
I see that what I like doing is changing the way people look at what surrounds them. That it is energising and worthwhile, and makes you get up, and eat, and brings your senses to life as you wonder how you can do it again so that what people see in the end are worlds in the grains of sand that disappear through their fingers, or heavens in summer wild flowers that grow in mundane grass and by the winter are seeds and dust.
I see that it is not what I am doing, by turning up to write briefs and reports and saying ‘Here, take this gift. I was reserving it for the progress and freedom of the race, but I can see it belongs to you just as much as to any.’
I feel light headed and my shoulders hurt like every knotted muscle is leaking a cocktail of aching time through my body. I pay and walk slowly and uncertainly with a steady heartbeat, my only reason for thinking I am not going mad.
San Salvadore
I walk to the Plaza San Salvadore to breathe and think and watch people walk by out of focus. It is one of those moments where, released from a greater anxiety, I want to cry into Fanny’s eternal breast with no thought of time, prostrate and huddled into her, until she can smell the vulnerability in her clothes.
The world turns around me closer than I except. The monument has a narrow ledge to sit on and it is narrow enough for children to run around the statue on it. A young girl of about eleven convinces her brother, who less than half her age, to chase her. I quickly become part of the obstacle course that makes them laugh.
At first they climb down carefully to run around my outstretched leg, but after several turns they start to jump and they run faster and faster until altogether they run around the monument two dozen times, always laughing, always keeping their feet, never tiring. Eventually they dance their way back to their parents who are at a table by a coffee stand about twenty metres away. Everywhere there are people sitting and talking or walking through the plaza on their way home or to meet friends and eat and drink. Everyone is in focus and I decide it’s time to leave.
Paella and flamenco
Still aching, but wanting to find out about the ‘maybe tomorrow’ moment from the night before, I flat step to the hostel at nine o’clock, take a long breath, swipe my card and push the heavy door open.
Tonight is Paella – six Euros for a slopheap of coagulated rice and chicken and chorizo cooked in a pale orange colouring. The Belgian comes while I am alone at the bar and asks about my plans for the night. It is his admission he wants to be to the only bull in the herd, but I have already seen Fanny at the computer in reception booking her ticket home, and she has invited me to flamenco with whoever is going. She is leaving tomorrow, Sunday, a day earlier than I thought. There is no chance of spending a day with her. There is only tonight, maybe.
There are four of us. The fourth is a woman from Japan, Norico, who is travelling with the Belgian and about to start writing her doctoral thesis in Osaka on British citizenship law. She has come to visit Gibraltar just to see it before she writes it up. Her voice is soft and calm and her English sometimes precise, sometimes imprecise, but she is always thoughtful, thinking of what to say next, what to ask.
We eat and leave.
Tennessee Williams wrote in his memoirs when he was hungry in Central America that every day he saw a boy sitting on a cliff, just looking at the sky and the sea. When asked why, the boy said if you sit out here for long enough, one day a bird is going to shit a pot of gold on your head.
As we walk the fat Belgian ignores his friend and speaks only French to the girl from Alsace who doctors in Geneva. He always walks in front trying to intuit the way a camera pasted to your face as he tries to snap the Fanny as he did last night.
Lost, Fanny finally asks a waiter where we should go (in Spanish – one of her four languages) and soon we are there. The hall is full of tourists watching three Spaniards – a guitarist, a handclapping singer who cannot keep time with himself or the band, and a dramatically serious looking dancer who may or may not have used castanets.
As the night goes on I see that Fanny likes being photographed, likes speaking French to an idiot and will follow a fat no sense of direction Belgian without a care for who is following, or what beauty there might be in the still bright Spanish night, where the streets are empty and the air is warm and everywhere the only hint of autumn is the hard green skin of the small tart oranges turning a faint glow of ripe.
Last night Fanny had a valency everyone wanted to attach themselves to. The only single girl I had met in two months, she was a particle of oxygen I wanted to join, and share even just one molecular moment of life. I decided I could fall in love with her then. Tonight I decide she is not my calling, and that I could fall out of love with her even more easily.
We walk back from flamenco and come at the Plaza de Alfalfa. I tell them I know the way, but it’s no use. The senseless Belgian must lead and kind-eyed Fanny must follow. By then I am liking Norico more and more. She is the one with grass between her toes. When I complain about the hand clapper who can’t keep time, she tells me with a gentle strength, that it is the first time she has heard flamenco and could not judge. Every time I get annoyed that the fat Belgian goes in the wrong direction she tells me we will get there eventually. I want to hear her about what she sees, and we talk about the balconies and windows and pavements, graffiti doors, stillness and soft light in the mild and narrow streets, and holidays, hopes and dreams.
When we come to the hostel everyone pauses at the empty reception. The unwritten silence of the moment is that tomorrow we disperse and tonight everyone sleeps in different beds. To avoid the convenience of the orange trees, I release myself at the toilet in the lobby.
I do not want stay and when I come out I first shake the Belgian’s hand and hope he will think the worst about my still moist hand. Norico smiles at a short distance and I embrace Fanny before disappearing.
That night I come down with a fever. I flicker and turn and sleep an interrupted sleep of deep and shallow breathing, until the next morning, when I wake up in a cold sweat.
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