Church bells ring for mass, and it seems that people heed their call. Past my window the footfall is generally infrequent, but for a few minutes, there’s a rush, with almost everyone heading in the same direction. I listen to the bells and watch the people, surprised at the activity. I’m struck by the sense of community. It’s nearly time for places to open up, but the chef, wearing his chequered trousers, is playing cards in the park.
The way everyone moves in sync reminds me of Murcia. I observe the rhythm of the street: older ladies staggering along with bags of vegetable in the morning, flat-shoed German tourists staring at guidebooks, Italian women striding past them in their heels, then by afternoon, the streets are pretty much dead, until evening comes with children playing in the streets in spotless trainers and the city wakes up.
You have to learn the unsaid schedule if you don’t want to spend your entire time being disappointed. In Murcia you could identify the foreign tourists by the way they didn’t obey the ritual of the city. They walked on the wrong side of the street, not knowing how to avoid the intense rays of the lunchtime sun. They looked for lunch when everyone was eating breadsticks, and ice-cream when everyone was eating lunch. They were constantly confused and, for the most part, oblivious to the social system. The Italians in England have similar problems. They can’t understand where to get a real lunch in a country that only sells tea and cake and find it weird that the shops shut at 5. To be fair, I’m with them on this one – it’s terribly inconvenient when you stop to think about it.
Drifting along through my Italian daydream, I follow the lights to the town centre, and I’m met with boutique shops and rows of restaurants where people sit, sipping cocktails and eating olives. My head in a spin. People speak to me in Italian and although I sometimes understand them, I can’t respond in Italian. In fact, I fail to respond in English. I automatically find my mouth brimming with Spanish and the words tumble out incoherently much to my frustration. There’s a fight going on in my mind. My thoughts seem to happen languagelessly and then splinter, different words finding different ways of expression. Sometimes people understand. Most of the time they have no idea what’s happening. I think of the trilingual three-year-old I once looked after back when I was an au-pair, and her insistence that I didn’t speak English because when she spoke to me, I didn’t understand. She was speaking Catalan; she just didn’t know it.
Now I understand. Now I can empathise.
I treat myself to pizza. I’ve been awake for way too many hours and I’m hungry. The waiter uses a mobile phone to scan my vaccine pass, which is very 2021, but ‘we don’t pay like that’ is the response to me brandishing my money card. I assume it’s the thick stone walls, but I’m a suddenly aware that I’m going to be going to a cashpoint for the first time since leaving Chile. Later, when I find a cashpoint, it’s run out of small notes.
