The Monday After

It feels ridiculous to be here today, sitting in an office, on a Monday, only a few hours after the most involved trip of my life, a morning on which I see a small girl walking to school and still hear another screaming "Ey, chica!" from behind her, on a day of rain and cold and gale-like wind in London, when my mind's eye is filled with the brightest sunshine on the most beautiful, evocative buildings, when I am so filled with fresh images and sounds and thoughts, of whitewashed villages on hillsides, and palm trees, and Alhambra. Or of the evening a few days ago, sitting in a corner of a dingy room unevenly lit, with rows of benches and a sloping roof, and people drinking: this could so easily have been back home, an improvised space with an asbestos roof at the back of a wine shop just outside town. Except for the front of the room, where three men sit on three upright wooden chairs, and one man sings songs that sound a little like a folk song from back home, a little like a song that you can imagine being sung in a caravanserai in the Arabian desert. He thumps the ground with his foot as he sings, and claps his hands between phrases. A man with a flute and a man with a guitar sit on either side of him, and all of them, and all of us, watching a gypsy woman dance.