The second time I lived in Spain was at the other end of
the country, in La Coruňa. I’d been recommended to someone who was running a
Celtic folk festival there, and I didn’t have the heart to tell them I didn’t
see myself as a folkie, or even Celtic, particularly.
Still, they paid me the cost of my travel and a small
fee, and I was in the south of France at the time, so off I went. The Pyrenees
just about killed the VW’s engine; and when we got to Galicia in early June, it
started raining and just kept right on. It was wet summer, in 2001; at least in
La Coruňa.
La Coruňa’s quite something, though. Much bigger than I
expected – the Spanish call anything bigger than a village a city, but this
place stretches itself tight around miles of the headland, like it’s trying to
swallow the Atlantic whole.
I gave up trying to be a good vegetarian in Spain. There
was so much seafood – octopus, of course, but I preferred the fried squid, or
the cangrejos, the crabs you could
see in the market, their claws tied as they tried to fight each other in the
holding tanks.
I was meant to be there for a week, but ended up staying
four months. Most of the time I was in a flat on Rúa Cantábrico that belonged to a friend’s cousin. After
things got complicated with the friend’s cousin, I lived in the V for a while,
parked up round the headland near the tower they claimed had been built by
Hercules.
I really liked that place, especially walking along the
beach in the twilight on my own, watching the Atlantic throw clouds at the city
as its surf broke on the rocks below. I had lots of time to think things
through, and no access to the harmful stuff.
Then, one day, I was sitting in a cafe, reading the local
paper over a pitch-thick cafe solo,
and the woman behind the counter cried out. I looked up in time to see a plane
fly into a building. Then people falling out of the plane, jumping out of the
building, leaping for their lives: real human beings, lost souls in a brand new
hell that some mad god created for reasons of his own.
I don’t know why that made me want to go back to the
States, but it did. I left as soon as they started flying again, heading out of Madrid on a half-empty plane. It was three more years before I got the V back. It was exactly where I'd left it.
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