Doorways

I'm in them, through them, under them all day, approaching and leaving. This is a city of doors and of doorways.

This is a city of handles and grasps, of latches and locks and keys, of knobs and knockers and bangers and hasps. It is a city of permissions.

You are either allowed or you are not. If you are known, you enter. If you are not known, you are left to yourself, out there, outside, on the street, where the world is public, and where you are but another passerby.

If you are known, and are welcome today, you may enter and find another world. You see the walls as the owners do. You find coolness on a hot day, or warmth after an outside chill. You are admitted to silence. The traffic, the dogs, the screeches and moans and shouts and hoots of life in the street remain in the street when you enter through a doorway. You shuck it, let it slide, let it fall behind you, allow it all to stay where it must stay, out there, when you move from one world to another. From public to private. Through a doorway.

It is mystery you never even speculate on, when you arrive in this city. There is no reason to wonder, because you have no crack or crevice or walkway or tunnel or view to entice you. There is no visibility. You see the pavements of the street, you see a slit of sky, you see walls. Walls exterior and smooth, with closed doors. Locked doors. You see nothing else. There is nothing to speculate about.

Then, if you watch, if you look, if you remain alert, you catch a glimpse. Of businesses set back, inside buildings, of bits of the normally external world wrapped inside architectures, used to house vehicles, temporarily. Now and again you do see a dark inside stairway through a door left open for a moment. You do see one or two coming or going, but usually you do not look, deliberately, for that would be a curiosity too forceful, too intrusive, rude. You do not try to intrude or to be rude. This is a city of privacies after all. You respect that. But you do, without intent, now and then, see a slice of one, of those other worlds, in there. Behind the doors.

From above it all seems different. It is different. That is where you realize the successive shells of multiple worlds, when you see them. Below, laid out before you like mazes, but that perspective is hard to achieve. The high places are also private, unless you are invited in, but if you should find yourself up high, and can look down, then you see. The walls within walls, the courtyards behind and within and side-to-side with the other courtyards, the gardens wrapped in gardens, the hanging laundry, broken windows, blind balconies unseen from the level of the streets, from outside.

All, all this is mediated by doorways, which are everywhere, of all colors and sizes and shapes and locations — opening onto the steepest of stairways, fronting onto walls, behind walls, leading to empty tiled spaces, choked with vendor's wares, full of purses or shoes or flowers — it's all there, but yet it isn't. Everything can fold up and close in a minute, a second, an instant.

Which you may see or not see. It depends. On when you are there, and if you are going to or going fro. Whether you are looking ahead, or around, or full of your own thoughts, or whether you are lolling your head free of thoughts, allowing your eyes to wander without intent. And then it is there, or not — it all depends. If you see it, something, whatever, it is because of the doorway and its door and the state of the doorway and the door and the time of day, day of the week, season of the year, and chance.

You never know.

But if you walk here and walk there, and watch, eventually you see this and that and the other — bits of evidence fluttering. Doorways opening onto — what? Something? Nothing? You never know. So you wait and watch. Slowly, you learn.

Side Hazards Walk Hazards

Rest in peace.

Is not an option here.

And not just at night while the fireworks are going off for no rational reasons whatsoever.

It happens whenever and wherever you are. The not-resting thing. The no-peace-ness.

Because you can't relax, switch off your mind, and crooz.

Especially while walking. No croozing while walking here. Too dangerous. Too crazy. Plain nutso.

Because you'd quickly you'd die, you. Or worse, like get your butt mangled. Or your neck wrapped around a madly spinning axle.

Me? Me no want. Me want safe to be.

So I stay alert, watchful for the lumpy, grumpy, angry, and dumpy things around here. And there are many, the five just mentioned all being found among sidewalk features. (I'm not going into detailed mentions of dog poo this time around — that's covered in every other post I've done and will do, but not this one right here.)

But just for instance, should you want a concrete so-to-speak example in another sense of that metaphor, there is this: the open drainage trench off the south end of Calle Padre Agquirre.

It's still there. After three years.

And it should be there, because it was cast into the walkway. Anywhere else, most other places, it would still have its metal grating in place. Y'know — the metal grating part we're supposed to walk on so's we don't drop one leg or t'other into the drainage trench cutting across the whole width of the walkway and snap it off. (The leg.)

But there is no metal grating there. Without it, water still flows into the trench (which is about eight inches across and eight inches deep), but so can one of your feet.

Somehow, the site is not littered with the dead and dying, and not me either, even though I was not brought up here and should know better than to look where I'm going 24-seven (that's 24 times a second or seven inches of travel, whichever seems more reasonable).

But if you do see me there, lying on the ground, writhing, with the lower part of one leg chewed away by the infrastructure, it's OK if you step over me and keep going. That's what you're supposed to be doing. But if it isn't' too much trouble, send flowers, 'K? At least a few.

I See You?

You walk around.

If you want to see anything, you do. Walking is the best way to see things. And here is no exception, seeing things here.

To walk, you need open spaces. Open spaces to walk in, walk through, experience, explore.

But you don't get much here.

It's different here. This is a private society.

Streets are necessary. Streets are mandatory. Otherwise we'd all need to be birds. That won't work for me. I've tried. When I was young. With the arm flapping. Every kid tries it. It doesn't work.

So flight is out.

Moving around on the ground, the obvious place to start is with your feet. You move them. And then you move.

And to move you need streets. Because moving feet can do only so much.

Moving feet move bodies, and bodies can carry some of this and that, but not much else. So that's were wagons and carts and donkeys and then cars and trucks and buses come in. All require streets.

So we have streets here. They are essential. But this is a private society.

Which means.

That things are different here.

Open spaces are rare, aside from streets, occurring randomly and relatively unpleasantly, as parks. They aren't. Not as we know parks. We foreigners.

The parks here are flat squares of pavement, with a few shrubs, and a scattering of fenced-off trees.

Not what we think of. No. Not what I think of.

The open spaces here are inside houses. Or other buildings.

Schools have them. You can see. Every now and then you can see. Them. Inside. Inside the walls inside the buildings.

Safe areas. Protected areas. Private areas. Roman villa style, rooms around the periphery, space in the middle. Sealed off from the rest of the world.

The parks. What they call parks. Are incidental. Really.

Token gestures.

When you go to a park, you're going to a place you go to be public.

And that's different from.

From what?

I don't know — different from what I used to know. Just different. More public in a way.

Deliberate.

Like making a political statement, or formally proclaiming a religious view. I am here, now, today, in this place, and am visible. So there. Done.

And then you go home and get all private again and no one knows where you really are or what you are up to and no one cares.

You behind your walls.

Walk On The Mármol Side

Polish my bricks.

There isn't much of it, but it's here, randomly, along Gran Colombia, a major east-west street not far from where I'm staying. Marble.

It goes on for blocks, on one side of the street or the other, in small paving stones roughly eight inches (20 cm) on a side. These are spaced loosely, each block surrounded by a generous application of mortar, or maybe ordinary concrete, and set into it at drunken angles.

Most public walkways here are randomly dumped clods of concrete that has hardened into whatever shape it had when it left the truck, or the mixer, or the wheelbarrow, except that it ordinarily also shows paw prints, or footprints, or bicycle tracks, or has a few random items embedded in it.

And what isn't concrete hardened into facsimiles of breaking waves, is large squares of tile that look nice but turn into death traps when they become wet. The closest thing possible to wet ice, if you've walked on that. If it's a level area, you have to skate along, keeping your feet in contact with the tiles or you crash, and if the area is inclined, and steep at all, you can't walk, period. It truly is that slippery.

It's a surprise to come across marble paving stones then, since they occur only in one area of Cuenca, and seem to have no kinship with the surrounding architecture, and as far as I can tell, there is no significance to the area — it's only another random part of the city.

But what do I know?

I'm constantly finding that places I've walked past a hundred times, or two hundred, have little secrets I've never noticed, or big secrets I've never noticed. And I'm only a fleeting shadow of a visitor here. I'll never know half the stories behind a quarter of the places in an eighth of the city during a sixteenth of its history.

So it's better not to fret over anything. I'll just enjoy the special pavement when I walk over it, and the random marble building facades, some of which share the same general location as the paving stones.