Wild Sovereign Development Site

Category: street life

  • the father & son skateboards

    Bearded guy walking past rather fast along the cobbles holding his cell phone up to type rapidly, with a sprig of green clutched in his other hand, at chest height. As he walks he types and as he types he keeps glancing over at the little torn-off sprout – it’s clear this green is what is informing his flow of ideas this fine morning. I guess he is describing it but can’t shake the sweet thought that it is somehow dictating to him: a poem, a song.

    This street is crowded with ice cream shops which make their own blends onsite. “The surest sign of gentrification,” said boyf as we were queuing in the sunshine to choose between matcha (green tea ice cream) and white chocolate with parmesan. When I first moved in, was it only last week? a man walked past with his skateboarding little son. The father had a skateboard of his own clutched under his free arm and was holding the little boy’s hand. As I watched, the man dropped his boy’s hand, dropped his own much smaller board to the ground, and hopped on. From behind, they were unmistakeably linked: little boy in colourful t-shirt covered with tiny dinosaurs, and drab pants; daddy wearing his own groovy colourful t-shirt (covered in Donald Ducks) and khakis. They set off together, paddling solemnly, right down the middle of the pavement, wearing their genes.

  • the night so vast

    Walking at night through the little woods that runs along the shore. I can hear a muted guitar playing from across the water. The dirty water in the dark looks black and clean as ink. Spring is thickening and the trees reach in from either side, closing the path. You have to be swallowed in it. The low thrum of summer night conversation peppers along the canal. The smell of pot. The smell of cigarettes. The clinking of old bottles as a man wheeling his laden bicycle stops under a streetlamp to readjust them all so tenderly in their bags, with furrowing care as though he were collecting them to keep. When I turned down last night an invitation to the birthday party of a man who lives in a van in a village of vans in a thicket where the cherry trees were all pink in April his brother, who’d invited me, said, You should come, we will have a fire in a barrel. Like New York. His brother, he said, had a telescope and this was a telescope party. “Saturn,” he said, the German way, “and her rings and… Jupiter.” I turned for home under the linden trees and he told me how every village had its linden once: with a bench running round it, the Dorflinden. I’m alone now, in the manner of people who don’t go to parties, and my eyes are swollen from crying, and sore. The headache lifts and disintegrates from my shoulders as I walk on, caring for little and everything, reaching the peace inside like dark water. Right at the far end the moon hovers low over the broadening trees and the water, a doorway to infinite peace, an intermittently rattling blind, a prize.

  • casa de correos

    A beautiful girl went into meltdown at the post office counter at ten o’clock at night and we saw her wailing, sobbing with her mouth open, pleading in liquid Spanish. Tears ran down her face and arms, she was almost screaming with some kind of unbearable grief, what could be the matter? I felt like a psychopath unable to share her intense suffering. People behind us in the queue started shouting and pelting the staff members with accusations. No, said the man at the end, no, we’re closed now. I asked the man next to me, Hablo pocolito Ingles? Do you have a tiny bit of English? Yes, he said, hesitating. “Why is that girl so upset? What happened to her? Do you know?” He said, “She have to deliver something and the staff is working extra slow, that is why she’s unhappy.” I looked the girl over, carefully. I had never seen anyone cry so unashamedly and I envied her. She had dropped her head onto the counter and long black hair fell across her shoulders and pooled on the desk. She lifted her head suddenly and with both hands spread imploringly cried out to the postal worker in her husky treble, oh you can not do this, you are ruining my life. This tableau took place in a surreal setting as at some deserted wedding reception or garden party, we were right up the back of the seventh floor of a department store where the post office is located – other floors had advertised a travel agent, health insurance office, cafe – and on three sides were palatial suites of bright gleaming garden furniture, orange and pink and purple, sleek beige couches which fold out into beds, Chinese vases, immaculate mirrors. The rest of the store had closed and we went slowly, reluctantly down the escalators past floor after floor of unlit displays of homewares, women’s clothing, children’s fashion, appliances. Outside it was high blue hour and all the creamy ancient buildings reared into the perfect endless Spanish sky like stagecraft, I have never seen anywhere more beautiful and its mix of comfortable acceptance and torrid drama is a constant astonishment to me. Last time I flew home to Berlin from Madrid I noticed Spanish passengers tend to applaud, once the plane safely touches down – something English-speaking people will do only when the weather has been perilous and the landing dicey. They did it again this time. A ragged shout of “yay!” went up when we took off. The streets are crowded with tablecloth stalls which are held by four ropes to be picked up over the shoulder if the police happen past; there are stores filled with gold-crusted crosses and confirmation cups, long white candles with gold stickers round them, baby Jesuses the size of small bears. The sacred Andalusian baths in a grotto underground which are lit only by candles and have tiled signs in every room which say Silencio, Por Favor are always crammed with people gossiping at the tops of their voices. At the end of the night we walk home very slowly, worn out by the endless stones and the glaring heat, and in the Museum of Ham and the Paradise of Ham along the zinc-topped counters men in white aprons are sweeping, very quietly, a dirty snowfall of white crumpled napkins flung down by the day’s customers as they have finished their meals, one by one.

  • the lovely man

    You know how sometimes two souls collide in a fleeting way, like two bells chiming in different trees, and you never forget that person even if you never again see them or think of them. Well, that happened to me today. A most beautiful man. I went out to buy eggs and to finally drop in and see my friend who runs an exquisite New Berlin gift shop – it is filled with lovely things – he sells liquors and vodkas brewed locally. He sells handmade cards on creamy laid paper which have perfect arrangements of tiny dried flowers on them. Each card is initialed by the lady who makes it and inside is a little sheet of paper with her wavering handwriting – she is quite old, he says, and lives in Bavaria – explaining which wildflowers she used for this card. After much hesitation among the meadows I chose one with violets and something called in German “geese flowerlings.” The lady’s name is Rotraud – that’s her first name. I imagine her an elderly maiden, Germanic, pure-hearted, fieldly.

    While we were standing chatting a woman walked in whom I had passed on my way into the snooty health food store, she has a seamed and brown face round like a nut and he showed me the cards he also sells with her photographs on them. I was still reeling. Ahead of me browsing in the health food store opposite I had seen this lovely man, baby straps wrapped around his chest, long wrinkled pants and comfy shoes and somehow the back of his head attracted me. At the egg shelves we ran against each other and looked into one another’s eyes and smiled. I like you! I like you, too. As I was walking home feeling so filled with ardour and friendship he cycled past, slow and leisurely, making faces at his baby who lay smiling in the little wooden cart pushed in front of the bicycle. Hey, I said. Hey, he said. I came home to the man whose loveliness is known to me in more compelling detail and the sound of whose voice from outside the door lifts my heart. He took a photo of me in my crowded overalls, every pocket bulging with spinach, bananas, nectarines, tea. I put some water on to boil the eggs whilst telling him all about it. We gloated over the four different kinds of amazing German breadrolls I had chosen and their funny names. My favourite breadroll name is ‘Schrippen,’ a kind of ordinary light white bun. I bought potato rolls, farmer’s rolls, dinkel rolls and poppy and sesame fruit rolls, lifting each one out of its hutch with the long-handled scissor provided there for just that purpose.

  • a beauty

    When I woke up I remembered the beautiful girl who was sitting outside a coffee booth by the river yesterday. She got out her phone and scrolled, she was luminous like a black pearl. When we were leaving I went up to her and said, Excuse me. Do you speak English. Yes, she said, in American. I always prefer to give compliments on the way out, to avoid creating half an hour of shared embarrassment where they have to keep smiling at you for thank you, or avoid looking your way. “You’re so beautiful,” I told her, “it makes me happy to see you. Beautiful, classy face. Bless you.”

    She looked shy and pleased and said Thanks, very soft. All along the river path people were pushing their bicycles, sitting in the sun on benches, tramping with their large and small dogs. I guess everyone is beautiful when you look closely but some people wear it like a treasure they are trapped inside of, which casts its light on everyone they pass.

  • don’t you feel like reading books any more?

    I was in a bookshop yesterday with my friend just arrived from Copenhagen. It is around the corner from the bookshop where he and I first met. We met because he was standing gazing at the books in the English-speaking section when I visited to see how the ones I’d left were doing, and I went up to him and said, You should buy this one! I wrote it! And he did and then later I visited him at his own bookshop near the cold Danish lakes which has one wall of records and two walls of books and a tiny espresso machine.

    The bookshop yesterday has a cafe attached, it’s built under a railway line in a series of old-fashioned orange brick arches and you can hear trains screaming overhead while you drink your coffee. Adjacent to the cafe part are the shelves of books in two rooms, and the two sections of literature reach each other by means of a narrow passage, all too brief, papered entirely with the titles published by a German house which uses bold whole colours. So you walk into a rainbow of literature: I catch my breath. On the other side I peeled off to go visit poetry and my friend went visiting novels. The man who staffs the back section (English and French, philosophy, poetry) came sailing through from the just-closed cafe holding a small plate high on one hand. A fork stuck out of it, upright like a sail. Hard on his heels were two sad-eyed beagle-like dogs who weren’t beagles, who gathered themselves at his feet as he reached the stool and gazed imploringly at the underside of his plate. “Two very firm friends!” I remarked. “With clearly no agenda whatsoever.” “Tcha,” he said, spearing a wedge of cake. “Or maybe two very firm friends of the strawberry cake.”

    I began turning over the hardcover books, looking to see how people had solved the design problem I am wrestling with: how do you answer, on the back cover, the one powerful almost abstract image on the front? Do you just have a plain colour? If you put another photo, does it end up looking 90s, like a boulevard magazine? The combination, I find, of ambitious ideas of beauty with design inexperience makes independent publishing hard. My friend showed me a novel marked The greatest book you’ve never read. Neither of us had read it, either. He was looking for WG Sebald. “Have you read Proust?” “Oh, yes. But I can’t remember any of it. It took me months.”

    As he turned away I remembered what my novelist friend had said, at the time: You should put that on your gravestone. “She read Proust.” The man on the stool dropped two chunks of cake for his patient friends. I thought how the poetry section was in the dimmest corner but a good slice of strawberry cake brings dogs to your heels. I turned back to the hardcovers, none the wiser, nonetheless. Another book lover walked in, an older man in a beautiful wool coat. One of the dogs had climbed into the leather armchair at the entrance to my rainbow and was sitting there looking rather tired and sad. “Na?” he said, stooping to greet her. ‘Na’ is hard to translate but means, I think, approximately: so? how are you, person whom I feel attached to and fond of, or whom I like on sight. The dog gazed back at him plaintively. Clearly he had brought no strawberry cake. He tickled her under her chin. “Und?” he asked her. “Hast du keine Lust mehr, Bücher zu lesen?” Don’t you feel like reading books anymore? How Germans speak to dogs – courteously, seriously, with familiarity – makes me truly love them.

    You’ll see some raddled punker and some lady in expensive trainers, their two dogs tangle in a sniffing wreath along the river path and they both stand there smiling tolerantly, as if to say: Tcha…. That’s just the way dogs are. I had seen this that same morning, in a seamier part of town. In other news, we saw an otter swimming along the canal, and followed it for half a mile under the trees. Periodically it dived, making a ring of bright water and then emerging further along up the bank. Turns out otters swim at about a walking pace. In all my life I’ve never seen one before, I’d have taken it for a beaver except that I asked a man standing with his arms folded and he told me, doubtlessly, “That – is an otter.” Another man in his blue kayak was sorting things on the bank, readying himself for a sunny day’s rowing. On the other side two trumpeters stood side by side and played some mournful tune into the quiet water’s ears.

  • hanging from lace

    Walking home I saw a man clinging to the upper part of a set of ornate window bars, gazing intently upward. At first I thought he was doing parkour. Then I wondered was he maybe housebreaking, aiming to climb onto the balcony on the first floor. Then I saw four hands reaching from within, scooping motions, like some kind of performance dance piece. He was repairing the long window, which had stuck, with two helpers crouched on the turning staircase inside, one of them higher, one lower. Coming round the corner into the square where the man with his telescope busks for the stars and I learned the moons of Jupiter in Spanish (Io… Ganymede… Callisto…) there was as usual a clot of thirty teenagers just hanging round together, chattering and laughing. I had earlier seen a hundred people in a large circle, watching a series of fantastic show-offs demonstrate their circus skills with a soccer ball. Other people sat more singly or in smaller groups having divided their tribe from the everyone-who’s-like-me mêlée, having rather perhaps pain and disappointingly discovered those who are most like me and can tolerate all of me number a handful at very utter best. A family sat perched and hunched on two concrete bollards, one of the girls scrolling her phone disconsolately. I discovered the identity, kind of, of cardboard collection man, whom I’d photographed out of the window of a genial Thai restaurant upstairs a week back: towing his ship of folded boxes stowed in boxes he appeared from the dense shopping strip, and swept his cardboard pirate ship into the shadow alcoves of the huge Theater Real, the royal opera, where a companion greeted him and he went back to a large bag at the glass doors and fetched himself something of his own. Around town you can see the possessions and the bedding of homeless people stashed in between the close-spaced columns of the enormous quiet churches which are frantic with gold inside; you can see the grubbied slabs of cardboard leaning up under the bridge all ready to make bedding for another night. Yesterday I came off Plaza Mayor which is the centrepoint of Spain and a long row of people were sleeping down the medieval alleyway, some of them in small palaces of one large cardboard carton telescoped into another; a man who was concealed in one of these pushed back the lid and sat up, startlingly, gazing at the afternoon like Count Dracula.

  • love in public

    I saw two girls, two women, long-haired and standing round bags, close together on the subway and talking American. The train jolted round a corner and the girl nearer me fell against her lover as if accidentally, snatching a kiss as she fell. The lover was displeased, detached herself, stood gazing out at the striped blackness underground. I supposed that the kisser maybe felt, hey we are so far from home, we are safe here, and nobody knows us. I supposed the kissee felt, now: none of that, people are looking, we’re in public, we’ve got to lock it down.

    I saw two men, two boys, in their middle-age running a bubble stall from a bucket on the crowded square. It is Saturday night and everybody is out. The incredible din. The shrieks and the rumble. A high bus goes past with no lid on its upper storey, crammed with tourists taking pictures who crane as their bus turns a corner then turn their backs, gazing ahead as though now none of this any more even exists for them. The bubble venders are busking, they have two long poles joined by a slack rope and a slightly shorter string, so that when they have dipped their poles and pulled them out and separate them slightly, one string pulls tight and the bubble forms and drifts up into the spangling dark. They must have newly learned this skill and are not very good at it. In between they sneak gasps off each other’s cigarette and the younger one resumes an endless phone call that has now been going for half an hour. I saw one family after another stop to take advantage of the play, their little children grasping after the bubbles to make them sprinkle into rain and the two men gallantly entertaining, letting each child take a turn on the poles, not even screwing up their faces when one after another the families left again, throwing no coins in their yellow hat.

    I saw three girls in their teens chase a boy clear across the square and they were shouting at him, something, all of them laughing, the boy bolted over and collapsed at my feet as the three of them pelted on him and tore him down. They had him there on the stones screaming for mercy, his laugh interrupting him: he asked me for help in Spanish but I said, No, indeed, in English: You probably deserve it, I am going to sit here and take your picture. And I did and the old man in green on the table behind met my eye and we both smiled, in our different languages, a rueful smile. I saw Spring arrive, suddenly it seems across the span of only three or four days; all the delicate trees along the walkways are blooming and shimmering in the light.

  • a fortunate wander

    Today a very fortunate wander took me into a place I adored: several places and all of them new. I couldn’t handle the surly manner and derisory service, the lack of smiles from the waiters who work year in, year out with tourists treating their town like a fun park, nor my fellow tourists themselves, not even the six English ladies made up like drag queens with giant, winged eyebrows painted on their pink foreheads who got drunk at the next table on Friday afternoon and asked the man, Is the chicken salad thigh or breast meat? And then when he didn’t understand, their ringleader (biggest brows) insisted, Breast! You know? Breast? putting her cupped hands under her own mammoth bust and jiggling herself at him invitingly. They made me laugh and they made him laugh but also, enough is enough. I went walking and kept walking, without looking at the map, just following whatever alleyway or lane seemed inviting and counting the geraniums in people’s windows.

    Down a steep hill I rounded a corner into this long, elliptical square – a rhomboid square – just filled up with Indian restaurants. There was a grocer’s selling plantains and yams and cheap calling cards, and on the other side where the pavement swung out from the houses maybe ten or a dozen restaurants ran down the hill. About a hundred tables were crowded with afternoon revellers. I found a seat under a giant umbrella and read from the cheap, fantastic menu. All around me people were eating and chatting, it felt like a very laid-back party. I put my hand round my jarra of beer and a terrific commotion struck from uphill, drummers, dancers, forty or fifty lanky African men came bursting slowly out of the narrow road between the houses and they had skin drums, shakers, all kinds of noise makers and were dancing. Really dancing. They tumbled down the hill gradually like an intricacy of shells washed in the surf. Round the hems of this raggedy band half a dozen fellows carried pots and hats, which they danced among the tables to offer deftly round. People remonstrated, laughed, threw in coins. They were irresistible. When I had done eating I got up from my chequered table cloth and followed downhill the shaggy brown dog who was carrying a whole soccer ball in his mouth. The ball was saggy and deflated but he clearly loved it. At the bottom of the road where it met the next street was another plaza, ramshackle and traffic-stained, where dozens of people lounged on bollards and under trees, many of them African. And as I was coming up again towards, I thought, the part of the old town I know I found a little bookshop open all day until midnight, in which quiet prevailed and concentration reigned so much that when people came in from the street they instinctively lowered their voices. It was like the opposite of the meat cave I had found on the shopping street, Paraíso de Jamon: it was a paradise of non-ham. Three people in alcoves and under bookshelves were writing. They serve coffee and the windows are encrusted with flyers. I sank down by the cardboard carton of old vinyl and took out my notebook and my pen. People turned pages and moved very little. The guy serving sat behind his computer peacefully reading all afternoon. We were there for hours.

  • hungry in Spain

    I saw three Spanish boys doing parkour in the gardens. I have run out of money and am hungry: it’s temporary. To a Spaniard gardens means a large, bare, gravelled expanse with formally clipped hedges and dark, clotting trees. The smell of the cyprus is familiar from home. I sat on a bench under the trees and watched these boys for half an hour. They were trying to climb a sheer twelve-foot wall using their speed and hands and concentration and willpower. To my right a couple in puffer jackets were smoking some excellent weed. I sat watching the three boys in their baggy grey pants intently concentrating, doing it for themselves, and was overcome with dark sexual longing. I adored them. They went at it over and over, always exactly the same, one of them actually scaled the wall and stood on top clutching the railing with both hands before he dropped lightly back to earth like an angel, I thought: were it not for tree-planting and feeding the hungry I think this would be the noblest pursuit a young man can throw himself into, in this messed-up, traffic-scarred, urbanised world.

    A child of four or five threw his teddy up in the air again and again for his mother to catch and hurl back to him. His teddy-loving days, I thought, are numbered, and not high. Another couple hid inside the boy’s parka hood and with intense delicacy grazed on each other’s faces. I saw a man cycle past guiding with one hand the back of his child’s tiny bicycle, he had a large paper butterfly she had hand-painted with sparkles attached to his backpack and flapping. Spanish girls with their luscious long hair. On every corner a hairdresser, a pharmacy. The underground train which is livid with voices laughing, chatting, like a big, relaxed club. The five elders sitting side by side, four men and one lady, formally attired and letting the last drops of sunlight fall on them along the lip of a large statue, in granite, of some soldier or some prince.