Midnight in Cordoba

Thought it was time to write a serious story ...



New years eve in Cordoba is freezing. Quiet. Grey.

It’s festive – the Spaniards dress the holiday season better than anyone – but there’s a drabness. As though a spell has been cast to make this last siesta of the year persist, forever. Oranges nestle together in the trees lining every street, still vibrantly orange, and facades of pale pink, stucco and yellow stand majestically on the empty streets. But dreary permeates through the forlorn solitude. It is going to rain, and not so much as a coffee shop seems to be open.

“You can eat a donut,” the terse senora in the process of cleaning out the bins of an Americanized franchise gesticulates wildly at the closed sign on the door. “If you eat quickly. We are closing.”

Christine doesn’t want to eat quickly. Christine doesn’t really want a fucking donut, actually, thanks very much. She wants for it to not be New Years Eve again, and definitely to not be in Cordoba. She gives a special gesticulation of her own and walks back out into the eerie yellow dusk. The narrow labyrinth of alleyways back to her hotel are oppressive, without people to guide her – that crazy fucking gypsy in the purple coat on one corner, an illegal immigrant selling stolen lottery tickets at the next, and the familiar thrum of buoyancy and appetite to a quiet harmony of chinking cutlery and glassware. Without all this to guide her, Christine is lost.

Ending up in the main square for the third time, she decides just to stay there. What is the point in going back anyway, she surmises? What can she possibly find to amuse her there, but the thoughts inside her own head?

Last new years had gone something like this:

Step one: Take a giant bottle of bourbon.

Step two: swindle 2 tabs of rather powerful anti-psychotic medication from a clearly psychotic homeless person – in exchange for said bourbon.

Step three: Down the hatch – in the safety of her own place, obviously – before remorse could set in. And pleasant dreams. No dreams, actually. A rather dangerous way to ensure sleep before midnight – or at all, which was actually the point – but a year ago Christine hadn’t much cared for waking up any way. The awful irony of wanting to sleep for the rest of her life, and not being able to sleep for an hour.

Her predilection towards scamming homeless people, taking dangerous un-prescribed narcotics and insomnia has long passed, but it is probably best to avoid a cramped hotel room so tiny she’d nearly broken her toe swinging out of bed this morning. With a big toe now a psychedelic hue of mottled purples after its encounter with the wall three millimeters from her bed, going back does seem a little pointless. In truth, it feels like the room is crushing her, consuming her; in the new year, all that would be left would be an oversized white pullover and the discarded remains of an unpalatable bruised toe.

Best to stay out in the open.

Best to stay sober.

Best not to contemplate being alone on New Years Eve. In Cordoba.

Best to drink.

One or two bars are open. There’s no-one in them, but bored and fat baristas-cum- wine-waiters stand under the eves of verandahs hoping for customers at the end of siesta. Christine chooses a seat outside, in the cold, but where she can watch for people and not feel quite so isolated. It’s funny how Madrid had more people than she could bear: the hordes of tourists that swamped the old city. There, it was the people who consumed her; they were like oblivious gangs, an anarchic mass marching wall to wall in the cobbled and festive streets. Feeling like prey, she often ran rather than face them. Now there is no one to face and she feels lonely.

Christine orders a sangria and doesn’t touch it beyond the first sip. The red syrup is almost gelatinous and the peaches floating in its depths look putrefied. She knows it’s not the Spanish way, it’s just her morbid brain; but once she’s had the thought she can’t get it out of her head. Like a lot of thoughts that hack their way through her psyche.

He’s cheating on me. He hates me. He’s going to leave me.

The fact that these actually turned out to be true didn’t seem to lessen his rage when they spilled out. He accused her of conjuring the situation into being, like an evil incantation. When, in actual fact, he was fucking his hairdresser. And the mail-person. His therapist called it a sex addiction - he was probably fucking her too; his primary impulse was convenience. A dig at her, she’d wondered as she was hauling boxes of her broken life into her station wagon, or was that just her brain in overdrive too?

Christine ponders the absurdity that she still cares that he was angry. Still cares at all. And yet, here she is pretending to be happy. Watching - right in front of her - the decomposition of her drink, the decomposition of her year, the world going by without her in it. Not to mention the screen of her mobile phone, which could light up her new years with apologies and promises that will actually be kept.

Anything is possible. And yet nothing is possible. Not if that’s what she’s waiting for.

People are starting to turn out now. The fat barista-cum-barman glances at her malevolently, daring her to keep sitting there in the midst of waiting customers who might actually drink something. It’s time to be turned out into the synthetic glow of a siesta woken by fairy lights. The twilight of another year.

To be continued … (ha ha. Just to lazy to finish it, actually – I always sucked at the short stuff)

And a shot note - I have never been to Cordoba, so I apologise for any denigration of what I am sure is a beautiful city. And many thanks to the scary lady in the purple coat who is real - she just lives in Florence!