01.05.2004
I stood in the gothic alley chain smoking while trying to entertain the Italian girl who'd spent the last few nights with me. I was in nothing but my boxer shorts and between every semi-witty quip I glanced back into the laundry with the two old Spanish women inside and wondered when my clothes would be done. Every other glance, the women would smile toothlessly and wave in their way that said "any minute, any minute." The pilot light on the dryer - which was twice as old as me at least - had gone out twice already and I kept having paranoid visions of being handed back nothing but ashes and a timid shrug while one of the old women tried to explain to me in Catalan that sometimes these things just happen.
Anywhere else I might have been cold, standing on a cobblestone path in just my shorts, but the Barcelona sun was beaming down with an intensity it picked up early and held until sunset and I started thinking about actually finding a shady nook to crouch in while my clothes dried. The Italian girl was pleasant but spoke little English and we spent a good deal of time trying to communicate via hand signals and painful expressions. She spoke fluent Spanish, which worked out well because I could point to menu items that she would order for me, and once I thought I heard her say something in French to her friend, but I wasn't sure since I didn't speak that either. I flicked away my Camel and lit another while the girl spoke haltingly about American politics and their effect on Europe. If she'd had the vocabulary, things probably wouldn't have worked out like they did since she kept trying for topics that I disagreed with her on, but since I would have had to define every other word while explaining, I decided it was easier to just let her speak and nod and smile and make simplistic replies in simplistic joke form.
My friend was still upstairs, no doubt still curled up and asleep with the friend of my girl who'd taken a liking to him. It was always nice when things worked out like that because competition between the two of us was never a healthy thing. He was perhaps the smartest of the two of us given that he had enough clothes to not have to have washed while waiting around in drawers and could still be asleep even at the late morning hour it was.
A pair of Americans passed the Italian and me during a short pause in our conversation and I heard one say to the other, "So this is laundry day in Spain, huh?" thinking that we probably couldn't understand English and that they could say whatever they wanted. Each walked with a hiking backpack on which was sewn a Canadian flag the size of a billfold. They sounded like they were from Texas and were about as Canadian as I was French. My disgust must have been obvious because the Italian looked quizzical and asked what was wrong.
I nodded my head at the Americans and said, "Not Canadian."
It always irked me to see Americans in a foreign country because it always made me realize how easily my countrymen stood out. I was told once that people could always spot an American because of their white socks but I discovered this to be crap because everyone wore white socks. What made Americans stand out was mostly the Canadian flags. Given that Canada is a country with one-tenth the population of America, the whole of Canadian youth would have had to have been in Europe to account for all the flags seen on the Ramblas. The one Canadian my friend and I met didn't have a flag anywhere on her. There was also the American penchant for hiker's backpacks that seemed to go everywhere with them without regard to the class of the location. The two put together provided a pointer as subtle as firing a flare in Placa Reial.
"Are you sure," the girl asked haltingly.
"As sure as can be," I said, lighting another cigarette. It would have been tough to not like Spain. The smokes were cheap, the wine was good and plentiful, the food was incredible, and there was a place for all three around just about every corner. My friend and I spent our trip well blended into the background because, unlike most Americans, we enjoyed doing all three all the time and rarely considered the consequences – seemingly a very Spanish trait – and never went to ex-pat bars.
I glanced into the laundry and saw one of the women pulling out a pair of my jeans. I dropped my cigarette – an American habit since both of the women had a constant cigarette between their lips – and went inside to put on my trousers before they bothered to fold them. The women politely provided more clothes and I put on the ones needed, tossing the rest into the large Navy surplus bag I carried them down in. Once I was full up, after I paid the women a few Euros for their work but before I noticed that my white shirts weren't exactly white any longer, I carried the bag up the two flights of stairs my hotel room was on with the Italian in tow. As I unlocked my door, my friend came out with his arm around his girl.
"Hey," he said. "Been up long."
"Just long enough to get my clothes washed."
"Yeah," he said. "I needed to do that a few days ago. Oh well."
His girl shirked his arm and the two Italians went to the hall corner to talk quietly though neither of us could have understood them anyway.
"You guys going somewhere for food," I asked as I dropped my bag inside the door.
"We were going to head down to Placa Sant Maria, to go to that place. You two want to come?"
He was talking about a café we discovered a few days before that was on an old cathedral square. The food in Spain had been good, but the food there had been the best thus far with its tender pork tapas and cheap vino de la casa. The constant smoking in the sun had made me thirsty and a few bottles of wine before our inevitable decent to the beach made sense. He and I planned everything in blocks of four or five hours. It was just noon and going down to Sant Maria would carry us until dinner which would carry us to sundown which was when the four of us would finally go to the beach. In the four days we'd been with the Italians, we'd been to a beach five times, twice out to Sitges where we stayed late into the evenings. Neither of the girls had any money, being students and poor by any standard, so they went were we felt like going because we paid for everything and at all the best places. My friend's girl once said that she felt better about Americans on the whole because of the trip and we weren't sure whether we felt good or bad about her changed opinion. Having two younger sisters, I felt like I was setting them up for a big fall some time later down the line.
We meandered up Carrer Jaume, crossed Via Laietana, and window shopped on Carrer L'Argenteria. The Italians wanted to go into one of the trendy boutiques that lined the small alley and we indulged them all the way to the register where they purchased two new swim suits on our American Express cards and promised to thank us in the traditional way later that evening. There seemed to be some debate as to whether the traditional way took place at the beach or at the hotel so it was settled that both would be tried and "traditional" would be defined by our preference which worked out fine. I was partial to the hotel, mostly because sand seemed to creep into places where it had no right to be and it spoiled the mood for me every time. The only time it had ever gone off without a hitch was the last time out to Sitges where my girl and I had tried it in the water. We walked out from the sand over a hundred yards and the warm Mediterranean water still hadn't reached my shoulders. I made a joke about walking all the way to Tunisia from there when I suddenly found my arms full. We were out in the water for over an hour and found some rather unpleasant company when we returned.
"The hell have you been," my friend demanded.
"We were just enjoying the water," I said. "It's warmed up since this morning." When we arrived the sky had been overcast and there was some discussion as to whether it was a proper beach day or not. He and his girl had ventured into the water only to find it chilly and uninviting and hadn't been back in since. In the meantime, the sun came out. I found my white skin baking, and I invited my girl into the water regardless of previous reports. By the time we came back out, I knew I wasn't the only one who found it comfortable.
My friend jumped up and I could see the fresh glisten of lotion on his red hued skin. Both he and I hailed from Northern European backgrounds and it was apparent on the beach, as we were the whitest people there except for the odd Englishman bathing in briefs or less. He didn't wait for his girl as he trudged off towards the water, but she jumped up anyway, frowned at her friend and ran after him as I envied her olive skin. My girl saw me follow her with my eyes and I found that I had a frown of my own to contend with. "Skin," I said, pointing at my shoulders, growing redder by the minute. "I envy your color."
"Envy?"
So we imagined our girls in the new swimsuits just purchased and I put together the dates they said they'd still be in town hoping we might see them in them during the day. In America I didn't understand paying fifty dollars for less clothes than most women wear just in undergarments, but in Barcelona I wondered even more when it cost fifty Euros. Clearly they were going after the tourists because there was no way I could imagine the locals paying so much.
After more window-shopping on the fairly short stretch of cobblestone road, we reached Placa Sant Maria and found a table out on the square. The waiter, who looked more like Jesus then I felt comfortable with, came up and mumbled an "Hola" as he dropped off a few menus and we ordered a bottle of wine.
"I like this church," my friend's girl said brightly, looking up at the Cathedral Sant Maria that dominated the square. Just then, a troop of nuns appeared from around the corner and, like a high school senior photo, posed making faces in front of it.
"I like the people who come to it," I said watching the nuns. They weren't dressed in the black and white I would have expected but in blue and white instead. Being raised Protestant, I had no knowledge of what the colors meant, but I was a lapsed Protestant which, for some reason, didn't carry the same respect as misguided Catholicism, so I kept quiet.
"Nuns are bad," said my girl with a scowl on her face that made me want to invite her into the toilet with me. "Evil." Her friend nodded, and though I couldn't understand what she said, I was fairly sure she cursed at them.
"Nuns aren't evil," said my friend, another lapsed Protestant. "They're god's..., whatever. I don't know, but they look like grandmothers."
The Italians said something we couldn't understand but the high school cheerleader tone of which sounded like it was making fun of us, then they both laughed. Jesus finally arrived with the wine and poured us each a glass, leaving before seeing if we wanted anything else. I figured a translation wasn't needed as I had the gist, lit a cigarette and perused the menu. I settled on the pork loin since it was served with a cream drizzle and was rich enough that I wouldn't stuff myself on it. My Italian looked over her menu then cursed the one English phrase I'd actually taught her. "Fuckinghell. Nothing good," she said to me as though I should have known.
"There's plenty good," I said. "Look again." She fetched my cigarette from between my fingers and took a long drag on it, frowning as she blew the stream of smoke into my face.
"No," was all she said. I waved for her to hand back my smoke, but she turned away and I fished out another. "I liked it better at Sitges," she said frowning again.
I couldn't blame her, not that the food there was anything special, but the little beach town really did have something to it. Both times we were out, we looked for a vacancy so as to spend the night, but both times we found nothing but rejection. Still, the little winding streets that all seemed to end right at the sea and the string of café's lining the seawall were hard to argue with. The only people that seemed to work in all of Spain were those who worked at the cafés because any part of town not directly adjacent to the beach was empty. My friend and I traveled without beach towels and had to wind through every alley to eventually find one little shop that seemed to value them as though they were solid bricks of gold. Beyond that, the sleepy town only seemed awake beyond the beach once as we made our way back to the train for Barcelona. It looked like just another alley, but people of all stripes paced back and forth along it as though it were the Ramblas and just as quick as they appeared, they were gone. It was as though they were the ghosts of all who had once lived in the fishing village that had once been but dressed in beach attire to torment one street before returning to their graves until who knew when.
Had we been able to find accommodation in Sitges, we would probably have stayed until ejected because of all that. Instead, we were back in Barcelona where the food may have been better, but the atmosphere was less imposing and the beach sand a good sight coarser. I didn't mind, but the Italians seemed to have it fixed in their heads that if they were to be with rich Americans for the duration of their trip, they wanted to be treated like American princesses, something my friend and I found endlessly funny. Still, we figured, while we'd never given a second thought to Italians before, we now considered the entire country to be populated with beautiful females and thus cultural stereotypes continued on.