Tarifa
flash fiction by Sara Connell
We were somewhere between Marbella and Tarifa, where our Spanish friend said we would camp for the week. Hitchhiking was still done in Spain, she said. The boys had taken the motorcycles and would meet us at the campground. We were three nineteen-year-old girls, tanned legs and hair blown dry by the beach, just beginning to ripen. Away from our parents for the first time. Someone will pick you up, the boys had said.
We’d walked for over an hour and hadn’t seen a car. Even the air way up on the highway smelled of sand. The sky was purple black as we walked on an overpass, over some city I didn’t bother to ask the name of.
We’d left Seville a day ago. Moorish archways of perforated stone. Buildings that had stood for centuries but looked fragile as lace.
Now, we walked along a cliff—fifty, maybe one hundred feet above blinking lights of houses and rows of electrical poles along the roads. When the car came around the curve, the headlights flashed twice. A blue sedan, the color of sea. Every sinew of muscle inside me said do not get in.
What was I going to do, walk twenty miles to Tarifa? My friends asked.
The man was drunk. We smelled it when he locked the doors. The alcohol rose off his skin, tangy and wet. We could not slow his driving, but we could protect ourselves from his touch. We pressed together across the back seat, arms linked like a chain fence.
The man swore as he drove. I didn’t speak Spanish but I recognized some words after being in Spain for a few weeks: puta, joda, mierda. He swerved more than once, not always missing the guardrail. When the car scraped against the metal, the contact sent up sparks. I squinted in the dark through the windshield, holding the horizon line of mountain and sea and thought how this was just one of so many anti-decisions I had made. Not calling our host mother when we’d been delayed two days in Madrid. She won’t care, my American friend had said. Stop being such a worrier.
She did care. She was frantic when we returned, then angry.
I’d imagined Spain as a place of self-creation. Instead, Spain showed me my own cowardice and compliance. Spain invited acceptances. Accepting that I’d caused pain to the friendly woman who’d opened her home to us. Accepting a muffin baked with hash, a swim in the ocean so close to Africa that we could see the Rock of Gibraltar in a patch of ocean, a boy on the beach told us afterwards was heaving with sharks. Accepting something clear and vaporous from a shot glass and vomiting into the next day. Accepting a ride from a drunk stranger, hurtling along a highway.
How many chances did one get?
The man dropped us at the campground, barely slowing the wheels to a stop. All three of us screaming at each other as we got out of the car. Brown, white, sunburned faces of other campers turning to stare as they washed dishes in a communal sink under a buzzing mosquito light. My friend’s shorts were wet, the part near her crotch darker green than the fabric on her thighs. For a while the smell of urine, rubber, and fire was all I thought of when I remembered Spain.
But there was also the tortilla our host mother made us every night we stayed at her house—a fluffy pie of egg and potatoes and ham. Garlic scraped across toasted bread in the mornings. Tracing Hemmingway’s ghost through San Sebastian, Pamplona, Running with the Bulls, a whole city of white and red. Rushing into the ocean at four in the morning when the air was still black, after dancing at the clubs where, for a moment, one could become the deep thump of base, a vibrating chord played on an electric guitar. The water—a baptism, a forgiveness. The sea so full of salt you didn’t have to move your arms or legs to float. Looking up at a sky sprayed with stars, the moon the crowning over the sea, basking our bodies in creamy light.
There was that, too.
We’d walked for over an hour and hadn’t seen a car. Even the air way up on the highway smelled of sand. The sky was purple black as we walked on an overpass, over some city I didn’t bother to ask the name of.
We’d left Seville a day ago. Moorish archways of perforated stone. Buildings that had stood for centuries but looked fragile as lace.
Now, we walked along a cliff—fifty, maybe one hundred feet above blinking lights of houses and rows of electrical poles along the roads. When the car came around the curve, the headlights flashed twice. A blue sedan, the color of sea. Every sinew of muscle inside me said do not get in.
What was I going to do, walk twenty miles to Tarifa? My friends asked.
The man was drunk. We smelled it when he locked the doors. The alcohol rose off his skin, tangy and wet. We could not slow his driving, but we could protect ourselves from his touch. We pressed together across the back seat, arms linked like a chain fence.
The man swore as he drove. I didn’t speak Spanish but I recognized some words after being in Spain for a few weeks: puta, joda, mierda. He swerved more than once, not always missing the guardrail. When the car scraped against the metal, the contact sent up sparks. I squinted in the dark through the windshield, holding the horizon line of mountain and sea and thought how this was just one of so many anti-decisions I had made. Not calling our host mother when we’d been delayed two days in Madrid. She won’t care, my American friend had said. Stop being such a worrier.
She did care. She was frantic when we returned, then angry.
I’d imagined Spain as a place of self-creation. Instead, Spain showed me my own cowardice and compliance. Spain invited acceptances. Accepting that I’d caused pain to the friendly woman who’d opened her home to us. Accepting a muffin baked with hash, a swim in the ocean so close to Africa that we could see the Rock of Gibraltar in a patch of ocean, a boy on the beach told us afterwards was heaving with sharks. Accepting something clear and vaporous from a shot glass and vomiting into the next day. Accepting a ride from a drunk stranger, hurtling along a highway.
How many chances did one get?
The man dropped us at the campground, barely slowing the wheels to a stop. All three of us screaming at each other as we got out of the car. Brown, white, sunburned faces of other campers turning to stare as they washed dishes in a communal sink under a buzzing mosquito light. My friend’s shorts were wet, the part near her crotch darker green than the fabric on her thighs. For a while the smell of urine, rubber, and fire was all I thought of when I remembered Spain.
But there was also the tortilla our host mother made us every night we stayed at her house—a fluffy pie of egg and potatoes and ham. Garlic scraped across toasted bread in the mornings. Tracing Hemmingway’s ghost through San Sebastian, Pamplona, Running with the Bulls, a whole city of white and red. Rushing into the ocean at four in the morning when the air was still black, after dancing at the clubs where, for a moment, one could become the deep thump of base, a vibrating chord played on an electric guitar. The water—a baptism, a forgiveness. The sea so full of salt you didn’t have to move your arms or legs to float. Looking up at a sky sprayed with stars, the moon the crowning over the sea, basking our bodies in creamy light.
There was that, too.
About the writer
Sara Connell is an author and writing coach in Chicago. She has been featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Good Morning America, The View, FOX Chicago, NPR, and Katie Couric. She received the Judith Dawn Memorial Grant for fiction and has presented at Printer’s Row Literary Festival, Open Books and teaches at Story Studio Chicago. Her writing has appeared in: The New York Times, Tri-Quarterly, Parenting, & Schlock. Her first book Bringing In Finn was nominated for ELLE magazine 2012 Book of the Year.
www.saraconnell.com |