Por: Angel Perdomo
The bus station where this fictional story takes place.
I rushed out of the tram towards the bus station. I sprinted my way up the stairs through the rush hour masses, and just as I reached the second floor, I saw my bus leaving the station. I took a deep breath and tried to let out my frustration along with my respiration. Feeling dumb and resigned, I walked towards the screen where the next departures were announced—I would have to wait twenty minutes. Not too bad, I thought. The next natural action was, of course, picking the appropriate waiting playlist. I pulled out my phone from my pocket only to be greeted by the dark unresponsive screen casting back my desperate reflection. For a moment I felt like I finally understood what Nietzsche meant by “when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back…”
And then I remembered that I could just find an outlet and charge my phone.
I looked around and located an outlet in a corner of the small waiting area of the terminal. I plugged in my phone, and with nothing better to do I decided to people-watch in the meantime. There were rows of benches facing one another. An elderly lady arrived at the benches at around the same time as a woman of around forty years old, who was also looking at her phone.
“Hi!” The elderly lady said warmly, recognising the woman. “How are you? How is the family?”
“Oh, hi,” the woman said a bit absentmindedly. “Doing fine, what about you?”
“Doing fantastic,” The elderly lady said with a large smile. “Never been better.”
“Glad to hear that,” she responded, and a natural silence ensued.
They both sat opposite to each other. The woman pulled out an Ikea magazine and slowly looked through the newest Swedish furniture. Kallax, Eket, Hemnes, Gersby… On the other hand, the elderly lady seemed off. She constantly looked around, shifting her position, fixing her posture, and her heel was constantly tapping the floor, going faster by the minute. Tap. Tap. Taptaptaptap…
Ten minutes later—she seemed to have reached her limit.
“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven,” the elderly lady said, addressing the woman, but really addressing the room. “Seven people! And no one is talking to someone. How ugly is that?”
“Huh… yeah.” Replied the woman, barely taking her eyes off the Swedish furniture. “The times.”
“Back in may day,” began the elderly lady. “We would actually talk to the people around us, that’s how we meet new people.” Sometimes those people stuck around for life, you know? Nowadays however, the youth never talk to each other, they just look at their smartphones all day. You can’t even get them to focus or hold onto any information. They are so dependent on”—here she used dramatic air quotes—“the Google. I turned eighty-four this year and I can still remember most things. Ask the youth of today if they can recite all the capital cities of Spain and they can’t. Well, I’ll tell you. In the Canaries, we have Santa Cruz de Tenerife and Las Palmas de Gran Canarias. In Andalucía, you have Almeria, Cadiz, Cordoba, Granada, Huelva, Jaén, Málaga, and Sevilla. In Aragón, you have Huesca, Teruel, Zaragoza…”
At this point, she continued to recite all communities and provinces of Spain. I didn’t know how accurate her statements were—I didn’t have the Google to double check—but I was impressed nonetheless.
Ending her long monologue with a huff, she declared:“I always had a good memory, but it is thanks to using my brain and keeping active that I retain my youthfulness.”
The people around her, a teenage girl with her father sitting next to her, and some other folks probably in their thirties gave her a polite smile. The elderly lady noticed this change in the atmosphere and decided to extend her speech.
“The reason why I have such a good memory,” she said, gifting a smile to her audience. “Is because I keep myself active—I have gone swimming every week since I was four. Let me show you!’
She got up, positioned herself in the middle of the benches, and raised her hands towards the sky. She slowly went down and touched the tip of her toes with her fingers. She then swiftly sprung back up with her arms still up—she had a flare of showmanship—and turned towards the teenage girl and said, “If you go swimming every week you might still be able to do that by the time you are my age”. The teenage girl replied with a shy smile which was echoed by the other onlookers including myself.
At this moment two elderly gentlemen arrived at the benches. One of them caught her attention.
“You,” She said, pointing at the first of the two. “Do I know you?”
“I don’t think so,” he replied politely.
“No,” She said thoughtfully. “Are you From Santa Cruz?”
“Yes, I am,” he answered timidly, somewhat shocked by her forwardness.
“I have seen you before!” She said excitedly. “Ten years ago I think…your family lives near La Castillo, right?”
“Yes, they do,” He said quietly, feeling a bit taken aback.
‘I remember, I first met some of your relatives in the eighties, during my party-girl days…’
At this point, I realised that I wouldn’t be able to hear the story of her party-girl days because my bus was leaving and I couldn't afford to miss another bus. I unplugged my phone from the wall, and boarded onto one of the back seats. I switched on my phone and got out my headphones—at this point, a mechanical, automatic action. But today was different: I decided that I was better off with no playlist, podcast or YouTube video. I sat and observed my fellow humans, all of them looking at their phones. I thought of googling “Parties during the eighties in Santa Cruz” but didn’t because it would defeat the purpose and probably wouldn’t be as interesting as to how the elderly lady would have told it. So I just spent the next forty-five minutes looking at the large expanse of blue ocean flash by, trying to imagine what being young was like during the eighties.
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