November 3, 2009
Not only did we discover the place in the wall of the ruin where the waiter lives, we found some of his cats and a dog or two. The casual story told to us yesterday evening in intermittent short sentences now took shape and came to life with every careful step we took across the courtyard of the old palace.
The waiter had lived his whole life in a couple of houses build within or as adjuncts to the walls of this old palace. He was as genuine a native-born Zaharan as it is possible to be, and that made our visit rather special, somehow.
I took photographs illustrating the bleakness of the off-season town. It reminded me of the off-season, slightly seedy towns in Albert Camus' La Peste or Najib Mahfuz' Miramar. That sense of self-sufficiency and isolation from the outside world, that there were so many stories waiting to be discovered in the rooms behind the shuttered windows and locked doors.
The closed-down town seemed like a circus that had packed up its colourful props and withdrawn into itself for the winter.
We had planned to drive off after buying some groceries, but our exit took a lot longer than should be necessary for such a small town. The road layout was a little complex, and we were trying to find the cute old bakery where we had bought some excellent wholemeal rolls last time we were here. We found it, but the assistant was a little curt, and that eroded some of its cuteness. Then we decided coffee was in order. And we then kept stopping to buy food that would be eaten or lost amidst the mess in the car. The town wasn't going to let us leave that easily.
Click here for my Flickr photos of Andalusia
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