It was my second year at college, my friend Rosa and I lived in the downtown area of a cute city in Southern Spain. It was a neighborhood full of college buildings, bookstores, coffee shops and used clothing tents. The music conservatory was located there too, so it was common to see the students carrying their instrument cases of every size and shape.
My apartment and Rosa’s were just a block away from each other , but I have to specify that the block concept doesn’t work well when you are in an old European town. Actually, to visit Rosa I had to take four dark, narrow and winding streets that were the perfect scenario for a mysterious student kidnapping every evening. But thank God, that was not the case. It was a bright sunny afternoon in October, the course had just started and I was studying some presocratics when I realized I had left my last lesson notes at Rosa’s place. Though the day was sunny, the temperature at my apartment had begun to fall, so I was wearing one of those gnawed robes that had been in my mom’s closet from the pre-Roman era over my t-shirt and jeans. It was kind of chilly and just a two-minute walk, the four narrow backstreets were going to be empty, and I had no time to waste, so, in spite of my homey appearance, I decided to go ahead and step outside wrapped in my green bathrobe.
When I took the first of the four streets, nobody was walking along it, so I felt confident about my decision, but the comfort didn’t last when I looked at my feet and I saw with horror that I was also wearing my teddybear cat-shape slippers. In that moment, I began to speed up and pray that nobody would recognize me from the huge group of music students that had just entered the street and were walking towards me. Oh no! One of them looked a lot like a friend of mine. Oh no! actually three of them…
“Carmen! Carmen! What’s up? Why are you going that way? Aren’t you joining us for the beginning of the course concert? We told you, it was today! We all will be playing there! and there will be free catering afterwards! C’mon, where are you going? You promised.” I should mention here the fact that Spanish friends’ insistance is a complicated thing to fight. After arguing with them for an unending while, I realized it may be better to camouflage myself between them than performing a loud dispute with such an outfit like that, so before I could blink my eyes, I was attending a string quartet concert inside my grandma’s robe. Fashion is not my strong point anyhow.
