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Scotland

(from the novel  "November's Sun")

    Arriving. A new country is like opening an unexpected gift. When you get it you feel surprised and moved, but sometimes when you unwrapped it you feel disappointed, in other cases it varnishes your glance and also you get tongue-tied with happiness. Since ages I've avoided to be eluded by previous ideas. I've learned not to wait for nothing, not to imagine anything from anybody either; but I hardly could do that with the unknown spaces, the landscapes or certain intuitions. I could imagine any sort of people but I couldn't describe to myself the landscapes in advance. At last I couldn't avoid to describe me a place that the topics always decorate in any way. So when I arrived, I usually find a scene very different from that I hoped. To land in that country was an excessive gift that shocked me and it produced the opposite effect of that who stares at everything without being able to see nothing it.

........ His bearing was very upright, he seemed concise and gentlemanly in the most topical and typical British concept, Patrick accompanied me to the house that was going to be, I did not know it yet, my home for so short while. The house was a bit away from Central City but it was not so far from the institute, in any case it was well communicated due to a good public transport service. The house was small but nice and comfortable, it had the characteristic great kitchen-living room where the social gatherings were carried after meals. A tiny garden in the entrance and bit bigger one behind the house with grass and showy beds of flowers, the set of which seemed made of plastic as a result of the extreme care that was put into the vegetation. 

 

    I was eager to find out landscapes. I started going up to the Edinburgh Castle. As all the castles it was placed in the summit of a rocky mass from where you could sightseeing all the city. Streets and houses had a smart looking that I scarcely could believe what I saw, when it did not rain the light had a clear shade, like gilded air. I visited the rural zone where R L Stevenson lived and I understood that it would be very easy to live there and forget the world just in awakening every day in front of those panoramics.

 

    I used to pass by a peculiar shop, in its window I observed with greed some painting equipment. I had the eyes full of unknown lights, landscapes still to discover and ahead three weeks before beginning the lectures....

    When I returned for dinner, and that meant early afternoon for me, without thinking it twice I came in, there were prepared small linen cloths for the tourists where they reproduced, outlined previously, some of the topical views from Edinburgh and its environs, others were impressive images of Scotland, all with their tiny postcards to copy from the original and to imitate the colours. I felt like a greedy child in front of a shop window full of sweets. It took me a long time to decide, I looked for something that impressed me but enough easy. At last I made up my mind in a hurry because the shop was going to close and that forced me to choose an image of Bridge Inn and another one from Urquhart Castle. 

 

    Scotland ended up prevailing upon me triumphantly.......... 

 

    It was an adventure that I encountered by chance, without any desire or any previous intention. I saw myself surrounded without trying it in the games that lead and acclimate an exceptional discovery, a new relation, with all the restlessness that produced to me knowing that it was a game of trivial seduction for both of us and it surprised me the illusion, and the tenacity he put at any moment, at least in appearance. I could not explain to myself why I did not remember at any moment the distant scepticism whith I had tried to demonstrate him that anyone could moved away or protected from any feeling. Probably he understood my words like a challenge. Just I was unaware of saying those words  just only a few days ago in the train... Now it was that... 

   I discovered places where the beauty left me breathless. The sensation of silence and calm in the summits, the impenetrable mystery of nature. The uneasy solitude near the sky. The wish of merging with that landscape, of staying there until the exhausting of senses......         

    Everything exposed with a hard beauty that forbade me saying a word. I listened to the stories about the bloody fights in Glencoe to defend the independence of the country, the legends, the souls in pain. I was losing the account of the castles that we visited and their names. I liked the abnormality of so mild and fresh climate, we had to wear a sweater at the height of summer even when I felt colder than I could suppose or when we suffered from unexpected rains. After few kilometres of walking with a splendid sun that reflected so clean colours in so different way from those of the Mediterranean climate, we had to take out the raincoats with urgency and carry on walking under rain......... 

© Emília V. Talens. Reproduction is forbidden without author's permision. I also apologize for any error in the translation, as I am not a native born English speaker, nor a profesional translator.