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. 

 

Conversation While a Front Approaches

 

The air is cooler this morning, as I sit on my terrace above the street. Not much, just a few degrees. But it makes a difference.  My plants seem more relaxed. 

A front bludgeon’s its was across the peninsula bringing much cooler air. Most of the peninsula can expect thunderstorms and rain, sometimes heavy rain from its clubs and tackles.  Alicante’s capital city will miss out. It will be somewhat cooler but dry. I would love the rain.

I lived for years on the Mexican Border, in El Paso, when young, and grew up with the drama of monsoons in July. Very dry land and arroyos that fill up quickly bringing flash floods even into the city.  

This small corner of Spain, is that dry, perhaps even more so than my El Paso. 

Rain seldom visits us here, even though the spring was unusually rainy. We have days after days of intense, bright sunshine. 

Still, you can see water-carved gullies all over this desert land, just like in El Paso, only more so. 

We get clouds and cooler weather, but storms, no matter how much they bluster and bludgeon across the peninsula, tend to skip over us.  The ones that don’t carve the landscape.

I am sure the reasons are meteorologically complicated though the  obvious answer is that we are in the rain shadow of the mountains that rise on the coast and the uplift to the great Spanish plateau.. 

A few weeks ago, Alicante and water was a topic of conversation when I met a movie-star handsome Ph.D.student in a cafe who has lived here for years while studying in the university. He is Palestinian from Gaza. 

Instead of spending more than a few sentences on the genocide, he steered our conversation elsewhere, such as to Alicante City and his impressions as a Levantine Arab. 

To him, Alicante feels like an Arabic city. Everywhere he turns he finds styles, concepts, and words from the Arab world. 

He said the city’s name, Alicante, sounds to him like an Arabic phrase which means a place with no water, a very dry place.

Alicante was an Arabic town and the Arab castle still sits above the city (with Christian accretions) on Mount Benacantil). 

Over the centuries, Alicante has had much back and forth with Algeria and Tunisia, as well as with Morocco. 

Indeed, this city is one of two in Spain with the largest percentage of foreigners among its inhabitants, some 23%. This is the official number composed of people with residence permits. The actual number is much larger. 

In the Province of Alicante the largest number of immigrants is from the UK, mostly an older group of retirees and sunny-beach seekers from the land of green and rain, However, in the city, the largest group is from Morocco, followed ever more closely now by Colombians.

Before the Arabs, Alicante had an indigenous population. Then Phoenecians came here, probably to take advantage of its port. The Romans, built a small city here, called Lucentum, the place of light. A small set of its ruins can be visited north of Mount Benacantil. 

Spain as a whole was a very important Roman province and people still speak versions of its language. Iberia was a center of the empire. 

In fact, the first non Italian Emperor came from from Sevilla, then Hispalia. He was the very gay or bi emperor Trajan who was popular and had a huge impact on the entire empire. 

I devoured a book review this morning in El Pais for a new book about him by the historian David Soria (Trajano, el mejor emperador Desperta Ferro 2025).

Sevilla located on the Guadalquivir river was a Roman place. Then the Goths intervened and later Sevilla became an important city in Arab Spain. 

Arabic flourished here though much of the population retained versions of their Latin now Arabized. This is reflected in contemporary Spanish where even simple words like shirt (camisa) or cotton (algodón) are Arabic.

But there is an historical break when Alicante—like other places in Spain—carried out an ethnic cleansing.The Arabized and Islamic population was driven out and people from Catalonia and Aragon were brought in to repopulate the area. Centuries elapsed before Arabs again became a significant part of the population as they are today. It was in the nineties that Moroccans began here in numbers. 

In all of this one hears the fears of the right wing types who speak out against immigration as a threat to the Spanish nation and to ideas of population replacement. However, the majority of the non-immigrant population of Alicante favors immigrants and tries to embrace them and let them know they, like rain and cool air, are welcome. 

Another numerous group of immigrants that is growing perhaps faster than Moroccans is not Arabs, but is composed of Ukranians, most fleeing Russia’s devastating adventure. 

Monday morning, as I went into one of my favorite places, where the air conditioning was fortunately strong because it had not cooled off in the night, I was warmly greeted by a woman who works by the front window rolling shaping and forming dough.  This morning, she was cutting pieces of focaccia. 

She asked how I was and whether my eyes were better (I have had an infection in both eyes and a reaction to Ciprofoxin).  When she verified the swelling was gone and my lids had almost returned to their normal color, she said “I had my eye operated on last week.”

In Spain, she said, they do not do the operation and so she had to return to her home country, Ukraine. Her city, as she said is close to the Russian border.

I was doubly surprised because I had thought she was Argentine, as almost every other worker in this cafe and Italian food shop is. I was also surprised she returned to a war zone for her surgery. She said, in response: “When you live there you mostly just go on with your life. You can’t let the war stop you.”

Good Times while the Bad Times Roll On

On this chilly gray Alicante day, Carnaval Saturday, when directions are easily confused, I see a woman across the street walking her two beagles.

She is the very image of normality. Even her dogs, usually rambunctious, seem calm, as if the reduced light has softened their energy.

Yet my screen is filled with the after effects of the White House bullying of Ukraine. Both the US President and Vice President are shameful and should not lift up their heads in polite company.

I shall not jump even more aggressively on to the pile castigating them, nor much less support these wannabe vipers and real life bullies.

Instead, I shall relate a question from the server at a small and charming cafe where I had breakfast.

After telling me she chose soft jazz to set the tone for what might become a raucous day, she wondered if carnaval would even take place this late afternoon due to the forecast of rain.

I do not know about Alicante, but in Peru and Bolivia, water is very much part of Carnaval. Youths roam with water balloons, buckets, and water uzis in hand. They soak the unsuspecting or those who would get them first.

Cans of foam have replaced some of this but water is still a major symbol in this festival of fertility.

Spring is shortly to come in Spain, despite today’s cold. In some ways, Carnaval is about the bacchanalian confusion of a warming earth readying to open and throw up sprouts.

(In the Andes it is about high summer and the need for water for the crops to ripen, all the while the earth prepares to close down for winter’s cold and wind).

The costumes and movement take place here tonight, on the Rambla—a former gully now canalized and covered with the former stones of the city’s walls. The street then goes around one edge of the hill Benalcantil where the Moorish and Christian town remains, and where the castle of Santa Barbara (she of lightning) still stands. At its end, the street now opens onto the Esplanade, the tiled, Pedestrian avenue along the sea’s edge.

Furthermore, the Rambla starts at the city’s public market where a road named for the Castilian King Alfonso X, el Sabio who took the city from the moors, meets a road that continues to the other side of Benalcantil.

It is named for the King of Aragon, Jaume II who removed Alicante from the Castilians in favor of the Catalan and Aragonés speaking peoples who, joined by the Murcians with their own language and the more highland Castilians form the bulk of the provinces population. They give it linguistic complexity.

One should not forget the often ignored Moors. They did not pass simply into history. Many left, some converted, and over the centuries since, many others have come in the back and forth between Alicante and North Africa.

Many people will spend today inside with their families. Yet, it is fitting that others fill the Rambla—that Avenue into the past and the present—in masks and costumes.

After all, on Monday Lent begins and I wish the threatening war on Europe’s edge and the political destruction in the US capital were as easily finalized and contained in words as this Feast.