“I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.”
-Jack Kerouac, On the Road
After a full day in Lisbon, I had dropped my receipt, which contained the code to the locker that held all of Jenn’s and my bags. Now I had no way of accessing my luggage. I convinced Jenn to leave without her luggage, which I would bring to her in two days, and she boarded. For all I knew, the overnight train to northern Spain had probably departed. There were no hotels available that I could afford. A locker attendant was supposedly on his way, but I saw no sign of him.
I kept poking my head out towards the hall watching the front doors, seeing just hoards of people again and again. At the last, a man in street clothes burst out from behind a group of tourists, carrying a tool box. He was old and had a repressed limp, but made his way valiantly, huffing and puffing. I waved frantically, and he waved back. “Okay, okay, okay,” he kept saying as if it were one word. “Okayokayokay”.
In a quick exchange, he put in a master code to the locker which reset it, I placed five euros in the receipt machine, got another code, and voila! The locker swung open. “Thankyouthankyouthankyou!” I exclaimed. I grabbed a ten euro bill from my pocket and nearly threw it at him in the rush as I ran up to the tracks, luggage swinging wildly from every limb.
I looked at the station clock as I pushed and bumped my way through a sea of pokey travellers. It was several minutes past departure, but facts are things that can crush ambition, and in rare cases the latter ought to triumph over the former.
To my utter joy, the train had not yet left, though the final call had already been shouted. The last remaining attendant began to make his way inside the doors, and I shouted at him from a distance. He heard me, held the door, and motioned me in. The moment I entered the train, the doors snapped closed.
“Lucky! Lucky!” he laughed.
I am still proud to say that to this day, I have never missed a train, bus, or a plane. But of course, there can be first time for everything.
This was the last time I would return to Spain, and I wanted to experience it to the utmost, but found in Pamplona during the Festival of San Fermin that “the utmost” was beyond my reckoning. Thus far, I had only experienced the Spanish fiesta life at its baseline, which is a sideshow in comparison to Spanish festivals. People from all over Spain, and indeed the world, party ceaselessly, many bars never closing their doors. Normal work continues during the day, but I would imagine it is probably a little less efficient and precise as normal. That is to say, I don’t think much gets done.
The streets are packed with people clad in white clothes with red bandanas, belts, and hats. So many smells permeate the streets: popcorn, alcohol, fried foods, tobacco, marijuana, and cotton candy, and, as a natural consequence of the aforementioned, the smell of vomit and urine. The hilly streets are filled with slovenly people, walking backwards and sideways and running into unforseen walls and barriers at all hours of the day. Around every corner are the sounds of laughter and music, some traditional, with guitars and violins, and some with blaring with bass and synthesizers.
Our graceful AirBnB hosts suggested that we watch el encierro (“the running” of bulls up barricaded streets into the arena) up some steps near the starting bull pin. I started that pre-dawn morning having every intention of running. The long walk past slow epicureans, zombie-like with hangovers, had me half convinced the run was a bad idea. I reminded myself that the odds of being badly injured, let alone killed, were somewhat small. But when I saw that some of those odds were still repressing a stumble at dawn, and I saw another balancing himself by the forehead on a wall, dropping his pants and wetting the stones below in front of a crowd of thousands, I became fully convinced it was a really, really bad idea. Fellow runners were the greatest risk of running, not the bulls.
The sun peeked at us over the distant hills. The air was full with anticipation as the last of the wooden barriers were dropped into the streets at every intersection. The makeshift corridor was complete.
A woman climbed up a ladder and placed an icon of Saint Fermin in a little stone cut-out along the wall and lit some candles around it. About five minutes before the hour, the crowd turned towards the icon and thousands of voices sang the prayer of protection to it. They ended by striking rolled papers into air and shouting twice.
A small firework shot into the air and exploded, a gate down the hill swung open with a clack, and the deep sound of clomping hooves and dangling bells could be heard before the sight came into view. At a harmless trot was a herd of strong male bulls. They seemed comfortable and tame, being herded from behind by the longer horned steers. But when they became aware of the crowd ahead, their nostrils flared and they began to push the pace. Some in the crowd began to panic, and a frantic tide of white and red was overcome by the herd of muscle, hide, and horns. Some dove to the ground, others whipped left and right, leaping and sliding. The scene grew louder and more frantic until it disappeared around the corner and the echo of the crowd dwindled. After a time, a final rocket shot into the sky signifying that the bulls were in the ring.
I hate an unfinished story, so I bought tickets to the arena the next morning so we might watch the end of the run. The first hour or so was filled with some entertainment, like rope walking and balancing acts. Then the rocket flew into the air and the gates were swung open, one at the entrance and one to ring pin. The remaining runners entered, faster and faster like a wave approaching the beach, then the bulls burst in and, almost without exception, all exited through an open corral on the other side, where they were kept until the evening slaughter.
It was a surprisingly short affair to get them in, lasting only a minute or so. Much of the crowd re-entered the ring, and over the next hour, mock fought young bulls with their horns bandaged to avoid cornatas (gorings). The crowds hooted and booed the amateurs when they showed skill or showed cowardice, and were sometimes brought out of their seats by their bravado or recklessness, some of whom were lightning quick, and others who were tossed by the bulls into the dust like a banana peel into the garbage. That was the end to my bull run story.
One of my visions for being in Spain was to do the run. Perhaps that sort of adrenaline-fueled adventure might have been my new reason for travelling. But in hindsight, I stand by my decision. If I was injured, I might have had to go back to America. I did not want one moment to define the whole journey by causing its end. If I was going to leave, that would be on my terms. Whatever that was at the wishing well, a prayer or a wish, I kept going back to it. I wanted it to be fulfilled before I went back home.
We left the foggy northwest of Spain for its heart in Madrid where it was sunny and hot. Madrid was by far the most metropolitan city I visited in Spain. In the financial district and the main business areas, blacktop and pavement tell the time, bearing the pointy shadows of the massive, shiny, modern buildings. Yet in certain places it retains the old world style of Seville and Granada: old buildings hobbled together under sun burnt clay tiles, massive palatial structures with complex facades.
For not the first time, we stayed in a cheap hostel. I have hitherto neglected to mention these, favoring the ideal places, but every once in awhile, a hostel is not quite what it seems when you book it. Online it looked friendly, modern, and clean (when I do pay to sleep somewhere, I expect it to be as advertised), but when we arrived in Madrid, we were met by semi-sober staff and patrons who looked like they belonged in a halfway house. The building was held together by the stickiness of its floors and by concrete walls crumbling under their new neon colored paint. It’s rooms were packed with sub-Ikea grade particle board furniture, on top of which were spread stained sheets and flat pillows.
Among the most interesting patrons were a self-obsessed American collegiate, whose travel dreams can be summed up in an interest in Spanish tail. I referred him to Las Ventas, the bull ring. Another was a self-proclaimed runaway from Liverpool (and in my untrained opinion, mildly autistic), who loved corned beef and painfully awkward conversations with Jenn, whom he called Jane no matter how many times he was corrected, the substance of which were mostly about running away from Liverpool and his love for corned beef.
Madrid has a faster rhythm to it than much of what I saw in Spain, and is a fast paced jumble of all walks of life. Jenn chided me into buying some better looking clothes at a Spanish chain discount store, as we had the wedding of one of her friends to attend on the Costa del Sol in a few days. Then I went for some new socks and Ray Bons (you read that right) from an African emigrant from his unsanctioned selection on a blanket. These blankets, full of knock-off goods, can be found almost everywhere in Southern Europe. Often they are the focus of targeted crackdowns by immigration police, and many have strings tied on the corners for a quick getaway.
Being the height of tourist season, Madrid was frantic in pace. To escape it, we took a day trip, a short train ride south. On a lonely weedy hill next to a river, whose flags were caught in a nice breeze, is the quiet little town of Toledo. There is not anything specific to see or do there, a few churches and art galleries, or perhaps you might play chess in the park with some old men sucking on cigars and sipping cups of wine. What there is mainly to do is to walk around, or perhaps sit around, but mainly to just be around. To smell the wind as it gusts past the weedy hills, to hear the quiet river beneath your feet on the ancient arched bridge, to squint your eyes at the sun glaring in the warped stain glass windows of the cathedral, and to feel the bumps and textures of the hilly streets and buildings.
Central Spain wizzed by us, and we exited our bus at Marbella on the Costa del Sol. I felt like I would only have this small chance to have time to myself, and decided not to attend the wedding with Jenn. She stayed the next couple of days elsewhere with some friends. I took those days to swim, read A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway and Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence (which I had started way back in Morocco), and record some thoughts that had been jumbling around.
Marbella was like a watercolor painting with its whitewashed walls and red roofs against the perfect blues of sky and sea. But that beauty was bought and paid for by some of the wealthiest people in Spain who resided there. I quickly grew annoyed with the bourgeois culture, and I do not believe I spoke a word to anyone except my AirBnB host and a station attendant as I bought train tickets.
I kept going back to all I had seen and experienced so far. I kept asking, so what? I have come all this way, waking up in many mornings’ beds to find myself in another in the evening. So many people I have met and travelled with and learned from. All the challenging conversations, or nights spent in laughter, that moved me from one understanding to somewhere in between understandings, having left one and not yet arrived at another.
Each day, I sat for an hour or so in a little chapel, somewhere between meditation, thought, and prayer. One afternoon, an old woman finally asked me to leave so they could shut the doors, and I quickly bought a rosary. I’m not much for a heavy dose of religiosity, but I thought it might help to have something tangible to hold onto in the midst of all I was working through. I used my own ritual sometimes at nights, saying a few prayers I had memorized, my fingers pinching the beads. To some it would be sacrilege, to me it was necessary.
Jenn returned one afternoon, and we left the soil of Spain for the last time, taking to the eastern sky. I felt as if Spain were all becoming a part of what I called home: the desert hills, the weedy brush, the brown castles, the watercolor afternoons at the turquoise sea, the old cathedrals dense with mystery in the wax everglow and smoky incense, the neon nights of tapas, the late sunrises, the smell of the dusty wind, the bumpy uneven streets, the bulls and the blood, the unpredictable interplay of violence and art, and most of all, the vehemence of Spanish joy. I felt as if I had read the country cover to cover, and like any good book, it was not long enough.
For me, leaving has always been easier and far more exciting than arriving. In leaving, I can look backward in perfect hindsight, knowing all I think I need to know. It’s when I arrive that I learn how flawed all my plans are, and how little I really know of a new place and new people. It means new arrangements, having small talk, good first impressions, and having to start over again. As I thought of my adventure so far, the question kept enshrouding my memories: so what?
What I had begun to recognize as more of a prayer than a wish was hanging upon my mind. On our flight, I thought of almost nothing but that coin resting alone on the ledge in the well. So what? So what? So what?
The brown Spanish terrain morphed into the green forests and white snow capped peaks of Switzerland. Onward the relentless journey went to new lands and experiences, to bitter memories and to sweet. The prayer remained, as yet, not granted. The shadow, from which I was tired of running, was growing.
