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.   

A Frisky Sun and Aging Men Alone

The rains have gone but the sun dances through the sky with a thousand veils, each a fantasy. 

It is tempting to walk with my head in the sky to observe this dance and figure out the various shapes and movements.  Alas, other things have demanded my time.

I had a visit with a traumatologist this morning concerning pain in my shoulder. It is so cool here for me since I have private insurance and do not rely on the public system. My monthly fee for that is not even 200 Euros. And it gives full coverage with no co-pays, though I could have paid less and accepted co-pays. There are also no bills coming later.

Today, I got lost and had to get off my bus and walk for maybe half a mile to get to the right place in the Vithas private hospital. That walk was a delight with the clouds and different views of the massive castle on the mountain. I was alone with the sky and almost alone on the sidewalk.

I was called right in.  The doctor, a woman in her late forties probably, sat there cold and formal daring me to try to chit chat, cuz I like to do that and humanize a bit the visit. Oh well, I did get a half smile out of her at one point. 

She reminded me of my barber, though he is a man with thinning black hair swept back and an angular face. He is also quite terse and un-talkative. Business is business and so unlike the kinds of interactions that take place in bars and cafes/ 

I have gotten him to converse with me and he has been a great source of information about aspects of Alicante’s life, since he is born and raised here. So I imagine the issue of the stiffness and stern look is related to formalness and time and place. I will have to come back and report after I have been here more. 

Still, I get a kick out of breaking through that with delicacy so as not to offend, 

In the cafe this morning, while eating my bowl of yogurt with granola, I read an article tangentially related to this that almost made me cry as it cut a little close to my own fears and anxieties.

It was about and 84 year old man in the city of Valencia some two hours away from here by train. Since his wife died he had lived alone. People saw him in cafes and bars, and walking on the street, but he had only formal interactions though people described him as pleasant.  

He was just one of many older, retired men walking or sitting alone in the streets as the day passes by. They often seem unfocused, though at first—after my life in the university—that struck me as a luxury, a delight.

Most men still have focus that I can see, even if I do not know the details. José, for example, who I have written about before, has a round he makes every day with his walker.  

We exchange sentences now and it is wonderful to see the light blooms in his face, eve if the sun is off at a club some where dancing dirty. José is focused on keeping and improving his ability to walk. That is a superb goal.  Of course I do not know what else occupies his time. 

Seeing him and his smile when I greet him always makes me happy. 

Another man, a much younger one who is probably a Latin American and only recently came to Alicante, maybe five or six months ago, I see in cafes having his breakfast which always includes a coke and alcohol. 

He dresses as if a musician and at first said almost nothing to anyone. He is opening up. Today I saw him brightly ask the woman who serves at an Argentine cafe how she was and he called her “mi amor”, my love, with a bright and even flirtatious tone in his voice. This made me happy as he had really seemed lost and self medicated with booze when I first saw him.  

Anyway, back to the article in today’s El País. The man they described had disappeared fifteen years ago and nobody noticed. He was invisible. The firemen broke into his apartment yesterday in a mid rise building and found his skeleton in his bed. He had died, alone as he had lived. 

The journalists wrote about how before he disappeared he had been getting more and more disheveled. His clothes dirty and wrinkled and he, unshaven, his hair uncombed. 

It is so easy to lose yourself in your emotions and thoughts while that slowly happens to you,

There is another man, an Scotsman who is in his early eighties and a fairly recent widower. He is an engineer by training and has lived all over the world supervising projects. He recently returned to Alicante, alone.  

He had lived here before and it was a happy time in his life so he returned though his children and grandchildren live in London.  He does not wish to give in so easily to the entropy of old age but is seeking a revival, even if a small one. 

As a result he came to my English language book group, a bit poorly groomed. We talked and he told me his story and desires in a thickish Scottish brogue. 

He has become a valued member of the group and is active in reading the books, discussing them, and joining people afterwards to go to a bar for a drink. 

Like him, I have made it a point to become part of groups and to develop social relationships. Unlike him, I also make it a point to not live alone.  

By nature, I am just a bit of a loner and have a social anxiety. Those are things that I have to actively work with and against because I am very aware that if not, my fate could very well be that of the man who passed away alone, in his bed, in Valencia. 

The battery of my laptop is about empty, and I feel like going outside to chase the clouds myself and enjoy a bit of the playful sun.