Greetings to FIVE PLUS blog readers...
I thought as an entry before I am admitted into the hospital tomorrow for my IL-2 treatments I would post this excerpt of a still undefined work of stories and episodes set in Spain. Those pieces are loosely entitled Love in Exile.
I hope you find some entertainment in this piece and feel also the deep attachment I have for Spain, to which I have been lucky enough to have traveled since 1981. This piece is still a draft, but it's shaped up enough for ya'll to read.
Well, enjoy, and you'll be hearing from me once I and, my wife, Terry are settled into the room that will be our home for the next week. Our companions will be boredom and monotony, but it's all for a good cause: me.
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| August 25, 2013, 7:56 PM. Best to all who have taken the time to follow this blog and chosen to read the lines I have written about my journey this year. |
There are more stories to come, Tim
The Zocodover, Toledo, Spain
In the evening kids play soccer in the Zocodover. A place at peace with itself. The many cafes are quiet, the few tourists not so eager to sit in the chilly January air. Some cafes remain open, like the Toledo Cafe. The terrace is not big and glass partitions enclose its tables and chairs from the larger space of the square. The terrace is a comfortable place, even in January and even at night when the winter chill seems to spring directly from the old stone city. The terrace is home for couples, young and old, who find pleasure in talking, drinking wine, eating snacks from the kitchen, and they enjoy the sounds of the night: the chatter of school kids passing in small clusters and wandering off down some side alley or the clatter of dishes on the trays and the muffled shouts of friends recognizing one another across the square. The busy young crowd at the MacDonald’s just doors away from the cafe add to the low murmur of many voices as the square is populated. The rise and fall of foot steps pushing along the walk beside the terrace scratch and the clippy-clopping on the pavement punctuates the serendipitous sounds of the night. They all embrace the darkness, holding it captive.
A young woman bent over her knees studies intently her cell phone. She leans against her table, huddling up within herself while pounding out a text. She holds a cigarette in her thin pale hand. Studying the small screen, she returns to punching the little keyboard again. Consumed with her cryptic conversation she could be anywhere. The world around her has ceased to exist. Her inner voice spoke only to her conversation traveling down a long electronic tunnel. Waiting for the echo to return to her before she could shout into it again. She did so eagerly and punched her phone with a malice that left no doubt in her mind what it was she was shouting. Determined to make her point, each snap of her finger nail against the plastic confirmed what she said as the cigarette flicked mindlessly ashes onto her shoe.
The waiter slipped a small plate of salty chips onto the table in front of an old man seated at one of the tables. Then he disappeared and reappeared as he busied himself on the terrace. A couple nearby chatted incessantly. Forced and artificial laughter nearby came from a young man who was trying to seduce his date. From another quarter came soft admonitions of a mother talking to her child and behind them the rolling cadence of an old man boring his family with stories of no consequence, working the intervals of his narrative with his deep gravelly cadence, a man still panning for gold in the rivers of his vanity.
The waiter rushed by with a tray of small glasses of beer and half liter wine decanters clinging to the tray in desperation. The little terrace was filling and the chatter began to blend in to discord, an eddy of humanity trying to find a course toward something greater than itself.
The old man stretched and then recomposed himself. His soft white hair was thin and tailored neatly to the shape of his head and it marked his age from any distance. He studied the young man and the woman he was with. His energy was annoying to the old man as he watched the younger one try so hard to seduce his date. Unwilling to push others around with his memories the old man wanted only solitude to quiet his own mind. Quiet it from the hard memories of his own life. He was waiting for death patiently and deliberately. He felt no nobility in his patience, only the calculated understanding that it would happen sooner than later.
He still lived in his house near the Monasterio de San Juan de los Reyes. The Monasterio is elegant and peaceful on the inside, hard and determined facing the street. There in the old Jewish quarter of the Barrio de la Juderia of Toledo, not far rom the ancient Synagogues of El Transito and Santa Maria la Blanca left empty of Jews since their expulsion by Isabella and Ferdinand, the old man still lived. It was there in that quiet neighborhood the old white haired man and his wife had raised their family.
His wife had been obedient to the dictatorship of their marriage just as he had been as a citizen under Franco’s regime. She cooked his food, cleaned his clothes, and walked with him in the evening, that long slow walk that couples take in the evening. The paseo. They would walk toward Iglesia de Santo Tome and quietly he would think about El Greco’s painting The Burial of the Count of Orgaz over the tomb of Orgaz inside the small church. He never went in to see it but he knew it was there and thought about it when he passed. It was a treasure of the city and he was proud of it, even though he had never seen it.
He rarely thought about what his wife was thinking. He knew she was but never asked what it was. It was not important to him. She would quietly walk with him as they would pass down Calle de Trinidad just north of the majestic Gothic Cathedral illuminated against the night sky. Inspiring, the tower hovered over the darkened streets of the city silhouetted against the blue ebony of the sky. It still impresses he thought when he could see it appear and disappear among the myriad views throughout the city. Then the old man and his wife of the Monasterio de San Juan de los Reyes would continue to walk up the Calle Hombre del Palo and Del Comcerio to the triangular square. The Zocodover.
After some small talk with his acquaintances and perhaps a glass of red wine at one of the terrace bars when he would look anywhere except at his wife. They would return the way they had come and retire from the night. In the quiet of their home the sound of a drawer being closed, a door slowly being shut, a light being extinguished, a flush, the distant sounds of cars crossing the Tagus, or the random sound of voices somewhere down the street were reminders of the solitude of their lives even though they lived together.
The old man with the white hair of the Monasterio de San Juan de los Reyes still made the walk every evening and talked just as little as he had when his wife was there with him. She was dead. He was dead now he thought but alive to understand it. He was alone now he knew and when you are alone you wonder if you were ever not alone. You wonder if you were ever loved by anyone if they could ever really love you. He did not have the energy to seek new loves like the young man nearby. Being alone haunts you with what may have been. It is a quiet time when reflections stir the dust of untaken paths. Those ghosts convince you that you have lived a lost life and never taken the chances you should have taken and never let the love in when it was there in front of you. Somethings are meant to be he thought bitterly, but usually the reason for this is not found until long after the thing has happened, that irrevocable and ungracious coincidence of the end of life proclaiming its victory over time and events and sealing them regrettably within the limitations of the soul. The old man with the white hair revealed no emotion, showed no sign of regret, but he felt it deep within himself, in a soul that felt lost, that wondered if it had ever been loved. Being alone is like that. But then, he shrugged and his wonderment was lost in the forgetfulness of his age.
The old man of the Monasterio de San Juan de los Reyes cautiously observed the world around him. He didn’t know the world of the young man with his little black cap tight to his head who trying to seduce his date didn’t know that he tried too hard to convince the young woman that his energy was important. The old man listened, unmoved, staring blankly across the Zocodover lost in the memory of his life. Faint memories competing with the crowing of the young man.
He rolled his thumbs hard against one another.
The young man rattled on about nothing.
The old white haired man felt nothing but the lost sensation that was now an apparition against the knowledge of his limited world. He inspected the shaggy sideburns of the young man, his fidgety pumping of his cigarette as though a conductor of a great tobacco orchestra. Smoking can seem so seductive the old man thought distracted by the gentle rising of smoke through the terrace lights and into the darkness beyond, it’s richness drifting through the air like the details of a Velazquez painting; soft, sensual, serendipitous, and ethereal, like the slow movement of a loaded brush of gray pigment washed across the wet paint of the black sky.
Crossing his legs the old man pushed his thumbs hard against one another. Emptiness filled him with a sense of want magnifying the void he felt. In the winter chilled blackness senses become sharper and they echo longer etching themselves indelibly upon the mind. Emotions are more precise and felt deeper but they become lost in the dark of the night like the transient beauty of dusk when the halo of the sun passes into the depth of night's envelope. Getting old is like that he thought. He sipped his glass of dark wine and then his hands again clasp each other, slowly, as though two actors in a silent drama, two companions in a life lived.
The waiter rushed back through the tables collecting spent glasses and plates, depositing small dishes of food and drink. A little world but he made it work for his livelihood. At the bar’s window he waited for an order to take onto the terrace. Even though January he didn’t need a coat, he was too busy and warmed by his job.
An old couple in the corner of the terrace smiled at one another. They had watched patiently as the hard blue of the sky turned a soft pink and then to a deep lavender on the fringes of the coming night growing inside it like the inside of a deep blue blossom closing around the earth until the black of night encompassed all.
Dawn would come she knew and the unyielding sun would forge the world again sustaining her confidence in the continuity of the world and the hard task of living each day. The cycle seemed to explain to her the rational over the irrational, sanity over madness, passion over the indifferent. It defined the spectacle of life proclaimed without equivocation by shadow and light cleaved at the edge of black and white which was like night and day, heaven and earth, love and hate, life and death, one without the other seemed lost and lacked definition. It seemed at that edge, that brittle and ever changing boundary where the two meet, that was where the conflict began and as the light changed the war of one over the other seemed to be endlessly pursued as long as the sun had shone in the sky and men and women walked the earth. She thought these things as she sat there in the darkness of the Zocodover, the warmth of her companion a small reward for the youthful dreams she still wished would come true somewhere out there in the black of the night.
Her thick mink and her companion’s dark woolen jacket warmed them as they sat there at the terrace cafe. Happily they blew kisses to a friend across the terrace and waving a restrained gesture, tired peasant royalty. She dropped her arm and let it slip easily into his. Her companion’s red face alive with fulfillment, hers weary and relaxed. She drew her drink closer sliding it slowly and carefully across the table top. The thick burnt siena of her fur, the odd magenta mittens, the cream scarf, and the dark brown of her recently tinted hair framed the tight expression on her face. A diffuse halo glowed around her head, created from the cafe lights and held her captive like an aging courtesan receiving the gift of annunciation from the sorrowful maidens of the night. Her lenient, weathered, and aged skin marinated by the truculent reality of life like the winter fog that often lay over La Mancha. It lay close to the earth pushed into the low places by the sun overhead concealing the rows and rows of vines, olive trees, and fruit orchards, as does age conceal the memories of passion and defeat, the growth of things and the death of others. The sun soaking through the haze, an intruder, a reminder of the large world beyond the white mist of old age but held back by the circumspect wall of fading reflections.
The old woman’s cheeks blushed unevenly with a soft pink as the blood rose to warm the chill and her glassy dark eyes possessed melancholy in a way that only an old woman’s eyes can. Held open with determination she looked out at the world through two small glimmering orbs that had studied the plain needs of her life. She griped firmly her lover’s arm knowing they would sleep together this night. She felt rewarded for a hard life because she knew he loved her. She knew he had always loved her. He loved her before she married another man. He loved her after she was married and he loved her now as a widow. He loved her before he knew her because he loved her in his heart knowing that she was to be his sometime during his life. He always loved her and she felt rewarded to be loved. He beamed with gladness to be here with the woman he loved so long. To have her arm slip into his and to feel her pressure against him and to know that he would sleep with her this night. He loved her and his faith in that love had been rewarded.
The night lost its cold edge. The lights seemed a little brighter as the laughter of the young became a light choral above the low resonance of older voices, two ends of the arch of life.
The old man of the Monasterio de San Juan de los Reyes unmoved, only occasionally turned his head and calculatingly taking in the vibrant life around him and the small bit of wine he had in front of him. He changed the position of his legs recrossing them in a self-conscious gesture, slowly as though a ritual. When people age their mannerisms age with them. Gone is the energy but still the slow movements of the limbs follow the same path they have for decades like a dancer in pantomime redefining the small space within which they move, slowly and circumscribed.
He coughed.
The old man of the Monasterio de San Juan de los Reyes wished that he had a woman to slowly slip her arm into his, to say she loved him in a way that he knew it was true and not an obligation. That time had passed and he knew it. He just wondered if he ever had been in love. He wondered if he cared at all. It is only when one gets old enough to fill that expectation of love with a full dose of affection that true love blossoms he thought quietly. Those eager feelings of youth that drive people together like colliding stars in the hope of becoming greater than themselves, hoping to create an entirely new universe that is only a preamble to the path that leads the lucky few to the enriched happiness of loving someone beyond those expectations. The old man felt he had failed and he knew that he would never find the answer to his questions. He just sat and watched the world around him and wondered how he had lived such a life, a life that now seemed so empty. He wondered that and felt again the loneliness in his heart.
The waiter looked around. The white hair of the old man had just been an apparition and the vision was lost in the many small carnivals of life that sat at the terrace tables. The small groups left and the evening took on its age with dignity.
Deep in the mix of alleys that crisscrossed Toledo the old man and woman who had sat in the cafe were walking to their home. In the slow movements of a dancer Don Juan stepped in front of the woman and slowly they danced a few shuffled footsteps into a darken doorway. The soft magenta mittens embraced him as he lay his hand on her cheek, kissing her on the mouth with what was left of his youth. She kissed back and for that brief moment they loved one another in a way that few people ever will.
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