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Published: September 21st 2006
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It’s half-past ten when I jump in the shower and a quarter to twelve when I’m finishing dinner, and at a few minutes shy of two in the morning, Karla and Patrick buzz the bell, ready for a night on the town.
I’m really, really too old for this. Really. Even in New York - no stranger to nightlife, let it be known - my best hard-drinking days were a distant, fuzzy memory by the time I’d left. Now and then - usually wrestled into a corner by some birthday-related guilt-trip - I could dust off the old dancing shoes, jumpstart the liver, and do serious damage to my internal organs. But really. That’s like saying now and then, Pinochet could find it in his heart to make 5,000 dissidents disappear.
Just because something
could be done doesn’t mean it
should.
There are a few main drags of bar-choked streets that draw most of the traffic, and if there’s a prevailing philosophy for how a night out in Salamanca should proceed, it would probably go something like: drink like it’s the only thing keeping four million puppies from dying an ugly death. These rowdy young
Salamancans, with their high-end jeans and protruding hip bones and extravagant mullets, knock back drinks and roar over the music and stumble to bar after bar, even though it’s half-past five. Karla - enjoying a rare night off from tending bar - leads us around with a sort of lascivious pride at her adopted city’s excess. There’s certainly something to be said for a town that’s still binge-drinking and dancing on the tables when the first streaks of daylight strike the stones of the Plaza Mayor.
Salamanca might be the original college town. Its university was gathering dust a few centuries before Columbus was even born, and on any given night, the streets and plazas swell with gaggles of college kids - by Karla’s estimate, 70,000 strong in a city of 200,000. I had an initiation into Salamanca life just minutes after arriving. Waiting for Karla and Patrick to greet me in the Plaza Mayor, I was surrounded by a posse of drunken students, decked out in afro wigs and frilly underwear. The new semester had just begun, and these poor, inebriated souls were being hazed into university life with the sorts of shameless rituals that, it seems,
are part of our common heritage. Songs were sung, dances danced; I watched one chubby girl - straining through the tiny bra clasped over her t-shirt - negotiate her way onto a lamppost to howls of encouragement.
All week long I’ve seen these same rites performed around the Plaza Mayor, with tipsy teens - their faces painted, their eyes woozy - maintaining the proud tradition no doubt begun by some bawdy, bleary-eyed scholars in the 13th century. Which isn’t to say that Salamanca’s just another party town. With its massive cathedral and sandstone buildings, the city’s an absolute beauty. I’ve spent days beating the pavement around the Plaza Mayor and the university, not at all embarrassed by the stupid, wide-eyed look on my face. You see it on others, too: the tourists fumbling with their maps, the American exchange students already wondering why they have to go back to Podunk U in the spring.
For a city of its size, Salamanca’s wildly cosmopolitan. I help a few gray-haired Brits trying to find the cathedral; I clamber over a few linguistic hurdles with a Japanese couple, delighted to see the name of their homeland written across my chest.
On a bench outside the Catedral Nueva, I fall into conversation with a young Greek anarchist studying at the university. In a curious mix of Spanish, Greek and English, he explains to me in earnest that there’s a great difference between WiFi and the Internet: that WiFi is just a small part of the vast reaches of cyberspace. I’m still not quite sure what he was getting at.
Outside the university I meet Eleonora, a pretty Italian girl who’s in Salamanca with the Erasmus program. We’re staring at the façade, looking for the famous frog that’s hidden among the elaborate carvings. Tradition holds that anyone who can find the frog without help will enjoy good luck within a year. What tradition says about someone who can’t find it in four tries after his guidebook has told him exactly where it is…well, I’d rather not speculate.
Eleonora, hidden behind a massive pair of shades, is craning her slim, tanned neck toward the sky. It’s tough going for the both of us. You have to appreciate how many little sculpted figures and whorls are chiseled into that damn wall. After a while we give up, though we vow to
find him before I leave. In a café, eating a packet of sugar with childish glee, Eleonora tells me about her life back home. At 20, she’s left her native Rome for the first time; she’s been gone for just over a week. When she talks about her family and friends, her dark eyes dance ecstatically. In slow, measured Spanish, she explains that these first days have been easier than she feared. Little puffs of smoke pipe from her mouth as she speaks. She gets embarrassed as she stumbles over words, burying her face in her scarf.
It’s just a matter of time, she suspects, before the enormity of being in Salamanca hits her. She pretends to brace herself, drawing the knobs of her slender shoulders close together. In Rome she was close to her family, to the 14 cousins and the father who stroked her hair when she curled up in his lap. She offers to show me pictures of her friends, each living proof that in Rome, your average
uomo on the street looks just like a Dolce & Gabbana ad. She names each one for me, explaining their relation. “
Mi prima, Rosa.” “
Mis compañeras, Isabel y Maria y Donna.” She lingers over her ex-boyfriend - dark and handsome with green, serious eyes. “I love him. Not
love him, but love him.
Me entiendes?” I tell her I understand perfectly.
Somehow we talk for hours. Now and then, getting carried away, she lapses into Italian and has to backtrack. She wants to tell me some of her favorite words.
“Honey,” she says sweetly, swallowing the “h.”
“
Coccole” - an Italian word for small, tender gestures.
“
Ridere di gusto” - a hearty laugh.
In America, she has a pen pal on Death Row. I try to imagine those little monkey-like hands offering “
coccole” to a convicted killer. When she talks about her life, and the future, her face takes on an air of great gravity. She has the feeling this is an important period of growth for her - that she’ll be a different person when she returns to Rome. The thought scares her, but she stiffens her lip and looks resolute. Her Spanish begins to falter, and she switches to English with deliberation.
“In Salamanca, here, even if things are not so good, I win.”
Her face erupts in light and nervous laughter, and then she buries herself in her scarf.
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