ESSAY: The Gap in which the Chameleon Changes Colors

Notes from the 13-hour Cádiz-Barcelona express

I wake up at 6:30 a.m. – a certain idea of hell, for me – in an old-school pensión a 7-minute walk from the city train station. I want to sleep in more but I have to get ready. My train leaves in an hour. I praise Shiva that yesterday, I had the presence of mind to brew a small batch of coffee and put it in a thermos. This was before leaving the apartment in a small seaside town in the Cádiz region of Spain that I had been living out of for months and heading to Cádiz Capital, as they call it (the region & the city being homonyms). I usually despise this thermos and would never be seen in public with it, as it advertises the name of an American bank, but I must admit today it is my trusty friend. I down the coffee in a few gulps while reading a reddit thread about the prevalence of pickpocketing in Barcelona (I don’t seek this out, reddit’s algorithm feeds it to me, and I accept as I don’t know what else to look at whilst this bleary-eyed). L. wakes up next to me and says she still feels ill. She got seasick from surfing the other day, which is apparently a thing, and hasn’t quite recovered. I can’t say I feel amazing either, though I think it’s mostly lack of sleep. After a bit of hesitation, she decides to walk me to the station anyway, in a way that suggests she feels it is her Duty to be strong & come along. I rinse and we set off. The streets are empty. No one will emerge til around 9. At the station there is a big maze of green rope you have to walk through to gain access to this particular train, which is funny because it’s not a very big station and there is basically no one there. We start to make our way through the roped area, but then I don’t want to have to say goodbye right in front of the attendants at the end of it, so I make us stop halfway. We make a bit of a show of our farewell, with lots of kissing and hugging. I am about to head off to a yoga teacher training for 3 weeks, it is unusual for us to be apart for this long, and my mental health hasn’t been the best exactly due to lack of work and other reasons, so there is a whirling sense of vulnerability, worry, and looming change around us. Plus, it’s easy to feel emotional when flung into unusual circumstances at 7:30 a.m. I expect the attendants to be charmed by our romantic spectacle or at least empathetic, but in fact they are irritated. I guess the train leaves in 2 minutes, and they are arguing intensely with some people who are for some reason being withheld. These people will never make it on. Who knows what they’ll do, as there is only one such train daily. On-board the train I have coach 17 to myself – the second blessing of the day – although there is a suspicious leak creeping its way out from the wall to the bathroom. I immediately think, “Cindy, the TV is leaking…” – a line from the Scary Movie franchise (?) that for some reason I have thought of repeatedly in the past few days. A premonition? I sit down & wonder if this is the longest train journey one can do in Spain. It must be close. Something about it feels American. The scale of it. Within Europe you’d be hard pressed to sit on a single train for such a long time and still be within the same country. In fact it is probably my second longest train ride ever. The longest was as a student, when I got a ‘eurorail’ pass and took a direct train from Istanbul to Berlin (the same route as the ‘Orient Express’ but less vermouth-and-murder and more loud backpacking Australian raver), and the second longest was when I took the 10 hour NYC-Montreal train, to perform in a reading where I felt like a sort of random fifth wheel, but that was probably instrumental to my first book getting published, since I met the publisher there, Metatron, as they were organizing the event. I also wrote a long poem on it that is probably one of my favorite ones in that book, so I guess what I’m saying is getting on long trains can make things happen. L. seems to somehow be aware of my route today, and is telling me about places I will go through. How has she managed this? I have no clue what’s going on. We set off over the bay of Cádiz still in the half-light. Cádiz city is a near-island that lies curled up in a small fist at the ends of the earth after miles of sandbar. It is among the more stunning cities that exist, in my humble estimation, though I have been enough times now that I have started taking it for granted. Its white domed Cathedral sits in the center of the city like some giant ornate oyster that grew by accumulating residual plundered gold from ships as they returned from their Atlantic voyages. A comically ugly TV tower also looms over its skyline, a bleak 20th century exclamation mark punctuating centuries of colonial grandeur. These two monuments seem to embody the seemingly contradictory, blended economic nature of the city quite nicely: on the one hand, it is a place through which much of the wealth from the Americas flowed, but unlike Seville, where it was headed, Cádiz was merely a vessel: this was the port where all of the dock-workers lived (and still live, to an extent), giving it a sort of working class grit, despite the glamor of some of its architecture & the glorious coastal setting (which has led to a lot of the local merch calling it Cádizfornia). Something else I feel you need to know about Spain, while I am on the subject of making broad generalizations about it, is that much of the country lives almost 2 hours behind its solar time - in northwestern Galicia, it is as much as 2.5 hours. Supposedly, this is partly due to the fact that, in the mid-20th century, Franco changed the clocks so the country would be on Nazi time, and then the habit stuck. So when you are told it is 7:30 a.m. here, it is really 5:30 a.m. – or at least that is how I am choosing to experience the fact that I am on this train so early. Hence also, maybe, the famously late dinners. At the yoga training where I am headed, which is being run by a British couple, they have told me that dinner will be served around 6 p.m. This is making a little queasy bird inside of me want to die. I much prefer the lazy late pace of life here, would happily live by it all the time. I guess I can be my own sort of little fascist about time. But I shouldn’t complain about free dinner. The reason I am going to the training is that I have been given a ‘scholarship’ - value approx €3.5k - that includes room and board. (I have however been told I may have a roommate, which I am desperately hoping will not be the case, as I am much too old & bougie a poor poet for that kind of thing.) It is unclear why I have been allowed to simply not pay. Granted, a friend/teacher of mine is involved in the training. But it also feels like it sort of fell out of the sky. In that vein, I’m not sure what exactly it will be, or mean, for me. A mental health break? A possible career change? (Translation work has been running dry ever since the agencies that run the biz found out about ChatGPT – it took them about a year, but eventually they cottoned on – so I may need to pivot.) Unfortunately, the more yoga I do, the more I think I sort of hate it, or at least don’t really feel like teaching it. The sun rises behind the clouds around 8 a.m. – not yet its usual burning Andalusian self – like some alien moon, a white plate glued onto a silver sky, as we head north into the salt-marshes. The landscape is flamingos who are looking more grey than pink this morning, and industrial windmills in the distance that power this windswept corner of the planet when the sun doesn’t. You have to wonder what it feels like to be from here. A blessing & a curse? On the city beach yesterday there was a tag that said, in big black letters, GUIRI GO HOME. (“Guiri” is a slang term for a foreigner, sort of like a gringo.) But which foreigners? Not the Latin American immigrants that make up a big chunk of the workforce, surely. The tag is lefty-flavored, geared at tourists. But someone else has crossed out the word “GUIRI” and written “RACISTS” above it, so that it reads: RACISTS GO HOME. I find this hilarious, for some reason. Who is being called a racist? The locals? Are tourists a race? Or is it saying that foreigners are welcome, except the especially racist ones…? On reddit I am always reading threads by well-meaning, usually American digital nomads who want to move here and start living “the good life” (as every American I’ve met who has moved here describes it), but also don’t want to upset anyone. They want to know how they can do things right. They are told, come along with your big American salary, but don’t rent at big American prices! This is a dual tension that is nowadays endemic to many of Spain’s coastal cities, where tourism has become such a massive part of the economy, but where the airbnbification of things has also led to a lot of anger & population displacement. In Cádiz it is felt very keenly since it is basically a tiny island, though they seem to have done a fairly good job of preserving it, perhaps in part because many people visiting the region are often simply passing through the city. There also seem to be laws in place limiting the presence of international chain stores and hotels in the downtown area. And many of the modern buildings from the 20th century onward – with their characteristically depressing Franco-era faded pastel tint – have been built further down the sandbar, on the way to other places. Still, the strain is palpable, almost Athenian. The wannabe do-gooder redditors make a show of saying of course we won’t rent airbnbs, of course we won’t be the loud, obnoxious kind of tourists. But no amount of hand-wringing can release you from the realities of global macro-economics. They are moving to escape something, too – even if this hardly helps the problem of displacement. You see iterations of the anxious sentiment it induces everywhere, of Cádiz para los Gaditanos! – which is what people from the city are called. In a way, the region thrives off its tourism, in another way, it is killing it. A poison cure. I am reminded of the Communist 100 Montaditos worker. I really want to tell you about him. 100 Montaditos is a national Spanish chain that sells 100 different kinds of tiny sandwiches. Often these are fairly mediocre and don’t come with much on the actual sandwich, but they are handy in a pinch. The Cádiz one is located at the foot of the white Cathedral, in a large square that would be jaw-droppingly gorgeous were it not for the constant seagulls and nature of some of the restaurants on it, such as 100 Montaditos. I went there once with L. and the man who worked the kitchen there – looking vaguely David Foster Wallacy in his sweat-drenched bandana – made a show of putting entirely too many toppings on the sandwiches, and adding far more chips than strictly necessary, as if intentionally trying to tank the chain’s profits and make any hungry passersby as happy as possible in the process. For once, the sandwiches actually tasted good, made with something akin to ‘love.’ It is a good thing I do not live in Cádiz, as I would have found it difficult not to develop a crush on this man. By the time we reach Jerez, around 8:30 a.m., I am already famished. Usually I struggle to ever get hungry, but I guess things are different on a 13-hour train. Luckily L. ensured I came prepared and went around with me as I bought lots of snacks last night. We pull into the station amidst ads for local sherry distilleries. (Jerez is where Sherry is from - “Sherry” is just a weird anglicization of “Jerez.”) Tons of people get on. Someone sits next to me. Gross. It is rare for me to travel solo these days, it feels like I am surrendering to the elements. On the back of the seat in front of me there is a sticker that tells me I can get a 10% discount if I sign up for the train company’s frequent traveller program. But the phrase, descuento de bienvenida al darte de alta, reads to me more literally like it is saying, welcome discount at the giving up of yourself. I give myself over to Renfe, body and soul. When we arrive in Seville, a gaggle of bro-teens sitting in front of me who I have assumed are Russians says something about the “Ukraini.” I don’t speak any Slavic languages, so that is all I am able to glean from their conversation. We pass a cool, massive black and white bird I can’t name. I feel self-conscious, but I can’t be bothered to know about such things. I mean, I should know more bird names. The excuse I have for myself is that I am bilingual, I can almost speak three languages… surely my tired brain can’t be expected to know the words for all these hyperspecific things! It often happens that I will know the name for a species or a spice in one language, but not be aware of its equivalent in the other. Like, what the hell is the word for platypus in French, again? (I look it up later, it’s ornithorynque – an amazing word really, but why is it so different?) Another excuse is that I think of myself as too ‘urban,’ too ‘internet’ a poet to know the words for such things. I am so much better than nature. But now I am remembering my grandmother who, a few years before she died, while listing the names of a bunch of private American prep schools out loud, for some reason, got annoyed with me when I laughed about the fact that I didn’t know any of them. It’s funny because who cares about prep schools? But she said, Don't do that, don’t parade your ignorance around like a prize! She had a point, I guess, and now I am wondering if this has been a specific failure of mine in my life and in my writing in general. I might even go so far as to say it was both a failure and a success of the movement known as alt lit, at the time – ‘parading around ignorance like a prize.’ (My grandmother was keenly aware of my writing and worried about it, she found my twitter in 2015 after my first book came out, which I imagine she read and didn't like, I mean it has poems that mention porn so why would she have done? After she found the twitter she called up my uncle in a panic and said, Is this normal? Is he ok? Do we need to worry about him? My uncle told her it was fine - bless his heart - though who knows what kind of inane xanaxed-out suicidal shit I was saying on there.) At the next stop I poke my head out of the train for a breath of fresh air (aka a sip of vape). We are there for a while, and when I get back to my seat, the leak has grown, turned muddy from people’s shoes. The train is leaking… My previous compañero has left me. But then a British couple gets on and one of them is seated next to me, his wife across the way. They ask if we need to sit in our assigned seats, I say no I don’t think so, because I want to be alone, I hate having people looking over my shoulder especially when I am writing, because a writer is essentially a sneak. Someone who is always waiting to stab you in the back, I think Joan Didion said. I offer my seat to the woman, saying I was going to the cafe car anyway. Unfortunately when I arrive there are no seats, so now I am standing and typing this as we trundle on towards Córdoba. The sun and sky are classic Andalusian brilliant white and blue now. The Russian teens have made their way to the cafe car too. They have ordered Estrella Galicia beers and the local equivalent of a cup’o’noodles. It is all of 11 a.m. and they cannot be over 13 years old. I order a seltzer and start thinking about the recent death of Alice Notley. Actually, I don’t really start thinking about it so much as I start thinking about the fact that I should be. This woman I never met, but was more and more peripherally aware of, whose presence within American poetics felt massive already and will probably only continue to grow. I started Telling the Truth as it Comes Up back in November when I was here in the same seaside apartment I have just left. It is a thick volume, and for a while, I read little essays from it every evening. It was the first piece of writing in what felt like years that had me actually excited about poetics again. As in wanting to stamp my feet on the ground like hell yeah. I forget what exactly it was that got me going. Maybe something about the phrasing, or a question about the nature of dreams. Alice Notley seemed like a real cranky old bat - no offense - and in this way she reminds me of my dead grandmother. A couple of years ago, when she was visiting Paris, Carrie Lorig, who was spending a lot of time around Alice, recalled a story about how she had told Alice she was going out for a walk across the city, as she had visited several times but never actually seen much of it, and Alice had said something like, “A walk! Don’t do that! That’s terrible for you!” This sounds like exactly the kind of insane shit my grandmother would have said, so I find it oddly endearing. My grandmother was the sort of person people described as a “real battleaxe.” The last time I saw her before she died, she made me read a book out loud to her about grammar by someone who was an editor for the New Yorker. The primary effect the book had on me was that it hammered in when it is appropriate to say “you and me” vs. “you and I.” The latter when used incorrectly is an instance of grammatical “hypercorrection.” We are taught the use of ‘I’ is generally more correct, more formal, and so people use it instead of ‘me’ because they think it makes them sound smarter. The trick is to substitute the plural, “you and I/me,” for the singular, “I/me,” and then we usually know intuitively which is correct. This has resulted in an annoying, but irresistible urge in me to systematically correct people when they use this wrong. Thanks, grandma. Not sure what you were trying to teach me. Maybe she was just worried because my first book used a lot of “text message” spelling and she thought that meant I didn’t know how to spell. Now I’m just thinking about writing and the passage of time and how we pass literary batons down to one another, or choose to claim them or rob them. I mean I am on a train so how can I not be thinking about the passage of time. We just went by a stream with a crumbled bridge going over it that looked proto-Roman, with the Parque Natural de las Sierras de Honachuelos in the distance. I don’t know where my life is headed. Something that usually happens to me when I travel is that I get ridiculously horny, which I suspect is a manifestation of anxiety. Today, though, it’s hitting different. Instead I am thinking about vastness, history, I am excited about the journey – I feel a bit like a teenager again, let loose into the wild – and so I am excited about writing this, instead. Even if it is the sort of excitement that comes tinged with the fear that I may be unravelling. But so, I am thinking about my first book of poetry again. Do I regret spelling bits of it like Hey I wr0te this pome 4 u? Not really. It was a decade ago. I was excited about the possibilities. Some of the French friends I grew up with and who were nice enough to be excited about me having a book out (this effect only lasts for exactly one book, I am sorry to say) later expressed frustration with the writing style, saying it made it tricky for them to read. When my friend Andrew interviewed me for it, he said it seemed like ‘an extreme manifestation of the end of a certain style,’ and I wasn’t sure what he meant, but in retrospect it probably was just that. I remember more recently when a book by someone named Sean Thor Conroe came out and I saw people criticizing its style, saying it put on a ‘false urban air’ for someone who had gone to Columbia. I don’t think anyone said this about my first book but I can see why they would have done, or why some might have found it stylistically off-putting. But then isn’t this offputtingness key to how we differentiate ourselves, generation to generation? Then there was an article recently claiming this writer and some of his friends were representative of something called ‘Alt Lit 2.0.’ Nobody else wants to claim that, so the author probably figured, why can’t they have it? Who wants to touch something that was seen by much of the world as annoying to begin with, and then brutally fell apart amidst a series of sexual assault allegations? The moniker is free for the taking. But when I wrote my first book in the height of what was perhaps the “Alt Lit 1.0” era, or maybe rather in the midst of its collapse, I had only just discovered that there was a whole world of people out there who were excited about the possibilities of the internet. It hadn’t even occurred to me that I could write things on my phone, rather than on paper, prior to it. And ‘online life’ as a subject of writing was what brought me into interrelation with other writers, what made me realize I wasn’t operating in a void. I don’t know, I guess I am just thinking about how things age. I am thinking about the work Nick Sturm did and is doing in helping Alice Notley organize her archive. How we can care for each other and for each other’s legacies. A woman in a dark flower-patterned dress comes into the cafe and reports something about my car, 17. Probably the leak. I hope it hasn’t covered the floor and gotten all over my snackbag. She is told that there is not much that can be done, and that the train is currently running an hour behind schedule. I go back to my car. It is very wet on the floor now, the whole part I am meant to be sitting in is soaked through. The AC has vanished. So have the British tourists. People are standing around and complaining. Someone has picked my bag of snacks off the floor, probably the Brits (cheers). There is a man standing next to the flower patterned woman in a pink knock-off Ralph Lauren polo shirt & chinos telling everyone who goes by to watch out, that the floor is covered in piss, that they ought to be filing claims. He and the woman in the dress are annoyed that no one has come to fix any of this. He says it is a national problem, many trains have no staff, arrive very late, and are covered in piss. He asks me where I am going, I say Barcelona, he says bufff, arriving at nine, but probably much later. He is going to Valencia, as it appears everyone else in this car is. At least they have said something about the leak, I wouldn’t have known what to do. My Spanish is okay these days, but for something like this I am useless. I say surely it’s not pee, it’s just leaking water, though to be honest it is starting to smell a bit in here. The Russian teens, for their own part, are unbothered by the flood of urine. They are eating snacks. The man says they don’t care, they just need to eat. Son chavales. I love the word “chaval,” or the image it creates for me at least. It means “young man” or “lad,” but it sounds like the French word for horse (cheval), to which in my imagination it is etymologically related. I look it up and find it stems from the Sanskrit chava, a cub or baby animal. But it is a word I have seen adult men using to describe themselves or others. Soy un chaval muy normal. I’m a totally normal guy. The cult of masculinity is charming as long as it is foreign – kept at arms length by the lens of alterity. A woman walks by and pink polo shirt says something about there being piss everywhere. She thinks he is insulting her. He says no really it’s piss. She storms off and he asks me where I am from, what I am doing, I tell him the towns I have been to in Andalusia, he loves them, great parties though we agree it is too crazy in summer. I tell him I am on my way to a yoga training in Catalunya. He does not seem particularly interested in this, or in much of what I have to say. He begins to talk about how there is a very good olive oil from here in Córdoba, and a very, very good one from near Seville. He says there are many good olive oils, which is the elixir of life. I think, is this guy real… And then I think a riff on something Stacey Teague once said - Nobody on this Spanish train even cares I am a Famous Traveling Poet. Everyone except the unfazeable Russian teens decides it’s time to flee the urine scene. We have been given official permission to relocate. I find a spot near a child who is watching cartoons on an iPad too loud, although apart from this it feels like the train is beginning to chill out. Now that we have passed Córdoba, I start getting excited that we are embarking on the part of the journey that goes through España Vacia - empty Spain. I picture this as a vast desert encircling Madrid and extending to near the coast in every direction, although so far it is mostly just olive groves and more olive groves. At a stop in a town I’ve never heard of, I try to step off for another quick vape, but the way is blocked by a woman with a pink bow and a small feral white dog getting on. She wants help with her bags. Ok. I sneak a quick puff in the space between the cars and shortly thereafter a notice comes on reminding everyone that it is strictly prohibited to smoke on the train. I don’t see how they could possibly have noticed me, unless smoke detectors have improved vastly in recent years, but I won’t be risking it again, as I don’t want to get kicked off the train in Random Spain. We pass another one of those black and white birds. It is also massive. People seem to have encouraged them to make their nests on top of phone poles, somehow. I make a mental note to find out what they are called, but how? I need a shazaam for birds. (Don’t come for me, bird people, I know there probably already is one.) I am thinking about how this could have been an event dispatch, since in Barcelona I know my friend Luna Miguel is doing a reading or presentation of some kind tonight, I could have covered it, could have talked about how little I understood, or what I did, could have waxed lyrical about how cool and exciting I think their scene is. Unfortunately, my train is now running an hour and a half late, and I was probably already going to miss the event to begin with. We begin to pass gorges with small creeks in the bottom of them, old wells, dried hills, rocky crags and peaks, bits of ruins of old farms or towers, ribbons of red-purple-yellow flowers snaking through fields (poppies? lavender? who knows). This is a bit more like the Arid Spain I was picturing. It begins to get strikingly wild somewhere around Valdepeñas, which is a name I only recognize from it being a type of wine. This is confirmed by the presence of vineyards. Around Manzanares (home, apparently, of the Museum of Manchego cheese) I notice the Spanish accents I’m hearing are getting a little easier to understand. Less garbled syllables. Nos vamos por alla instead of vamos paya. What a relief! On the downside, when I offer a lady to help with her bag, she doesn’t seem to understand me. Near Villeroblejo the landscape gets flat and boring again. I get off and the conductor yells at me from afar that he is waiting for me and that I am taking too long with my fresh air. A lady gets on with a child and informs me that I am in her seat. I notice something has leaked from my bag and am embarrassed so I scurry off to my hot, piss-filled car. The Russian teens are still here, unbothered. They must be made of different stuff. Around Albacete the hot piss begins to get to me and I start to feel sick. My only thought becomes, damn this is a long-ass train. I lie back and stare at the countryside rolling by for what feels like hours. The snackcart lady goes by asking if anyone wants refreshments. Flower-patterned-dress lady says, please it’s so hot in here, I’m sweating, I’m dying. I go back to the cafe car. A guy orders a coffee and a cup of ice then pours the one over the other. This strikes me as a genius move and I say, Oh, I’ll have one of those too please. He says in perfect Spanish We are such Guiris jaja… I shrug like yes but also I am hot. He asks how late we are running and the cafe lady says an hour and fifteen or so and I say, Oh, only an hour and she says, Only! Horór! At 5:30 p.m., I am able to secure another air conditioned seat. I feel like a whole new person, refreshed, smart, ready to get down to whatever business needs attending to. Then I go pee and realize I have had my underwear on backwards all day. We arrive in Valencia and I am reminded of the dried up river bed (which they diverted initially because of the floods, many years ago) that has been converted into a park that is an amazing place to run in. I want to run the half or full marathon here some day, but it’s so hard to get a spot in races these days, mostly because of pandemic hobby joggers like me. After Valencia, the landscape morphs into a series of old castles, their walls encircling high up hills. I try to take a good picture, but it is impossible. I’m back to not understanding people at stops when they say goodbye to one another. The only difference is that now when they talk to each other it’s not just in a tricky Andalusian accent, it’s a whole different language: Catalan. I move back to my too-hot car, where the AC has died again. I am wary about my stuff here, probably because of the reddit thread I read earlier, and because there are many small stops being made here. I worry this might provide the opportunity for some sneaky low-types to jump on the train and scurry off with my things, so I sit at my pissy seat and guard them like a feral cat. When we reach Tarragona, the last stop on the train before Barcelona, the risk of this happening disappears. I allow myself to relax and go back to the cafe car. Ostensibly we have about an hour left. It is absolutely popping off in the cafe, and everyone is talking about exactly one thing: how late we are. The train had gone up to running over an hour and a half late, maybe two, but it has managed to make some of that time back up. Renfe’s most recent ‘punctuality commitment’ policy states you get a 50% refund if your train is over 60 minutes late. But if it is 59 minutes late, you can kiss their railway asses. You can feel the tension crackling in the air like heat lightning. I picture the conductor with his hat between his teeth, biting down on the brim, white-knuckled and absolutely flooring it. If only some obstacle would show up now to slow down the suddenly unstoppable speed of this previously snailpaced train… Which seems like a metaphor for life itself. It really does “come at you fast,” as they say, although telling someone this is almost invariably a waste of time, since you don’t realize just how brutal time can be until its big unyielding clock is right there slapping you in the face. I order an Estrella Galicia, secure myself a nice standing spot by the window, and start typing happily away on my laptop in the midst of the electric chatter, with daylight dwindling over the passing Catalunyan mountains. But then it occurs to me I have forgotten to bring along the small tin of paprika-flavored Pringles I had purchased the night before. I had been saving it for precisely this moment, so it wouldn’t feel right without them. I am forced to use my laptop as a placeholder or face losing my prime cafe car real estate. It is a reckless move, but I feel like I know these cafe car people now, we are all in this together hoping for our refunds, I feel certain they will watch over it for me. I whisper to the computer that I’ll be back and abandon it briefly. I rush back to my seat and secure the chips. When I return, the laptop is there safely holding my spot for me. Someone announces that we are now running exactly one hour behind schedule. Are we going to make it, or are they? Whatever, now that I have my chips, I feel I can finally be expansive. I watch the sun set over an oil refinery. I start thinking about what it is, if anything, that gives me value as a writer, and how this might relate to other writers. I am thinking about this because, since Zona Motel came along a few months ago, I’ve started to feel excited about the possibility of writing-in-community again, for the first time in what feels like years. I’ve thought I wanted to contribute something special to it, but I wasn’t sure what that could be. So, I’ve been thinking about how I can make myself useful. Initially, I had floated the idea of doing a book reviews column. People need those, right? I’ve had a review of André Gide’s The Immoralist clanging about for months (incidentally a real banger of a book, up there with the Dorian Greys of the turn of the 20th century). But I wasn’t excited enough about it. Mainly I just wanted to tell people about this quote: “If there’s one thing I detest it’s a man of principles. You can’t expect any kind of sincerity from him, for he only does what his principles have ordered him to do, or else he considers what he does a transgression.” I love this quote, I feel it encapsulates the whole problem of where as writers and as people we are allowed to go with our thoughts and with language. When I read it I felt vindicated by it, as part of one of those made-up arguments I had been having in my head with a friend. So there, I’ve told you about it now. Then I thought of doing a lifestyle column about fitness and food. How do writers relate to their bodies, how do they keep fit, what do they like to eat? I love talking about this, but it doesn’t quite feel like a potential essay series. So, what then? What makes me ‘unique’? It’s certainly not my intelligence, which is fine, but I have met enough people by now to be able to know that I am by no means the cleverest cookie in the cookie jar. Nor is it probably my controversial opinions on topical issues, or those pertaining to the particulars of my identity (i.e. being bicultural, bisexual, vaguely bipolar). I’m weird and I have hot takes – but who isn’t and who doesn’t? So, what then. A certain intensity of feeling? A dogged, probably delusional belief in my own specialness, the same specialness every millennial had inculcated into them from birth? I don’t know. Maybe more useful is wondering what, as a writer, my function can be. How I can be ‘of service.’ What is this, a cover letter? L. often likes to point out that something unusual about me is that I have multiple cultures and languages clattering around in my head, arguing and talking over each other, like unhappy siblings stuck in the back of the same car. I tend to find this embarrassing, like something I want to hide rather than let on. Besides, these are primarily American and French, and isn’t that such a tired combination, does anyone really want to hear more about that? Even my work as a translator I have kept separate from my writing life, going so far as to use different names for them and envisioning my ‘writer’ and ‘translator’ self as entirely different personalities. A translator tends to be someone who wants to disappear behind a text, so a certain desire for anonymity makes sense. But why does it feel like a kind of work that is almost tinged with shame? I guess when you are translating something for someone, you are forced to briefly enter a kind of intercultural vortex where you yourself are not anything in relation to any other group of people, a void where you become a non-thing transmuting the thoughts and feelings of one group of people into those of another. This is not an aspect of myself that I am particularly keen on exploring, even though I feel this interstitial space may be precisely what, if anything, defines me. This gap in which the chameleon changes colors. It is not something I particularly want to explore within myself because it sort of terrifies me. It feels like a place of non-being where what little sense I am able to make of the world and my identity within it begins to fall apart. But I realize that what I am fascinated by is what happens to other people when they enter this space. People who write in English despite it not being their first language, for instance. Where do those people go when they do that? And could dicussing that with them turn into some sort of series? For instance, I recently read Le Straight Park by Québecois writer Gabriel Cholette and was struck by his choice to write in French despite many of the conversations between the characters clearly happening in English. Maybe I could ask him about that…? My musings are cut short by a voice over the loudspeaker. Próxima parada: Barcelona Sants. The train enters a tunnel and within moments we have ground to a halt at the station. I wasn’t expecting the journey to end this suddenly - I have barely touched my chips, haven’t even finished my beer. I take one last sip and run back through the train to grab my stuff amidst the hoards of people getting off. They shoot each other sardonic smiles and empathetic groans before they head off into their different lives. I glance down at my watch. It is 9:58 p.m, and we were meant to arrive at 9. I guess none of us will be getting a refund.