Come back tomorrow

by Rhianna Jones (United Kingdom (Great Britain))

Making a local connection Spain

The mirador de San Nicolás is packed with people, but Juan isn’t here. In the greying light of dusk, the jostling crowd is blurry and indistinct. Yesterday the view from the mirador was glorious. The red stone of Granada’s famous Alhambra stood proud against a sunset-streaked sky no photo could ever do justice to. Today is the first of December, and the fortress is overhung with heavy clouds. The mirador is crawling with tourists anyway, elbowing each other out of the way in pursuit of the perfect selfie. ‘Come back tomorrow. You know where to find me,’ he’d said in his slow Bolivian accent. I could hear the lazy half-smile in his voice, and wondered if he was laughing at me. I wonder the same thing now, as my eyes dart from face to shadowy face without recognising a single one. To be clear, Juan is a stranger. We met here yesterday because he – a jewellery-maker – wanted to make a sale and I – travelling alone on a two-day visit to the city – was an obvious target. He showed me his bracelets. We started talking. As the final rays of sunset deepened into nightfall, he whisked me away on a moonlit walking tour that I can only describe as magical. From the mirador we disappeared along the winding pathways of the Albaicín, the ancient Moorish district of Granada. Crossing the Albaicín’s main square – a cobbled space hemmed in by tiny restaurants, where a gathering of locals sang softly to the muted strumming of a flamenco guitar – I marvelled at flowerpots hung on walls, Roman masks adorning the doors of houses, a tiny ceramic fountain inscribed with poetry. Among small white-washed houses crammed onto narrow pedestrian streets, where gaps between buildings gave way to breathtaking views of the Alhambra, we climbed beneath a sky peppered with stars. That bright one is Venus, he pointed out to me as we stopped at a crumbling piece of city wall to catch our breath. Far above the distant traffic of the city centre, the night was still and silent and perfect. As we reached the top of the hill, the buildings grew fewer and further between. No longer freestanding dwellings, now they nestled into the mountainside: tumbledown wooden doorways, roofs of roughly-hewn rock with tufts of grass growing on their windowsills. We are in Sacromonte, Juan informed me. Historically a neighbourhood for Granada’s poorest, who could only afford to live in homes carved from the hillside: now many of these caves are trendy eco-homes for millionaire hipsters. The caves aren’t far from the mirador where I’m once again standing, alone and lost in a sea of people, but they feel worlds away. This is commercial Granada, postcard Granada, a lifetime from the tranquillity and sadness of Sacromonte. At Juan’s side I was a guest in that place; then he left me under a lamppost at the foot of the hill the Albaicín is built on, still stammering my thanks for an evening I’ll never forget. Now, I am merely an outsider. ‘Come back tomorrow’ – and so here I am. But he is nowhere to be seen. The shadows lengthen. The tourists continue to mill. An irrational wave of sadness rises in my chest as I think of this stranger I will never see again. Someone I met by chance, who was kind to me in a city that feels like a monument to a lost world. He has vanished now, as though he were never there at all, into this rabbit-warren of history and nature and overlapping cultures. Perhaps one day he will read this. But our paths will probably not cross again. My time in Granada is nearly over. At the bottom of this hill there is a bus that will not wait for me, which will take me far away from the magic of this place and the guide who unveiled it all to me. The next day I will do my laundry and go to work. I’m learning that some people are adventures, and they only last a brief instant.