“Julia!” yelled back Javi to his wife before he left for the finca to prepare the country house for the next guests. “Take Brian to the tahona. He’s gonna love it.”
“Javi, you’ve told me this 100 times. I will!”
“Just wanna make sure. I know he’ll love it.”
“Don’t worry. We’ll go see it.”
“Brian!” he called up to me, but I was on the living room couch with bags under my eyes and begging for a little more rest. It was my second full night back from the United States and anyone who has been in my position knows that is when the effects of jetlag are at their most devastating. There is no reconciliation with slumber because there is no slumber at all. Unconsciousness departs and forces you to face the unforgiving drawbacks of prolonged lack of rest. It’s a form of torture that long-distance travelers must accept with dignity.
In theory, country life often offers some measures to counter the problem. The climate in the center of Spain helps too. It is bone dry and that means temperature changes swing like a pendulum. The blistering daytime heat of a 105ºF can vanish once the sun goes down, and you may even find yourself reaching for a sweatshirt before the evening’s over. That’s also good for the grapes, by the way, so that they don’t stress out. In Madrid, by contrast, the heat is absorbed by the concrete throughout the hours of light and then radiated outward well into the early morning hours. The Spanish often compare it to an oven and after 25 years of on-the-job field work here, I can personally attest to the accuracy of the analogy. If I were a piece of dough, I might start swelling at any moment.
And the absence of city life. The outdoor cafés in Madrid are filled with customers who feel the need to talk to each other from distances of two feet as if they all were used to living next to an airport runway. And I also have the fortune of having the city send a fleet of sanitation trucks to my corner to recreate the Battle of Britain every night. Not once, but twice. Then there is a third round at two in the morning, but I’m not sure what that’s for. All I know is that shatters your REM phase.
Javi’s home was the perfect place to combat these problems. The peace, quiet and coolness should have made nodding off a fairly straightforward proposal.
I was sharing a room with Javi’s eight-year-old son, Alex, as his room had the only available extra bed. Our friendship had gone back a long way, as far back as the day he was born. I had spent some time in Javi’s apartment years before when Alex was just three and he was in the midst of his negative stage in life, a period when the answer to everything is an unequivocal “no”, for which I then baptized him as the one and only “Mr. No.” It’s basically stuck since then.
To many of my friends’ kids, I am the “Tito” Brian, which sounds like I am a former dictator of a Balkan nation, but it’s generally just an affectionate name for a faux uncle (“tío” in Spanish) who is kind of a loser and a loner at the same time.
Lying on our backs on our respective beds with the light on, we discussed the general state of affairs in our lives. Actually, we focused more on his situation, since listening to mine would have run the risk of scarring him for life.
“How is the summer going?”
“Good.”
“What have you been doing?”
“Stuff.” That was a good sign. Kids who say “stuff” show promise. It’s a universal trait of noncommittal communication.
“I hear you have camp tomorrow? Looking forward to it?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t know anything about it and I want to stay home.” A noncomformist, I thought. Good for him.
“Well, give it a shot. You never know.”
“I have no choice,” he admitted. A realist, I thought. Makes sense.
“That’s a good point. Let’s try to get some sleep.”
“Can we turn off the light? Mom wants it on because she thinks I’m afraid of the dark. But moms are always thinking we are afraid of everything.”
A courageous kid. A sensible one too. “That’s fine with me. Night.”
Alex wasn’t out like a light, he was out before the light went out. Kids are often like dogs. They can just click on and off like that. I can normally do the same these days because I’m getting older and don’t care about anything anymore. But this wasn’t going to happen that night. Every silver lining has a cloud.
You see, making the most of the coolness of the night air requires opening a window which, in addition to letting the lower temperatures in, also allows for a lot of flying creatures in search of human blood. Mosquitos aren’t attracted to everyone, according to studies, so I guess I happen to be one of the unfortunate individuals they find irresistible. The Spanish like to say, “that’s because your blood is sweeter,” and while this certainly has nothing to do with anything – I tend to take any culture’s folkloric medicine with a great deal of suspicion, apparently there really are a number of scientific reasons why those bastards go after some people more than others and make lying in a bed at night about as pleasant as being buried up to your neck in sand.
Here are some things that seem to contribute to this differentiation: blood type (O, is the classification of preference – mine is A+ and one of the least appealing, so you could scratch the “sweet blood” thing), carbon dioxide emission (generally larger people are greater producers, an overabundance of skin bacteria (that I could not measure, beer (certainly a probable contributor, but experts question this point for a lot of reasons – I just don’t know what they are), pregnancy (well that speaks for itself), clothing color (maybe), sweat and body odor (now we were getting closer) and, as usual, just plain genetics – the universal culprit of just about everything that goes on with us.
Regardless, considering that just about any factor, save being knocked up, could have contributed to the invitation, the point is, word got around the insect neighborhood that I was in town, and before you knew it, the room had more airborne objects swirling around than Dubai International Airport. What’s more, the little peckers would hover right up to the ear and give me warning of the slaughter that was to come. They would say it with that high-pitched hum that induce a handful of ideas so violent and evil in nature the fact that any human could have conceived them would be enough to land them in jail. To avoid the bloodbath, I had to turn on the light, apologize to Alex, wait patiently while the bugs unwittingly alighted on a wall and SMACK! incrust them in the surface. Seven deaths later, I turned off the light, fell asleep only to be jolted awake by my hand smacking my own body. It seems that a second, and possibly a third, wave of squadrons had arrived and were taking advantage of the fact I had lowered my guard. Y closed the window to prevent any more intruders, but that just increased the temperature by some 20º in that many minutes. Jetlag did the rest. The flying vampires didn’t seem to find to find my roommate as tasty, so I left him to defend for himself and plodded downstairs to the couch, where it was cooler, the WIFI was within reach and I could listen to documentaries on YouTube until I faded off.
“Yes, Javi,” I answered with a scruffy voice not yet oiled by its first coffee. “I definitely want to see the tahona.”
