Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: Spain

  • this land is our land

    Was quite excited to work out last night by decoding the allergies notice in a Korean BBQ restaurant (‘alergia’) which began ‘en caso de…’ – ‘in case of…’ – that ‘casa’, house, must mean your case. It’s your shell. And mi casa es su casa. My case is your case, we all breathe the same air, death and the roiling adventure of this life will inflict us all.

    On the way home we passed again the man whose giant telescope, set up in the square outside the Teatro Real, has shown me on previous visits Jupiter, and her moons, and – unbelievably – Saturn, looking like a chalk sketch much stouter and smaller than I had always pictured Saturn. He busks with it. Drags it down there, I can only suppose, on the back of a small truck and sets it up pointed at whichever body in the heavens is tonight most significant, then he stands artlessly waiting, perhaps not polishing the lens but minutely adjusting the sights after each visit, inviting all and sundry to take a look through his machinery at the distant miracles now shedding some light on us – too little light, and too late. We didn’t stop to look through the lens again but my companion pointed out the joy on the man’s face, the way when someone steps up onto his wooden footstool to apply their eye to the eyepiece stooping to reach it he himself bends in, unconsciously it seems, and eagerly, as though he is sharing their experience and imagining their wonder. The first time I saw Jupiter in a long line of moons I was almost crying. Now every time the man and I wave to one another, satisfaction on our faces, a strange friendship. Mi luna es su luna, inevitably.

  • sugar no sugar

    Pleased as Punch, in that resinous phrase, that in my first days in Spain I worked out how to say, spelling notwithstanding, “Cafe descafinado con leche, por favor – cafe machinata – muy calliente, y con miele.” This is my strenous coffee order, what Melbourne baristas sneeringly call “the why bother” – in order to convey ‘honey’ I first had to mime little fluttering motions with my elbows trapped by my sides, saying repeatedly ‘azucar, non azucar’ (sugar, not sugar)… When I finally spotted a squeezer of honey on the shelf and pointed to it, the assembled staff turned to each other and started mimicking my mime, going, “Ahhhh, *miele*…”

    I love languages but know none apart from German, decayed Bahasa Indonesia, and some shreds of truly pathetic French. But Spanish is glorious. I learned yesterday from some friends who run a bookshop that ‘vacuum cleaner’ is, in English translation, ‘the aspirator’ – that which inhales everything. But let’s not get too carried away – to use that other, far less celebratory phrase: as far as I’m concerned, Nature abhors a vacuum. And I’m with Nature.

  • jazz bar, balconies, bikers, busker, moth, Madrid

    The moth which landed in the glossy black curls of a woman sitting on the Metro so lightly and delicately without her noticing, and which spread its dun linen wings like opera skirts to reveal the sheer, white gauze underneath. The two boys who jumped on and played joyously, their guitars facing belly to belly. The long, arching trees filling curving streets with greenery and palpably articulating the breeze into soft whistles and dim spirit presences, into a welcoming and retired song, almost a language. The man and woman whose voices caught my attention from above and whose conversation diagonally across from his first floor balcony to hers on the third seemed frank and gossipy, reflective, unhurried. The jazz bar with windows open right onto the street and spilling glorious plants, which served gin and tonic in round-bellied goblets with surprisingly sweet, chewy, nutlike juniper berries bobbing against the cubes. The lovely dog opposite, above the antiquarian bookshop, who stands on the balcony and gazes up and down the street with such a mournfully intent expression; the man playing a baby grand under a white cloth in his open window and gesturing to his colleague, playing violin, and the crowd of silent witnesses standing with their phones and faces raised on the curving road underneath. The security guard reading a volume of poetry on the underground, so intent he almost missed his stop. The three tiny ladies chatting loudly and volubly on the train who parted with light, smacking kisses at Nuevos Ministerios. The BMX bikers who practice outside the opera house every day, every day, waiting their turn and daring each concrete bench and set of steps to rout them like ballet dancers swimming far out to sea. The low doorways and Metro tunnels against which my sweetheart has to watch his head. The expressiveness of public life with a girl flying into a passion of sobs at the post office counter, a woman crying openly as she was talking on her phone walking through a crowded restaurant district at lunch time. The yoghurts brewed in little glass pots desde 1992 which we top with strawberries, blueberries, bananas; the milk section of the supermarket which is on shelves unrefrigerated because everybody likes powerfully adulterated longlife milk yet luscious, unpasteurised, handmade yoghurt. The quiet, hot siesta hours when shops are barred and windows shuttered and the Metro crammed to the gills. The people who gaze up so curiously, so unjudgingly, at me and my two metre tall lover as we bow our heads to enter the train. The busker in orange top hat who tied his dog to the railings and turned aside into a shop window to tune his guitar. The little backstreet shops which build guitars and the man with his cardboard box desk on the shopping street who carves crosses out of two sticks and binds them together to sell, one after another, he was here at Easter and he is still here now, filling the paving creases with whittled shavings as though there can never be enough crosses in the world and he must fill the lack.

  • 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.

  • Olé au lait

    When I travel I am never alone because always there is the companionship of my shyness. This sometimes feels like a long shadow I drag over things (‘allo, scuse us, thank you, pardon me’) and sometimes like a large soft yielding mass I work my way through to reach people, to reach the surface: the world, spiky and free. Cities are terrorising for a shy person. At the same time I fall into this kind of trance of exploration and love where I can spend a whole day feeling my way up hills and round corners and scurrying joyously from one shadowed alcove to the next, under trees feeling the spent light curl up inside itself and sleep on its own downy belly, like so many dormice, striking out into the sunlight and forcing myself – by dint of a good hard short talking-to, you can do it c’mon just do it, to stride across the diagonal length of the largest square in Spain for example where hundreds of people in throngs stand about pointing their implements at the view (stonemasonry, cafes rooved with white umbrellas, and the freemasonry of each other). Most mornings it takes some courage to leave the sanctuary of my room. I walk into the breakfast bar. People in Germany and Spain seem to greet each other in such situations, in Australia that would be only me. I gather my comestibles: yoghurt, tea, fruit. I put the room key in my pocket and step out into the day.

    In Madrid the days are blue and whole. The sky runs freely with very often no clouds of vapour dissolved in it. From the vantage point of the ancient city you can see mountains, towns, all of Spain. Coming on this vista unexpectedly down a narrow alleyway between the little high houses I catch my breath and start to cry. It’s wonderful, it’s beautiful, it’s reached through an endless twisting byway: like the past.

    On my second day I fell into a little bar and cafe called the Cafe Olé. As well as cafe au lait they serve spirits, wines, beers, and a raft of different kinds of open-faced sandwiches including one variety loaded with solid chunks of solid Spanish omelette, tortilla. It’s almost Germanic, that one: potatoes on bread. The lady who cooks brings out tray after tray and people wander in out of the sunlight and order, familiarly, stand there and eat. I discovered the sweetest, lightest pastry on earth. I went back another day and had it again: the coffee and the pastry cost two euros. The third time I ate it I discovered it is made from a transverse slice of baguette soaked in egg and milk, what on an English menu we would call French toast: a babyish kind of comfort food with just the right amount of sugar through it. The bread dissolves into light, fruity custard. They serve it with knife and fork. I was so happy there, eating my torrija and soaking up the atmosphere like bread sucks milk, the soft feeling of being included.

    Later in my long visit I found other places where I felt at home. The city itself felt welcoming, ancient, its splendour laid open and well-worn. Finding oneself tripping down a turning side street with some enticing view hovering at its end, finding oneself saying out loud without really intending to, “I just – feel – so happy here!” You know the affinity with places. I noticed the needling cypress trees and their green dark clots; the way they seem to sift the wind and sough it into a cradle song that reminds me of islands, distant and far-offshore islands, and afternoons spent on my own as I wandered the hillsides of my grandfather’s old farm and laid my face reverently, familiarly on the warm stones with their mottled discolouring like an old lace badly stored, greenish purplish blueish white grey colonies. And mosses, the velvet of ancient things and my favourite plant. It all feels so personal. Like the fold-down table off the back of a stranger’s seat on the airplane I seem to have been boarding and reboarding every month or two since I was a baby. That private space unseen in the public glass, the back of the mirror, inside of the knee. The pinkish smell of my own fingertips. The plants that grow in between stones.

    A lady who runs a shop in a large, chill, drafty barn halfway up a steep hill with an unfamiliar flag hung out the front told me, in labouring English far better than my almost-nothing Spanish – español silencio, the Spanish of silence – these things are from Malawi and she visits every year, they are running their own school in this community and the school children and their families make these products – apart from those over there (her white arm waving, a hanger of bead necklaces and assorted things), “Those are from French.” “French?” I said, “so, a colony?” Yes, she said, “things of my French.” Looking closer I could see of course she meant second-hand, these were things friends had donated: a handbag with the tag still on, an ornate belt, a necklace of shells. “This,” she said, “I make myself. In my terraza,” the courtyard of her home. It was a cake of clay soap which she wrapped for me in newspaper, explaining, “Is very good for the soft sky.” For the sky. “My sky,” she showed me, stroking the belly of her forearm invitingly, “very soft, very soft.”

    The smell of Malawi is like the smell of Java where I grew into my childhood and where I have never been back. The Java that I long for doesn’t exist anymore, the outer islands have been logged, the mountains hollowed for high rise and bridges, everything ruined and mined. We won’t talk about that. I went back afterwards to the Cafe Olé and sat there gazing and writing and that is where I gradually came to terms with the place and its strangeness and my strange attraction to it; the sense of knowing and belonging that I also found in old Lissabon, with its needled cypress trees, its castled mountain tops; its alleyways, its tiny, remote, yet intimate vistas. I gave the bar tender my careful request in Spanish, marshalling my few dozen words: “por favor,” “cafe machinata,” “decafinado,” “miel.” To order a pastry I could only say, pan bread and azúcar sugar: sweet bread por favor. All I can do in Spanish is eat. “Where are you from?” he asked. “Australia.” “Ah,” he said. “When somebody come in… who is friendly… open-minded, like you: open heart: they are always Australia. Or… Irish.” I smiled at my hands. He said, shrugging, “To us… you look English.”

    In a flurry of Spanish he turned to the older man sitting at the bar, refilling his glass of some creamy liqueur. “Something, something, Australian,” he said and I tried hard to eavesdrop. The one or two words one gleans in a spume of an almost entirely new foreign tongue feel like shells vouchsafed by the sea: there is so much more, beauty, so colourful and alive, in the rolling deeps under this enveloping foam. The bar guy pointed at me, explaining something. They both nodded, their gazes resting on me as I ate. “Cafe delicioso,” I ventured, and he smiled: all warmth, no malice, free.

    We sat in silence in the quiet cafe, which is dim and all clad in dark wood. Dusty things stand on the higher shelves above the rows of glinting liqueurs. Right up top is a wooden matador, proudly erect in his faded scarlet togs and with one hand rearing up almost to the yellowed ceiling. We sit like birds under the shelter of his masculine wings. The tomatoes on the sandwiches are very red, no white in them, their seeds a dark greenish orange and filling the gleaming segments like jam. I stroke the soft sky on my arms. A beautiful woman comes in, glamour clinging to her like light from the street. She reminds me of Jennifer Lopez, only older. Casting off her garments and bags she sits down on the stool next to mine. After a long long time I put my hand on her forearm like a moth. “Bella,” I tell her, probably in Italian: “muy bella.” I am? she asks, pressing her hand to her breastbone. “Si.” And she says, something something, your eyes: showing me by opening her own very wide and indicating me from one eye across to another. Very… something, much something else. I would love to know what the beautiful Spanish lady said about my eyes. But I can’t understand and say thank you, and we lapse into silence, the two men also, the bullfighter magnificent and motionless above us standing guard over the ages: he is holding up the ceiling, roof, the whole soft sky with only one hand and the cargo carved modestly in front of his matador pantaloons seems to my shy glance so imposing from below it is as though we are all drinking coffee in the shelter of its fruitful shade.

  • 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.

  • desperate for literature

    At ten o’clock at night I went out walking round the curve of the road under bright green trees lit from the lamps, everything beautiful, hot and radiant. A bookshop was open, or so I thought. When I pushed on the door two guys came running out from the rush-bottomed chairs where they’d been chatting. “Oh, sorry,” I said, “you look as if you’ve just closed, actually.” “No, no, come in, come in.” The books were in English down one wall and Spanish on the other, stacked on shelves which started out polished and neat and then wound up built from raw old wood and bricks. A beautiful woman came out from some back room and told me, “The books up the back are just as good as the books up the front here, keep looking.” They sat down and continued their chat. “What was the name of the girl in To Kill a Mockingbird? Cass?” “Was it Cass?”

    I said, “I know people in Hollywood have named babies after her, so if we could just think of the right baby…” “Scout!” said the man with the beard who had Google in his hand. We talked for a moment about the new novel and how there is some concern Harper Lee may have been… persuaded into finally publishing it. “It’s about Scout’s life as an adult,” said the other guy, an American. A small crowd of people came in at the narrow front door. One said, I think, this reminded him of Shakespeare and Co in Paris, and the English man said pointing to his partner, whose name was Charlotte, “That’s where we worked! Up until three days ago!” Two hours earlier he and Charlotte had taken over this tiny store, which is called Desperate Literature, from their American friend, whose name is Cory. “So we’ve met!” said Charlotte, a gorgeous woman who acts as though being beautiful gives her no special status. The little man who had mentioned Shakespeare and Co gave a cry. “We’ve met! So you’ve patted my book!” “I’ve patted your book!” she said. “Wait – what book was it.” Without hesitation he named the book everybody buys when they visit Shakespeare and Co in Paris. “The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas.” “That was you!” she cried. I was out the back laughing. The timing was so wonderful, the sense of willing group improvisation that is true conversation, as at the loveliest dinner parties. Charlotte was jubilant that they’d sold a copy of Wisława Szymborska (to me) on their first night and her partner Terry introduced himself and told me, as he had told the Paris customers, “We are having a big party here on Thursday night, come by.” He looked around the tiny, crowded rooms. “Well – a little party.”

     

  • Spanish nights

    Oh, Spain! Is so filled with amazing events! Walking home just now I saw a man busking with his telescope. It was pointed up towards the moon, a peach lying in dark glossy syrup, and his hand-lettered sign and the beast had attracted a queue of people eager to see the sky up close. His telescope was as big as three people bound together for the stake, which is what might have happened to a busker with a telescope four hundred years ago in this or most countries.

    On my way out as the blue hour deepened I ran across an angry demonstration. With huge signs they marched until they came face to face with police, standing legs planted apart in their sexy motorcycle boots and cavalier pants. The anger seemed to dissolve and the two groups faced each other chattering and laughing. I couldn’t make out the signs, I asked a hipster who is always begging with his brass Tibetan bowl, “Hablo pocolito Ingles?” Do you have a little English? Oh yes, he said, and launched into an explanation in Spanish. I gathered that the protestors were anti-austerity, “like Greece.” He said something something about the poor. At least that’s how it sounded to me. I thanked him profusely, the first homeless hipster beggar I have ever met, and hurried on to the bookshop cafe open til midnight which is where I plan to spend the rest of my visit if not my life. I found it yesterday and spent an hour in there, resolving to come back with my laptop. So hushed and filled with concentration is the atmosphere that people entering the shop instinctively begin to whisper to each other. That is, nirvana.

    Leading up to Palm Sunday people were selling sprigs of rosemary and olive branches in the streets. In front of churches you could buy yellow palm leaves woven into fantastical shapes like candelabras and I wish I had. Then on Sunday I got caught up in a huge motionless crowd and by dint of being 18 inches taller than everybody else could see the parade, standing waiting, women in black lace mantillas and impeccable heels, men wearing tall conical hats that to me shrieked Ku Klux Klan but I suppose they have appropriated, as nothing else they represent is ever original. At the front was a large float the size of a four wheel drive, higher and taller, and banked up with candles and scarlet rose petals. I walked on and later that night found another, similar procession, this one carrying a bier for the Virgin Mary, whose velvet train embroidered in gold dropped behind her so far it needed four people to carry it.

    I saw a man dressed as a Super Mario Brother with his blue foam head off, sitting gazing at one of the colourful balloons he sells, in a trance. I saw two giant Bart Simpsons with their heads off, feeding pigeons from a park bench and apparently unable to understand why I was finding them so delightful. I saw an immaculate lady all in tan with leather gloves lying back on a bench in the middle of a crowded square, her eyes closed to worship Sun. I saw a man crouched on a square of cardboard carving crosses from two twigs, his wares spread out in front of him. He was talking to a little girl. I saw two mounted police officers on their horses scrolling their phones. They were the centre of a circle of other phones as everybody stopped to take pictures. I saw the Museum of Ham that has whole hocks hung from the ceilings dense as balloons at a child’s birthday do. Another place called Paradise of Ham sells thin shavings of Iberian ham from pigs fed on acorns that costs 95 Euros a kilo. I saw a woman dressed as a bride hold out her skirts and curtsey, she too was busking, perhaps after the wedding had gone off. And in the midst of all this I saw a Swiss family eating an expensive dinner, their table facing into the milling night time street, and the parents drearily cheered each other in champagne as their girls, perhaps 14 and 9, sat slumped over their phones reaching for one potato chip after another and oblivious to all the glory that passes over us every moment.

  • 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.