Una Cerveza, Por Favor

I

In a bar in Santander an old man sneezes explosively several times. It is the international prerogative of old men to sneeze as if they are expelling a demon. You can sneeze from your nose and you can sneeze with your voice, and his voice bubbles up from some Stygian cavern, strained as if he is pushing a great weight.

Plastic chairs, snooker on the TV, the smells of fried onions and bacon. An old-fashioned Coca-Cola napkin dispenser and a cigarette machine. Several other elderly men are welded to the bar in worn jeans and jackets, picking at pintxos — sausage, cheese, Spanish omelette — and peering with interest out of the window. They’re watching the hurricane.

This is not figurative. The last wheezes of Hurricane Kirk are blowing through northern Spain, and a short hop into a bar by the university to get out of the rain has turned into a full blown shelter for several passers-by, who now drip onto the linoleum floor and debate whether they’re morally obligated to buy a drink.

They are, at least, dressed for the weather. How many holidays has a coat been an albatross around my neck? The foolishness of a tourist from damp, windblown England, tramping around golden Iberian sunlight in a windbreaker. This time I finally learned my lesson; Hurricane Kirk had other ideas.

I feel, as I usually do when travelling alone, a little out of place. Complaining about tourists on holiday is gauche in the extreme (you’re not in traffic, you are traffic), but I spend most of my time on holiday trying to avoid them all the same. Away from the centre you get better experiences, but more complicated ones as well. More painful failed attempts at placing orders in Spanish, a greater sense that you’re disturbing someone’s quiet afternoon, that you’re too garish and alien for a quiet suburban bar.

This is mostly projection. If anything, the people most exhausted by tourists are those who have to deal with them all the time, in places where humility is in shorter supply. This is why cities like Paris have developed a reputation for unfriendliness — not because of any inherent Parisian character, but because you are the fiftieth tourist that day trying to order through gesticulation and chewed out Franglish.

I like travelling alone. The problem is that I’m not very good at it. It always takes me too long to feel comfortable enough to try my basic phrasebook language skills, eat alone at restaurants, ask strangers for directions and recommendations. The first day or so in a new place is invariably spent wandering around, passing places but never quite finding the courage to go inside, waiting for the most familiar and least frightening choice. Feeling the pressure build on me with every second expended trying to find the right word, every flicker of the server’s expression which might precipitate an eyeroll or an impatient gesture. Worrying with every fresh failure to communicate or adhere to invisible local protocol that I am marking myself that most unattractive of things: the British tourist.

This, again, is projection: the British have a certain reputation abroad but the types likely to upturn a table or vomit on a 13th century church are usually visible immediately, and move in large groups. Enter with good intentions and no matching t-shirts and you’re unlikely to be the subject of burning Anglophobic prejudice.

Back in the bar I pay my bill and attempt to leave, but the wind comes at me with such vigour that I immediately turn back around, soaked through to my skin from just a couple of seconds of horizontal rain.

Instead, I order another drink, and the old men make space.

II

On Playa del Portio, I share the beach with a nudist. He vanishes somewhere while I read my book. Later I see a clothed man in the same area, but I don’t recognise him without his balls out. I feel a passing urge to strip down as well. The beach is otherwise deserted, and completely enclosed by high cliffs. I decide against it for several reasons, chief among them being that I would prefer not to be arrested — though happily my phrasebook does include the sentence, “Por favor, hubo un malentendido.” Please, there has been a mistake! Or indeed, “Yo confieso”.

Some time later a farmer drives down to the beach with a tractor and trailer. I have a low opinion of farmers, so I assume he has come to fly tip or unload toxic waste. It turns out he is collecting seaweed, diligently walking up and down the width of the beach with a pitchfork. Soon there are several stinking mounds dotting the sand. A woman watches him do it with suspicion, slowly orbiting around him, never approaching, trapped in the gravity wells of those dark piles. Eventually she leaves, apparently satisfied (or unable to watch any longer).

I spend a lot of time on holiday lonely. It’s a contradiction I’ve never quite resolved. Given the option I’ll always travel alone, and then spend as much time as possible in isolated places too. On deserted beaches, up mountains, in the corner of an empty bar. For the majority of the time this suffices, but there always comes a point after sunset where the solitude starts to feel a bit more pointed. When I’ve been reading and drinking all afternoon, and it would be nice to have a human conversation. Most of the time the place to find that is at the hostel.

Hostels are full of travellers, but they’re also full of Travellers. Professional holidaymakers. I envy them. They exchange stories of Guadalajara and Ko Pha Ngan. There is always an accounting. Their days and weeks are measured in passport stamps. I recognise them in their highly self-conscious lack of self-consciousness. They are often awkward but have developed the muscle memory of hostel socialising, even if the artifice is visible, the pushing through of social barriers.

They ask me where I’ve come from, and where I’m going next. They look sympathetic when I say, no, I have come here for a holiday. I’m leaving in three days. Several are undertaking the Camino de Santiago, a pilgrim’s path running the length of northern Spain. Another is going to hit up Madrid after. A girl from New Zealand is thinking about America. I resist asking how they manage to afford this.

I make a faux pas in the bar with the group later. The toast is to new friends and I raise a glass to temporary ones too. It’s ill judged. Maybe to these young travelers the possibility of meeting back up in Santiago is real. Or maybe it isn’t real to them either, they just aren’t so willing to joke about it, poke at the brittle edges.

Then again, resentment is very unattractive quality. They are all charming, friendly, interesting. I don’t know that they’re all definitely wealthy. Quite possibly they just took different paths in life. They work from laptops, or stay in a city for weeks at a time, volunteering in exchange for board or doing casual labour.

I try not to live my life constantly embittered and envious. I just don’t see why I shouldn’t be allowed to be on holiday all the time.

III

Libro Mediterránea de los muertos. I don’t catch the poet’s name but I see the banner on the muted TV. Mediterranean Book of the Dead. She stands on the harbour, reading silently from a book, the sea churning behind her. The pages try to turn themselves, and she struggles to hold on to them.

Earlier in the day, passing the same spot, I saw a deputation of old men (more old men: Santander, like the British seaside resorts it resembles, is a place of the elderly) staring at the water below. A small boat has come unmoored, and is now bouncing up and down in the increasingly choppy water. It isn’t clear if they are the owners or just interested parties — none of them seem inclined to do anything about it, though there is some serious shaking of the head. The hurricane proper has not arrived yet — I wonder what havoc this loose boat will wreak when Kirk hits. Splintering against carbon fibre hulls and wooden jettys, snapping at the more well-behaved vessels like an untethered dog loose in a park.

Santander is not on the Mediterranean. It is green, hilly, and Atlantic. There’s no mistaking it when you go for a paddle. Across the water — a ferry away — is England. The steep slopes facing the harbour are covered in wild nasturtiums, and the local drink is cider. The city smells of frying fish, even when there isn’t an obvious source. Some restaurant outflow, some market stall, something greasy clutched in a paper wrapping from a passer-by.

In many respects it feels achingly familiar. Santander is not Scarborough — though it may be topographically similar — but you can close your eyes and imagine some point at the turn of the century where it could have been. Fewer psychotic gulls, fewer fag-ends in the sand, fewer payday lenders, but some of the same windswept grandeur.

Hug goodbye, hoist backpacks, check passports. Clean out your bunk, return your keys, exchange phone numbers and international dialing codes. See you guys in Bognor Regis, yeah?