#19 Is the Grass Greener on the Other Side?

For the first time in my life, I've handled something wisely, and eh... that doesn’t feel bad. Montelobado! A small Spanish village on the border with Portugal, at the latitude of Salamanca, where the locals bravely resist progress. Heidi, Boris the terrier, and I recently moved there from Andalusia after a brief visit to Montelobado on the first of May this year. It may have been an unwise move, but so far, we don’t regret it. We keep that to ourselves because we do regret our previous, mostly international moves—several they were—and while giving that some thought, I realize it's ridiculous to use the word regret in this context. We don't regret our previous moves at all. After each move, we discovered we didn't feel at home where we’d landed, which is something positive, not something to regret.

Who knows what she or he wants? Everything we think we want in the third millennium is conditioned or has been marketed upon us. We resign ourselves to that—that too is conditioned—and in doing so, we overlook that it’s essential to discover what we don’t want in life to develop a sense of what we do want.

The more we engage in, the larger the pool of what we don't want and the smaller the pool of what we possibly do want. Of course, we may be lucky and know early in life what we do want, but I fear we’re conditioned to be easily satisfied.

“But the grass is always greener on the other side,” a voice in my head whines.

“Oh man,” I hear myself reply, “that’s a typical statement born of idleness, the most dangerous addiction there is and like all addictions sweet with bitter consequences.”

Two weeks ago, on July 31, 2025, we arrived in Montelobado. Early the next morning, I pumped up the tires on Heidi's bike—which I ride because my groin hurts when I ride my old Cannondale. I called out to Heidi that I was leaving, and ten minutes later, I was back at the tiny house we rent—a fine house, as luck would have it. I ignored Heidi's “You’re back soon” and walked with a carafe in my hand to the village fountain, thirty meters from our house. Back at the house, I scooped coffee into the filter on the rim of our Stanley thermos and poured boiling spring water over it. As my coffee seeped through, I made rooibos tea for Heidi and turned on our new house’s television, to which Heidi had connected a small device that allows us to watch Netflix.

Drinking our tea and coffee, we watched part of a series in which a couple of Americans restore old cars, one of the few Netflix series in which we’re not conditioned to accept diversity-, equality-, and inclusion-related nonsense—though it seems Netflix only shows car restoration series if the mechanic happens to be a woman who, flirting with the camera from under fake eyelashes, explains how much horsepower the restored car’s engine has after its overhaul while unscrewing cylinder heads with centimeters-long fake nails. Anyway, we enjoy watching how something beautiful is made from scrap, and after Heidi turned off the television, our tea and coffee finished, she asked, “You’ve been out for only ten minutes. Is riding my bike no longer the solution for the pain in your groin?”

“I eh... I'm handling things wisely,” I replied. Heidi burst out laughing, and disgruntled, I explained, "The year we lived in Andalusia, I was hardly able to cycle. When I tried, two months ago, I’d never have made it home if you hadn't come looking for me in the car. Today, I cycled for ten minutes. Fifteen tomorrow. Wise!"

That was two weeks ago. For the last four days, I've been happily cycling about thirty kilometers each day, and today, I planned a forty-five-kilometer route—with a stop along the way. Man, it's great fun, cycling around Montelobado. Everywhere, sandy paths meander through rolling countryside divided into small plots by centuries-old walls of stacked stones, overgrown with blackberry bushes. Close to the village, people grow fruit and vegetables in those plots. Farther out, cattle graze in larger plots. People weed their plots, called huertos, irrigate their fruit and vegetables with water from wells, or drive cows, goats, and sheep from plot to plot. Apples and pears aren’t yet ripe, but plums and figs are, and every now and then, I stumble upon a blackberry bush with already ripe blackberries. Everywhere, both inside and outside the plots, trees of all kinds stand among boulders that protrude from the ground. Yellowish brown is the color that dominates the landscape, without it feeling barren. An elephant or a giraffe in the distance and I’d be in Africa.

Only when I noticed, some ten minutes ago, that I smelled fire, did I realize that it isn’t hazy today. Smoke from bushfires all around Montelobado hangs low over the ground, creating an old-world, fairy-tale-like calm. The sun is orange, vultures—Egyptian vultures, alimoches—circle just meters above me, and ... posters announcing bullfights greet me as I cycle into the village of Castralba. The village square, which I reach moments later, has been partially converted into an arena, and I suspect that the annual village festival, the feria, is imminent and that the arena is being built, not dismantled. I lean my bike against the church, drink water from the village fountain, enter a café, and look around in surprise. The café is busy. People talking everywhere, and at the ten, eleven, twelve tables in the café, people are playing cards. It eh… it’s a pleasant spectacle, seemingly untouched by progress ...

I find an empty stool at the bar and don't have to wait long before a waiter looks at me and raises his eyebrows.

“Un café solo,” I say as loudly as I can over the buzz of voices, “con un poco más agua.”

“Solo largo?”

“Solo medio largo,” I reply, feeling a pang of regret that Heidi isn’t here—angry with myself for a fleeting moment that I haven't yet rigged a basket for Boris on one of our bikes so that we can cycle together again.

The waiter places a glass with my coffee in front of me on the bar.

“Algo para picar?” he kindly asks.

“No, gracias,” I reply. “He desayunado hace poco I just had breakfast,” and I crane my neck when, out of the corner of my eye, I see fire through a window. Orange flames above a ridge. I tap the nearest card player on the shoulder, and when he looks up at me, I point to the window and say, “No te preocupas, ese incendio?”

The man cups a hand behind an ear, and I shout: “El incendio the fire! No te preocupas don't you worry about it?”

Everyone at the table grins. The man I addressed puts his cards down. In that unique hoarse voice only some people in Spain have, he says, “Tengo ochenta y tres años I'm eighty-three. Do you know how many fires I've seen here? Ustedes jóvenes you youngsters watch too much television. Fire is good for the earth,” and mockingly shaking his head, he picks up his cards again.

Sipping my coffee—good coffee!—I stare at the orange glow behind the windows of the café, and my thoughts wander to the orange glow I once saw behind the window of a house in Schiebroek, a borough of Rotterdam.

The mother of my then four-year-old son watched suspiciously as I put the presents she had bought—which Saint Nicholas, as per Dutch custom, would give my son on the evening of the fifth of December—into a gunny sack in which I had already put the presents I’d bought. To enliven that special evening for my son, one of my friends, dressed as Zwarte Piet—Black Pete, Saint Nicholas’s helper, who, according to tradition, enters houses through chimneys unseen, which leaves him black as soot—would, just past dinnertime on the evening of the fifth of December, bang on the door of the apartment where my son and his mother lived and where I would also be that evening, the present-loaded gunny sack over his shoulder, his free hand filled with pepernoten, the typical candy the festival of Saint Nicholas can’t be celebrated without.

Now, my friend was forgetful, and I failed to take that into account, but he was not prone to idleness, and I failed to take that into account as well. It wasn’t until seven o’clock in the evening of the fifth of December that my friend remembered what he was supposed to be doing that evening and realized he’d forgotten to rent a Black Pete costume. During the hour and a half that followed, as I learned the next day, my friend not only managed to get hold of a clown suit, a yellow wig, a cork, a lighter, a climbing harness, an eight used by rock climbers, a static line of considerable length, and a pack of sparklers, but also managed to gain access to the roof of the apartment building where my son and his mother lived. To make up for his blunder and to turn Black Pete into a mythological figure, my friend—clown suit on, yellow wig on his head, a few black smears from a burnt cork on his face—had decided to abseil from the roof he’d gained access to and bang on a window of apartment 37 instead of the door. The line attached to a chimney and threaded through the eight, the climbing harness over his clown suit and the eight attached to it, some sparklers stuck into the gunny sack with presents, the sparklers lit, and the gunny sack attached to the climbing harness so that it hung between his legs, my friend stepped over the edge of the roof. Abseiling, he passed windows on the sixth, fifth, and fourth floors, and just before he reached the third floor, the sparklers had burned down so far that the gunny sack caught fire.

My son, when the police banged on the door of apartment 37, unwrapped wet, scorched presents without seeming to care, while I ate the slice of boterletter, cake people eat in the Netherlands on the evening of the fifth of December, which his mother had angrily slammed down on the coffee table. I wasn't worried. I knew the clown the police were looking for had long since disappeared into the dark night, and ... a waiter taps my arm.

“Otro café?” he asks when I turn to him. As I rub a leg of my cycling shorts and feel that I haven't lost the two-euro coin I tucked into it, I shake my head regretfully and mumble, “No gracias,” just as the café door opens and Júlia walks in.

A year and a half ago—Heidi and I were still living in Catalonia, where we lived before moving to Andalusia—I met Júlia, and I remember writing the short story Pinball Machines and the Inquisition about that encounter. She hasn't changed. Her blonde hair is pinned up with the same metal pin, decorated with turquoise stones, that she used to pin up her hair back then. Just like a year and a half ago, she is wearing a half-length dress of undyed wool. I hadn't noticed it then—we were sitting on the grass—but she’s wearing a wide, beautifully decorated leather belt around her waist. The leather bracelets she wears on her wrists stir some jealousy in me, and I realize I was right, back then, when I judged her sandals to be sustainable; she's still wearing them—and she's far from home.

Júlia's blue eyes light up when she sees me. She squeezes her way through the crowd, puts her leather backpack on the ground, takes the stool next to me that someone just got up from, and says, “El trovador the troubadour! Qué haces aquí what are you doing here?”

“Tomando café,” I reply, and when Júlia's eyebrows shoot up, I realize Júlia is from 1497 and has no idea what coffee is. I leave it at that and ask her what she’d like to drink.

“Ptisana!” she replies with a smile.

I shake my head and say, “Maybe I can get you some warm milk with honey, or a chamomile infusion.”

“Chamomile, then,” Júlia says, which I pass on to a waiter who happens to be looking my way. When I ask Júlia what she is doing in Castralba, she answers, “I'm walking through Castile for a few months. I want to cross the Duero a few kilometers up the road, then walk further west through Portucale to see the ocean.”

“In 2025?”

“Why not?”

“I eh... I can come up with a reason or two why I'd rather be walking here in 1497,” I reply.

“Hm... you got a point,” Júlia agrees. “The world hasn't exactly become more attractive the coming five hundred years, though this area isn't so bad. But it feels,” she adds, “as if something is bothering you,” and her eyes widen when a waiter places a saucer with a glass of hot water in front of her on the bar. I raise a hand to reassure her, grab the small bag on the saucer, tear it open, take out a little pouch, which I hang in the glass, and say, “I don't know, but it hit me hard, half an hour ago, that humanity is going under because of its idleness.”

“Imposible,” says Júlia, shaking her head. “En una sociedad sana in a healthy society idle people have no chance of survival, so humanity cannot go under because of idleness ... although! Didn't you tell me, last time we spoke, that in most countries in your time—in this time—democracy is being tried again as a form of government?”

“I eh... yes, we talked about that, but ...” “That,” Júlia interrupts, "is what could cause humanity to go under, and idleness contributes to it because a democracy can only succeed if people are the opposite of idle. If people, to give a silly example, form their opinions on state affairs based on what the pregón shouts”—which I quickly translate as town crier—"then whoever occasionally slips a few reales de plata into the town crier's pocket will inevitably—and behind the scenes—seize power. Nothing much will happen in the end if humanity is resilient, but eh... humanity doesn't quite strike me as resilient in 2025.”

As I ponder a clever reply, Júlia takes a sip of her infusion. A shadow crosses her face, and she exclaims, “What is this? This is hot water with a strange taste! No ginger, no mint, no thyme, no rosemary, and no honey! Even the chamomile is missing!”

“Oh, it eh… it's ...” I stammer, startled by Júlia's sudden outburst, “it's not about the taste of an infusion any longer; it's about people buying it.”

“But who buys a chamomile infusion that is not a chamomile infusion?”

“Hu-hum...” I mumble, just as an argument seems to break out among some card players. Júlia fades away. I fumble the two-euro coin out of the leg of my cycling shorts, place it on the bar, and stare at the euro and ten cents a waiter changes it for. Then, I chuckle inwardly. Not because I could have ordered that second coffee I wanted so much, but because I realize how sweet the mere thought of the euro once was for Europeans and how bitter the consequences of its introduction have been so far ...

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