Burbuja
bubble
September 2006
BUBBLE: She is wearing a striped tee shirt, her long, straight, black hair cut into a blunt fringe, through which, smudgy black-kholed eyes peer out of her pale face. She's something between The White Stripes, Tim Burton and the streets of Tokyo, and she's out of place on the streets of Seville. You won't hear her listening to Flamenco, or dancing Sevillanas in her spotty, fish tailed dress and you certainly won't see her at the bullring. Auxi is one of my new students and she asked me while we were chatting at the end of class the other day, why we had chosen to return to Seville to live, in fact what had possessed us? Clearly not enamoured with the place, Auxi had spent a couple of years living in London and was now fighting that sense of dislocation that we all face when we return home. "I just don’t fit in" she complained, "I can't wait to get out!" Seville is a place where you can find a lot of people who have never left nor want to. In outlying villages, some of the elderly folk still refer to Seville as " Capital City".
I guess one person's belly button of the universe is another person's…well... To her question of how we were adjusting, I simply replied that, I lived in a bit of a bubble, neither yet part of the community nor uncomfortably isolated. Moving town and country a lot, I realised I had started to mentally shift around what the world looks like. On my map right now, New Zealand is just off the Galician Coast and in my neighbourhood, walk a wide variety of characters, in fact all the people of my life, some from here, some very from very far away, some from practically a parallel reality, but I have them there in my bubble nevertheless, just not in my immediate physical neighbourhood.
This new school, in which I am now working, is an historic building in the heart of the oldest suburb of town. The rooms, in slight disrepair in places, open onto a typical Andalusian patio downstairs and a gallery upstairs. The ceilings are Mudejar - that is built in the manner of the old Muslim period of the city. I was quite taken with the idea of spending my working day there. Oh, and there is a ghost. The story goes that a woman of the family had tearfully seen off her fiancé, bound for Cuba, not knowing that she would never see him again. While out there, he died and she, broken hearted, became a shadow in the corridors, living an isolated existence, alone in her world until she died. She has since been heard on the stairs and seen walking in certain corridors. While some of the students think it is just an old spook story, the cleaners swear by her and won’t go into some places in the evening alone. So, I suppose there are many bubbles, conservative bubbles, alternative bubbles, foreign bubbles and this bubble, which is where the parallel reality comes in. If she is wandering past the door one evening as I'm giving my class and I find myself short a pair for a speaking activity, I might invite her to join in.