PARA CANTARTE NUESTRO DOLOR

after just one week as obviously not sevillanos, we've still managed to develop a regular routine of caffeine and wi-fi consumption, which required much less trial and error than it easily could have (although the limited number of establishments with wi-fi signals certainly helped that), and having steadied ourselves after the bump in the search at café piola, we've settled more or less happily into seats at the patio of the café ciudad condal (the name of which is, ironically, an antiquated appellation for the city of barcelona). but the alameda de hercules has very definitely become our go to promenading ourselves as well as for sitting and watching the promenade, if for no other reason than its proximity to the apartment, which isn't its only similarity with mississippi/albina back in the old country, or doesn't have to be if we felt like drawing comparisons, which we probably shouldn't, because we left that other land of unemployment to find new opportunity in this one, and so we'll draw no further. besides, there's no whorehouse that we know of around mississippi that offers ladies with such defiant dye jobs.

yesterday afternoon, it was on the alameda, at the bar de los columnas, that i met with a friend of a friend from portland who was in sevilla for a couple of days to renew her student visa. sachiko is spending the month in lebrija (not far from jerez de la frontera) studying with concha vargas, who you should search on your own because i don't have the words to do her justice, at least not in this post, which should focus more on her sister, angelita, whose classes sachiko was taking when she met my friend danielle. and it was angelita's untimely stroke (it happened only a week into the beginning of the class) that caused sachiko to recognize the importance of refocusing her studies on the gitano tradition as opposed to the more strictured formalities of the flamenco academies where she'd spent most of her dancing career. before her stroke, angelita had been teaching the soleá, which sachiko said she just walked. or, rather, that angelita vargas' soleá, the one she was teaching sachiko and danielle and probably the only choreography for that palo she had, was just walking. but walking that was dancing the soleá.

o-ho! there's a moral to this story. or a reflexive directive that i've decided to share in lieu of enumerating all of the possible comparisons that we might draw between the new neighborhood and the old one. i'm sharing it even though i'm not quite sure what it is; but it has something to do with walking, but learning to walk somehow differently -- or learning how to walk a walk that's something else...or just to keep walking until i come to the dramatic epiphany that i've never really walked before (and hopefully that will be near one of the grander plazas in the santa cruz neighborhood for the benefit of the cameras). then again, maybe the secret of the best gitano flamencos is to convince foreign students to pay top dollar for a mystical experience that is conjured just to satisfy their desires for it and to lead the other bees back to the honey. and that's the secret that will pass when angelita vargas' generation does. the new world of unemployment is for real, so that's a secret that i'd very much like to learn.

the apartment is on a narrow street in la macarena about half a mile from the northern tip of the alameda, and the narrowness of the street causes every street noise to echo up the walls of the buildings on either side and on into the open windows of the apartment. and with the windows open, it's impossible not to hear everything being said in each of the other apartments, which are arranged around an air shaft with courtyard pretensions that opens out at the center of the rooftop terrace. that looming epiphany. but i wonder: will i be more or less annoyed at night when i can finally understand what what everyone's saying.