gesus

After a week of living in strangers’ cars, depending on other people for every little thing, I was done for. Hitchhiking through Europe, the supposed adventure of a lifetime, had paled to novel dependency. The wind blew me into Malaga like a plastic bag. I sat there on a bench in front of the train station, nothing was moving, the tracks two long pencil lines of silence. In the middle of this desert, a man in rags dancing like a fish having jumped out of the water. His speaker echoing over the floor. The life poured out of his eyes, a gaze like an erupting volcano. His hands gestured towards my power bank. That’s how I met Gesus. He took me up on my offer to smoke a reefer and took me to the beach. We rolled one with a cigarette filter because of his stomach. I took pictures of him on the empty highway. Nothing moved but the two of us. He told me his story and the weed made me understand half of his Spanish. He was three times my age, but he was a young boy with an old voice. A voice like a seashell when you hold it to your ear.

We passed people who knew him, and he had a little chat here and there. One guy my age handed him some hash and disappeared. We sat down by the water, and I leaned back while he stacked stones on each other. After the last weeks, it took me seconds to fall asleep. When I woke up from the pain of sunburn, he had built a whole castle out of stones and things he’d found in his pockets. His hands were covered with dirt and little wounds, but he had feeling in them like a violin player. Hundreds of stones at tilted angles balancing on top of each other, they were so fragile I thought a breath would make them tumble. Time stood still like a stalking tiger before pouncing. A cold breeze pulling at my shirt gave me goosebumps, but the castle stood still. I asked him where he usually slept. He gestured to some pavilions where the beach met the road. After the sun had set, we walked over, they were closed, and we spread out our sleeping bags where during the day people had bought drinks and snacks. The pavilion had a straw roof and when it started to rain, we laid under it, listening to the waves crash into darkness and the water running down the straw husks over our heads. Sometime in the night, we got visited by a fellow free soul who was just a little too drunk and too aggressive for the two sunburned vegetables we were. We left and settled on a construction site. The next day, his towers had fallen over. The news said they’d close the boarders because of covid. So I figured i better get home. I didn’t know what to say. Especially not in Spanish, so I tried in English. I said I had been looking for freedom all over, and he had made me find it in Malaga. He understood the word Malaga. I wanted to give him something in return. I handed him my sleeping bag. Now he had two sleeping bags in this heat. Before I got on the bus, I walked down the beach one last time to have the ocean wash the sand off my feet. I didn’t bring my shoes, so I just walked back through the sand. The bus driver watched with tilted head how I left a trail of sand on the floor of his bus. Gesus stood outside smiling through the tinted windows. He wanted to wave, but his arms were holding a sleeping bag each. The bus was empty, and the driver looked back and forth between Gesus outside and me fiddling around my backpack. Then we drove off.