Chapter 13
Jade
New-to-me cities like Valencia are best approached without a plan.
I’ve learned this over the years—the ones that reward you most are the ones you let lead, and Valencia is leading me down a narrow street full of orange trees and laundry strung between windows and the smell of something frying somewhere I can’t identify but intend to find.
We got in this morning from Zurich, and while I should be checking emails or practicing, I made an escape instead.
I have my phone out, taking pictures of things that don’t matter.
A cat on a step. A doorway painted the specific shade of yellow that only exists in Spain.
A menu board with a drawing of a prawn that I find deeply charming.
These pictures will go into my camera roll and I will scroll past them in six months and feel briefly, pleasantly nostalgic. That’s what they’re for.
The Polaroid is in my bag.
I’ve had it for twelve years, bought from a vintage shop in Nashville on a work trip where I had a free afternoon and nowhere specific to be.
It came with half a cartridge of film already loaded.
The first picture I took on it was of myself, in the shop mirror, squinting slightly into the flash.
I still have it somewhere in the collection.
The collection moves with me everywhere.
Two shoeboxes now, taped shut and bubble-wrapped, in whatever city I’m calling home.
Twelve years of Polaroids: myself in front of things, mostly, sometimes my friends, and occasionally a person I met along the way who agreed to be documented.
A woman in Kyoto who shared her umbrella.
A retired fisherman in Lisbon who wanted to know where I was from and then told me I was very far from home, like this was news.
A family in Budapest who invited me to sit with them at a festival and spent the evening teaching me words I have since forgotten.
I take the tourist pictures with my phone. I save the Polaroid for things I want to keep.
The fried dough smell demands my attention, so I follow it for four more blocks before I find the source: a woman at a folding table, frying something on a portable burner, selling portions wrapped in paper to a small queue of locals.
I join the queue. I don’t know what it is.
That’s fine. I pay two euros and eat one standing on the pavement—doughy, hot, a little crispy at the edges—and it’s exactly right.
When I ask the woman what it is, she smiles and tells me “bunuelos.”
“Delicious,” I say in Spanish and the corner of her eyes wrinkle in pleasure.
This. This is why I travel.
I’m reading a street sign when someone falls into step beside me.
“You’re going the wrong way,” Carlos says.
I turn around. He’s holding a coffee, dressed for the June heat in dark trousers and a white linen shirt with the sleeves already rolled up. He looks like he’s been up for hours.
“Are you following me?”
He points just up the road that I came down. “I was in that cafe. The market is that way,” he says, nodding in the opposite direction.
“Who says I’m going to the market?”
“Maybe you weren’t. But you should.”
He’s right about the market, which I refuse to acknowledge out loud but which is evident from the moment we walk in.
The Mercado Central is vast and domed and completely overwhelming in the best possible way—a mosaic ceiling over a thousand stalls, the morning rush in full swing, the air thick with the smell of fish and citrus and the specific richness of good jamón.
I take phone pictures. The pyramids of tomatoes. The fish laid out on ice. The olive stall where Carlos makes me try three different varieties before he’ll let me buy any.
“This one,” I say, pointing.
“That one is fine.” He picks up a different container. “This one is better.”
“You haven’t let me taste that one.”
“You don’t need to. Trust me.”
“I am going to keep a running tally,” I tell him, “of every time you say trust me.”
The corners of his mouth do the thing they do when he’s suppressing a smile.
I’m getting good at spotting it, which is its own problem—the fact that I’ve been watching his mouth closely enough to catalog its habits.
I file this away next to the cologne and the rolled sleeves and the way he says trust me like it’s a perfectly reasonable thing to ask of me.
I suppose that, whatever our differences, trusting a Spaniard with food choices isn’t too much of a stretch.
We leave the market with olives, a paper cone of almonds, and an argument about paella. Carlos has opinions and is really mad when I say I’ve made it before with chorizo. He tilts his head toward the plaza. “La Basílica de la Virgen de los Desamparados is just here, if you want to see it.”
I go still for a moment. Then: “Sure.”
It takes us a few minutes to walk over. I study him as he leads.
I finally get the nerve to ask. “Are you religious?”
Carlos grunts. “No.” Then he looks at me out of the corner of his eye. “Are you?”
“Definitely not.”
He raises an eyebrow.
“My parents were really religious. Like—really. When things went wrong they prayed. Me and my sisters were raised to be obedient wives and bear children, which is not me.”
My parents’ faith was so strong that they often ignored what was right in front of them—their ill daughter, for example.
“My parents were . . . not that bad, but . . .” He shakes his head. “We disagreed on many things. Or, I should say, I disagreed with the church. My parents were too scared to even attempt to understand me.”
I smile grimly. “So we’re both in the religious trauma club. Are your parents still around?”
Carlos shakes his head, and then we’ve arrived and Carlos guides me to the entrance of the church.
Inside, it takes my eyes a moment to adjust—not to darkness, because the Basílica is surprisingly bright, but to the sheer density of it.
Baroque, all of it, every surface gilded or painted or both, the dome overhead swimming with figures.
It’s ornate in the way that feels less like decoration and more like insistence, like the building itself is arguing a point.
I take a phone picture of the dome. Then another of the nave, which is elliptical, smaller than I expected, more intimate.
There’s a queue of people along the left side—not tourists, not mostly—moving slowly toward a glass case at the front.
Women, mostly, some with children. A few reach out and touch the glass when they get close enough.
I don’t join the queue.
My parents, already religious before I got sick, became even more so after. Their prayer healed me, not the chemotherapy. I had believed it, for a while.
When I went to college, my eyes were opened. Not only did I learn so much about science and medicine, but I also learned so many of the other things my parents didn’t teach me.
Mainly, sex.
I take another picture.
Carlos is standing a few feet away, watching me.
I lower my phone. It’s quiet except for the murmurs of the woman whose fingertips are on the glass.
Wordlessly, we stroll back to the entrance. He’s quiet as he holds the door open for me, and we walk back into the heat. When we get far enough away, I stop and turn to Carlos. “Will you take my picture?”
He looks at me, then at the phone in my hand. I shake my head and reach into my bag.
The Polaroid is heavier than it looks. I hold it out to him and something shifts in his expression when he takes it—recognition, not puzzlement. He turns it over and runs a thumb over the logo.
“My mother had one of these,” he says. “An older version, anyway. I doubt many of those models exist anymore. She’d pull it out at family parties. You’d have to hold the picture and wave it around.”
“You’re not supposed to do that actually. It can damage the image.”
He looks at me. “We didn’t know that.”
“Nobody knew that. OutKast lied,” I tease.
Carlos’s brows draw together. “OutKast?”
If I was with my friends, I would bust out some dance moves, but after the church and learning about our mutual religious trauma, it feels too heavy for that. Instead, I shake my head. “Never mind. It’s not important.”
I walk back a bit, just enough that Carlos can get the church and most of me in the picture. I turn to face him.
Carlos raises the camera. Looks at me through the viewfinder for a long moment, and then counts down.
“Uno, dos y . . . ?Tres!”
The shutter clicks. The film slides out, and he holds it carefully by the edge, watching it develop with the focused attention he gives to everything.
“How’d it come out?” I ask, walking back to him.
He tilts it toward me. The image has come up clean—me in the bright sun, a smile, my hair cascading down from my ponytail over one shoulder.
“Good job,” I say.
He hands it back, then offers me back the camera. “You take these everywhere?”
“The camera, yes. The film I use—” I consider. “Carefully. I only take photos that are really important with it. They’re mementos that travel well.”
“How many do you have?”
“Two shoeboxes. Decades of them.”
He’s quiet for a moment, looking at the developing photograph in my hands. “They are all of you?”
“Mostly me. Some people I met.” I tuck the photograph into my bag, into the inside pocket where I keep the ones I want to protect. “I travel alone a lot. So.”
“How do you get photographs of yourself if you’re alone?”
I smile. “I ask someone. That’s how I make friends,” I say. “You’d be surprised. You ask a stranger to take your picture and you get thirty seconds of them focused entirely on you. Sometimes that’s all it takes.”
Carlos looks around the square—the tour groups, Spaniards going about their workday, the pigeons. “And you asked me.”
“I asked you,” I agree, and Carlos leads us out of the square.
We find a restaurant near the water that Carlos knows.
We order. Carlos raises his eyebrow when I ask for a cava, no doubt thinking the same thing Manny does—what are we celebrating? I shrug. “What is it you like about this restaurant?”
“The sofrito,” he says.
“Of course.”