Otherwise What?--Chapter ?--Arriving at Miguel's

This chapter is the second to last one in the book. In it the protagonist is on a flight back to the US. She is reminiscing about the first day of her trip two months prior, and is beginning to write some things down, (including the Introduction, which some of you may have already read.) Although this chapter belongs at the end, I am posting it first, because it gives a taste for how the story sets out.

All posts are subject to change and probable denial that they have anything to do with me whatsoever. For the record, all characters, as well as the plot, are entirely fictional. Many of the places really exist near Granada, in el Cabo de Gata, and the Alpujarra Mountains, Spain.

Beware, super-unedited still.....

Let me know what you think

:)

Rachael

P.S. You have to click "Read More"

Arriving at Miguel's    

    Once the juices got flowing, I knew exactly where to begin: at the bus station that day I ended up at Miguel’s. Fresh out of college, with a social work degree, and a minor in education, I arrived at the ASNA bus station, just outside Granada, with two months and no plans ahead of me.
    The last few weeks leading up to graduation has been stressful, with exams, saying goodbye to friends, and worst of all, wondering if the last three years had been a big waste of money and time. Now I was qualified to get paid for doing something I believe in, but what am I supposed to tell my students they can do? Social Security is bankrupt. The global economy is fundamentally evil, not to mention collapsing. The planet demands that humans recognize our relationship to it for the survival of our species. Before leaving, I had landed a job working in a residential school for elementary students who were removed from their families of origin and were waiting for foster parents. If I was lucky I could even bring in my passion-art-perhaps in a way that is healing.
    But what are you supposed to tell kids inheriting a world full of problems their predecessors couldn’t handle? “See this row of hoops? Ok, all together now, let’s jump!” We need to address the divide between ethics and science, we need to evaluate the costs of free market capitalism, the war on terror, abstract intellectualism. We need to solve our food, and clear and air and water crisis. We need to reclaim the Arts. We need to figure out what’s going to happen when robots come to our doors and we have no stone stair case and a trapdoor in our basements to run away to. Otherwise what? Well, look around and see.
    So, it had been a busy year, and I was hoping to get some clarity by visiting my Spanish friends I’d met the summer after high school when I’d come to Spain to try and learn the language. I hadn’t slept much on the plane ride, and rather than feel excited on the bus ride from Madrid to Andalusia, I became more and more anxious. The entire landscape through Castilla and past Jaen is one endless olive plantation. “What if I turn up and they don’t want me there?” My friend’s scene is a counter culture one, and now I was a bonafied upholder of the institutions, living beyond my means, no longer smoking pot, not even taking my art seriously anymore.
    That summer after high school was the highlight of my life. My plan was to learn Spanish on my own by being brave and just talking to people while backpacking around painting and writing. It was pure coincidence that I’d met Tito and Fer, who introduced me to flamenco music and Spanish poetry. The three of us together on a drive through the mountains had the good fortune of picking up Agus hitchhiking one day. Bea was staying with friends of hers in town indefinitely, so they rented us her part of the house for really cheap. (Agus and Bea had been married for over 25 years, but always had their own living quarters).
    Spain makes you want to stand up on the table top and dance, to stamp your feet, and wear your craziest outfit in public on a random occasion. But I had tightened up. The last three years had dulled me into becoming an adult, whatever that means. For months I’d been filling out job applications worrying, “Will they be able to tell I’m really not very professional? Will my clothes be alright? Will my students behave themselves? Otherwise what?
    Now, looking out the windows of the bus at infinite olive trees, whose trunks were immortal and twisted like bonzis, my fears were the opposite: “Have I sold myself out? Can I get my inspiration back? will Agus still treat me like I’m his child, or did I make that up? Are my artistic friends just really immature losers, all in their 30’s, 40’s or older, running around like peace-mongering hippies? Who am I? Then I was the token mascot, a bohemian traveler, converted by flamenco. Today I am different. What am I running away from? Which persona really am I? Do I have to choose one?

.......

    Pen and paper in hand on the plane ride, I remembered that bus ride. When I’d gotten out, totally sleep deprived, I decided to spend the night in Granada rather than catch another bus right away to Agus’ house in the Alpujarras. I expected I’d recognize the station and know my way around. I must have taken a city bus or a taxi last time I came, because as I started walking towards town, nothing looked familiar. As it turns out, I was walking in the wrong direction, heading west instead of east.
    The buzz of travel began to hit me. As I continued along the main drag, my breathing picked up and my pack caused my shirt to stick to the sweat on my back. This wasn’t the mythical Granada I remembered, with music serenading from Moorish ramparts, jasmine vines and aroma overflowing from enclosed courtyards, the old cobblestone streets of the Jewish quarter. Instead, stray dogs peed in front of lurching trucks. Young black haired mothers dragged their toddlers through the filthy streets. Logos of American brands flashed in grubby storefronts cluttered with packaged snacks. Only the occasional bakery or fruit stand reminded me that I was in Spain.
    Finding an ATM machine, I took out some euros and bought two perfectly right chilimoyas, a liter of water, and a bag of dates, stopping to eat on a public bench. A railway crossed the putrid street in front of me. Glancing along it, a green oasis was visible across the cultivated plains, tall trees drinking from el Rio Genil. Deciding to take the path less traveled, I left the road for cars and followed the train tracks. This way was much more pleasant, passing by properties of tall trees with pale bark planted in immaculate rows, green fields, recently tilled plots, and other odd shaped lots of many different colors with prickly shrubs between them.
    “I can just take my time,” I thought. “Nobody is expecting me.”
    I chose not to worry about where I would sleep. “Something will work out. I can always find a cheap hotel.”
    Not a soul was on the tracks. A couple times I had to move way off to the side to let passenger trains roar by, once making me step in a patch of stinging nettle, which burned my ankles for hours. It’s supposably good for blood circulation.

.......


    The woman in the neighboring seat fell asleep, leaving me less self-conscious to zone into space and reminisce. I wasn’t writing anything about this, just remarking with amazement how the soul can transport itself to absolutely any place it wants. This was the first time I has revisited the lead-up to what happened at the train station and then at Miguel’s. Surprisingly the world opened up all its crystaline detail.
    The tracks led me out of town and small villages scattered around the Vega were too far away to invade my privacy. I shed my cotton cardigan, becoming light and free in my stretchy tank top. The damp shirt, hooked to the outside of my pack along with some sprigs of fresh thyme and lavender flowers, dried in the hot air, sweat being consumed by the atmosphere. The great sun was probably burning my face, but I didn’t mind. In the shade of a large sycamore tree, chaffing with it’s US army camoflage bark, I sat on the hard dirt and ate my other chilimoya. The chilimoya is my favorite fruit, after blueberries. It tastes identical to pina-colada, has an iguana-like skin, and off-white edible pulp which surrounds enclosing myriad smooth dark brown pits the size of romantic Mediteranian irises. I spit the seeds as far as I could and then played balancing games on the iron tracks, feeling much better now.
    The next village was about a half a kilometer ahead when my first mystical experience happened. Before I reached the railroad crossing coming into view, I spotted a makeshift little shack perched on the embankment beside the rails. I scrambled up the eight or ten steps, carved into the dry clay earth, and found a refuge, complete with a covered mattress, a writing desk, a fire pit, and many other bizarre trifles. The shelter stood on four meager wooden posts, with a rippled piece of sheet metal for a roof. It had two side walls woven with twigs between larger upright branches. The back wall against some shrubs was a sun-bleached tapestry from India. Facing south, my temporary abode overlooked an agricultural valley with cement irrigation ditches dividing it. The snowcapped peaks of the Sierra Nevadas loomed in miniature to the left, La Velata the tallest among them.
    I must have realize then that Granada was behind me. “If needed I can stay here for the night,” I thought.
    All the decor in the shanty harkened to the feminine, the flowery duvet on the bed, the lace-covered pillow. The most prizewinning piece of furniture present, a faux baroque desk, with most of it’s turquoise paint chipped off and scratched, housed a trusty recycled chair. Draped across the lean-to face of the dwelling a thick muslin curtain provided some shade from blaring afternoon heat. Over a dozen wind chimes hung from the same beam. From where I squatted by the unlit fire pit, they looked like ceremonial dancers framed by light.
    Taking off my backpack and my shoes, I explored the little fort. A yellowed Spanish translation of Huxley’s Brave New World lay beside the bed on a wooden crate, stacked atop two volumes of poetry by Juan Ramon Jimenez, a copy of the I Ching, and The Gift, by Hafiz, a sufi mystic, which happened to be in English. I opened this last book randomly to a page. It was titled, “The Imagination does not Exist.” Taking a sip of my luke-warm water, I read aloud to myself, the sound of my own voice giving ears to everything around.

“You should come close to me tonight wayfarer
For I will be celebrating you.
Your beauty still causes me madness,
Keeps the neighbors complaining
When I start shouting in the middle of the night
Because I can’t bear all this joy.

I will give birth to suns
I will be holding forests upside down
Gently shaking soft animals from trees into my lap.

What you conceive as Imagination
Does not exist for me.

Whatever you can do in a dream
Or in your mind-canvas
My hands can pull--alive--from my coat pocket.

But let’s not talk about my divine world
For what I most want to know tonight is
All about
You.”

--Hafiz

    The highway droned in the distance. An occasional car passed in the village nearby. Here, all was absolutely quiet and still. Even the little Tibetan prayer flags fastened inside the ridgepole  were motionless. A little bronze figurine of the God Ganesh was perfectly on one leg, balancing his chubby boy with an array of arms.
    “What does this mean, ‘the Imagination doesn’t exist?’” Although my public profile depicted public services and education, as my personal priority, deep down inside, Imagination was always the ultimate. “Writing and painting are what keep me sane. In fact, I believe the future of Art is Art being a process for healing, rather than commercial, or even expressive, reasons.” Something about the poem resonated for me, though, even if it flew in the face of what I hold most dear.
    I pulled my iPhone from the top of my bag. (This has a tendency to happen unconsciously whenever even slightly unsettling situations arise.) My water was almost gone, and I was too sketched out to sleep out there alone. Maybe if I was a guy. With Google Maps, I could see exactly where I was and typed in ‘hotels.’ There were two in the village up ahead. Atarfe it’s called.
    The sun would be up for several hours more, and hence technologically reassured, I decided to write for awhile. I came up with a really cool writing exercise in which I entered a stream of consciousness free write in the lefthand side of the page. Then, on the other side, a second poem transcribes the first, line by line. The column on the right states what I really meant the first time and is more raw, vulnerable, and in honest terms, as though re-writing Jazz lyrics into Blues, or changing styles from Rock n’ Roll to Flamenco.

.......


        This deepening experience had already altered me by then. Remembering it again, I could clearly discern that was around the time my consciousness began to shift. I wrote a few things down finally on the little notebook Marco gave me, trying not to nudge the lady on my left. The plane rose and then careened flatly down a hundred or so feet, entrusting itself to gravity. She did not stir. I wished I’d had the journal with me still. It would have been interesting to see what I wrote my first day there, unaware of what was to come, as I tried to bridge the gap between what I imagine and what is real.
    “The body can’t tell the difference between a fantasy and a real event. That’s what neurobiologists say. So if imagined events are real, since the body experiences all the same chemical effects, aren’t external events internalized as well? That would in turn project internal events outward again as fantasies.” No wonder I was acting weird by the time I reached Miguel’s. Thinking about that kind of stuff can blow your mind any day!
    I remember ver clearly what happened next. There was a chime on a pile of bricks beside the desk with a beautiful little instrument on top. I picked up the mallet, a surprisingly nice quality wood prong with a ceramic ball at the tip. I struck it against the straight metal tube perched horizontally on felt pads and a small wood stand. As the chime vibration began to fade, another sound, an octave lower resounded.
    “What is that?” I looked around, but everything was as before. The patchwork of fields were germinating immperceptably before me. Silent insects shuttled through the peaceful air. I rang the chime again. This time I followed the deeper noise to one of the bells hanging from the ridgepole. It was rectangular, possibly also made of steel, or iron. “Why did this bell ring, while the others are silent!” Dangling skinny chimes, a copper bell shaped like a miniature one from a cathedral, and many others, hung in a row, oblivious, still waiting. That is when it hit me--how resonance works. You need to have the inner template for something to be recognizable to you! And vise versa, what ripples out of us will only be conceivable to that which has access to a similar vibration within them.
    I believe I meditated after that, sitting on the edge of the mattress, my face shaded, my crossed legs bathed in warm sun. The breathe became slow, the the mind’s sediment  was able to settle. Then I gathered my things, put everything back the way I had found it, and walked to Atarfe.

.......


    Where the train tracks crossed the narrow paved road was a modest one-story building with a walled-in terrace. A large fig tree grew within it, and it’s branches extended out over the gravel platform alongside the track. A bench was build into the whitewashed wall, and the building attached to it had large windows overlooking the tracks as though it were a public station. But there were no signs that the station was open, nor that it had been in decades. The only sign of life was a radio playing on the other side of the wall, which was about my height. I believe it was El Bicho emanating from the shrouded garden, which I would become quite familiar with in the days to come. El Bicho is a Flamenco punk rock band, the Pink Floyde of the Iberian Peninsula. Those who are into them love them and never grow out of it, no matter from which walk of life you come. Since the old station appeared to be a private residence, and all the other houses past it faced toward the village, I turned right and found myself on the main street.
    A couple blocks further on was the new train station, which was modern, digitalized, and horrendously generic. Every square inch of wall space, between the ticket booth, the bathrooms, and the backlit RENFE map, were slot machines. Slot machines are big in Spain. The whole country is one giant casino, and they are always being used. It’s usually men that play them, their backs turned, feeding their scarce coins into the ding-donging, flashing, ratcheting, mechanisms. In front of the only windows in the entire station were two electronic signs, “Llegadas” and “Salidas,” arrivals and departures.
    I used the bathroom, and as I came out, I encountered the first experience of communication with an inanimate object of the adventures to come. It was a white cloth which lay on the plastic rows of seats attached by metal posts to the tile floor. It was the most beautiful cloth I had ever seen, primitive and unheard of, and I understood immediately it had been placed there for me. The fragile veil was embroidered with designs of plants and animals and bordered with geometrical shapes. Its folds were newly charged from someone freshly posing it, but no person was to be seen anywhere nearby. I knew this white cloth was a sign. “It is a metaphor. When you know about the veil, it no longer exists. Everything is what it is. Everything tells its story, reveals its desires, its suffering, its fate, in a single instant. Nothing is hidden nor other than it seems.” Since there was no one there, I went and sat a few seats down from the white shawl. I marveled at how every single thing around me had been created with this of intention, placed with this importance of meaning. Foreground and background converged, and every contrast became a prophetic verse.

.......


    I’m not sure how long I sat there. After some time, a lopsided man asked if he could sit down in the seat next to me. Without waiting for a response, he did so saying, “What time is your train?”
    “I’m not waiting for a train.”
    “Oh. Somebody’s picking you up?” What time? Would you like to have some dinner first?” He gestured towards the semi-restaurant establishment within the station, where basically all they serve is beer, wine, coffee, break, and pork.
    I was not longer caught up in the specifics of words. In its stead the intonation of our speech was riddled with layers of meaning, and time had somehow slowed down enough for me to unravel every one. This man was clearly very lonely. He just needed to be loved, although his approach, unbenounced to him, was utterly repelling. Infused by the creative verve of everything around me, my capacity for compassion was through the roof. My heart even beat as though I was in the presence of my beloved, and amazingly I felt no sensation of annoyance towards this guy.
    “That’s very kind of you to ask,” which (because of my intonation and strength of will) he gathered as “no.”
    “Are you from Germany?” he asked.
    “I’m from the United State.”
    “Oh, the United States!” He became excited. “Barak Obama.”
    I wasn’t sure if he was going to complete his sentence, so I waited. The man continued. “So you came to see the Alhambra Palace? In your country you no old buildings. Only big sky scrapers.”
    “It’s amazing how much this man longs to connect and how poorly he knows how to,” I observed.
    He seemed to get another idea. “Have you heard of Camaron? The King of Flamenco. He is playing tonight! I can get you tickets if you like. They’re sold out.”
    Camaron de la Isla had died almost 20 years ago. I decided it was time to stop enabling this poor fellow. “Don’t bullshit me, Mr. Now leave me alone.”
    He glanced around. There were other people milling about and a few policemen standing by the door.
    “You know, all you Americans are the same,” he jeered peevishly.
    “Oh yeah?” I responded lightly.
    “You can try all your life, but nobody can help but turn out the same as the conditions they grew up with.”
    “Or you can let go of your past and do what makes you happy.”
    “It’s impossible,” said the pork chop. “Prove it.”
    Calmly, I took the jackknife from inside my bag. As the man looked on in shock, I opened the tiny sharp scissors of the tool and cut my beautiful, long, thick hair off, holding it together with one hand and with the other snipping around my throat. Then I threw the robust healthy bundle of hair in the trashcan next to us. He walked away.

.......


    No wonder I’d not wanted to remember any of this earlier. I was acting totally nuts. It’s even embarrassing to think about now. “I wonder if Miguel would have let me in if he’d known I’d just lopped off all my hair on a whim an hour before.” Even though my new do came out sort of uneven, many of his friends are kind of punky, with sprigs of various colored hair sticking out in all directions. It shouldn’t have made any difference.
    The policemen were making me really uncomfortable. Everyone in the place seemed hell bent on being miserable. Doing anything out of the ordinary was strictly out of the question. I still felt the spaciousness in my chest, but to get some more air I went out to the street again. It had started getting dark. The music from the old station had made an impression on me, so I returned there and sat on the long bench looking up at the fig branches, gentle and stocky like elephants’ bodies. Similar music was still playing, accompanied by friendly voices and the clanging of pots.

“I woke up
Before the day dawned,
Before the light came,
Overjoyed, not having slept all night.

Yes I am thinking of you,
That I can go on thinking.
If you loose yourself, I am lost,
Amidst all of this.

Look how I have enough for you
Watch how I have enough for so much,
That even the wind breathes me
And the air calms itself down.

See how I have enough for you
How I have enough for all that
So even the wind sighs
It’s just that the air.....

If you don’t know me
That hold the things
That make sense
Do not touch them.

Tell me what sense is there
If you understand me
Without hearing me,
And until there, the night comes.

My girl’s got a sense of humor
She’s kidding around
le le le lei lei lei lei

Look, I have enough for you
I have enough for so much
That even the wind takes me in
And the air becomes calm.”

--El Bicho

    I really liked the song. When it was over, I looked up and, about three yards from me, elbows resting on the wall, looking across the tracks at dusk, was Miguel. His skinny arms were muscular, and his half bald head and disheveled ponytail were hallowed in light from inside. His face was kind. Several women’s voices came from what sounded like the kitchen. Just then he turned.
    “Would you like to come in and join us?” the man looking out invited.
    I nodded, feeling like we’d been friends for a long time.

.......


    That’s where the story begins. I started writing, trapped in the silver bird with all these stranger who are just like me, suspended somewhere between the sky and the ocean.