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. 

 

Storm and Spain on its National Day

The rain cut loose with drama. Lightning was striking close by and lakes of water fell, almost at once on the narrow street of tables. 

When I got here to enjoy my pain au chocolate (what they call here a napoleón de chocolate), fight off the pigeons, and write. I had wanted to sit outside, but all the tables were occupied. 

As a result I sat inside, in the darkish and narrow confines that included a row of maybe four or five tables and a counter-display case filled with luscious pastries. If you went further inside this narrow space you found the working bakery and maybe its owner / baker, a dry bread stick of an aging French man.

When it started to rain with the fervor of Evangelicals preaching on a street corner, drenching with sound and wet, suddenly the space overflowed with people. At first confused, I then realized these were the occupants of the tables outside. They carried their plates and cups of coffee and tried to figure out how to accommodate themselves into a much smaller space. 

A woman asked if she could take a chair from my table and, as a result, ice was broken. We talked briefly. I found out they were a group of visiting Rumanians, all women. Alicante has had relatively large numbers of Rumanians, though with rising prices in Spain without corresponding increases in income, the numbers have dropped. But these were visitors. 

One of them asked the server if there was grocery store open on this holiday morning. She had already been defending herself from customer demands in good Argentine sense—“Wait your turn. There is only me today and I cannot work any faster.” At that break i demands she lifted her thermos of hot water and refilled her gourd of yerba maté before taking a few pulls. 

While she drank, almost in unison, I and the similarly aged man sitting next to me in the dark corner, told them almost nothing was open because it was a major holiday.  

This led him and me to speak. Turns out, he is from Paris though his family is Andaluz and his new wife is from Alicante. We had a lovely conversation. At one point, he insisted Spain would be much better off it had cultural unity and just a single language.  I looked at him, with a slight smile and said “Oh I disagree”.  Well we were off, not arguing as you might expect, but dialoguing, two sides in a conversation. And we shall continue that conversation when next we see each other, and we shall, since both he and I live here and frequent that local French bakery. 

That passionate encounter took place on Thursday, the Day of Valencia which also celebrates its language, Valencian. Today is a bigger holiday and when I awoke, my patio was wet from substantial rain in the night .

Today is Spain’s National holiday, the Day of Spain, though there is conflict over its name. It has variously been called the Day of Columbus, the Day of HIspanidad (Hispanicity to coin an awkward term in English), and now the National Day. 

Spain is a lovely word with an ancient history that goes back at least to the Romans, though it probably predates them and may have origins in the Phoenecians who inhabited Much of Spain’s coastal areas (including Alicante). However, the word did not refer to what we today call Spain, but to the entire Peninsula though, in reality, the Romans who dominated the peninsula long enough to leave their language firmly entrenched—we speak a version of it today—made their word Hispania plural to refer to the peninsula. They called it effectively “The Spains”. 

Then Arab and Berber armies came from the same north Africa that had hosted large Phoenecian settlement of relevance to our peninsula, including the amazing city of Carthage. At that point the Roman unity broke and the peninsula became a set of Christian Kingdoms in the fringe of the north and an encyclopedia of Taifas, Moorish “kingdoms” with resultant instabilities. 

You can easily see the history of conflict written on the land in the vertiginous number of castles and watch towers throughout the land, many of them still in reasonably good shape.   

Once Castile and Aragon, the two most powerful Christian kingdoms, had joined forces in the symbolic and dynastic union of Ferdinand and Isabella and conquered the remaining Taifas, including the final one of Cordoba, there was a political union though, as the great historian Benedict Anderson noted, feudal states did not rely on a common language to unify them, but on political fealty which also included kinds of religious celebrations sponsored by kings and lords though the situation was far from one of a single religion, They did create widely shared bureaucratic and educational practices. 

Aragon and Castile had different though closely related languages. Numerous others were spoken in Hispania.

With the crown, now of Spain, taking over American lands and even a small part of Asia (the Philippines), Castilian as a formal written language now called Spanish (although not without argument) was born as an instrument of state. It pulled elites toward it, pushing their Iberian and indigenous tongues to become more and more like Castilian though there is still substantial diversity in the Hispanic world within what is glibly called the Spanish language and supported by the Royal Spanish Academy and the Cervantes Institute (meeting in Peru these days).  

The Romans were probably wise to make Hispania plural. Even today it is plural, although there are areas of unity if not undisputed and many efforts at creating unity.

On this Day of the Nation, one should not forget that about half of the twentieth century left it fractured as Franco and a Fascist wing including the Church performed a coup and drove out the clearly internationalist left that had won elections yet was fractured among itself. The conflict left a landscape saturated with blood and memories of horror.

Only now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century are intellectuals and people really grappling with that past and researching it.

On this day in 2025, nonetheless, Spain leads the European Union—of which it is a part giving it a wannabe nation state without full sovereignty. It tops the Community in terms of economic growth and, to a degree, even in political stability. 

Even if it does not have linguistic or cultural unity,  Spain is worth celebrating for its amazing, if troubled, history and its current, if troubled, success. 

A Celebration, a Storm, and Memory

 At midnight, the city rocked with explosions.  

Not to worry, although for a moment I did. It was a large fireworks show, I assume in honor of the día festivo, holiday, declared for today and tomorrow which gives people four days off, essentially, 

Spain values celebrations and the resultant time off from work. 

Last evening, when I went to the supermarket to buy raw ingredients for at least today, the clerk—a lovely man named José, told me he couldn’t wait. He looked forward to kicking back and relaxing, he said. 

While the main businesses take the holiday some smaller ones do not, especially those providing necessary servicies such as many cafes. That was fortunate for me.

I left home shortly after sunrise—no I did not get up that early. The noise last night kept me stimulated and awake. And, anyway, it does not turn light until around 8 AM. As I left my place, I saw the homeless man across the street putting on his shoes and carefully arranging his things to stow them somewhere. 

Spain does indeed value celebrations and so, the fireworks as well as many official acts, just not the massive thunder storm that has also cut loose today.

The day is an intriguing one of keeping historical memory alive and tying it to the present, It is a celebration of when the King of Aragon and duke of Barcelona, the young Jaume I (Jaime 1), after failing in his endeavors to acquire land by conquest north of the Pyranees in what is now France, turned south and conquered Valencia. 

The festivo remembers that event, something also marked in street names and other events in this dependency of Valencia, by linking it to a celebration of the Community of Valencia, of which Alicante is a part. 

Communities in Spain, roughly equivalent to US States, also mark historical, economic, and cultural units. 

In the present, the memory is tied to a political effort to rid the Community of its president, Mazón, who happens to be from Alicante, for his abysmal failure of leadership a year ago when a different massive storm hit, caused extensive flooding, and the death of more than 200 people due to government inaction. The poll released today says 70% of the Community’s population demands he resign. As that number has grown he drops his eyes and toughs it out. 

Today, this may be about poll results, marches and court actions, but it is notably not supported by the movement of troops and sword or cannon battles. 

While the image is one of a day in which there was a clean break; Valencia changed from being Arabic and became Valencian and Spanish, although that is a hot topic these days and many, especially in other parts of Spain say it is OK if they keep their language related to Catalan, but they should officially speak Spanish and just be Spanish.  

In days in which the airwaves and internet are filled with images of Israelis trying to destroy Arabic Hamas in Gaza, and perhaps “cleanse” the area for Israeli settlement, a bit of attention to the notion of ethnic and religious replacement here is a question worth reflecting on.

The moment of the reconquest is ostensibly memorialized in the battles between Christians and Moors celebrated here in almost every town and neighborhood though on different dates. I say ostensibly because, they have come more to represent the little invasions of slavers from North Africa who would strike almost at random along the coast and even a bit inland to take merchandise and perhaps even more important humans as slaves to sell in the markets of Algiers and perhaps elsewhere.  

Those moments of invaders from the sea—a brief entrance and not a long lasting one with a population replacement—came to be the material for the celebratory representations and popular memory.

In them, we note the population has already been Christianized, They unite against the invaders, the Islamic moors who come from the sea. 

I do not know the history of this transformation, although it is an important one. The whole Mediterranean coast of Spain has stone watch towers, look outs and castles on hill tops to see and give early warning of the invaders as well as to serve to defend against them. When the invaders could they would sneak up and catch people unawares, working in the fields or elsewhere, even mending their fishing nets, to capture them and take them to North Africa. 

That moment in history changed almost two centuries ago with the destruction of the regimes in Tangiers and Algeria. Yet the memory remains, codified, and annually performed. People come of age playing roles in these dramas in the streets.

Today, though, Valencia has a new Moorish population, as the rightwing Vox would call them, the Moroccans and Algerians who have come to work, especially in agriculture and construction. That relationship has tension in historical memory and gets activated every year when people dress up as Moorish pirates and Moorish women to have sword fights with Christians in the streets. I am told contemporary North African immigrants do not participate in this and, I imagine, many stay home those days. 

This day pretends a triumphal entry of Jaime I on horseback with his soldiers into the glorious and ancient city of Valencia. That may be fictitious, but one wonders how they were received, especially in the middle ages, i.e.October 9, 1237. 

These seem to have been changes of feudos, where the people became vassals of a new Lord. I imagen that moment was dramatic and emotional. But, there does not seem to have been a major exchange of population. Some of Muslim lords had supported Jaume for a time and Valencia had been paying an onerous tribute to the throne of Aragon, which had also been a major Muslim center. 

Alicante still was not in Jaume’s hands. It ended up attached to Castilla and Alfonso el Sabio, its great monarch.  

In 1264 the Muslims of Alicante and near by down to Murcia, rose up. They were still numerous, but slowly the pressure was on to convert such that by the nineteenth century there were few if any Muslims in Alicante or Valencia. 

That story of change of religion, language, and perhaps of people is one I shall study a bit and write about later. 

For today we will celebrate with the rain fall and waters running in the region’s exotic streams and rivers the existence of a Valencian Community, now perhaps the most diverse in Spain even if fraught with politics over language and perhaps, if Vox has its way, over ethnicity and race.   

Meanwhile lightning explodes in the sky and rain beats a tattoo on the awnings and side walks of the city.