Читать книгу Around the heart in eleven years - Epp Petrone - Страница 5

How I lost an old friend

January 2009. Arguineguin, Gran Canaria

That house. I’ve seen it in my dreams. Sitting there in the bus, I wasn’t sure I could find my way back, but as soon as the bus closed its doors behind us and I got a good look at the street winding down the mountainside, it all came back to me.

Supermercado – the sign can be seen from far away. It doesn’t look like much has changed around here.

Stepping inside the store tosses me back in time. That old corner market is almost exactly the same as it was ten years ago, when I hopped in here with a goatee-sporting, Jesus Christ lookalike. Harri and I made an exotic-looking couple while we were travelling around and selling goods in the markets. Wait, a couple? The two of us were never a couple! I even lied to people and told them that Harri was my uncle, so that no one would suspect that there was anything sexual between us.

I stare at a man with bushy eyebrows who stands behind the counter. Ten years doesn’t really change a middle-aged person that much. It’s Jorge from Cuba, the same one who worked here a decade ago.

“Jorge, do you remember me? Epa! La periodista del Estonia, the journalist from Estonia?”

A puzzled shadow passes over his face before his mouth stretches into a wide smile. “Epa! How many years have passed?”

I’ve probably changed more than he has; the twenty-something slight girl has become a voluptuous thirty-something woman.

“Yes, I know, time flies! How... how is Marco doing?”

“Not bad! But he missed you; he was waiting for you to come back for years!” After all, Marco wasn’t just Jorge’s boss, but a friend as well.

“When is he coming?” I ask. “Is he coming today? We just arrived on the island yesterday and the first thing we did this morning was come here.”

I don’t want to allow any pauses in the conversation, let the air be filled with words instead. My two daughters are running around behind me, while their father, my husband Justin is watching over them. A week ago I sat him down and told him that it was time to jump on a last-minute offer to Gran Canaria, because I had been planning and postponing this return trip. Now we’re here, ready to face the careless world traveller Epp from ten years ago. Ready to face my past. And somewhere here, in the possession of the shop- and hotelkeeper Marco, a bag is waiting with my clothes, books and travel journals documenting the most confusing time of my life.

“Marco isn’t coming today; he’s at the doctor’s. His heart is not good, los problemas^[1.] , Epa...”

Jorge doesn’t ask me, “How come you never called?” I remember that Jorge was always very tactful. My travel companion Harri, the wild Christ-lookalike, liked to classify people, and he judged Jorge to be a specimen of high intelligence and alertness. Marco, on the other hand, was greedy and stupid, according to Harri. I’m sure that his opinion did count for me at the point when I had to choose whether to stay on the island or not, whether to return later or not... And Djellah, my best friend at this same hotel, she also kept telling me the same thing: “For Marco, you are just a girl passing through.”

I spoke of many things with Djellah back then. It was right here in the hotel above the store, or on the beach in front of it where we spent time together and discovered each other. Twenty-four years older than me, born on the same date, she had grown up with the same itch in her soul, a fever burning under her skin – to move, to travel, to experience the new, to melt into it, take it along and move on. I filled up five cassette tapes with interviews with Djellah and wrote a long article for an Estonian magazine about her: “That strange woman still flashes through my thoughts, like a dream I saw or a thought I didn’t get to finish. It’s as if I’ve touched something at once plaintive, humorous and beautiful. Something intangible and incomprehensible that I can’t ever completely forget...” That’s a series of flowery words that I once stitched together to describe my experience. Unfortunately the article was rejected: “This person is nuts, why should we publish a story about her?” argued one editor. “The city trams are full of these half crazies pushing fifty. You probably haven’t had any contact with real bohemians, but it’s normal, you’re still young!” Another magazine did end up accepting the story after severe editing: a piece about a woman without a homeland or mother tongue; a woman who still holds a place of honor for me as one of the most unique people I have ever met.

But I haven’t had any more contact with Djellah. I accidentally left my journals, notebooks and the little phonebook with her contacts, as well as the contacts of so many others, in the bag that I left here, at Marco’s hotel. Soon after that, I had to block out most of what happened here on this island and those whom I had met.

Sometimes, though, I listened to a CD Djellah gave me of her songs – she was a travelling musician. Weeks went by, then months, then years; new trips came along, new people, new crises, new searches and discoveries...

How did ten years manage to go by so fast?

“Have you heard anything from Djellah?” I ask Jorge after he’s dealt with some tourists that wandered into his store.

“Djellah? But Djellah is dead! They discovered she had cancer, a few years ago. She left us in a matter of weeks. Before that she lived here for a couple of stretches. For a while she left, to go somewhere else, and then ended up, coming back, you know!”

Yes, that’s right, Djellah had kind of adopted a girl in this village, the daughter of a prostitute that worked down at the port. Of course, she’d come back here, and repeatedly, unlike me.

I can’t think any further than that.

But what did Jorge just say about her being dead? It had to be some kind of a sick joke.

Suddenly, I remember sharing another thing with Djellah. We were both just a bit over twenty when our mothers died of cancer. And just like me, Djellah also said that she still hadn’t gotten over it (she was forty-eight when we met) and, just like me, she was afraid that it, the disease, could happen to her.

“Dead? But she was still so young!” My eyes tear up. My children are fighting at the other end of the store while loud German tourists are passing the supermarket’s open front... Daily life and the past have mixed together. I’m crying. I’ve finally made it back here, but it’s too late.

1 “Problems” in Spanish. [ ↵ ]