Eduardo formally introduced us, and we all had a friendly conversation until he and I left fifteen minutes later. I still felt embarrassed, although I could hardly blame them for sharing the same suspicion I had when I first met their friend. Eduardo treats me with the same joviality with which he treats everyone, yet the conjecture that rippled through the bar tonight made me realize that, although we’ve acted with propriety, the appearance of impropriety still exists.
As we left the bar, Eduardo asked me about my plans for tomorrow. I told him I planned to see the Torcas y Lagunas, and he offered to take me. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but I’d been looking forward to spending an entire day alone. The moment in the bar had only strengthened that desire. I could imagine how much worse the whispers and stares would be if people saw an older Spanish man visit a swimming hole with an American woman half his age, especially if I were to go for a swim in my bikini as I hoped to do. I sat in silence, trying to figure out how to tell him I didn’t want company.
“You seem very serious and quiet,” Eduardo said.
“I’m sorry. I respect you very much and you have been a real gentleman. But I’m uncomfortable with the attitude of the people tonight. I’m worried that in Spain it may not be right for a young, single woman to enjoy the company of an older, married man.”
“You shouldn’t worry,” Eduardo said, with the unflinching directness of a man who knows who he is and never worries about the opinions of others. “We’re only friends. We’re doing nothing wrong and I have no bad intentions. What other people think is not our problem.”
“This is true, in theory. But in reality, what other people think can be our problem. They can make me uncomfortable. They can say something to your wife and make her think something is wrong. They can be unfriendly to you.”
“My true friends would not act that way.”
“No, but you live in a community, with other people besides your friends, people that you must see every day. And when I’m visiting your country, in some way I’m representing my country. I don’t want to give my country a bad reputation.” I’m sure that, in Spanish, my grammar was much worse than I’ve expressed it here, but the meaning was there. I took a deep breath and got to the point: “I think of you as a friend and I’m grateful to you for showing me your city. But I’m thinking maybe I should go alone tomorrow.”
Eduardo looked crestfallen, but there was no resentment in his voice when he said, “I understand. You should do whatever makes you feel comfortable.” I looked at him and thought about the grandfather who was once a father to me. I remembered the silliest thing: After my grandfather divorced my grandmother when I was twelve, he kept promising to take me to Six Flags Magic Mountain. But we never went. I never got over the disappointment. Now here was a kind, harmless man nearly my grandfather’s age, who never had a daughter, who wanted to take me somewhere that I wanted to go.
I felt foolish. Had I come so far down an unconventional path, abandoning society’s notions of “normal” and “acceptable,” only to break down at the first real sign of peer pressure? I might fear the disapproval of others, but what was the point of acting on that fear? In any life, rejection is inevitable. Trying to avoid it by rejecting myself is irrational. Trying to avoid it by rejecting another is cowardly.
Still, I did want time alone. So I said, “If you would still like to take me, I would like to see some of the sights with you. But I would like to spend part of the day alone, to write and to be alone with my . . . ” What was the Spanish word for thoughts? “ . . . to be alone in my mind.”
Eduardo cheered up a little. He said that would be best, after all, because his son was coming to town and he would have to end our day before two.
He dropped me off at my pensión and watched from the car to make sure I made it inside safely. When I reached the front door, Maria was already opening it, as if she’d been waiting. She waved at Eduardo as he drove away, then she gave me a saccharin smile and said it looked like I’d made a good friend. But a sly gleam stole the sweetness from her eyes as a pointed question tumbled out of her mouth: “Eduardo is married, isn’t he?”
“Yes, he is,” I said tersely. Then I switched to exaggerated politeness. “He’s treated me like a daughter. At first I was worried, because I had a bad experience with an old man in Greece. But when you told me he was a good man from a good family, I decided to trust him. He has shown me much of Cuenca. Someday I want to return with my novio and show it all to him.”
Her look changed to relief. It took me several minutes to extricate myself from her many questions about how I’d met my novio, how he’d courted me, and how he’d proposed. A likely reader of romance novels, she seemed carried away with the idea of a lone woman traveler who had a fiancé waiting at home. I finally pled exhaustion. She apologized, patted my cheek, and shooed me off to my room, insisting that I did too much and should get more rest.
Now I lie here “alone in my mind,” as I described it to Eduardo. Tomorrow is the last time we’ll see each other. Why couldn’t I have kept my mouth shut for one more day? I fear our friendship is now marred, not by the ill opinion of others, but by my inability to hold onto my own truth in the face of a cynical world that can more easily understand a lie.
***
Today the only faces that stared at Eduardo and me were the faces of the girasoles: field after field of sunflowers standing in unified attention as we drove past, each and every face turned to the sun.
We stopped at a spot in the woods that gave little indication it hid anything unusual until we reached the startling edge of one of Las Torcas de los Palancares. The torcas are thirty giant, circular holes scattered through the pine forest of the Monte de los Palancares. The abrupt holes range from fifty to seven hundred meters wide, and as much as ninety meters deep. Sean would have suffered vertigo if he’d been with us, standing atop a vertical, rippling cliff, looking down into the crater.
Eduardo told me he’s taken part in several rescues of climbers who’ve underestimated the torcas. Some have died.
The torcas were created millennia ago when an ancient sea receded from these mountains, leaving behind just enough water to slowly eat away the rock. The erosion turned the mountains into Swiss cheese. To me, the round chasms represented tremendous symbolic power, because the circle embodies one of the unifying mathematic principles of all the spinning, revolving energy in the universe.
The craters were scattered with greenery. Along their upper edges, pine trees jutted from the walls, starting out horizontally, then stretching vertically toward the sun. Some of the trees were stunted dwarves, their shapes twisted into nature’s own bonsai.
The Torca del Lobo was arguably the most beautiful torca. It’s named for the many wolves, or lobos, that once roamed the area, until shepherds killed most of them to protect their flocks. But I was partial to the small, relatively plain Torca de la Novia, because of its haunting legend. Eduardo told me it was named for a sad, true story that took place when he was young.
As the story goes, a young woman’s family betrothed her to a young man she didn’t love. Perhaps she was in love with another man; Eduardo didn’t know. She and her family lived in a village near Cuenca. One day, the girl and her family went into Cuenca to buy the traditional dowry items the couple would need, such as a bed and other furniture. I suspect they rode in a carriage. Cars have only been in use here for a few decades. On their way home, as they rode past the Torcas y Lagunas, the girl asked her father to stop so she could relieve herself. She needed more relief than her family realized. She walked into the woods and never returned. The family later found her at the bottom of this torca, where she’d jumped to her death.
“How sad,” I said, scanning the crater as if she might still be there.
“Yes. It is sad. It’s not good for parents to force children to do something when they are that unhappy, even if they think it is the right thing.
What good is it to force a child to do what you think is right, if you lose that child?” I sensed that Eduardo spoke from personal experience, but I didn’t ask.
We drove on to Las Lagunas de Cañada del Hoyo. In these mountains, a laguna is basically a torca filled with spring water. We stopped at three. One small lagoon was murky and shallow and blanketed with algae, but two craters were filled with freshwater of an intense aquamarine, too deep to be limpid, yet pure and clean as the beginning of time. A cliff rose above the water line, tracing the circumference. Pines and lush greenery clung to the lip.
At the edge of one of those pools, in the rippling August air, Eduardo and I said farewell. A few people were swimming and picnicking nearby, but no one looked at us with judgment or surprise. Perhaps they took us for father and daughter. I told him, “Siempre te recuerdo” (“I’ll always remember you,” or in my creative grammar, “I always remember you”). He said he felt the same. I gave him a kiss on both cheeks and took his right hand formally but fondly in both of mine. Then he drove away.
At that moment, I missed my grandfather. I remembered a day when I was eleven, when Grampa took me on a drive high up into the California mountains, just him and me. We drove for hours and just talked. It was the first time in my life anyone talked to me like an adult. Having yearned since I was five to be taken seriously by one of the unpredictable giants who ruled my world, I drank up his show of respect like a thirsty desert traveler who’s discovered a well. The words in my crowded brain tumbled over each other in their mad rush to get out and be heard.
Grampa and I talked about the role of politics in social change, the importance of loyalty in friendship, the nature of romantic love, the mystery of God, even the meaning of life. He obviously had something on his mind and he was unusually disposed to listen. I distinctly remember him remarking that he was surprised an eleven-year-old had spent time considering life’s big questions. I knew that was partly because I spent so much time alone, but I kept that thought to myself. There have been few times since that I’ve felt so visible to another.
After Eduardo left I became invisible again. But only for a moment. Then the laguna stared at me with its single, fathomless eye and dared me.
I walked down the rocky slope to the laguna’s edge. A young German couple were pulling themselves out of the water, hugging their shivering, goose-bumped bodies. They laughed heartily when a Spanish man jumped in, shouting expletives at the chilling shock. His wife and son stood at the edge, laughing too. The son, a boy of about thirteen, leapt in after him while the wife watched, her eyes round with amusement and worry. I found a spot where I could wade in and called out to the wide-eyed wife, “Venga!” (Come on!) She grinned but shook her head firmly: no way!
Because there were three small groups of people standing and swimming around the edges of the pool, I decided it would be safe to swim across the center to the other side and back. I wouldn’t have done it if the place were deserted; I could picture getting a cramp in the middle of the icy pool and sinking to the bottom.
It was an arbitrary goal, perversely inspired by fear. I had no clue how deep the water was and this gave the idea a creepy thrill. The opposite side was a sheer cliff with no shallow place to put my feet down. There were some limbs to grab onto over there, but I wouldn’t be able to touch bottom until I returned to this side.
I’m not a particularly strong swimmer, and this was not the salty Mediterranean Sea to which I’ve become accustomed. It took a lot of work to stay afloat. I swam for about five minutes to reach the center, where I told myself, “Okay, now all you have to do is do that again.” About two minutes later, I felt a wave of panic as my limbs began to scream at me: in reaction to the intense cold, my muscles were stiffening, my skin burning. I feared that I wouldn’t make it after all and that the people on the opposite shore would never reach me before I sank to oblivion.
Then I reached the large tree limb that forked out into the laguna, grabbed it like a drowning woman, and held on as if my life depended on it. I felt that everyone along the distant edges of the lagoon must be able to hear my sobbing, gasping breaths.
When my breathing returned to normal, I looked back at the water I’d just crossed and realized that, in spite of my panic, I’d been well within my range of ability. I’d been frightened only by the idea of it, by the inscrutable depth of the water beneath me.
On the way back, my fear departed. When I grew tired I simply rolled over and did a lazy backstroke until I felt ready to continue. It took longer than ten minutes to get back, but I was a lot more relaxed. Still, when I reached a spot where my feet could touch bottom, I exhaled with relief. A small group of Spanish teenagers stared at me wordlessly as I rose from the icy water back into the searing hot air. Unable to repress a grin of victory, I winked at one of the girls and she gave me a congratulatory smile.
I dried off and sat on a ledge, looking out over that water which appeared clear even though it was opaque. With a new clarity of mind, I knew that the mystical green circle below had imparted to me some of its power. As much as I’ve gained from the friendship of others, this is one of the gifts I’ve received from friendship with myself, as I’ve swum out of my depth, across the circle, over the abyss.
Invisible power is the perfect gift for a lone traveler, because the unseen void can open beneath us at any time.
I’ve Been Dingled
Thirty-six years old—Dingle, Ireland
The wood floor nagged so loudly beneath my feet, the old girl sounded ready to give way. The three-hundred-year-old Ballintaggart Manor has been converted into a hostel, but it feels like a home, the kind you might find in the pages of a cozy fireside mystery. Sunlight poured into my dorm room through two picture windows, and the view made me laugh out loud; if I’d seen a painting of the Irish countryside that looked like this, I would have accused the artist of nostalgic exaggeration. Outside the windows, black-and-white cows and roly-poly white sheep munched on grass, which grew in overzealous green pastures. The gentle pastures rolled down, down, down to the lovely puddle of Dingle Bay, where one long, low cloud skimmed the water. An old stone watchtower watched over it all. Everything was silent, save the occasional moo of a cow.
I was quietly unpacking yesterday when Jukka and Janet noised in, discussing their plans for the afternoon. Jukka, a young man from Finland with a contagious good humor, asked for my input, as if we were old friends and it was understood that I’d join them. Janet is a lively, up-for-whatever, recent college grad from Texas. I declined to join them for a hike, wanting some time alone to explore the town. However, I agreed to meet them later to go to a small concert.
I whiled away the afternoon with a stroll into town, just a mile away. Dingle’s diminutive waterfront is lined with boxy shops and pubs, each painted a different color. Small fishing boats bob in the bay. The town is surrounded by green hills that disappear into low clouds, but I sense promise hidden there. The scenery reminds me of Juneau, making me homesick for a place that was never really home.
On my journey, internal peace has come and gone, and come again. But there’s an external peace to this place, which is settling into me with every breath of the breezy sea air. Instinct tells me that the two worlds through which I’ve been traveling for nearly a year—the internal and the external—have found their harmonic meeting place in Dingle. I’d planned to visit a couple of other towns in Ireland, but I know now that I’ll never see them, not on this journey. I might not have a home anymore in the traditional sense. But if a wanderer can experience anything like home—a place where she sighs with the comforting feeling that she has returned to a place where she belongs—then for me surely Dingle is it.
In the evening, Janet, Jukka, and I took the hostel van into town. We were joined by Gareth, a soft-spoken Englishman with dark good looks and a serious air. The van dropped us off on the waterfront, and from there we walked to a little bit of a church, the venue for the
concert.
The bill featured an eclectic handful of musicians: an American harpist, a Northern Irish folk guitarist, a German violinist, and a local bagpiper named Owen. While all of them were talented, Owen’s slow airs reached into my soul and found my Celtic ancestors weeping there, while his jigs found them dancing and laughing until I felt possessed and nearly leapt to my feet.
Jukka, who’d been to a concert at the same church last week, regularly leaned toward the rest of us with a grin to say, “I love this song” or “This is the one I was telling you about” or “Do you like it?” It was slightly annoying to be interrupted in my enjoyment of the concert so often, just to be told how enjoyable the concert was. But Jukka’s enthusiasm was hard to resist.
In between comments, he pointed out the tall window behind the altar. Sparrows darted back and forth across the pale evening sky. They kept changing direction, like auguries unsure of their message: time to go home; not done flying; no, time to go home; no, not done flying.
After the concert, as we walked out of the church, Jukka suggested we go pub hopping.
“Definitely. I can’t wait to have my first pint of Irish ale,” Janet said.
“I don’t know if I can finish a whole pint,” I said. “I’m not much of a beer drinker.”
To which Jukka loudly replied, “Don’t lie to me. I’m tired of you stumbling home drunk every night, staying in the pubs until all hours, leaving me with the children!” A middle-aged woman who was also leaving the concert turned to stare. Jukka leaned toward her and spoke in a confiding tone, “I’ve been putting up with this for nine years because I promised to stay with her for better or worse.” He threw a devoted arm over my shoulder and squeezed.
Rolling her eyes, the woman asked me, “Is this your first date?”
“I barely know him.”
They Only Eat Their Husbands Page 37