Vernon Mooers writes

THE WHITE MAN'S GRAVEYARD

chapter 9 (1)

It was early evening when Alex walked the couple of blocks from the station and checked into a Pension. He dropped his pack, changed his T-shirt and went back out. It was summer, temperate, and here was a city he could enjoy himself in. Now he was glad he'd split from the others, having had enough of the dissonance of the Arabic chanting blasting from the cassette decks in Morocco, and got the boat across to Spain. There he'd promptly caught the train which had chugged up the coast here to Barcelona.

Wide plazas ringed with cafes spread like the crooked spokes of a wheel. Alex sat down at the first bar he came to and ordered a carafe of red wine.

"Why do you young people think you all have to follow in Hemingway's footsteps?" the man with a bristled short beard laughed from the next table. He turned to Alex, "You are new here. Come and join us."

Alex moved his chair over. "I'm trying to be a writer," the plumpish American sheepishly said, his hands twisting the spiral of a notebook. "I've been here a year."

"See my wooden leg," the older man knocked his knuckles on his thigh. He was obviously inebriated. "I've got a seat at Oxford. I come here in the summer just to show I've got some life left in me." The man proceeded to go into a diatribe about literature. Alex drank the carafe and half-listened to the man's alcohol-laden opinions.

At another table, two girls, wearing a bright pair of Wind River and L.L. Bean sweat shirts, sat down and ordered a pitcher of beer. When the older man and the would-be writer finally left for another watering-hole, Alex asked them if he could sit down. They were, it turned out, students from Brandon University. Very soon, one had her thigh against his and the trio were all getting pleasantly pissed, as if they were back in any big prairie tavern.

The girls had just arrived by train from Madrid and had their backpacks, resplendent with the sewn-on Canadian Maple Leaf. Alex invited them to crash in his room, at which point they wandered, singing "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" completely off-key and a Stan Rogers tune Alex was trying to teach them, back up the stone block alley to the Pension.

They were to sleep in the big bed together and the hefty frumpy one Susan didn't seem to know what was going on. She took a shower and Alex and Alanna, the pretty one with the Breck-girl blonde hair, started to make love quickly while she was gone, but were interrupted just before getting into it. When Susan, overweight with a curly brown hair and tinted glasses came back, she got in the bed on the outside by her friend. Just as Alex felt the spring slant and sag, there was a loud rapping on the door. He jumped up in his briefs, ready to yell at whoever it was, that they'd definitely had the wrong room, and to go away, but faced instead the Pension owner, who'd seen them go up together, shaking his fingers vigorously and repeating, "No en Espana! No en Espana!"

There was nothing Alex could do. The Pension owner turned to the girls and informed them they had to get a separate room downstairs, still repeating, "No en Espana." Alex knew this guy only wanted to rent another room but he was half-drunk and would have argued more except that the owner then threatened to call the "Policia." He wanted no part of what he suspected would be a collaborating notoriously corrupt Spanish police and justice system.

When the girls had gone, Alex lay there, swearing to himself, wide-awake. It was still early. He got up, grabbed his pants and shirt and went back down to the street, thinking he could get a night-cap somewhere, and wandered over to the Ramblas, the main boulevard, still bristling with nightlife. In another cafe he drank wine with Americans, identical twin students and another Bostonian who played flute with the Barcelona Symphony, a friend they'd recently met. One of the twins liked the guy and was all over him, saying things like, "Isn't he cute?" Alex couldn't care less. The other sister was quieter. They were not the same. Alex could get nothing going with her. They'd been to a bull-fight together and had just stopped for a drink on the way home and left him in the cafe.

Two young fellows who said they were from Beirut sat down and bought him a drink. They asked Alex questions about Canada and he reached for a few pictures he had in the Moroccan shoulder bag. The photos fell out with a peso note and one guy reached for them and smiled and handed it back. This guy had an expensive gold watch on his wrist. The two were well-dressed and Alex didn't pick up what was happening.

Another drink later they invited him out to smoke some good Lebanese hash. Alex had been drinking all evening and was almost staggering when they went down a side-street and sat on the steps in an alley. One guy rolled the hash with tobacco and the other, who appeared half-drunk, sat next to Alex with his arm drooped over his neck. Suddenly, the other one jumped up and said "Policia" and ran to the end of the ally. His friend told Alex to wait and went to check a few seconds later.

Alex threw the hash in the rolled Drum cigarette off to the side because he was nervous, instinctively reaching into his shoulder bag. It suddenly hit him. Panic set in. There was no bundle of papers. He reached around. His hand felt empty space and he immediately jumped up and ran to the corner. His papers were gone, the packet of Traveller's Cheques and currency attached by an elastic band to his International Driver's License.

Around the corner was an empty alley. Alex ran down a dimly-lit street in a panic, opened a bar door, glanced around and ran to the washroom. His hand clutched the knife in his shoulder bag, the switch blade he'd bought at a souvenir shop in Cologne with an etching of a church.

At the next bar, he swung the door open too. Holes in black nylon-covered fat thighs greeted him and a woman's face was thrust at him saying "Fucky, Fucky?" Alex ran toward the washroom, expecting to kick in a stall door, find them. He needed his papers back. Sailors with tattoos glared at him and he went back out and ran through the side streets looking for some glimpse of the guys who'd ripped him off. Then he stopped running, gave up. His heart pounded. They were long gone. He walked slowly then, trying to get a grip on himself and it finally dawned on him what a dangerous section of town he was in. He walked back toward the Ramblas up and down, back to the cafe where they'd first been, still looking for them.

Alex was sobered up now. He sat, despondent, on a bench on the Ramblas. Finally, he walked back to the Pension.

When morning came, Alex went down to check out. The girls were gone. The owner handed him his passport. He had forgotten they had to ask foreigners for it, and kept it at the desk. He had lost his money though, all ID except his passport. He walked back to the Ramblas and sat on a bench amongst the pigeons and pulled out his map of Europe.

He had to think. There were no branches of Canadian Banks in Barcelona. It was early Friday morning. He could hitch-hike five hundred miles across the desert to the Canadian Embassy in Madrid, but he'd heard it was hard to get rides in Spain. He didn't want to get stranded in the desert. The other alternative was make his way up the Costa Del Sol toward Paris, get out of Spain. It looked to be less than two hundred kilometres to the border and then the Autobahn went straight up. There would Banks in Paris and he could get money transferred over on Monday. He could survive without food for the weekend if he had to.

Alex walked half way across the city, his pack heavier as he went, resting in the shade of parks along the way. At noon he spent the change in his pockets, seven pesetas on a bottle of mineral water. An hour later he was standing on the edge of the highway leading north out of Barcelona.

By evening, almost sunset, he was tired of hitchhiking and just sat on his pack with a cardboard sign he'd scribbled the word France on, going over and over it with a ball-point pen. A friend had once been hitchhiking in Spain and woke up in a ditch with his pants down to his knees, beaten-up and robbed. Alex had nothing much to lose and nowhere to sleep.