In Kreuzberg is a red car painted like a cow and, nearby, a GATOR CROSSING road sign. Vines growing all over the side of a building remind me of my ongoing battle with body hair.
In the Thai restaurant Manuel takes me to the toilets number two, one labeled SEXYLADY below a super-femme silhouette, the other with LADYBOY beneath an intersex symbol. The menu features German-language Thai food puns, which Manuel explains but not so well that they stick for the permanent record.
This afternoon I lingered a long time in a brasserie on Rue Jacob where I’d been psyched to order something off the comparatively cheap menu like what everyone around me was tucking tastily into but — because I wasn’t assertive enough with these gelid French waiters — as advertised — it’s just breathtaking, their disregard — and the kitchen closed — couldn’t and instead talked a long time, through my hunger, with the guy lunching at the next table avec ses enfants who was very smart and interesting but not as smart — not as much a purveyor of revelation — as I realize I was trying to lead him to believe he was, doing that thing I do where I act like whoever is talking to me is the first person to talk to me ever in my whole entire life, like everything they say is just blowing my sweet little mind so sweetly, like they’re just with every word bestowing this terrific cognitive gift.
I guess the thinking is that if I flatter someone with my synthetic ingenue idiocy and awe they’ll keep talking and like me and other good will come of it.
For la cena today we had omelets from the eggs I had collected and potatoes I had fried, thinking of the Spanish speakers I’ve been close with heretofore, almost all of them standing over hot oil in New York City like now I do in rural Spain.
Patatas, my hosts here said while we ate and I played point-to-a-new-vocabulary-word. “Papas” is strictly American — North, Central, South — they said, as is “con gusto.”
I find myself feeling some loyalty to the Spanish — Mexican — Ecuadoran — Salvadoran — I’ve learned from coworkers back home, resistance to inculcation in the ways of the point of origin. Not my king, I want to say.
Tonight I finally met Gael, and he’s amazing. Has these crazy wide-set eyes in something like topaz that he blinks probably one-third as often as most humans blink their eyes, like some kind of beautiful CGI Catalan lizard. I want to put a long-stemmed rose between his teeth every second that there isn’t one. He took me to a great dinner somewhere fancy near University Square, and when I saw another table’s hoopla and made as if to tell the waiter that it was my companion’s birthday, too, Gael, unsmiling, unblinking, rose from his chair and got down on one knee beside mine to make an even bigger false scene. God I love being outsmarted. He has a whole plan about emigrating to the United States, a plan that involves marrying an Argentine flight attendant. After dinner we went outside to his motorcycle and he produced a helmet for me, which I put on backward, not even trying to be funny, just being a fucking idiot, and he laughed and laughed. Then I put it on correctly and we rode away and it was my turn to laugh but with the pleasure of the motion through the hot, still night. Later, we went to meet his visiting Polish manfriend in a gay bar with a redhead theme. The manfriend had a ladyfriend with him, also Polish, also gay, and he — the one of the two who spoke English — talked about her being on the prowl for shes, and we didn’t correct him because why would anyone ever put a stop to that? Since Gael had treated me to dinner, I treated him to a toro rojo sin azucar. The bored gay boi Barcelona bartender (not a redhead, btw) was not interested in my Spanish and was like, Okay do you want a lime?
~ my nameless taberna of choice of the moment at the foot of Calle de la Murtra ~
My taberna friend Juan is eating something that looks like pieces of green apple and scallion in an amber broth with ice cubes. What is it?
Sopa frio? I asked him, and he said something sounding like Es un pacho.
Another guy came in and said something to him I didn’t catch and Juan replied to him in the same way, so I guess I’m not the only one.
A lot of these tabernas seem to be the same, one to another. One thing is none seems to have a menu that I can see, and everyone just comes in and knows what choices there are. At ten in the morning I watch amazing things come out of the kitchen: open-faced sandwiches topped with semi-mystery stuff melting along their considerable lengths… snails… jámon for an older couple that came in after me, hers with melón, his with piña. How do they know?
…I notice now a hand-chalked sandwich board outside, so I guess there is something in the manner of a menu after all. What is lomo? And plancha? Was Juan saying ‘pacho, as in, gaz-?
If I live here, I’ll have to learn Catalan, too.
Is my forearm sticking to the table just because of surface textures or because it’s sticky with juice from my nectarine, which is turning out to be the signature scent of my mornings here?
