Cuidad Cadiz

By Michael Quin


In those quenchless streets through Cuidad Cadiz, Andalucia’s most historic of port cities, there hangs a sullen atmosphere. Whether the city’s true voice, or just how it spoke to us those August days, I could not claim to know. Perhaps it was a mood only the sullen could sense. History’s a curios thing in Cadiz; brooding quietly over its grand past, whilst young Spaniards gather to dance warm nights away on its trampled beaches, considering only the sea. Yet, I stop to reflect, and can’t help but feel a little like Cadiz, staring back while the dance goes on. In my memories, Cadiz is a place to both cherish and curse.

I recall the city’s withdrawn charm, sitting alone on the end of the Iberian Peninsula, with tepid seas on three sides. I observed it, rough and worn with no pretensions, just gazing towards Africa and its balmy airstreams. I read into it a stubborn resilience, like the flamenco lyrics of its artists.

Blink. A scruffy city of faded dignity, seeming so forgotten, left prey to the salty air which ate it like carrion. From another angle the tragic sense of endings loomed ominously, causing me unease. Cadiz was a destination of the heart, a stage where dreams that had sustained me were to face their muse. Thus is my story of how this act played out.

My friend Luke and myself, after two months of travel, were close to broke and heading for Cadiz which the author of our guidebook had dismissed as ‘rarely included as one of the great cities of Andalucia’. However, we approached in expectant moods, based on the good people awaiting us, our faith in the romance of coastal cities, and our unspoken convictions that we could will just about anything.

Our bus rose above sparkling wetlands, crossing bridge after bridge, before entering the crooked fingered peninsula of Cadiz. The welcomed returned of the coast was bittersweet as we simultaneously braced ourselves for the trial ahead - the accommodation hunt in a labyrinth of new streets. Booking had felt too restrictive, and thusly we became slaves to our freedom. Sometimes it was pleasantly easy; the first name on our short list was cheap and clean with a vacancy. Other times we’d been haunted by ‘Todo Completo’ signs at every door. Then protracted dramas of biblical proportions ensued, with us soliciting door to door late at night, begging a crib. We’d developed a bullish resilience, but on this occasion the mirages of cold beer, ocean swims, and friends to meet, drew with particularly awesome power.

On a whim, I struck up conversation with the pretty señorita beside me, hoping to gain some local tips about where to eat or drink, and spare us some blind meanderings. I politely caught her attention, but she was dismissive. Spaniards had bent over backwards to help us out, but this lady with nowhere to go and nothing to do, didn’t give a chorizo. Luke, raising his eyebrows across the aisle, had witnessed her reaction and didn’t need a translation. I stiffened in my seat and turned back to face the lakes out of my window once more, to focus on those calm waters, so full of patience.

I was anxious, not about this lady but the other I was in Cadiz to meet, but trying to contain it, and Luke was trying not to show he’d noticed. Luke knew my Achilles' heel was exposed; he’d endured my laments at life’s way of putting distance between souls so close, as well as how much the overcoming of this distance meant to me.

Along the wide promenade stretching the length of Cadiz, from its outskirts until the fortified giant-brick wall of the old city’s ramparts, then through the city gate towards the bus station, our bus drove. I noticed first the sun-bleached monstrosity of the modern part, and then how aged the modernity appeared. Few people were to be seen in the streets, and those few were moving rather slowly, even for Andalucians. I imagined a bustling plaza somewhere ahead, but never actually saw it.

Whilst heaving our luggage off the bus, I promptly appreciated why people were walking so slowly. The heat was overbearing, with no hint of either moisture or respite. Now I really wanted that cold beer. It seemed the heat had followed our bus all the way from sweltering Sevilla where we’d hoped to escape it. Even down this narrow peninsula it forced any sea breeze there may have been back in retreat. The line was drawn - our battle for refreshment would need to be fought all the way to the sea - or a bar - whichever we found first.

The low-roofed bus station had a very out-of-date feel to it, and reeked of tobacco. It wasn’t an uncommon odor in Spain, where even banks smelt like smoky bars, but something struck me about the smokers themselves. Lounging about as they were, few possessing any luggage, they didn’t seem to be waiting for buses at all; it looked more like a frontier saloon full of idle smokers. I couldn’t read their body language, and knew not whether it was my fatigue or their ways. I didn’t sum them up as types to ask about sights of interest. When I realised my summation was jaded by the fact they simply looked less friendly than that pretty lady on the bus, I was at once angry that she’d gotten to me.

We swiftly located a pension, congratulating ourselves on our navigation. We’d sliced through labyrinthine streets and odd shaped plazas as swiftly as local cats. Making our trajectory more cumbersome was Luke’s surfboard. A hangover from our surf safari, which had disbanded weeks ago, the board was now being hauled day by day through Andalucia, for lack of a better idea. He claimed it hadn’t been so bad skirting the surfable oceans of Portugal and the Basque country, but had tangibly gained weight since we’d left the last surf beach behind us.

We squeezed through the hostel entrance, a smaller door cut out of the grandiose, and perpetually closed, larger door. After a tentative minute the hostel hag appeared on the balcony above, definitely looked crabbier than the bus lady. I had, however, learnt in my European travels not to be intimidated by first impressions of the archetypal pension owner. They were, it’s true, often bent over and grumbling, with unhealthy levels of affection for their dog, and highly suspicious of sweaty unshaven travelers. However, after a few smiles and well-aimed niceties, they usually melted into sweet old ladies.

She insisted on giving us a personal tour of a tiny, clean room. It was a real ‘hot box’ but we’d shared many of these, awaking hourly from the heat, and swearing in the morning we had to pay for a fan and separate beds. Yet, sure enough the next time we got a room our stingy budgets meant choosing between drinking or air conditioning and two beds. And so we accepted our lot, and the fact that the latter was only bearable drunk. This room also had the mocking feature of a single window, which opened out onto the suffocating central foyer, presumably so we could let in the sweaty air from there as we pleased.

If the room was normal enough, the building itself wasn’t. Peculiar stairways lead in every direction, including to ‘Prohibited’ rooms with barred windows. Eagerly we climbed to see our balcony view, and after taking a few wrong staircases, finally stumbled upon it. There we sat amongst the drying underwear, taking in the sun, watching them flap sluggishly about our heads.

We treated ourselves with 1-litre bottles of San Miguel and a bag of dusty green pistachio nuts, agreeing that this was going to be a good few days, no matter how bizarre our initial impressions.

By the time a couple of girls arrived, things were looking even better than the trinity of beer, nuts and sun - or so we thought. In fact, they turned out to be quite peculiar, their timing a complete puzzle. Laughter met our silences, silence at our jokes. Like those staring faces in the bus station, I couldn’t read them at all, and it unsettled me. They apparently loved Cadiz, yet had very little to say about it. We couldn’t tell whether they wished to befriend us or escape us. Later that night we returned to find they’d left one of their beers on our windowsill, warm and unopened, and we never quite understood what the donation of a single warm beer signified. (We took it with us when we eventually left, so as not to be rude, and drank it warm in Granada after realising we would never afford a room with a fridge.)

After our beers, we returned to our hot box for a quick change to freshen up before heading out, but it was so hot in that room we were already thirsty again. We left as hot and bothered as we had been on arrival, but now with every intention to become lost. Walking the streets, there still weren’t many people around, although I’d been sure a couple of hours earlier that it was then siesta time. On we walked while, starved of opportunities for people watching, our interest in the architecture grew. The decayed and discoloured opulence of Cadiz’s old town was eerie and haunting, and all the more so in the near silence of those emptied streets. The flaked paint possessed some charm - in the right light - but the rotted window shutters didn’t, and few buildings seemed to have dodged the decline. A couple of dogs circled in the shade of the plaza’s palm trees, and nearby some bums sat with distant stares, both talking at once, like philosophers in disrepair. Besides these, only a few other people turned out for our first tour of the city, and these only appeared in glimpses, always around the corner of the next alley. Children disappeared into passageways, leading presumably to houses above. One wheeled his tricycle by us, and stared knowingly.

We couldn’t find anywhere to publicly quench our thirst. One tapas bar had just closed, the chairs stacked, and another had been closed for what looked like years, its windows patchily boarded up. It was all beginning to feel like we’d come at the wrong time, or the wrong century. We peered through the gaps in the boards, and couldn’t resist using the cliché ‘crack in time’. At first we took it for some ancient tavern, with dusty unrecognisable shapes fuelling our imaginations, but the calendar hung at October 2000. Next to the calendar was an enthusiastically hand drawn poster praising Real Madrid, and further along hung portraits of fresh-faced matadors in full costume, all wearing the same dark hair slicked to the side. The long wooden bar top, which once must have held colourfully assembled trays of tapas and Andalucian elbows, was now covered in dust and littered with empty Sherry bottles. On one corner of the bar were two cigar boxes, and I thought of men passing them around in the now uninhabited space before us. The other end of the bar a more sober air lingered. There was Jesus Christ bleeding on the cross for ‘Semana Santa 2000’. This place spoke of Spain in many ways, even in its silence. Garish turquoise tiles screamed from floor to ceiling, even in the low light, as did inlayed patterns in crimson and salmon pink. It was a sight to behold, one verging on hideous, only forgivable by its force of character. It must have been a bustling tapas bar in its day, spilling out into the main square with dark skinned Andalucians enjoying their favorite indulgences, but now it was faded, decayed and just a little gloomy.

Continuing down the streets leading out from the cathedral plaza, we were puzzled by the lack of life to be found and mocked by the sun at our failure to find the shade of a bar. Luke claimed his blood was boiling, and I believed him. I’d never seen a sun lover cursing the light as fervently as he now was. I offered my sunglasses to Luke for a minute, exposing myself to the full force of the Andalucian sun. Africa lay not too far away, just across the sea to the south, but in that moment I felt like I was stranded in one of its vast deserts. It wasn’t only the heat, which we’d felt in Sevilla, but also the brightness that radiated from white facades, and others not white but faded to something near enough - intensity on all sides. Next to the white cathedral we cowered like ants under a looking glass with rays reflected onto us. I snatched my shades back and, as Luke was suffering again already, we headed for the beach.

The empty city made more sense as we discovered the full beach. As we neared the water’s edge we saw to our horror that this was in fact where all the cigarette butts had been hiding as well. They rolled up and down the sand with the lapping waves, in a perfect poetry that stirred repulsion all the more intensely. Out to sea, two dark oil tankers stalked, otherwise all was beautiful. This was the setting for my dream, so I looked selectively and laughed. We searched out an area with the lowest concentration of cigarette litter and lay down our towels, then ran into the water. It was surprisingly easy to forget our initial concerns as soon as the water was all around me like cool tonic, and that ball of fire overhead had now had its strength sapped by its old liquid foe.

Refreshment now ours, we decided composure was needed too. It had been a peculiar morning indeed, but we were here for reunions, so that was now our next step. To understand my apprehension, one needs to understand how it is to travel half way around the world with your breath held. More than any other factor, it had been my close friendship with a Catalan girl, almost 2 years earlier whilst studying in Holland, which had brought me flying to Spain. Her name was Meritxell, but apparently I could never pronounce the ‘xell’ right. Now, after so long being a world away, she was somewhere in Cadiz, and I was trying to ride out the terror and exhilaration of this imminent confrontation between dreams and reality.

In such atmospheres of apprehension, obstacles in meeting can feel cruel. Yet, predictably enough, trouble chose to strike while we were weak with relaxation. In a euphoric distraction of saltwater and sand, I managed to lose my phone card from my pocket, into the depths of Cadiz bay. As I pictured her walking the streets of Cadiz, at times perhaps around the next corner or in the shop I hesitated in front of before continuing on, and my card to call her floating thru the ocean we could both see, the faultless comedy of it all sank my mood. Between Luke and I we had little money, and trekking in the heat with the meager remainder of that money for a store selling phone cards was not an exciting option. I cursed the same ocean which hours earlier I had been craving.

One hour passed and my mind had not eased. I’d lost all hope of finding a blue piece of plastic in a bay that once housed the Spanish armada, and had gone back into the water to calm myself down when, defying all chance, it appeared to me.

There it was, dancing paper thin and blue in two meters of sea, the proverbial needle in the haystack. It appeared swimming almost merrily along, sending off shimmers of blue in that dreamy underwater radiance lit by summer’s blush. I dove down and clasped it between two hands while laughing bubbles, then swam madly to the beach to announce my happy discovery. Luke was already sun-dazed, and I suspected well on his way to yet another spell of sunstroke, but once I started telling him how I’d miraculously found the card swimming like a runaway rollercoaster on the ocean currents, he looked positively bewildered. Days later, in the tea houses of Granada’s old quarter, we would be sipping mint tea, smoking shishas, and still talking about the magical phone card discovery as if it truly had been a miracle. Suddenly we couldn’t control our grins. Cigarette butts and oil tankers disappeared. Instead there was magical sunlight and sweet seawater and friends a phone call away.

Calling my friend Alejandro to give him our location, I was almost laughing out each word as I spoke. Our friend Javi was in Sevilla but on his way down, said Alejandro who’d just spoken with him. I took a deep breath at the thought of calling Meritxell, then exhaled only when he said he’d speak to the girls. Soon Alejandro arrived, along with his signature air of relaxation, and informed us that we were meeting the girls further along the beach.

Away from the main shorefront the beach broadened, past low fortifications in ruin, where we found sands deserted by people and devoid of cigarettes. Alejandro is that rare personality who stands outside of time, so relaxing, but while we enjoyed a timely coffee on ice at the Flamingo Bar, I could not hide my agitation at knowing Meritxell was within two minutes of where we sat.

If the initial moment of reunion was sweet as we hugged, smiled and played with the sand, then what followed was like an elusive flavour one cannot articulate, yet wants desperately to grasp. I was not sure what I was waiting for, but perhaps it was meant to equal the miracle of the phone card, or at least resemble the myriad of imaginings I’d let my mind spin around this day. I was surprised and I wasn’t, my imaginings did not play out, time did not stand still, nor did it speed up, but simply ground on as gulls circled, and waves lapped at the shore. For the first time I had no idea of what to say or where to begin, so that each ‘tell me everything’ and ‘so..?’ began to sound like a bad interview.

I tried to put my finger on the flavour, but still I could not. There she sat, her face catching the light exactly how I had remembered, as true to memory as a photograph. Yes, it was her. Yet there I sat unable to read her like those faces in the bus station, the strange girls at the hostel, or the mysterious mood of Cadiz itself, so who was I?

Luke and I raced out into the sea, deeper and deeper as far as we dared. I wanted to sink; I needed to pull myself together. I thought of distance, that reality so powerful in imagination, and how I’d made it a sworn enemy in my yearnings, and how I fled to its safety now.

I racked my brains as to what my impressions were, but very little came to me still. This was like the experience of trying to calculate elusive initial impressions of a destination in travel, albeit a perplexity of a more pressing nature. Underwater I closed my eyes and saw her eyes, barely concealing an emptiness not true to memory, which would later haunt my dreams. All of this was felt so slightly, so inarticulately, but in that corner of myself I felt like one of the facades in Cadiz’s lonely streets, which no longer moved a heart the way it had in days gone by, holding the music and romance now only in memory’s fading paints.

Who was I? Melodramatic perhaps, but I couldn’t shake the nagging thought that my pity for Cadiz as a city of riches departed, matched closely the feeling I had for myself.

Returning with Luke, towards the little group we’d brought together on the sand of Cadiz bay, I knew only the slightest flavour of these endings I’d arrived at. As we sat there telling stories of our past life together and vague summaries of life since then, and how our paths had lead back to cross again, our 1-litre bottles of Cruz Campo dug into the sand catching the brilliant sunset’s glow in glass, I was more relaxed. We laughed at the mere fact we were all together again, and as the bliss of watching an ocean sunset with good people was being taken in, more tangibly I felt the fulfillment of the journey which had been made, one which could not be taken from me. So played out the act that’d brought me to that beach from the other side of the world.

I’d overcome so much distance, only to fall victim to change. Several hundred sunsets after that one over Cadiz I read some lines that took me back there. It was one of Marcus Aurelius’ meditations that ‘Even while a thing is in the act of coming into existence, some part of it has already ceased to be. Flux and change are for ever renewing the fabric of the universe, just as the ceaseless sweep of time is for ever renewing the face of eternity’. While I had been dreaming this destination it had already begun fading away, and I had never stopped to consider the possibility. And it occurred to me then how still, after man has known this for so long, we need to learn it for ourselves, in our own way.

I’d waited with the anticipation of a deliverance that moment of reunion, and knew the power of focussed energy that took me there to that beach on that afternoon. To see it not wholly fulfilled was also to learn that there is no final overcoming, in a world that is finished in every single moment, and then moves on. Eventually too, If this passion I’d followed had given me strength, the realisation that it was a bridge and not a destination would eventually afford me an obstinate endurance.

I saw Meritxell again, one last time weeks later in Barcelona. The wonders of that city and the lengths Meritxell took to show them to us aside, that mysterious flavour from Cadiz endured, while the same nagging images haunted. Cadiz was a stage for a final act in many ways because since then no new enduring images arose which connected to previous acts in that tale. Exactly why this was, and how it could happen without my noticing it, is a question I eventually tired of asking myself.

A few days later, when our bus was leaving Cadiz for Granada, back down that big long boulevard which spanned its length, I began writing what I’d just experienced. I had no pages left in the notebook I’d brought from Australia. Its final page announced my arrival in Cadiz, and my hopes at that time, and I didn’t have a new book to begin writing in. What I did have was the large receipt from a month earlier that the mechanic, Mr. Amado, had given us in Paris. I remembered that day well, and how we all feared for the trip then, and worried about not reaching southern Spain because we had bought such a lemon of a van. As I looked, at the receipt and then out the window at my Andalucian vista, I laughed to myself. Loss, I reflected, can be such a perversion of a sacred impermanence by which all is made more valuable.

On that bus I stewed quietly over these events, while images of Cadiz jostled for attention. I thought of it’s ghosts; doomed armadas that had to be, and its palaces of flaking paint built to denote the fortunes of a people in their time, and flamenco’s soulful laments of loss triumphantly sung. The fact that Cadiz rose as others fell, then eventually declined as others rose, could be read clearly in its buildings. I reflected how despite this the people remain proud of its history, of what was achieved by those who set forth from its port, of the enduring faith of its artists, of the seafood restaurant I was obliged to visit, of its kind hearted inhabitants, and Javi’s beaming smile welcoming us for the first time to his beloved city, which years earlier in Holland he’d invited me to. It is a type of triumphant pride that celebrates experiences that with less fortune may never have been at all. Yet they did, and they remain in memory, becoming a part of identity, and cannot be taken back.

In strange way I felt like Cadiz had been trying to tell me this since I arrived and only now, as I left, was I beginning to understand.