In Search of the Torico of Teruel
I left Blanes for Teruel, where I was going to be on the jury for a short-story prize, without knowing very well whether Teruel exists (as they like to claim in Teruel) or not. Of course, I was inclined to think that it existed, but an inner voice — the rapturous voice of desire, which frightens us all — told me that it was possible that Teruel, in fact, didn’t exist. The trip along the highway from Barcelona to Valencia was uneventful. The driver — whose name I unfortunately can’t recall, just as I’m unable to recall the names of anyone else I met on that trip, except Ana María Navales, who more than anything else is a force of nature — talked to me about how good life was in Teruel, about its 30,000 inhabitants (Teruel is the same size as Blanes), about the unemployment rate (notably low), about the happy and well-documented possibility of crossing the whole city from end to end in twenty minutes. The driver was an exemplary citizen of Teruel, an excellent driver, and one could tell that he loved his city. The problems began when we turned off the highway and began to climb towards Teruel. The landscape was very beautiful, with that austere and mocking beauty of certain parts of Aragón; but there were also curves, and for a while now curves have made me sick to my stomach, which meant that several times we had to take breaks at roadside restaurants, places that vaguely reminded me of another time, when my father was a truck driver and we pulled into lost truckstops to eat fried eggs, because the roads of Teruel are lost in time and I began to feel that all zigzagging roads somehow led to Teruel, no matter where they were situated geographically or whether the roads were Chilean or Mexican or even Central American, which was rather disturbing, because everyone knows that nausea plus melancholia tends to be the harbinger of impending illness, and that made me a little sad, because not only did we have to stop at roadside restaurants, we also had to stop out in the open, which gave us the chance to gaze at the towns along the way to Teruel, sad, beautiful little towns, towns that are gradually being abandoned, the driver told me, as I gagged and retched at the side of the road, because the young people are leaving for the cities, for Valencia, Barcelona, Zaragoza, and Madrid, as if the battle of Teruel hadn’t ended and the winter in which the battle was enveloped hadn’t ended either.
So I was still sick when I caught a glimpse of the towns just outside Teruel and I continued to be sick when we got to the city, crossed a bridge, and looked down into a very deep gorge, like the dry bed of an enormous river, but with houses and buildings where the river once flowed, something which now that I’m no longer sick and able to think more clearly, strikes me as suspiciously wonderful. How could anything have been built there, in that giant ravine? It was an astonishing sight. Like the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, but the mirror image, with a bridge even passing over the houses. It was like Aragonese cubism in an age when no one makes cubist art anymore, let alone so obstinately. And at the other end of the bridge, Teruel rose like a minimalist labyrinth on a promontory or hill or mesa. This city is much better than people say, was what I thought. I was also thinking that I was sick, and that when I got to the hotel I’d better go straight to bed.