When we left Madrid after our first ten days in Spain, the sky was completely ordinary. Could have been the Florida sky, if you were to pour a dollop of milk into the latter, to get just a paler shade of blue. I remember looking at it, wondering if it would rain. It didn’t. The morning was awash with sunlight when we stepped into the streets we had come to love completely in only ten days: streets that are ancient, walkable, peopled, and suffused with the reckless zephyrs of cigarette smoke.
We exchanged warm farewells with the concierge of Apartamentos Juan Bravo, and promised to return the following year. Then we hailed a cab and asked to be taken to the Puerta de Atocha train station, where we hitched a high speed train that took us from Madrid to Barcelona in only two hours and half. Just like that, Madrid was gone, and suddenly, there was the Mediterranean sea.
Okay, not true. It didn’t happen just like that. Six hundred and twenty five kilometers had to unravel outside our train window, and before falling asleep, I actually paid attention to the landscape, as best as I could with my lazy eyes. We passed fields full of trees that were planted in perfect symmetry amid crisp, nude-colored roads, and hills that blazed with haphazardly blooming, fiery red and goldenrod flowers. I have zero botanical knowledge and cannot tell you what they were. I mean, the trees or the flowers. Lemon trees and geraniums?
“Those are olive trees,” I heard Papi say to me. At that very moment my terrible eyes were flaunting all their warped, double-sighted glory and all I saw was a green blur. But remember, we were on a high-speed train. No use in telling my eyes to relax at that particular moment, no point in mumbling my usual, Stop trying to see everything twice, my eyes!
Michael told me that the further south you go in Spain, the dryer it gets. “It’s almost like being in Africa, “Michael said, “in the south of Spain.” But we were headed north. I fell asleep with my Fleur cap over my face, and when I woke up hours later, we were in Lleida, which meant that we were next to Zaragoza. The train station at Lleida was announced as Lleida Pyreneius. The billboards at the train station had changed from Spanish to Catalan. Suddenly, I could no longer read them, and when Michael asked me what they said, and I could not answer, we realized we had reached Catalonia.
It is wonderful to be in a place far away from home that speaks a language you don’t. Not just because it’s mysterious, but because nothing is more human than to long for bygone possibilities. To think, This brain could have soaked up French in infancy, but it didn’t; it was exposed only to Spanish at the time… what would my life be like if I had grown up on another continent?… Hmm, I could have learned how to play an instrument…
I am not talking about regrets. I am talking about debunking that silly, overquoted cliché that has come to decorate a million tote bags, magnets, and coffee mugs, “It’s never too late to be what you might have been.” By the way, George Eliot never said this. Really.
We should know that George Eliot never said these words because, well, the quote is bullshit. If you consider Eliot’s own life and work, it becomes dubious that she would voice such a sentiment, since, in my husband’s own words, “her life and work were constantly measured against all the things she would never be allowed to become.” George Eliot wrote under a male pseudonym, not just because she was a woman, but also to dispel the accusations of prostitution leveled against her on account of her adulterous relationship with George Henry Lewes. George Eliot was never free to “be what she could have been.”
And well, neither are we. The words George Eliot never uttered are, quite simply, dumb. Too often, it is too late to be what you might have been. That’s what makes life fleeting, finite, and precious. The choices we make in life narrow down our possibilities. This is good. It is the very narrowing down of possibilities that makes us deepen our sense of ourselves as mortal creatures with a bounded destiny. That sense of mortality, in turn, gives us the impetus to do more… whatever “more” might mean to us right now. Instead of deluding ourselves with the jejune aphorism, “I can do anything if I just set my mind to it!” we might mentor ourselves with a humbler thought, such as, “I’m far too late to be a ballerina, but definitely not too late to become a runner.” Or, “Even with my crappy, crossed eyes, I can still learn about Francisco de Goya!” Yes. We can always learn new things. That’s the fixed and glorious nature our existence.
In the train to Barcelona, I found myself longing to learn Catalan. It seems akin to Spanish at first glance, but alas, it is not. A Spanish speaker won’t infer the meanings of Catalan phrases the way he or she might infer those of Italian. Catalan, like Spanish and Italian, is a romance language. However, Spanish is much closer to Italian than to Catalan, and this summer, that became ruefully apparent to me.
There was a couple on the train who was drinking beer to pass the time. They were the sweetest people. Happy couple with backpacks. A blonde woman and a redhead man, both middle-aged, both sunkissed. We exchanged a few pleasantries because we almost stole their train seats (who knew that train seats were assigned?) and we noticed each of them was carrying an entire six pack of beer in one hand. Now why we didn’t we think of that!, I wanted to say, but in truth, I knew why. I was avoiding motion sickness and a migraine. Papi was “eating wisely,” before noon because our days in Europe never ended wisely, if wisely meant refraining from sitting in yet another terrace and drinking more Estrella under the stars. Death by Spanish beer!
By the time our train reached Barcelona, the Mediterranean Sea had unfurled itself smoothly across the horizon. No more mountains. Michael and I were starving, underslept, and eager to meet our Barcelona hostess. We took a cab to the city, and then began our Airbnb adventure.
As it turns out, we had the wrong address. Our hopes of meeting Maria at five o’clock were thwarted by a one-digit building number!
“Are you sure this is the right place?” I asked my husband, after we’d rung the doorbell for several minutes and attempted to communicate with the neighborhood people, who really didn’t know how to help.
“Maria? Owner of that house? Yes, I know her, she’ll be here soon,” said the beautiful Muslim lady in the nearby bakery. I know now that she was trying to be helpful but also know that she had no way of knowing where Maria was, or whether or not Maria would be arriving soon. I love this quality in Spanish people. How they think that trying to help you, or at least give you hope, is sometimes more important than the truth.
I won’t bore my readers with technicalities. Suffice it to say that our dear Maria was waiting for us in the right apartment at the right time, while we rang the doorbell at the wrong place. I had begun to entertain thoughts of an Airbnb scam… or a much worse type of scam… a God knows what will happen to us now! type of scam. Forgive me if I am from El Salvador, a war-ravaged country where, if you get lost in the wrong neighborhood, you truly might not come out alive.
“That’s it! We’re getting a hotel!” I kept telling Papi. We had no phones and no way of contacting our host. But we suddenly had the common sense to find an internet cafe and email her, and when she emailed us back that she was waiting, still waiting for us… we discovered the mistake in the address, and were finally able to find each other.
And that was how our Barcelona days began.
I wrote in my previous entry about Maria’s place and how beautiful it was, so I won’t repeat those details now. It was a pleasant place to stay in, but it was not half as pleasant as our warm hearted hostess. We spent time with Maria on our first and last nights in Barcelona. Our our very last night, she graciously guided us to La Paradeta, a seafood joint where the ingredients were truly fresh.
When I say truly fresh, I mean truly fresh. In this restaurant, you can pick out your own lobster while it’s still alive and crawling crabbily over ice. It was the squid we were really drawn to, however. We had so many different types that I don’t even remember the names. We drank a bubbly white wine, which Papi and I never do. It was Maria’s choice, and it was delicious.
We waited half an hour to get into La Paradeta, and were finally seated at a table across from a mural of a lady standing behind a colorful seafood counter. The letter “d” in the word “Paradeta” was symbolized by a rust-colored shrimp. “At one time, all of the restaurants in Barcelona were decorated with beautiful murals,” Maria said to us.
The place was bustling. We saw lots of man buns and hipsters. The young couple at the table next to us asked us to take their picture. We surmised that they might be on their honeymoon. Papi sat beside me, and Maria sat across from us in one of my favorite hoodies, a very soft, heather gray sweatshirt with a cute American Flag heart on the chest. (I had run upstairs before leaving the house to grab sweaters when we’d realized the evening would be chilly).
The night of La Paradeta was our best evening in Barcelona. Partly because of the food, and primarily because of the company.
It is when you are leaving a place that you most realize why you have to come back to it. On our way home from La Paradeta, we passed La Plaza del Ayuntamiento (City Hall). And a little further down, we passed an enchanting little plaza with streetlights that were as round and as lovely as full little moons, and it was here that Michael stopped, turned, and exclaimed, “Wait, wait. This is how I remember Las Ramblas…”
They say Barcelona “has become soooo beautiful since the 1992 Olympic Games.” I say that I wish I had seen Barcelona the way Michael saw it in 1972. Before the tidal wave of tourism and the rowdy bonfires and broken glass scattered upon the beaches. When the loveliness was in the extraordinary architecture. Those curlicued buildings that have been built and rebuilt over and over, each time to the same perfection.
I didn’t think I would get close to two thousand words without writing about our “middle days” in Barcelona. But I have, so I will stop writing here, and start my next entry in media res.
06/27/18
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