By Matthias Krug
Pablo Nerudo Matias Hernandez was his name in its inflated entirety, but despite its obviously Spanish origins, he had never stepped foot inside that country of bloodied bulls and sensual flamenco, of eloquent Don Quixote and the elegant world champions of football before. In many ways, he was like the deflated hot-air balloon his friends lovingly compared him to; always pronouncing his departure on that foreign adventure but never actually having the means to take off into the clear blue sun-stained sky.
But now, approaching thirty-three years and with a full moon of baldness beginning to shine whitely on the top of his rounded head, he paced with nervous anticipation above the city in which he had landed just a few hours earlier. Behind him were twenty hours of sometimes precarious travel. Awaiting him was a fresh start, a new world in this old world of Europe. He had a vague whisper of a job waiting for him, but nothing entirely concrete to him apart from the one hundred Euros, freshly emitted from the exchange booth at the airport. He examined the small balcony of his cheap room. There would be enough money for a few more nights yet. Then he’d have to figure out something. But the hard part, getting here, was done now. Behind him a greasy bed beckoned, not entirely convincingly, but with the power of exhaustion weighing in on the decision. He tugged at the bristly tips of his fine macho moustache. Looking down from his fifth floor balcony, the humming city called up melodically in its seductive manner. This was a difficult call: sleep or certain seduction.
Then he saw a black man running. The black man was carrying handbags wrapped in a white sheet which looked much cleaner than the one Pablo saw behind him on the wobbly bed. That did it. His decision was taken. He would explore the fascinating streets below, just a little. He took the control. The small box television mounted up in the corner of the room eked out its last insignificant words and then turned a nightly black.
2
On the street below the motel, there was a smell in the air which positively burnt the nostrils of the unacquainted. Perhaps it was the perspiration of the deep sea-monsters which lurked in the alley next to the cinema, awaiting their certain death in green, bubbly tanks of water. Or it may well have been the sweet rusty odour of the paella rice dish, swimming with chicken pieces in a yellow rice sea.
But it was not this which the running black man smelt. He smelt fear. Pure, instinctive fear, which was raw and like blood, only more metallic and ended up insignificant and weightless up your nostrils. The policeman, running heavy-footed after him, smelt the deep sea-monsters, or perhaps even the paella, and stopped the chase to catch a quick snack at the tapas restaurant before getting back to work. It would be a long night and there would be plenty more chases of black street sellers. The streets were full of them. Best to get some snacks on the way, before the restaurants closed.
The black man kept running. He had lost his fake handbags along the way, clutching now only to the lily white sheet in his right hand. What he had not lost was his will to live. It had never been stronger in him and it had no fake Gucci sticker on its glossy, grotesque snakeskin surface. It was very real. Everywhere he saw beautiful manifestations of security and contented life, something he was unaccustomed to in his hometown. Then this vision of security escaped him momentarily. His eyesight was failing again now. He tried to keep running with some sense of purpose, but when everything blurred like this he became a gazelle, running wildly without any hope of escape. He ran by smell, avoiding dangerous objects at the last moment by how they reverberated in slanted tangents into his gaping nostrils. He did not see that the policeman had long since been shaken off.
3
In his patchy dream in the cross-Atlantic flight some hours earlier, whilst fighting the twin demons of the engine’s incessant roar and his seat neighbour’s terrible snore, Pablo had been running too. Fast as he could, fingers outstretched, through the streets of La Paz at night. They were running after him with burning torches, screaming ‘go home, foreigner, go home.’ They had called him by his nickname: ‘El Extranjero’. That was in the dream. In life he walked through that soft Spanish city. He was entirely weightless now from the tiredness creeping through his body like a stealthy thief, pick-pocketing his senses. But the city was certainly something. He liked the clean, light, airy feel of the city and he liked that the weather was fine and balmy and that the buildings were large and drawn and chirpy as birds flapping effortlessly from his imagination into reality and back again. It was this beauty, this impulse to discover his new surroundings, which made him walk on. This was a fine city to arrive in. Valencia. Beautiful, seductive Valencia. Lady Val, he would call her. Thinking that nick-naming nonsense was how he came across the beggar man in the side street leading into the big central plaza. It was a beautifully curved square.
The man was holding a cup from a burger shop. Pablo, basking in this cloud of complete tiredness, which grew in hairy bushes from each of the pores of his body and threatened to enshroud his reason, wondered what had happened to the man. This wonderment made him stop walking. Why was he there? He did not look like a bum. Harsh and probably politically incorrect, that word. But people refer to people who live on the streets as bums. Probably because they sit there on their bum often, Pablo thought, remembering his English from the time spent in the USA.
But not this one. He was kneeling. He looked well kept and not at all scary. Not demanding. Not accusing. Just kneeling there with a cup from one of those burger joints in his hands. Pablo detested the burger joints.
His girlfriend, who he had met on the central plaza in La Paz five years ago next week, and who he had first kissed on the side of a street which buzzed with cars, pulled him into burger joints sometimes. He had left her behind, as with everyone else, promising not to return soon, but to offer them a chance to come too when he was rich and influential. But she would be first, he had promised her, when he had a house or at least a flat into which they could marry.
‘Come on, come in,’ she would say with a hurt look on her face when, on the verge of entering the burger joint in La Paz, he hesitated gravely at the door.
‘No, I don’t like the look nor the smell of it,’ Pablo would say. It smelt of oily capitalism and fried corporations, he told her. But he would enter anyway just to please her and because he liked the smell of it when he kissed her, softly, in the midst of a burger joint. Now without her he felt that kiss and tasted it and felt her absence acutely, like the lack of clean boxers, like the lack of clean air in a bursting metropolis. But this Lady Val was not such a bursting voluptuous lady. Lady Val was fine and refined and tenderly dressed in elegant robes. Which could not be said of his lady. But no mind. She had her own dark fizzle. He thought of when he drank the Coke she always ordered in the burger joint.
That same cup made of plastic paper was now in the bum’s hand. Not full of black, fizzy love, but empty of yellow, clinking coins. There is never enough money to go around, or if there is, it never goes around, Pablo thought with regret. He observed the old man from a doorway in the street. He did not have the courage to go and talk to him and ask why he was there. Maybe he was just afraid of catching something if he came too close, as if poverty might somehow be contagious. And on a first day like this, fraught with difficulties and tiredness and unknown challenges, it was not advisable to catch poverty. No, sir. But he stayed to watch, somehow captured in the kneeling man’s miserable web.
Someone walked past the kneeling man now. His eyes were closed all the time. He muttered something, presumably prayers. Pablo encountered a fleeting feeling of home in those prayers, of his strictly religious upbringing and the festivals in church. A couple passed by. The man kneeled. He wore no sign to describe his plight, just a thin nightgown of pride. Apart from that a full green jacket, very smart, and blue jeans. That was all. Respectable office shoes too.
The lady of the couple turned back on a whim and dropped a coin in the burger joint cup.
Clink. It hit another small coin and settled.
The man crossed himself and said a prayer in her direction. Then he went back to his former kneeling meditation. Pablo watched as the black man he had observed earlier, the very same one he thought, came running up to the cup. He saw that the bum had no chance. He had his eyes closed and held the cup softly, eloquently, almost as an afterthought to this terrible state of poverty. The black man had come running softly too, but with quiet intent, and snatched the cup cleanly from his hands. It made a brief whooshing noise and then the black man was already gone around the next corner, and the bum who had been kneeling opened his eyes in great forlorn surprise.
All this happened in such a rush-blink-rush that Pablo had exactly one moment to decide what to do. In that moment he did not think about his tired, plane-squashed legs, about the loose nothingness in his numb arms, nor about the sleepiness which was creeping upon his mind in great stealthy steps. In that moment he looked into the bum’s crumpled face and saw a hopeless void. It was such a dreadful void that Pablo began running.
For Pablo the chase was unusual, because he was not accustomed to spilling his lungs out onto the pavement on a daily basis. For the black man it was as in almost every day in his life; he was running blindly and with a bad conscience just for being alive in a country where he was obviously unwanted. But this time his conscience was justifiably bad and he despised himself for what an animalistic instinct in him had made him do. He had taken revenge for his lost bags, his lack of money, by robbing a poor, helpless old man.
Pablo did not think much. He only sprinted to catch the black man. He did not always want to think of him as a black man, but there was no other description he could think of whilst running at full gasp through these heaving hordes of gawking people. Perhaps he should call him illegal immigrant instead, because surely he was here without papers. This was funny coming from an immigrant on his first day in Spain, but that’s what immigration laws did to you.
But he had no chance, really, to catch the illegal immigrant. He quickly lost sight of the man between arms and legs and people and baby baskets and little cuddly dogs. Pablo slowed down. Now a deep oceanic hunger ached inside his stomach, augmented by the breathless wheezing bringing up bunches of stale air from inside his lungs. He thought he saw some bronze angels fluttering above the building he walked past now. Shaking his head sceptically at his strange vision, he slipped a leaf of chewing gum into his mouth. This helped momentarily against the hunger.
He walked past two other street bums on the way to find a restaurant. One of them got up, shaking her wrinkle-riddled hand at the other, younger bum.
‘Go and find some work: you are young, you can work, you little tramp!’ she shouted.
The other woman mumbled something back. It was hardly audible above the steady tremor of the street but she left anyhow and then there was just one beggar woman on the street upon which Pablo walked for the first time. He would have mentally called her a bum too, but that was politically even less correct, to call a woman a bum. That might even be considered sexist in this new place. You had to be careful with what you said in new places, he knew from his American years.
Pablo walked on and watched now as a few people reached for their pockets to give the only remaining beggar lady some coins for her troubles. But all of them had run out of coins all at once. The beggar lady shook her wrinkled hands at those no-good people who had run out of coins at the same time. She did not believe it. Not for one moment. She thought it was another cheap trick, like looking away or talking suddenly on the mobile phone, without having received a call.
But perhaps it was no cheap trick. The same pattern was repeated everywhere Pablo raked his tired gaze through the mounds of gently swaying people. At the flower stand which was just closing for the night, the good paying customers suddenly found that they had not a single coin in their pockets to pay for the array of flowers on display. But he did not give it significance. Now he just needed to get some food and retreat to his motel bed.
Pablo walked on with faltering legs. He came across a restaurant and decided to turn in there, whatever the price, because he could not possibly walk any further. He saw that some kind of commotion was happening inside.
He walked up to the order counter. I’ll have a Caesar salad to take away, he said, in Spanish. His Spanish. Their Spanish. Everyone’s Spanish.
‘Nada.’ The man at the order counter said. He looked stressed. He also looked Spanish. A tiny crab of racism stirred inside Pablo’s mind.
‘Como que nada?’ Pablo inquired. How could it be nothing? But now he looked more closely at the commotion which was taking place.
‘You might want to check that you have enough money,’ the waiter said. ‘Or any money for that matter. Check it and then order.’
This was flagrant racism. Did he look like a foreigner, really? At home they called him “the foreigner” because of his time in America. It wasn’t the most inventive nickname, for South America produced plenty of inventive and entirely enviable nicknames like ‘The Barbie Doll’, ‘The Little Pea’, ‘The Stomach Hair’, or even ‘The Flea’. But he was just ‘The Foreigner’. Now he felt like a foreigner too, being treated like this upon stepping into his first restaurant in this new place. Did he have it written across his twisted moustache, stamped upon his beautifully shining moon-forehead, or even typed carefully across his drooping eye-lids? Was this the treatment for a newcomer?
Pablo blinked twice in sheer anger. The waiter left in response. He had to stop a fight at one table. It was between a waiter who had returned a credit card and its owner. It does not work, the waiter said in Spanish. But the violent young man would not have it. Fists were exchanged.
At another table there sat a nice-looking gentleman who had also just received the bill and then taken his leathery wallet out. It was empty of money. Maybe he thought the lovely little kitten sitting across from him had poached the cash because he handily gave the waiter a golden credit card. He smiled suavely.
Incredulously, Pablo turned his gaze again to the other table where the young man had kicked a toss. The waiter had gotten his way and the bloodied young man and his partner were going to the kitchen to wash dishes. The nice-looking gentleman was just getting his golden credit card returned as he saw this taking place. He broke into a sweat as he saw it and did not look at the lovely little kitten sitting across from him. She did not look at him either, but fidgeted awkwardly with her phone.
‘This card does not work,’ the waiter said. This one was an immigrant waiter, but a legal immigrant. His legality brought only a measured improvement in the treatment dished out to him. But now he was keen on dishing back. He had always done this job well and long had waited for a moment like this, perhaps.
‘Try it again,’ the gentleman ordered, not looking nice any longer. He looked like a sneering voodoo mask from Africa now, emitting heavy hues of sweat-air that Pablo could sense from the counter.
‘I tried it four times, sir. Your card does not work.’ He made a gesture towards the kitchen. The whole restaurant was watching this now. They all had checked their wallets and seen the same thing happen. No more money. What now, Pablo thought? Sleep. Go to the motel and get some sleep on an empty stomach. Then try to get to grips with this unusual place in the morning.
The face of the man with the golden credit card blanked and he began to cry. The lovely little kitten made a tutting sound and made as though to leave.
The legal immigrant waiter blocked her way. He shook his head quietly from side to side. His body was strong and lion-like. He was worth a view if you were on safari.
‘You too,’ he said.
Reluctantly she followed the crying gentleman who had wooed her favour until then but suddenly would not look at her any longer. She looked at her red fingernails one last time. They went to the kitchen. The whole restaurant suddenly migrated to the kitchen. It was the waiter’s revenge. The other waiter came up to Pablo at the front desk.
‘Do you still want to order?’ he asked.
‘No, it will be alright,’ Pablo said.
‘Como que no?’ the waiter asked with a smile.
Pablo made a South America hand sign for him to go to such and such a place, which would hardly be understood here, and then left the restaurant.
He popped another leaf of chewing gum into his mouth. Then he walked alone and hungry but very much alive through the mellow Lady Val night and to the motel. He was happy that at least there they would not charge the bill until the end of his stay.
