The Tale of the Lost Beloved

Gypsy Lou began:

"The streets of Barcelona run as forgotten rivers between buildings like cliffs on each side. Balconies nest outside each facing room and you can spit into the kitchen of your neighbour opposite. Yesterday's arguments and laughter ricochet in these urban canyons. Silence is as much as a stranger as the sunlight that never really finds its way in.

Only tough beauty survives here. The locals all have an extra layer of muscle over their faces in protection against the strange temper of the streets. Cities are not places for cry babies. They are the domain of the restless, the dissatisfied who roam the capillaries of the beating concrete heart, hunting for God knows what, aware that we may never find it.

And lovers of the city don’t just wander in self-absorbed exile, stuck inside the confines of our own moods. The beauty of the home of millions is that we lose ourselves in the fabric of a myriad stories, each one of them different yet alive with a resonance that seduces the sympathy of our hearts.

I live to wander through the streets, the ghosts of lost, forgotten memories disappearing into my nostrils and ears. Most of all I love to walk through the night, treading dangerous ways and surrendering myself to the mercy of the chance encounter. Accompanied only by the sound of my footsteps and my shadow that grows and falls away with each passing streetlight.

And then I find that the night has abandoned me and the morning slips up behind with a cheerful song and all the AM people come out. They head to their jobs, they walk their dogs, they take their children to school. It’s not long before I feel myself beginning to fade. I need coffee. I pray that the shadowed streams of cobbled stone I tread will soon open out to an open plaza basking in early sunshine, tables and chairs of a cafe awaiting me. It’s in character with this city that I can never find the same one twice.

And on this one day, I'm already into my second expresso when I'm distracted by the sight of an old man in the distance. Although he’s wearing his smart church clothes, he’s swaying from side to side as he gazes up at the balconies. I guess he's either a dedicated alcoholic to be so obliterated by 9 am or else he's hopelessly lost, struggling to read the street signs with fading eyes.

But actually, neither explanation fits. Because as he comes closer I can hear that his voice is sober and unslurred. He's just loco. He stops in front of every balcony and calls up a whole load of women's names, many of them archaic and out of fashion. He either receives no response or else gets a deserved bucket of cold water dumped on him from whoever he’s woken up at this unhealthy hour.

"It's a very sad story." Comes the deep voice of the patron behind me, laying a thick hand upon my shoulder and seating himself a-straddle a chair. I can hardly see the skin for the hair on his arms and his face is flushed red from a lifetime’s affection for the grape.

"He has been this way since I was a child. For the last forty years I have heard him cry all day long like a lost dog and his desperation grows by the year." He tells me and fingers his breast pocket for a cigar and lighter. I wait for the story that will tumble out of my new acquaintance's mouth as surely as the pigeons will soon shit on the street.

"It is said that this poor soul was once powerfully in love with a woman so beautiful and charming that he was hated by half the men in the city. He was no one special, you understand, to be so favoured but perhaps he was the only one possessed of love strong enough to match her own.

I used to watch him writing feverish love poems at this very table when, as a boy, I wiped the surfaces and cleared the ashtrays for my father. He never once looked up from his poetry but he never failed to leave me a small coin and so he had my affection from the first. I sometimes awoke in the night to see them from my bedroom window, sitting on a bench in the shadows, hiding their love from her family who were reluctant to let her marry so far beneath herself.

Still, their love was so strong that the day would undoubtedly have come when the two of them could have realized their happiness as man and wife. But perhaps it was the blinding intensity of his love that proved his ruin, for he became single-minded and proud. Nothing else in the world mattered to him except her and he no longer had the time to stop and talk about the weather.

Now at that time it was not unknown for wandering dervishes to pass through here, travelling between Turkey and Morocco when the North African routes were too dangerous - Or perhaps because of some ancestral nostalgia for when all of Spain was awash with the sounds of the Qur'an.

Well, one morning, this love-struck young man happened to turn a corner without looking and he bumped smack into one of the oldest and most mean-tempered dervishes known - no doubt he was wise enough. But his ways were damn tough and no one cared to get on the wrong side of his tongue. Straight off he flew into a rage and shouted:

-Why the hell can't you watch where you're going?

-I have more important things to think about, the young man replied, pissed that he had lost hold of the verse he was working on.

-What can be more important than your Path? The dervish cried.

-Why, my Beloved, of course.

At this, the Muslim pulled himself up to his full height and screamed:

-So you think you have found a love to obscure all else, eh? Then your arrogance earns you this curse - May you forget the name of your Beloved.

Then the dervish spun on his heels and walked out of the city. We never say him again.

After this the youth stood in a daze, his eyes glazed over and his lips shaking. The enchantment was so strong that he didn't just forget her name, he also lost the memory of how she looked, where she lived and, in fact, everything else about her. All that he knew was that he loved her with all the life within him.

It was then that he began to wander through the streets, calling up at every balcony and checking the face of every woman that he passed. But it was no good, for the one time that he did meet his love, in this very plaza, as I remember, he failed to recognize her and mooched on in his relentless search. She was devastated, of course and supposed that he'd found another. Her family took advantage of her broken will to move to another city before he might recover. The two of them never met again.

And now, forty years later, he still just drifts through the streets, always dressed up and with his hair oiled to look at his best, just in case this will be the day that reunites them. There is not a house in the city that has not met his hopeful gaze and he has sworn not to die until he sees his Beloved once more. Though that is now unlikely as I heard she passed away five years ago in Valencia.

I’ve learned to tell the time by when he approaches and I carry on the tradition of my deceased father in feeding him coffee and croissant every day. He is a true martyr to love."

The patron rises and clears a table for the old man who now steps closer without ever looking our way. Finally, his head swivels round and he meets my eyes.

"It's you." He cries, "At last."

I almost choke on my coffee as he comes to his knees before me. His eyes fill with tears and he grips onto my ankles with knotted fingers.

"Don't worry." He says. "I have not gone mad... It's just that I see now - What the dervish was trying to tell me. Everyone's face is that of my Beloved and every name too."

His smile cracks through forty years of sorrow and the wonder of a child nestles in his eyes. He sighs with intense relief, letting go of a lifetime of loneliness and the patron catches his head before it hits the ground. But there is no one left to feel the pain. He is gone, reunited at last.”

Chapter 11