I awake as early as is physically pleasing after finally
settling at 7:30am. He shouts something in Spanish possibly about buying houses
followed by a wash of incoherent babbling ending in the word Capita. I try not
to laugh audibly. It is a little after 10. Previous to the bilingual mumblings
he left for work at 8pm and returned to me a little after 7:30am, shiny shoes
and swollen feet. He rolls over and professes through pursed lips and sealed
eyes he wants to wake to be with me. I bid him sleep, steal a kiss and slink
away, shutting out the day as I do.
I wrap a borrowed pen, a notebook, my wallet and his spare
telephone in my aged scarf along with my latest inspirational confuzzlement
from Lama Yeshe and tie the precious bundle securely to my back.
I take some keys from the dresser and let myself out into
the sun quietly, miraculously without bumping into or sending anything hurling
noisily to the ground. A result, in my book.
It would appear that my 10:22 rise into the world, was a
surprise attack on the bustling night streets of the Puerto Banus, the rest of
which appears to lie dormant. My intention to procure him breakfast from the
‘Hipocor’ is thwarted by cold steel shutters. So I walk.
All is at peace again, the sheer ecstasy and elation of the
package holiday makers antics has fallen silent with the rising of the sun. A
young girl is showing signs of a complex struggle to operate a payphone in a circular
bank of 5. She wears tousled hair, large glasses and an air of dismay. Her
clothes are not fitting of the time of day. One can imagine such fineries to
have been adorned a mere 12 hours ago as a badge of pride, she now awkwardly
undertakes her walk of shame.
We are the only two in our little world at this precise
moment. She sees me crossing, her stance changes from starkly pensive to a faux
casual as she turns to lean her back to the phonebank, nonchallently gazing
sporadically up and down, anywhere but at me. As if she feels that by adopting
this stance this perfect stranger (me) will believe her whereabouts to be
intentional and that, any minute, this casual damsel, not in distress, will be
rescued by her night in shining amore and whisked away. Would it matter to her
if I thought different? I smile. I smile at encountering my amusing new friend
across the road and carry my smile around empty street corners.
After all, who has not been in her shoes from time to time?
Although, I ponder as I walk, I can never remember a time during the morning
after the night before where I was incapable of operating a payphone. And then
it dawns on me; my only companion in this secret world of empty streets and
piercing sun is potentially the best part of a decade my junior. This
generation will all have possessed mobile telephone technology before exiting
Primary School. To my new found friend, is the payphone, which she explores
with all the grace of a monkey bashing a rock on a nut, an obsolete concept? Is
there such a difference between my former fun loving self and the next
generation of promiscuous binge drinkers? How long has it been since I, myself
benefited from the use of such a contraption? Surely it can’t have become that
complicated?
Seeing as the Puerto Banus wasn’t expecting me this early in
the game, I have discovered her with her arsenal empty, so I decide to pootle.
I draw my pen and pull out my notebook from the bundle and rest on the
temporarily forgotten patio of El Mexicano Banus. Aside which is an
extravagantly decorated kiosk, adorned with a thousand thousand intricate
twists and twirls, flowing fashionably frosted to the four clean relatively new
walls of the glass enclosure. A wash of wintery whites on such a juicy fresh
Sunday. Above the ornate frosting in clear crisp tangerine letters proudly sits
the word ‘sweet’, vacant of capital lettering or punctuation.
Inside the transparent extravaganza there lies nothing.
Nothing but a bare screeded floor and newly abandoned dust. A now too familiar
sight to each and every plaza, each avenue, each promenade now bares empty
shells bypassed and forgotten by all. A sour pill many have swallowed in the
sticky climate of today. Deeper down the rabbit hole we go with sweeter teeth
and costly décor.
I turn a corner to cross at one of the hundred striped pedestrian crossings
along this empty road, beneath a perfectly cultivated and trimmed criss-cross of branches I take
momentary shelter from the sun. People are beginning to stir, I sit outside a
Thai restaurant named the ‘Naga’. There are false stone carvings on the wall,
non of which have any bearing to the mythical snaked Naga at all. A young Thai
lady now shares my bench waiting contentedly between two white headphones. I
examine the street up and down. My inquisitive eyes meet a cornucopia of themed
restaurants and bars, estate agents, decadent ice creams and beauty
alternatives all offering the same ideology perfectly manufactured for your
exotic sensual pleasures in a boardroom far removed from here.
An English man constricted yet flowing from poorly purchased
golf shorts and a vibrant polo shirt talks clumsily in a booming voice of
breaking into the ‘long term elderly market’. I can not say I care for his
brash tone or his inhumane pitch. He stirs in me the need to move on. I realize
it is Sunday, a fact I already knew yet had not yet contemplated. Now safe in
the knowledge that little may come from my search for breakfast goods, I decide
to head back to the apartment. As I take my first few steps a looming veranda
shades the puce streets ahead, imprinted in its electric blue canvas in bold
unyielding lettering is the message;
MARBELLA FOR SALE.
A sunburned couple waddle awkwardly past, clutching each
other with dumpy pink arms, speaking sadly of missing MacDonald’s breakfast. I
cross the road in the direction of home. Directly opposite, displaying dream
properties and luxury shared apartments in the same bold blue stands the same
veranda with the same message. A double sided attack;
MARBELLA FOR SALE.
For all my good intentions, which were leaning towards
Strawberry pancakes and a veritable plethora of fruits, Sunday morning in the
Puerto Banus has gotten the better of me. And as a I make the longer than
originally anticipated walk home, I stop at the aptly named ‘Open Shop’ a
seconds dash away from the gates of the complex and pick up a box of ‘Bon o
Bon’ biscuits he had been excited for me try on our arrival and a children’s
yoghurt version of a pina colada, which I intend to leave at his bedside. I
also buy cheese, chorizo and sweet white rolls in a hope this falls into his
category of acceptable breakfast foods (ironically the closest thing to
croissant, which was my second choice, I can find in this ‘gourmet’ assault on
the sea side senses.) A small offering compared to the grand designs I had
awoken with on this Santo Domingo. As I pay the 9.75 a large handed, broad
shouldered man smiles the warmest smile one could possibly ask for and dips
into a box of sweets on the counter with his magnificent palms and cumbersome
fingers and retrieves a fist of ‘Bon o Bon’ treats that he tosses into my open carrier
free of charge. Thanks to this impressive man (whom I will later discover hails
from Argentina) and his generous display, I come to the lasting conclusion that
I will like the Puerto Banus, possibly not for the same reasons as my national
counterparts who roam her shores. I feel content as I kick a piece of broken
glass down the club lined ‘Plaza del Antonio Banderas’ looking in vain for a place
I can dispose of it, spotting many more as I go.
I make sure on the way home to stop and lift the receiver of
a pay phone in the bank, I smile as I gently place it back in its cradle,
comforted by the subtlety and familiarity of the simple. Somethings just don’t
change, I muse as I unwrap the first of my chocolate treats in the mid-day sun.
I sneak back into the
house of sleeping men, careful not to let the rustle of the bags or the
flippedy flap of my beloved 'hippo bloos' wake the workers. I slip the biscuits in by the
bed, unnoticed. A round head and wide open mouth are the only things to
protrude noisily from a fleece blanket, I watch for a second and smile again,
turn tail and tip toe from the closed window towards the living room, where I sit at the glass and wrought iron table top, tapping away at loose black
and white keys pondering how long the Puerto Banus will remain wide open to
a world where all that glitters has found its place. The worn glitz and
glamour of golden trinkets, tit-bits and treasures, all offered as lasting
memories of the magic of the 'puerta abierta' sit in dazzling dressed windows. Their neighbors,
the ever more prominent bold black and yellow signs that sting the eyes with
their buzzing exclamations of salvation ‘Compro Oro!’ and ‘In GOLD we trust!’ A
never ending band of circling commerce symbolically resting side by side, eternity
rings lying in both the contrasting windows of the package dream in the
daylight.
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