La Blanca

Hey

We decided to call her La Blanca. She was brown and wirey and had long black hair. She wore a traditional flamenco dress, all in white. It pressed against her breasts revealing a faint discription of her areolas, hung on her slender waist for quite a while before itflared around her long legs. There was a single blood red rose in her hair. Best of all, she rode to and from work on a little yellow motorized scooter.

When she danced, she danced with all of her heart and you could feel it. We stayed there for hours in this little beachside restaurant surrounded by palm trees, listening to the ocean and the castenets and the sorrowful singing of the guitarist. We drank three pitchers of sangria. We watched the moon rise above the jagged cliffs. Barolo said that he might cry. I was on the verge myself. I don't get the feeling that Neshta cries much.

Earilier, when Barolo and I were by ourselves, he told me that Neshta had been raised in a very wealthy family in Sarajevo. When the war started soilders had forced their way into his parents house and cut his mothers throat in front of him. His father and sister survived. So when he gets a little moody we don´t bother him.
Barolo is Brazillian, he never gets moody. In the mornings when we have dark arabian coffee with hot milk in a cafe, he sings to us, just under his breath, while I try to read spanish newspapers and Neshta keeps an eye out for interesting men.

We met in Torre del Mar. When I got to the airport in Malaga they told me that because of the Feria there were no rooms anywhere at all within 30km of the city. Malaga is a great hidious mass of a city. It is as if someone took 100 Miami´s, piled them on top of each other and dumped them along a narrow strip of land between the oceans and the mountains. I found my way to the bus station and got out of town. I ended up 25km north of there in a tourist office where they were listening to the same story I had been hearing all day. Completo, there is nothing, go away. They lived in Hamburg and so we all spoke german. We decided our fates were no less miserable alone than seperate and besides I spoke better spanish, and they had a car.

We drove for hours going to town after town, twisting through narrow medieval streets looking for tiny pensions which we hoped sombody had forgotten about. I spoke with old ladies who sat in doorways, who greeted us like lost friends and wanted to know our histories. I petted their cats, tickled babies feet and still at midnight we had nothing. "Maybe tommorow" they said. I was thinking the beach might be our only friend.

We decided to head back to Malaga and from there north to Sevilla. We ate fresh, whole fried fish, drank wine in some little town, and had our first taste the rich black coffee that we would all come to love so dearly in the following days. Somewhere on the outskirts I saw a hotel and said to Barolo lets give it one more try. Neshta chain smoked cigarettes and looked out the window. I talked to the old man inside. He told me no right off. I asked him if he knew of anything anywhere. I told him we had been looking all day. He asked me where I was from. I told him and he bent a little. He said he could give us two rooms for one night only.

The next day we went back to Torre del Mar to see if any of our tommorow possibilites might materialize. I talked with this girl in a hotel for half an hour, told her my life story, complemented her english, her dress, her hair, her mother. The old lady interupted. She knew of an apartment in town, not one of her´s but a friends. We were in luck.

Our place has two little balconies and a kitchen. Barolo and Neshta are in one room and I in the other. We are a short walk to the beach.

We took a day trip to a place farther up the coast and found a paradise. Nurja. It is an old city completely painted white to fight off the fierceness of the sun. There is lush palm vegetation and the mountains come right up to the azure ocean. The beach is filled with the brown and the naked and at night, if you walk along the carterellas, you can watch La Blanca dance.

Besos

Rene