I see spilled-over love
Running through the streets
Melting the stillness in an ice cube
Those tiny little
Pearl-like
But-oh-so-great agonies
Waiting is time’s kind gift
~~A Dearly Bought Voice
~~Bei Ling

Cadiz streets so narrow …we clamor through the reverberating alleys of cold stone like horses, footfalls echoing …galloping …heads stretched forward …winter scarves like manes. We stride along to seize every passing second as we nibble tiny, rose-scented, Arab pastries …as we pass an old shoemaker shop. Isabel stops us up short. Shoes hang on the wall …impossibly high, orange high heels …work shoes …delicate, pointy-toed boots. The shoemaker taps with his hammar bent over in the low light as he talks to a customer. A ceramic virgin hangs on the wall along with 1950’s-style version of a naturally endowed women in a brassiere advertisement …a caricature of what we’ve made the sacred and profane.

We are on the way to the Royal Academy of Hispano-Americans of Cadiz. I pass through the paneled, thick-carpeted portals of the Royal Academy of Medicine and Surgery for the second time in my life. The walls of the room are covered with famous paintings of surgeons and doctors. There are a small group of old academicians, all the color of dusty books. A picture of King Juan Carlos presides over the dais of red velvet and gilded gold chairs. A shortish man, bald and bearded presides, joking all the while as he sits in his important chair with the academy’s gold lavaliere around his neck.

We are there to hear the composer, Jose Luis Greco, talk about his music and his new opera about Alesandro Malesfina, the explorer. A pianist plays …a contralto sings. Jose Luis Greco has lived a colorful life. He has been jailed in Mexico. He cuts through the superfluous to the essence of things. I can’t keep up with the Spanish that goes rat-a-tat-tat and find out only later that Jose Luis Greco is the son of famous parents, Jose Greco and Nila Ampara, the flamenco dancers. I am transported to 1957 and the Ed Sullivan show …Jose rapping out a dark, secret code in cadences that require my attention to tell me that Spain will be part of my future. I shake Jose Luis Greco’s hand …have the two sentence conversation with the artist in passing. He looks very much like his father …now dead …his mother now dead, too.

Juan and Isabel take me to tapas bars. We hob nob with the Gadetanos …drink fino …eat anemones. Juan says anemones taste like a wave …and, of course, they do.  We return by way of the bridge back home to the house in the tiny cul-de-sac of Juanita, the mother-in-law …Pepe the housekeeper …the sweet-faced children who smile as quickly as they cry …my little second floor room in the back of the house that still smells of canvas and linseed oil. Juanita and Isabel cook at the speed of light. I clean up. We eat bocarones, hake, tuna, paella, and hake eggs that surely could not be cooked more perfectly anywhere else, but in this house in the cul-de-sac. We smear the bread with cremasita from the Extremadura and bitter orange marmalade. We sit in front of the fire.

China comes to the door in the form of Pin, the owner of the Chinese restaurant in town …we have tea and all tumble through Spanish, English and Chinese as the children all roll on the floor and fall asleep on the sofa.

The time comes to leave them.  I cry. They laugh. I laugh, too.

Cindy, my sweet Cinderella will-of-the-wisp friend, and Felix, her boyfriend, have come to visit me from China. I pick them up at the bus station at some godawful hour. They are happy just to eat, sleep, walk on the beach. I cook piles and piles of gambas and fry a huge pile of fish flavored with cumin that they eat for dinner. At breakfast I cook more gambas, heat up roast chicken, rustle up oatmeal, eggs and vegetables washed down with juice from the frutas del bosque and cafe con leche. They eat the sweet arm of the gypsy along with the gambas. I laugh …amazed. They inhale the food with smiles and compliments. Later, the two of them will attempt to make a Spanish tortilla of eggs, potatoes and onions. I lay on the sofa and supervise. I earn the title of “La Reina de la Cocina” …the Queen of the Kitchen. We begin to name call …Felix, “the Prince of Admiring Old Grandma’s and Maps…Cindy, “the Princess of Birds and Seashells.” They start cooking at 6 …at 9, I’ve had enough …and go out there to be the scullery maid and send them off to bed …do their laundry as an excuse to be out in the cold on the terrace …to look into the blackness of the nighttime sea.

We eat the tortilla and bocadillos with Spanish ham and cheese at the side of the road outside of Guadix in view of a mountain and head off toward Granada. We stay in the pension that Felix suggests. It is the same one Ralph and I stayed in 12 years ago. They give Cindy and I the same room. I am quiet …say nothing at first …but then tell her. She asks me how I feel. I say I don’t know …I really don’t know. I would tell her if I did. We talk late into the night …girl talk about her life …I try to capture her dreams and give them back to her. The next day they leave to visit the Alhambra …take the bus to Seville. She will send me text messages for awhile. They will stop, of course. I’ll call worried and discover the reason.  She has been staying with illegal Chinese “immigrantes” in Salamanca. I’ll have a fit, but she will go home tomorrow to dumplings and noodles made by her mother leaving Felix behind to study. She says it’s what she wants …her mother and green vegetables. I start to cry and tell her I don’t want to leave Spain. She says, “Paula, why are you crying? We are going back to CHINA. She says Gao Li will make dumplings for me.” I smile and tell her I long for a cup of jasmine tea.

Back by the side of the sea, I wander through a tiny village in the evening looking for the country doctor Ahmed. I ask the residents, “Donde esta el medico Ahmed??” No one knows. Somehow I find the house from my hairdresser’s description, “You know, it’s kind of high up …a big beautiful house with a surgery in the back.” His name is not Dr. Ahmed. It is Ahmed El-Ribaidi. He is an Egyptian. I ask him in Spanish if we can speak English. He says, “But, of course.” He probably speaks a thousand languages. He is a tidy man …no receptionist, a state of the art computer. He is addressing a letter to a doctor. He stuffs in a medical report and puts on a stamp that he pulls out of his pocket. In five minutes, I am laying on a table. He is giving me a sonogram regaling me with stories of his trip to China, showing me various ducts and organs. My medical problem is real, but a small one. He tells me what to buy at the pharmacy and sends me on my way …both of us are laughing.

…and then there are Hok, Lok and Xiu …Hermione, Muriel and Puy, like the three Buddhist monks in a Chinese version of Stone Soup. They are running around trying to get their visas to come to China. I don’t know how Hermione, now 80, will make it, but I have the presence of mind to shut up …this trip is important to her somehow. Can anyone challenge the indomitable nature of “Britishness” born of colonial India and Africa in a bright flowered dress and a funny hat? Between times, Puy rattles on in Spanish about my need for lymphatic drainage as she pummels my body and Muriel goes on and on about my damp in the form of trapped energy as she sticks needles in me. Finally, I agree with them both. Everything they say falls in line with what El-Ribaidi has told me. No matter how much I try to pull myself in to the tune of the universe, human, I still fall by the wayside. Yes, I tell them …I’ll do everything you say …after all, their advice is practical and comes of their love and professional concern …these Isabels and Puys, those Hermiones, Muriels, and El-Ribaidis …but mostly, I will listen more closely again to the still voice of the universe living in the deepest part of me

I reward this insight with the poetry of Bei Ling that I read in the space of an evening. He is an exiled poet from China …arrested and jailed …rescued through the efforts of Susan Sontag’s call to Bill Clinton. Muriel, the sensing and sensible Irishwoman fluent in all things Spanish and ancient Chinese, has gotten to know him during his visit and has shared her thoughts with me. We have had the marvelous conversations that are so valuable that life offers up only once in a while.

The early night of rest in the comfort of poetry has given way to morning. I lay here and dream of a little, rented apartment with a terrace and a postage stamp of a garden with pots and vines …a Spanish color and fragrance coming into my life. I opened the persianas this morning and started writing …the fishing boats went out in the dark again under the bright light of Saturn that faded in the eastern sky with apricot and navy colors over a still sea that linger long waiting for the lazy sun to appear. I have made the transition in this short space and realize it is time to return home to China …to dark, winter skies over the mysterious little blue-green mountain …dusty streets …noise and bustle …smells …characters written, stamped, engraved, painted, brushed, etched …the curious little China life I have grown to understand as my own..

Spain travels with me in the flowers that fall out of a book …in the bright scarf I’ve bought that reminds me of sunset and green leaves …the people of rich lives who “melt the stillness of an ice cube” …who make me dream of empty, narrow streets under a blue sky…

…”Waiting is time’s kind gift.”