Santiago de Compostela, Spain There is a café here in Santiago called Avante! frequented principally by students and post-grads, whose walls are near-to-exclusively covered in Leftist memorabilia. I have overheard some Americans—most recently a group of Patagonia-clad boys from Colorado—excitedly call it “the communist bar” as if perhaps the First International were meeting down in… more
Writer: Jesse Salvo
History Is Not Chronology
GENRE NON-BINARY by Jesse SalvoThe Spanish expression, for being unfaithful to someone is “Puso los cuernos” to put the horns on them. My romantic partner one day wandered into the teacher’s lounge of her high school, to find her colleagues gossiping that one of the girls, Maria, had “put the horns on Alvaro.”
“Poor Alvaro,” someone said.
“Poor Maria,” my partner said to me.
The Spanish word for a shameless gossip is “chismoso”
The Spanish word for a hotshot, or someone who makes all the decisions is “El que corta el bacalao” or “he that cuts the codfish.”… more
The View From Down Here
GENRE NON-BINARY by Jesse Salvoguiri (spanish): a foreigner, a tourist, usually a white person On Thursday nights here, I used to run an English language trivia which suffered middling attendance on account of I was not so good at properly calibrating the difficulty of the questions. The place where I hosted was and is called La Sra Pop. The staff… more
War & Peace in a Time of Quarantine
GENRE NON-BINARY by Jesse SalvoThere were a handful of instances, circulated online and in the national papers, of Spanish citizens calling the police on their neighbors for sunbathing, but for the most part the roof restrictions represented the de jure senselessness of Spanish policy-makers, a rule citizens would vacillate between using as a cudgel against neighbors they disliked, and themselves violating in moments of indulgence, without ever actually getting the police involved. Still, it was long and confused and spiritually cramped period.… more
Life in the Plague Times
GENRE NON-BINARY by Jesse SalvoIt is a sunny day in Seville. From where I sit on the balcony, the street looks mostly empty. Through the windows you can still hear private people having private lives. Everything is shut. Somewhere a dog barks. 5,700 cases and counting.… more
Bicicleteria
GENRE NON-BINARY by Jesse SalvoIts hours are entirely discretionary, which is not so rare a thing in Spain. A glass of beer costs two euro, wine is three. No dive bar worth its salt has got a bathroom that isn’t always putrescent. Bicicleteria is no exception in this.… more
Estrogenuinas & Terrier
GENRE NON-BINARY by Jesse SalvoThere’s a lot to recommend self-imposed exile in Spain. The three-dollar Rioja, for one. The less-than-three-dollar healthcare, for two. But if you travel a bit farther down the list you come across the line-item that the Spanish alternative scene is goddamn bursting with creativity.… more
The Silence of Small Rooms
FICTION by Jesse SalvoThe elevator is full to bursting. Intolerably hot is how you would describe it, if pressed. Wall to wall. Elbow meet elbow. You’re eyeballing the orderlies and patients and visitors all around you, trying to dead-reckon their weight and then compare to the oxidated inspection plaque that lists the elevator’s carrying capacity as Max 4… more
