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Friday, April 25, 2003 Blarghh. Have not so far been able to wake up or clear my head today. Can't blame it on the construction across the street, they've actually been comparatively low-key so far this morning. No jackhammer hooha clattering away. Just the more normal excavating activity, punctuated by periods of quiet. There are only two people working on-site -- the guy who operates the front-end/rear-end loader and another who trots around the space helping in whatever ways are necessary. Surprising, in a way, that they can produce as much noise as they have during the last few days. On the other hand, they a big machine to play with, one that can produce serious nerve-shredding noise levels when they get going with it. Professional noise-making gear. But today, like I've said, they've been relatively tranquil, so I can't blame them for my foggy state. I'm sure I'll get clear enough at some point to begin conducting myself like a high-functioning sentient being. (Pause here to wander around the piso from one attempted activity to another like a groggy pinball until finally throwing on a coat, going out to pick up a newspaper, hoovering down a cup of espresso. Which brought me a step or two in the direction of, er, clarity.) I realized after posting yesterday's entry that that little bit about classroom personalities is the first time I've written about the characters I spend schoolroom time with in many, many months. (I mean apart from bitching about being tortured by instructors with the infinite -- possibly fictional, given how many endless varieties they come up with -- uses of the subjunctive verb form in Castellano.) In February of last year, I was in class with some great personalities, in particular a 20-something German male, J., and H.,a slightly older Japanese woman. Nice people, both of them, very quirky in their individual ways, great folks to watch. With sparks flying quietly, discretely between them. She was married, here in Madrid because her husband worked with a Japanese company; he was a grad. student, here studying for an extended period. It seemed pretty clear that nothing extramarital was happening between them -- they simply liked each other. Given different circumstances, who knows what direction that may have taken, but they seemed to stay carefully within the limitations of the situation, enjoying being around each other in the sweetest of ways. In the wake of writing a bit about them, someone suggested to me that I might be invading their privacy by laying out my observations here. This is a public page, after all, they were real people in the middle of something that could be construed in various positive and negative ways. I thought about that, then made the decision to leave them alone. Around that time, some folks at school became aware of this webpage, a few began checking it out -- another inhibiting factor. And the truth is I've missed writing about that part of my life. It's so much fun, with such a great cast of characters, all showing up to show us who they are before moving on. I realized recently that keeping all that off-limits has come to feel like I'm depriving myself of something important, something I genuinely enjoy. So I'm going to quit depriving myself. (I'm also going quit giving this page's URL to people from school.) The last time I saw J. and H., BTW, the three of us met for lunch. J. and I had both stopped classes the week before this get-together, J. would be leaving Madrid shortly. Not long after that, H. would be moving to South America with her husband, following his new job posting. That occasion would be the last time I would see either of them. We rendezvoused on a sunny, cool March day out on the sidewalk in front of a Korean restaurant over on la Calle de Atocha, an area of the city I don't know well. H.'s part of town, apparently, so that she and her husband had tried various restaurants in the barrio. Once J. and I had arrived, she ferried us inside, found us a table in a corner. Not your standard dining table, this. A circular wrought-iron cover came off to reveal a single-ring gas stove inset in the table's center. The deal was: you order your vegetables and your meat, they bring them to your table in rounds. Everything raw. You cook it to your liking on a flat surface that gets positioned over the burner, you eat it. We order. We make conversation in our limited Spanish, doing all right between the three of us. The first round of food arrives. H. gets the cooking process started, lighting the fire, laying out the food on the cooking surface. J. and I follow her example, in a short time we're all slapping meat and veggies onto the cooking surface, dragging finished bits on to our individual plates. It may not sound like much here, but there were seasonings used both during and post-cooking, producing a tasty end-result. Fresh, tangy. So we're eating. J. and H. are sitting together on the other side of the table. We're all talking away. And throughout the process, I got to watch a continuous stream of subtle, minute interactions being played out between J. and H., communications of affection and regard. Simple, relaxed. Two interesting people, both a long way from home, with a connection that only went so far, yet clearly involved emotion and frank mutual appreciation. H.: a pretty, slim woman of middle height, with long dark hair, nice eyes, a bit of overbite, who tended to dress with some style (that day wearing a black knee-length wool coat with knee-high leather boots). J.: tall, with unruly medium brown hair, a pronounced forehead and a nice smile, though his expression often remained somewhat neutral, reined in. A person who seemed to have a tendency toward watchfulness. Intelligent, both of them, with lots going on beneath the surface and a deceptively strong, tender connection. When the meal was finished and we'd paid up, found our way outside, the March sunlight had moved to mid-afternoon angles, the air remained cool. We said smiling good-byes, I shook J.'s hand, H. and I kissed each other each cheek. I went in one direction, toward Sol, they moved slowly off in the opposite direction. This was, I think, their last time in each other's company. They walked together -- not up against each other like lovers, not awkwardly far apart. Relaxed, their smiles visible to me from a distance as their heads turned toward each other in the course of whatever they were saying, their manner betraying what may have been the slightest edge of melancholy. Every now and then that image of them comes to mind, walking off down la Calle de Atocha together. Wherever they each are now, I hope they're both well. People come and go, the days move on. rws 12:11 PM [+]
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