Everything seems dead; I don’t know what I thought I would see, but it wasn’t this. I knew that Europe no longer consisted purely of castles and knights, and never really did, but this was a new level of… not disappointment, because I didn’t have an expectation to disappoint, but the jarring sensation of fiction and reality not merging when they still really shouldn’t; phantom limb syndrome for my sword-hand pains. The city is ancient and littered in detritus, the dust of ages already rotting in their own juices; ancient winding roads, cobbled for long-dead horses, can barely fit cars and motorcycles; church-spires are speckled with tangling, strangling, vinelike cords and television antennas clustered on it like parasites, receiving a different kind of message from heaven. Cigarette butts, shards of glass, bottle caps, crushed beer and soda cans, sometimes moved up or subducted by the tectonic forces of city-cleaners, potsherds and paleolithic broken-boned marrowless femurs, the sun setting on the dark earth horizon. Countless strata, fossilized plastic and cardboard wrappers.
This is an old, old place; we don’t have many old places in America, only prehistoric ones (which, though arguably older, feel young, preserved unwrinkled from their far-off birth) and the occasional four-century-old city. St Augustine, that revered elder, was not born when these European cities sent out their people to settle across the sea. There are iron tools buried in ancient farmland; all we have are stone arrowheads and lead bullets. This is the Old World, a world unto its own age, civilizations so utterly ancient that they have dementia, but even that gives them a kind of respectability. They have legends; we have only tall tales and lies. They have magic swords, and all we have are axes used to chop down cherry trees. Not that many people seem to think about it, here; their written history clogs the streets and is swept away by rain and alcohol, or burned for heat in dark nights and dark ages.
Aqueducts, the calcified blood-vessels of a civilization that was more than a thousand years old when it fell more than a thousand years ago, its origins lost to time and myth, are the main remnants of the Empire which once stretched across this place; you can walk under them, huge arches, ribcage-like, left aloft by time, remaining even now marvels of architecture. The imprints of that massive beast, that Empire, are still felt, though they have been eroded and deposited over by the river of time. You can feel it in the language, the d’oc and the d’oïl, the Romance and the adulterated Germanic, the language that the voice in your head is reading this in.
Speaking of Romance, Don Quixote used to live here; sometimes I think I can see his reflection in the plates of armor which the shops display. I turn, and he is not there; perhaps I mistook that elderly gentleman inspecting the swords for him. Yes, they sell armor and swords here, in this city here, and in none of the others that I came across; they were famed for their metalworking, and I suppose they still are, though it is perhaps not as useful. War has degraded into play, or perhaps been elevated and enchanted. I pass by a souvenir shop, with little sculptures of the knight and Sancho on display, physical manifestations of the first novel, which by now has lost all novelty, but lives on in such novelties as these shops are selling.
The bus ride was scary and generally unpleasant. We weren’t sure if the driver actually knew how to drive, or if he was sober, or perhaps he was merely as sleep-deprived as we were. He might have been some relic of the middle-ages, more accustomed to a horse than a motor vehicle; he certainly seemed enthusiastic about jousting, as he drove on the wrong side of the road with the violent fervor of any medieval knight, aiming, perhaps, to knock enemy drivers off the side of the mountain road (onto the perilous cliffs below) and claim the favour of the princess. This bus was his trusty steed, and we were merely along for the ride. The bus smelled medieval, too; the sanitary system was decidedly non-Roman, made by someone who had heard a far-off traveller’s tale of the marvels of that mythical “plumbing”, and decided to try and replicate it. There are better buses to be had in Europe, I must say, but you have to keep an eye out lest you stumble into grave peril.
I sat on the worn faux-leather seat and stared out the window. In the fading light, the landscape was a mess of blocky tones, reds and dark greens and black-browns, silhouetted against the stage of the dull red evening sky. The hills are rugged, and were once even more so, but have had their backs broken by centuries of farming and human habitation. Windmills still turn here, pushed by winds who know no time; they have not yet been replaced with towering turbines. They are giants of a smaller and much more manageable size, but somehow more impressive for it. I strain my eyes; I think I see a glint of metal, somewhere, out there. It seems to be a man on horseback, followed by a smaller on on a donkey. Something about their posture speaks to me; the one, older and prouder than ever, the other still just as fat and practical as he ever was. They seem to be discussing something; it is of no use to these modern times. But then, it never was; and the bus speeds by with all the fleetness of time and leaves these two shadows behind.
The sun used to set in the west.