This weekend I went to Terramolinos, a sleepy beach coastal town about 30 kilometers from Malaga. I am noticing that the Meditteranean looks different wherever you go.
The beach at this place was stunning. Not to say that the beach at Malaga isn’t-it is absolutely gorgeous-but this place, it was new, it was sleepy, seductive, and calm. I sat on the beach with my flat mates and sunbathed naked. I had tapas at a restaurant so close to the water that the spray danced at our feet as we ate. The water was a deep European blue, the Iberian version of the tropics.
As I walked along the boardwalk and watched the people going about their business (I like to people watch in Europe) I thought to myself, “ I could do this, I could live here.” As soon as I thought it I felt a pang of guilt in my stomach, as if I were betraying my New York. But it wasn’t that at all. Living in one city your whole life you feel that there is nothing else for you anywhere, but now, being here, experiencing all this place has to offer, I feel like my world is getting bigger, and consequently, almost obligatorily, my world back home is getting smaller.
I don’t know why the beach has always called to me. The water here beckons so sweetly, as if it knows you, and wants to know more. Terramolinos has the allure of a place that people who have been hurt would regard as sanctuary, those with broken hearts would deem therapy, and those with broken lives would look to as renovation. Spain’s south coast with all its sand and sea and naked women and guitar players serenading passers by for spare Euros is not at all cliché, or superficial-it’s deep, unending, dirty even. Real. Visceral. Seductive. Erotic.
I watched my flat mates absorb our surroundings in the same way; the looks of partial awe and enticement visible in their young supple faces. I watched my roommate, Agnuiska, especially. She is young and pretty and she is from Poland and there is a boyfriend back home whom she loves more than the waking world. She glows when she speaks of him, so much so that I can tell the moments when she thinks of him, as the same light emanates through her pellucid, blue eyes.
They fought yesterday morning, the same fight that most young lovers have at this point in life, when the love is new and real, when it is no longer high school flirting or sex in a car that you borrowed on a Friday night. It burns with the intensity of that original love, that they will always compare her future loves to. The first responsible love, replete with birth control pills and sleep over’s that parents know about. The love that makes you a grown up.
I watched this little woman child stare out at the water with an esoteric intensity, as if she were sending something across that water, to someone, just one, in particular. Here, in Terramolinos, the sea is celestial, and obliging.
I smiled to myself, and walked on ahead, leaving her to her moment, and I collected the smooth, pretty stones I saw on the coastline.
It seems that somewhere, always, there is someone nursing a broken heart. At that moment, I was glad it wasn’t me. But I paused, brought myself closer to the shore, and looked out at the horizon, at my old friend, carrying the message on her deep cerulean flourish of foam and surf, and I remember, and wonder to myself, if the lover on the other side ever really gets the message.
No comments:
Post a Comment