The rule is don’t talk to strangers. Truth is, I have never been good at following rules.
I’m walking straight to the student residence where I live. My fingers are numb with cold. My camera seems to me heavier than an elephant. I’m disappointed at having failed on my first attempt to collect opinions on my article for journalism class. As well I can not stop cursing my mind for finding it impossible to engage in an analytic way l in Political Communications class. Life is not logical or sequential, why do teachers want us to behave as if it was?
Suddenly an old man stops by my side and says. “Hey girl, are you segovian?” I’m so surprised that all that I can answer is no. “Good, well then I’ve got a couple of photographs to suggest to you”. He is 65, with a walking stick in one hand, a newspaper boy hat and is following the classical dressing code of brown,gray and black. Combining a suit with a wool sweeter. His face is covered in wrinkles and his eyes are sinked into his face. His name is Gonzalo and he has walked everyday since 45 years ago the same 7 kilometers. Today he has chosen me to talk to while he walks. His steep is fast and steady. My city girl that refuses to get used to the country legs struggle to keep up with him. The wind plays with my hair, caresses my skin but with Gonzalo it seems as if it was greeting an old friend. It is not Gonzalo against the wind or Gonazalo and the wind but Gonzalo walking with his friend the wind. The Eresma river roars while we build a conversation. Segovia is his lover, a beautiful and mysterious lady full of secrets. He walks it with the aim of discovering the secret geographies of her body but aware that she will never be fully his. In her he has found refugee during the summer and winter months of his youth. A war orphan he grew up with with the idea that Segovia was both his mother and his father. In his own words he is more segovian than Juan Bravo. The discovery of my ignorance of the history of the small city comes almost as an offense to the walker. He points the convent of San Jeronimo and the one of San Vicente. It is important not to confuse them. A place he finds specially interesting is the El Parral. Gonzalo requests me to imagine a small town full of nuns praying, working and existing in a perfect order. It is an almost surreal image in a twenty first century mind. But it is not surreal not even a drunken imagery, it is a factual event. We keep on walking and while doing so the sun begins to set. We pass the old windmills and the roman center of San Lorenzo. It is a special place for him, you don’t need time travel ing machines when you have a pair of legs and a talkative companion. The sun is bleeding pink, orange and almost golden over the rooftops and treetops that surround us. People nod at him more often than not, he nods back His breathing is becoming heavy and his eyes unsure. He stops and turns to me to say”You have to kick the dust in Segovia everyday if you want to discover it correctly. And do not do it alone. Alone you will walk pass the most beautiful things here. Walk with someone, you need a guide, a book, something.” Just after this declaration he points me the concrete path, he can not continue walking with me because well “People sing, and they are going to be saying there goes Gonzalo with a young girl” I smile at him and thank him for his guidance. While mentally I note: I need to discover more about his small city I’m living in. It is a pain that is growing inside of my like the chords of a forgotten song that you suddenly find yourself humming. I’m slowly falling in love with Segovia…its a scary but at the same time wonderful feeling. Its streets already hold many of my secret dreams, laughters, adventures and tears. And all of the stories that are yet to be lived await to be engraved in her trees, her walls, her longer than life aqueduct…it does surprise me as I write it but I’m finding it hard not to bite my lip too hard because of the shrills the idea provokes me.
