Though I try to keep my feet firmly planted on the ground and my face below the clouds, I fear I am often lost in a hazy and dreamy romantic world.
The world as it is, at least the part I occupy, is reasonably ok, although It probably isn’t for my homeless neighbor who sleeps in the entryway of the building across the street and, it isn’t for the Palestinian graduate student from Gaza with whom I had a fine conversation a few weeks ago, much less for the young Palestinian woman jailed endlessly in the US on laughable causes.
In a particularly dreamy mood a couple of days ago, I entered a new coffee house, but one that looked rustic, removed from the space of designers and planners. To be frank, it looked like the small town Andes where I have spent much of my life.
As very blond haired and too-fair skinned boy, of clear Saxon and Scandinavian descent in the Southwestern US, I used to dream of things Spanish. I did not know Spain then other than through the reference of the people who lived around me. Many of their ancestors came from this appendage of Europe that drops into two seas as if a world unto itself.
Two of my dream worlds, joined, when I took the small steps down and into this space which I had known before as a Pakistani grocery store, though one with many Latino products.
The sign on the street offered me a breakfast of Colombian campesino coffee and empanadas. I thought, why not and entered into a place made delightful in reference to memories, films, experience and dreams.
The campesino coffee made me think of Mexican caté de olla, a delicious coffee cooked rather than brewed in pot with cinnamon and orange peel.
At the bottom, who should greet me, but a tall man with weeks-old gray scruff who spoke how I imagined a Spaniard should sound, resonant, precise, with every vowel and every consonant, even final s, in its place.
It turned out, he was more romantic than I and was married to a Colombian woman. He had lived twenty years in the back-hills of that county’s famous coffee district.
Like the Indianistas or yore, he had returned to Spain, not with Colombian gold or even “snow”, but with another valuable: high-ranked Colombian coffee.
He sat me, at a small, brightly colored table, wooden table in a room with five or six such, a glass display case, and an expresso machine.
Of course, unlike formal servers, he did not limit himself to telling the shine and joy of his toasted beans made dark mahogany liquid, though good they are. Instead he told me about coming to Spain to begin this coffee house and how they had only pushed open their heavy doors less than a month ago.
In my mind those doors became heavy, hand-carved ones appropriate to massive Adobe walls and low slung, rustic tile roofs with moss.
The man, whose name somehow did not stick in my mind, asked me where I was from and why I spoke Spanish. So I returned the favor with a twist. I asked where he was from and about his Spanish-so pristine and beautiful, as if a shiny emerald in an imperial crown.
He seemed to me as if he had returned from my imagined past and neither Spain where I now live nor from the mountains of Colombian where I have been even if I have not visited the Eje Cafetera formally.
His was the voice that I would imagine coming out of the colonial houses of Old Medellin or old Cali.
He surprised me and yet didn’t surprise me when he said he was from Toledo.
Even though I have been there, is still a city more mythological than real to me, rising on its bend of a gorge with a river far below. I did not expect him to be a Toledano, someone who might have posed for an El Greco painting.
When I mentioned his Spanish and its even, moderate pace—so unlike the desperate race of so many Colombians and almost all the Spaniards among whom I live now as well as its clear, almost text-book enunciation—he simply said “soy castellano”, I am Castilllian.
He might well have been the King of Castille speaking from his throne at that moment: a figure two thirds myth and one third reality.
I pinched myself and looked around to make sure Cervantes was not scripting this encounter along with windmills just outside the door.
He then said the Spanish here was heavily influenced by an underlying language, Valencian, and that Murcian and Andalucian were extraordinarily fast.
It struck me I liked him and his Spanish, not just because of all that, but because his voice reminded me of the old men with whom my father would gather many evenings in my northern New Mexico redoubt when I was a boy and talk.
Yes, many people came from his dialect region to settle my New Mexico, but also my Bolivia, unlike the Andalusians of the coast and the Caribbean.
Being in Spain is like a dream scape. Not only do I see people from literature and film, I also see faces and bodies I have known throughout the Latin World. I have known their their distant kin.
In a week or so, this gentleman will return to the Colombia of his dreams, while I shall remain here dreaming now about Toledo and El Greco.
P.S. the coffee was good, if not the Mexican café de olla. It was more like a camp coffee also boiled but from very good and properly toasted beans.
