In short, I have accrued a modest but eclectic collection of the souvenirs of other peoples' travels: a Dutch Van Gogh print; an Argentinean pencil box; a portly pottery Czech village mayor with his nose in the air; a cadaverous wood-carved Don Quixote figurine. And then there are the stocks of crinkled postcards from all and sundry person and place, coffee-stained and ink-blotted, wishing I was here.
Travel may broaden the mind, but the mind can also broaden travel; it can intensify it; it can crystallize the experience and distil the sensation of moving itself until the kinetic process becomes frozen in time like the photo of a struggling smile. And of course, landscapes themselves are constantly on the move. Hills and rocks slowly, almost invisibly through time, subside or accumulate - especially desert dunes, snaking in the wind in North Africa, just across the water from here on which the Moors first came. It's not only we who journey, the sand travels too.
When I do travel abroad, it is likely to be to Granada, to accompany Lucía in visiting her family. Granada, that contradictory, almost arcane city where uncannily preserved Moorish architecture clashes deafeningly with that of the sky-gazing Christian inheritors. You may feel yourself sojourning in two worlds at the same time in this labyrinthine place, nestled in a dusty valley between the olive-tree-mottled hills and the snow-capped Sierra Nevada mountains. They say that Granada has such seasonal extremes because of these mighty peaks. In summer the heat smothers the city like a hand over a face, and in winter the cold reddens the skin with an icy burn.
Our last visit was in winter. The penetrating chill of a city I had come to associate with thick, heavy heat, served to both surprise me and complete my sense of disorientation (my customary sense of being when travelling abroad). My Cancerean pincers always tense when I am away from home, but, unhelpfully, my shell recedes and the cold sunlight pours into me and stretches my eyes, melting off the blinkers. Then I am spiritually naked, my sense of self and purpose shrinking, as I am exposed to the glare of an unfamiliar sun illuminating unfamiliar views and unfamiliar faces, until my own identity and perception are reduced to the size and dimensions of a postcard. This feels more than simply a transition of time and place. It seems sometimes like a painful but educative metamorphosis: a transmogrification from native to foreigner - and yet I've always felt a foreigner even at home. Some people go abroad carrying their countries with them and leaving their minds behind, safe at home. Unfortunately, or perhaps ultimately fortunately, I bring my mind with me.
While I am abroad, scooped like a tadpole from my microcosmic pond, I fill with the transience of things. It's as if I'm suddenly all spirit, all ether, flitting insubstantially through a maze of lasting buildings, markers of my own earthly limitation. Throughout this dislocated passage of time, one thought sticks like a thorn in my mind: words printed on a page, my words, my poems, blinding me with their permanence - and all I want is to become as permanent as them, to have my entire consciousness immortally franked onto paper. And this immovable thought serves continuously, without any respite, to remind me with a piercing shiver of my own ephemeral substance. This thought is the stone, it can blunt any scissor-points but those of panic; paper can wrap it - but paper also burns.
Why do I meditate on mortality as I pass by the beautiful, motley, mustard-yellow and milkshake-pink town houses with their pretty balconies and large rectangular shuttered windows? The winding backtreets verged high by silent, shuttered terraces look dark and unlived in, only a washing-line away from their opposites across the narrow Roman cobbles. Their shutters are sealed like visors - mine are stretched wide open as if someone had clothes-pegged my eye lashes apart. I want to look and see and appreciate, but my thoughts swirl in and out the nooks and crannies of every poetically dilapidated street. This is an intense type of tourism, an out-of-the-body visit. My guide is a dislocated native of this place, who was brought up to accommodate the great weight of history heaving through every vivid day. Lucía says Spain is 'so heavy', and I think I might sense what she means sometimes in the dark chocolate of the peoples' eyes, the bars adorned with black bulls' heads and dust-caked wine bottles, clamouring with glasses and laughter, plates clanking like castanets.
Near our cramped, wood table where we feast on vivid-coloured delicacies, a gnarled-faced, leathery-skinned character strums flamenco - or some such idiomatic strain - on his chestnut-coloured guitar; his fingers spin their stringy web fast as a spider. Occasional thunderous strums strike picaresque images in my mind of Don Quixote jousting with the windmills as his armour clatters with his horse's gallop, Sancho Panza riding rationally behind him on his bungling mule. The flamenco strums strike my ears with a violent gust of pride which doesn't belong to me or my country - but it stirs something remote and significant in me nonetheless (like De Falla's "El amor brujo" when I listen to it at home in the cold). It strikes only a sort of inherited sense of turbulence in Lucía - and it is at this point, as she sighs wearily through her cigarette, that she first coins her legend: "Spain is so heavy."
"So is England,"' I utter, unconvinced of my own comparison, and she promptly ties up this thread of doubt: "No it isn't - not like Spain."
In the piercing mornings while breakfasting, I am struck by how alive Latin culture is, as we scramble for a spare table in the fug of animated conversations and cigarette smoke. The natives of Granada are as lively and loud as the ubiquitous little birds that smother the trees in the winter squares like puffy, rotund, feathery leaves. So it seems all year round, the city's trees are in leaf. Amidst the clatter of coffee glasses and tip-plates, the café congregations chirp friskily over their chorros and hot chocolate. Lucía introduces me to the many shades of café con leche, subtly differentiated in a hierarchy of milk quantities served in little glasses hot to the touch: shadow (so milky only a shadow of the coffee remains), cloud (milky), cut (milky espresso), Americano (black coffee).
Another bright, stunning day is in the ascendant, and the mournful toll of the cathedral bell can do nothing to lastingly solemnize it. This city is unrepentantly alive, bustling with activity and thought and feeling, perfumed with the odours of incense and oranges. Granada is a slow taste to acquire, like the olive: when you taste it as it should be tasted, it is both sweet and sour at the same time, gradually reviving the tongue. Many other analogies might do for this place: the smoky oak flavour of riocco; the salty tang of jamon, sliced clean and red as if from a raw wound.
Strangely enough I had never actually been into the Al Hambra before this visit. Twice before we had sat sipping summer wine in the Satsuma-glow of the bird-chirping, spring evening, staring up at the sunset-orange of the Moorish walls which had given the palace its name: the Red. Not so this time. We rose early one morning to discover another time, built in tribute to the Muslim sense of the transitory nature of things, built to pass like a thought, not to last, unlike the Christian cathedral at the city's heart. This convoluted palace had lasted beyond all expectations or even considerations, no doubt, of its original architects. Though some of the cobalt blues of the interior tiles had unsurprisingly faded in places, the intricacy of the sculpted walls with their egg-shelled casting and high star-shaped ceilings remained painstakingly intact, like the imprint of mummified cerebrums. Courtyards once paced in by sleepy Sultans have retained their shape and detail, still fecund with fountains in the centre and pillared porticoes, perfectly preserved and symmetrical, lure the eyes to their whispering shades. One fountain stands on squat stone lions - 'a gift from the Jews' informs my guide, assuring me, even the tour-book omits this information. And from the porticoed balconies, through the Visigoth arches and architraves, the most breathtaking sight of all, the view of Granada itself: cliffs of innumerable white houses tumbling upwards to the inky mountains beyond. Here and there are protrusions of green, cypresses and poplars, and the whole city looks like the miniature Bethlehem lovingly crafted for display in a tent outside the Cathedral.
It is night in the miniature Bethlehem, only the bleats of shepherded sheep and the grumbles of King-burdened camels carry in the evening silence. Faint glows of scrub-nestled households hover here and there like glow-worms on the hillsides. The three Wise Kings bring their gifts, guided by a special star lighting their way. Joseph and Mary are crouched beside a haloed baby in a straw manger in an illuminated stable. The Angel Gabriel is held on with blue tack to the stable beam. The customary visitors huddle near the place of nativity, three pipe-smoking shepherds, a cow and a mule. There seem to be more attendees than one would see in the average Anglo-Catholic crib - and most bizarrely of all, there is one figurine, possibly a shepherd, perpetually crouched in a crapping position, his trousers pulled down, an emerging stool protruding from his anus. "Who the hell is this meant to be?" I ask Lucía and she smiles knowingly, with that inimitable Spanish iconoclasm, saying "No one knows - but he's always there." "Perhaps it's meant to be the Devil?" I suggest.
Strangely, my most enduring memory of this last visit of ours to Lucía's city of birth is of sitting round a glass-topped table, a heated tablecloth hugging all of our knees as we watch Gabriel's existential cartoons. Gabriel is only five years old, with wide brown eyes full of dread and wonder - the strange bedfellows of innocence. He sits couched in sierras of cushions, gripping his special pillow, Felipa, which he always brings with him wherever he goes. And I am the foreigner in his small imaginative world, struggling to let go of a thought which is lodged in my mind like a sharp and jagged rock. One day soon, he will have to let go of his pillow.