The Cold War: Unreasonably Good Times In East Berlin

With a slight push on the heavy steel door, the five of us come in from the cold. The small building is the size of two tractor trailers, and constructed from pockmarked wartime concrete. It is almost invisible against the wide white landscape of snow and crooked winter trees. The floors, which were once painted a rusty blood red, have been chipped away by the passage of hundreds, or thousands of tourist feet. We huddle for a moment before continuing; the German winter sun is setting at 4:00PM, and outside the temperature has dropped to -10ºC. With another nudge, Nikola opens a second door to our left, into the small museum the Germans have erected around the remains of the Orianneburg concentration camp prisoner’s kitchen.

On the main floor, small windowboxes hang at eye level, protected by centimetre-thick glass and lit impassively from below. Each includes a name, an enlarged black-and-white photo, and a simple story of persecution. Here is Max Ernst, a camp escapee from Poland. Here is Rosa Limburg, who smuggled medicine from army barracks to concentration camp prisoners. Here is Daniel Schauzberg, who was forced to help the camp doctor when he prepared lampshades for his personal study. He writes that he threw up when he found a tattoo on a pelt: he realized the lampshades were being cut from the dead skins of camp prisoners.

His picture, and many of the others, bear wide and unconvincing smiles. The years of torture, rape, abuse, starvation, and assault the Nazis inflicted on these people has left around their eyes the lines of an old man. At the bottom of a staircase, we come upon a long flat display case, full of leather scraps. The caption reads: “At the ‘shoe-factory,’ camp workers disassembled the leather shoes and luggage of concentration camp prisoners, after execution at Dachau. New prisoners were issued wooden clogs. On the scrap above, an address in Vienna is still visible.” Another passageway opens into a new display room, where stories of grief and horror lay beneath plate glass. A staircase at the back of the exhibit drops into the frigid basement. The floor here is unprotected, and I descend alone. An empty cold-room holds fifty-or-so thick iron hooks, hanging from the ceiling to hold sides of meat. In the the next room, a concrete depression the size of a washtub is marked by a simple sign: this was the sink for a camp of thousands. Any prisoner attempting to wash a potato, or any food, before it was cooked was beaten and held under the putrid dish water.

On every wall, and many of the colossal concrete columns of the basement, the prisoners left paintings. Water droplets with tubby legs and cartoony smiles leap from deep porcelain tubs; carrots with googly eyes dance with onion women at a festival; a small display of painted flowers has faded with time, mostly because food dyes were never meant to be used as paint by prisoner cooks. They are scenes of happiness, of being fat and unwrinkled, of groups and dancing and mythic feasts. And there, alone in the basement of the Orianneburg concentration camp kitchen, I felt as though I should cry; not because the camp was a tragedy, which it was, but because people had left paintings in this kitchen. Starved and beaten and hated by mad-dog guards, these people had painted anything but their grim camp-lives.

*

Whatever you have heard about Germany is wonderfully, eerily true. The people of Berlin are built tall and thick, and are remarkably blond. The language is full of English-sounding barks, coughs, and mouth-rounding “U” noises. They seem to be unaware that they all sound like B-movie Germans, and insist on saying things like “Brunsbetter Franklewurster” without laughing.

At the end of four days in Berlin, it’s obvious that four days aren’t nearly enough to grok Germany. Winter fairs have sprouted in the main squares that make us laugh with pleasure, and uncomprehending delight. Booths sell absurdly long sausage, and hot spiced wine, and bear-fur balaclavas. Small drinking halls have been erected next to fountains. The closest thing to fruit in Berlin is probably the sauerkraut. Children are ice-skating in front of the Reichstag. Beer is as cheap and hearty as bread; if your nose isn’t cherry red from the frigid river winds, then your cheeks are rosy from being gently drunk. The Germans are ruthless in their hospitality and efficiency. Lines form automatically. Although there is every reason to get in out of the cold, there is no jaywalking. None.

A much mocked sign marks one edge of the old Berlin Wall, at the border of the old wartime American zone. If you have seen it, on t-shirts or in dorm rooms, you may understand a little of German humor. Though the old sign was stolen in the fever of re-unification when the Wall fell, the Germans have reconstructed it, and mounted the replica about where the wall fell. It reads:

YOU ARE NOW LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR.
please obey all traffic rules.

It’s All Greek to Me: Rome in Three Days

I winced slightly as the bottle fell from my hand, clattering noisily across the slick, dark cobblestone steps. The sound rang out in long reports across the wet spread of St. Peter’s Square, an oval plaza big enough to hold several hundred thousand people. Less than a dozen citizens strolled around its center, damp foreheads frosted in the light from a towering Christmas fir in the center of the square. A police car hunkered menacingly across the oval from us four, its two headlights blazing twin golden arches across the plaza cobbles. As the beer bottle clattered to the stony floor of the square, I jerk my head up to meet that hot yellow stare; the unnerving impression of an almond-eyed predator watching us from a cave, made more dramatic by the fact that the Vatican is towering, dark and windswept, just meters behind the police car’s bumper.

Two ringing peals later, I had my hand on the neck of the beer, and had spun it behind my heel, out of sight. We are, in a time-honored Spanish tradition, botellón-ing the Vatican. A bag to the left has tidily swallowed the empties. I am sure this sort of public drinking must be illegal in America -- and regardless, it feels tremendously dangerous to wield your bottle-opener in the Vatican. We toast to the Pope’s good health, by nodding the tapered glass necks towards the hotly glowing windows of the pontiff’s balcony, and shiver in the frigid river wind that whips across Rome from the east.


*

We followed the winter winds around the Eternal City for three days: seven hills, four men, and thousands of years of history, caked on everything the eye could reach. The palm-sized, square slate cobbles run in crazed, angular capillaries between main thoroughfares, broad avenues choked by top-heavy Vespae, hammerhead SmartCars, and the bleating blitz of the Italian police force. The men are all a head shorter than our crew, and seem to favor their hair flipped backwards, and brushed to a glossy finish. Dark, knee-length wool coats are buttoned over suit-and-tie, or the strong, simple lines of a scarf. The gleam of buckled loafers ambles lazily in and out of their shadows; the Italian is not a rushed man, life will come at the same pace it always has. The women have zipped their legs into long leather contraptions, so that from knee to toe they are pure cappuccino calf-skin. In my red skiing shell, I look mostly like a stranded Swede.

Our warpath down the avenida was planned using the free, cartoonish map from the hostel. It includes helpful hints on how to respond to Rome’s monuments: toss a coin at the Trevi fountain (two if you seek love); look for the sun motif in the Pantheon (it’s under the crosses); climb to the top of the Coliseum to take in the arresting power of the arena (“are you now entertained!?”). Many were the times when I wished that the map would include other useful information (how do you say, “cheap,” in Italian?), but did not mind so much that I went off in search of the Italian answer. Nobody (but nobody!) in our group speaks any Italian, though we make a good show of gesticulating, and pronouncing our Spanish like the name of a pasta.

Later Tuesday, on the summit of Palatine Hill, wandering among the ruins of the Roman Emperor’s most magnificent palace, we ran into another set of Stanford-in-Madrid students. After quoting (and misquoting) our tourguides on the debauched origins of Rome, we slipped away to take in the rest. From the cap of the hill, which is crowned with the skeletons of the tallest arches of Rome, we could see across to the mournfully teetering half of the Colosseum. At the foot of the hill between the two giants of architecture, a double-wide road (Via Sagra) traces the spine of what was once the world’s greatest market. A thin cord separates the Via tourist’s footsteps from the graveyards of ancient Roman business; on the desolate field to either side hip-high marble columns have fallen everywhere, the intricate capstones nearly faded with time and neglect. A few walls still stand, reluctantly, gaptoothed and senile-looking, their brick covered with mossy verdigris. Grass springs up fitfully, as though it knows it shouldn’t reclaim the Forum; what was once the financial heart of a world is being slowly reclaimed, absorbed into a mossy hill.


*

The new, larger group has decided not to drink at the Sistine Chapel again, in favor of more traditional scenery. A dinner at Caffé Carbonara is one of the NYTimes’ favorites -- under the front awning, the restaurant frames its copy of the article that awarded it “best pasta in Rome.” It was certainly fresh: my spaghetti carbonara almost bit back, it was so new. A few glasses of red Tuscan wine convinced us we might like some gelato to close out the night’s eating, so we moved on to the NYTimes “number one” gelato location, a thin bar called San Nicolo’s that boasted unusually delicious flavors like Honey, Lemongrass, and Forest. We find a bar in Campo de Fiore, and say some long, well-liquored goodbyes. Though we hug goodbye, and mean it, our faces are full of a stronger, shared emotion: home is calling. And though these friends are heading off to the States, the rest of us are making one last red-eyed tour of Europe. Scarves are left hanging over bed-rails that night; we hear Berlin may bring our first snow of the season.

Go Bing Or Go Home: thoughts from a long quarter away

I feel as though I should say something, as the waiter whisks away the dessert plates. Dessert has finished, I say to myself, in Spanish: <ya se ha acabado el postre> Such a simple tug, and the program’s last dinner has ended; if I want to, for the first time in three months, I might say something in English. Nervous and clammy, I hastily excuse myself (perdona) and walk stiffly to the bathroom.

I make a small ritual of washing my hands, just to give myself time to really swallow the moment. “You’ve earned it,” I’m thinking. “Just let the rest go.” I’m almost surprised by the resistance I’m getting, as I walk through the motions of English in my head. For a long, long time, I put a viciously sharp end to any English thought, and the sensation feels forbidden, taboo, and something like cheating.

We depart by Metro, soon to meet up and head out one last time, on the famous Madrid party circuit. As the cars trundle mildly under the city, an entire car full of Americans is gushing English, vowels twanging off the steel walls and arching their backs under the long, fluorescent lights. Gische and I are talking about the trip we’ll be taking afterward, and sudden, almost-unwanted freedom of leaving Madrid. As is our custom, he speaks in English, I respond in Spanish; it is very comfortable this way. And then James says, in response to something I have said: “Yeah, it’s been a long night.” And as easily if I meant to do it all along, as if my mind knew before I did, the last little brick in a once-tall wall toppled over. “It’s been a long three months,” I respond, watching the last of a steely damping wall slide past the slowing railcar. I do not know if he sees the long shiver that runs across my back, or the hot rush of blood across my face. It is done. The Americans have arrived, and I pick up what is left of my papers and join them. We leave the station in a large, ungainly pack.

*

If you and I, friend and reader, have a moment sometime, we might talk about what the Madrid program taught us all. To be sure, each of the forty students left Madrid with a heavy helping of Spanish, of Iberian culture, and the chafing uncertainty of being alone in broad, foreign city for months. Many of us cried when we hugged our host-moms goodbye: for me, Maria Luisa Basail Larrañaga was everything; she taught me thousands of words, how to cook patatas bravas, and shared her family with an open heart. Leaving her was harder than leaving Stanford.

I will not return, I think, unchanged. One of the unfortunate side-effects of the language ban was the complete death of your social life (which sounds melodramatic, but is surprisingly true). For three months, I did not make jokes: you simply don’t have the tools to make them. No wordplay: you don’t have the vocabulary. No comebacks: you’re still not fast enough. And if you’re planning on going out tonight, and you aren’t packing English, you’re more of an involved bystander than a party-goer.

In the beginning it was difficult, but it isn’t any longer. I spent many more hours reading than talking; Atlas Shrugged, I Am Charlotte Simmons, Five Smooth Stones, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, Freddy and Frederika, Ringworld, and many more besides. These authors were the only English I allowed myself, and I clung to them like a drowning man. Solitude became passable, even agreeable. The Spanish meal schedule was the norm; the family became everything; the language took life. It was exactly what I asked for, when I applied in March, now that I think back, exactly what enraptured me at the end of that long and indolent summer at Stanford. If I thought it would be a pleasure, then I was a fool.

As I write this, my plane to Rome leaves in three hours. I must close the lid and weigh my bags one last time, trying like a mad man to fit my life into twenty kilos. I can hear Señora opening the lock on the apartment door, which means that she’s come home from shopping to see me off safely. There is a word in Spanish for this feeling, of being special and cherished, but lonely and singular. It is word that wraps up these three months well, in three syllables.

The word is <único.>

BURN AFTER READING: contraband news from Madrid

BURN AFTER READING:
contraband news from Madrid


I would like to begin this letter with a hug.

[THIS IS A HUG]

There. That’s much better, if I say so myself. If you caught that hug correctly, you already know everything I’m about to tell you: about the desperation and exhilaration of bungee-jumping into life overseas; about the pain (and that is a weak word) of denying ourselves our mother tongue; about the castles, the palaces, and the paradises that I live in, and around.
A good hug should do that.

Before I begin in earnest (and I must type like the wind, for I have to get myself to the Parque de Atenas in just a mediahora), I should tell you that this note is the largest body of English to have seeped out of me in awhile. In a long while. Already I can feel something stirring, sleepily; the old tricks are rumbling to life. And so you’ll have to forgive me two things: that I had a weak moment, and wrote home in English; and secondly, that this note is less-than-grammatical. The code of silence has put a serious hurt on my English skills, for sure.

*

Every day, I wake up in my room on Calle Virgen del Puerto, in the centery-westy-part of Madrid. Think Upper-Row-type distances from everything I need. Marisa, my host mother, is invariably awake -- she jumps out of bed by six. As soon as she hears me, she starts the tea. As soon I hear her, I get out of bed, and try to fall asleep in the cramped, lineolo-tastic shower.

Marisa and I share toast and tea, and watch the morning news. We converse in Spanish. She tells me about how to get to that-new-place, and where she-said-he-said is living. I currently understand approximately 80% of what she says, I think. I am occasionally suprised to find out that I have agreed to things unknown, in my haste to greet every question with an earnest ¡sí!, but it’s happening less. We spar on politics, and I try to make overtures to leave, only to be steamrollered by the rat-at-tat-tat of her castellano.

I leave for school late. Invariably, and without exception. Getting to school (the International Institute of Nosequé) entails three big chapters: running, busing, and metro-ing. The science of the 25-minute commute (a golden goal) is more of an alchemy: it seems like no matter how much time I feed to the bus stop, the walk, or the train-ride, it’s never enough.

And so I start running to the bus station. (Look at the Brasilian run!). (But seriously, I’m not Brasilian). I jaywalk across the last road. I shake my fist at the picaro who ran his light. I do the left-right sidewalk tango with an old codger. I climb on board a bus, any bus -- as far as I can tell, they all f#@% you over about the same -- and wait until it seems appropriate to get off, or I see signs that have the Metro diamond on them. I push the button. I get off.

The train to the Center is free, thanks to the Bings. As is, I should say, all public transportation in Madrid.

========================
|  THANK YOU FROM THE  |
|  BOTTOM OF MY HEART, |
| HELEN AND PETER BING |
========================

The Metro is a minefield of stares. Spaniards love to stare. LOVE to stare. I secretly rejoice that I am building awkward-immunity: when I return to America, life is going to be so much more comfortable.

And that, I suppose, is the theme of this letter. I’ve laid a heavy bet that this is worth it; I’m hoping that at the end of this, I’ll be able to write home in castellano, without spellcheck. If you are at Stanford, and wonder what life here is like, I would ask a boon of you: pick a day to do with your off hand. If you’re a rightie, use your left hand. And vice versa.

Be very strict about following your new, highly-arbitrary, educational rule. Eat with your off-hand. Piss with your off-hand. Write with your off-hand. Catch that pencil with your off-hand. Type using only your off-hand. Wave goodbye to your parter with your off-hand. And so on. Seriously. I'm being earnest: you should try to meaningfully switch.

If you did that, it would go a long way towards explaining what my hug left out. I think. It’s hard to be sure of anything, writing in English. By the time the idea is shaping up nicely, the sentence just gives out at the knees. If you did that, we are mostly up to speed. The rest is just my baggage.

Con un abrazo fuerte,
Roberto

(9, 10, etc.) — Famous Last Words: first days in Madrid, last days in English

The girl from L.A., sitting overly erect at the end of the lunch table, is treading all over her vowels; every English word bends over backwards to make itself “looooong,” and “NAAAAAY-sal.” It’s almost too much, now that Madrid has forced us into a new accent, into a new language. It’s almost too much, because American English seems indiscreet; it’s almost too much, because when she stops shaking her gold-bangled wrist at no one, she says “gracias” to the waiter, and it tumbles out as: “GRASSY-ass.”

Carl has long flown: we hugged our bleary, early morning goodbyes at the Metro stop under my hostel. The Metro air was heavy with the scent of hot metal, of scuffed rubber, of well-rubbed plastic; an assault on your nose at 8:00AM. A hug, maybe a handshake, and he whipped around the corner. There was no practical joke moment; no mistakes—from what I hear, he is back at Stanford; he is home.

And so, for the next six days, I tried to mummify myself; tried to spend as little as I could, tried to sleep too much, tried to hold myself ready for the arrival of 50 StanfordKids. And then Madrid, the capricious wondertown, took me along for the ride. Without realizing what I was doing, I finished all the big museums, I began to memorize El Centro, I found myself taking root in my neighborhood. I picked a restaurante, I order ‘the usual’, I don’t eat on gringo-time, I thank the waiter (Pepe) with “GRATH-iahhh.”

It feels normal, now. That’s all I can say.

As I write this, the language ban begins in one hour. The pocket dictionaries are out. Phones are switching languages. Last questions — “what does equivocar mean?” — have the desperate edge of the linguistic refugee. And I have to say: this note has been very difficult to write. I have re-typed almost every sentence, because English feels like someone else’s car: familiar, but only because the rules are known. It’s not my car anymore; it’s not quite my language. Whatever magic I found in these sounds is gone, replaced with the local contempt for anything that doesn’t slur.

To my friends, and my family: “good luck with Fall! I’ll see you soon!”—because really, it’s not going to be long before the program ends. Not too long before I go back to street signs, and a full work day, and the muted efficiency that is rolling off of these freshly American students. Today my isolation in Madrid ends: in one hour, we will gather for the “primer reunión,” and the Iron Curtain will fall. Or something.

To my friends, and my family: “nos vemos; suerte, y adios.”

(6, 7) — From the Halls of Algeciras to the Shores of Rough Tangier

A cell phone goes off in front of us in line. Two or three heads swivel towards the tinny sound, sighing loudly in annoyance. A powerfully-built black man in a palomino daishiki and tambourine-shaped cap turns in front of me, a curiously thoughtful expression passing across his face. He steps out of line slowly, dreamily, kicking off his black leather sandals next to a bulkhead door set into the wall to our left. His briefcase is lowered on top of his shoes, and he slips out of view into the room. A stern figure in an all-black paramilitary suit peers from around a corner several yards ahead, checking on the commotion. His arm bears the seal of the King of Morocco, a densely knotted star of crimson on a field of green; he is Moroccan police control. The fumbling hand of a stranger ahead finds his phone’s mute switch and kills the ringtone -- the tinny call to prayer that pulled the daishiki out of line. The policeman retreats to his bulletproof booth. The only sound in the room now comes from the room to our left, little more than a closet, labelled crudely in three languages:

MOSQUÉE
MOSQUA
مسجد‎

Unable to help myself, I clutch my passport a little tighter, and pick a porthole out which to stare, fixedly. The seas outside the ferry are choppy, a gunmetal blue under a slate-grey sky.

*

With my passport stamped, Carl and I slip back down to the lower deck, where teal sectional couches and navy armchairs sprawl against the lens-like, concave plastic windows. Save for commenting on the mosque upstairs, we do not talk much; it is easier to pretend to doze, or just stare out the windows at the gloomy weather. When the time comes, we shuffle outside against the blustering winds, to take pictures of the port emerging on the horizon.

My first glimpse of Tangier, and of Africa, is unremarkable. Low mountains are stenciled against a dim late afternoon. It is warm enough to wear t-shirts, but the clammy inscrutability of the clouds roiling on the horizon prompts me to pull a hoodie on. Over the loudspeaker, a woman’s voice is serving up instructions, first in mucous French, then in the barking, sharp coughs of Arabic. Carl listens attentively to the French, nodding at the door to show we should leave. The small group of passengers, half-backpacker, half-robed Moroccans, grip at the railing as we dock. Minutes later, we are clanking down the gangplank, in no danger of looking as though we understand what is happening.

As we try to leave the glassed-in holding tank, a small waiting room for passengers’ safety, we are pulled aside by a dapper-looking senior man in a suit. He is wearing a prominent lanyard and I.D. card under a salt-and-pepper bead, and begins speaking in rapid French. Carl and I, alarmed but docile, let ourselves get steered away from the stream of tourists, straining to hear the man speak.

Suit: “English? Do you speak English? ¿Hablaís castellano? Parlez vous Français?”
Carl: “Je parle...”
Rob: “Sí, castellano está bien...”

The suit gives us a critical eye, and settles on English. The appraising look he gives us, a swift once-over that takes in our daypacks, sandals, and deeply suspicious faces, says a lot about him. It is the efficient sort of look a waitress gives to a table, or a pickpocket gives to your back. Carl leads in French, his mouth a hard, firm line. The man matches him, and continues on in French, locking me out of the debate. Whatever Carl is saying, he seems deeply agitated, and ready to break away. I am uncomfortably aware that the last of the tourists are leaving security, and that the doors are beginning to close.

Suit: “My friends, I just give you information -- if you don’t like it, you don’t have to buy my tour.”
Carl: “I really think we’ll be okay”
Suit: “You see this?” [holds up I.D. card] “it’s my identification card. See? Issued by the government. Right here: it says in French. This is official.”

Carl and I exchange deeply dubious looks, unsure how long we have to talk to this man, before it’s OK to leave. We wave him off three, four, five times, telling him that we know that it’s dangerous, thank you very much, but we’ll be fine. “Before you leave...,” he keeps saying, describing the port’s dangers, its petty thieves, the winding back alleys of the medina where anything (and anyone) can go missing. “Much better,” he says, “to have a Moroccan with you. Protection.” His eyes shuttle between us, looking for some insecurity, some wavering urge to fork over fifty euro (around eighty dollars), if only to be safe; if only to be sure.

Carl and I tell him to back off, and walk quickly through the closing doors. The sun is falling off of its noon, and the wind that stirs trickily off of the port’s waters should not be enough to chill us. Regardless, we feel unnerved, uneasy; the man’s long description of the dangers outside the port’s gates had the uncanny ring of truth. We padlock our bags, hide our passports and wallets, and march past security, into the dusty cacophony of a Tangier afternoon.

*

We are heading, in a vague way, towards the top of the hill, the casbah, a limestone-white fortress of columns and domes. It seems less like a destination, and more like an agreed upon warplan; as Carl and I climb the narrow, choked streets of the medina, the old town, our faces are creased with constant worry. “Some welcome,” Carl says at one point, as we wait for a two taxis and a motorcycle to untangle a fender bender. I can’t help but agree: the market air is thick with foreign sounds, strange smells, and my mouth is full of the metallic taste of paranoia.

The young people who move around us in shoals are comfortably Westernized; some even have track jackets, though none could be mistaken for European. Each adolescent has one thing slightly off: a bald head, or bright yellow clogs, or the thin barrel of a cigarillo, wagging from between gap-toothed smiles. The women are nowhere, or in every corner; it is hard to catch a lady’s eye, or even frame them in a glance. The burquas melt before men in tall black robes and small crowns, before ruddy-faced Frenchmen in safari khaki, before wolf packs of ten-year-old boys, who are playing with their lighters. It is utterly foreign, and disarming; half-storybook, half-nightmare, all-too-real for us, at times, to handle.

Our alley breaks out upon a square, an open plaza of palm trees and benches. With a wary eye about us, I fish my camera out of its locker, and take picture after picture. “I do have one mission,” I say to Carl, reminding him of my quest for spices. He nods, and we roll over to one of the spice vendors, a wooden stall under a sagging canvas canopy. The smell coming off of the tabletop is incredible, an assault on your nose: sharp balsam, spicy cumin and curry, riotously green olive oil, and there, in the center, in a mountain of burnt-scarlet, the paprika my mom asked for.

The man who owns the stall has a long, grey face, capped by another of those mini-tambourine hats. He speaks twenty languages, or maybe fifty, but all of them poorly, as though he no longer remembers which is his own. Our debate over the paprika is stewed in French, Arabic, English, and Spanish; Carl handles most of the actual details. The final price is three dirhams, the Moroccan currency. The lowest note we have is a 100-dirham bill; as we offer it to him, he throws up his hands, and issues pidgin-demands to Carl to get change. And so on.

*

We have retreated to a café in another back-alley. Somewhat shamefacedly, we order in English, uncomfortably aware that we have chosen these seats for the soothing island of pale faces around us. I try to order an omelette and coffee; a tuxedoed Arab whirls our plates back to us, bearing two Cokes and some sort of egg-wrapped sandwich. The frosty glass of the Coke bottle is unreadable, written in Arabic and French -- when the waiter is not watching, I slip it into my backpack for home. If I am going to remember Tangier, I want that bottle to anchor my memories. I want the Coke logo in Arabic, a talisman of the commercial, the quixotic, and utterly indecipherable feel of Tangier.

“Why is no one else eating?” Carl asks, his eyes scanning the long barrel of the alleyway. It’s true: every restaurant is empty, save for the palefaces at this café. “It’s Ramadan,” I hear myself say, almost unsure of its truth, until I hear myself say it. It is Ramadan, and these people have been fasting all day; these people are hungry; these people are waiting for dark to fall; these people are waiting to feed.

*

“It’s still not legal to take pictures,” Carl says, for the third time, as we sit on the concrete deck outside the dock building. I look around cursorily, and go back to building a panorama with my camera. Carl’s voice raises in pitch, almost imperceptibly. “There were signs all along the walk back! Non...” and he finishes in French, a phrase that probably means “picture-takers will be slain, and fed to syphilitic she-camels” (or something). I shrug, mostly because I don’t speak French, but also because I have zero faith in Moroccan rule-of-law. Not long after, we watch three young Moroccan kids sneak over to the fence below us, and jump into the loading dock area behind our ferry. “Shrug,” the new Moroccan in me wants to say.

We are outside because the guards refuse to let us inside; inexplicably, they have barred the doors against the coming night with potted plants and iron bars. As the bars rattle into place, I marshal enough Spanish to tell them that we have tickets, that we’re American, that we paid already, and can we please wait inside? They shake their heads curtly, and gesture firmly to the concrete ledge that hangs over a parking lot, and the port gates. We obey; there is no alternative.

A bitter wind whips off the casbah, carrying the sounds of the call-to-prayer. Ululation, the sound of weary wonder, and of stern warning, fills the sunset air. The mosques are the tallest shadows against the enflamed sky; the sun sets behind the casbah summit. On the port wall, over the sea, a tinker is walking, balanced delicately with a long pole. On one side, the medina, and the chaotic law of a black market. And on the other: a stable of glass and steel, of Americans and Europeans baying desperately at the falling night in this strange land. The tinker turns toward us slowly, silhouetted against the flames of Tangier. Our eyes do not meet.

(5) — Buses Galore: Salema to Seville

I winced as I swatted my calf again, and missed. The horsefly I was aiming for tried for the other leg, ignoring by crazy guero-luggage dance. Carl and a British couple looked on, somewhat amused from inside the Salema bus-stop—a silver nugget set into the dusty side of sandstone cliffs.

The only poster to have survived Salema’s sea winds clings to the Plexiglass of the bus stop wall in shreds. It’s a picture of Beyoncé, who seems to be getting a kick out of grabbing a handful of her own (well-conditioned?) hair; in fact, she looks so happy that she could be in pain. And someone has written, in a crude ballpoint speech bubble:

¿Sabe alguien a que hora viene el autobús?
(does anyone know when the bus comes?)

Beyoncé’s question gave us a good chuckle, standing in the noontime heat of a new day in Salema. Another morning on the beach had left us slaphappy with sun, and I was content to wait for the world to end. Ridiculous picture aside, it seemed amusing that anyone would stress so much about bus schedules; we thought of buses as a curious second option to trains. But Beyoncé had a point: the Andalusian people, a colorful tribe of rebels and misfits, decided sometime ago that they weren't okay with a train system. That is to say: by the time the bus to Lagos chugged around the corner of the Saleman cliffs, it was beginning to dawn on us how many buses were in our future.

We planned to attack the Costa del Sol from Seville, a classically crafted city famed for its bullfighting school and its lingering, pervasive scent of orange blossom. With my eye over his shoulder, Carl plotted our campaign: from Salema, we would swoop out of Portugal, ducking inland to Seville. Seville ran buses to Algeciras, which ran ferries to Morocco, which would return us to Spain through Tarifa. And from there, we had heard tell of the azure skies and warm sands of Spain's coast: we planned to indulge in a resort town, Nerja, just east of Málaga. It was ambitious; it was king-making; it was doomed from the start.

Ten hours later, cramped and irritable, Carl and I prowled Seville at dusk. A short dinner of croquetas (Iberian chicken fingers) did something to smooth the mood over, as did the walk we took through Santa Cruz, the old quarter of the city. But even as we planned our trip to Morocco the next day, tensions simmered: the long bus rides and curt treatment we had been receiving Spaniards was beginning to wear on us.

By the time we passed out on the stiff beds of our hostel in Seville, it seemed unimaginable that only that morning we had been wading in the clear waters of the Mediterranean. It seemed as though our day in Salema had been a dream I had stolen from a happier week; ahead, the skies seemed darker, gloomier, and inexplicably ominous. I slept fitfully, hobbled by bus-naps and the sinking-stomach feeling of a bet gone wrong.

(4) — Salema, The Lost Jewel

“You know, you nearly took my head off this morning when I woke you,” Carl said, pulling his hand back from my tense, now-awake shoulder. “Yeah,” I sighed, my voice a little groggy and a little guilty. I had a vague memory of nearly braining the shadow-figure who pulled me into the dawn light of the hostel. “No worries,” Carl said, retreating to his side of the train-seat. “But I think this lady wants her seat back.”

A squat lady backpacker with mousy features and chin-length, straight-brown hair stood at my elbow. She opened her mouth and jawed emptily for a second, visibly fumbling with language. She chose Portuguese, and even through the toothy buzz of my nap’s inertia, it was clear that Carl was right: the woman was jabbering excitedly about one of the numbers on her ticket, and was almost overwhelming my armrest in her urgency. Carl and I swept our arms about our seats, gathering our baggage and trash in a few easy scoops—“Obrigado; desculpe,” I chanted apologetically, trying to get her eyes to stop bulging. We sidled out of the aisle swiftly, taking refuge temporarily in another pair of empty seats. “Well,” Carl said, once he had finished decrypting the ticket stub, “it definitely seems that the Portuguese train system assigned us seats.” I snuck a look at the irate backpacker, who was setting up her nest, and surely stealing my butt-heat. “Now we know,” I said, thumbing my Ray-Bans back over my eyes, and laid my head against the softly thrumming carriage window.

The landscape outside could have been lifted, roots and all, from the south of California. Yucca and prickly pear supplied the only bright greens for miles: the rest of the desert was a stony Mars red, broken only when we passed the carcass of a farm, or struggling olive orchard. Our southbound train was racing pell-mell away from Lisbon, away from the small luxuries and attractions we had grown used to in the last couple of days. “What concerns me,” Carl said, frowning aggressively at his ripped-out guidebook map, “is how we’re getting to Sevilla from Salema.” I shrugged, not sure if this was a concern that needed my input. He flipped open his MacBook and began autopsying the train schedule left up on his screen. “Because this suggests,” he traced a finger down the dusty screen, “that trains from the south of Portugal just don’t go to Spain.”

His frown evaporated as I whipped my head up suddenly. “I smell,” I began, hesitantly, “but do not see, salt.” Carl groaned, and I turned back from raising my nose toward the slit window at neck-height. “What’s up?” I asked, looking quickly over his book, his map, his compu- “No,” Carl said, smiling only slightly. “Nothing’s wrong. It’s just... you know... see salt?”

*

Bad puns aside, I wasn't too far off; soon we trundled out of the rust-colored waste and into the dusty tile of a station marked “LAGOS” (LAH-goshhh). The port town marked the end of Portugal’s hardpan reach for the sea; the mouth of the Mediterranean began just out of sight, beyond the stony tidal walls. Eager to clap eyes on the waters, and starved for some non-jostled naptime, we were swift to board a bus to Salema, the secretive fishing town that marks the west-most point of Portugal.

Walking into Salema, dust billowing off the bus behind us, with the sun winking off the metal of a deserted bus stop, has to be one of the most pleasant moments of my trip so far. The small fishing hamlet, a pinprick even on any local map, was a footnote in a travel guide I researched this spring. The gushing reviews—love letters to the locals, and their hidden beach—inspired us to bend our itinerary towards the Algarve coast.

A weathered old man with eyes like marbled sapphires and deeply wrinkled, tan skin sat alone on a stone bench in front of the beach wall. The broad granite boulders were inexpertly mortared, providing him some shade from the bronze sun of two in the afternoon. With surprising ease, he shuffled to his feet, and scooted over to the bus stop, were I had stopped clicking my luggage down the cobblestone main street—the only street—to gape, openmouthed, at the sea.

The Mediterranean is the color of an afternoon daydream; a smokily bright turquoise that swirls, idly, with the ruffled whitecaps of small, hip-height waves. A few stupefied French tourists float in the surf, their bleached faces uplifted in exaltation, or thankfulness, or both, at the broad dome of a perfectly cloudless sky. Fishermen, and their boats, are red-hulled sparkles halfway to the horizon, and announce themselves with pennant flags and the miniscule, precise ballet of their nets as they billow and catch at the air. The sand is blemishless; the tanned color of pie crust, and crunches satisfyingly underfoot with a loamy, rich heat. Carl and I could only smile, and smile, a fact not lost on the grandpa trying to catch our eye.



His Portuguese included the words: “quarto,” “quilarse,” “euro,” and “cinque”—a string I was willing to bet offered us lodging, probably at an eye-gouging rate. Carl confirmed that the man was tourist-poaching, then offered to guard our bags at the low-slung wall adjacent to the beach, while I looked about for a room to rent. Only too eager to shed my suitcase, duffel, and gravity-happy backpack, I lit out for Salema’s back alleys, armed only with my wallet, a determined expression, and an imperfect command of an unrelated language.

The pavement ended a few meters past the old man’s perch; a narrow road lined with the beaten, broken remains of fishing boats reached up a hilly incline, bending away along the beachfront. It was la hora de siesta; every door was shuttered against the heat, and porches were empty of fishermen or their wives. With no particular plan in mind, I knocked at the swinging saloon doors of casa after casa, asking about alojamiento in Spanish, which worked as well as speaking Italian to a Spaniard. Prices were steep, until a charming couple in their golden years offered us a full apartment, with two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a veranda overlooking the sea, for 45 euro a night—easily undercutting their competition by twenty euro or more.

With our deal struck, I returned to fetch Carl. As we hauled our freight up the hill to our new home, the duffel’s wheels clicking off the whitewashed eaves of the deserted alley, shutters swung open behind us, and leathery faces peeped from their inky depths. It was the click of tourist money, late in a dry, dry season, and from the way their faces fell as we past, it was clear that Salema had seen a tough year.

*

“I’m impressed, Rob,” Carl said, from somewhere above me. I shaded my eyes against the sun, and let a sliver of the beach light through my lashes. I followed his gaze to the four corners of the blanket I had set up on the light slope to the water. I shrugged, and let my head fall back to the pillowy, quilted sands. “Like I said,” I murmured, my mouth thick with the prospect of my first European beach nap, “lashings are relevant to my interests.” Carl shucked his shirt, his shoes, and joined me on the blanket. Sometime later, we were both fast asleep, toasting, lightly, in the Algarve sun.

The rest of the day was spent in and out of the waves, sometimes venturing into town for a bathroom (marked, inscrutably, “W.C.”) or a beer. We took our lunch at the only real beachside restaurant—a recommendation of the travel guide—and I had the best fish (a monkfish kebab) that has ever crossed my plate. Carl’s sea bass came unadorned, the honest product of a morning’s fishing, and he spent a furrowed ten minutes dissecting its charred midriff. And when the time came, we left our tip and bill on the table, and descended, dream-like, back into the surf.

*

The night air in Salema was restless, a tidal surge from the sea. We walked along the beach aways, then retreated to the cobbles of the main square. To pre-empt our hunger, I steered us towards the lamplight of an Indian restaurant on the plaza’s corner. Our requests for “spicy,” were met with a laugh, and no small success: my garlic chicken tandoori came rioting from the kitchen in a cloud of steam and the sharp, vinegary scent of good curry. Afterward, with our mouths still glowing from the curry’s revenge, and our teeth buzzing from our cervejha, we slunk up the hill to our apartment, closing the door firmly against the fitful, lonely breath of the sea.

(3) — Castles, Castles, Everywhere

A breeze swirled in from the alley outside, rustling the curtains and pulling us awake. I became suddenly and uncomfortably aware of the sticky state of my body; I had collapsed on the bed in the same clothes I had been traveling in for nearly two days. A short shower, and brisk toweling off, and I was ready—Carl and I grabbed our wallets; our cameras; our keys, and struck out to meet Lisbon.

“I had a chance to look around already,” Carl said, leading the way down the marbled staircase. He smiled as he reached for the portal, saying, “it was a while before you arrived. Luckily, you missed the rain.” With a click, the weighty green door swung inward, and we slipped out into a balmy Lisbon evening. Food, and maybe a short walk, were on the docket—I hadn’t garnered much of a view from the bus window, and the silky rustle of twilight was falling over every Rue and Avenida, giving the tiled streets a new, hushed luster. Our shoes slipped easily over the smooth, cobbled streets as Lisbon unfolded before us in a maze of malls and lesser alleys; each climbing, falling, twisting, and turning on themselves in tangles of pale ivory flagstones.

Our guidebook seemed at a loss to describe the air of Lisbon; I understand their confusion completely. The introduction leaves it at “charming melancholy,” which comes close, but not close enough, to the air of bittersweet memory that perfumes each plaza. The tall Roman colonnades are drawn up to a stately three stories, and are embellished regularly with elaborate scrollwork, columns, and the flourished lips of iron-tipped balconies. Hibiscus and jasmine open at dusk, and their sweet scent tumbles from their perches on the city’s verandas, wafting, wafting fitfully. Some long-ago monarch worked elaborate mosaic tile, in ivory and jet, into every street and sidewalk, so that to walk anywhere in Lisbon is to trace a wending, marbled path. Verdigris and rust pours openly from gutters, from fountains, from roofs; it streaks the pale, stuccoed walls of the arcades; it always appears as though the city has been recently crying, and is unashamed. Guitarristas in the squares play mournfully from lion-footed benches or the empty hollows of fountains, their cases open and gaspingly empty. Waifishly thin women play panpipes, and recorders, from the thresholds of shuttered shops; their rags are pastiches of garbage bags and brightly colored linen. Often, they keep a wary hand on slim steel chains, a leash for hulking, bare-ribbed dogs.

It is a city that welcomes twilight for the holes it fills; Lisbon’s small and bustling storefronts, the lower lip of any colonnade, are studded with the fossils of failed enterprise. Plywood boards and cryptic notices of eviction (“eviça?”) are often all that remain on the scarred façade. As Carl and I took to the night, our eyes brimming with the baleful sodium light cast by high iron storm lamps, we were not alone. The streets clutched at a few dozen people, who darted between banks and bakeries, tanned and wrapped in leathers and linens. But it always felt to us as though we were hearing the echoes of a larger crowd; as though the real city were just around a corner; as if, at any time, half of Lisbon had drifted into a fitful, forgetful sleep. It is a city of memory and and melancholy, and at times such as these, as Carl and I struck out for the high quarter of Castillo, the nostalgia lay thick and sweet upon the air.

Carl’s guidebook led us to a high knot of cobblestone staircases and alleyways, studded with small cafés. At each, a maître d'hôtel waited hopefully in tuxedo, offering their menus to the roving, rare tourists. We settled on a small, nondescript restaurant whose menu kept its prices below ten Euro, and seemed to ring a bell with Carl. “The Chiarraoscuro Gaúcho,” Carl read, ululating his vowels as the Portuguese seem to do. “Looks like it’ll be fine, right?” His choice did not disappoint; we had a small meal of battered chicken, white steamed rice, and home-cooked french fries with a generous helping of salt. “You have to be careful,” Carl noted, as we sat down, his finger triumphant in the air. “The guidebook notes that the bread and olives they leave with the menus are not free: if you nibble, you have to pay.”

Two beers and two plates of gallega later, we slipped back to the hostel, speaking in soft tones over the city’s hush. The walk was mostly a descent back to our quarter, the Barrio Baixo-Chiado, and we kept a lively pace. It was unnerving, being the only pair on a well-lit street at ten in the evening; it felt as though we were the pale ghosts of this quiet, Mediterranean town.

*
A bright hubbub, a clashing of plates and accents, woke us the next morning. The free Continental breakfast (which means more to me, now that I’m on the Continent) was well underway, and the other youth of the hostel—a confection of nations—were crowding the small kitchen table in their rush to down a free slice of toast, or glass of juice. Carl and I made our way hesitantly into the fray, wary of stepping on toes and egos. Some short work with a knife gave me serviceable toast; not great stuff, but I couldn’t complain—it was, after all, a hostel.

“The guidebook,” I said, huffing my way up the terraced streets of Castillo, “said this place belonged to whom?” “King Jorge the First,” Carl answered, pausing a moment to check our cross street. He raised the packet of torn-out pages absent-mindedly as he oriented himself, swiveling slightly on his heels to check more of the embossed, fading sign posts. “He went down in history for uniting Portugal against the Moors, and this,”— he pointed with his sheaf at the chunky ankles of the fort on the hill—“was his crowning achievement.” I groaned, and let the pun wash over me for a second in the midday heat. “Sorry,” Carl said, as he skipped up the next step in front of me. He shot a smile over his shoulder. “Completely unintentional.”

Jorge’s castle certainly looked like it would do the job—that is to say, it had walls in all the right places. Carl and I paddled languidly around the tourist circuit, stopping to frame photos of Lisbon, which lay below the cap of the hill at our feet. A hundred thousand red-tile roofs shimmered in the heat, piled on each other with all the forethought of a peeved toddler. Now and again, across the cityscape, hills like our own erupted from the plain, knuckling a cluster of houses, an abandoned watchtower, or a copse of pine trees toward the clear blue sky. Thirsty, and vaguely irritated that castles no longer came with jousting, or wenches, we ducked into the cool shade of a museum-cum-gift shop.

Bulbous arrowheads, historical sketches, and broken shards of pottery hovered on the walls, suspended in shafts of cool fluorescent light. I traced a finger against the Plexiglass, turning to smile heartily at Carl. “You will recall, Mr. Case, that this used to be relevant to my interests.” He turned from a tapestry of the Moorish invasion and let out a short laugh. I followed him through another alcove, ducking to avoid the hobbit-sized ceilings.

*
A short lunch, and hostel pit-stop later, and we were striding hastily again through the shaded veins of Lisbon. True to form, Carl kept his sheaf out and aloft, reading out the introduction to our next castle, the whimsical Palace of Sintra. “Huh.” Carl said, harrumphing as he followed a footnote down the page. “What is it?” I asked, craning my neck into a gelato shop to check the time. “Lord Byron called the Palace at Sintra his ‘Eden on Earth,’” he said, raising his eyebrows in a pleased grin. “Why?” I asked, suspiciously, more worried about missing our train than where we were going. “It only says that he traveled there often,” Carl replied, slowly, scanning the page for more details. “Though I suppose,” he looked up at the train station ahead, “if you’re Lord Byron, that’s the sort of thing you say more often than not.”

Faced with a longish line at the ticket machine, we divided to conquer. Carl peeled off to be Team Machine-Buy, and I picked another line, eager to speak the wrong language to the man behind the ticket counter. In an infuriating manner I came to recognize as the norm for my next few days, the ticketeer fired his opening shot in Portuguese:

Dude: “Podgua mais paragem dao?”
Rob: “¡Hola! ¿Habla ud. castellano? Solo quiero dos billetes para ir por Sintra.”
Dude: [turns away with an exasperated expression]
Rob: “Hey, sorry—just looking for two tickets to Sintra. How much are they?”
Dude: “están cinco Euro”
Rob: “Obrigado. Aqui lo está.”

It is never really clear which language we’re speaking. All I know is, I’m a doofus in two languages, and that’s usually enough (along with pointing, and excited eyebrows) to mime what I need. So much for not being an American.

*
The Lisbon-Sintra train shot across the Bay in a few short minutes; slum-towns and tin mountains of humanity crowned the hills on the outskirts of the city, giving way only gradually to the high, broad forehead of the Portuguese desert. Piñon trees dotted the arid landscape in a desperate grab at life. Each tree whipped past the carriage in a blur of sage and nutmeg; I counted them silently to pass the time, an old habit, and before I even felt myself going, I had fallen fast asleep.

The town of Sintra borrows some of its older cousin (Lisbon)’s Old World charm. But where Lisbon looks like a home for retired pirates, Sintra seems pieced together as an asylum for poets, or failed prophets (irresistible to people like Byron). Where Lisbon seems to perch frozen at seven in the evening, Sintra personifies the hazy nonsense of four in the afternoon—the Palace in particular takes the philosophy of dreamy significance to incredible heights. The road to the Palace, for instance, is studded with abstract art installations, which hide in the hollows of a tight mountain road. The path, laid in palm-sized, irregular bricks of pearly marble, slices through two gardens and a small hamlet to reach the Palace. There is no doubt that you have reached the Palace, once you have arrived: the faces of the people leaving the hedged-in property are wrapped in thought; enigmatic and troubled.

A Gothic, steeple-chased mansion appears suddenly from the side of its heavily wooded hill, the upper arches lost in the canopies of sycamore and oak. Meticulously worked statuettes of imaginary gods contort soundlessly between lilies and labyrinthine hedges. Any path leads everywhere: with your ticket you receive a map, but you toss it the first time it leads you deep into the mountainside, into chilly grottoes slick with lime-melt and icy puddles. Finding the right staircases (underground, or otherwise) is the crucial trick: often, Carl and I climbed a stair to find ourselves alone at the top of an unmapped tower, hilltop, or observatory. Escaping is often a puzzle; you can be delighted by a Scooby Doo-style trapdoor, or forced back into a spiraling road into the cliffside. If you make it to the house, you’ll find only empty rooms of pornographic amounts of gold-chased mahogany, drawings of paintings of tapestries, and the empty, insane echoes of a family driven mad by their fortune and regret. We pinched ourselves often; the eerie feeling is not pleasant, not unpleasant, just otherworldly. You get the sense that your group has found its own mansion--that there could easily be other spires, tucked behind the next decaying courtyard, or empty altar.

*
Lisbon welcomed us home with its spare, wistful sunset. Soon enough, the moon was skipping brightly off the bleached tiles of Rua de Sao Nicolau, our hostel’s address, and we were buzzing our way upstairs. We sat on the beds in silence for awhile, content to let the day seep from our soles. Carl poked his head over the bunk-bed, just as I stirred from my half-sleep. “Rooob,” I waved him off. “Rooooob,” he coaxed, lightly. I opened my eyes to frame his silhouette, dark against the lighter grey of the torpid ceiling fan. “Wake up,” he said, his eyes the color of piano keys against the shadowy ceiling. “We need to plan Morocco.”

(1, 2) — Bom Dia, Lisboa

[it’s a monster; take it slow]

*

With a surprisingly soft “click,” the bus door slid shut. Outside, Bob stepped back as the bus knuckled its way up a foot or two, hissing pneumatically and revving its low, throaty engine. The motor coach, fifty-foot bus with “Superior Tours” plastered across the side in vivid, Technicolor inks, fell away from the curb in slow jerks, gathering steam across the smooth blacktop of a deserted dawn-time Baltimore parking lot. From beside his pickup, Bob waved one final time. Unsure if he could see, I waved back, and then, because 6AM is not an appropriate hour to be awake, I slid my nose into the crook of my elbow, muffling one ear, and fell fast asleep.

A smoker’s voice woke me: “Goooooood morningggg!!!” a voice trilled, in the key of Marlboro Red. Blearily, I thumbed my glassed onto my face, casting about for the voice’s owner. “My name,” a small woman said, hunched mischievously over a wireless microphone, “is Gloria, and I said: GOOD MORNING!!!” Gloria twirled the microphone outward, cabaret-style, in time to catch the arthritically slow response of sixty-or-so octogenarians; row upon row of old folks chorused back “good morning!” These people were dangerously awake, and in the fashion of old people on vacation, prone to repeating things that people in uniform said. I took stock of the enemy: swiveling in my seat and peering through the velveteen crack of my front-row seat at the ranks (and ranks) of senior citizenry.

It was a bad scene: Superior Tour’s 6AM bus to New York had netted every lonely grannie south of the Mason-Dixon line, and under the spell of Gloria’s magic wand, their eyes had glazed and their mouths were nearly foaming with excitement. A sea of white buns and salmon visors slipped in-and-out of view as Gloria continued: “we are about to enter the Lincoln Tunnel. The Lincoln Tunnel.” (Once you turn sixty, I assume, you enroll in elder-garten). “There will be two stops this morning,...” Gloria went on, the object of many a jaundiced eye. More instructions were given, in triplicate, as we rolled into the tiled and sodium-lit driving hell that is the Lincoln Tunnel to New York. Time to call Carl.

By the time I finished my text message, Gloria was tapping her toes. Sinatra’s “New York, New York” was being played softly over the loudspeaker, to wake the travelers who were still sleeping. The horns, and Frankie Blue-Eyes, crescendoed from a low pianissimo, until the entire bus was tapping something along to the beat. “I’M LEAVING TODAYYYY” a sixty-year-old man with Down Syndrome (I think) crooned into the silence, right along with Frankie. “GOOD OLDDD... NEW YORKKK!...” the chorus picked up without a pause, until the bus shook with song:

These little town blues, are melting away
I’ll make a brand new start of it - in old New York
If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere
It’s up to you - New York, New York

I couldn’t help it; a broad grin split my face as I took it in. I was on The Road, in the Big Apple; I had tickets abroad; my back-up chorus had probably seen Sinatra live; I joined in for the final line (“New York, New York...”). By the time Carl responded, buzzing my phone in the cup holder, Gloria and the Disabled Man were dancing in the aisle together, absurd in their enthusiasm for the City That Never Sleeps. Tony, our driver, hauled the bus into a sunny New York morning, a whale among taxi-fishes, the spinal shapes of the skyline reflected in the iridescent sheen of his wraparound Oakleys.




*

“Obama is in town,” Carl explained, apologetically, as he handed me the rear-end of a pink hippopotamus cookie. “I hear Midtown is just... stopped.” I nodded throughout my crumbs; my cabbie had sworn about our President’s Glorious Coming in three languages, none of them English. After a quick glass of water, we hit the streets (on foot) in search of a few last-minute odds and ends. We weren’t the only ones: in true Big Apple fashion, the arteries of the city were clogged with protesters, well-wishers, pilgrims, schoolchildren, moms in pantsuits, financial types in tailored suits, and, somewhere near Broadway, a crop of antique Baltimoreans.

“Obama is in town,” Carl’s mom explained, when she, too, had fought her way back to their Upper West-Side apartment. “It’s like this every time we get someone famous. Do you remember when Nelson Mandela...,” she continued, whirling about the kitchen in an elegant black-and-white pantsuit. Over the remains of her [excellent] chicken pot-pie, we planned our attack on the airports. Carl would angle for Newark, I would head for JFK, we would [hopefully] meet in Lisbon. Carl triple-checked his baggage while I tried to give his Dachshund, Mocha, her Lebensraum.

True to form, New York’s trains ran on time, and before I knew it, I was staring somewhat numbly at my departure gate. My flight was connecting through Heathrow, so my company, for the moment, were British. Like most Americans, I’m charmed by the sound of the English voice; it makes me want to be an actor, or wear rubber boots, or say snappy, clever things about tea cozies. To kill time, I called my bank, and let them know I was going over to The Dark Side, (and would they please not freeze my card when I used it?). The woman across from me began knitting. Once safely aboard, I tucked my sweatshirt into the hollow of the window, waved off the woman with the drink-cart, and slipped gently into a dream of waltzing geriatrics.




*

I woke over Pennsylvania. Or, at least, it looked like Pennsylvania: the rural outskirts of London, from above, are ruled into squares of cream and chartreuse by low walls of earth and brick. Sheep dot the landscape like so many crumbs on a quilt; each little knoll swells and rolls into the next in a quaint, storybook way. Without too much ado, the pilot brought us to earth, docking gently against the bedlam and furor of Heathrow Airport.

I began doubting myself over my breakfast; the waitress at the Friday's Express served me steaming “Cajun’-style” eggs, with a glass of orange drink (not, as promised, orange juice). As I fumbled through the Euro-coinage, a little stymied by its Monopoly-Money appearance, I took inventory of my situation. Nothing lost so far. Good. Nothing injured. Good. Still on schedule. Good. “But why,” I wondered, as I wended my way through the pale-faced crowds, “was I in England?” I flicked open my laptop at the gate for Lisbon, and changed my gStatus:

Rob Ryan: had no idea what he was getting himself into.

*

With a start, I awoke again. The power-napping of the road warrior was beginning to futz seriously with my internal clock; it felt like 3AM in Baltimore, but outside, a Mediterranean sun shone strongly on a noontime sea. I craned my head to peer out, for the first time, on Lisbon; my heart, which had been so tired, thumped strongly, and tried to jump into my throat.

An azure sea stretched for miles in each direction, ruffled only by the sleepy wakes of white-masted fishing boats. Our shadow bobbed slightly in the surf, the pale turquoise silhouette of some legendary bird, flitting across a deeper marine pattern of dark cerulean, indigo, and a soulful navy hue. “Cor!” the sharp-nosed bloke sitting next to me said, craning his own head to the other porthole. “Getta load o’ that!” he chirped to his partner-in-crime, an athletic-looking aristocrat, probably a banker, whose misty Savile Row suit and dapper pink pocket square complimented his Roman nose and firm chin perfectly. When we stood to de-plane, the banker reached effortlessly for my overhead bag; it occurred to me that he looked like nothing so much as a racing-breed greyhound in glasses.




*

It was now Thursday, September the Eleventh, and I was grateful to be a grounded American. By now news had reached me of an AeroMexico hijacking; an unhappy event to hear about on an unhappy day. But whatever chilly gloom Heathrow had left on her passengers was now evaporating into the humid, noontime air. The air’s rich tropical heat was melting over everything, and even the legendarily prim British were relaxing into its hammocky feel.

The airport’s marbled floor was flecked in gold leaf and burnished to a shimmer. The silken surface, or my bubbling elation, pulled my luggage for me; I captained my rolly-polly with only a finger and a smile. Swarthy men with ebony, nappy hair called out for me in Portguese, sure that I was Brazilian. For the umpteenth time abroad, I gave thanks to the God of Interracial Children; I was invisibly foreign.

Before we had parted, Carl had given me letterhead with simple instructions to get to our hostel. I brute-forced my way through a conversation with one of the cabbies in Spanish, the instructions clutched in a sweaty palm. Around us, newly-rented cars buzzed past with payloads of cow-eyed Britons. A bus-ride later, I stood in front of a heavy green door, which rested charmingly askew on its white marble lip. I clicked my luggage over the cobblestoned interior, and made my way to the hostel’s second-floor desk. A tanned beauty slid her ivory earphones from behind her ears, and raised her eyebrows in an international “what’s up?”

Rob: “Bom dia! Me llamo Roberto y estoy el compañero de cuarto de Sr. Carl Case. ¿Sabe ud. si el esté aqui?
Maria: “Olá! Si, ha llegado hasta cinco horas, más o menos. Disculpe; me voy a sacar sus llaves.”

She led me past a sunny day-room of couches, TVs, (and, predictably, Americans). Her hand trailed along the wall, a rich cream color, chased in scarlet and maroon. Her slim fingers gestured to a room at the end of the hall, and with an artful twist and a smile, she showed me how to disable the lock. I stepped into the cool, tiled gloom of a vaulted room. The maple rails of two bunk-beds reposed in a corner, cast in shadow by the window’s long, crimson drapes. And on the top bunk, curled against the wall in the knee-bend I know as well as my own name, was Mr. Carl Case.

“Hello,” he said, simply, turning over in the dappled twilight of a humid Lisbon afternoon. He smiled endearingly, and mussed his tousled hair, looking over my bags and newly-smoothed forehead. “Bem-vindo: you have arrived.”

upward-facing dog

I can't lift my toes. A gentle hand, the color of a creamy cappuccino, rests two fingers on my knee, forcing it farther into a deep bend. “Relax your face,” the yoga instructor says, in a voice that evaporates some of the pain. Her face creases with an open, simple smile, aglow with the first hints of sunrise. The room breathes: in, out. In, and out. With a movement like opening a door, we swim into a new pose, rising to the balls of our feet and stretching our hands in prayer. We salute the sun. There is a pause; we share the space of a whole note, and the lady instructor pads back across the mat, leopard-like. The lily-pink pads of her fingertips pry at my big toe, forcing it to arch to the ceiling. With a shiver, I accept the new pose, clamping down hard on an urge to cry out, fall over, and curse my mother, who is balancing serenely in front of me on her broken leg.

My mother's hair, a steely silver in the morning light, bobs slightly as she finds her center. Her palms curl to the left, pressed outward as she lowers into a tight squat with élan. “Lift your toes, warriors,” the yogi says, in a voice like hot chocolate—“lift your toes and BREATHE!” She says the last word as if it will get us into heaven, and in the mirror in front of us all, thirty chests spasm, clutch, and gasp open. In, and out. A few intrepid toes shove off from the floor, as the bend lowers. Somewhere, behind me (could it the pregnant lady in the umber leotard?) a knee pops.

A morning passes in an hour; led by our yogi, we become Downward-Facing Dogs, Balancing Crows, Happy Babies, and twelve other oddball constellations of limbs. I find new muscles to cry about. My mother attempts the standing split. Beside her, her secretary balances on one wrist. I get the feeling that everyone in the room is looking forward to retirement soon—not just because the room is a half-century my senior, but because in this stillness, in this nothing, chime the echoes of everything.

Afterward, with the music subdued, we allow our brains to reboot. They come online slowly, arthritic in their morning haze, grumbling about the hot, liquid feeling of joints, or the slick sheen of sweat that has taken hold of our skins. In slow, religious movements, we roll the mats, and return them to a shelf. With the hesitation of a heretic, a woman says something conversational—“well, that was...”—into the stillness. The spell is broken, and babble laps at the walls, as the morning's class dissolves. “How did you do?” Mom asks, her hazel eyes limpid and almost vibrating with force. “Fine,” I grit out of the side of my mouth. I have a feeling that if I unclench my left ass-cheek, everything will hurt worse. I hobble out of the room on her heels, leaving the damp half-moons of a barefoot pilgrim behind me.

It is the fourth day of following my parents to the gym; it isn't getting any easier. Pilates, step classes, yoga—it's all surprisingly taxing, if you aren't used to breaking off your sleep to put your legs through their paces. As I sink into the champagne waters of the spa, intent on stretch my calves out, I paw lazily at my day. There is a lot to do. There is time. I reach for my ankle, mildly surprised to find that my wrist shoots past my sole without too much effort. Smiling into the bubbling jacuzzi froth, I flex my toes, curling them toward my dampened head.


*

This is the only way I can explain to you what is happening: I am learning, steadily, to lift my toes. My summer at Stanford was cut from incredible cloth: the rhythm of each week was studded with adventure, raucous debates, difficult projects, and the steadying rush of adulthood. I lived, and loved, my house. I replaced the toilet-paper; I helped with dishes; I carpooled; I mopped; I did laundry; I wrote, and wrote, and wrote; I coded a website; I mused on our porch (our porch!); I hailed our West Coast Family; I hailed our West Coast Life. I bolted Heinlein's Stranger in A Strange Land; I digested it; I got indigestion. And from Heinlein—and from his Mike Valentine—I learned how to govern myself; I learned how to breathe while stretching; I learned how to lift my toes.

For the people who did not live at 2465 Alpine Road, you will never know what you missed. In all truth, we made something mysterious and gem-like out of our two months together: for the fourteen souls who crashed, and worked, and whooped it up on our Cooch, or Porch, or in Sheila—I don't think we will ever get a summer like that again. We rode into the mountains on the back of a Prius, and sailed across the open face of Shaver Lake. We installed summer squash in the Burghers of Calais. We drove (well, almost) across the Quad. We saluted the Perseids from the crest of La Cañada. We spent Sundays in Carmel and Wednesdays in the city; we baked on the shores of Santa Cruz, and held court on the Oval. We launched software products; we weathered visitors and parties we never saw coming; we breathed together on the Porch. In, and out. I wanted nothing more.

Except.

I'm giving it all up for a quarter abroad; in five hours, I leave for Lisbon, and Madrid. I cannot say that I will not miss the House, who do not need to be named, because sometime in August, I shamelessly adopted, or enfolded our group. I am probably useless without them. Without us. Or whomever we are, because somewhere in the breath between our years, we did become a solid thing—tangible, nameable, and permanent. I salute us, and give thanks.

I grok that I am about to learn to lift even more; the Quarter Abroad is rumored to do more than salt your accent. If this were last year; if this were Perú, I might be able to write something spicier, something that rang out with all the hot pride and fear of my young self. But I can't; maybe this is the fault of Michael Valentine, or Robert Heinlein, or Joshua Khani, or Carl Case, or Keegan Poppen, or Justin Costa, or Yu-Jin Lee, or William Rowan, or Jamie Morgan, or Michael Ramscar, or Mia Khani, or everyone who I hugged in the month of August, or my brother, or Ravi Parikh, or Jason Chen, or my newly dead dog. I don't know what shifted, I don't know who tilted the balance; all I know is that I have been sliding, for some time now, towards a separate peace. Towards flexibility. For those who are keeping an eye on me, and for those who I watch in turn—we are molting as we grok. I promise to keep you posted, if you promise to stay on your toes.

[a poem:] “telling time”

tick tock go my
father's calves, from
under the belly of his muscle-car
they say: he is not here for long.

and his face: that rich chocolate tone
those teeth that flash, and flash, and
open for you, just for you, just to
say:  “hello, I missed you: first-born son,
hope of your mother and pride of your
brother, I made your sandwich like
you like them—sloppy with extra jam.”

tick tock goes the cat's tail at midnight,
unafraid of my dog's ghost, unafraid of this
stranger who wears skinny jeans and
smells like buses and walks like a stranger
in his own house. she says: “step lightly,
amigo, your breath does not carry over here.”

and we fold back together, better than before,
simpler than before; we rock together, knitting
our smiles desperately, hopefully, back into Family.
tick tock cheeps the blackberry from the counter
tick tock waves the pencil in my brother's cramping hand
tick tock goes the back of my father's musclecar, the only
panther on this dappled Maryland lane, torquing, mamboing;
the artful footwork of a man who only
wanted to grow up to be his son.

The [Magical] Rob-Locating Machine

Summer is already hot on my heels, and I've been getting nice notes asking where I'll be next year. As an easy answer, I made this quick-'n-dirty chart -- it lays out the warpath until the New Year. Mailing addresses are tricksy things, so think twice before you send something along in the post -- chances are it'll get lost on it's way to me. But otherwise, stay tuned -- I plan to rap out a few more notes when the travel actually begins.

And for the curious, here are the particulars of my mailing addresses:

P.O. Box (campus):

P.O. Box 11866
Stanford, CA 94309

FroSoCo -- Residential (expires in early June):

236 Santa Teresa St.
Schiff 201
Stanford, CA 94305

(Alpine) Summer House:

2465 Alpine Road
Stanford, CA 94305

Madrid (center's address, unreliable):

(student's name)
Stanford Program in Madrid
Instituto Internacional
Miguel Angel, 8
28010 Madrid
España

Once more into the breach,
Rob