The Things About This City...

“That’s the thing about this city…”

Meaning, this city isn’t particularly evil, or glorious, by nature. It is unforgettable, but hold on a moment, you need to find the right way to avoid forgetting it. This is extremely important because you have to avoid the forgetting. Trust me. This city does not take to being forgotten.

Do not get me wrong. If you have come here and stayed for a while, this city can become whatever you want it to be. Not every metropolitan area can offer that, but this offering, this rewarding the time spent in this city, comes with a price. You won’t know this at first, but you must find its flow or it can and will bore you to death. Do not ask me how I know, because I will never tell the whole truth.

You will see only the shades of gray, of which there are at least fifty, but I suspect there are a lot more. Some of the grays were once new white-washing on the old walls. White that has drizzled away, drowning in showers and downpours. White that can barely claim to having been white, once. Crumbly calcium or lime coating, posing in all its nondescript appearance as rather ancient. Beware! It might be only twenty years old, but those stones, that plaster, that endless rain, always have their way with the bright white. Age is not what you think, in this town.

Don’t be discouraged. There’s a lot of old in this city. Really old. The you-don’t-want-to-know-how-old. There's that true (and cool) old, and then there is fake old, looking for all the world as if its false aged appearance were running to catch up with the authentically old. Only newcomers and day visitors fall into that trap.

The ensanche, the new part, from what we can see, appears to be trying to do this. Catch up. It matters not, because the new will never catch up to the old, never. All it can hope to do is draw people away from the ancient, the layered, city. Except that means leaving the best part, the old part, to the tourists. The thousands and thousands that invade the city annually. 

That is not a pleasant thought. Tourists can be dispensed with, and should be. Not in the killing sense of to dispense with, but in the sense of letting them in for two hours a day, then settling them back in their neat little hotel-cages, raving about how good the food is here. After that, load them onto their buses and get them far away, to Soria or Badajoz.

However, the ensanche, that’s another world. You cross the street, the line between the old and the new, and you enter a different universe that radiates from the old center. You have gone too far. Unappealing, gray, shoppable, but not loveable. 

I learned slowly but surely not to cross that line, which has more than one name and runs along one side of the Alameda and one side of the Praza de Galiza, where sometimes you can find an underground parking spot. I started avoiding the line when I began to know this city and the things about it that matter. However, first I had to flee. That, and I had to get a grip on my madness, my anxiety, my concern that I was living in the belly of the beast and needed to get away. Yet leaving what precisely what I needed to do. Get perspective, some would say. Let it go, some would sing. (I don't sing.)

It probably took a year, or even two, before I began to figure out that there was another city with the same name I had tried to live in and failed miserably. It was the city that had leitugas growing on the facade of the catedral. Little green leaves with purple flowers. That weren’t, technically, lettuces at all.  

My point here is that other cities I had visited in the area were brighter, but were missing the green-and-purple, ragged adornment to the huge church. I didn't know that meant something. Nobody makes things easy for you around here.

What did all those little plants mean? Didn’t the municipal government or the Church (which used to be one and the same, even I know that) care enough to do its very best to keep up with the façade maintenance? Oh, that’s right. If you rip the roots out, you might destabilize the high Baroque walls. Might. That’s the worst-case scenario. The best case would be that a week later, or less, during rainy periods, the green would sprout anew and soon after the grape-colored tufts would be back as well, and stronger than ever. 

Waste of money, in other words.

All budgets need to cut corners, so I understand that, but there’s also the matter of the tourists. They’re already upset that some views of the historical building aren’t open to them, and having to take photographs with little ant-people on the large vertical front of the temple would be the last straw. They should schedule the cleaning for during the night. Surely the town council hasn't figured that out.

It’s bad enough that people in the city often don’t speak Spanish, and they sure as heck don’t seem fluent in English. Maybe in the hotel reception, if you’re in at least four-star accommodations. Over the years, that attitude of why don't people speak Spanish here became attached (by me) to the tourists-who-were-disguised-as-pilgrims. It was the correct thing to do. They became personae-non-gratae to me, like they had to the people from the city, the ones whose roots had broken through the stones. 

People who travel hundreds of kilometers and still think they are in Spain but have the right to think like that because they're devout. Right. 

So the pilgrimage started for me, as I indicated previously, on the wrong side of the line, not too far from the city center. A stone’s-throw away. 

It became essential that I make up my mind. Love this city or hate it. Uncertainty would be lethal and never really an option. Nevertheless, the secret guessing game continued and was exhausting. Would I escape, swearing under my breath at the hideous city? Or would I swoon and let it embrace me? (I say this, knowing that swooning on granite can have painful consequences.)

I was getting nowhere fast and was running out of time as well as patience. There were those glimmers of a city within the city, but they were brief and there was little opportunity to see what needed to be seen. Run to Correos to get stamps or mail a post card. Find a papeleiría where there would be watercolor paints and paper. Try the tapas in a traditional bar. (Some of the traditional bars were just old and grimy. No need to go into them.)

I didn’t know at the time that I had been inserted into one way of seeing the city and that I ran the risk of never grasping the other ways. Yet those other ways were my only hope. Store after store after crosswalk after horns honking offered nothing of worth. I tried to run, and run I did. The other ways had yet to reach me,

I ran from what I thought I knew. 

That could have been something they planned. They might have made me the victim of a plan to ensure that I would choose to hate this city and would leave, never coming back. That was me, in fact. Run from your failures, duck your head and apologize. Coward. 

Foreigner, after all. Estranxeira na nosa patria, a foreigner in our land. They had all judged me, and I did not disappoint them. I had nothing to stay for, That's the thing about this city: its gray skin can start to look like the snake's outer covering. (I detest snakes.)

None of this self-pity let me off the hook as far as having the need to figure out what this city is like. I owed it to both of us. In order to accomplish anything, to learn what the thing about this city actually is, I needed to return to the definition-that-is-not-a-definition. What did that mean, that observation about the plants growing out horizontally, then skyward, did it mean anything at all? 

After all, the statement was tossed my way on a rare day without rain. Just a casual remark, but it was, after all, chosen from the millions that might have been made.

How does that green-plus-lavender motif describe any city? How does it work, a plant, but no words? 

It works by forcing us to realize that each person has to write her or his own definition. Nobody can do it for you. 

I had run, coward that I am, because I hadn’t been able to focus, to see the brave little lettuces who perhaps were a plant called couselo for what they reallly were: as part of the book I was trying to read but didn’t know the languages. At one point I had started wondering how many languages this city spoke, then chided myself for even asking. No need to keep track of everything.

Those languages the city has spoken are simply words, no need to translate them. People come from all over the world to this city. Tourists or tourst-pilgrims; it doesn't matter. 

It’s the visual image that needs translation, actually. Take an image, then write its pages, its before, its now, its future. That's the thing about this city: you will follow its lead, its advice, or it will continue to breathe down your neck.

I thought of one of my favorite poems ever, by William Carlos Williams. It came to mind again because it's so good, and so pertinent. I've written about it before, but it's worth another look:

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

And that's it: You and I have to figure out what that "it" is. That's the first step: accept the responsibility given to you. Then we have to figure out how "it" can "depend" on the wheel barrow, what ties them together. If we don't tie the images together, there is no poem. In the same way, if we don't understand the meaning of the green plants with their purple flowers, there is no city.

It's all about filling in that silence, that clarity. With our own lives and thoughts.

Another thing about this city is that it’s wise. It knows what it knows, and it knows that you will either figure it out or you will be sorry the rest of your life. It knows it is an open book, scrutinized by an infinite number of scholars. It doesn't tell you that its real meaning lies just beyond the visible ink and colorful illuminations of the codices those scholars are scrutinizing.

You will not walk away unchanged.

Why do the leaves and petals matter? They matter because plants growing on stone are not in themselves definitions. They point to the void we need to fill and they are symbols of a profound concept. Did Aristoteles develop that concept? Did Plato? 

I doubt it. This is just me trying to make sense out of this place before I finish swooning.

What does the scene look like? You might be curious.

It is simply a sheet of granite that nearly blocks out the sky, flecked with lichens and flocked with couselos? It's a deceptive view, because it makes you think the façade is going to tumble forward, ending your existence. You think it's bigger than it is, because it isn't really all that big: two hundred forty six feet high, say those who've measured it. 

How long do they take to grow?, you might ask, concerned about the brave little plants.

What are they called?, you want to know also, but please realize that I only suggested couselo because I've seen them on little churches. Obviously I can't get close enough to see for sure. They could be herba de namorar plants, for all I know. The love weed. Quite appropriate for a big cathedral.

That’s the thing about Santiago. You can choose to love it or hate it. You can do that without the use of plants. The city is old, but the unexpected roams at will.

You can hate it, then love it, change your mind.

If you decide to love it, fine, but you will have to pay a high price for your affection. You can't get blood from a stone, but you can grow a few lettuces, if you water them properly.

You will have to learn its history and more: you have to listen between the lines. Listen to the stories people tell you, then be prepared: when you go back to hear the stories again, the tellers might not remember having shared such an incredible story with you.

You may become obsessed, hurrying to make up for lost time. It's hard to say when this stage might be reached, but it tends to creep up on you. You are falling head over heels, amazed at your change of heart that no drug or alcohol could ever produce (thank goodness).

You start to feel hungry. Hungry, but also feeling guilty for not knowing sooner. It's not about things you're dying to swallow, but about places and words you want to see. Some are familiar, but others will be coming to you for the first time. You will wonder where they have been hidden all these years that you walked all these streets and heard all this music.

Walk more, and slowly. 

Time has to be on your side, becauuse you have chosen this city.

Obsessed, wanting to tell the world. You admit it now.

Obsessed. 

Utterly mad about this city.

That’s the thing about this city. Many a resident of the area ended up in Conxo, in the asylum for the learning-challenged, I think is the correct term. Conxo is only a kilometer or two away, and is famous for its structure, home to a religious cult, to some valuable artwork, and to the inmates. But then Conxo was a different symbol back then. An individual with extremely progressive ideas might be termed “unstable” and committed by family members.

That’s the thing. You learned that by reading a novel about Conxo. Something like “The First Madman.” Except it’s not yet published in English, so you aren’t sure about the title in the original.

You can’t hate it, no matter how hard you try. If you forget about Conxo-the-building, you might run into one of its residents in the old part. Conxo calling you back, weaving itself around you, in the heart of the city. You spin, but no cocoon you might make will free you. The city has spread to Conxo, then it will be in O Pico Sacro and Santa Susana before you know it. It will be in your dreams, next, so be prepared.

So now you know that you'll gradually allow your edges to be worn down, your sharper angles softened. You tied your cocoon to what you knew best. This steadied you, letting you walk in, through all the lost gates of the city, plus one more, the secret one. Yours, but never theirs, because they hid it from you.

Hoping that this realization, this pose of take-me-I'm-yours will make the city notice you. That is when it will gently breathe you in and loan you a bit of mortality.

In exchange, you will weave it forever, you old Penelope.

Which reminds me of a poem about her by an interesting writer, Marica Campo. That may have to wait for another story.