An Afternoon in Gibraltar (A Short and Quick Romance)

“Okay. Yes. Now, will you let me tell you what I want to do?” I told the young woman.

Now that I look back I don’t even remember his name. She was sitting on the bus; we had combed the Costa del Sol which is along the coast of Spain that connects to the Mediterranean Sea. We were twenty-seven on the bus. She sat next to me for two days of the trip, we talked, she was pretty, about twenty-eight years old, I was forty-eight. No expectations. She was from Bucharest. And now she was sitting with me in a little pub, on a cobbled street in the land of Gibraltar, an annexed British state, with her own kind of sovereign; she with a glass of wine, me with a glass of coke, and the two of us eating a sandwich each.

“Now that we’ve come this far with each other,” he laughs, “as you were about to do, tell me what you want to do for the rest of the afternoon, I think that’s on your mind, something tells me you decided before get off the bus climb that rock (The Rock of Gibraltar)”.

We were, for the most part, at its bottom edge.

Her dark eyes penetrated my blue, and she must have been reading my mind, because that’s exactly what I was contemplating, and I was about to suggest if she wanted to keep me company, and I suggested this, and she was more than willing. she took this as a complement for the rest of the afternoon.

We took the taxi as high as we could to the big rock, considered one of the ‘Pillars of Hercules’. So I said,

“I’m going to go up to the cement cage at the top, with that cannon extending out from us, see, there’s a little tree next to it?”

She looks, a road sign fills her view, a little further down the road (she looked at the sign, the little tree, she said), “Says Dennis, no trespassing.”

“Yes,” I answered, “but I am not, of course, a prisoner of such rules, they are to protect the uninquisitive, or rather, the non-adventurers.”

She looked at me like I was a shocked saleswoman, and then my face changed to: you pick which way you want to go, up or down, but I’m going up, and I started to climb up the side of the rock, and it went straight up, up up!

“I’ll hit you up there,” he said, and started climbing immediately.

These of course were the wrong words coming from a woman, and I had to meet the challenge, and she was wrong, I won her, and the taste of victory was good, she kissed me on the cheek, and we walked the WWII, kind of an old tower, overlooking the area below. At the moment we were both happy, you see, it was perhaps the best view of the entire Rock of Gibraltar. Below you could see the little airport they had, small as it was, the tram that went up the Rock near us but not close enough to protest that we were there, if indeed there was an official on board, the winding streets that led to the Peñón were visible, some of the residential monkeys were being fed by tourists, below, they looked like peanuts, but some had climbed close, they were really all over the mountain, as the legend says: “When the monkeys disappear, they will also disappear”. people (something like that)”.

Then my friend from Bucharest said, “That tree”, pointing to the small tree, “I can climb it higher than you”, and the bet started. And she went up to the top of it, and it was swaying with the wind, actually the wind at this level was a little noisy, strong, which just told me we were next to the clouds. I looked around to see if the police were anywhere and we were safe.

“Your turn, Dennis,” she said. Then a second, then quickly, she slides down the tree to a standing ovation.

She had stopped talking now, she extends her right hand towards the tree, as if to say: your turn, eyes without light, two arms, legs and eyes standing like a soldier waiting for me to climb the tree that looks like a stream of rain, thin, almost as thin as the spokes of a wheel on a kid’s bike at the top, not really that thin, but towards the top, and the bottom wasn’t really that thick.

I was now taking the dimensions of the tree into consideration and I saw a red light as I approached the top. I started to climb, and in no more than a few feet I could feel the tree swaying with my weight, so I remained inactive, I looked at my Romanian friend, calm with a smile, she was standing, less excited, while I remained hanging . on this bony tree, almost as if it were suspended twenty fathoms deep in the Mediterranean, and then I knew I was defeated, I was not going to climb to its top and allow the tree to break, and that would be a sin, I was the only one tree on this side of the top of the rock.

I wonder what I learned that afternoon, maybe nothing about myself or climbing, or Gibraltar itself, because all of that I had learned before I got to Gibraltar, from books. However, I always like to watch that part of my life’s travels; I think what I discovered at such a strange age is that this new generation was competitive, challenging and maybe underappreciated, they could have fun with older men, without crushing her ego too much, she was smart, and maybe that was an asset, as long as when it’s under control.

Written on 5-30-2008