FIESTA: Nightfall

I WOKE to the sound of shrieks. I opened my eyes abruptly and in the purple gold city lights I watched a young child and his father diverted by a bouncing rubber ball. Erik was still on the bench. He saw me as I tried to feign uninterrupted sleep and walked over to expose my charade. With the blanket now folded in the pack we made for the center again, to load up on small cups of hot black coffee before the scheduled rendezvous. We sat for a while in Café Ibiza neither of us saying very much, shedding the grog and quaffing our thrift with narrow slits of eyes watching grumbling old people watching boisterous young people watching televised football. I put the small spoon from Erik's saucer in my pocket and we paid and went out into the night.
The meet-up was still distant and so we turned back to those streets where we first went wild with hunger and thirst. While the beasts in our bellies were still placated, the dryness in our gullets was just as palpable and we found a small bar on the main street whose halls were not yet buttressed by bodies. Instead, people slowly entered and went to the restaurant in the back, leaving E and myself to muse over the merits of Rioja white and the aspects of the room around us. The light was nice, the bartender was too, and the wine was well valued, so we stayed for several glasses before finally taking leave.

The wine acted like lubricant and feelings of fatigue were far behind. Now was time to sate ourselves, and we pushed further into the network of side streets, pressurized like narrowing pipes filling with water. This effect pushed us along walls and into alleys and finally through a door into a brightly lit bar where people shouted over the din to the two man team running back and forth behind the bar to the grill relaying only numbers. Numbers corresponding to the quantities of champiñones, that people were demanding. We's gotten the idea to leave the street when we saw people standing outside the door with their necks outstretched putting skewers of dripping mushrooms into their mouths over their hands, but we had no idea what we were in for. We each got one - a stick with three caps on it, and as we watched the man hose the grill with a fresh coat of green extra virgin and slap 6 giant white caps on the steel, we started to feel the ravenous crave. It's difficult to maintain nonchalance or even an image of good humour  when hunger like that takes hold. We simply watched, our necks outstretched as well, while the caps went from grey to ashy brown and the master of our desires finished each with a powerful burst of house-made mayonnaise inside each upturned cap. He adroitly skewered each through the center into three-story towers and in a flash they were before us on an ivory white platter. The heat, the texture, the slick and crisp surfaces were intoxicating, but still nothing compared to the flavor. I had never chewed fungus with such voracious gusto, and I certainly never felt a more salient regret go along with the final flex of peristalsis. I no longer recall how many more we had to order before our heartbreak was eclipsed by bellyache.*

Unfortunately the bellyache was more serious than jest, and by the time we finally met with Paula and her girlfriends by the ayuntamiento, I was barely able to speak. I spent a large portion of time hunched up against a wall, while Erik and Paula spoke of French afternoons and her friends did their best to cheer me up with swigs of red wine and cola. When the digestive acids did eventually kick in, I was quite a bit fired up from the kalimotxo and live music, and our group had again swelled in number. Seeing my enthusiasm, Paula's boyfriend and his friend came up to me and started to cultivate excitement. We passed some kind of alcohol around, though my belly was so well lined I don't remember even caring to check, and walked back toward the streets surrounding the cathedral. The world was again a sea of bodies and heads and the effect of the harmonious nocturne served to brazen our hearts with mirth. The din of our joy turned to shouts and more of Paula's friends came and walked with us while we sang to the heavens praise of the town, the wine, and the Spanish fiesta in all it's forms. Someone taught me cojonudo, deriving from cojones and meaning something akin to "fucking great", and it became the motto of the eve. We went into bars and danced, drank from bottles in dark corners, and ran out in the streets to belt out words I barely understood. For hours we moved around in this way, never noticing the passing of time or space. It was all the same crowded golden calle, the same blurry red and black bar, and the same cheshire grin, screeching guffaw, and guttural roar lasting late into the morning. We eventually said our goodbyes outside that bar, and though were offered a place on a floor of one of the friends, we were loath to impose and found our way back to our patch by the river, where I resumed my pastry roll on the grass and once again closed my eyes on E watching from the bench. Only this time there were no other bodies around. Or so I thought.




* Since the trip up north I have been chasing, yet never reaching, that mushroom-induced euphoria. I have not gone a day without trying. I am considering making it a goal to find help as part of some sort of new years resolution. Today alone I have eaten mushrooms on two different occasions and am in the process of preparing a third.