Chantal - Have Laptop Will Travel: Alternate Reality

July 11, 2004

Alternate Reality

Bupa was standing outside the airport.

He was pleased but nonchalant when he saw me, as though I’d only been gone for a few days, not three and a half months. Was I coming back to play again, how long would I be staying for this time, implying that hopefully it’d be longer than the week I was booked in for. He told me he was waiting for his daughter and ten friends. I was waiting for a friend who would be meeting me (once his pizza had arrived).

I was the last onto the plane. Easy to draw comparisons with the previous flight, back in March. I had been under so much pressure then, both at work and in preparation for the music festival, also I think I wasn’t sleeping much in those days either. It wasn’t until nearly at the end of the four-hour flight, when we started banking over Lanzarote, that I had finally started feeling excited and thrilled at last. Neither feeling would apply to finding that I would be spending the next four hours surrounded by eleven teenage girls old enough to drink. I’d only had about three hours’ sleep the night before, followed by a foul half-day at work, and seeing them brought back flashbacks of the RAF men’s rugby team on my last flight out of England, and the RAF women’s rugby team on the way back.

Again, as the flight came to an end, the girls started to get excited – apparently Maya (sitting behind me) was the one bringing them over – and asking lots of questions about what the island was like, what the nightlife was like. I had asked hopefully how long they’d be staying for, realising almost as soon as the plane took off that I might be stuck returning with them too. For them, a week in Fuerteventura was up there with Paradise; for me, it meant not being able to return to Guatemala or Mexico for at least two more months, and simply somewhere I could sleep and relax. And catch up with friends.

Being met at the aiport is something extremely important to me, chiefly because it only happens when I go back to Guatemala, and because I hate returning to England at the best of times. I think Garry was a bit taken aback by my disbelief at his offer to meet me there, but bumping into a friend as soon as I stepped outside of the airport made this island – which I’d only visited for three days previously – feel instantly like home. Like more than home, or at least London. I hadn’t known what to expect, as my previous trip had ended badly, leaving me wanting to never return; I’d half-expected others might be feeling the same too.

Similarly, when it emerged that neither Garry or I knew where my hotel-for-the-night was (I’d booked into a five star hotel as my hotel of choice, Oasis Papagayo, or Parrot, had apparently been full), and that the directions I’d been given by a shopkeeper had made no sense at all, I suggested we drive over to Papagayo so I could ask there, and for a map, as I’d be staying there for the rest of the week anyway. The man on reception’s reaction was much the same as Bupa’s – ‘Oh hi there, so you’re back, where’s your harp, how are you?’ – again leaving me glowing that he would remember me and recognise me despite all the tourists passing through. At Imagine, Eric smiled and pulled happy faces at me when I walked in; when I returned from chatting with some friends at the bar, as soon as he finished his current song, he came over to chat to me. All throughout, I was battling against text messages and phone calls from friends I’d made on or through this island.

Compare this to London. Apart from my final years of living with my mother in Hampstead, when I knew so many of the locals and local staff it could be excruciating going to the High Street, after four years in New Cross, I essentially know one neighbour and five shopkeepers. Four of the shopkeepers are recent friends/acquaintances, as are the top-floor neighbours, and a recent reacquaintance next door. There’s nothing I can do to improve on that. I took a friend drinking in New Cross one night – I’d been too tired to trust myself anywhere near public transport – and a woman picked a fight with me. When I return from any trip, the older Indian man at the newspaper stand at the train station waves and pulls a face at my rucksack, but that’s all the greeting I get. A year and a half ago, when I was severely and chronically ill, between him and my Christian then-flatmate, he was the only one who would talk to me. At times I worry that if anything happened to me, nobody’d know, nobody’d notice; and that’s after four years of living in this area. If anything, they’d only notice when my garden would start to die.

So back to Fuerteventura. Every day I’ve wanted to start writing this piece, and now it’s my fourth day, and I’m waiting for Garry to stop watching the Grand Prix and come over.

My initial plans, on booking this holiday, had been to sleeeeeeeeeeeeeep, write, catch up with the sun and with a number of friends. Because of the friends, though, it looks like none of the rest will be happening, except by fluke. My sleeping problem in London is due to my body clock and its preference for going to sleep at 2 or 3 am despite having to get up at 7; I’m now getting to bed around 7. I don’t stand a chance. I was meant to spend all day yesterday with Kate, today with Garry, Tuesday with Kate so she can show me how the non-tourists live, and tonight’s my only night (depending on Garry’s plans) which I don’t have booked up, though Laura, the Colombian cleaner (who also gave me a huge welcome after fighting to get into my room) wants to meet up one night.

Returning to my previous trip, my plans then had been to see (from a distance if need be) Eric, a former good friend of mine, and to play my harp at a dratted music festival to be held at his piano bar. I’d arranged it through Bruce, a friend of his, and actually, by the time I arrived, there were what seemed to be a lot of people primed and excited to meet me, but yet specifically in connection with the festival.

This time, I’m proud to be able to say I’m meeting up with friends who have no connection with Eric or his bar, and also that I’m also not some desperate groupie flying thousands of miles to get my fix of him. When I’m in his bar, I’m more likely to be chatting to the locals and trying to gauge their feelings about living here and the tourism, or, in the case of last night, being subjected to a Galician’s trauma about his Mexican girlfriend breaking up with him (and repeatedly texing ‘Help!’ to Garry throughout).

For all that I’m thrilled that there are these people, whether locals, tourists or expats who remember a harper of fuzzy background or who I’ve gotten to know since, the fundamental aspects of this holiday remain. For all that I feel I can’t leave Eric’s bar, Imagine, before everyone starts wrapping up (around 5.30 am last night I told them they were all vampires and as I wasn’t, good night), such late nights mean too much suffering the next day (especially as Laura tends to wake me while cleaning the apartment next to mine around 10.30 am). Spending hours trying to wake means certainly I can lie by the pool, but not be capable of thinking coherently about the other pressing issue, whether or not to quit my job, or indeed do much else. By the time I’ve sunbathed and waterbathed, it’s about time to perch outside to wait for a friend, and then that’s it for the day.

It’s perhaps not a good idea to be here when I’m in so much turmoil over my job. At least if I was in Guatemala, for all I want to return there incessantly, I have no illusions left about living there; here, the seduction of the welcomes, the friendliness of all makes me want to look for work as a translator or interpreter (my chatting to a local last night was greeted by stares and silence from the female expats), just so I can return as soon as possible and stay indefinitely.

But I keep reminding myself of Antigua, Guatemala, and how seductive it is for similar reasons, and how the illusions don’t match the realities of living there. Kate and James manage to live here by burrowing themselves in a touristfree enclave; Eric depends on the tourists to survive, and although Garry’s wife Julie is fully seduced, at least Garry is objective enough to see the island in terms of how it can sustain and support him financially. I know that most of the friendships I have here are superficial, and that they aren’t sufficient to maintain me here, although the feeling of Being Home might last for at least a little while.

Yesterday I looked for a local mobile phone. Not only would it salvage what was left of my phone bill before I go, but given I’m looking for work in Spain anyway, and that my mother could use it whenever she next returns to Barcelona, it seemed a fully practical and justifiable idea. Garry had told me of the good deal he got on his phone, so I fully expected to be able to find the same. I guess I also fully expected to be able to buy one and still be smiling when I returned.

Another seduction of being here is being able to speak or babble in Spanish to my heart’s content. The only other time I can do that is when I’m back in Guatemala, which isn’t nearly frequent enough for my liking. My translations back in London are few, so no matter how many websearches I do for my Fuerteventura friends, there’s nothing like being able to chat incessantly in Spanish. As a lot of my accent derives from when I worked in Honduras and Panamá, I know it’s at times painful for others, and also that the dialects can be significantly different. Most of the time here, though, none of this has been an issue. Only yesterday – and the day before, when I finally got through to a friend’s hotel to confirm his reservation – did men start speaking to me in English, or say outright that my Spanish sucked. Okay, so my accent and vocabulary may be wrong, but for me, so is theirs. The winds may be oppressively high these days, but at least it means a constant aroma of oleander on the twenty-minute walk into town. But for all I love oleanders (besides the twelve in my London garden, I have two at the foot of the bed here and another in the living room), the landscape beyond them is arid, and not even a mirage of the rainforest I crave. Even if only to propagate the seduction.

Yesterday, too, was the first day I’d seen Corralejo by daylight. Eric’s bar opens at 9 pm, yet I’m hard-pressed to make it there before midnight, which is when it officially closes. Last time, I never made it before 11 pm. I love cities and towns by night, and Corralejo by night is a very Spanish and cosmopolitan cross between Playa del Carmen in Mexico, and Panajachel in Guatemala. (Caleta del Fuste, by comparison, seems to be no more than a sprawling version of the nightclub zone outside San José, Costa Rica). By day it is not only infested with tourists, but also with tourist shops. A friend has asked me to buy her a specific keyring, and I can’t face so much as going into one of the shops, as it would mean becoming yet another English tourist. At least in Antigua, I can blank out the tourists and not so much as notice them, much in the same way I don’t hear Americans when they speak. But when the streets are filled with them, the supermarkets are filled with them, and the shopkeepers expect you to to be English before any other nationality, it doesn’t seem somewhere anyone could build a meaningful lifestyle, unless, like Kate and James, you manage to escape it outright, but at the cost of viewing Corralejo as a no-go zone.

It also doesn’t help that this seems to be a halfway place between London and Guatemala. Its levels of tourism at times obscures its European basis, but it only makes me all the more homesick for Central America – I talk of little else while here, though at least a little of Kazakhstan – as it’s so nearly there, just not quite.

Eric acknowledged last night how he knows me, if not the friendship we had after that.

And the expression on Maya’s face when I told her, at the airport, that I knew her father, was priceless.

Posted by chantal at July 11, 2004 03:01 PM

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