by Tommy Dakar
Inland, where the sea is always as distant as a summer holiday, and as romantically remembered, people suffer under the blow of summer suns. They walk from shade to shade, drooping like the stunned plants. Rivers and swimming pools and fountains become the nerve points of a cracked and dusty season. Breeze, whose very name contains coolness, requires a new sound here, it is the blast of an oven door continually being opened, a summer braze. This is a land for winter, for clean washed January light and sudden squalls out of the mountains. Summer kills it, dries it and blows it away, and for those who stay the dampened courtyard or the siesta is the only irrigation. The sea laps at their thoughts and spreads out its benevolent wavelets before them, blue and smooth as her eyes, and as shallow, as deep! Tall glasses crammed with ice and always behind, in front, so you feel like an island, the cool, cool, cool crystal sea.
Here on the coast we remember that sea, its moods and expressions. Swallows fishermen and spits out fish, grieves and mourns then attacks with a ferocity that shakes the walls of the town, hissing and hurling waves. Or calm, thoughtful, a kaleidoscope of currents and textures, one long finger meditatively doodling in the sand. Now, in its new summer frock it fans us lightly, and for a while is at rest; a lull.
Today bright and blue-yellow, with a breeze that deserves its name, a day in which nothing has to happen, it is enough in itself, its existence justified by its existence.
In the park the light trickles through the trees and sprinkles onto the ground as light escapes from the water in a quiet cove. Under them, dressed in spring, people are splashed and feel refreshed. They sit outside the caf?s or play noisily with each other amongst the bushes. A gypsy family is begging half-heartedly, a Moroccan is smoking joints with some Italian hippies, a group of teenage girls flirt on one of the benches, an elderly couple walk together in silence carrying books. Pablo turns up with a bottle of beer and is as full as ever, giving me the impression he always gives me; that today is new and interesting and well worth a bash.
In one corner of the park, hidden at the foot of a tall wall, we come to the zoo. It is small and dirty and smells so strongly in that salted air that the sensation is almost visual. Shit and litter and scraps of dry food make the floor as you peer through the mesh into that rank darkness. There are birds like chickens, only brighter or more beautiful, and some are pigeons, but sleeker, more musical. A fox paces its coop with a hunted air, as if it hasn't realised yet that it's been caught. A variety of beasts lounge or fidget in a pale night, examine or ignore the passers by. And terrific, stupefying, the eagle on its perch, motionless, a poem of space and height in the yellow pages of a dirty book. It fixes its eye on you and you feel fear as you sense the violence of its revenge. Outside the monkey house children and adults point and laugh, and the monkeys inside, nervous and excited, look back much as I imagine criminals must have done when they used to take them through the streets in chains. And Loli's there, too, the Boss's wife, feeding them peanuts and crisps.
'Feeding the prisoners.'
Pablo greeted her.
'Poor things,'
she replied, naturally.
'I feel so sorry for them, they could at least keep it a bit cleaner for them, couldn't they? Or give them some clean water, look at it,'
and her face convulsed to show her disgust
'and all those horrible little kids poking fun at them, still, I suppose that can't be helped, kids are like that.'
She continued feeding them, as she did most days, and the monkeys would return to her again and again. She had even taught them a few little tricks, and they would stroke her finger or blow her a kiss before they got their reward. She loved them, she said, and thought it was cruel that they should be treated with such disrespect, and although she knew they didn't have souls, she sometimes thought that they might have the monkey equivalent they looked so depressed.
'Christ!'
shouted Pablo, shaking his head,
'Let's get out of here.'
And started to walk off. Children were playing on the swings and I had the day off; the monkeys would be there tomorrow.
