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The No Name Diary

5th of October 2024

The kids were back in school and the summer was over. It was a relief to be teaching again. Like those films where you see athletes, drivers and pilots turning into a mess without their work, I too could feel something slipping away in those shapeless days under the Spanish sun. Bad habits, not enough exercise, bleary-eyed early mornings with Ian learning to pee standing up, but doing it into the open dishwasher. Maia with her questions from her booster seat in the back of the car:

“Are you happy?!”

“Yes Maia, I’m happy.”

“ARE YOU HAPPY A LOT?”

“Yes Maia, I’m very happy,”

She screams, “HAPPY A LOT, HAPPY A LOT, HAPPY A LOT?!!!”

Despite all my instincts as an English language teacher I cave in and answer, “Yes Maia, I’m happy a lot,” Alejandra in the passenger seat just laughs and laughs.

It was about time, it was about time. I start this blog, a resolution, and I suppose I should begin with how the diary came into my possession…

“Hamish, Hamish!” Mbaye called my name from where he was sat between the grey concrete pillars on one of the housing estate’s passageways. He gestured to me with his hand, like a cat pawing at a dangling piece of string. Mbaye´s an illegal immigrant from Senegal who sits around here most days, reading, praying and talking to folk. He’s one of many trapped in limbo; working the street selling things like lighters and bracelets. Pulling a black shopping trolley along wherever he goes around the city of Valencia.

“Here” he says in Spanish after extracting a book with a worn black cover from his shopping trolley and offering it to me. I felt awkward as I took it from him, and sensed a sort of heat emanate from the book and pass through my body as I did. The sort I’d only ever felt once in the past; deep in the jungle on the coast of Colombia…

***

I followed Caesar over the boulders through the trees, down into a part of the jungle with wide streams of running water. Then we clambered along enormous smooth rocks with chasms between them which Caesar helped me over, before he’d run off again down a track, his feet falling gently until the path evened out. We were in a dense tropical forest, where a monkey or ape screamed in the distance, and a giant millipede was curled into a question mark on one of the trees in front of me. I remember sweating; baked in the hot humid morning. Caesar zinging me with that tree’s energy, hugging it, telling me to hug it. On the approach to the settlement I stood on a stone which echoed out into the jungle from the ancient path, warning people of a presence.

When we finally got to the place it was high up, there were large grass terraces, then circular huts, a path which we followed to a sort of cave with loose earth and dark rocks where they did magic. Just before the area of sacrifices Caesar quickly scaled a tree with his nimble limbs to steal some avocados. Then he told me to take some coca leaves off a nearby plant to chew on. I remember his wide grin and him telling me about the nights he’d spent with his girlfriend on one of those huge stones further down.

We arrived at the spot, the altar I suppose, in the midst of the undergrowth and foliage where a giant oval stone stood, the clear outline of a human body embedded upon it, three steps up the side and a narrow chiseled channel to conduct blood into a pool near the base. There was a high wall of flat stone next to that dark spectacle which Caesar had put his palms up against. I sat down on the lying obelisk opposite, then Caesar disappeared off up another rock to crouch and do something with “his back to the place,” as I understood in Spanish. It was then, then that I was sat watching the altar with the sun somewhere obscured above me, imagining what it must have been like, hearing the slight swaying of the leaves and branches, that I felt the unmistakeable warmth of another body pressed to my side. That was the only other time.

***

I turned the book over in my hands a little alarmed, then intrigued. We exchanged a few words, I thanked him, finally I put the book in my backpack and I was off again with my busy life, walking, wondering if this was all because I had given him a book a while ago myself.

I rediscovered it that night, emptying out my bag onto the living room table after my late classes. I brushed my palm across the dark cover and noticed a circular symbol engraved in its centre. Sitting there I was unable to place the material the book was made of, I opened it. On the first blank sheet, large watery words started to emerge which read:

The No Name Diary