The doctor seemed to rejoice at finding in a man from Madrid an illness typical of coastal people. Because doctors feel an unspeakable happiness in the illnesses of others if they are uncommon and they celebrate the discovery of rarely seen fractures or other whims of the disease that make them happy, like someone who finds a bill in a coat. «You suffer from surfer’s ear. Due to frequent exposure to very cold water, the bone around the ear canal grows, so that the canal narrows and eventually closes. “It is a rare disease in the interior.” “I’m from San Sebastián,” I replied, somewhat offended by the assumption. Who had he taken me for? I was proud to suffer from a marine illness, there at the asphalt corner of the M-30. I thought that the coastal guy has always felt superior to the dryland guy, a guy who doesn’t know about currents, winds, or fish and who barely knows how to swim. It is true that now, one from Bierzo beats you in the 500 meter butterfly, but that is another topic. My doctor talked about the deadlines for the operation, deafness thresholds, among other details, and I sat there smiling thinking about the baths with the board in January, on that day when we capsized the sailboat in the middle of the snow in front of the Aquarium, and spearfishing in spring with the water cramping your temples like a Taser. And the day we were shipwrecked in La Concha and the Optimist seemed like the raft of the Medusa and the swim with the white shark in Gansbaai at the Cape of Good Hope and the adventure on the Skeleton Coast, so lonely, in which it pushed us towards the rocks a sea like UIP. One goes to Madrid to be left alone and to forget the sea and all its range of blues, but in the city all forms of nostalgia for water are displayed. In the Retiro, boyfriends, bad poets and failed explorers dream of the South Seas. They open swimming pools with training for open water crossings, artificial waves, diving centers with tanks deeper than the Mariana Trench, navigation academies in which prosecutors dream of the Strait of Hormuz and aquariums with numbers of dolphins that seem like Aranda de Duero. In the summer, men in flip-flops cross the zebra crossings as out of context as Koldo in a sacristy and the open sea – ‘itsas zabalean’ in Basque, literally ‘in the open sea’ -, it’s six days and five nights in a tourist apartment in which pets are allowed. «The surfer’s ear is probably the last thing I have left of the ocean besides this marine nostalgia.» Here it dries up in a deconstructive process that consists of forgetting the sea. Surfer’s ear is probably the last thing I have left of the ocean besides this marine nostalgia, the surfboards in the garage and the plans that never come true. Paloma, the middle one, has already painted three drawings of beaches for me, as if to say. These bones grown in the ear were, in some way, my ivory paw of Ahab, the earring in the ear after turning Hornos and the scar from the boarding at Trafalgar. The surfer’s ear gave a maritime prestige that I now lose, surgically, like so many things. At the close of the edition, they will have given me a dry ear and from now on I will listen as if I were from Valladolid.
#trace #sea
