Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante no hay camino
sino estelas en la mar.

I am pretty much in love with the Spanish language. My mother would say that this is remarkable, considering the distaste I’ve regularly shown for other singularly Spanish things, like Spanish housewives and Spanish parties (both of the festive and political variety) and Spanish public library systems and Spanish slutty bathroom mirror pictures (OH MY GOD THE LEVEL OF OBNOXIOUS) and Spanish late-night soap operas and Spanish temperaments and Spanish supermarket dairy aisles.

Antonio Machado makes up for all that, though, as do Federico García Lorca and Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and Vicente Aleixander and Miguel Hernández. I know that sounds dreadfully pretentious, like I’m some kind of beret-wearing, chain-smoking 1900′s CHILD OF THE BOHEMIAN REVOLUTION, sleeping in opium dens and defending all poets as divine creatures of the new century, but I like to think that sometimes you’re allowed to be a little pretentious. That’s what I like to think, anyway.

Soneto de la dulce queja, by Federico García Lorca:

Tengo miedo a perder la maravilla
de tus ojos de estatua, y el acento
que de noche me pone en la mejilla
la solitaria rosa de tu aliento.

Tengo pena de ser en esta orilla
tronco sin ramas; y lo que más siento
es no tener la flor, pulpa o arcilla,
para el gusano de mi sufrimiento.

Si tú eres el tesoro oculto mío,
si eres mi cruz y mi dolor mojado,
si soy el perro de tu señorío,

no me dejes perder lo que he ganado
y decora las aguas de tu río
con hojas de mi otoño enajenado.

Translated conveniently into English, Sonnet of the Sweet Complaint:

Never let me lose the marvel
of your statue-like eyes, or the accent
the solitary rose of your breath
places on my cheek at night.

I am afraid of being, on this shore,
a branchless trunk, and what I most regret
is having no flower, pulp, or clay
for the worm of my despair.

If you are my hidden treasure,
if you are my cross, my dampened pain,
if I am a dog, and you alone my master,

never let me lose what I have gained,
and adorn the branches of your river
with leaves of my estranged Autumn.

Today, children are being forced into suits and dark dresses, oddly colored ties and black shoes. Grumbling frowns. They are being taken to ashy graves, skeletons under their feet, their eyes twitching about nervously. Agitated. Even the smallest of them know this is not a place to be trusted.

They are embarrassed, watching their parents kneel, some of them crying, laying hands over stone headstones. They watch, and although they do not understand, they also weep.

The sky is somber today, there is dirty water on the ground. For once, everything is colorless and empty. I can’t hear the usual morning sounds, the clanking and banging of pots, the vibrant swearing, the swish of zippers as people emerge from the building, purposeful.

I tell my mother we should go visit my grandfather’s grave.

She doesn’t answer.

“Don’t you know where it is?”

“Yes.” She says, slowly. “But I’ve never been there.”

“What? You’ve never visited your father’s grave?!”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“He never let me go to graveyards.”

I look at her curiously. She holds on to his authority, even after he’s been dead for more than fourteen years. Onto him.

“I still think we should go. It’s All Saint’s Day. You’re Christian, aren’t you? We should go.”

“But they’re not there. He’s not in the ground. It’s just bones.”

“So? We should go. We’re supposed to. It’s tradition.”

She’s quiet and I realize that maybe I shouldn’t be doing this. Maybe we should avoid his grave, today, where the pain of others will also be visible. Let my mother’s sorrow sleep. Quietly, where it will not do us any harm.

Or perhaps it should come now, to the surface. Unveiled, and thus vulnerable. So the emptiness he left will be filled, with something.

But I have a feeling this kind of sadness cannot be taken away, not fully. It can’t be that simple. To have loved, and lost?

I think about the swarms of sobbing people, the very ones at the graveyards right now.

Maybe they, and my mother, will never be whole again.

My mother is non-chalant about this weather, but deep inside, in some secret subconcious part of her, I know she hates it. She’ll pull out flashlights and draw back the curtains, staring through the windows as if she could somehow will the water back into the clouds. She’ll worry obsessively about my father, who is coming home via subway, a worry which is manifested in several cursing proclamations (example: “Damn it! Damn this weather! Damn your father for being such a numbskull and taking the subway when I told him to take a taxi!”). My brother will scream when lightning pierces the sky, taking the opportunity to go hide in his room (though I suspect this is just one of his conniving ploys to delay his bedtime). As for me? I love this weather. The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen was one of these storms over the sea, adding rhythm to the push-pull tempo of the waves, whispering away the clouds and revealing the perfect innards of the sky, millions of stars you’d never be able to see in the city.

These rains are common in October on the Mediterranean coast. The sea is crazed and delirious, forcing a drought upon the earth until autumn, where it suddenly changes its mind and spews out more water than we can handle. As the Spaniards like to say: No llueve. Pero cuando llueve, llueve. It doesn’t rain. But when it rains, it rains.

It was during one of these periods, in 1957, when the river Turia, just a few kilometers away from where I live, swelled and broke. Ruptured.

The water rose and filled the cobblestone streets, leaving scraggly scars on buildings and covering automobiles and the gnarled, pockmared orange trees we are famous for. Valencia is circular, and the Turia flows around the semicircle of it, surrounding the city and almost filling it, sweeping away fields and homes and the souls of eighty-one people.

When it ended, the Valencians decided to change the flow of the river, directing it into a different path, so its waters would no longer run through the city. Where it had once been, they tossed seeds that would one day flourish and bloom and prosper, trees like their rain-blown ancestors, born from the desire to rebuild what the river had taken away in the course of few hours.

You know what I find interesting from this ordeal? When the Turia rose and fought, there was one point in Valencia it did not touch – its innermost center. Here is a little stone plaza, surrounded by wooden benches with love notes scratched onto the sides. A plaza with a fountain in the middle, paved with rose-colored stone, and named after the Virgen. La Plaza de la Virgen. And in the middle, Valencia’s only, and most precious cathedral.

I’m not overly religious or anything – but it does make me wonder.