A Bus to Romania

The day is speeding away, ever faster. On average each is colder. Winter stalks us. 

A rather handsome man, in good shape, with only one tooth in his smile sits on folded cardboard outside, in front of the Supermarket’s sliding door, an empty cup in his hand and the trained ability to quickly turn from smile to suffering in his eyes. 

This morning, when I went to buy food to make for lunch, he was surrounded by men in yellow and green vests and I worried something was up. 

Why should I worry?  Well, I have been speaking with him there and on the street corner now for months. Besides his normal plea for food—not money, he has shared a whole range of expressions, a positive encyclopedia of experiences and looks. He has told me about his six children, of course. He uses them as justification for begging when his person is not sufficient motivation. 

After a while though, I have come to believe him.  

My neighbor from two floors down came up to me. “David, I saw you talking to a Romanian. You have got to be careful. Do not believe anything they say. They just want to get money from you and even if they have to steal it.” 

I thanked him for his advice. He is after all, a good and big-hearted man. But after weighing his advice against what I have learned about this man, more than facts, bits and pieces of his life and soul, I decided to set it aside. I continued to talk to the man in front of the store, let’s call him Alex. 

Most days, when I go into the store, I say hello and ask him what he needs since he says it is for his children and that he does not have papers to live here and so cannot work. True and not true. With out papers you work a la negra, in the black market of jobs and labor. You are badly paid and people can take advantage of you. 

Alex prefers to beg. I think that is a harder task, to be honest with you. 

A man from Colombia I know in his early fifties, let us call him Luís, arrived without papers and found he could not legally reside anywhere and could not find a way to get papers for a job without an address, a local phone number, and someone to sponsor him with the city government in order to register him at an address, what they call empadronamiento. 

Every day, Luís walked the streets looking for opportunities and odd jobs. He found low paying occasional work that allowed him to pay rent and eat, but did not allow him to send money to his elderly mother nor for his youngest son who were dependent on him. They almost did not make it. 

One day, Luís lucked out. A local company needed laborers. They took him on sub rosa, liked him, and then decided to sponsor him. He now works legally.     

The process is very difficult and many do not make it, though many, like Luís, do. I do not know all of Alex’ history nor his ethnic and social background. 

He says he is from Romania, as my neighbor intuited. But my neighbor meant gypsy—he was being polite—and not every Romanian is gypsy. That is to say, Alex is not a light skinned, Romanian Romanian, but a dark skinned gypsy one, what people outside those circles often call Roma, to avoid the stigma of gypsy. 

In Spain gitano, the Spanish word for gypsy, is not a bad word. It is the normal one. I fact, the provincial government publishes numbers on how many gitanos reside in Alicante, the city and the province as does the Foundation of the Gypsy Secretariat. The Foundation uses in Spanish the word Roma while the government just uses gitano. Alicante Province has one of the largest numbers of Roma in Spain with more than 60,000. Alicante city has around 9,000 people.

I suspect that Romanian Roma do not integrate easily into Spanish Roma communities. Their language and customs and, maybe tribal belonging, are different. 

Back to Alex. I went up to him when the men in vests left, nervous for what might have happened. He greeted me with a wide and warm smile on his face, a cup of warm coffee in his hand and a half eaten pastry to his side. They had come to check on him. 

Alex had told me two days ago, on the street corner, that he was returning to his country. He has to go back. He can’t make it work here.  When I saw him today he said he cannot take his children with him. He barely has enough money for his bus trip and cannot afford to take them. Alex’ wife will stay here with the children. They are in school he said and he does not want to take them out. 

My fingers are crossed for them. Gypsies have one of the lowest rates of educational completion in Spain.

Alex has been complaining that it has been getting harder and harder for him. 

There is a gaunt, black and gray bearded Spanish man who often competes with Alex for that place, the best to get donations from people entering and especially leaving the store. I do not know him. His eyes are always down cast, making it hard to break ice. 

Another man, much younger, has broken into the territorial struggle. He is much more aggressive, both in begging and in claiming turf. Alex says he is a drug addict. 

I do not know about that but I can see Alex is facing difficulty in finding a profitable place from which to obtain the beneficence of the passer’s by.

When he returns, as he says he will, I hope to see him and learn more about his trip home and his family here. Maybe I will talk with some of the other street workers (beggars) who look like they could be his kin in terms of physical features, or who are just Romanians. 

Winter is coming and spring, along with warming weather and flowers, may well bring the next chapter of this story.   

Barriers and Shuffling: Another Day in Alicante

 

A man, with well barbered gray hair, and a clipped and combed mustache hobbled while pushing his blue walker up the slight incline into the Cafe where I sit. I see him almost every day, either sitting on his walker in a cafe and sipping coffee or sitting in the shade on a street. I also see him with his halting pace working to get around. 

I know nothing of his story other than what I can intuit: he is retired, somewhere in his mid-seventies, with legs that barely work. Yet, he refuses to leave it at that, and continues, day in and day out, to shuffle on a few block round that makes up his mornings. 

Of course, I—a half year seventy-year old—walk much of the same round daily because my flat is on its edge and I too insist on walking. I have feet that have seen better days and sometimes just feel numb. But I work them, to keep what feeling and mobility I have—fortunately my mobility is good even if sensation is not quite there. Pre-diabetes and peripheral neuropathy along with intense chemo for leukemia of which, fortunately, I have been “cured”, have had their way with my feet to my frustration. 

But that is life.  My Grandmother on my mother’s side , who immigrated from West Yorkshire, had leg and feet problems that seemed so mysterious to me. They were always bothering her and mornings she would carefully wrap them. I did not understand until recently, my aunt who is in her nineties and suffering Alzheimer’s heard me state I had gout. She said “oh David, you have inherited mother’s gout.” Until that moment I did not know other people in the family had similar problems. I have recently learned of a cousin who also experiences this problem with processing uric acid.  

Every time I see this gentleman, who looks right through me when I try to say hello, I pay attention. I learn about the details of troubled movement which I might face, and more than anything his courage and determination, carved like stone into his jaw, cheeks, and eyes. 

Well, this is a strange theme, and not the one I had planned to write about on this sunny and hot, post-fiesta day in which I feel a little strange from taking a poison, colchicine, to stop a gout attack that was spiking itself into my foot.  

That aside, I think of a warm and smiling Chinese woman who has almost no Spanish or English, though several kinds of Chinese, I think, grace her tongue. Even without the language, she came to Spain and runs a restaurant with delicious offerings cooked by her husband. If you know what you want on the menu and can signal it, there is no problem, but if your wishes require words, suddenly her face clouds with frustration and even shame. She holds up a finger and runs to find someone who can help. 

I do not know how I would respond to running a business relying on words and not being able to understand them or make them myself. I do know I turn inside and work hard to figure out everything for myself and then have to just be patient when misunderstood. 

 That little restaurant has become one of my favorite places, and not just because of the delicious food. I also love the lady’s smile, the light that crosses her face when I try to say siè sie, thank you in Mandarin. In my few words, I try to, even if absolutely at a minimum, cross the boundary into her linguistic world.

In the last month or so, a different Chinese couple has opened a “chino” across the street from my building. It sells a variety of inexpensive merchandise for the home, from hardware to a bit of food. These are very useful stores.

After more than another month of rehabilitating that space that has been empty since I moved here, some green plants for sale outside marked the opening of their business. The  youngish woman there also doesn’t speak much Spanish, kind of like all the foreign tourists who shop at the neighborhood supermarket in tourist season and often even lack hello or thank you. I resist the temptation to jump in every time they speak English—since most have at least some command of that language—to smooth things over. 

Not being able to communicate can be as important an experience in a foreign country as trying to speak the native language with its thousands of years of practices and layered connotations that take a lifetime to really get. 

Yes, I am speaking in part of my difficulties with the Spanish here. It is a language I have spoken almost my entire life and I often feel a fool here, though every day less so. 

The woman in the “chino” looks too young to have a early twenties son, but there is a young man who is often there and does speak Spanish as does the upper forties man who also hangs out and carries a body and face that says simply “owner”. 

To put together a store like this requires substantial capital, in inventory if nothing else. I get the sense that there my be several extended families who work together to open and manage these stores and possibly pool capital. 

I have seen the owner-man in other "chinos", looking just as much the owner. However, a block away there is another chino and the people there are physically different and their Chinese sounds different, possibly being a different regional variety. That owner man is never there in my experience. 

Spain has a substantial Chinese community and has had for a few generations. In this are family ties and business ties between this overseas community and the homelands as well as business centers in Spain and China. The stories of this community would fascinate me for a long time. 

However, to continue with the theme of these musings, a week or so after the chino across from me opened I had the need to buy something and crossed over. I found it in the back of their crowded store and went to the register. 

Here I have gotten used to paying with my phone through a debit card it holds. I seldom have cash because of the cost in time and money of getting it from an ATM. The card machine in the Chinese store did not function yet. Their bank had not yet finalized its use. So they asked me for cash or bizum. This latter is a way of paying money electronically directly into someone’s phone and hence their bank account. I had not activated that yet. 

We looked at each other, merchandise between us, and realized we had no way of finalizing a transaction. 

If language or legs can be a difficulty, so can something ostensibly simple like money. I will not describe the gyrations I have gone through before simplifying them in order to receive my retirement checks from the US and get Euros for daily needs.

  

 

The Scent of Tea

A pot of English tea steeps in a striped pot on the table before me. By its side, sand slowly pours into the base of a timer stamped “Tee Uhr” on top to let me know when it is ready to consume.

I am in the T-Room, a very comfortable cafe between the neighborhoods of Prenzlauer Berg and Mitte. Run by a fellow from London who used to work construction, it has open for only three months.