I traveled from the Basque Country to Euskadi. The dawn of democracy. I loved the tension that my neutrality caused in the Basque Country. When I met it, it was, for me, the Basque Country; then, little by little and imperceptibly, it became Euskadi to me. I arrived there with a girl from Zarautz who knew how to look at me and let me look at her. Every time the look with a woman was transparent, you knew that days of sensuality and learning were coming. Or just one day. Some year someone will take the Nobel Prize for discovering what happens right in that millionth of a second that two looks collide, of stars, not of crashing; we are talking about love, not subsistence.
I don't remember how I got to Zarautz, but it must have been at night. It was a place where human sophistication and wild nature had met in peace. But always with an invisible border line that you crossed every moment, now wild, now sophisticated with every step, with every look. And those people, that girl with the look, were a bit like that. She worked and left me alone in an endearing attic and, for me, like something out of a fairy tale; well, for me everything was either out of a fairy tale or a movie. But I have to remember it so you can get an idea of where I was; let's just say it wasn't in the world, but inside a fairy tale or in a movie. Because it was hard for me to understand that what was outside of Lanzarote was real. And that island where my mother gave birth to me was already unreal. With that thing about my father.
But I say inside because I, naive, didn't feel like a spectator, but, sometimes, because of the way people looked at me, it did seem like I had that fairy tale or movie. And many times they came and went as they pleased. I had no power over that situation. It always rained. I don't know if that was rain; it was as if the air instead of being like here was made of millions of tiny droplets in suspension, like the haze, but instead of dust, droplets of water. And I loved sitting in a small window of the attic and spending hours watching the water run down the glass and over the umbrellas that passed through the streets, or hypnotized by the smoke from the chimneys. Listening to modern music that I had never heard before.
One day the droplets stopped and it started to rain for real, oh my god, cats and dogs. And then another day it stopped raining and the world became a postcard. With that blue sky that you always think are tricks of the postcards, but that suddenly appear. And I went out into the street, and I discovered that under the umbrellas there were Basque men and women, more Basque women than Basque men, because there it wasn't like in Lanzarote, there women went out into the streets day and night and they looked independent and badass.
And something wonderful happened: they loved me. Everyone loved me, I didn't know if the girl was the head of the town and had given orders or what, but they loved me, they took care of me at all times, they suggested things to me, food, walks, whatever - I came from a town in Castellón where you are a permanent enemy, they are watching you.
I liked the young people and I liked the old people. I liked everything new in the world that entered virgin and with vigor there and everything old that remained unaltered and guarded there. Except for heroin. The white weapon against that rebellious youth. Then I discovered the walk to Guetaria and that was like the Montjuic cable car, only for free. I could have stayed in a loop all my life between Zarautz and Guetaria.
Guetaria, the witch, looks you in the face and tells you you don't know anything, you haven't seen anything, you don't know anything, you're an idiot, stop observing everything and listen too. Come in. You are a human being, part of the lineage of other human beings who brought you here. So Zaratustra didn't talk to me, but Guetaria did. But she kept me in the increasingly accelerated loop. And, as if I had been bewitched, all the events began to accumulate. Politics, police, drugs... under that paradise there was another world, like behind the rain there were other sunny days.
And suddenly, when the speed of everything was already unsustainable, dizzying, one morning after another crazy night, everything appeared white. It had snowed. My first snow, all "the snow" that I had systematically rejected there, fell cleanly and purely. A reward for my stubbornness of, that's a no. The loop stopped and an indomitable force, a power much superior - to me and to what united me to that girl - pushed me to the mountain. She didn't understand anything about my departure, I couldn't explain anything, but all her friends looked at me and told her leave him, leave him, he has to continue.
I think they were also possessed, otherwise they wouldn't have let me leave on a lonely path full of snow, wrapped in plastic bags from my feet to my head because I didn't even have good boots. The Basques were big, but I wasn't that big; I had a size 45.
I started by saying: "I loved the tension that my neutrality caused in the Basque Country". Well, imagine: in that country that I was beginning to enter they were at war. A strange war, but war. Everyone watched each other, everyone was suspicious, either for some or for others. But no one was considered neutral. Imagine then a small town covered in snow. Imagine the cold and dry barracks full of paranoid civil guards, watching TV and a bar in the town square with its bonfire full of semi-silent Basques over their glasses of wine - two trenches, one in front of the other. Strong the ones and the others, brave the ones and the others, helpless the ones and the others. Full of rage all. Waiting for the next blow from one side or the other. Stalking like wounded wolves, in the soul. And that, suddenly, from nowhere, semi-buried in the snow, a figure wrapped in plastic appears with a long white beard and hair from the snow, but, by god, if you put the cross on him it's Jesus Christ dragging it. I could only go to the bar, frozen and satisfied that the night hadn't caught me without reaching the town. You entered where everyone had already taken position and gesture for your entrance. And then I pronounced the magic phrase that the witch of Guetaria had recommended to me. I said "I'm Canarian" and then everything changed and hospitality in its deepest sense unfolded. Surely, moments later, in the barracks, a deep and unanimous sigh sounded.
It was the first town and no one knew yet that I was not on any side. That the only thing under the plastics was cold embracing an idiot. And everyone forgot about the war and began to listen to the stories that they demanded of me of how I had arrived there in the middle of a snowfall that not even the horses moved their tails. And that neither ETA nor the police nor God had intercepted that plasticized black dot that advanced along the most lonely road in the world at that moment. Laughter, lots of laughter and wine, lots of wine. And liquors. And I felt the maternal breath of the witch of Guetaria who approached my ear and said to me: thank you, they needed it. Then, someone always took me to their house, where we continued telling each other stories until almost dawn, next to the kitchen oven. In the morning I had my clothes washed and dry next to the fire, no one had gotten size 45 boots and already, only with plastics on my legs, I continued to the next town and at the exit, a couple of civil guards always checked my departure as the seagulls wait for you to stop fishing.
I crossed all of Euskadi like that, always controlling the notes that I still keep of the route to follow, which I made to guarantee that I would never leave for another town that was more than ten kilometers away. That, in the snow, sometimes quite deep, is not little. But it was about that under no circumstances would the night catch me. That was death. I sailed through that white sea for many days, in the same way that someone who never saw the sea is given a boat and goes to tour the Canary Islands.
I went deeper into the country and the deeper I went, the more hospitable and welcoming they were to the spell of "I'm Canarian". The beauty of what I saw is indescribable. I'm sorry but I have no words; you take and imagine a guy from zero altitude walking through snowy landscapes never seen and already out of any movie. There was no margin for cinema there, there was a palpable border between absolute beauty and fucking it up well.
Of everything, the culminating moment was when I had to climb a port to then face towards the Ebro valley. The port had a tunnel and skirting that was more than dangerous, because it meant entering the mountain bare and climbing it and lowering it to the other side. Fucking it up. The tunnel was frozen and thousands of stalactites hung from the ceiling like spears of more than a meter. It was like a magic tube of millions of diamonds shining and even the light lost its meaning there and bounced trapped from one side to the other, from one stalactite to another, from the ground to the ceiling. Looking for the desperate exit.
I tried to enter and I got such a blow that I almost killed myself; there is nothing more slippery than that floor. And I don't know if it was because of the blow or pure chance but, a little away from me, one of those spears fell making it clear what they would do with my head if necessary. Maybe it didn't fall, but I saw it fall. I was about to leave it and go back. The girl, her figure, her warmth, began to take power. Siren songs. Then the witch Guetaria came to my neck and guts and zumbó me: "A woman is not treated like that, coward. If you left, continue, and if you want to go back with her, pass the tunnel, pass it back here again and then go with her". Jo, she made me cry from how miserable I felt and with tears in my eyes that made the light even crazier if possible, millimeter by millimeter, on all fours, I crossed the tunnel. An eternity. Then the witch Guetaria told me: Is she here? No? Well, keep going.
I sailed between the borders of Navarra and Euskadi and, finally - it was already a bit overwhelming - the snow disappeared. I arrived at a town-city on the Ebro River. It was raining cats and dogs: the night had caught me just the last day of my trip. I was well fucked up and that didn't look like Euskadi or those Basques, nor did the witch Guetaria give any sign, it sounded like a good fuck and suddenly I thought of the police. Jo, all the trip they had been subtly aware of me. So I went to visit them. I found the local police station and told them my adventure and that obviously that was not a town and no one was going to take me to their house and outside it was death, so I asked them for lodging, well, more like celling. Ahhh! Of course, the thing about Canarian had already come out. The cop called on the phone and told me yes, but that I had to be locked up. Good ending for the most free imagined trip, locked in a police cell.
I didn't care, sleeping was always my gift. And, after all, can dreams be locked up? And even less your star. She always needs to go ahead in space and time. If you have surrendered and trusted, ha! it is ethereal. It cannot be locked up. But I didn't sleep alone; the cell was large with a stretcher attached to the wall. The rest was full of giants and big heads, papahuevos let's go. That if they are big, from the stretcher on the ground they were immense and if you add good thunder and lightning lighting, what more can you ask for to leave a night Euskadi - it happened to me the other way around than in 'Ocho apellidos vascos' at the exit, but it happens?.
The cop in the middle of the night left for his house. Because the bastard said goodbye with a sly smile, leaving me and the papahuevos in charge of the night of lightning and thunder. That if the papahuevos are already expressive by themselves, lightninged in a dark room I don't even tell you. In the morning, after he opened me, I met the famous Ebro River, but that is another song and right now I don't remember a shit where he sent me to stop.
