In Search of Lost Tapas
I walked past my favourite tapas place, the one with the lantern-lit garden. It was closed for the Plague. Vandals had already scrawled graffiti all over it. My Berlin-adjusted eyes noted the difference between “everyday misguided guerilla public art graffiti” and the more sinister, bullying, derelictifying graffitti that grew like poisoned fungus all over any place that dared reveal vulnerability in These Uncertain Times™.
The garden had already fallen into disarray and instead of lanterns, there was a carpet of litter.
I looked on the bare grey tree branches, naked in the cold morning light, holding court over broken refuse and squalor, and I remembered them as they had been….
Thick green leaves hung heavily above, canopying the garden, threaded throughout with garlands of glowing lanterns, some shining freely, some peeking out from under the sagging foliage of August. The diners below also glowed, the sweat of the day having subsided to a kinder degree of communal perspiration as the suffocating afternoon melted into a sultry evening.
A soft hubbub murmured up from the tables of couples, families, and friends, engaged in the slow process of conversing over sangría and jamón Serrano.
I was there with a semi-famous, half-Japanese-half-German Scorpio opera director who oozed power.
I was on top of my Beautifulness Game that evening and I knew it. I wore massive Turkish earrings, a clinging green dress that matched my eyes, and gold sandals. My hair was an artless mess.
We smouldered at each other over dátiles con bacón, patatas bravas, pan y aïoli, rioja, ensalada, albóndigas, sardinas fritas, aceitunas, verduras a la parrilla, and on and on, the table covered with platters and heaps of colour and taste. We flashed our brilliant brains at each other like peacock tails, sexual displays wielded at their most magnificent, and the food lingered long into the evening.
The chilly March morning light filtered weakly over the malevolent graffiti and the garbage.
And for the first time I realised that it was not only that the restaurants were now closed.
It was that there was no way of knowing which ones would ever re-open.
Was that the last bite of manchego and quince paste, the last glass of vinho verde, that I would ever have in that garden?
And how could I celebrate the past without clinging to it? How could I love the memory without grieving? And if I did grieve, was I doing so with healthy desire and love, or was I grasping and craving?
And was it maybe ok to cut myself some slack and go ahead and feel whatever I felt without hunting for wrongness in my thinking like a Zen Stasi agent?
When is hunting for the “be here now” moral lesson an appropriate response to sadness, and when is it ok to just be sad, and mourn, and feel jealous of our past selves and scared about the future?
