Valiente en Valencia
It's undoubtedly a watershed moment, seeing off the youngest child to university, and we had to leave behind the quiet of the mountains at five in the morning to deliver him on time to an open day. He was nervous, while I was looking forward to stealing some time to write, stepping off the lonely treadmill of the day job I’d come to loathe and resent with a deep Marxian analysis of the alienation of commodified labour. For a day, I’d be another unknown face in a sea of unknown faces, a human, rather than a human resource, flogged to bits at a business we all knew was never going to make any money. The day proposed willowy and urbane women in sundresses, a Joaquin Sorolla exhibition, jacarandas in flower and palm trees suggestive of the Arab south. At the very least it would be a cambio de aires, a change of air.
I had some lofty notion that I’d pick up the keys to my son’s flat, briskly sign whatever papers were involved and would then coolly arrive in Valencia’s Biblioteca municipal, an elegant and understated library in an old hospital building set in the colonnaded grounds of a Roman palazzo. But there was an issue of course, someone was late for who-cares-what-reasons, so before my self-referential fantasy of a writerly life at the library could begin, I had to loiter for a couple of hours around what would be my son’s barrio, breathing in the sweet hormonal funk of student piss which glazed the kerbs and alleys like a varnish of pure testosterone. I sat at a café called ‘Bastard’, a name that must have seemed inspired at the time, while an industrious tiger mosquito worked on my legs. I drank the fourth coffee of the day, despite having made no plans or consideration for the call of nature. I’d have to walk it off. Café y cigarro, muñequito de barro.
And walk I did, the papers signed and keys in hand, after the enthralling novelty of a bus ride into the centre of the city. The driver implied I was an idiot for not noticing the bullring I’d asked for, but then I clawed back some dignity and saved his bacon by translating directions for a rude and ignorant Dutch tourist Karen. Decanted onto the street, I dusted off and reflected on the previous night’s amusing conversation I’d enjoyed with a linocut artist. It had been pure oxygen to talk to someone talented and interesting at last, after so long festering in my fortress of solitude and I realised, when she mentioned ‘Men in Masias’ (farmhouses like mine) that she was referring to the lunatics we slowly become. More interesting however, was the discussion of her open, long-distance relationship, the parameters of ‘ethical non-monogamy’ and the new (to me) hook-up app, ‘Feeld’
On ‘Feeld’ everyone has hooks to hang their hook ups on, there were many unfamiliar acronyms I had to decipher, FFM, MMF, some others I can’t remember, and what did ‘curious hetero-flexible’ mean in real life? Of course I had to Google several of these sexy new liberties, strapping myself down into the virtual ‘playroom’. But when I deleted the app, my curiosity more than sated, I just felt like another tired and sexless GenXer, the cohort category I insist on when my kids barb me with the label ‘boomer’. It would appear the ethical non-monogamy, the ‘primary partner’ deal, the polycules and whatnot depend on lots and lots of endlessly intense and honest communication, all of which apparently serving to make it incredibly hot and empowering.
Back in Valencia, I was hot on the bus, head swivelling like John Voight in Midnight Cowboy. Everybody was talking at me, I was dazzled by all the rushing people, the noise, the smells. A sickly strawberry candy stench billowed up out of a basement, cheap and horrific looking generic ‘Asian’ food served by Slovaks sulked in dark vats. I took in a lungful of some casposo’s cloying extravagance of aftershave, and found I already longed for the hiss of wind in the pines, the calls of night birds, total silence.
Yet the day still held some promise, I was headed to kill time at the fancy library, where I would edit and craft and such, and play at being a poet in a hip seaside city of exotic palm trees and girls with almond eyes. I fancied after some small triumph that I might step out and reward myself with an icy glass of the grainily gratifying Horchata, Valencia’s famous nut milk. But ‘Feeld’ must have got under my skin somehow, because ‘nut-milk’ of course only made me think like the sticky people I’d seen on the app.
Google maps, as it so often does, was whirling helplessly in all directions and I couldn’t centre either myself or the spinning compass needle. Tech disillusionment under duress is one of the few things these days to quicken my temper, I read the news that depleted Uranium would be deployed in Ukraine, and fantasised about shelling Google HQ with its armour piercing torrent of hot metals. My legs blossomed with angry mosquito welts while I plodded in a giant, sweaty circle, dodging trams and e-scooters like a doddering geriatric. I remembered the first rule of asking for directions in cities: Don’t bother, no one is ever from there and nobody knows anything about anything. To further complicate the situation there were building works and roadblocks on almost every street, fenced off with giant swinging cranes and screaming angle grinders. All this hullabaloo reminded me of a friend’s quip: ‘I like Spain’ he said, ‘It’ll be nice when it’s finished’.
Lost and simmering with frustration, I decided to cut my losses, just give in to it and wander about. I’d find the fucking library, si o si, but for now I had to get on with the urgent business of viscerally and terribly missing someone again after a long period of healing and grieving. Distracted and vaguely despondent, I considered buying a tarnished and crumpled trumpet in a shop window I would surely never learn to play, pondered the purchase of a green shirt printed with white lilies, hovered at the door of Primark, unable to cross the threshold. All the cakes in all the smudgy windows glistened and stank, the hazy Calima sun had an effect like sand kicked in the face and everyone at every corner appeared to have a cough. Not for the first time, I noticed Valencia’s proliferation of amputee beggars, so I googled while I walked whether this was a bad heroin thing, learning nothing. Roof tiles crashed into a skip, raising a cloud of dust. The filthy pigeons looked on, greasily.
I’d all but given up, until with a little pomp and some flags to announce that this was the work of the state, there was the library. I can’t tell you much about it because I was only there for twenty minutes, but when they built the original hospital I noticed they’d repurposed the roman columns to hold up the vaulted roof and the stonemason in me tipped his hat to the dead fellow masons. There were some curmudgeons thumbing the newspapers and perhaps only a dozen people pacing the polished travertine, while the street outside was mayhem. Someone kindly tutted when my laptop gently chimed and I began this piece of nonsense, at which point, of course, my son called. Relieved of my delusions I stepped outside to look for a taxi, pleased to see the homeless junkies could at least doze unmolested under the giant date palms shading the library gardens.
We grabbed lunch in one of those more-than-you-can-bear-to-eat joints, self-serving some rank and phoney Chinese food with a fridge-fishy chocolate tart to follow so pelagic my son spat it out in disgust. We dumped his stuff, sniffed about the apartment for a bit then slipped out of the city and gunned it back up the motorway in the wafty old Benz for three hours or so. I’m home, back up here in the hills, back to my quiet maddening, shrinking gratefully away from the world and all its complicated people. There is a barn owl shuffling beyond the shutter of one of the tiny living room windows. I’m tempted to open it to check him out, but know he would fly off, never to return, so I respect the vantage of his nightly vigil.
As a child I once picked apart a pellet coughed out by a barn owl, earnestly numbering the tiny rodent mandibles and femurs. And here I am with whatever this is, coughing out the undigestible parts of my day in Valencia, picking through the grey fur and bones, numbering and naming the shards and splinters. The pines sigh down the chimney and the frogs, beguiled into thinking it might be spring, are trying to out-sing the nightjars. It is one of the first of the last of these nights this year. Tomorrow I’ll service my chainsaw, fix a leaking pipe, get high after work, see off the bee eaters and the swallows. On Sunday I will wave off the last of my three fine sons, fed to bursting, ready to leave. ‘I’m not nervous, Dad’, he said, ‘I’m excited.’