EXCERPT FROM SARA’S JOURNALFebruary 14, 1999
San Valentin
Calle Conde de Barajas
Seville
Valentine’s Day has been a commercial enterprise for only a few
years in Spain. El Corte Ingles, the city’s large department store, sells
boxes of chocolates with red ribbons.
Rich and I are having Bed Day. Primer dries on the canvas. Batteries
are charging. The hot water tank will be busy for the next three hours after a load of
laundry. The construction men who chip away at the floor in the building next door, the
building with the Antoni Tapies wall, have taken the day off. The only sound is the artist
upstairs who is nailing something, tentatively. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. I initiate my
homemade four-colour Finca Los Parrales candle.
The sprightly man at Carreras Art Supply has directed us to a
place where we can buy a staple gun. It’s down the road, turn right, at the end of
the dead-end.
This Papeleria (stationery) is a little bigger than the
regular hole-in-the-wall. It’s a long room, with a large wooden table along one side.
The table is a counter. The place is musty. It reeks of smoke and nicotine.
Three men stand behind the counter. It’s busy. Take a number busy.
We wait until a large, round man with wheezy breathing calls us. Around him are stacks of
computer paper, office supplies like pens and rubber stamps and rolls of tape. On our side
of the counter there are rolls upon rolls of brown paper and bubble wrap and construction
paper. There is a wall of small, uniform wooden drawers.
"Quiero una corriente…cathunk, cathunk, cathunk."
After studying the English-Spanish dictionary he nods and turns, shuffling away behind the
piles and shelves of notebooks and paper samples, rulers, mechanical drawing sets, printer
cartridges and envelopes. He disappears for a long time. We wait, watching the other men.
One is holding open a book of wedding invitations. The other walks hurriedly from the
counter and behind the piles and shelves, and we hear the sound of steps ascending and
descending. This shop has four floors of merchandise, ready to be retrieved by one of
three smoking, middle-aged men in button-down shirts and reading glasses.
Much later, the stairs creak and the sound of heavy wheezing
approaches. He has the look of a man who has crossed a desert. He places three staple guns
and a large box of staples on the counter. He consults a notebook and writes three prices
on a piece of paper.
The shop is getting full with customers. They all stand at the counter
and wait to be helped. We step out of the time-travel firetrap and into the dead-end
street.
