The city has turned cold and windy. Night falls early. The Mediterranean is not immune to winter, it seems.
The streets are lined with Christmas lights and the commuters leave work wearing balaclavas beneath their helmets and idle their mopeds at the corner traffic light, waiting for the incandescent red to turn an incandescent green. They are eager to get home and out of this cold.
I am eager to get home, too. But the thing is-- I don't want to leave here.
I went to a friend's house for dinner the other night. They live with a very pretty, sweet, divorced psychologist named Elena. Her eccentric, unemployed sister, Conchita, and Conchita's rustic, quiet, and wry husband, Miguel, came as well. Miguel had a heavy hand with the wine and then with the cava and before long Conchita and Elena were standing up to sing an ancient Andalusian gypsy ballad about a bull looking at his reflection in a stream by silver moonlight. Their voices were thin and tenuous and as they sang Miguel shut his eyes and tapped his dessert spoon against his champagne flute. It was beautiful in the strange, ephemeral way of all perfect moments that you know memory will inevitably blemish.
Or maybe the blemish is that memory makes them perfect. Maybe it was silly and maybe they were drunk and maybe their voices were neither thin nor tenuous but simply bad.
Then they were done singing and I was still clapping and laughing and smiling when they asked me to sing a folk song from my country.
But I didn't know any... oh, well, there was that one, but...
And my memory is strong. Strong enough that I will not remember a winter that came late to Spain: no, it was all warm sunny days on the beach, traveling Europe, and four months of a guiltily pleasurable utter lack of responsibility for which I will receive academic credit. But my memory is not strong enough to erase the two minutes it took my voice to crack through Take Me Out to the Ball Game while three Spaniards watched with the solemn respect they felt due of an anthem they couldn't understand.
And it never will be.
