España

Spain is a quartet of octogenarian dames closing down a cafe at 2 AM having finished their last coffees hours earlier. Spain is a joint smoked on a topless beach while drinking a cold beer bought for a euro off a Senegalese thief. Spain is a mad crowd waving white kerchiefs in the air so that the ear of a dead bull might be severed and presented to a man of high station as a token of honor.

It was scenes like these that made me fall in love, that made me return. I'd been country-hopping through Europe, in some cases feeling the brevity of my stay almost an insult to my host land. But I didn't know when I'd be back, and I wanted to see a lot. I had. It was my plan all along to make a close study of a single country. Spain would be that country.

The women had something to do with it, too. To talk of their physical beauty is facile. What it is instead is a certain sensuality. A confidence that seems to emanate not from the conquest or suppression of self-doubt but rather from the absence of it entirely. But it must be a trick, I told myself. Surely they're afflicted by the same insecurities as American girls.

If they are, they don't show it. When I was in Spain a year ago I could hardly say a word to them, and what I could say came out very wrong. One of my friend's favorite anecdotes from that trip was when I thanked a girl in Spanish after spilling a beer on her. Now I could at least get started. It was never about trying to get a Spanish girl. Funny how it worked out. I would end up with a girl who spoke Spanish, but she wouldn't be from Spain.

My itinerary would allow me to cover the entire country. First San Sebastian, located in the extreme northeast just across the border with France. Then I would travel west to the pilgrim city of Santiago, and from there to the middle of the country toward an eventual rendezvous with my sisters in Barcelona.

I was lying in bed in my San Sebastian hostel dorm room finishing my book when a group of three Italians walked in. A couple and another girl. They were all architects who had just finished grad school or were still in it. I would end up traveling with them for a week. The single girl, Michela, would be as close to a girlfriend as someone who you won't see again for a long time, if ever, can be. From San Sebastian we went to Bilbao and then Gijón, where a fiesta was taking place. This was my first fiesta in Spain and the charming little town was invested with a wonderful vivacity. A stage was set up in the Plaza Mayor and each evening what seemed the whole population of the town streamed up to the square to watch the entertainment, the elderly seated in folding chairs in the center and everyone else standing around them looking on or spilling out of the bars that lined the edge of the square. The night we went there were traditional dancers. The men on stage wore black pants and long-sleeved white shirts with red kerchiefs tied at their necks and black gaucho hats. The women in colorful garb, shawls about their shoulders and clicking castanets in hand and their tapping shoes ringing out over the crowd. My new friends were moving on the next day to A Coruña where Michela had done her Erasmus studies. But I wasn't done with this town. We were arm in arm in the plaza watching the dancers when she asked me about my plans and I told her I was staying. That I needed to stay and write about this town and the fiesta.

"Well," she said, "you say it will be hard for you to leave Gijón, but it's going to be harder for me to leave you."

This affair had been long enough for real guilt. The disappointment in her eyes she tried to hide. The old sickening feeling of hurting a girl.

Later that night when I held her in my room I said to myself "Remember this" because a moment like that is a perfect encapsulation of the traveler's life. A few joyous days together, a week if you're lucky. The entire time colored fatally by the parting that is so soon to come. Then it comes. And beyond that sadness the promise of the next step, and the new people, places and experiences it will bring.

She left the next morning and I was alone again. The atmosphere of the town at fiesta - with the dancers, the decorations, the ceremony - was lovely. But that wasn't why I stayed. The posters were all over town. In the foreground a simple table with two roses laying on it and beyond the table the sand of the empty arena. The main event of the fiesta was a week of bullfights, and I was going to one.