to come.
I don’t know how long I was sitting there like that, looking all around me, gazing at the stones on the ground, when I asked myself, “Is it really true that you have to pay to get onto the beach here in Italy? I’ve never heard of such a thing in all my days.” I still thought it had been a joke, by that man who had told me, even though he didn’t have the face of a joker. “Who would pay to enter such a place? If the sea belonged to everyone, in my opinion, who would have come up with such a strange notion.”
Turning that issue over in my mind, so odd, yet so unimportant to me, I was forgetting all the commotion that’d had to happen that day to reach this point.
Relaxed, sitting there facing the sea, the Mediterranean was so calm. It seemed, as they say, “As still as a millpond,” so different from the Atlantic to which I was so accustomed to seeing.
There was no chance of ever finding the sea calm along the coasts of Galicia, it always seemed to be wild, like it was angry, as if it wanted to smash the rocks that prevented it from penetrating the land. It was nothing like here, where it gently approached and receded again, almost in silence, as if it didn’t want to cause a fuss.
Today at least, the water moved silently. The waves were barely noticeable, although looking around and seeing the debris that was scattered over the stones, it was clear that it wasn’t always so peaceful, that it also knew how to get angry. That being said, the important thing was that I was enjoying it now as it rocked gently back and forth in front of me as if it wanted to reassure me, saying, “Relax, all the danger has passed.”
I was watching it for a while and I began to think about how curious it is that even in nature, there are massive differences. Tiny plants born next to towering trees, long-necked giraffes alongside large-shelled turtles with almost no neck at all, although I do know that in Australia, there is a native species of turtle with a long neck. That’s rare of course, but there are many things there that can’t be found anywhere else except for in those distant lands, from what I’ve read about them.
Well, this wasn’t the time to think about that, although one day I would like to visit that distant country and check out the curiosities of its culture for myself.
We Galicians have always boasted about the antiquity of our land, but I think the aborigines in Australia say that they have lived there for 40,000 years, that the gods had left them there to take care of everything and that one day they would return and hold them accountable for it.
Of course it’s important to see that different beliefs are held in different places, and I dare say, something really must be hidden behind traditions, because if not, where did they come from? Who was the first to come up with them? And why have they not been lost with the passage of time?
Too many questions always arise as soon as you start to really think about something, but it would be interesting to know all the answers.
I remembered that there is a belief in witches, or “the Meigas” in my beloved Galicia, and when you ask people, as I had asked my grandmother on several occasions:
“Have you ever seen a ‘Meiga?’” I asked her inquisitively, so she would tell me.
“No, child, never, but I’m sure they exist, as they say, ‘Just because you haven’t seen them, it doesn’t mean they’re not there,’ and if you don’t believe in them, they come and punish you,” my grandmother would answer very seriously.
That subject had scared me for a time, and it made me not want to go to my grandparents’ house. I was almost sure that because my grandmother believed in them, even though she had never seen one, a “Meiga” was roaming around her house, and I didn’t want it to see me. When it saw that I didn’t believe they existed, it would punish me by not letting me play or by taking away my snack, which was worse, because as my brothers say, I have always been a glutton.
My father used to say that I must have “Tapeworms,” because I was always eating and I was like a toothpick. I didn’t understand it, but the truth is that I’ve been thin all my life. My mother put it down to soccer, and more than once when she got angry because I had borrowed something, Carmen had called me scrawny, which she knew bothered me a lot.
“It seems you’re jealous of me,” I would say, “for not having my slim figure and you can’t eat all the bread you want, because you say that bread is fattening. It must be for you because I eat sandwiches and I’ve never put on weight. Maybe it’s that the bread knows who’s eating it, and since it knows that you don’t like to be chubby, the bread stays inside your body just to annoy you and it sees that such nonsense doesn’t matter to me, so it leaves me in peace.”
The discussion would have to end, because my mother would get between us and say:
“That’s enough, everyone eats their own food, case closed.”
Leaving a piece of her snack as soon as my mother left, she would hand it to me and say:
“Let’s see if this’ll make some of your bones less noticeable.”
I was delighted that she would give it to me, I don’t remember ever saying no.
CHAPTER 5.
A mild ache in my belly reminded me that I hadn’t eaten anything for a long time. At that moment, I suddenly heard a noise and I said to myself, “What’s that sound? It sounded like someone was raising a metal shutter, the kind they have in some stores. Let’s see if I’m lucky and it’s a coffee shop or something. Whatever it is, at this point I’ll settle for anything, sweet or savory, it’s all the same to me, but I can’t hold out much longer without getting a bite to eat,” I thought, “I’m going to end up fainting.”
Getting up from those stones that I’d spent such a long time sitting on, and becoming aware of some pain in my buttocks, caused by the discomfort of my seat, I headed toward the place where I thought that sound had come from.
I was walking slowly, my legs seemed to be half asleep because of the way they’d been positioned, when I suddenly saw a girl walking a dog. She was calling it beautiful and other things that I found amusing.
Why do people imagine that animals are listening to them? I have stopped to think about that at times. I had a neighbor who lived alone, and with the idea of keeping loneliness at bay, or so he told me, he bought a puppy. It was a tiny little thing, a Chihuahua, I think it’s called. If you weren’t careful, you could step on it, and when I would meet him on the porch as he was coming in or setting out for a walk, my neighbor would tell me:
“Manu, you have no idea how good company he is.”
Smiling and doubting his words, I would leave and hear him talking to his dog as I walked away.
“Let’s go here or there, I know you like it there,” he would say to the dog.
How did he know what his dog liked? What an imagination. Well, this girl was so entertained talking to her dog, that when I said, “Hi,” having not seen me approach, she was startled, so I immediately added:
“Don’t be afraid, I just wanted to ask you if you knew where there was a coffee shop that would be open at this time.”
After her fright, she had pulled on the dog’s chain and placed him between us, to defend her. She made a gesture with a shrug of her shoulders to show that she hadn’t understood me, which made me realize that I had spoken to her in
