Córdoba
We had been in Granada only a few weeks before my love grew restless. Our stationary existence had brought to light incompatibilities that constant motion had thus far kept concealed. Another city was always the antidote. The disconnection between us was accompanied by a mounting sense of dread that neither of us wanted to acknowledge. So, as the bickering reached a fever pitch, she had the bright idea that another trip was in order.
“Let’s go to Córdoba. We ought to see all of Andalusia. When’s the next time we’ll be here?”
At first I protested. We had hardly been off the plane for a month and the apartment where we were staying was costing me a fortune. Why do we need to go somewhere else to spend money? I was working tirelessly as an editor trying to make ends meet on this fix-it trip around Europe. But then she pulled out the unwavering Amex linked to her parents’ bank account, the one that had solved so many of our problems for so many months. She offered to pay for a luxury hotel with world-famous baths and a two Michelin star restaurant in the lobby. I could not but oblige.
We did, however, make one concession for the sake of the budget. We would rent a stick shift car, much cheaper than its automatic counterpart. This, I would pay for myself. I offered to accept the archaic option because when I was 16 I had owned a 1990 Mazda Miata with a manual transmission. I regaled my love with tales of how I had learned to drive it quite skillfully in the hills of the Ozarks. I did not mention, however, that I had only driven the car for three months before I was t-boned on a country highway and shoved into oncoming traffic, totaling the car. I simply hoped that my time with the vehicle had been sufficient to ingrain into my muscle memory the necessary pattern of pressing the clutch, shifting, and accelerating.
On the morning of our departure I was nervous. I had come to feel that my value in our relationship depended on putting forth a front of masculinity that meant I could drive stick shift cars, chop wood, make money, and support our lavish lifestyle while my love lazed in stoned complacency. Her resignation, I would later learn, was the manifestation of an unhappiness that she could not express in words.
As we sat down to breakfast on the balcony of our apartment overlooking the Alhambra—the 13th century Moorish castle that served as a backdrop to the dissolution of our relationship—I was quiet. I silently watched YouTube videos on how to operate a manual transmission under the table. Given the fragile nature of our connection at the time, my love took my quiet as a sign of displeasure with her and so began to probe ceaselessly about what it was that was bothering me.
“Why are you acting like you hate me?”
I tried to relay my fear without shaking her confidence in my ability to safely convey us to our destination. This was my first time driving in a foreign country, after all. This answer was unsatisfying to her, and she continued attacking me for the duration of the 45-minute walk to the car rental office. This had the effect of slowly producing in me the exact grudge that she presumed I was harboring from the outset.
After hauling our luggage out of the uneven streets of the Albaicín, my patience and good-will towards my love’s nervous assumption had worn thin. As we approached the rental office, I let out a calm, measured, “Oh, fuck you,” and then walked inside.
By this time my love, an American who bore a Spanish name that elicited a string of a rapid dialect when used to make a dinner reservation, had begun to refuse to speak her passable Spanish. I can only presume out of resentment for me. This left me to handle all of our interactions in my broken high school Spanish.
“Tengo una reserva,” I choked out while she stood behind me, arms crossed, mouth agape in disbelief of what she had just heard.
I stumbled through the interaction and was eventually rewarded for my effort with a key to a gray Citroën SUV. Once safely inside the vehicle we broke into a tempest of screeching and hollering, the boiling over of a pot that has been left simmering for weeks.
I screamed both out of anger with her and from the anxiety I felt while driving the car. I jolted the beast of a vehicle through the parking garage, stalling twice before making it out on to the street. As she realized that I could not, in fact, confidently operate a manual transmission, her rage intensified. However, I hit neither car nor pedestrian and I managed to keep the stalling to a minimum as we made our way to the highway.
Once the car was safely in fifth gear, I began to relax. I set to work de-escalating the situation, praying that we were not on the precipice of spending thousands of dollars just to hate each other in a novel location. Over the course of the next few hours, we managed to find some understanding between us. However, as we took the highway exit for Córdoba I made one last inflammatory remark.
“Why do you keep doing this?”
This time there was no screaming, just silence.
Earlier, I had asked her to enter the address of the hotel where we were due to stay, but in the midst of our scrimmage she had entered only the name of the city for which we were bound. So, while attempting to operate the vehicle on ever-narrowing streets, I began to fumble with my phone, searching for the name of the hotel which I had neglected to learn in advance. I begged my reticent love to please help me. My shirt was soaked through with sweat and my hands were shaking. All of this was taking place under 30 km/hr in the most sensitive of gears.
Fearing the destruction of the car whose insurance plan I had, admittedly, paid for with her parents’ credit card, I parked the car in a small lot that seemed to appear out of nowhere. For a moment, everything was calm. I reveled in my accomplishment. I had not made it to the hotel, not yet, but surely, we were close! The vehicle had not been destroyed, and we were safe, although unhappy. I led my love to a park to try to calm her down and eventually coaxed out of her the name of the hotel she had booked.
We both felt as though we had had our fill of the misery machine, so we decided to walk down the cobblestone streets in search of our lodgings. We eventually came to a set of large wooden doors with a small plaque bearing the name of the palacio. They were opened for us by two porters dressed in white. Exhausted, I explained the situation to them in a mix of poor Spanish, emphatic English, guttural grunts, and pointing. Eventually, they led me to a British concierge with whom I was able to communicate more civilly. I felt great relief at being able to express my exhaustion in English. I handed over the key to a handsome young Spanish man who was sent to retrieve the car.
My love’s face was wet and soft from crying. Her eye makeup streamed down her cheeks giving her a look of disheveled beauty. For this I received several concerned looks from the hotel staff. I hoped they would chalk it up to the stress caused by my inability to drive the vehicle gracefully. Finally, the car was pulled into the drive and we were shown to our room.
Once inside we proceeded to have awful, rude sex, the kind she had demanded of me more and more as the tensions between us had grown. This, I indulged. The choking, slapping and scratching acted out the frustrations we had clearly failed to adequately express in the preceding hours. Once finished, I gulped down a split of champagne from the mini bar that cost God-knows-how-much and collapsed on the bed in a depressed heap. She went down to lunch in the courtyard alone.
When I awoke from my fugue, I spent a few hours editing and writing. Seeing as I was paid by the word, I worked furiously, trying to make enough money to justify the massive expenditure that was about to take place at dinner.
I decided to handle this episode the same way I had handled other episodes in the last few weeks: by getting fabulously drunk. While sharing apéritifs at the bar, it seemed as if things might turn around and we might enjoy ourselves for the evening. However, during the appetizers, she remembered the sleight she had been dealt outside the rental office in Granada, and we passed the next seven courses in silence. I for one was sufficiently sedated to at least be able to enjoy the cuisine. My only displeasure stemmed from the knowledge of how much money we were spending on such a terrible time.
After dinner, we retreated to the room to have it out once more. She, finally wishing to make amends, admitted that this had been her fault, that she had started a fight just to start a fight. She said that she did not know why she kept doing this. I told her I didn't care why but that I only wanted it to stop.
Finally, we collapsed into each other, this time making love. At this point, it was late. We had spent the entire day in disarray and had not enjoyed a second of Córdoba together. We decided to head out for the night and see what could be salvaged of the trip.
Although we had ostensibly both quit smoking cigarettes six months before, we bought a pack and went looking for a lighter. I refused to buy another because we had left several in Granada and I could not stand to spend one more unnecessary cent. Despite the new easygoing mood that accompanied us in the night, she still refused to speak Spanish. This left me to approach groups of burly Spanish men huddled around their beers with pretty women sat on their laps.
"Tienes encendedor?" I demanded.
Eventually we got a hit. I insisted that we keep chain smoking so that I would not have to have the embarrassing interaction again.
The astounding amount of attention that my dear, sweet love paid to her physical appearance had the pleasant effect of us being offered free admission and drinks to clubs and bars. This lightened my mood, and we enjoyed our celebrity status on our dissociative tour of old Córdoba. Most of the clubs were full of teenagers and, although we entertained fantasies of making friends, even meeting someone to fuck together in a last-ditch effort to rekindle our connection, the groups of Spaniards lining the streets proved impenetrable.
We walked around until 4 a.m. before finally going back to the hotel to take a hot bath. Because of all the alcohol and the inability to get away from each other, my anger did not have a means of escape and so stayed with me throughout the few hours of sleep that greeted me around 6 a.m.
Upon waking, we enjoyed a breakfast of Spanish omelettes and cold cuts on a glass floor that looked down on the Roman ruins atop which the hotel had been built. Afterwards we were shown the ruins along with a Chinese family dressed head to toe in Louis Vuitton that my love informed me was real, not the fake stuffed peddled in the shops on the streets.
Afterwards, we loaded our bags into the car and set out to explore the city in the light of day. We toured the Diocese of Córdoba, the church turned mosque turned church whose religious allegiances had shifted over the centuries along with those of the hegemony of the Iberian Peninsula. There, I was graced with the first moment of peace I had felt since the preceding morning. Surrounded by so much splendor, a sense of religious feeling overcame me, and I thought I might release the frustrations that had plagued the last 30 hours. This saintly halo was ripped from my head when my love complained that my eyes lingered too long on a few fine Spanish waists. I could not argue with this and so I hid my wandering gaze behind a pair of dark sunglasses.
We returned to the hotel where my love attempted to erase my unhappiness with a swipe of that cold metal credit card. The meal, the room, and the spa services we had booked and abandoned, would be charged. Her parents would likely not even notice the sizable sum. We clambered into the vehicle. This time, I dealt with the clutch tenderly. Before pulling out of the drive, I squeezed my love’s hand and planted a gentle kiss on her delicate cheek.
“We’ll be okay,” I said, pressing my forehead to hers and looking into her eyes. “I’ll make it okay.”
For the next several months, I let myself believe that I could.