Having a limoncello with you
From the depths of my brain to yours!
Hello and happy mid-December! This week, Hanoi decided all at once to engage in winter, which means the season of being perpetually a little bit cold in my drafty apartment. It’s also another year of having miserably chilly hands on the motorbike, but constantly forgetting to buy gloves when I’m off the motorbike. However, the nostalgia of this being my last grim and gray Northern Vietnam December is warming me from the inside, so I persist. Also, it feels wonderfully Christmassy.
But instead of talking about Spotify Wrapped or snow, which were among my ideas for this week’s newsletter, I’m going to ask you all to suspend your seasonal expectations and join me instead in… the summer of 2018. Gasp!
Recently, the course of a conversation fortuitously stirred a memory that had been dormant for quite some time, of a hilariously strange woman I met on the Camino de Santiago many years ago. I was struck not only by what a fond memory it was, but also by the fact that I hadn’t thought about it in so long, and that in that time bumbling around in the back of my brain, some of the details and texture had eroded away.
It’s bizarre how we can’t do much of anything to stop even our fondest memories from fading like a favorite piece of clothing in the wash. I think it was the unsettling nature of this fact, more than anything, that had my mind replaying the memory over and over in the days following the chat that resurrected it. And I think that’s why I feel so inclined to tell you about it now, if for no other reason than that someone ought to know before I forget it entirely. Before my hard drive deletes more of it to make room for another themed birthday party or New York Times cooking recipe.
In recalling fondly this long-gone day, and in writing about it, I also started to think about my longtime favorite poem, “Having a Coke with You” by Frank O’Hara.
The poem, written by O’Hara about his lover, is straightforwardly about romantic love, and the way no art can compare to the object of your affection. I’ve always loved this direct meaning, but what has made the poem stick with me is more so the general sentiment that art is wonderful, but people, romantic or platonic, are better. And so, you’ll have to forgive me for being a cheesy loser and interspersing lines from the poem throughout this essay. You can also read the whole poem here.
In June of 2018, the summer after my freshman year of college, Ellie, Phoebe (for those new to the newsletter, see: best friends), and I flew to Lisbon to begin the Portuguese section of the Camino de Santiago. We went to high school together but had split up for college, and reuniting was as much a part of the scheme as the adventure itself.
At the risk of sounding like a dick for explaining something you might already know about, the Camino is a network of pilgrimage trails through different parts of Europe that all converge in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. The most popular starting point is the French Pyrenees, but the route we chose started in Porto and ran for two weeks up through Portugal and into the northwestern chunk of Spain. You walk all day and at night sleep in basic boardinghouses in the small towns that dot the trail. It’s absurdly charming.
“Having a coke with you is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne”
I was dazzled to be allowed to experience it. I’ve written about times in my life when I’ve lost my senses, but if I had to point to a time in my life when they were at their height, it would have been these two weeks. Every stream was brilliantly icy, and every tube of sour cream and onion Pringles was more flavorful than the last. And because it was the first big trip I had ever planned on my own, I was eager to do it well. I acquired multiple maps. And I still giggle to see the guidebook I brought on that trip, now sitting on the bookshelf in my childhood bedroom, with a hundred neon tabs earmarking different historic ruins and structures to visit along the way.
Because of the nature of a trip on the Camino (alternating between walking and sleeping), we ended up with lots of recurring trail characters. These are the people who were walking at the same pace as us, and therefore sleeping in the same towns on the same nights. Among these people were some very noteworthy personalities, including an artist who was collecting bugs from the trailside to turn into earrings, and a young German woman who was walking the Camino alone to decide which of two men from home she was going to marry. Congruently, we all marched from Porto to Barcelos to Ponte de Lima, and then over the border bridge to Spain and through the towns of Tui and Redondela.
We plodded on storybook-like arched bridges and stopped to admire historic churches, each more beautiful but at the same time more ambiguous to us than the last.
In Pontevedra, about 10 days into the trek with four left to go, we woke up with the sun to start one of our longer sections of the pilgrimage. We walked, sleepy and quiet, in the slanting morning light, the only sounds being the occasional tug of discomfort on our backpacks or the clumsy clomping of our shoes on the sidewalk. This was one of the largest towns we’d pass through on the trip, and could perhaps actually be called a small city with its 80,000 people. In lieu of cobblestones and historic wells, Pontevedra had the less whimsical apartment blocks and chain shops.
From the silent morning, a taxi suddenly turned the corner and halted at the curb in front of us. Out burst a woman shouting animatedly in Spanish, followed more reluctantly by a man who seemed stunned into silence. She was dressed in a scarlet jumpsuit and was was balancing on her 5-inch patent black heels, which complemented her tumbling black hair. He was wearing a navy suit and already had his house keys out of his pocket before the taxi drove off. She pursued him like a cat pawing at a mouse as we tried, bewildered by the scene and feeling suddenly foolish in our hiking clothes, to quietly skirt around them.
“and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank”
“American girls, are you walking to Santiago?” She turned suddenly and asked. To which we nodded our assent.
“My boyfriend, here with the receding hairline,” she said, pointing at the man as he tried himself to recede into the building’s entryway. “He just broke up with me in the club tonight. Can you believe that?”
And we had to admit, we couldn’t. On even first glance, this woman, whose name I either never knew or can’t remember, was miraculous. Perhaps difficult to date, but hard to love? Certainly not. It was like she’d been plucked from the set of a Bridget Jones movie and plopped into our universe, like a freshly concocted Sim. She turned back to her allegedly balding ex with a final remark:
“Your mother is going to be very disappointed.”
And then, she whisked us down the street to join her in the increasingly dazzling summer morning.
She asked where we were headed, besides to Santiago, and we said we were looking for breakfast. She assured us that she knew the perfect cafe, and led us faster in her heels than us in our hiking boots, through the twisted streets to an unknown destination. Evidently (and impressively) still very drunk from the night before, this woman in red had somehow cemented herself as our tour guide.
“It is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth”
“I bet you American girls think ‘carpeta’ means ‘carpet’ in English,” she kindly scolded us, completely unprompted. “But it actually means file’. Everyone gets that wrong.”
She continued to advise us on other false-cognates to avoid lest we look foolish, while intermittenly stopping in her tracks to introduce us to someone-or-other from the neighborhood. The man walking his dog, the garbage collector, the poor, confused man unloading a truck of beer. I wish I could remember exactly what she said to them. To this day I haven’t a clue if she actually knew these people personally or was just in that perfect phase of intoxication when everyone is your best friend. Either way, the drama with which she accosted all of these neighbors, like she was Belle in the opening number of Beauty and the Beast, had us laughing more than I ever have before 7 in the morning.
When we arrived at the promised cafe, now an hour behind our schedule and set to arrive in the next town after dark, we opened the door to find it crowded with people chatting, smoking, and reading the paper. The buzz in the room was perfect to conceal a party as odd as our own. Our fearless leader collapased into a chair and immediately ordered four espressos, four empanadas, and four shots of limoncello.
We sipped away in the warm room and happily let the time tick on as this woman detailed hilariously her evening the night before, many of the details of which are now lost to me, annotating the story with dramatic, alcohol-fueled, hand flourishes.
And then, apparently sobered up a bit from her espresso shot and realizing the chaotic situation she’d constructed, our well-dressed companion stepped outside to call a friend who was probably worried. That was the last we saw of her. After waiting a bit, we assumed she had come to her senses on the advice of the friend and gone home to bed. On my more imaginative recollections, I like to think she was never real to begin with, but just a glamorous ghost come to remind us of all that is dazzling in life.
In any event, we paid and went on our way to try and recover lost time in making it to the next town on our agenda. To do so, we had to skip the ancient stone wells and statues that we’d have previously used the Camino guidebook to sniff out and admire. Instead, we passed the nine-hour walk talking about our strange morning, then other strange encounters, then just about anything at all, each other’s company carrying us along the roads.
“I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time”
As for the minutiae of the story that has eroded to so much anonymous dust, I like to think it’s still floating around in my mind somewhere, coloring everything a bit.
If you’re enjoying Kitchen Sink and are interested in supporting my work, you can always Buy Me a Coffee. If it’s not in your budget, you can support me by thinking Christmassy thoughts. Or you can always:
The bullet points:
I’ve been a little bit sick of Spotify Wrapped for perhaps two years now, but this year I found myself particularly annoyed by the whole ordeal. Part of it probably stems from self-hatred at my Top 5 lists, but I also think something about the concept in general is irking me. Anyone else feeling this way? Let me know.
I have three weeks to read two more Jane Austen books in order to complete my 2024 resolution. I’d like to thank Ella Feldman for importing a copy of Emma for me on her recent visit. It takes a village!
As always, the holidays are making me miss everyone, and I wish I could be in 100 places at once. I’ve long realized this is a blessing of a problem, but nonetheless tragic. Sending so many virtual hugs!
Don’t forget to have at least one Terry’s Chocolate Orange this month!
Love,
Ryley