To pick peaches I had to be in Catalonia, and to be in Catalonia I had to arrive, and to arrive I had to leave, and to leave I had to have a reason, and I had none to leave, but some not to continue roasting in the sun in the new park of Arrecife. Breeding crow's feet bigger than the paintings of a Comanche in war, with Manrique's scrap metal as the only cultural reference. Just as silly as us, there, in the sun.
One day like any other day, with nothing different from any other day, in a remontad, I said to my colleague, as if waking up from a dream of centuries: Chacho! Aren't you fed up? And he, as if he had been waiting for the question for a thousand lifetimes, said: Chacho, yes! Just like that. And we could have stayed there all our lives: nobody could beat us at being perenquenes. Or at passing the time.
Opposite, right in front of our white park bench, there was a travel agency, Tisalaya I think, I don't remember well, but it sounded like 'quetevallas'. That's it. It could have been a bar and we would have philosophized three sentences about the cost and life -not to be confused with the cost of living that was still in pesetas, the one of the people-. There were a thousand bars and one agency, and I woke up in front of the agency. You will tell me that I was seeing it and I will tell you why I was going to be seeing a travel agency if I was not sick or had family to visit. These are things that can be in front of you all your life and you don't see them. And I'm not going to list examples and portray them all, that we were not the blindest ones. Even today I could say many things that they have in front of their noses and don't see.
Now, I only remember that we are passing the police position at the airport of some place that they had put us in the passage, that we were not experts in agencies either and what it was about was to leave, not where to go. We carried a piece of chocolate, in case there was no food there. Rather, in case it was bad and to have time to get used to it. There was a reputation that our chocolate was very good. Just like gofio. When we had walked a few steps, a cop called us and said, in a loud voice: Hey, canaries! What is the pan for, to heat the chocolate?
I was carrying a pan hanging from my backpack and I thought it would be me because, until that day, we were all more or less canaries. It was not worth arguing about customs -about how to heat the chocolate- and besides that was another place and the note the police. And I told him with that smile of mine, which at that time was of an angel, that of course and we continued. And I don't remember anything again until I'm in a kiosk in the city asking for a map of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. The man, with a strange accent for me, offered me maps of the whole world except Santa Cruz and, above all, Barcelona.
The colleague, who woke up early -Jo!, the girls that were there and the looks they were giving to the pan- was splitting his sides laughing and I with my plans, erre that erre, thinking that the mamón had had more chocolate for breakfast than he should. When he saw that the kiosk man was going to get his hands on me, he shook me and, crying with laughter, brought me to the world: we were in Barcelona.
What do you want me to tell you, I had not had breakfast and those big stone and tall houses reminded me of Santa Cruz de Tenerife and one, in those cases, ties ends as well as he can. Well, I bought a map of Barcelona. Then, I don't know why, we decided to get rid of the chocolate and start a new diet, but if you have a leg of Iberian ham and you are going to become a vegetarian you don't throw it away, damn it, you eat it!, I say. So we looked on the map for a good place to spend the day eating the pan. And, by the way, to see if the police's suggestion worked.
And I don't know how it was, but we ended up in the Montjuic cable car. Good heavens, what a sight! Flying and flying up and down hanging like socks in the old woman's patio line, over that immense city that promised nothing, but was a blast. Now there are many images of Google Earth and satellites and dronners -enterait@- and even artistic seagulls, but in that time you had not seen a city from above even in painting. Well? Arrecife going down from San Bartolomé, but that was not a city no matter how much the Gran Hotel insisted. Well, back and forth to the cable car and back and forth to the pan, the day was gone and someone reminded us with an amazed face that it was closing.
Again lapsus and I resume the memory in a train that we took with the four pesetas that we had left from the cable car, it must not have been free. And I have a vague memory of the face of the ticket seller every time we went for others as the day went by. Ha, ha, ha? Nowadays, with the moorish faces we had, they would have attacked us by land, sea and air on the third trip.
Oh god, a train! It was so cinematic for a film-loving conejero for whom Atlántida was only a movie theater that I swear I looked out the window and saw the seats of the cinema and the people looking at us, who were the actors. And through the windows on the other side, a world of green color, but a rare green. It was not like the doors of the houses of Lanzarote or like the stripe of the shirt of the Elche soccer team, which were the references; it was darker, as if it was wet. Green with black.
Of course, nobody explained to us well where we were going with the train and there, after many hours stopping by many towns bigger than Arrecife, suddenly, in one of the stops, someone -I don't remember who- asked us for the passport. We took out the card and it was not valid? Jo!, we had just stumbled upon our first border, France. And it's a good thing it wasn't Europe, because if we pass to see how we get out of there. Can you imagine? Hey, hey! Fren, may fren, yo primo Gadifer de la Salle. Or that, or: My cousin has a good rabbit hunting dog named Napoleon? Can you help me? Fatal...
Well, we didn't get in. So we got off we started walking backwards and without realizing it and I don't know how we were on an urbanized beach full of guiris, like Lanzarote. But there was not the solajera of here -we had not tried the Catalan summer yet- and we did not know each other, because I do not know if you have noticed but, normally, you know each other by what others know about you, and if others do not know anything about you, then you do not know each other, and that was like a cool feeling. So we looked at each other and without saying a word, as it was spoken in the park, we agreed that he did not know a shit about me and I another about him. Because four or five things if we knew about each other, and with less the peña already makes a personality.
It happened like this because at that moment god, who appeared like the train conductors, wanted to give a hand to two gilipollas. I at that time to god I called him Chucho. I don't know, god is like very of I shit on god and those chungas things or like a messenger that everyone asks for everything. So we looked at him and said: We don't know you either, eh?, and you don't know us either, because, you know?, he sees everything and if you follow the roll is a muermo; then yes that endiña you a personality and descojona of you, as to stay in the world with her, aguita! I don't know why the peña thinks that god has no sense of humor and vaya if he has it and vaya that is rarito: he spends a lot of time alone. And he likes you to make him laugh.
He could have fulminated us right there giving us a good job for that place -with that he splits his ass-, but he was not in a bad mood and he winked at us. When god winks at you is very strong, because he only has one in the center of that pyramid. And it's like rare. But you notice the squeeze of the eyelid and you know it's a sting and not that closing the chunguillo eye, when you're going to pass by and it gets hurt. Well, after clarifying things with god, which is always good, we made the first decision. When you don't have a personality hanging you decide quickly and cool. Quite the opposite of when you're hanging? from a personality.
The first decision we made, so in plan to decide something, was that we had not gone to stop there to see guiris and less to work in the guirerío. That's how we went to stop at the fruit trees of Lérida, which was called Lérida. That to me, for the memories and for the sound, seems much cooler than Lleida. That is as if it was going to faint, no?, this Lleida. The colleague and I already made some adventures and misadventures for that place that if you walked a little to the east had next to Spain. And to me that Spain also began to like me madly. Ños, and it was very big! Very very big. In size.
But the colleague, suddenly, began as to think. I don't know if it was the lack of eating chocolate at all hours or what, but I had never seen him like that thinking and thinking all serious, neither him nor any colleague. So I waited calmly, waiting for him to give birth to something of what he had in his coco. And it was not an attack of some personality that had been sneaked. Because, of course, when you don't have, if you're not attentive, you can hang some very easily. To us there were three very heavy that had cast the eye: the hippies, the canaries and the good-looking guys. That there it seemed that women ate other things.
One day, suddenly, he gave birth and said so, as transcendent: Ginés, the canaries are whiners. I was stunned waiting for something else: Jo!, he had been thinking for days. And then, suddenly, he continued and released a phrase that of course justified at length that self-absorption. And he said: Here there are godos! And I knew that the trip was going to continue alone.
He had known the gothic, the gothic cathedrals and there, between the lights of the stained glass windows, the cold of the stones and the tripiadas of the things that sculpted, I found a real border, one that was going to pass with passport or without it. The one of the history of the man, that with which the maestr@s and profesor@s were determined to martyr one under the sofocón of the cages. And that border opened before me insinuating an infinite and unfathomable world. And 'me', as I told you, was nothing, an empty bowl where everything fit from everything. Up to 40 million god@s and all their stories.
And to all these I still do not understand them much. Why do they like Urdangarín more than Piqué? For Basque or Catalan? For princess or star? Because one touches them with his hands or the other with his feet? Or because one steals quietly the mouth and the other curra and long? The truth is that they are rare. To me, and here I get wet, I love Piqué and I never liked anything the other, the zorrocloco of the son-in-law.
When we arrived at the orchard at dawn, every morning we walked along the paths that were between the infinite lines of the peach trees, between the soaked grasses, and with the first rays of the sun lighting them, among thousands and thousands, we chose one, for pleasure. And then we got together for the pan tumaca and each one boasted of his peach.
