sig and onto spain

tomorrow we go to spain but this morning we are in Sig - the men in matching blue jackets and hard hats pound up walls and measure thin steel pipes by eye - the hats and coats give it away as a government job. anything else and they'd be in fake LaCoste t shirts and maybe a baseball cap

i am sneaking a look through the three layers of curtains that puff in and out of the balcony door- gauzy white; rose petals on thick gold, and a striped blue and yellow that recalls the sea far out and away from this inland town. they are layered for modesty? For the women of the house to keep sheilded from peepers. but i am the one peeping in this place

in this house, the house of my husband/s brother/s usually it is his wife that cooks and controls the kitchen but these days she is on a trip to Mecca so her grown up children and another brother are here running the show. which is how i come to cook filflah /roasted peppers/ how i came to be in the kitchen so long that the filthy square began to unfold its sense and order to me/ that the heat could creep and creep until i was suprised when my husband came in bearing a bag of stingy limes and commented on the heat of the room

of course. but i hadnt felt it until the two youngest girls come in to close off the one window- its yellowed glass all the more smothering than sheer would have been- because

a man who doesnt live in the house, who is tall and dark, and by dark i mean black, with a deep deep voice has come to help kill the lizard who has taken up residence on the back balcony in the sprouting eyefulls of potatoes and blurry, rotting onions.

when i insist that i have met this man before, his name is Beludjma and i myself have had coffee and then later lunch on my own balcony and that his sister had cooked for their grandfathers funeral funeral feast of mountains of cooscoos and whole lambs slaughtered for the guests who sat in plastic white chairs in the street down below they crack it open again a bit

this is greeted by the oldest son who has grown to his full height _huge_ and grown out of his pimples and given up on college and settled into working for his uncle in the business they run out of the ground floor of this sale house all of which is inhabited by them-- the oldest son barks

but now i have to leave this place sig and so i will continue later again this journey