EN: Like an octopus in a garage
‘Como un pulpo en el garaje / Like an octopus in a garage’. This Spanish turn of phrase describes someone who is lost, confused or completely out of place. And can’t you see it? The image of an octopus reaching its tentacles across garden scissors and exhaust pipes in desperate search for familiarity. I used to love this expression. Until I became the pulpo, transplanted to an alien environment for at least half of the year due to my partner’s family circumstances. But instead of a cephalopod mollusc with eight sucker-bearing arms, I am a two-armed city lover and the garage, in my case, is the suburb of a provincial beach town in the bay of Cadiz, opposite the coast of Africa. A terracotta and cream-coloured, turret-donning neighbourhood that is half empty except for a couple of months each summer, when heat-stroked Madrileños flock to their second residences to escape the baking capital. Basically, I have moved from the green-leafed streets of my North London eco-bubble to what feels like an empty wedding cake. And so, for the past two weeks, my tentacles have been desperately grasping around for something to hold on to.
Tentacle 1: Sounds
The first thing that puts me on alert is the silence. We arrive at our new flat late one Friday night and not a soul is out on the streets. I wake and hear – nothing. I go on my lunchtime walk and see – no one. This is what I imagine the world will look like post nuclear apocalypse. Cricket-sounding, tumbleweed-rolling silence. Or rather palm-leaf-rustling silence. Because unlike people, palm trees are everywhere here. (I fear that it is with the mention of palm trees that I lose the last reader who was feeling even remotely sorry for me. But stick with me, people! It gets more tragic).
Tentacle 2: Sustenance
On our first morning, we head to our local bar for breakfast. The moment I step through the door, it is clear that this is not the kind of establishment that welcomes inquiries after oat milk. The TV is blaring the ‘Hunting and Fishing’ channel, the programme on: ‘Pura Caza / Pure Hunt’. Its premise involves mid-life crazed Spanish men teaming up with Indigenous Uzbeks on horseback for ‘traditional’ hunting … with shooting riffles. While Javi and Gonzalo skin a caribou or something on screen, the waiter comes round to take our orders. The choices are cooked ham, cured ham or turkey. Bread it is then.
Lauded the greenhouse of Europe, you may be forgiven for expecting a plethora of vegetables as you go out for meals in Spain but don’t be fooled. In a cruel globalised twist, all the vegetables that are produced here, can be found back in my local Lidl in Wood Green, North London. Even in a lunch spread for 20 people at a birthday party, I can’t find one item that is not beige, fried or recently alive. Hi octopus, old friend. If you are a vegetarian in Andalucía, you better like your starches because beyond bread and potatoes it’s a veggie desert out here.
Tentacle 3: Climate
Here comes possibly the most unrelatable problem to complain about in November to an audience based in the Northern Hemisphere. I. Don’t. Care. For. Sunshine. While the Italian side of my family has passed on its fierce eyebrow game, they have not passed down any of their heat resilient genes. In this short life I have already had to get eight moles removed for suspicion of skin cancer. My green eyes crease into an immovable frown as soon as the light hits 400 Lux (that’s sunset and sunrise conditions). At 24 degrees I sweat and swell. At 29 degrees I am a vitriol-spewing puddle of a person hating everyone who wanders this scorched earth. Good thing that I now live part-time in a place where I have to put on freaking sunglasses before I take out the trash.
Tentacle 4: Beach
I don’t get beach. Ever since I came to my boyfriend’s hometown for the first time, I understood that while we look similar, the people here belong to a completely different species. One that is apparently content to while away hours sitting on sand doing NOTHING. I’ve never felt more reverse Ken than I do here. And now that I have to see it every day it doesn’t get any better. There are moments where I think if I have to look at the same vast expanse of beige and turquoise one more time I’ll gouge my eyes out. Give me the interminable grey skies of a London autumn afternoon anytime. Naturally then, the only reason we ended up renting a flat near the beach is so that I can easily leave and go home when I get inevitably bored before everybody else.
Tentacle 5: Movement
This is another thing that makes this place feel so claustrophobic. It is quite difficult to get away. In London, I can catch a bus that runs every 8 minutes to Kings Cross, jump on the Eurostar and end up in Paris 4 hours later. Here you can’t get anywhere without a car. Admittedly, there are bike lanes (a big improvement on London!) and A bus. But they are no use unless you want to go to a limited number of very specific places at very specific times of the day. Trains run to the next town and even to Seville but if you want to get on them you have to be organised as they book up a month in advance. This is fuelled by a free public transport ticket for residents (seems like even the municipality recognises its citizens’ need to get away). If all earth-bound transport fails, you can catch a boat to Cadiz. If the sea is not too rough. And you get to the port at just the right time.
🐙 Tentacle 6: My herd
And it’s no surprise that there should be so little public transport to get away because overall there is not that much demand. Most people who live here are maddeningly content with staying right where they are. Working up to my first beach meltdown post hunting-programme bread breakfast, I overhear a woman say ‘You can’t put a price on this. Isn’t it incredible that we get to live here?’. The desire to live anywhere else in the province, let alone in a different country is usually met with utter incomprehension. And the most infuriating thing about all this is the nagging suspicion that if the people here have found the kind of contentment that seems so elusive to me in the absence of the big city perks I think essential to my self-fulfilment perhaps the problem is me…
🐙 Tentacle 7: Mating
So far, I have observed 3 modes of being if you are in your 30s and heterosexual in this town. 1) Married with kids 2) Saving up for your wedding 3) Debating whether to get married or pregnant first. Planning to do none of these ever, the most connected I feel to anyone I’ve met since we arrived is the pharmacist who sells me mosquito bite remedy. She says: ‘If the temperatures we are experiencing today aren’t climate change, I don’t know what is’. I could have kissed her.
🐙 Tentacle 8: Play
In spite of this, it takes more than palm trees and endless sandy beaches to kill a culture vulture. The first weekend we take the boat to Cadiz to attend a screening of Latin American documentaries. Conditioned by London’s pre-booking mania, I speed-walk to the venue with 10 minutes to spare (Note to self: the boat timetables are based on VERY loose estimates), only to find myself with 3 pensioners in a vast re-modelled granary space. At least this crowd is easy to wrestle to the ground in case there is ever fierce competition over tickets to a cultural event. Spurred on by tales of a women’s collective of Mexican weavers, I discover exactly one book café and one café that serves oat milk and where staff don’t run to the microwave when I order tea (kettles are a rare occurrence in these parts). I guess this is karma from complaining one too many times about decision fatigue in London.
So after these first two weeks, I wouldn’t say I’m a pulpo living its best life. But maybe that shouldn’t be my ambition. As I am getting ready to head to the oat milk café to write this, I put on my usual under-eye concealer only for a panda to stare back at me from the mirror. Without me noticing, this place has already changed me. Whether I like it or not.