sweet things, ferociously far away,

for boneless nights,

Looking for a place to live. Looking for a job. You begin to doubt your judgement, you begin to doubt everything. You become imprecise. And that’s when you’re beginning to go under. You’ve been beaten, and it’s been deliberate. The whole society has decided to make you nothing. And they don’t even know they’re doing it.
- The Art of Fiction no-78 - James Baldwin
 

‘The gypsies will take everything you have’, he promised. ‘They’ll take your nose hairs and make them into Persian rugs. They’ll marry you to each of their children while you’re sleeping. You’ll never leave this city afterwards. But it’s a good place to be…the tapas are big and there are teterias everywhere.’
We left him in a crowded bar and made our way north to Albayzin. We would stop people and ask them for directions, all of them would gasp and sigh, shaking their heads and uttering insufrible, insufrible and suggested a bus or new feet. But it was true that it was harder with backpacks. I hadn’t had such an elephant upon my shoulders in almost half a year. 
A man sat under a stone bridge stroking his beard thoughtfully and adding honey pollen into his dreadlocks so as they would hold together better. He smelt of the mountains. We stopped and asked him and he asked in bewilderment if we spoke any Finnish. No, no. English then? A little, yes. We had planned the trip badly, or bravely with spontaneity and had nowhere to stay for the night. Delfin had heard of a place called the el jardin colgante and the honey man’s eyes shone when he heard that we too knew of it. 
Dismantlement. One by one, I dislocate my fingers unconsciously until I cannot hold our map any longer. 
‘What are you doing?’, Delfin asks. I look down at my hands. I laugh - a strange sound like a mockingbird swallowing a mosquito.
‘I know this life too well, is all’.
Every firefly deserts me, rushes out of my mouth and ears. At last, I need another life. I begin to doubt everything. 

Past the heavy gate, few acknowledge us as we enter. Dogs rush around snapping at mice hiding in the trees.
A man approaches us, slightly bent over as he walks and young full of years of cheap liquor. He leads us to a small house.
‘You can sleep here’, he says in a thick Italian accent. ‘Fuck everyone else, you can sleep here, they can find somewhere else.’ And he hobbles away.
We turn away and look around. The tree next to us contains a blanket hanging from a branch. A girl greets us and begins to speak of candle wax and flamenco songs. I cut her off -
‘Lo siento pero sabes donde podemos dormir por esta noche?’ 
She begins to laugh and points at the trees.
From the trees further on, there are people hanging upside down and held by rope attached to a branch. Jardin Colgante means ‘hanging garden’. 
‘Es salud’, she promises, grinning broadly. ‘De sueños magníficos’.
Dozens of them up there snoring away.
A laughter comes out of me, causing me to jump up in the air in surprise. Even in my writing I couldn’t have imagined this. There are things that continue to astonish and awaken and in this, you are alive, you are here… and later in a teteria, a strength returns while Arabia shimmers and cries before me.

Drawing by Erica Il Cane

step right inside the storm,

‘There was a song on the radio. And with it I collapsed, just like a shot deer. There was something about it that had caught me…the thin strings of a puppet that had held me…cut.’
She sat up and smiled. Full of relief after the Sierra Nevada and thick brewed mint teas of the teterias in Granada, I gazed out at her taken aback. All these wanderings and the few that ever go anywhere. Here under an old tram bridge, sucking at the sea air in relief, at last.
Around her were scattered broken plates and mugs. I picked up one. It was created to appear to be a face with long strings hanging down from the bottom for hair. I shivered and the mug dropped from my hands bouncing off the ground and tumbling away.
‘Everything I once knew just stopped being important anymore’, she says. ‘I stood there and became heavier than the ocean’.
She looked at me, straight. Right into me.
‘You’re sad’, she says, suddenly, in an accusing way.
I curse. Sometimes I dislike to be so open.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Aiana, this is an English lesson - we don’t need to discuss my blues here’.
She becomes quiet. The howl of caged dogs in the distance. 
The night breathed in and out cutting through the air, into us. I told her about what I had lost in Granada. She began to cry. 
‘Joder, don’t cry, Maria’.
She sniffed.
‘Why can’t you ever remember my name?’
Silence. 
A dwarf approaches us and offers us a packet of tissues. That she hasn’t had a morsel to eat in years.  You are so sad, you must need tissues for those eyes of yours. The encounters at 4am under a tram bridge in this city constantly surprise me.
My babies, my babies!, she cries.
A rat jumps out of her shirt pocket. 
One of my babies…Sergio is his name, she explains.
I love you, I say.
What? they both murmur together.
Nothing, I say, and begin to walk on back, full with broken cities and flamenco dances flickering through me. The little woman sneaks off with my messenger bag. I sleep and wake in a field before I realise its disappearance. And then there are times when you can do nothing else but laugh with the rats that have followed you home.
There is nothing else to be heard of her or anything else - all there is are the waves and you, so far away, urging me on. 

Photo : Wilfred Thesiger - making his second crossing of the Rub’ al-Khali, the desolate Empty Quarter of Arabia that he described as “a desert within a desert”.

play wild, spontaneous jazz

The twelve jurors were all writing very busily on slates. ‘What are they doing?’, Alice whispered to the Gryphon. ‘They can’t have anything to put down yet, before the trial’s begun’.
‘They’re putting down their names’, the Gryphon whispered in reply, ‘for fear they should forget them before the end of the trial’.
- Alice In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.

Gradual changes in rhythm.
He stuck out his hand and offered it to me and asked ‘de donde eres’?
I curse and detach my arm, leaving my hand clasped in his, walking past the mountains of pizza, stacked to the ceiling, past the cheap plastic wine and into the kitchen.
He follows. He repeats his question, smiling. I don’t know, I tell him, finally. No lo sé. I pour out a giant glass of wine and filter it carefully through my belly button.  Es más rápido así, y sin sabor, muttering into his ear. No sabes de dónde eres? Imposible!
No, es posible. I begin to dig a tunnel in the wall. ‘Y quanto anos tienes?’, he asks, hopefully.
Joder, hombre. 

How many years do you feel you have? Only the important things can go into them, I tell him. If everything was gathered together, how long would it make? He looks me with the eyes of a burning moth. Why do I find it so hard to move past these questions? Why do they bother me so much? 
I keep digging. 
A girl taps me on the shoulder and asks, in English, what it is that I’m doing. I don’t know the word for digging in Spanish and feel relieved to speak English. I tell her that in this tunnel, anyone who wanted to speak of really very vital things would crawl into here, whisper it or shout it as loud or softly as they wanted to the person they were telling, and then they could leave again. 
-But why do you need a tunnel?
Because people feel uncomfortable with important and tender things when out in the open. 
-Oh.
People hide behind questions that they don’t care about at parties, don’t they? 
- Mmhmm. Why do you react in such a strange way to these questions?
Because it’s not me, you know? I’m not the answers because I don’t care for them. 
- Then create another part, another performance. All people want is a way to see how your eyes light up when close to you. To see excitements and the possibilities of happiness. To measure a life. Yeah, it’s all too quick, too defined, maybe even judgemental - but don’t be hard on people who don’t understand these roles. Otherwise…you become hardened in the end.

I gaze at her, shocked. 
But don’t you find it hard sometimes to sort through it all, the hoards of useless of information, the dead time, the times when nothing seems to move or grow?
-Yes. Of course. Doesn’t everyone? But instead of your strange, ugly madness why not turn it into something incredibly creative and warm? You could…
She falters.
-But…why are you using a teaspoon to dig the tunnel?

Photo from Everything Is Illuminated [2005, Liev Schreiber]. 

dancing against fear,

The oasis seems to grow from nothing
- from The Desert Seas with David Attenborough 

As soon as I acknowledge its arrival, I hop on down to the sea. And when it approaches, the fear always returns. Better to be in control and destroy it myself than allow it to come and go as it pleases.

On the way, a man stood beside a full shopping cart stacked as high as a small mountain. He had a grey beard of a goat that went all the way down to his knees and he smelt of oranges and sea salt. He played the radio and from it came the voice woman reading poetry, softly, rivers of it. He lived there, under the tram tracks. Passing him, I caught him in a search for something in the air, inside himself - a memory, a moment, a feeling. He scrambled at invisible rocks. There are times when I would try and talk with men like this. But not today.

The days had been good and true for more than a week. Absurd. Full of hopes and contentment. The stories that are formed upon my bicycle into central, by the sea. And the donkeys walk on regardless in this city, scruffy haired and oblivious. The orange trees mumble about the time of yonder years but they grow sweeter and sweeter despite it all. Without masks, this city stood without moaning, sleepy and quiet. 
The old people walk out to the sea and pass the days on the great boulevard waiting for someone to come and talk to them. On a Sunday they’ll wear suits and smart dresses and they’ll stare at the sky until dusk comes. Some of them speak of laughter and then against everything I know - a happiness settles into me.

As soon as I acknowledge its arrival, I go to the sea. I must pretend in future days that it is not there, that it has not landed upon my shoulder. I scoot by the troll under the bridge. I had passed the previous night running into a wall, willing myself to fight again. It’s all I know. I go with the pasado simple and broken sunglasses. Shit. More than anything, they’re against the goldfish who swim on by with office bellies and stale breaths. I sit in the sea. Let it lap me up. When I get too cold I head out to a seat, sheltered from the wind.
Within a couple of a minutes, two men and a woman surround me speaking Russian and asking themselves what is for dinner, what will be for breakfast, then lunch tomorrow. The meticulous planning. Retirement plans. Life insurance. They gaze out at me with fishtank eyes and then they remove their clothes. The men’s bodies had not seen the sun in twenty years. Huge blizzards out there. Their nipples emit a peculiar puss and they never once close their eyes. The woman strolls up and down the path gazing close at people sitting like me. If this is a life. Everything dulls, loses brilliance and fuerza and I begin to squawk until they pack up and leave far down the beach. Instead of transformation and laughter, I allow them annoyance and strange sounds. In return I cut off my legs with an old fishing hook and slide on back past the troll who looks at me sadly and nods his head in greeting as I slither on by.
I wake the next day with a cactus growing out of my chest and I suckle at its fruit greedily. The blues come and go with suitcases and bombs. Let them come, let them come. What highs and plights there are to be found!

Photo - from Pina [2011, Wim Wenders]

it will only feed desire,

What the water gave me by Frida Kahlo, 1938

A man playing piano by the river in a dinner suit, eyes swimming in climaxes and bomb wreckage. His attention was not with the music but upon the man sitting serenely gazing into the water. A mist hangs over the ice and everything is frozen upon the river, yet the forest appears untouched. The piano notes grow in intensity, infused with the licks of the wind. 

As if urgent and on a whim of instinct, the sitting man rises and tucks himself into a ball and throws himself into a hole in the river. It forces a sharp intake of breath, the temperature could cease the blood flow. 
A girl sits there too. I knew her once in a long lost dream, lifetimes ago. 
From the trees another man joins the piano player with a violin. He has absent eyes as if from within some kind of terrible war where people do terrible things to each other without any longer knowing why. His ears, quite like dried apricots, twitch every time an impulse for a new direction within the music comes. Every hair upon his body stands at attention when he plays.
I approach the girl, deeply sad and confused. She looks at me, smiling. 
’Before living, you must die’, she whispers into my ear. The words fill me as desert winds in Tunisia that have once swept through me. The piano turns to thunder and the violin into gypsy music of a long, faraway travel. We pass into the water. We’re naked but I forget myself. I forget my tail, my doubts, my memories of joy. Everything. Je suis un autre.
I laugh and the water comes through me, filling me entire. To be engulfed must be the greatest desire.

esperemos aqui por la nieve,

You cannot walk straight
when the road bends
- Romani proverb

Waiting under a crooked hotel, tipping my boots upside down; wine, tea and sea water spilling on out. Is that all I am? I mutter to myself, my voice low and husky - trembling with the Mediterranean winds, sea salt thick at the back of my throat. Keep checking behind me for a tail. We’re all rats, she had breathed into my ear the other night. And I go the other way, away from the deadlines and constant hunger but just as blind, into ruin and isolation, tall tales and incoherent truths.

I sit on a wall and watch the woman I pass every Saturday ever since I had arrived, often early in the morning as the sun was just stretching out, and when I would return as the sun was setting she would remain there eerily like a dwarf. She was likely my height. Perhaps I’d always been a lot smaller than I’d imagined myself to be. What had continued to startle me was that she did not take on the appearance or impatience of one who was waiting for something. She was within herself watching everything and everyone, a cockroach waiting for the honey jar to fall so as it could scurry on over to it and dive straight in the wreck. 
I planned to understand who she was.
Her eyes were black straight through and I could not tell if she was sixteen or fifty two such was her body, of a young man, such was her expression of a sulking girl from the burning caravan blues. Upon her forehead were a thousand wrinkles, vastly more so than the shrivelled old women in Sofia selling a handful of herbs picked from the street, hovering always by the train station exit steps. Her skin was that of one that had never known a shadow.
She sat there for hours and I did too, telling myself tales of the man who pulls a sack of bananas with him everywhere he goes smoking the skins to lift him back in to ideas and constant thoughts. I ask him sometimes if it works and he looks at me and curses at me straight down telling me that he’s empty again and it’s all my damned fault. The skins trail behind him in a line and there’s not one thing anyone can do about it ‘cos they’re all natural, you see, composting. 
The howling dogs, the man living in the purple kennel close to my casita, always telling me, ‘imagine more, live more’ while swigging on a bottle of local wine, gritty that goes down hard. He wears robes and reads Don Quixote over and over & swims in the sea every day. I can never find him when I’m sad.
I have become a master at waiting but the next time I look up she’s gone.
I weave through the traffic, spin past as motorcycle and where she was sitting lies only a drop of oil - extra virgin olive oil. A new advertising scheme by the Spanish government, I realise. Olives picked by pretty young immigrants. Without even the financing to design a sign. The people are clever, they will understand what all this means, they’re intelligent enough to be sold to. But times are hard, here. Let’s wait for the snow.

[Photo by Dr. Giuseppe Mazza]

dig a way out from the bottom of the sea,

You are a clever little man,
full of fantasy and doubting,
-Rumi

Old mountain songs crackled out from the radio, husky and broken. Here there were only men with stained yellow fingernails and pressed white shirts - all heading out to deal in electrical supplies at the end of the world. Hanging over the bar were large legs of salted meat occasionally chiselled at by the barman who stuck his chest out when he moved and not once exhaling. 
Upon the fire a cook toasts our bread. When it’s ready, he slices fresh tomatoes, mixes them with a little salt, herbs and extra virgin olive oil and pushes the twirling plate down the bar towards us. 
‘Esta es la mejor tostadas del mundo’, Vincente announced grinning. ‘Dime que no es’.
The first time that I’d had bread from the fire before.
‘Escuchame’, he says, leaning to me.
‘Que?’
‘Trabajo con los muertes - solo tienes un poco de tiempo, sabes?’
He was the first pathologist I’ve met since I’ve known the definition of the word. I grinned and green tea spurts out of my eyes splashing Vincente in the chest. He rubs it off as if it were a mosquito. Ever since i have arrived here he has laughed with me and listened to my mistakes in his language. It is hard not to feel remarkably lucky with such an acquaintance.
‘What is important for you?’, he asks in English.
There are things that I cannot begin to say in Spanish. In any language.
I shrug and write on a drink mat of the hanging pig legs jumping out onto the bar and demanding a trough of water.

the dormouse who swallowed time,

Their nightmares are our dreams
- Daniel Cohn-Bendit, May 68 
 
They sit me down at the table and ask, ‘Jass, quanto tiempo piensas quedarte?’
The question from the centre of the earth. I gnaw off my arm and fall into the night. 
Cycle furiously, as ever, scaring the concrete eyed dolls out of their skins while they wait in mini skirts on the street corners under the orange moon. My foghorn brakes. Anticipating the moment when it falls apart. The creek of the peddles, the slurp of the chain, the cracking of earth in the changing of gears. 
I go to the sea. A woman is always there naked with the skin of sun dried tomatoes , walking in and out of the water. Never going deeper, nunca. I ask her, one night, por qué no? She looks at me, through me and prods me in the chest and walks back to her beach towel. 
I bury my head in the sand and await the return of visions.

the riddle of the end of the world,

We will sail pathless and wild seas
-Walt Whitman

Every once in a while, an old man would open the door and look up at the sky for signs of snow.A long, long time of absence. The aching wait. When it comes it will be a fine day. I could not imagine it settling upon the tangerine trees.
It was hot on this day. I wanted to tell him that there are so many other things to hope for but his eyes were startling white, full of mountain mist. And I couldn’t do it.
Across the road were North African men with nicotine hole marked skin watching another juggling a with a diabolo, spinning and weaving in the air. They were out of cigarettes and sucked on their knuckles instead. Their smiles were hard, rigid, an effort to form into place. 
A couple approach the door that I wait at and buzz the same name that I’d tried without answer. Soon after a man, suited and with shiny pointed shoes twice the size of my own but who was no taller than I approaches and shakes their hands, guides them through with keys. I curse as the door closes. A woman with a hunched back and a black veil passes me quietly murmuring & hooting pigeon songs. 
I press the buzzer again. Nothing. I put my ear real close to the speaker in case the passing mopeds were blocking out all the noise. Just my heart inside a canyon and the crackle of the intercom. The feeling of a swarm of fireflies darting through the left side of my body, thousands of them. I can only ever remember this feeling a couple of times in life, important moments of heightened instinct. But I could not understand this, here, of all places.
The man in the suit exits the door and pushes the buzzer several times without looking at me. Estoy confundido…estoy aquí para una entrevista, I whisper in his ear. He looks at me and makes the smile of a cheshire cat. I follow him in and up the stairs. 

And I wait. 
I wait until my hair turns grey. In the reflection of the board room, I see wrinkles appear on my forehead. All the worries I have had that never did me no good. My entire life digested and showing up upon my face. A small girl enters the room and stares at me as if I were a giant bee. They all look at me the same way. Searching me for answers that I once had, somewhere.
He calls me in and sits opposite the desk. A man enters and crouches down beside me, for there are no more chairs and is announced as a colleague. He wears big thick rimmed black glasses and leans in immediately to examine me no more than a couple of inches away from my face. I can feel his coffee breath heavy upon my cheeks. I ignore him and listen to the questions.
‘It’s okay in Spanish?’, the man with the shiny shoes asks.
‘Si si - vaya, vaya’. Until the important parts. 
‘You will speak to them until they are ready to leave’, he says, ‘and then you can leave too. They may have many questions for you. Now, let me ask you, why are you here, in this city of all cities you could live in?’
I smile broadly. 
‘Have you ever gotten to the end of the world, your world? Then you go towards the things that you need most in this moment?’ 
He looks at me, understanding. He writes notes on a piece of a paper.
‘Yes, yes, I have’, he says. ‘Then I got lost. Then I appeared here. Well. That’s good. How old are you?’
I tell him. With my greyed hair and cracked teeth, he looks twice and writes it down. 
He writes it down again, again and again. We pass minutes as he fills the page. As if it my age were a riddle. From the door next to us comes a knocking. A woman in a grey formal business dress comes out. Another knock and a man follows with slick back hair. Across from me, the man clears his voice, smiles and makes a discovery. 
‘Well, nine hours a week - Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday. We will pay this much.’ He turns over the piece of paper and writes it down, pushing it towards me.
I turn and coffee still breathes upon me, formlessly. 
‘We do hope you will be happy with us. Let us know when you’ve made your decision.’
I nod. 
Outside the old man and the snow wait for each other. I collect my bicycle and head towards the sea.

goldfish tea,

When I was little, one radio station played the sounds of the sea.
Giant waves. 
- Biutiful (2010) directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu

Watermelon juice filled the sky and a slice of the moon sucked at my breath with its lungs. There were a lot of them out there and a couple soon came up to me, the man stroking my chest, searching me for lost maps. Dirt paints their faces and encrusts their nails. Their eyes were those that I’d passed my entire life avoiding. They lead me into a small cabin full of goldfish floating in tea cups.
The woman kneels down and rips off my dress and I do not have breasts and I’m painfully conscious of the thought that they may have not realised this yet as the man licks at my knee caps, hairy, hungrily and rough. The woman leans into me with a tongue like that of a lizard, massaging my lips with its tip, jolting in and out.
Her eyes are of an abandoned building, bombed fifteen years or so ago, that I once slept within just outside of Belgrade. A grinning priest walks in muttering gibberish soon followed by an old woman singing mountain songs, feeding the goldfish grain by grain. I burst wide open from longing for greater days while they continue on entering me from behind, from all directions.
The most brilliant years of my life often spent comatose; frequently tremendous and passionate. Yet here I am, nesting in train wrecks.