I meet Enya sometime during a breakfast.
I remember – I was writing. For the first time since my arrival I was properly writing. Well ‘rewriting’ to be exact, but focussed, full of energy and in need of neither company nor conversation.
“Excuse me. Do you av the cod”
A ‘why would I want fish and chips for breakfast?’ thought, enters unbidden, as I look up and see a tall, painfully thin (some would say, slim – in my book painfully thin), woman with almost shoulder length, almost straight dark hair and dark eyes, smiling politely. The look says Spanish, the accent – German.
A light bulb moment as I realise she has seen me on the computer and ‘cod’ means ‘code’.
‘It doesn’t work here, well it does sometimes, but the box is too far away.’
She looks a little hurt as if I am keeping the ‘cod’ a secret.
‘I am writing’ I explain. ‘Not on the internet’.
“Ah, OK, thank you”.
I probably should have engaged in conversation then. Breakfast is ‘my’ time. I love breakfast. I am usually the only one here. Ham brings me my vegetable omelette, disgusting tea and plate piled high with fruit. Ham’s daughter, Lucky, the two year old flame thrower, clambers onto the chair next to me to share my fruit and watches happily and in silence as I bang the keys, occasionally asking for her face to be wiped clean of the pineapple juice dribbling down her chin, with much movement of tiny arms. She can juggle with fire but can’t wipe her face?
The owner told Ham on day 3 that I was not entitled to both an omelette AND fruit in my ‘long term room deal’ breakfast and Ham presented me with the new long term menu. I quietly insisted on speaking to him – the owner that is.
I am now – entitled to it – the breakfast that is.
Most of the people who come at this time of year come for the full moon/halfmoon/jungle parties and are incapable of making the 10.30 am breakfast deadline, he’s coining it in and he knows it. I’m old and a little wiser – he knows that now too.
I remember saying when the rain poured down on summer days in Blighty:
‘This is monsoon weather’.
It isn’t.
I am sitting in monsoon weather this morning. Sheets of water pouring down from a still sky like bolts of sheer material with weights at the bottom being dropped from a tall building. Out at sea visibility is down to a few metres, lightning illuminates the horizon and thunder rumbles. If I were here for a two week break, I would be somewhat disappointed but knowing I have months of sunshine to come, I love this rain, its strength, its attitude.
Back to Enya – now where did that leap come from?
Sometime in the afternoon of the breakfast day we met, I am lying on a wooden, Thai style sun lounger, trying to burn evenly while finishing ‘Frank’s Wild Years’ by Nick Triplow – a somewhat sad but lovely little book about the underlife in South East london whose characters reminded me vividly of the many people I knew in that area in the 70’s.
Enya comes over and says “Hello, we meet again”.
We talk.
Enya is from the Basque country but has lived in Berlin for 20 years. She is the wrong side of 45 but looks much younger, a photographer who has spent the last 7 winters in Thailand and was married to a German. She has a huge spanish family with many nephews, nieces, aunts, uncles and cousins but no children. She visits her family at least twice a year. She speaks with a spanish passion and germanic ferocity. There is something haunting or maybe ‘haunted’ about her.
I tell her I am here to write and because I hate the English winters.
“Oh yes, they are bullshit!”
Well that’s one word for it, Enya, ‘Cold’ could possibly be another?
She talks about her photography. She is to have an exhibition of her photos in Las Vegas next year. She spent one night in the favelas of Buenos Aires and the photos are a result. The exhibition is to be entitled ‘One night in the favelas of Buenos Aires’ – I thought perhaps ‘One night’ might have been more snappy but refrained from suggesting it.
I ask if she uses film or digital photography. She looks at me scathingly. She uses film, she is an artist. Everyone in Berlin is an artist, except the bourgeois middle class. Berlin is becoming far too bourgeois middle class – but it is cheap. Her apartment is only £300 a month.
Didn’t the environmental pollution caused by film processing worry her? (The footage of kilometres of wasteland in eastern Europe caused by film processing I saw on a documentary some years ago, ended my use of film forever).
Enya explodes. Capitalistic states! Banks! Motor Cars! More ‘Bullshit!’ The tirade lasts a good three minutes and ends with:
“We are not going to discuss it! We are not going to argue!”
Not quite comprehending how you can embrace a long haul flight from Berlin but believe no one should have a motor car in the ‘fighting world pollution stakes’ but more than happy not to argue, I ask her about her future plans.
She is working on a new ‘theme’.
“I am always looking for teems”. Her spanish hands talking as rapidly as her clipped speech.
This one is entitled ‘Waiting for lunch’ but is far more conceptual – I had mentioned that Christo was my favourite conceptual artist and this met with a modicum of approval.
“It could be waiting for love, waiting for freedom, waiting for fortune – you see – conceptual!”
I was quite happy with the ‘waiting for lunch’ theme, thinking a photo of some overpaid A list celebrity in Claridges in juxtaposition with lions in the jungle or children in Ethiopia quite a big enough ‘theme’ – I am patently not an ‘artist’.
“And you? What do you write about?”
Knowing that my small story is not in the same league as nights in favelas or starving children, I mumble that the screenplay I am working on is about 4 female pensioners who go on a sort of road trip and find themselves – it sounds, even to me, extremely middle class and bourgeois – Hang on! I am middle class and bourgeois and there are an awful lot of us out there!
Surprisingly she likes the idea – a lot.
I tell her briefly about my life. When I reach the bit about my husband dying she suddenly interrupts
“Mine died too; 5 years ago”.
That’s where the haunted look comes from – there’s the simpatico.
It seems they were both into parties and drugs and alcohol and being different. So they joined the ‘different’ clan spending time in squats and communes, hiding under the duvet of ‘artistic’; determined to live a hedonistic, bohemian life.
She grew tired of it pulled herself away and left him; choosing rather to focuss on her photography.
He didn’t make it. His body wrecked with years of abuse; a heart attack the final insult.
She has been coming back to thailand every winter since he died.
It’s that book and cover thing again.
I think perhaps that Enya is waiting for lunch.