Pulling a Geographic

Out of season and out of place.

Let me start by saying this: I really like out-of-season places. As well as abandoned places, faded glory type-places. Foreign (to me) places. This attraction is most likely why I ended up emigrating; to be able to live permanently within a place of multiple, shapeshifting identity. Like, what is more interesting than that? Probably many things, but that is my own particular crush.

Moody, off-season Jávea

Shortly after moving to Madrid, my sister met her now husband. For the first time in the hectic months since we'd emigrated, everything fell quiet. I no longer had my sister as default company and, drinking by myself in bars, fenced off from the world around me by the barrier of a book cover, I was always the only person sitting alone. Being an outsider is more plainly obvious here in this country where people are apparently unable to leave the house without three or four friends people in tow.

A few years later, my niece came along. The summer she was born I spent a weekend in the walled city of Ávila, which was close enough to Madrid to get home quickly if my sister went into labour. I stayed at an expensive hotel I couldn’t afford and thought about Nabokov living in the Montreux Palace hotel for the last 16 years of his life. And about his languages, each one he mastered infusing the other, whether he wanted them to or not, his English native and foreign both. Centurion-like, I paced the Roman wall that enclosed the city, saying Hola to everyone that I passed. The responses varied through languages and accents, and the odd silence.

On that trip, I discovered that travelling within Spain adds an additional layer to the feeling of existing in various identities at once. I suspect that to most Spaniards, I am what I’ve always been: decidedly English, or just generally foreign. (Although, at hotels, I enjoy the trick of producing my residency card instead of a passport when asked for identification; my own rabbit from the hat.) But to other travellers, I am something else: I am native and foreign both.

A Christmas tree… on the beach!

I thought I was used to this feeling of both belonging and not belonging simultaneously. However, last week, I found myself alone in an off-season beachside hotel in that odd little blip of time between Christmas and the new year.

Spain has a chain of government-run hotels, the Paradores. The public company was set up in 1928 to protect buildings of particular historic, cultural or artistic interest, and to support local economies and the environment by restoring and running them as hotels. I find this idea very cool - buildings that would otherwise have been left to ruin, given a new life and a new identity. They are also great places to get away and write. I can't tell you why exactly, I only know that being alone in a hotel (of particular historic, cultural, artistic or natural beauty) for three nights really works.

Over Christmas, I stayed with my parents in their home near Alicante. On the 27th of December, I asked them to drop me off at the Parador in Jávea. Going from time in family, to being alone in an unfamiliar, half-empty place, was an unexpected jolt. I live on my own, I like my own company, but once my parents drove away, I was a little bereft. I was returned to that lonely time in Madrid, shortly after emigration, when I suddenly no longer had my sister for company, to my long solitary paseos feeling more than a little sorry for myself.

After I checked in, I took a bracing, fresh air-filled walk along the rocky seafront, but my mind kept wandering, taking no notice of me telling it how lucky it was to bear witness to the scenes around it, to stop ruminating, even for a few seconds, and just listen to the lapping of the waves on the shore. Instead, my gaze kept being drawn, not to the lush blues of the Mediterranean, but to the shuttered-up summer houses, crunchy leaves carpeting their porches, the empty or covered over swimming pools. To the closed-up bars with dusty chairs and tables chained together and piled up on the terraces.

Something else strange: after dropping me off, my parents didn’t leave. They went to stay with a friend who lives ten minutes walk from the Parador. They hadn't previously mentioned this fact to me and so, during my three-night break, I kept seeing them around. We waved at each other from across the road as we crossed paths, I spied them from the balcony of my hotel, having a coffee on the beach. All of us out of place, out of season, out of sync. Separate togetherness at its most surreal.

On the first evening I walked along the promenade where there was life and the hope of activity. Like my early days alone in Madrid, I walked the entire seafront and back again before I got the courage to enter one of the bars. It is easy to forget that a break from our usual geography is not a break from self, and that any attempt to divorce ourselves from ourselves is probably futile. I was drawn to a bar mocked up like a village pub and spilling over with a language, with a cadence and accent that accessed my brain without my consent or even my conscious knowledge. Chomsky's deep structure now deeply comforting.

Such places have always acted like a house of mirrors, reflecting back to me a place (the country I was born in) where I had never really fit in. But, in this new (foreign) geography, they represent a kind of home. Or, one non-home within another. Which, for all its confusion, in its familiarity, is comforting. And, in turn, forces me to pull on the thread that has tangled itself through my life: why not belonging has always felt like its opposite. I don’t have the answer, but at least I got to write about it. My other particular crush.