2 – City Sights and Smells
The
odour of acrid smoke from roasting chestnuts always reminds me of my
early days in the city. I noticed them immediately, because it seemed
far too early in the year for chestnuts, something I associated with
Christmas in England. Summer was hardly over when my wife and I
arrived in Spain. Roasting chestnuts, and fresh espresso coffee and
the smoke from rough dark tobacco, the other city smells in Spain.
A wave
of heat hit us as we stepped out of the plane into the open air, even
though it was an autumn evening and the sun was only just sinking
down below the distant mountains, which were silhouetted against the
pink sky behind a row of palm trees across the runway. We negotiated
the rickety aluminium steps on wheels which led down to the
articulated airport bus, waiting to take us to the long, low terminal
building – a pretty basic-looking one – which was just visible in
the fading light. Now the airport has a big modern terminal with the
usual concertina-like walkways which reach out gingerly until they
make contact with the aircraft, allowing you to walk straight into
the building, with its gleaming marble floors, but we arrived on la
Costa in the early nineties.
We had
accomplished part one of our plan, well my plan, to be honest. I
looked at Becky, and was relieved to see that she seemed to share my
excitement, despite the last-minute announcement that she’d made
back in England that she didn’t want to accompany me to Spain. But
although I was excited I was also apprehensive, not only because of
her remarks, but also because part two of my plan didn’t exist
except in the most shadowy form. Even our arrival at this particular
airport had been left to fate to determine. I had simply asked for
the cheapest flight to any of the Spanish Costas. If another flight
had been cheaper, I would never have reached Pueblo Blanco, or rather
it would have been a different pueblo blanco.
Going
through customs I practised my Spanish, all learned from a BBC
television course, by greeting the stern-looking green-uniformed
guardia civil with a ‘Buenas tardes’ and being rewarded by seeing
his face break into a smile and receiving a friendly ‘Buenas
tardes’ in reply.
Outside
the terminal I peered at the thick Rough Guide to Spain to confirm
what I remembered reading, that you could get into the city ‘cheaply
and easily, by taking the electric railway, which runs every half
hour’. But where was this railway? I shooed off a waiting taxi
driver, saying ‘No, gracias’, and looked around for someone else
to ask the way to the train station. It seemed bad manners to ask the
taxi driver after dismissing him so abruptly, and in any case I could
imagine the torrent of unintelligible Spanish which would be his
reply, asking me where we were going. Our destination was something I
couldn’t tell anyone, because I didn’t know myself where we were
going, except that we were heading for the city centre, and seeing as
we weren’t in a hurry and only had a couple of small cases on
wheels, it seemed a good idea to save money by taking the train, if
only we could find it.
‘Por
favor, ¿dónde está la estación del tren?’
I asked a man wearing a uniform I didn’t recognize, and received
the customary long convoluted reply I was used to from our two
previous trips to Spain – three weeks in a little seaside town
north of Barcelona and a month travelling around by train. I
understood nothing at all except for the vague gesture across the
gloomy car park, but I said ‘Gracias’ to thank the man for his
help, and received a courteous ‘De nada’ (‘Don’t mention it’)
in reply, and we set off between the rows of cars, in the direction
where I assumed the man had indicated the station was.
When
we arrived at the station, just a few hundred metres away, the
platform was full of people with suitcases who had arrived there by
the easy route, which didn’t involve squeezing between parked cars,
scrambling up and down dusty embankments, and dashing across a busy
highway without a pedestrian crossing. A train pulled in at the
opposite platform, and just in time I realized that the crowds of
tourists weren’t going to the city, but to the coastal resorts in
the opposite direction. So we hurriedly bumped our cases down
concrete stairs, rushed through a dingy pedestrian tunnel, dragged
the cases up another flight of stairs onto the opposite platform, and
quickly heaved them into the train before it could leave without us.
We needn’t have hurried. The airport station was a passing place on
what was mainly a single-track line, and we sat in the stationary
train for five minutes until the one going in the opposite direction
arrived.
By now
Becky was looking much less enthusiastic than she had when we landed,
so I thought it better not to say anything during the fifteen-minute
journey. The train took us first through fields of what looked like
sugar cane, still visible in the twilight, although only just. Here
and there was an isolated house, its white walls grey in the
gathering gloom, a feeble light shining through the odd window, each
house dwarfed by a single tall palm tree. Then we passed an
industrial estate, and entered the outskirts of the city – an area
of dismal-looking, dimly-lit streets lined with tall ugly apartment
blocks, ten or more storeys high, built so close together that some
of their residents could easily have held a conversation with the
neighbours in the next block without shouting. Thankfully the view
was blocked out when the train plunged into a tunnel, and soon we
were at the end of the line, having taken the advice of the Rough
Guide and not got off at the mainline RENFE station.
The
last station on the line was a row of turnstiles, a ticket office,
and an escalator up to street level which I assumed wasn’t working,
as it was motionless. Only when we had struggled up the parallel
staircase did I look back and see it start automatically when someone
stepped onto it down below. Outside we found ourselves in a desolate
construction site between a big concrete building and a waterless
river, surrounded by piles of paving stones, with some unfinished
steps leading in the direction we needed to go according to my map.
Across
the bridge over the river, in the old part of the city, things got
better. There was a broad avenue lined with trees, old and twisted,
with thick trunks, a few brightly-lit shops, still open, and plenty
of bars offering food. Also, there were people: queues at the bus
stops, groups promenading in the still-warm evening air, others
eating and drinking in the bars, sending forth blasts of noisy
conversation when a door was opened, along with the aroma of coffee
from the hissing espresso machines and the smell of cigarettes, the
harsh ones made of dark tobacco which many Spaniards were still
smoking then. Some still do. At this time of the evening in England
the shops would long ago have closed and the streets would be
virtually deserted.
It was
in this area that I first saw the primitive equipment of the chestnut
roasters, an old metal pot with holes pierced in the bottom to allow
the heat from the bed of charcoal through, on broad, shallow metal
troughs on legs, always with a makeshift, homemade look about them.
The equipment was left out all night during the chestnut season –
who would want to steal it? Before being arranged for roasting, the
chestnuts were pierced with a knife, and when their shells were
charred and grey they were sold in a cone made of a sheet of paper
twisted at the bottom – half a dozen or so for 100 pesetas, about
40p, less than a dollar.
A
cheap pensión had been my objective, in an area recommended by
the guidebook, just off the tree-lined avenue, but I knew that I
would have been risking an instant demand for a divorce by shopping
around for the best deal for a room. So when a five-minute walk along
the avenue brought us to the entrance of a medium-range hotel, I
didn’t put up any resistance to the suggestion that we should
enquire about accommodation there, even though it appeared to be well
out of the price-range I had been contemplating. It was. However, the
bedroom was pleasant and spacious. It was on the corner of the
building, so there was a view of both the avenue and a broad street
leading off it, which was lined with elegant old buildings. Becky
switched on the television and zapped through the channels. ‘It’s
all in Spanish,’ she complained. She liked her television. I
refrained from pointing out that we were in Spain.
We
went out to explore. Through the open door of a long
dilapidated-looking wine bar, founded in the mid-nineteenth century
according to a plaque, a row of huge barrels was beckoning to me, but
my teetotal wife wanted food. So we set off in search of something
vegetarian for me, not for her, as she was only semi-vegetarian,
happy to pick the bits of meat out of a dish and eat the rest,
something which I found revolting. But every place Becky liked the
look of was strictly for carnivores. The trays of tapas on display in
the long glass cases on the bars included delicacies such as sangre
(cubes of coagulated blood), riñones en jerez (kidneys in
sherry), morcilla (black pudding), habas con jamón (broad
beans with ‘just a little ham’) and ensaladilla rusa (potato
salad with ‘just a little tuna’). Of course I didn’t know what
they were called then. I just knew that they weren’t my sort of
food.
So we
set off along one of the narrow streets which led off the avenue,
choosing it at random, and after many twists and turns we encountered
a pizzeria. Becky was panicking, afraid we wouldn’t be able to find
our way back to the hotel, but I calmed her down by producing from my
wallet the card I had picked up at reception. In any case, I have a
direction-finder built into my brain. For me it’s no mystery how
geese migrate south to the sun for their Christmas holidays and
return to the same village pond in England in the spring. However, I
didn’t mention this, not wanting to be called a smart-arse, or
possibly worse judging by the stony look on my wife’s face.
The
two beers I had with my pizza whetted my appetite for another drink,
preferably in the wine bar I had seen in the avenue near the hotel,
so I deliberately took a little detour to pass it on the way back.
But it was closing. I didn’t know then that most of the bars
selling the muscatel-type fortified wines and seafood closed at ten
o’clock. In any case, Becky wanted to go to bed – to sleep,
anything else was out of the question in her present mood. There was
to be no romantic night of passion to celebrate the start of our new
adventure.
Lying
in bed, listening to her gentle snoring, I wondering how I could have
got it so wrong. Why didn’t I see any warning signs? She wasn’t
making much money in England from either of her occupations –
painting portraits of pet animals and signwriting – despite the
fact that she was a technically-superb artist. That was one of the
things which had attracted me to her the day she first walked into my
art gallery and picture-framing business. However, there just didn’t
seem to be enough demand to make a living out of painting pets, and
she was no good at selling her signwriting services, even though
those customers she did manage to find were invariably satisfied. I
thought she would welcome a change, a new country, a new way of life.
How was it that I hadn’t realized what she was thinking until her
declaration just a few days earlier that she didn’t want to go to
Spain, never had wanted to, and that if I still intended to persist
with my crazy scheme, I could go on my own?
Why
hadn’t she said something sooner? Why had she waited until we had
handed the keys of the house to the tenant and moved in with her
mother for a couple of days, our cases packed and the flights booked?
It had
been months ago – almost a year in fact – that I had taken a
short course on teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) so that
I could get a job in a summer school in Manchester, for the
experience, not the meagre pay. Then I had paid out a sizeable chunk
of money for a longer residential course in rural Worcestershire to
obtain a Trinity College TEFL certificate – Trinity College,
London, that is, not one of the grander educational establishments,
but nevertheless issued under the patronage of none other than His
Royal Highness the Duke of Kent, according to my certificate. Didn’t
she think I was serious? And if she hadn’t wanted to come to Spain,
why had she made arrangements to let the house out while I was away
on the course? Eventually she reluctantly accepted that we couldn’t
evict the tenant who had just moved in with a properly-signed lease,
and she agreed, on sufferance, to accompany me.
Some
of her mood had rubbed off on me. I have to admit I didn’t like the
city all that much that night. Now I love it. I love sitting at a
table on the pavement at midmorning sipping a strong black coffee in
a little glass and eating churros, long golden fritters of batter
deep-fried in olive oil. I love watching the street life and all the
panhandlers after your money: motionless living statues, including a
man painted silver who is so unlifelike that he makes you look twice
to check that he’s alive, and not a metal statue; bad flamenco
singers that you pay to go away and leave you in peace; broad-hipped,
middle-aged gypsy women in long drab skirts thrusting sprigs of
rosemary at passers-by insisting that they are offering un regalo (a
gift), when in fact it’s simply a ruse to get innocents to cross
their palms with silver, or better still paper money, in return for
having their fortunes told; straightforward whining beggars with
cupped hands. I love the way the streets are still crowded at eight
thirty in the evening because the shops have reopened at five after
the afternoon break for a siesta. I love the way the old quarter
starts to come to life round about midnight at weekends, crowds of
people heading from the bus stops and car parks, all in one
direction, towards the maze of narrow streets lined with bars. There
many of them will carouse the whole night away, until dawn breaks,
and it’s time for a breakfast of churros, and then bed.
But
that night I lay awake wondering if I had made an awful mistake.
