[continued from previous entry]
Rain moved in Thursday evening, has fallen on and off since then, local skies low and gray, streets and sidewalks strewn with puddles. It's easy to tell when it's coming down heavily and when it's not -- the number of people out and about diminishes or increases accordingly. This neighborhood being the city’s party central zone and yesterday being Friday, the sounds from the street ebbed and swelled in direct proportion to the rainfall.
Late in the evening, downfall turned to drizzle, revelers came out of hiding, the soundtrack of happy carrying-on picked up volume and continued until around 6:30 yesterday morning. I know. I was awake for a lot of it.
My sleep cycles change as soon as I get here. In Vermont, I slip into a modified version of the local early-to-bed-early-to-rise bit, falling out generally between 10 and 11 p.m. Here I rarely experience the vaguest hint of drowsiness until twelve or beyond. Last night, after several days of less than optimum sleep, I managed to drift off after midnight. Shortly after two, I found myself awake, feeling the impulse to go turn on the computer. I tend not to argue with sensations like that, so got out of bed, turned on a light, cranked the laptop. Sure enough, some neighborhood angel had an open network going, allowing me to check mail, get some work done.
I know that kind of piggybacking is not looked upon kindly by the world at large, but sometimes one does what one has to, hoping it won't inconvenience the anonymous benefactor too much. (The network went offline a few hours later, hasn't reappeared since then -- a downside of finding oneself dependent on the kindness of cyber-strangers.) I worked until near dawn, shut off computer, turned out lights, fell back to sleep as life in the street finally began quieting down.
Three or four hours later, I was awake and out, attempting to pawn myself off as a high-functioning human being. A shot of caffeine and something to eat, stumbling in and out of different shops and markets, trawling for groceries, reorienting myself to life here.
Everything is always in a state of change, a constant evolving. In a place like this -- a neighborhood that has become red-hot since I began haunting it, with skyrocketing rents and an accelerating frenzy of buildings being rehabbed or almost entirely rebuilt -- it becomes normal to witness that state happening in compressed, hopped-up fashion. Businesses disappear, replaced by others or replaced by workers altering the space in preparation for someone else's stab at a shop, club, gallery, café or restaurant. I stopped into a restaurant around the corner from here for lunch on Friday, a place that did thriving business last autumn. No one there but me this time around. Jazz playing on the in-house sound system, decent food. One or two neighboring merchants stopped in to talk with the two 30-ish women running the joint as I sat reading, eating. But no other diners. I passed by yesterday, twenty-four hours later, the lunchtime menú del día sign outside the door to attract customers, as it had been on Friday. No diners. That keeps up, some day soon that enterprise will disappear, its insides will be torn out and replaced by stuff that will become the insides of the next business.
Before hiking over to the phone company office after arrival on Thursday, I stopped at the shop that sold me the cellphone a year ago. Or would have if it had been there. In its place I found a different shop, yet another of the high-end, hoping-to-be-chic clothing tiendas that have been sprouting up all over the barrio these last few years.
Ah, well.
This afternoon, most of the furniture I'd loaned out last December found its way back here, delivered by a taxi driven by the father of Nacho, the friend who used the stuff. Nacho and I carried the items up the five flights before he and his father took off to attend the family's Sunday dinner. I spent a while unpacking, putting disassembled armchairs back together, ending up with a space less empty, less austere, beginning to look like the piso I remember from a year ago. Feeling more homelike. One of the armchairs and its footstool picked up two or three new stains between them during their time out on loan, maybe the product of errant meals in front of the TV (also out on loan, in the same homestead). Small potatoes, all things considered. Into each life a little stain must fall.
When I first arrived here in 2000, there were only four national television channels. A fifth started up while I was here last autumn, another appeared sometime since then. I cranked up the TV, found news programs, a recap of the weekend's soccer action, a dubbed version of The Two Towers, a dubbed version of what looked like Les Miserables, Liam Neeson playing Jean Valjean, but speaking with a Spanish actor’s voice. The newest station had an episode of King of the Hill playing, all the characters blabbering away in Castellano. I watched for a moment then killed it. Maybe another time.
The good part: there will be other times, a simple reality for which I am truly grateful.
España, te quiero.
rws 9:28 PM [+]
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