MEMORIES….

Sometimes it is difficult to decide what to write about, not because there is a lack of ideas here but on the contrary there are so many. I figure I will just start and see what it comes to. For one , and this is really true, this morning I said to Salvador; It is funny, everybody here sees a lot of deer in their backyards and here we hardly ever see one. Months ago one crossed the road right in front of our car but that was it. A bit later we were having breakfast and I look out and what do I see? Not 1 but 2 deer crossing the backyard!

Hardly had time to get my camera and I only got one at a time….  But don’t you think that is funny? Did the deer come because I was thinking of them or was I thinking of deer because they were going to come?

If you pay attention it happens all the time and it has something to do with your attention being fixed on a certain thing or person? Like when our baby was a baby we used to go walk with her in a baby-car and I noticed all of a sudden there were quiet a lot of women with baby cars in the street, never had noticed them before. Or when you are pregnant you notice a lot of women pregnant and so on…

No, today I wanted to talk a little bit about Julita, this morning I came across a picture of her and a ton of memories came streaming in. Julita was our land lady in Canary Islands, in a place called Guia, about 20 miles from Las Palmas. Salvador was already there when I arrived from America and had rented that place from Julita, which was a top floor in a building that never got finished ( the Spanish are good at that) but had 2 floors. Downstairs was Julita’s domain because she was very heavy and could not walk the stairs. She had an enormous “kitchen” which was from top till bottom filled with antiques and old stuff, plants hanging everywhere, some old fridges full of I don’t know what, mostly bloody meat as she had that dog that was enormous and looked like a lion, never saw one like that, and everybody was scared to death of him. If you could wrestle yourself through all the stuff , watching out not to bump your head on all the cans and pots and treasures that were hanging from the ceiling, there was a table to sit and have a coffee amidst the incredible screams of about a 100 birds and a few Persian cats in cages that had their way of smelling too. Julita was beautiful, always immaculate made up, black eyes and red lips. She loved to dress nice but never could find anything to please her because of her size. but she had an old sewing machine, the pedal kind, and as smart and convincing as she was, she had me make her a bunch of outfits, even a bra because she could not find one big enough and here in the USA I see them all over and when I see them I always have to think of Julita.

Here is Julita posing in the wedding dress I made her from materials she had, which where for curtains but she had a lot of it. It was a sleeveless dress with a jacket and it really looked great and beside her is her husband, not yet changed in his suit for which he would wait till the last minute. Behind them a painting of them young she asked Salvador to make.

Her bedroom was quiet small and had a door with iron bars like they have in jail and always triple locked, whether she was in or out the room. She once was attacked while in bed and they had stolen all her gold, Julita loved gold, always wearing a lot of it so now the people that came to see her had to talk through the iron bars. We were the only ones more or less that were allowed to go in there and had a visit if you could find a place to sit between the dolls and other things she collected. The walls were full of clocks, the ones that say Coo-coo and the once that announce each half hour with a clang! I counted once 37 of them and plenty of mirrors of course. She loved to be in bed, she would sit like a doll, with stretched legs because she could not bend them, on top of some colourful blankets, because there on top of the bed she was the most comfortable and lets not forget she was well into her 60ties and very very heavy. In the time we were there she got married, although they had been married already but something had happened and they had to do it over again, they had 3 grown sons and he, the husband, only came home the weekends. He had a great love for whisky and together they had some incredible screaming sessions which was taken over by the incredible bird they had who could copy anything, so at times you thought someone had a fit but it was just the bird, no, unbelievable, he or she could do the phone ringing or my sewing machine going or the cats miaow or the birds sing, anything really and he kept calling a name which was not of any one known in the house and Julita sometimes got things nobody knew from where…. but that is a whole book, she is like a personage of the Almodovar movies to say the least. There was a room downstairs that was rented to a transvestite who had gorgeous long blond hair, boobs and everything. She had one leg shorter than the other so she could not walk well and did not work. She had a wonderful collection of Barby dolls and was very kind but did not want to know much about the other people that lived in the garage that had become a room. They were a couple and when I was saw her I thought what a pretty girl, very modern and nice looking. It turned out she was a boy but a girl, and the boyfriend who told me once that his mother had him his whole life tied to the bed, he could walk around a little bit but was tied up and had to do his necessities right there and other unbelievable horror stories, but that could be an other book by itself  and then there was an other transvestite of whom I forgot the name but he, she, had Aids and nobody wanted to have anything to do with that person but Julita always had an open door and food. Then there was el Padrino, who would come over everyday and sit with Julita for a while, he was very elegant and she would get all beautiful and dressed up and Raquel, the girl that came to clean… they were all caracters and could be an other book but this is getting too long so I leave you with an other picture of Julita with a dress I made of a very nasty material she picked up somewhere……

Guia 1998.