The Gallego, Dos Lunas, sat on the low wall of the Mirador San Nicolas hurling abuse at the tourists that passed him by. ‘Idiotas!!’ He shouted with his hand waving about in the air, until his mind soothed and he returned to the comfort of his can of Vol Damm (at 8% it was the strongest beer available in the Albaycin and his favourite beverage of all. Water, the elixir of life, flopped over the line a bedraggled second). His long black grey white hair fell about his shoulders which he occasionally used as a disguise by leaning forward, especially when the Guardia Civil were on their rounds. I said to him ‘Mira’ and started to sing Hotel California while pointing down the white painted lane at the orange orb sun, as it hovered over the branch of a tall palm tree. He laughed as he connected the song to the image and drank back the rest of his beer, letting out a long sigh in the afterglow of the gulp.
As the first star appeared in the evening light, a young man approached us on the wall from the other side of the mirador. It was the head the ball Ignacio, resident of the road, almost toothless, wan and thin. He had been kicked out of his home in Valencia and after making his way south alone had been living rough on the streets of Granada. Dos Lunas noticed him and raised his can in acknowledgment of his arrival but said nothing else. Ignacio’s clothes, caked in dirt and dust hadn’t been changed for many days and his shoes were held together by miracles. I was sitting close by and heard their conversation. Ignacio asked Dos for five Euros to which Dos belched loudly whilst simultaneously managing to produce the word ‘no’. Someone nearby laughed. After the third time of asking Ignacio picked up his belongings and left, making his way down the cobbled path that leads to the Alhambra.
One of the most spectacular aspects of Granada are its sunsets. As the day draws to a close the setting sun can sometimes be enough on its own but for the really spectacular ones what is needed are clouds. As I looked across over the Alhambra, I saw that one great cloud that stretched away like a canopy over the mountains had become an orchestra of light. Within the sun set, I counted no less than seventeen colours in the sky. How many shades I couldn’t tell. Perhaps thousands. Born from a blood red sun it danced its way west through oranges and yellows and greens and ochres, stretching its arms to a colour I didn’t know the name of, before pirouetting on a turquoise pillow, and finally it took a bow on a golden river of light.
Dos Luna’s eyes glazed over as he stared into the middle distance. I was sitting next to him, untalkative and drinking also, as the sun thought about bed. In the summer, time moves differently in Andalucia than it does in other parts of the world. I had the slightly disconcerting feeling that anything that could happen probably would, but I was able to put my fears aside and we sat there boozing under the cloudless Andalucian blue. Dos Lunas seemed fixated on something on the other side of the mirador. It was as if he had seen a ghost. In the scope of his vision, balancing precariously between the past and the future, between regret and hope, was the veil that protects life from death. That is the veil that men named God. Dos Lunas had neither name nor care for such an entity. He felt that God had betrayed him a long time ago, so his illusion failed, doomed as he was to a certain reality. His eyes returned to the mirador and his expression lost its fire.
He tilted his head slightly back and again drank deeply from the warming can. Again, the reaction in his veins apparent in his eyes. The dark nectar poured through his body chasing away his conscience for another moment, and then he burped loudly, lifting his leg only to replace his foot on the cobbles, immediately fearing he may follow through. He knew that he hadn’t eaten anything but rubbish in the last week, half eaten sandwiches gifted to him, left over tapas outside the Albaycin bars, that kind of thing. He suddenly became at ease when he realised that he hadn’t shit himself in public and a smiling countenance returned to his face. A woman walking her Pomeranian nearby reeled slightly in disgust as his gnarly teeth became visible in his smile. “OOP EEE!!” He sang out as they made eye contact. She extended her middle finger at him as if she were simply waving hello and carried on down the steps without altering her pace. Her bluntness made him laugh out loud. Tears of joy welled in his eyes. For Dos Lunas mirth and offence were often intertwined. He finished his can with a crushing fist and tossed it against the side of the adjacent bin. The two recently arrived Guardia Civil officers either failed to notice or tried to ignore the attempt. They knew him well. For thirty long hot years he had made the Mirador San Nicholas his home. He had seen them come and go. The two officers looked over at us, arms folded with their guns in their holsters, presumably ready to fire at a moment’s notice, or what’s the point? It was often hard to tell their intentions as their eyes were permanently hidden behind dark glasses. They knew as well as us that the eyes were the window to the soul.
It wouldn’t be long before those old demons would be back to claw at his brain like the hungry cats the old gypsy woman shooed away with her straw broom outside her cave house up in Sacramonte. It was a cave house Dos Lunas knew well, but only from the outside, having passed by it a thousand times on his zig-zagging walks home to his own cave, which was situated on the far side of the hill. The walls of the old gypsy’s cave were patterned with blue China plates and red and yellow flowers. There was a certain aesthetic, a certain beauty about her home where the old gypsy woman had lived since she was a little girl. Now well into her nineties she had looked out on this city since before the name of Franco was even a whisper. Dos Lunas had never been invited into her home. In a way, he feared the gypsies, and lived outside their world. She thought he was slightly mad, but not dangerous, like almost everyone else in the barrio did.
There were times when the sun was high in the August sky that the demons he housed in his brain would begin to boil and bubble his mind, like the hot cobble stones under his feet.
“Idiota!!” He shouted out.
“You’re the idiot!’ Someone replied and he laughed again, glad of the interaction. I was becoming increasingly embarrassed by his behaviour and wondered if one day my friendship with him would result in me getting beaten up. It was possible. Some people court disaster more than others. And there are people who are simply dangerous. He took the opportunity to ask for money from a passer-by and another middle finger was raised firmly in his direction.
Work to him was as mysterious as heaven. He saw others engage but had no evidence of it himself. He regularly saw the bin men and road sweepers doing their rounds but paid it no mind. He had turned loafing into an art. His aversion to work put the flâneurs of Montmartre to shame. He was now in his sixties and had been punched many times, (on no less than twelve occasions in the face), as a direct result of his method of instigating conversation.
He knew that this wall that he sat on all day, every day, was in the heart of the tourist quarter, and that those that he interacted with he would almost certainly never meet again. His actions were soon forgotten, which is perhaps why he repeated them so often. Many timeless summers had passed since his first day in the Albaycin. Long, short years. He was young when he arrived and the glowing sense of joy he felt as he looked out on the Alhambra, framed by the snow tipped mountains of the Sierra Nevada, put a kind of lock on his soul. But that was thirty years ago. Or “thirty fucking years” as he was fond of saying. The arduous living of life sometimes felt to him like eons, with its tedium and sorrow, but its recollection as old age approached felt like a fleeting moment in time, all those years lived, only a lightening flash over an ocean storm.
The truth was that when the sun was hot in the sky and he had enough money to drink and smoke, he didn’t fear death. It’s true. He would often say it. ‘No tengo miedo.’ And his eyes would glaze over, truly unable to understand the conundrum of deaths reality. But when winter drew in and the nights turned cold and he felt the long years he had lived as cold in his bones, and all those hungry mornings came begging, he would whisper secretly to the cobbled ground ‘I am scared.’
One day in the middle of August he asked some hippies that had just moved into the caves if they had a cigarette paper. He grumbled and cursed when they replied in the negative. ‘Hippies de mierda’ he said. It was a solid part his life now, to beg, and he had resolved many years earlier to accept the rough with the smooth. Ten or so minutes later he saw a cigarette paper tumbling across the cobbles in front of him but he was too lazy to get up and fetch it, and when he asked someone else to do it and they refused, he grumbled a moan tinged in bitterness. I went and got it for him. He said thank you as I passed it over to him but I wondered if here was a man who thought he had learned all the lessons life had to teach him, which is why he sat in the same place, doing the same thing, day in day out, through the changing seasons, year in year out. The superior attitude he had towards menial work was what had beggared him. His grandiose dreaming, the beating heart of his vagrancy. He was not the only one in the Albaycin guilty of this.
Noon came and went and by two o’clock when I returned from the shop with a fifth consecutive litre of Alhambra the fierce sun was high in the sky. It was one of those Granada days where even the stray dogs wouldn’t leave the shade. The electronic thermometer near Plaza Nueva read forty-eight degrees. The Granadino’s had absconded to the coast and left the city near empty.
Just before midday he saw a flash of light on the floor and to his amazement, he noticed a two-euro coin someone must have dropped. His heart leapt and he whispered under his breath, ‘God will provide’. He was always willing to denounce his atheism for money or drink. On that occasion he did move, but not to the shop, he got someone else to do the errand for him. The old Gallego was fussy about the coldness of his beer, a trait found in many who inhabit the region of Andalucia. When he felt the ice cold can of Vol Damm against his leather brown forehead he tingled with familiar glee. There would be life.
He hadn’t returned to Galicia for decades and it was starting to show in his soul. Strange he never left Andalucia for a man that loved the rain as much as he did. There had been no rain in Granada for months. The Galicians are a sea-faring people, as his own ancestors were, but he was anchored in the mirador. I looked over at him and thought perhaps it was the memory of the sea that kept him in the mountains. Perhaps something bad had happened that he had put to the back of his mind. I looked again at his silent, half-drunk expression and knew that the truth, in all likelihood, would never be known.
The police took their time but eventually got in their car and drove away. I sat by Dos Lunas on the baking hot wall in the silence of the siesta drinking cold beer and feeling young and happy. Looking out on the snowy mountains of the Sierra Nevada’s above the Alhambra never quite fails. He was wearing his shit-catchers and a vest T-shirt (no doubt gifted to him by someone or other). His clothing revealed the young man still in him, the one that wouldn’t relent. He seemed fully alive with the new can of cold Vol Damm. With another drink, another momentary lease of life.
At the middle of the siesta the mirador was empty save for a few people with nowhere to go. There was no-one there to call idiot, except of course for myself, which he obliged when the can had been drained and he had crushed it in his hand and thrown it at the full bin, doing nothing when it tumbled to the ground with some other detritus. He burped loudly, farted callously, (all previous concerns about shitting himself had vanished) and then the same old vacant expression came over his face as he wondered where the next drink would come from.
He began to check through his pockets as one of the blow-through hippies that had recently arrived up in the caves in Sacromonte approached him, nervously playing with one of the metal rings in his dreadlocks. The story the man had to tell brought a black cloud to the clear sky. The mad Ignacio, the slender youth with burning blue eyes and tanned skin who wandered around the Albaycin looking for food in the bins had been murdered the night before. Two differing stories emerged about the method of execution. One said he had been stabbed to death by a gang, the other version, told by another man who had arrived by the wall a short time later, said that he had been killed while sleeping during the night by the stream that runs under the Alhambra by someone throwing a heavy rock down on his head, crushing his skull. The hippie was unsure. That’s what he told Dos Lunas. One thing was for certain, Ignacio was dead, the death confirmed by others, including the police. I looked over at Dos Lunas and saw that all the mirth had been extracted from his soul. The Gallego’s face was weighed with sorrow. The burning sun had lost its charms as Dos Lunas began to tremble.
The hippie retreated when he saw the Gallego’s mood suddenly change and he violently launched his foot out and kicked the bin in frustration. The empty cans that teetered on the top scattered on the ground and the noise of the clattering turned heads. I thought a drink might calm him down so I suggested we walked to the shop and get a beer. He was too lazy, so I performed the simple task alone. I looked down and saw the sun tan on my arms was coming along well. Sad tale I thought, on the walk down the cobble lane. The bright day, and the colourful flowers, reds and purples and blues and greens in the pots outside the houses made me forget the terrible event for a while. The heat provided me with a blessed, constant thirst. That was life in the summer for us in the Albaycin, cold Alhambra from the bottle was just petrol for the car, without it, moving was impossible. When I returned with the beer, I saw the solitary figure of Dos Lunas hunched up and bent forward like a crooked old lady. The embers of his eyes had been extinguished. He had retreated completely within himself. I passed him a can of Voll Damm and to my amazement he didn’t open it.
“Something wrong?” I asked.
“He was my son” he said.
Feature Image: Miquel Rosselló Calafell