The realization of the trip hung upon the good will of the TWA manager at the other end of the telephone line. Doubtful as to whether a voyage with a total stay of one day at my destination was worth its price for a student whose income qualified him for telephone rates reserved for California's 'poor', I had left the decision to chance: if the manager agreed to extraordinarily extend the by now expired low rate I had found surfing the Web two days before, I would go. Otherwise, I would content myself with hearing news of Eva's defense of her thesis in telecommunications by telephone.

The manager was clear from the very beginning: the rate had expired, and it was therefore impossible for me to fly at that price.

"I understand", I assured him. "I know that you are under no obligation whatsoever to do this for me, and that my flying to attend my girlfriend's thesis by surprise is entirely at the mercy of whether you have the power and the will to do this or not".

I did not have to utter another word. I heard some keystrokes, and a few moments later I was asked for my credit card number.

Early the following morning, I was enjoying an aerial view of the Grand Canyon, well on my way to the Iberian Peninsula. Once in Newark, while waiting at the gate for the departure of my flight across the pond, I was an involuntary witness to Marisol's account of her life. A young woman from Andalucía, she was complaining bitterly about U.S. immigration laws forcing her to return to Spain after spending three months with her boyfriend, a New Yorker born to a Mexican mother that Marisol had met years ago during his holidays in Spain. Her audience, an elderly Argentine couple who was enjoying retirement traveling, could not see the problem:

"But he is an American citizen, isn't he?"

"Yes".

"Then you are fine. You just marry and then you can live here." For them, a couple who had spent three months living together would obviously get married shortly. The commitment aversion that is a landmark of today's young generation was unknown to them.

"It's not so easy", she excused herself, and changed the topic to a latino's lament over expatriation that I was so familiar with: "It's so hard to meet people in New York. When my brother visited me in Granada, within a month he knew half the town. I've been here for three months and have hardly met anyone." And, as one could easily verify by her fluency in English (or lack thereof), those she had met were latinos.

"Dos mil quinientas", said the cab driver, asked how much the drive to the Atocha railway station would cost.

I started to pick up the bags of Danielle, an American studying in Arizona who would be spending her last college year in Córdoba, but he stopped me and directed me to the front of the taxi line waiting patiently at Madrid's airport to be matched with the corresponding line of arriving passengers. I have never understood why, all over the world, when there are many cabs and many passengers, and a long street on which to load the latter into the former, one is forced to make the loading a slow sequential process, with one group of passengers waiting for the previous one before daring to set foot in the car. So we waited for our turn, and then asked the driver that luck had matched us with if he would take us to Atocha for the price the first driver had quoted.

"No", came the flat answer, and before he could give me his price, I was asking the next driver. But I got a second no, and a third.

"Too much luggage", one explained to me. Whether it was the extra gas for taking Danielle's suitcase and bag (I only had a small backpack with me) or the trouble of opening the trunk, they did not say. I finally found a driver willing to take us for the quoted price. His valor turned out to be suicidal. No sooner were we in the car, he was assailed by other angry taxidrivers, who protested for his skipping his place in the line.

"But you said you would not take him!", protested our chauffer in vain. For, to Madrid's taxidrivers as much as to the dog in the manger, that seemed not to matter.

......................... 

When I came in, the Clemencia seemed one of those places which had been chic a long time ago but had long since fallen to oblivion. It was past 1:30 PM and there was only a single table occupied. Not a great record for a restaurant that was given to me as the landmark with which to get the cab driver to know how to get to Lola's from the railway station. At 2 PM, it was still empty enough to allow Eva's call, literally asking for 'a tall young blond eating there', to get through to me immediately. At 2:30 PM, the place was packed full. I had forgotten I was in Spain, and it was a Sunday. It was as if local eating habits were trying to ease my stomach's jet lag by delaying lunch for half the time difference between Valencia and New York, where I had eaten my last meal on the ground, which I had also called lunch, about sixteen hours before.

For the first time since I had left for the dark continent five weeks before, I had both the time to write and the technology to do it in comfort. True, I had had pen and paper for a while in Africa. But pen only until I dropped my pen walking in the marshes surrounding Lake Baringo, and paper other than toilet paper only until my backpack got stolen from a Land Cruiser while I was hiking Mt. Kenya. Besides, the ease of mind afforded by the reversibility of a word processor is hard to substitute once you know it.

Not that the technology was easy to come by. The electronic notebook had cost my shoulder a lift from the West Coast of America to the East Coast of Spain. More importantly, the electricity to run it had been evasive, to say the least. First, the battery had decided to stop working, after refusing to let me know it would do this during any of the four hours that I was charging it the night before I left Pasadena. Then, the transformer's two skinny legs had refused to engage the inviting Spanish socket. The barman had then been extremely helpful, producing the right adapter seconds after he vehemently denied he had any. Finally, the cashier had overcome the sockets' obstinate demand for a ground connection by pointing out one which did not have a fuse. The fact that this promiscuous socket was located by the one table in the whole restaurant that the waiters used for resting trays and bread bothered one of them (waiter, not bread) a bit, but nothing that was not overcome by the joy of watching somebody type at a laptop computer.

"How many Mega?", he asked.

"150", I said, guessing he might be asking how many MHz.

"Fast, eh?!", he retorted incredulous, eradicating any suspicions that the answer should have been in Mbytes.

I did not comment that I was expecting a computer three times as fast in my office this week. My answer seemed to have given the impression that I was somebody important, because I soon had the cashier coming to apologize for the uncomfortable place he had given me, and offering me the comfort of his office, modem included. I explained that I was just fine, and went back to rejoicing in watching the city's Sunday lunch life, which I somewhat preferred over an electronic line connecting me to the world I had just escaped from.

The walkman gave me a certain isolation from the city I was observing, just like the soundtrack of a movie reminds you that you are in a theatre. The isolation might have been welcome for its own sake, but given the state of musical deprivation I had endured for the previous five weeks, it was indeed a highlight of the experience.

I had come to the wrong city. Or what is the same, to the right city at the wrong time. Four and a half hours early, to be precise. A phone call had reduced the time miscalculation by an hour and a half, but at a price. Now, the surprise had been accidentally delivered over the phone, and I had failed to see Eva's face upon hearing that I had traveled with three cars, two airplanes and one train to attend her thesis defense and then come back. So there I was, knowing I had as long to write as her drive from Alcoy to Valencia would take. So far, I had barely had time to narrate the events that happened as I wrote. Which helps explain why I welcomed the isolation. It gave me a chance to freeze my life in the world as I advanced my life on paper -- 'my life in bits' does not sound right. Incidentally, Bill Gates had been the name of the co-pilot of my plane from New York to Madrid. Only the plane did not crash.

A young second waiter interrupted Dire Straits.

"Internet?"

"No, just writing", I was sorry to disappoint him. Evidently, at least the concept of a cordless modem had made it across the Atlantic. Or perhaps the preoccupation to find a cord had not. In any case, a few seconds later, a third, older, waiter comforted me:

"Writing a novel?"

I hesitated, and then said yes, almost triumphantly, amid the 'Viva!'s of the table next to mine, whose twenty-something souls were apparently celebrating a baptism.

I glanced back at a table at which a girl, who gesticulated just like an ex-girlfriend of mine but otherwise looked not at all like her, flirted with her boyfriend. As only those of a biologist would do, my thoughts wandered off to speculate whether the striking similarity between the body language of two unrelated people in different lands was due to shared genes or shared culture.

All of a sudden, I had a premonition that Eva was arriving. I walked out to the street, saw a figure that could belong to any Spanish brunette walking in the direction of Clemencia's door, and ran to embrace her. Sure enough, it was Eva. Then again, I knew I did not face a great risk running toward a perfect stranger if the stranger was a Spanish girl.

I had not seen Eva in almost a week, which was the second longest we had ever been separated since I met her for the second time at her twenty-fourth birthday party in Pasadena. The first time had been at one of the annual Caltech's Club Latino election meetings, at which I had proposed she be elected treasurer rather than her roommate and friend, Valentina Bali, because Eva was Spanish and Valentina Argentinian, and the Spanish economy was faring better than its Argentine counterpart. My contact then had been limited to little more than that bad joke and a failed attempt at getting a shared date with her. But the second time, I was luckier. My Continental Airlines flight from Washington D.C. had failed to produce my suitcase in LAX, and my lack of wits had failed to remove my keys from the suitcase before checking it in. I therefore found myself facing my apartment's door late on a Saturday night, keyless and clueless. I heard latin music from a party at a third-floor apartment in the building next to mine, and walked up to ask for a phone, only to be surprised to find Eva opening the door and hugging me welcome to her birthday party, to which, unbeknownst to me, I had been sent an invitation.

After paying the bill at Clemencia's, Eva and I walked to her friend Lola's apartment, where we took what a good friend of mine calls a 'Spanish siesta'. And though I had taken many Spanish siestas with Eva before, this was perhaps our first Spanish siesta in Spain. We woke up from the nap after that when we anticipated, correctly, that Lola would be walking in any minute. Perhaps we were in a land of premonition in spite of all my agnosticism.

Lola was twenty-five or so, and was not only a virgin, something that is far more easily found in Spain than in America, but she had also never had a boyfriend, at least not one who would kiss her or take her hand. Perhaps there was something of an explanation in her oft-repeated statement that she liked to boss people around, combined with Spanish men's reluctance to take a domineered role. According to her friends, she had just been unlucky so far. This bad luck had included a brief romance with somebody who was simultaneously involved with at least a couple of other women, and who, as if his real harem was not large enough, went around saying that he had slept with several women who vehemently denied it to anybody who would lend their ears to the subject. Apparently, these fictitious affaires were not uncommon among Telequitos, students in the predominantly male Telecommunications School of the Politécnico de Valencia.

After spending a while with Lola, all three of us headed for Maria's house, my second lesson in Spanish conservative society. We headed out for tapas in oldtown Valencia, where our talk eventually got to the topic of premarital sex. Maria argued that, given that she had endured as long a wait as she had so far, she would go all the way and wait till her honeymoon, perhaps two years ahead, to have sex with her boyfriend of four years. Lola countered by asking:

"And what if there are problems later?", referring to the possibility of sexual incompatibility, whatever that means.

"Sex is highly overrated, anyway", was Maria's determined answer. And then immediately:

"I know what you are thinking now", she turned to me, "but I don't care."

"I am only thinking that life would not be the same without sex", I tried to reassure her. I was falling asleep, my body still trying to make some sense among the times of Nairobi, L.A. and now of Spain, and so we did not honor the Spanish tradition of going late into the night with our talk. At 1 AM, I was in bed. At 1:01, I was asleep. So much for my contempt of life without sex.

On the day of the event, Monday, September 27th, 1998, Eva and I drove to the Politécnico to find Professor Capmany walking to the cafetería for breakfast. He was in his late thirties, had a boyish face and the voice of a baby. The Politécnico's cafetería was packed full, so we walked to the School of Economics. For some reason, economists appeared to eat less than technical people. At 11, Eva started her first practice of the hour-long talk she was due to deliver at 12. At 12:30 (12 o'clock Spanish time) she started again, this time in front of the five professors who had come from every corner of Spain to serve on her doctoral committee and of the few acquaintances who had gathered for the occasion. The most senior of the professors, Muriel, who presided the committee, broke the ice by announcing that we were in the presence of a very good thesis, and told her to enjoy this festive day. Eva, in turn, opened the first act of the feast by offering an impeccable dissertation. This was followed by questions and comments by the committee, in order of ascending seniority, signaled by Muriel in a clear indication of pecking order. The youngest one, from Valencia, started by acknowledging that he had struggled to try to understand the thesis, praised it highly and asked a few intelligent and interesting questions about it. The next one played old boy and asked why references 18-32 had not been referenced in the text. The third, from Barcelona, was the kindest-looking, and was indeed the warmest, both during and after the defense. He warned us that we were sure to hear more of this young woman with such an outstanding CV. The fourth professor was the most interesting to watch, if not to hear. He was a fat man from Galicia --although not Gallego, he hastened to indicate-- , whose plump face rested on his hand, elbow on the table, struggling to stay awake. When the turn of the president, who had come from Madrid, came to ask, he lost his friendliness and admonished Eva for saying that future research would have to establish whether her theoretical findings were corroborated by experiment. Apparently, he was not ready to approve of a thesis the veracity of whose conclusions were put in doubt by its very author. Lost in him were 500 years of science since Galileo, perhaps the first modern to establish the scientific method as one of empirical verification. But the more serious reprimand was yet to come. It was on a personal level, he explained: "Why was the thesis printed in 'American' letter-size paper, rather than the Spanish A4 paper that the draft copy had been printed in? And on a related line of thought, why had her maternal last name (commonly used in conjunction with the paternal one in Spain) been dropped from the cover of the thesis? Had her mother not done enough to deserve the honor?". "Do not forget your roots", he ended. The session was then opened to any doctor in the audience who wished to make a question, following tradition. Eva's father, a medical doctor, understood that nobody was really asking for his opinion, and that if academic Ph.D.'s never earn their share of doctor respect from laymen, they fight back with a scorn of any doctorate short of a Ph.D. Prof. Capmany, though, put his proud smile away for a few minutes and announced that the methods exposed in the thesis had already been sought after for commercial exploitation by two American and one European company, including none less than the giant 3M, since Eva's publication of them. After which the committee was left alone to decide the thesis' non-commercial fate. It took them about five minutes to open the room to the public again and announce solemnly that, by unanimous decision, they would only award the maximum grade because there was no further distinction possible. This meant Act Two could now begin: a succulent paella in a typical barraca valenciana, including the committee, family and friends of the recently appointed Dr. Peral.

We spent the afternoon eating, and the evening recovering from what we ate. Just before sunset, Eva and I went down to a ferretería, a concept related to the American hardware store but strangely more commonplace in Spain and Argentina than in the U.S.A., to get an adapter to feed my flat American plug from the plump European sockets. We were greeted by the storekeeper in what I reckoned to be the accent that Spanish immigrants have in Argentina, although I had never heard it in Spain. I asked him for confirmation of my suspicion.

"Claro!", he said, "Soy italiano".

.........................

"¿Sabe dónde esta el Metro?", I asked a man standing in a small plazoleta upon my early morning arrival at the Madrid bus terminal.

"Yo no soy de acá", replied the man in a perfectly clear porteño accent (porteño is the Argentine name for a native of Buenos Aires, the once sole port of the then viceroyalty).

I probed the next candidates for some local knowledge: two girls in their early twenties.

"Dorthin, oder?", asked one of the other while she pointed across the plaza -which one might translate square if the shape of a single Spanish plaza bore any resemblance to a rectangle-, searching confirmation of her recall.

"Danke", I volunteered, rather disappointed to have seen my informers converted from locals into respective holders of the very same two passports I was carrying in the Peruvian pouch that was hanging from my neck, below the eye-catching green shirt and under the Samburu necklaces. But it was still not six in the Spanish capital, and the Metro had yet to open its gates. So I walked, first along the Called de la Reina Cristina, and then along the Calle de la Infanta Isabel, passing Marlboro signboard after signboard showing off the very Arizona landscape I had flown over 72 hours before, until I stumbled upon the open gates of another Metro station.

Dawn had not broken in foggy Plaza Colón at 7 AM, nor had any of the coffee shops Madrid is famous for and I was so anxiously looking for opened. In a city that prided itself in going to sleep late, nobody seemed to take pride in getting up early. But a stroll down the Paseo de Recoletos succeeded in finding a just-opened cafetería which, despite the fact that churros had not yet arrived, promised to serve them about half an hour later and even had an electric plug that was generous enough to offer my laptop a socket while it lighted a cigarette dispenser with another.

My previous experience with cortados prompted me to ask for the larger café con leche, 'but with lots of coffee and little milk'. This did not work, however; it just earned myself a cortado in a half-empty large cup. I watched Madrid sluggishly wake up, first to the bar, then to the cigarette dispenser, which was an inch to my left, beyond a glass panel within the cafetería that served as a window through which I watched the cancer-patients-to-be and they watched me, smiling at my laptop as though I suffered from a funny disease. Gradually, people started sitting at the tables, at eight some light made itself visible through the clouds, and with it came the first waiter. By quarter to nine, when I stood up to leave, the churros were there and ready, and I asked their price. The manager, surprised that I was so anxious for just one or two these elongated pastries, told me that if I all I wanted was that, it was free. I walked away happy, and after half a block's walk turned around to ask for more, this time decided to pay for them. But it was in vane; the manager was even more amused than before and insisted that I take it for free and return for breakfast the following morning. When I answered that I would be delighted to were I not destined to be in California by then, he told me to enjoy it, while I wandered off wondering whether the cause of benefaction had been my Argentinian carpincho boina, my ever-entertaining laptop, the remote possibility of me being a well-known novelist, or the sum of all the above.

At Barajas International Airport's post office, a German lady was politely asking the attendant:"Could I jaav sam stamps?" "Porrrr favorrrr?", she added hastily, and then proceeded to compliment Spanish stamps, complaining that Germany did not have any beautiful stamps. I found it hardly surprising, then, that Helmut Kohl had just lost his Chancellorship to Schröder.

The TWA employee performing the customary interrogation about baggage required of anybody using an American carrier traveling to the U.S. seemed annoyed that I was not excited enough about her questions to stop looking for a sweater in my bag while I responded. She patiently waited for me to finish before she began, despite my insistence that I would do my best to reply truthfully even as my hand searched through the very bag she was asking me about. For the nth time since I had started reading Dale Carnegie's How to make friends and influence people, I was verifying man's (and woman's) need to feel important.

At passport control, two officers juggled with an Italian tourist, each trying to lose possession of him so that the other one would have to deal with understanding Italian, while the poor man tried to explain that her wife had been left on the other side of the control booths and asked whether he could go fetch her or had to relinquish any thoughts of reclaiming her in time to catch a flight together. Meanwhile, I handed the officer at my booth my German passport and he handed me an antimalarial pill. With the certainty that I had not taken the pill I had brought along for that purpose came some doubt in my head as to whether I had taken no pill or Eva's.

I sat beside a Puerto Rican renegade model. She was reluctant to talk, much more to admit she was a model. Three days into her work in New York City, she had been offered the chance to go to Milan, and which starting model would not take up an invitation to work in Milan. But she soon found out that Italians were pigs, she said, and that only 'friends' of the managers made any progress. She left to work in Spain, but was dismayed to find that Spanish only liked one stereotype of woman. Perhaps what she did not like was that she did not fit that stereotype, I thought of venturing, but did not. I did not ask her either whether she had ever thought that it is precisely the fact that people like particular types of people that gives models a job at all, or any passerby would do the job and render it purposeless. To be fair to her, though, Spain is indeed the most self-absorbed country I know, a country where travel beyond the national borders is not in fashion and perhaps the only western country where it is still easy to find well-educated people who do not know what peanut butter tastes like, a blessed cultural survivor of the all-homogenizing global era. In any case, the hurricane that had just devastated Puerto Rico had given her an excuse to take a break and visit her family. She was sick of being a model, did not even want to be called that. What would she do after her break then?, I asked. Go back to anthropology school?

"Are you crazy? I want to travel. I'll go to London and resume modeling there".

In the meanwhile, a screen that purported to be showing a news report displayed a series of tasteless, insipid, timeless stories. The latest 'news' included the production of a symphonic concert by high school students, the not-altogether-surprising cooking of Creole dishes in New Orleans, and the measures the Federal Reserve takes against fraud. Among these pieces carefully orchestrated to be timeless, though, had slipped a mistake due to an unforeseeable act of God: the screen was inviting absent-minded tourists to travel to sunny Puerto Rico.

On my other side sat a Spanish chemistry student who was using a three-month break he had from school to go learn English in Dallas. Would he be able to learn English in three months?, he asked. I told him that depended on whether he spent his time among the English- or the Spanish-speaking population of Dallas. To which he countered by enduring the next four hours of his life watching two movies in a language he did not understand, while my Puerto Rican neighbor heard the Spanish soundtrack. After all, that's what travel is all about: briefly living life somebody else's way.