Yesterday after leaving the hospital for my weekly check-up I decided to turn right instead of left, which is where I usually walk after a hospital visit, up along the river and through to the park on the other side. This time I was in an ‘explorery’ mood and decided to meander back into town slowly and visit all the interesting things along the way. I passed by the Garcia Lorca park which was to my left and then doubled back up a side-street and finally came out at the base of Calle Recogidas. I had already done that pregnant thing I do, which is to call into a café and ask for the menu, and as seems to be quite often the case here in Granada if no printed menu is available, and if I do not have the chance to run through the available items and imagine them with my pregnant taste-buds, and there is no chalk board available which to sit beside, then I have to admit defeat and return to the street with the waiter scratching his head behind me. I have made a couple of married waiters grin and nod knowingly in this way, as if they too had loca wives who couldn’t make their minds up and didn’t know what they wanted.
In the end I popped into the most generic café I could find and joy! When I went to use the restroom it was clean! The toilet paper was stocked up and the soap dispenser was full. This is a rarity in many of Granada’s restrooms. Someone had just tended to the bathroom and I was the first to use it in all of its gleaming glory. It was almost as good as in the Naval lodge at Rota, where they actually wrap the toilet with a paper strip and a kind word printed on it to let you know it has been cleaned. I duly unwrap those toilets like they were presents.
But this was by far not the biggest thing that happened to me in Café Generica. And this next thing made me cry like Madeleine. An elderly gentlemen came up as I was polishing off a Panini and green tea and pointed to my bump. He said a couple of words I didn’t understand, I can only assume were along the lines of Enhorabuena and I smiled at him and asked him to repeat, more often than not the andalusian accent obscures some of the Spanish that I do know. He asked me if I spoke Spanish, was I here as a tourist or working etc. I told him I was here with my husband who worked here at the army MADOC headquarters in town. As I was telling him it suddenly struck me he was about the same age as my Dad – the Dad that lives in my head, the Dad before he got sick, the Dad who could still charm women and who loved nothing more than to meet a stranger.
Suddenly, in that very moment, the loss of my father filled the universe, not just my universe but the entire god-damn black of it. Everything came back to me at once, my system was flushed with every memory and moment we ever had together, the good (when he was well) and the bad (when he was sick).
My first ever memory of my Dad is of both of us lying in the sun, the sensation of my Mom being somewhere nearby but out of sight. I think I was about 2 or 3 and we were both laying on white plastic deck-chairs with a small white table between us. Both of our hands were on the table and Dad had fallen asleep with his hand on mine. Even today, I can still feel the strange sensation of not being able to get my hand out from under his; it was too heavy for my 3 year old hand; I remember his breathing was slow and rhythmic and I didn’t want to wake him nor disturb how peaceful everything was, but I also wanted to go find my Mum. I was torn and it was a place of love and my biggest problem in life and at the time was how to get from one love to the other. It is a beautiful memory, and I received a second gift from it too – my Mother one day handed me a photo of the exact moment, there we are asleep on our deck-chairs, I am sucking my thumb, Dad with his hand on my hand. Indeed my Mother had not been too far away – she had had the foresight to take a picture, as we were on holidays at the time and that is what people do when they are on holidays. And so, of this most precious memory, it turns out that I have a viewing point from both inside and outside of the moment.
My last ever memory of my Dad is a phone conversation, which was the second worst one of my life. Panicked, my family called me and told me not to say anything, about the hospital, about the doctors, about how he was really feeling, but to ‘here, quickly, talk to your father, say positive things’.The conversation was awkward, as I tried to be upbeat, knowing that that ominous feeling I had carried in my heart for weeks was almost upon us, wanting to scream and beg him to wait, to hang on, to fight, to get better. Instead I was made to make small talk as if we had just met on a cruise somewhere and were about to break for dinner. He could barely speak then, this great oak tree of a man, and I hope he knew how unnatural it felt for me, to talk this way on the phone when he was in such pain, how I just wanted some time with him alone, the two of us, to think about living and dying honestly and truthfully, the way we had always tackled other things, the way we had always been with each other. He tried to say something, and I didn’t understand and then the phone was taken away from us. That was the last time we ever spoke to each other. Me, hysterically vapid and he, trying to impart something that I just didn’t, couldn’t catch. An even worse phone call came later, at about 1AM when my brother called me to tell me that Papa had died. An animal, a horse maybe or some kind of large injured cat passed through my lungs and made a mortally injured scream and I collapsed on the floor, blinded by tears and sadness and rage. Later that night I spent hours outside, hurting my neck, looking at the stars, wondering where he went, feeling as small and weak as I had when I was trying to get my hand out from under his when I wanted to go find my Mom, except now I was trying to get out from under the blackened sky to find my Dad.
So, some of this fractured and painful event came flooding back to me as I sat in the café and spoke with the old man. It wasn’t the first time either, a few weeks ago as I was standing at my front door, looking up at the street, I noticed the back of an old man sitting on the street bench. He had a very similar hair cut to my father, and was wearing a navy sweater which was almost a uniform for my Dad. It made me catch my breath: old men kill me.
It all finally boiled over in the space of a few seconds, this man in the café smiled at me, I briefly and enormously thought about my father and suddenly the man leaned over and kissed me on the hand just as I had seen my father do countless of times. The same everything. The same bow of the head, the same acted out reverence of the hand and the same kiss but not a kiss, no lips touching, just a gesture, as if everyone was at an Austrian ball and the waltz that was playing had just ended. The old man left and I was cast into a vacuum where slowly and one by one, big fat tears formed under my eyelashes and I was blinking them away, trying to return to the present moment.
I’m glad I had the foresight to go up to the man behind the counter. A butchery man, he had his sleeves rolled up and a kind face. I asked him if he knew the gentleman who had just left, he looked a little concerned and almost imperceptibly nodded yes, I could sense a certain protection for this customer. This customer was a regular and he was well liked. I better not be some silly young woman about to make a ridiculous remark. I asked him if he came in every day and if he knew his order. Surprise and pleasure registered on his face as he understood what I was asking for – he drinks Café Cortado which is Espresso with a drop of milk. I paid for his next one and walked out onto the street, blinking in the hot sun.
