HAROLD (b. 1997, Steubenville, OH) is the author of Tropicália (2023) & HUMPTY DUMPTY (FSG 2026). He writes the free, weekly Substack THE ANNALS OF HAROLD; and coaches boxing & performs stand-up comedy in NYC.
LEFT PANEL: TURISTÁLIA. . .
#FLEETHE4TH. . . (JULY 3). . .
RAVENOUS, HAVING BREEZED EASILY THRU JFK security, we went to Shake Shack, —our last taste of the USA for 2 weeks: we’d been a FitCouple lately (surely doomed on our upcoming romp thru Spain & France).
Gaby got a Chicken Shack & I got a Smoke Shack; fries & a vanilla shake to share: $37 fucking dollars. We chowed bigly. I was moaning, I LOVE BURGERS, washing everything down with the vanilla milkshake. . .
TURNED OUT I FORGOT ANY SORT OF OVERWEAR. I was gonna be cold as fuck on the plane. I always forget something because I pack so hastily; giving myself only about an hour before I leave for the airport. Valiantly, Gaby lent me her sweatshirt; it was ill-fitting & humiliating, but it was better than shelling out $89.99 for the NYPD hoodie at Hudson News.
WHY TRAVEL? . . . (JULY 4: DAY). . .
THERE WAS A LOT OF ANTI-TURISTA chatter coming from Spain; protests about it: people were getting water gunned: —we were nervous; we got off at the Sol station (the central station of Madrid: everything revolves around Sol),
the first thing we saw was an enormous ad for the Book of Mormon, then we turned our heads and there was a cohort of Mickey Mice soliciting photos. . .
WOW this IS, INDEED, a country determined to keep turistas away at ALL COSTS!!!
WE WERE STAYING AT A BNB with a British lady: Henrietta, she moved to Spain from London 37 years ago; she told us after Franco died & they opened the country up, their slogan was, SPAIN IS DIFFERENT; but if the Sol station was any indication, Spain’s suffering from the TimesSquareification afflicting the whole world. . .
The problem is different don’t last, like Darwin says: either the Different makes everything else like It, or It becomes like everything else. . . the world tends toward conformity. . .
the world won’t end in fire but in a billionwide, collective, synchronous whip & nae nae. . .
BUT ONE OF THE REASONS to travel is to see some shit you can’t see nowhere else, right? It would be an infernal result, the world becoming an I <3 NY t-shirt.
That Spanish difference must be in there somewhere, we were looking out for it.
THE REASON ME & GABY TRAVEL is because we liked to walk around new places in each other’s company; & stuff our faces while people around us speak different languages. . . both of us had grown up between countries: my mom is from Rio de Janeiro, both her parents are from Belo Horizonte: we’d grown up spending a lot of time in Brasil.
4 years ago, she’d sent me a message on Bumble: “I love the carioca accent [eyes emoji]”, and I was like, “yeah haha, u r hot”, and the rest is history.
HENRIETTA’S APARTMENT WAS INCREDIBLE & ENDLESS. . . the hallways were like an enormous Castilian onion, you’d peel one twist & turn away to reveal another one & another one!
Pedro Almodovar filmed a scene for his next movie there, just yesterday, she said. We asked her what the scene was and she said, “this couple is staying at a bnb and they think they have the whole place to themselves but in the middle of the night a grotesque stranger shows up with his young girlfriend.”
I said, “and then what?” She said, “I don’t know.”
I WAS REALLY HORNY: NOT from the apartment tour; just from being alive & around Gaby all day. Gaby wanted to nap & shower.
We were staying in a little room in the back of the apartment with no AC, just a window that opened onto a courtyard. Honestly, the fan blowing, too hot to get under the covers but cool enough to sleep: to me that’s ideal.
I didn’t wanna wake up from the nap, but when I heard my alarm go off, I shook Gaby awake, trying to jolt her into quick-coitus, but she swerved me, said we had a city to explore.
I WAS WEARING A GREEN button-down short-sleeve shirt with black shorts & a worn-down fanny pack, —ostensibly to dissuade pickpockets, but it functioned more as a siren to herald my impending oafish turistagem.
My apparel has always been a point of contention when traveling with Gaby, —on our first trip together, in Paris, I wore a ragged t-shirt advertising the Spot Bar in Steubenville, Ohio, with basketball shorts & flip flops as we toured Saint Sulpice, in the reverent silence, all you could hear was my clomping, smacking, flops. . ., —but I had leveled up a bit,
(and after the first day, embarrassed, I ditched the pack, I was tired of shoving things up my fanny. . .).
COMO SE DICE. . . JAMON?. . . (JULY 4: EVENING). . .
OUR FIRST STOP WAS A BAR called Matador, near the Sol station. . . The most brilliant thing about Spain is that when you say, “can I get a cerveza?” they don’t say, Oh which of the million options do you want? Do you want it in a tall glass, a short glass? Blah, blah, fucking BLAH. . . NO!
THEY JUST BRING YOU A BEER! (And it costs around 3 euros 50.) Here was a tiny middle finger to American hoopla. Spain IS different!
BEERED UP, WE WENT WALKING in the Madrid heat; clowning Henrietta because she had made such a big stink about how hot it was. Like bitch, U ever heard of BRASIL?!?!
But soon, we started feeling it. Walking up hill to El Retiro Park, Gaby was flagging; I had to make an executive decision: pitstop.
I said we should just go into the Farmacia to get some water, but the world ain’t made up of Duane Reades, you quickly realize. . . it looked hopeless. . . but when we turned the corner there was an oasis: a bodega.
We popped in; I got a triangular Toblerone popsicle. She got an extremely phallic fruity thing, we got a 1.5L bottle of water and a coconut water: 8 euros.
Easy to spot Americans: just peep who’s chugging the jumbo waters on the sidewalk. . . we were worried it would be a clarion-call to the water gun brigade, but none came.
We threw our basura away in a dumpster under a sign (maybe intentionally) ill translated into English that read: HERE YOU’RE GARBAGE.
As we walked toward El Retiro, Gaby was giving her popsicle OD sloppy toppy: given that I was still horny from being alive & un-nut, I was extremely jealous.
ME LLAMO TURISTA. . . (JULY 5: DAY). . .
HENRIETTA SERVED US BREAKFAST AT 8:30AM, where we finally met her slinky, floppy, supposedly-scaredy cat Calypso. We ate yogurt, cantaloupe, and I drank almost a whole pot of coffee with leche.
I thought, for a second, I was lactose intolerant, so I wasn’t leche-ing, but Gaby was like, “that’s pussy shit, no you’re not”, so I was back on my leche and it was treating me fine. Henrietta remembered, 15 minutes in, that she made us toast.
Then we set off for the Museo Nacional del Prado.
THE PRADO WAS AMAZING. I didn’t really fuck with paintings or museums until I started dating Gaby. My appreciation of visual art work is inextricable from our trips to museums together.
Neither of us really know anything, so we find a way of talking about what we like about the work together; we’ve discovered our own museum idiom; so it’s one of my all-time favorite things: museum-romping with her.
We strolled right to the Bosch room. Jheronimous Bosch is the most GOATed painter. . . you see so much goddamn dead Jesus in these museums that it’s like ENOUGH ALREADY!!!,
but some painters, like Bosch, transcend the familiar forms & tropes with the power of their imaginative thinking: when you see it face to face it’s impossible not to be astounded.
Especially since his famous triptych, known as The Garden of Earthly Delights can be read, I think, as an allegory about turistating:
you get Adam & Eve in the left panel, but we don’t see them ever Fall, and the central panel, it’s a hog wild fuck fest, everybody’s naked & dancing, eating big delectable fruits,
—and in Spain everyone’s telling you to “disfrutar” all the time, and that’s what they’re doing in the Bosch panel: disfruiting. . . it’s like an untrammeled world, the purity of a place before you visit it,
like when Columbus first pulled up on his first perfect voyage; him & his men were extraordinarily lucky turistas, they got to see some shit no European EVER got to see:
clouds of parrots, the bluest water imaginable, the overwhelming fragrance of new flowers: it was Eden, and never again did anyone ever get to see it unspoiled:
—and that’s what’s happening in the third panel: the infernal panel: the ruin of paradisiacal play by machinery & financial interests & HOOPLA, and the panel is full of musical instruments: they’re playing the music as memory of the central panel, all they have left are these crumbs of what untrammeled transcendence felt like. . .
I ranted that to Gaby and she said, “who said it was like that?”
“Me, I’m saying it.”
She said, “that’s ridiculous. OK! I have my own theory, what did they eat back then? Idk, slop. OK! Bosch put the instruments in the painting because it always made him think of his favorite slop, so when he looked at the instruments, he thought: yummm.”
THE OTHER, TEDIOUSLY UNAVOIDABLE SUBJECT of paintings is random ass rich people; especially when it’s Powdered Wig Central. We were talking about what will be our version of powdered wigs for the coming generations; I think a good option might be tattoos.
I don’t know how people 200 years in the future will feel if they saw a dude with an anthropomorphic mosquito with angel wings taking up his entire calf (like we saw in the museum), but I think it’ll be something close to chagrin. . .
WE WENT WALKING, POST-PRADO, in the scorching heat. Desperate to get water-gunned: we resorted to extreme turistating; we got a pencil-drawing done by a guy named Nihil: he kept saying that I deserved an award for my smile (he didn’t have a single word to say about Gaby), but I’m not sure he crushed the depiction:
And then I got a picture with a guy in a Gorilla costume,
—which was surprisingly euphoric. But no dice, water gun wise. Rather than dousing or squirting us, the people around me just followed my lead. . .
WE WALKED & WALKED & WALKED & did bits. Talking about what we would name our kids. I suggested Quandrius Quagmirius, we’d call him QQ but Gaby was right: he would always be confused.Then I threw out, Zsuquette Zslurp, or ZZ, for a girl, but Gaby was right: she would probably feel a lot of pressure to perform oral sex.
We finally settled on Wormy Wud (WW), because of the overlooked importance of worms; plus, if she did something foolish, her friends could roll their eyes and said, “wormy wud. . .”
THAT NIGHT WE WENT OUT. First to the Taberna de Oro to watch the Real Madrid game, ostensibly with locals, but it turned out there were only Brasilians there rooting for Vini Jr. I got a Heineken and a Sangria for Gaby,
—ordered it all in perfect Spanish; that’s when it occurred to me that beer is feminine. Sus as fuck. I drank 2 beers and we dipped. . .
The next bar we went in, we immediately heard baile funk music playing. Gaby was like, “let’s dance!” I was like, “I have to go to the bathroom!” She was like, “are you a big strong man, or my liddle ladybug boyfriend?”
I said, “right now, I’m a ladybug that has to urinate.”
Stepping out of the bathroom, I tripped on the stairs and went hurtling forward, hitting my shin on the stair, then I caught myself, lurched up, banged my shoulder on the underside of the handrail. I was in excruciating pain.
When we got on the dance floor, we realized the brasilian funk was just a brutal tease. The DJ had absolutely nothing good to play. We sat in the corner and I had 3 beers, trying to spot the most powdered wig like tattoos. And then we left.
AROUND 2:30AM, WE DECIDED THERE was one last thing to do: McDonald’s. At the McDonald’s, a madrileño locked eyes with me. He was holding a water gun. I saw him consider blasting us. . . and then mercy washed over his face.
I think Bosch would’ve fucking DOUSED us. . . but we were still in paradise. . .
CENTRAL PANEL: TIENE QUE DISFRUTAR. . .
ON THE ROAD. . . (JULY 7: DAY). . .
WE WOKE UP AT 6:45AM GROGGIER than fuck; crept thru the long hallway to the door; when we got there, quiet as mice, we heard huge, distant clomping; I was worried maybe Calypso had transmogrified into an immense Godzillian beast. . .
but it was just Henrietta, sleepy, in her robe, come to say goodbye. She wanted a hug, it seemed; Gaby did too, —nobody jumped. . .
WE CLAMBERED TRUNDLINGLY TO SOL. Soon as we walked in, there was a man, collapsed & unconscious being tended to by the police, —it looked like a drug OD: I was trying to avoid omen-oriented thinking, but that didn’t augur well. . .
Confusingly, infuriatingly, there are different tickets for the different train lines, —and our ostensible leader (me) was brain dead from lack of coffee; befuddledly, we bought tickets that seemed familiar; tried to get thru the turnstile: blocked. Had to go back and get different ones.
We were starting to sweat; the frustration was growing. . . Eventually, we got the right tickets, but couldn’t find the signage for our direction. We tried to ask a cop, but his mouth was so full of doughnuts, he scraped his finger across his neck in the universal symbol for, You’re dead, just to let us know he couldn’t help. . .
But after 45 minutes of here & back & over rigamarole, we were on the train.
IN SPAIN, YOU HAVE TO PAY to get off the train (no rhyme intended). We didn’t have the right airport ticket, so we had to sneak thru the turnstile with a buddy who didn’t know we were on their ass. My ass-buddy turned around and cracked up when he saw what I was doing.
WE GOT TO THE CAR RENTAL PLACE. The incredibly aptly named Carlota ran me thru the gist,
“You don’t have insurance, so if something happens, YOU’RE FUCKED! You got me, you wreck-prone SCUM!? Oh? You’re driving to France too? You have no chance of bringing this car back without thousands of dollars worth of damage. FUCK YOU!”
I gave her 5 signatures, praying to the Spanish God to bring this car back intact.
GABY’S SCARED OF FLYING, BUT she has one of the most laissez-faire attitudes to car travel I’ve ever seen; it must be the Manhattan in her: she spent her whole life riding trains & walking; she don’t got an iota of healthy respect for highway danger; so it’s harder to get kudos for my obvious car-ambulatory heroism.
The first song she played as we were pulling out was The Smiths, “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out”,
“And if a 10 ton truck kills the both of us/To die by your side, well, the pleasure, the privilege is mine.”
I was like, “can you play anything else?”
WHEN WE GOT IN, I warned her, “I’m gonna be an asshole, sometimes, OK? But if I am, I just need you to chill. Be cool!”
As soon as we got on the road she was bewildered by the directions and I was an asshole and we had a 1 minute spat. . . but soon we were on the road, in a rhythm, safe & EZ. . .
NOT THE EASIEST DRIVING UP THRU THERE, in Basque country. The truckful mountainside 2 lane road littered with upturned burnt cars, as if we were entering an apocalyptic zone; every 10 kilometers a new tunnel. I was gripping the wheel pretty tight.
Gaby, with her road-danger-obliviousness, was all, LOOK AT THIS!, LOOK AT THAT! to the landscape. Worse, it was starting to rain & I was falling asleep. I asked Gaby to blast the music and sing along at irregular volume intervals. . .
THE CITY IS CALLED SAN SEBASTIAN/DONOSTIA because they have two official languages, Spanish, and Euskara (Donostia just means St. Sebastian in Euskara) which is a really old & really weird language.
DONOSTIA OPENED UP BEAUTIFULLY WHEN we walked toward the beach, to the Old Town. We stopped in a big glorious square with a triumphant statue of a guy I’d never heard of; I took a picture in front of it to remind myself of time’s annihilation, not only would this vacation end, but everything would end: traveling was a rehearsal for that: a brief eternity between the receding & forward progressions of your regular life; you had to learn to disfruit your eternity wholeheartedly: it was a reminder to savor my time with my beautiful Gabriella. . .
EATING & EATING & EATING. . . (JULY 8: DAY). . .
GABY WAS SNORING LIKE A WILD BOAR; it was bad enough to where I was gonna wake her up, tell her to quit it, but when I lightly brushed my fingers against her leg, she stopped like I flipped a switch.
WE WENT OUT FOR A breakfast she was totally desperate for: supposedly the world’s best tortillas. A spot called Bar Antonio. It’s like a breakfast pie. I looked at it, it looked cheesy. . . I don’t eat cheese except on pizza & cheesecake.
I was cranky already from the surprisingly cold air: I was sans-overwear, or, overwear-less. I was in a mood, I’ll admit. Gaby went to order 2 slices, I was like: I don’t want that shit, just get one.
We sat down. I was being an asshole. I took one bite of the tortilla and it was honestly some of the best things I’ve ever ate; there’s only 4 ingredients: potato, eggs, onions, & peppers: —it was fucking delicious. It only cost 3 euros 80. I was like, “this ain’t bad. . . let’s get another.”
So I had paid for just about everything on the trip, including Gaby’s plane ticket and all but one of the bnbs, but Gaby brought all the cash; she’d been giving me some. . . I suddenly realized that when I paid with her cash, she treated it as if I was the one paying. It was a life-hack. I got all the credit for paying and none of the detriment. I paid for everything with her money all day and she treated me like a god.
AFTER THE DOUBLE TORTA we went to a coffee shop called Cafe con Leche. I was still surly, trying to surmount my surliness by acknowledging the fact. There was a pile of oranges at the bar next to an ostensible juice machine. I was like, “let me order some juice.” I practiced: “zumo de naranja.”
Gaby goes, “it’s NARA.” I ordered, “un zumo de nara por favor.” The guy goes, “naranja?” I looked at Gaby pissed, “why the fuck did you tell me it was nara!?”
“Cause you were saying ‘laranja’! It’s with an N.”
“YOU HUMILIATED ME!”
MONTAIGNE’S SURPRISE . . (JULY 9: DAY). . .
DRIVING OUT OF DONOSTIA, WE stopped in Biarritz; I had decided we should stop at Montaigne’s house on the way to Bordeaux, which was kinda out of the way, so I was feeling something of a time crunch, but I didn’t wanna express that, rush Gaby. I knew if I rushed her and the Montaigne house turned out to be super wack, I would experience the ramifications;
in Biarritz, we went into shop after shop. . . I was overfull of the little soaps and knickknacks & local merch. . . feeling fed up. . . ; Gaby said, “Isn’t this place incredible?” I said, “yeah, it’s aight. . .”
Causing what was nearly our first spat of the trip; I was wary of this, too, because we were due for one big fight and everything had been so perfect that it seemed likely that we were gonna fight in Bordeaux. . .
WE TURNED OFF THE HIGHWAY toward the Montaigne house. Drove kilometer after kilometer thru bumfuck towns; having spawned in a bumfuck town, I’m always charmed & fascinated by the universality of bumfuckness.
Bumfuck is everywhere. . .
Gaby was powerful on the aux: blasting carioca funk, shaking the vineyard
shacks. Finally we turned off the road toward Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne, France; as we turned we were faced head-on by a troop of boy scouts, uniformed up, popping at us like deer; they were lucky they didn’t end up as hood ornaments.
We had literally no expectations. The vibe was like we were pulling up to a haunted hayride, out in the damn STICKS. The entrance is through the gift shop; there was a girl with a cartoonish French accent; she charged us 5 euros a piece and said Gaby was very beautiful while I was in the bathroom (a classic French, lesbian seduction: back off pute). . .
you get a complementary wine tasting with your entry; I was like ABSOLUTELY NOT I HAVE TO DRIVE (I had given up a long career of drunk driving after leaving Steubenville);
there was a glass of wine in my hand & I was chugging.
THE MONTAIGNE HOUSE TURNED OUT to be AWESOME. There was nobody there, no supervision, and there were GAMES! I felt like I was at Field Day in Grade School. There was knock the cans down with the ball, archery, French games we didn’t know how to play. . .
Gaby never shot an arrow before but she got a bullseye the first try, and she never threw a ball at cans, but she knocked them all down, easily. . .
MONTAIGNE RETIRED WHEN HE WAS 38 so he could just chill and write what became his life’s work, the Essays. Despite staying holed up in his tower for the last 20 years of his life, he had a lot to say about travel,
“For this purpose, mixing with people is wonderfully appropriate. So are visits to foreign lands: but not the way the French nobles do it (merely bringing back knowledge of how many yards long the Pantheon is, or of one of the rich embroideries on Signora Livia’s knickers); nor the way others do so (knowing how much longer and fatter Nero’s face is on some old ruin over there compared with his face on some comparable medallion) but mainly learning of the humors of those peoples and of their manners, and knocking off our corners by rubbing our brains against other people’s.”
You DO try to make travel an acquisitive thing, but it don’t matter what you acquire: bullshit knickknacks, the kinda factual knowledge, the trivia he’s talking about that people vainly bring back;
what matters is the brain-rubbing; and that’s especially the joy of traveling with someone you love: it’s unadulterated rubbing-time, you spent the trip knocking your corner off against each other & the foreigners fucking surrounding you.
Montaigne was a pleasure-hound though, at the core; I especially felt it when he said,
“My travels only hurt me by their expense, which is considerable and exceeds my resources. . . I have no wish that the pleasure of roaming should mar the pleasure of repose; on the contrary, I intend that each should nourish and encourage the other. . . my chief aim in life being to live it lazily and leisurely rather than busily.”
I’d worry about my bank account some OTHER TIME. . . you gotta do whatever you can to disfruit life for all its worth. . .
WE WALKED UP INTO MONTAIGNE’S TOWER where he died on the bottom floor in the chapel and where on the top floor he wrote, —well he didn’t write we found out, he actually dictated them to an unnamed, forgotten scribe, looking up at the ceiling for quotes in Greek & Latin he had engraved there, —his Essays. . .
Afterwards we frolicked around delightedly. . . the day was so perfect, the landscape stretching away from the castle was rolling & magnificent. . . there were two donkeys in the stables;
one, Martin, with a bum, bandaged leg, so he moved very very gingerly, and a mischievous bastard named Viking who had to be muzzled because he was biting people all the time; they were posted in the stables that were there since Montaigne lived in the house. . .
I rang an old rusty bell: there was nothing more we could’ve wanted.
We kept going, “YOOO why is the Montaigne house like FUN tho???”, and cackling.
On the way out they gave us another complementary wine tasting and we bought a bottle from them; we were euphoric. . .
The prospect of a fight had completely left my mind.
RIGHT PANEL: THE WAY OF ALL FUN. . .
NEMESIS. . . (JULY 9: NIGHT). . .
DRIVING BACK, I WAS FEELING THE WINE, so was Gaby, we were vibing, but on the way back we got caught in unexpected traffic, and you know the way alcohol wears you down when it’s hot and it’s been an hour since you drank already, that weariness was starting to sink in, entering the city, there was a quibble about directions, suddenly, there was tension in the car; . . . my impression of Bordeaux was that it was a shack in the middle of wine country, but it’s actually a serious city: a serious, un-drivable city. In NYC, I’m always railing against cars, saying we gotta ban all private cars, that’s how we’re gonna fix New York’s problems, but as a driver in an un-drivable city, I was pissed. . .
We turned into the street that was supposed to be the path to the bnb, but the streets to the center of town are blocked off by retractable bollards, with like an intercom next to them, so I parked my car and I pressed the button and said, “hey, no parley Fransay, but I gotta get thru here. . .”
The guy said, “Uhh, you can’t, obviously.” “But I gotta get to my bnb.” “I don’t care, you can’t get through.” “Can I at least go in to turn around?” “NO.”
There was a traffic jam behind me. FUCK. I motioned with my hands for everybody to back up, everyone rolling their eyes at the dumb American, but eventually I got out. Gaby wasn’t pressed, I was MAD, I wanted to turn these Bordeaux pedestrians into crème brûlée, running them over-wise;
from then on, it was circle city, trying to find a way to go. Eventually we put a parking garage into the GPS. Before we got to that one, I spotted another one. There was a guy, parked, texting in the way of the ramp, I had to angle around him and slide in; my left tire went over the curb, and then my right tire did: it seemed too narrow. I was worried it was an exit. I was stressed.
Gaby said, “just go, this is it.” “I don’t know if it’s an entrance.” I saw a symbol for a bicycle, and ridiculously, I thought it might’ve been a parking garage for bicycles. “Yes it is, just go.” I screamed, “IT’S NOT THE FUCKING ENTRANCE! THIS ISN’T A PARKING GARAGE!!” She was flabbergasted, “why are you screaming at me?!”
I said, “BECAUSE I’M FUCKING LOOKING OUT FOR US!!”
Then there was a car right behind us, I went forward. . . Reader, it was indeed the entrance to the parking garage, as it obviously appeared to be.
She was ready to let it go, but I was feeling lectureful & embarrassed. I told her, “you know, I shouldn’t have screamed at you, but I’m the FUCKING DRIVER. You don’t know SHIT about driving. I make the decisions here!”
She was like, “you’re so worried about being right!” I said, “I don’t care about being right! You’re the only one who cares about being right!”
“It’s easy not to care about being right when you’re WRONG!”
WE WALKED OVER TO THE BNB in silence. She walked in front of me. We got to the apartment and it was completely beautiful. . . Gaby didn’t say a thing. She went over and opened the Montaigne wine.
The cork started crumbling. I took it from her and helped her open it, thinking my heroism could prove salvivic. I just wanted to keep lecturing her, was my problem. I pressed the point again about how she doesn’t know SHIT about driving, how even if I was wrong, I was right because I’m in charge,
—and then I said,
“I was looking out for us, I saw TWO CLEAR RED FLAGS: the tires over the curb! The entrance shouldn’t be that narrow! It could’ve been the exit! It could’ve been for bikes for Christ’s sake!!”
“When have you ever seen a parking garage for BIKES?!?!”
“IT COULD’VE BEEN!”
“BUT IT WASN’T!!”
“Oh my god, you just don’t see me!”, I tantrum-ed, throwing myself on the floor. She called me childish and I scoffed “ME?? CHILDISH?? YOU’RE BEING A CHILD!”
She walked out, said she was going to the grocery store, turned her location off. I called her 6 times. She finally answered, came back, cut a little piece of baguette and put cheese and butter on it while she drank the Montaigne wine.
I apologized profusely, but she was not happy with me. . .
WE WENT TO WALK AROUND BORDEAUX, but it was depressing, silent; it seemed like everybody in the city was having a great time except for us. I tried
to small talk a few times, but she was parrying everything. She said she wasn’t hungry; I puffed my chest out and expressed like, if you don’t wanna be happy, I’ll just have a good night myself, and I picked a restaurant, we moped there. . .
WE GOT A TABLE ON THE 3RD FLOOR of a turista steak frites place, L’entrecôte. I started off good in French, “BONJOUR”, you know the vibes; I was determined to show Gaby I wouldn’t let her mood ruin my fun. The waiter asked me what I later realized was, “how do you want your steak cooked?”
I responded, “I’ll take a bottle of wine,” thusly blowing my cover.
The only thing they have on the menu is steak frites. They bring you a portion and you pay like 20 euros a person. It was tense at first, I said, “why do you just hide away from me when you’re mad like this? Why don’t you talk to me?”
She said, “you’re just repulsive to me after you act like that, I just don’t wanna talk to you.” I said, “well how can I make it better?” “Just be nice!” “I am nice! I LOVE YOU!!”
Then it broke: we stuffed our face with steak frites & wine, I teared up several times, she did once, then we walked home holding hands.
BACK TO BUMFUCK. . . (JULY 11: NIGHT). . .
WE WERE HEADED BACK TO SPAIN: one night in a random small town as a stopgap before Madrid.
Estollo was so small that there was only one road in and out of the town. The official population is 98. We drove thru the town twice in the midst of playing children and patrons dining at the only restaurant: Bar Estollo.
THE BNB HOST, ALMUDENA, WAS OUTSIDE, in the yard, playing with her grandchildren and her blind dog.
She only spoke Spanish. We were staying upstairs right across from her room. We got settled and headed for dinner at the only option in town. . .
UNDER THE BUDDING LIGHTNING, we walked to Bar Estollo. There were about 15 people sitting at tables out on the street.
I said, “is that it?” pointing to the place with the sign that said, BAR ESTOLLO. Gaby said, “where else would it be?” I said, “idk, over there?” pointing to a building that said CITY HALL. Gaby said, “bruh. . .”
There were several empty tables, nobody sitting inside. We milled about, not sure what to do. One of the workers at the bar was toiling like an ant on probation, setting up more & more tables outside even though it was clear it would storm soon, & it was almost 10PM, & there were already more chairs outside than residents in the whole town.
We walked over to the bartender, greeted her in Spanish and asked for the menu. There was no menu, she said, but she could make. . . and then she rattled off a list of several hundred things of which we understood 65%. . . she asked where we were from and when we said NYC, she started speaking in perfect English.
Apparently she was from Estollo but had lived in London for 37 years. Stunningly, her name was Henrietta like our first bnb host who’d followed an opposite trek. . . We asked for a repeat of the menu. Ended up going with the Spanish classic: jamon plate with stale bread. I also had 4 beers total & Gaby had a glass of white wine. . .
WHEN IT LOOKED LIKE IT WAS GONNA RAIN and people were leaving, we went to sit under the cover of CITY HALL. There was one other couple across from us. The guy was evidently very popular because people kept coming over to talk to him.
I tried to eavesdrop, but their regional accents were too thick & hard to parse.
Around Midnight (Bar Estollo is open until 1AM), it stopped raining, and we left. It was 20 euros total. . . We walked back home and ran into Almudena’s gato. Played with it out on the dirt road for a while.
WHEN WE WALKED IN, ALMUDENA was watching Breaking Bad in the living room. Almudena’s only rule was no sex in her house, and she was a KEEN listener. . . so we just went to bed, with the window open: the sounds of Spanish rural life wafting dreamward. . .
THE LAST DAY. . . (JULY 12: DAY). . .
WE AWOKE TO A GLORIOUS beamed, sunshiny chirp; we opened the door and Almudena skittered past us toward the bathroom in her underwear,
“BUENAS!”
GABY WAS SAD OUR TRIP WAS coming to an end.
To some extent, the whole point of traveling is to capture time: that’s why you break out of your regular habits, take pictures, buy souvenirs, write about it; it offers the illusion of defeating impermanence; but of course, it’s hopeless, and when the END rolls around, breaking what you thought for a second might last forever, it IS indeed brutally sad;
it’s another reminder that everything will end.
When we came back after breakfast, the cat (who we called Estollo),
—who would circle our legs and dive against our feet, nuzzling his little head against our shoes, —was there; now that we were leaving, the cat was gone. . .
It made Gaby think of her late grandpa, who, when she was going back to the United States after a summer in Belo Horizonte, would hide away because he was too sad to say goodbye; the first 20 minutes driving out of Estollo, there were clouds all over the sky and Gaby cried; she also had on a gooey face mask so when I tried to touch her face to comfort her, I kept touching goo,
when she was finally wrapping up her up cry about her grandpa & time, her grandma’s favorite song, Besame Mucho, started to play. . .
THE END, END. . . (JULY 12: NIGHT). . .
WE WERE BACK IN MADRID because the next morning we were flying out. We thought we had the whole apartment to ourselves. . . At 2:45AM Gaby wakes me up in a haste, going, “someone’s at the door!”
I’m in my underwear. She drapes herself in a sheet. Someone is hammering the buzzer, pissed off. We ask in Spanish, “who is it?”
The dude on the other side of the door starts screaming at us, we couldn’t understand much, but he’s saying he lives here, he lives here.
Gaby goes, “como te llamas?” He said, “Daniel.” Which was the host’s name. So we let him in, thinking it was the host.
We opened the door. He was in his 50s, wearing eye-liner & walking with a cane. There was a girl with him who couldn’t have been older than 12. He looks at me and goes, “did you lock that?!” pointing to the latch above the main lock. I said, “yeah.” And he huffed off to his room. . .
I don’t think he knew anyone was staying in his apartment. We looked at each other like, Holy shit. . . we were disfruiting all over the damn apartment. . . if someone had walked in on that. . . and then I was like, “wait. . . isn’t this like the scene Henrietta said Almodovar was filming?”
“Oh my god. . .” Gaby shuddered.
WE LOCKED THE DOOR TO OUR ROOM; our window was open and we could hear the Madrid night in its buzzy zenith, peak liveliness at 3AM; there was always going to be so much life that went on without you,
a diabolic thing to have to accept. . . you could never live enough:
that was really the reason to travel (the same reason to read), it allowed, maybe it was just an illusion, but for a little while, you got to LIVE more. . .
 | A guest post by
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I would like the 100 page version!
bumfuck IS everywhere...