A Lot Of Wind...

Suddenly it’s dark when I finish work and as I walk through El Cobre, the neighborhood reveals a little of its nocturnal self. The change in the time, abrupt and artificial, appears to have a very real effect – there are people around now as I go on my way that I’ve never seen before, stepping out of alleyways and hanging around in doorways. Of course, they were there all along; it’s my routine that’s been shifted forward, into the darkness – mine and anyone else who works, or who has any reason to be in a particular place at a particular time. Most of the new faces are lined; the older generation around here, having no such obligations, live the way their grandparents would have – by the sun.

The change of hours provides a glimpse of our own artifice – the gridwork of language and number that we graft onto the world. Twice a year, a little slip between clock time and real time, a tiny tremor along the fault line that runs between the two and we have an hour stolen from us, or we get this extra one that jars at first before settling in.

The gable wall of a crumbling old house glows green, bathed in the light of the pharmacy cross; I think it is green, and wonder why I’ve never noticed in the daytime, till it flickers. Further up toward the main road more flashes of light against a wall, this time emanating in horror movie fits and starts from a welder’s workshop, frankenstein sparks flying and filling the night outside with the visual rhythms of an electrical storm.

The journey home has also changed. For the last few weeks I’ve reached Tarifa in time to see the setting sun hit the water; now it’s gone by the time I get there, any clouds in the sky reflecting the last of its flamingo light, the sky still bright as human bulbs come on below and the town glows with them – white and yellow, blue and red.

Now it will feel as if we’re having dinner in the middle of the night, but then it always feels like that in Spain. We’ve just seen off another summer when, if anything, it’s worse – everybody waits for the air to cool just a little before they sit down to eat. It might be eleven by that time. It could be twelve.

The Spanish are renowned for it – lunch at dinnertime and dinner at bedtime. I remember trips to the old country house and vineyard of my padrastro’s family when I was a little boy: the warm nights, the nearest vines visible at the edge of the patio light, the rest of them shrouded in darkness and alive with cricket song, a vine trained through the trellis overhead, heavy with ripe grapes in the late summer, the table laden with chicken, rabbit and wine. The bustle of a meal prepared and served when I should have been in bed, the hum of chat amongst old and young that livened up the small hours.

For years afterwards I would invoke those nights as epitomising the mythical “Mediterranean lifestyle” – never mind that they took place in Galicia – or more specifically that much vaunted Spanish “difference” that so many have written about and attempted to explain. Of course in this day and age it’s bad form to mention it; we’re all supposed to aspire to homogenity under Brussels and Berlin now. Centuries ago though it seemed that any traveller who set foot in Spain came away convinced that it was “other”, more African than European in character – an exotic place, a truly foreign land.

Many Spanish people these days like to tell themselves they’re just “Europeans”, whatever that means. Indistinguishable from your average Belgian or Swede. But they keep the “difference” narrative alive inadvertently by excepting Andalucia almost every time. That lot down there are different. It’s like Africa or something. Many Andalucians will also tell you that they’re just Europeans, but nobody really believes them.

The same or different, the country has been attracting modern travellers for many decades now, drawn in by the latter, real or perceived, and the wacky mealtimes have been a big part of what has made the country feel so carefree and exotic for holiday makers. “Spain is different” has even been a nationally endorsed slogan, emerging under Franco, used and misused ever since. We imagine, I suppose, that the baffling but enchanting Spanish dining habits date back to some Roman foible or Moorish quirk.

They don’t. Before I put on my jacket and head through the neighbourhood to catch the bus home, I ask my group of sixteen and seventeen year olds, who are well aware that they eat much later than anyone else, if they know why. Blank expressions.

“Because Spain is special?” smirks R.

“I’m sure it is, but no,” I reply. “Do you think it’s an ancient custom?”

Timid nods.

“It isn’t. What if I told you it dates from 1940?”

Eyebrows rising. Glances exchanged.

“Why would Spain change its clocks to fall in line with central Europe, in 1940?” I ask.

Blank expressions.

“Who was in charge in 1940?”

“Franco!” as a group, frowning.

“So why would Franco, do you think, want the time in Spain to be the same as the time in, say, Germany?”

Blank expressions.

“Because he sympathised…?” I begin.

Still blank.

“…with..?” I continue.

A pause.

“Hitler?” says R.

“Yup.” I sit back to watch my handiwork unfold, immediately worried that I may have gone too far.

Their little faces. They look genuinely upset.

“You mean,” they seem to be saying, “that we have charmingly eccentric dining habits because Franco admired Hitler?”

I shrug.

“Yep.”

I’m worried I may have broken them. Hopefully nobody will cry. It’s as if I’ve run into the room and grabbed them all by the lapels, screaming “Wake up, Spain! Wake up! It’s fascist o’clock!”

They’re teenagers though, so as profound as the effect on them appears to be, a couple of minutes later we’re talking about something else. Still, for a moment there it was another kind of salutary awakening. That an Irishman could sit there and burst a bubble the Spanish themselves continue to blow made it all the more jarring for them, I think.

Another revelation, another falling away of the fictions we impose on our world. Whether reality is exposed underneath, or just another layer of fiction, isn’t the point.

The point is, it’s revealing.

On the roof at number eight again, a pale sun trying to burn through the thin layer of cloud overhead. I could be in the country here, in some crooked little pueblo, for all the city noise I can hear – which is to say, none. Red tiles and whitewashed walls, palms, ferns and potted plants – my visual field is a crowd of Andalusian tropes – but this place is different, has always managed to be different. Something in its proportions, in the shape of the slender carmens and villas that rise from the ramshackle roofscape, the better to build the miradors and terraces from which people have looked across at the opposite hill for centuries.

The horseshoe arches and heavy wooden doorways and window frames: there is something more distinctly Berber here than anywhere else on the peninsula. Something Arab. Something African. K has walked down to the frenetic city below where we were last night, almost intimidated by its busyness, its overflowing bars and bodegas, to shop. I’ll follow her down there soon; it’s only a five minute walk through the stepped and cobbled, car-free streets of the old town.

It isn’t completely silent; as I down the first coffee of the day and look up at the Alcazaba, I recognise a few notes of “New York, New York” as it wafts over from a house upslope behind me. It’s soft and welcome and entirely typical of the place. I can’t remember being here, in fact, and not being able to hear music, if only in the distance.  It always seems to be good music too: when it isn’t flamenco it’s jazz, or swing, or an old Billie Hollidaynumber – it might come from a radio set or a guitar being played near a window. Someone singing, or at the piano, but always music – always.

Tomorrow morning we’ll find ourselves strolling hand-in-hand down there together, along the upper reaches of the Cuesta de San Gregorio. It’s a cobbled slope of steps that widens here, narrows there; on a Sunday morning it’s deserted and we will have it to ourselves as it twists into a tiny plazuela in front a church and ahead of us the top of the cathedral will peep over the old town houses. Footsteps behind us will remind us we are not quite alone and as they overtake us I’ll note their owner – a young woman in black boots and a pair of jeans, a simple top and short brown hair tied casually back, carrying a plastic crate with some unidentifiable bits and bobs in it, and her face will be business-like for a Sunday as she gets in front of us and heads down into the city.

A pair of wings sprouting from her back – soft, white downy feathers spread out in the cool morning.

Always something in this city – even on the way in it seduced. Descending from the Sierra de Málaga, the last few hills ahead of us, a harvest moon – big and blood red – had risen. I was dozing in the passenger seat after a long and special day, only able to keep my eyes open on and off as the undulating olive groves gave way to the open flat and the car showrooms whispered by rhythmically, the planted Poplar patches and azujelo workshops, the odd urbanización and an olive oil refinery, muebles, electrodomesticos and the half-baked splendour of a neon-lit puti club with that big moon hanging over it. One of the twentieth century’s greatest visual gifts to the world: neon strips against a darkening but not yet dark sky.

The city traffic – and the bustle after we finally managed to park – was a shock. Once we’d gotten over it and left our bags in the little apartment we rent here sometimes (where we first fell in love with this city and where we decided to come and live in Spain) we went out for tapas, but were beaten back by the crowds. Every bar seemed to spill out onto the street, even those we know are normally quiet. We were tired and so instead we dropped into a deli and picked up some cheese and a bottle of wine, some crackers and a packet ofTrevélez ham packed in fat.

Back at the flat I laid it all out on a wooden board and carried it up the steep, wrought iron staircase outside to the roof terrace. It’s fresh here at night so we sat wrapped up in a couple of deck chairs and held forth on life’s deeper questions, bathed in magical, milky blue moonlight. Since there must be music, there was – a lone jazz trumpet, practising quietly somewhere nearby. Hidden in the silver shadow we quietened ourselves and looked up at the opposite height. The moon which had sat low in the sky and beckoned us into the city now hung high and bright above the Hall of the Ambassadors and the red outer walls of the Alcazaba and Nasrid palaces, lit up at night.

Any day ended here is a perfect day.

Today we’ll potter about doing nothing much, enjoying the city and each other. In the evening we’ll down good gazpacho and fried fish in Torcuato and have the terrace to ourselves in La Higuera beneath the enormous fig tree there. Tomorrow it’ll be the same – by the time we get to the bottom of the Cuesta, through the faux Moroccan souk and its trinkets, the winged girl will have disappeared.

We’ll hit Gran Via and the crowds, get through the gypsy women and their rosemary sprigs and pass the chapel where Isabel and Ferdinand are buried. On the smooth worn flagstones at the front of the cathedral the mesmerising musician will be there again with his Hang and so will she, standing on her upturned crate and wearing its former contents, statue still and leaning forward to beseech, a cap of coins at her feet.

The obvious thing to say would be that the wings will make sense, now that she’s dressed from head to toe in flowing white robes and has painted her skin white wherever it’s visible, but that isn’t what I’ll want to say.

They’ll have made sense to me all along.

The neighbourhood between the academia, where I’ve just finished work, and the bus stopwhere I wait each day for a ride back to Tarifa, is anything but picturesque. It has precisely nothing of the rustic charm that draws visitors to Andalucia, except perhaps an authentic dash of the chaotic, permission-free approach to town planning that created the medinas and pueblos blancos in the middle ages and continues to bash out the odd barrio today.

The pavements are in the kind of condition that could keep a thousand solicitors in work were this an anglo-saxon country, and that’s where there are pavements. There’s a chemist, a stationer, a few bars and a small family-run supermarket and butcher. I take a street that leads uphill toward the main road and the bus stop and pass a kindergarten and a kitchen showroom, opposite a hostal that advertises beds and showers. You’d have to wonder who would find their way to a hostal in a neighbourhood like this. The kind of person who requires assurance that their hostal contains showers, I suppose.

It’s a quiet time of day – just a few people here and there sitting on the kerb or on their doorsteps – but there is the repetitive clanging of someone at work. As I walk toward a white van parked up on the left the noise gets louder – I can’t see the source because the back doors are open and blocking my view but I do notice a large pile of dung behind it. I’m pretty sure it’s horse dung; it has that grassy texture to it and also, standing above it and tended by a tiny but cocky looking young boy, is a horse.

And because I’m passing by now I can see the back of the van, and the man standing on the street between the doors, banging away at a horseshoe on an honest-to-god anvil, and I can hear the distinctive roar of blue-flame gas somewhere behind him, obscured by his honest-to-god leather apron and I almost bump into a car as a I realise, gawping, that I’m looking at the first mobile farrier of my life. The middle ages in a Ford Transit.

Up at the road the ride I get is usually the bus, but not always. Today, P is there – a tarifeño K and I have given a lift to before and while we wait together, him regaling me with borderline incomprehensible one-liners, a car pulls in for him and he beckons for me to join him. The driver is a tarifeña and there’s another girl on the passenger side as Paco and I squeeze into the back next to the baby seat.

As we set off I’m somewhat reassured to see that his larger-than-life, belly laugh schtick isn’t an act he puts on for extranjeros; he keeps the girls in front thoroughly entertained as the driver hurtles dangerously toward Tarifa. I follow a little, but three tarifeños in conversation would challenge the average Spaniard so soon enough I tune out and look across the strait at Jebel Musa. Almost every day of my life I get to look at this and it never gets old.

In October, the ride home marks the end of each day as night begins to drop her veil. The African coast is golden and as the three of them chatter, a half moon sits high overhead in the cooler blue, haughty and irrelevant above a blush of clouds fanned out like recumbent flames, their underbellies still caught by the already sunken sun. P nudges me.

“Mira.”

The road twists here and begins the descent into Tarifa and the other coast – the Atlantic – comes into view. The sky above it is ablaze, the orb below the horizon but not its last light; not even this salty tarifeño in his paint-spattered overalls is immune, can ever really get used to the spectacle that surrounds him every day. Perhaps because it’s never the same.

They’re a singular bunch, the people of this beautiful and formerly isolated little town at the bottom of Europe. Our growing circle of friends around here has tended to consist, for whatever reason, of people from Madrid, Extremadura, Algeciras or Cádiz; the locals themselves we tend to have ‘encountered’ more than befriended – the man with the lazy eye who sells us our ham, the neighbours on the right who regularly keep us awake with flamenco dirges, the clap-clap, clap-clap-clap of dance practice from the apartment block behind us, the civil old gentleman and his sleepy, cranky brother who ran our corner shop and then retired, the almost hostile and unshaven young men who used to run the shop across the way and now run the kiosk about ten metres away, the dour women who’ve replaced them in the shop.

The following day as I’m shuffling down the aisle of the bus I’m slapped on the arm and startled out of my headphone reverie – it’s A, the neighbour on the left. A policeman, once or twice a week he goes to Algeciras to study psychology but I’ve never bumped into him on the bus before. Thirty-five minutes will be the longest conversation I’ll ever have had with him. He’s quite an intense chap and I’m one of those people who gets uncomfortable around the police in spite of my quiet, lawful life, so I’m intimidated at first, but we do ok. We talk of Scolymus maculatis, the wild asparagus that grows around here, and Ziziphus zizyphus, a strange little fruit that looks like an olive and tastes like an apple.

On Saturday, as we walk through the backyard of the old slaughterhouse where we go to feed the cats, the old man is there again. A short-sleeved shirt in the Cuban style, a face like the surface of the moon, the smoking stub of a cigar, he sits in the little room he must rent here or have been given, surrounded by wings and song. Canaries, budgerigars, finches – the walls of his little shack are lined with neatly arranged cages.

I never know what to think. He’s a nice man; his enjoyment of and devotion to his birds is evident, but I don’t like to see creatures born for flight in captivity. I feel sorry for them but I can’t say I’m sure how sorry to feel. What do they know? Can they miss what they’ve never had? Their little individual cages are too small but we all live in cages I suppose, even if we gilt them. P and A and I, we carry ours around. They are the limits of our understanding, the lockdown of our individual perspectives even if, once in a while, we are astonished – and momentarily freed – by the views between the bars.

Darkness has fallen though the night is soft and warm – we watch the world turn around us as the ferry floats slowly up the mouth of the river Guadalete and then shimmies round to dock on the riverbank at El Puerto de Santa Maria. The pin pricks of a thousand night lights are reflected vertically, the white and orange lines that fall from them interrupted gently by ripples on the surface of the water.

It’s our second time in the town; the first was this morning when we arrived by car, seething with the  arrival-rage that has become customary for us.  It’s as if we deliberately don’t write down the addresses of our hostales these days, or the phone numbers. I think it’s K’s fault but she thinks it’s mine. But it’s hers.

I think.

We can be so thoroughly put out that the first hour or two of a visit are ruined, but not today. Firstly, we more or less anticipate it these days, and laugh at ourselves sooner rather than later. Secondly, the hostal. We came on a whim at the last minute and have paid thirty-five euros for our bed, so I’m expecting a rickety one, the smell of stale tobacco and a fly carcass or two. What we get is something else entirely.

We’re early but greeted warmly by C once we get through the wrought iron gate at the street and another door into an open courtyard. He shows us straight into a room that would grace the pages of any interiors magazine you might think of. The most unlikely things, from children’s puzzles to books and boxes, have been nailed to the wall in delightfully artful formations. Oversized bulbs hang pendulously from the high ceiling to waist level at either side of the bed, over which the snow white window curtain billows.

There’s a little transistor radio on the table which is made out of cardboard and beside it a couple of paper cups. They contain coffee pods and, since I’m particularly partial to a complimentary coffee, necessitate a trip across the courtyard to the little guest kitchen. It’s a wonderland: a fairy-lit hodgepodge of vintage furniture and kitchen clutter, mismatched crockery and cinnamon sticks, yet somehow sparse and simple. The fridge is an honesty bar and there are a number of tins full of complimentary cake and biscuits. A crack in the wall above them has been made beautiful by the artistry of the owners’ graffiti-like doodles. By the time my eyes come to rest on the coffee machine I’ve forgotten it’s what I came here for.

I don’t believe I’ve ever been lifted out of a foul mood so quickly. Certainly not by décor. It makes me better company for K as we walk along the few streets that separate the hostal from my main reason for coming here.

Bodegas Obregón is the oldest bar in town and is in fact a barrel room – a despacho de vinos  – where the customer can enjoy a glass of various proprietary sherry wines or buy them buy the bottle. Or indeed bring a long an old plastic coke bottle and have it filled. It is predictably adorned with bullfighting memorabilia and men of a certain age but is otherwise unlike any bar I’ve seen before. There are no tables or chairs so one simply stands there amid all the barrels and gawps. Today is Saturday, the only day of the week when the little kitchen is open. It’s run by an abuela of a woman, her nietos milling around her ankles as she cranks out the berzo, menudos, pollo al Jiménez and papas aliñadas.

Home cooked food como antes but it doesn’t stop us dropping into to C’s recommended fish bar at the waterside for a plate of short fin shark before we get on the catamaran for Cádiz. It’s bright and the water sparkles beneath the windsurf rigs and bobbing tugs. As the skyline of the city bounces closer the glittering dome of the cathedral reveals itself. It might be the most beautiful city in the world and is certainly one of the oldest in Europe.

The quick crossing, just a water bus really, brings home just how connected Cádiz is to sherry country. I have never thought much about the wine while here but today, having arrived from El Puerto, another dot is joined. The handsome 18th century city’s streets are more numerous, the stately terraces of town house taller, but all of a sudden a place I know quite well is perfumed with palomino and Pedro Jiménez.

I sit in a little plaza below a church whose bell tower is bathed in the last honey light of the day as it shades me. K is shopping. So far October has been hot to the point of silliness and the cool in the shadow of the church is welcome and welcoming. I can see one of the old towers (a hundred and twenty or so of them survive) that the city’s merchants built on their roofs when Cádiz was perhaps the most cosmopolitan place on earth, not to mention where all that New World booty came in.

It’s not a city that will ever expand, hemmed in as it is on its narrow spit of land, and the price of beds reflects the limited space. Back across the water in the gathering night, the sailing smoother now that the wind has died down. We disembark and drop our bags back, head out to see what Santa Maria offers at night. Plenty, it turns out – even now that the tourist season has come to a close a strip of restaurants a street away from the water is heaving.

Later as we stroll back to the room we will watch amused as young revellers teeter on their heels and baseball caps sit sideways on shaved heads. For now though we sit outside the fish shop to end all fish shops: the town’s famous Romerijo, where on one side of the street you can have a paper cone filled with fried fish and on the other with all manner of seafood, sitting down to order a drink at the tables in between, each one equipped with a plastic-lined bin for shells. K sits patiently but uncomfortably and waits as I tuck into some puntillitas, looking with disgust over my shoulder as nearby patrons yank gelatinous whatevers from shells with their teeth.

K is throwing a few things into an overnight bag and I’m on the other side of the bed pretending to do the same, although really I’m just hanging around.

“Explain to me exactly what you mean,” she says, coiling the flex around some kind of hair tool, “by lunch.”

A doozer of a question. Not for the first time, I take a good long look at my fiancée.

“Something to eat,” I reply – an uncertain, questioning inflection finding its way into my voice, “in the middle of the day.”

She’s brushed past me and is gathering up small bottles and vials in the bathroom. No response.

“A light meal,” I call after her, “in the early afternoon?”

She returns with a bag of cosmetics and a faceful of scorn.

“I know what lunch is, you moron. I meant what did you have in mind?”

Once again she has me on the back foot. I hadn’t thought the suggestion a controversial one.

“I, eh, didn’t…I don’t really…” I drop the pair of boxing shorts I’ve been fidgeting with into my little case, “I just thought we’d…you know…we might…eat something.”

“In La Cañada?”

We’re off to Marbella for the night to meet up with E and N, a little family get-together I’ve been looking forward to. I’m not drawn to the place at all but it’s always family that takes us there and we always end up having a good time. One of the reasons I’m not particularly attracted is that, invariably, it provides an excuse for K to spend a few hours in the shopping mall on the main road outside town. Today is no exception. The name means ‘the canyon’ or ‘the ravine’ and is very fitting in the sense that both are things you can fall into and experience difficulty getting back out of.

“Yes, we could I suppose.”

“I wasn’t going to, to be honest,” she says, adding a glossy magazine to her shoulder bag and closing it. “Not really hungry.”

We’ve only just had breakfast. I’m trying to figure out how a person can cancel lunch on the basis of having had breakfast that day when the truth dawns on me.

“Wait a minute. Is this a not-eating-because-I’m-trying-clothes-on-today thing? Because I’m not at all on board with that.”

I do my best to look resolute.  “At lunchtime, I will want lunch.”

She tosses her head as if to indicate how silly I’m being.

“Alright then, where?”

I know from previous visits that the centre has all the usual fast food outlets, a couple of  Italians, a steakhouse, two or three fakey ‘mesons’, a bratwurst stand in the car park and a sushi place, so we have choices. Problem is, none of them appeal.

“I have to eat something, honey. That’s why they call it lunchtime.”

“King Burger?” she snorts.

Then something strange happens. Although I’m sure the suggestion left her mouth as a joke, it doesn’t reach my ears as one. The intervening space – the double bed and overnight bags, underwear, socks and toiletries – has breathed life into it. Like Frankenstein and the monster, or something.

“I’m not sure they have anything vegetarian on their menu these days,” I find myself speculating, out loud. I think my eyes may have glazed over.

“We’d have to check,” I actually hear her saying.

We continue to pack in a queasy, uncomfortable silence, no longer sure we know ourselves as well as we thought we did.

“They have onion rings, don’t they?” she asks after a minute or so, in the dreadful monotone of the reanimated.

A line has been crossed here. We are confronted with our own sordid lusts. I am pleased.

A dirty burger. And K is complicit. With her principles and such she won’t touch meat, but she isn’t above a bit of filthy fast food, it seems.

In the hour or so it takes us to get there we successfully avoid the issue. I brace myself for impact – K has decided that my life is deficient to the tune of precisely one cardigan, so I will stick with her as long as it takes to find it (I must admit I’m partial to a cardigan) and then I will leave her to her own devices, retreating to the English language bookshelf inFNAC  and getting myself another Charles Dickens novel before taking it outside and having a beer.

When we walk through the glass doors it’s worse than I thought. The place is mental. Every orange-skinned expat in Marbella has squeezed themselves into their Ralph Lauren, emptied a canister of spray into their hair and come out to shop. Frankenstein indeed – you can practically smell the botox. The only thing louder than the tannoy muzak is the clink and chink of gold-laden wrists. Today, La Cañada can boast both the largest concentration of blonde hair in the south of Spain and the potential to reboot the Spanish economy, if only all that money weren’t going to disappear offshore, which it probably is.

I try to suppress my snarl and make a beeline for King Burger, mouth watering.

But it isn’t to be. Filthy fast food is just that – fast and filthy. It’s the only way it makes any sense. If you give yourself enough time to think about it, you stop yourself. We’ve managed to distract each other the whole way up here but when we get to the restaurant there’s a monstrous queue. Seriously, from the back you’d be hard-pressed to tell if it was a burger joint or an Elton John concert. Defeated at the final hurdle – I’d happily lurry into some borderline illegal quality meat right now but there’s no way I’m queuing for it. Way too much time to reflect. I feel empty – just as demeaned as if I’d had the fecking thing but without the grease.

The cardigan search is unsuccessful and I go straight to plan FNAC. I don’t know if it’s the gnawing, empty feeling but I buy the biggest Dickens I can find and take it outside. K, bless her, keeps it down to ninety minutes and when we meet up she’s bought nothing. At this stage, neither of us is willing to leave without some kind of result. We go cardigan hunting again, and half an hour later we finally get to the car with some shopping bags – K has a massive, double-sided scarfy thing and I have a thick winter coat and a rather expensive blazer which I insist on calling a sports jacket and which I believe is going to make me look like one of the Rat Pack. No cardigan.

As we make our way down into the town, the veteran K explains a thing or two to me and I slowly fill up with a whole new kind of horror. The blazer is ‘not very neutral’ apparently and won’t go with any of my tops. I’ll get away with jeans, she says, but they’re not ideal. Therefore, I now ‘need’ a couple of plain shirts, a pair of trousers…