Speaker 1: There are certain details you notice only in retirement absences,
Speaker 1: mostly trains that you no longer need to catch, bells
Speaker 1: that might as well ring out for someone else. I've
Speaker 1: lived in this corner of Andalusia on and off since
Speaker 1: the seventies, but this was my first true summer as
Speaker 1: an inhabitant, not a visitor or a commuter. I thought
Speaker 1: this time would be spent requenting myself with the familiar
Speaker 1: long mornings leafing through doggyared books afternoons that stretched noiseless
Speaker 1: up the white hillside. Instead, everything started changing at the
Speaker 1: height of a noon so bright I almost squinted thinking
Speaker 1: about it. In July, Puente Salada glows white. A tight
Speaker 1: lattice of stone alleys wound up from the plaza, every
Speaker 1: surface sun blasted to a nearly blue, feverish reflection. On
Speaker 1: my third week here, I woke early and set out
Speaker 1: into the plaza to buy bread, keys jangling in my palm.
Speaker 1: The air bristles with heat even before the bell tower
Speaker 1: marked midday. As I passed beneath the plane trees, the
Speaker 1: mosaic tiles, and drowsy chatter of vendors under striped awnings,
Speaker 1: I caught myself performing one of those small ingrained checks
Speaker 1: a glance at my own shadow. I don't know why
Speaker 1: I did it, old habit, remnants of scientific alertness, maybe,
Speaker 1: but what I saw stopped me in the center of
Speaker 1: the stone. There was a suggestion of gray at my feet,
Speaker 1: barely more than a smudge. Not the crisp silhouette I'd
Speaker 1: grown up with, the one I admired as a child
Speaker 1: stalking through hot city streets, neither the erratic jumble that
Speaker 1: flickered around me on wind torn evenings, just a faint fog,
Speaker 1: as though some one had dusted my outline with flower
Speaker 1: and then swept it away. I held my hand up
Speaker 1: against the glare, fingers spread awkwardly, expecting a stronger imprint
Speaker 1: on the flagstones, still only a hint of form, barely
Speaker 1: enough for my mind to draw a connection. I moved tentatively,
Speaker 1: half smiling, searching for a spot where the real shadow
Speaker 1: might emerge, a trick of angle, or perhaps a spot
Speaker 1: where the sun's glare was less merciless. But no matter
Speaker 1: which paving stone I crossed, or how neatly I rotated
Speaker 1: on the axis of my own feet, the absence held
Speaker 1: my shadow was hardly there at all. It was an
Speaker 1: odd moment, so small and yet so dissonant that I
Speaker 1: nearly said something aloud. The waiter balancing three teetering cups
Speaker 1: between his fingers, the couple gesturing with animated hands at
Speaker 1: the corner table, even the swoop of the plaza's old
Speaker 1: iron lamp. None of them had proper shadows. Under this
Speaker 1: blinding radiance. Everything should have been pinned to the ground
Speaker 1: by its own sharp double. Instead, the plaza felt buoyant
Speaker 1: and slightly untethered, as if it could all be swept
Speaker 1: up and rearranged by a well placed breeze. But life continued.
Speaker 1: Children darted between unseeable borders. An ancient dog sighed under
Speaker 1: a bench where a delivery van reversed with operatic slowness.
Speaker 1: The surface world was as grounded as it ever had been.
Speaker 1: Only this minor breach, this missing weight, made it all
Speaker 1: feel just a notch away from expectation. I decided I
Speaker 1: would not mention it to any one. I had no
Speaker 1: urge to be the newly retired odd ball, already asking
Speaker 1: quirky questions before I'd even lined my books on the shelf. Still,
Speaker 1: the curiosity burned low but persistent, as I carried my
Speaker 1: bread home. Retirement cast you into the heart of a
Speaker 1: town in a way no summer holiday or borrowed week
Speaker 1: can match. I found myself filling days not with grand projects,
Speaker 1: but with small, repeating rituals. After breakfast, I'd strolled to
Speaker 1: the cafe under the vine laced veranda, where Matteo, a kind,
Speaker 1: heaver set man who'd been my friend since the years
Speaker 1: when the town's only tourist traffic came on mopeds, waited
Speaker 1: with a joke about my foreign city ways. He greeted
Speaker 1: me every morning as if our friendship began anew with
Speaker 1: every cup. There were coffees, of course, but also the soft,
Speaker 1: unnecessary debates about whether clouds would finally gather over the
Speaker 1: southern hills or whether this year's olives would be worse,
Speaker 1: which is better, you know? For flavor, I'd make my
Speaker 1: way to Carmen's bakery, whose windows spread sugard sent all
Speaker 1: down Caldel Rosaria. Carmen moved with the confidence of some
Speaker 1: one who never doubted her hands, slapping dough on to
Speaker 1: flowered boards, humming through the strain of a radio that
Speaker 1: never tuned in properly. She always shouted my name first,
Speaker 1: as though announcing me to the loaf of the day,
Speaker 1: to Mars. The handerman would wave to me from whatever
Speaker 1: surface he was maintaining, paint, whitewash or rattling roof tiles,
Speaker 1: His tan a study in subtle gradients. Elina, the gallery manager,
Speaker 1: was relatively recent, her accent revealing her roots in Madrid's
Speaker 1: bustling arts district, and she always wanted to know what
Speaker 1: I'd seen through my camera that morning, as though hoping
Speaker 1: to collect an outsider's vision before it faded into the
Speaker 1: everyday blur. Was hard not to feel folded into the
Speaker 1: rhythm of Puente Salada, the way Siesta unspooled mid day tension,
Speaker 1: How every Thursday's market felt both theatrical and pragmatic, How
Speaker 1: gossip traveled faster than weather. My perspective wore gently with itself.
Speaker 1: I taught physics long enough to catalog the precise way's
Speaker 1: southern sun sharpens a shadow's edge, how whitewashed lime reflects
Speaker 1: harshness away. I'd broken up more than a few student
Speaker 1: arguments about seeing his believing here it seemed a person's
Speaker 1: gaze was less a tool for analysis and more a
Speaker 1: way of soaking in safety. And yet As each day
Speaker 1: drew on that lack, those missing shadows persisted. The town,
Speaker 1: for all its sunlight, was both more dazzling and less
Speaker 1: defined than other places I'd known. In casual conversation, people
Speaker 1: would wax poetic about the light of Puente Salada. The
Speaker 1: brightness was a badge, but no one ever mentioned the
Speaker 1: other face of light. It's opposite its anchor. There was
Speaker 1: a gap, quiet but insistent, at the edge of every routine.
Speaker 1: By the end of my first month, it felt almost
Speaker 1: impolite to notice. I confessed my initial observation to Matteo,
Speaker 1: huddled over sticky table tops stained with decades of sugar
Speaker 1: and newsprint. Why do you think everything looks so bright?
Speaker 1: I tried keeping it light. We love the sun here,
Speaker 1: he replied. Haven't you heard how foreigners complain their eyes hurt?
Speaker 1: He snorted, as though the idea amused him deeply. You
Speaker 1: get used to it. You go back to the city,
Speaker 1: you'll see feels dull heavy. Here we have real light.
Speaker 1: But don't you ever notice. I don't know how the
Speaker 1: shade isn't really shade, He laughed, a big rolling sound. Ah,
Speaker 1: you want to cool off, go behind Carmen's my cousin says,
Speaker 1: that's the only place that counts as shade. But even there,
Speaker 1: the cat's squint, not just the heat that I faltered,
Speaker 1: wondering if I'd already run out of words the way
Speaker 1: things look. He shrugged, unconcerned. We say the light here
Speaker 1: keeps trouble away. That's why we paint the houses. Yes,
Speaker 1: otherwise the sun would burn holes in our heads. Don't
Speaker 1: think about it too hard, neighbor. That's what lets you
Speaker 1: enjoy your afternoons. I let myself laugh it off with him.
Speaker 1: Matteo wasn't a man for puzzles. He liked his world intact,
Speaker 1: but a scientist's restlessness lingered in my chest. I made
Speaker 1: a note in my battered note book, first attempt at
Speaker 1: casual inquiry, deflection, humor, share theory later, and closed it
Speaker 1: with a snap. Neither poetry nor folk wisdom could quite
Speaker 1: explain the way the town's own post cards depicted the
Speaker 1: place I'd paused by Alena's gallery, pretending interest in a
Speaker 1: rack of blond sun bleached water colors, pretending not to
Speaker 1: squint at the near indistinct geometries, white on white buildings
Speaker 1: piled like clouds. Occasional awnings rendered in improbable pastels. The
Speaker 1: Plazas fountain almost ghostly in mid day, but always without exception.
Speaker 1: The shadows below trees, benches, and balconies were so faint
Speaker 1: I had to tilt the cards to even distinguish where
Speaker 1: stone met air. I compared the cards to what I
Speaker 1: saw now looking across the square. The same effect all
Speaker 1: the definition in the world, except where the solid was
Speaker 1: supposed to meet the ground. The trees seemed to float,
Speaker 1: The benches had no anchor, no gravity. Visually speaking, even
Speaker 1: the children's colorful hats failed to throw shapes onto the
Speaker 1: luminous tiles. It wasn't failing eyes, I assured myself, Nor
Speaker 1: was it some simple peculiarity of the hour. I tried
Speaker 1: to catch Carmen between customers as she loaded rings of
Speaker 1: sugared bread on to the window's warm sill. Carmen, I asked,
Speaker 1: have you ever noticed how the light here sort of,
Speaker 1: I don't know, erases everything. She looked up, dimpled and brisk. Well,
Speaker 1: that's what good whitewash does. Isn't it too hot to
Speaker 1: keep dust? Too bright for stains? She grinned, Even shadows
Speaker 1: give up trying. I watched her no irony, just the
Speaker 1: pride of someone whose world always gleamed. Her laughter was honest,
Speaker 1: but something in the words she chose pricked me. Back
Speaker 1: at my rented apartment, I unearthed a small stash of
Speaker 1: post cards I'd kept as mementos from decades before, one
Speaker 1: from a university trip in eighty two, another I'd sent
Speaker 1: to my parents when I first bicycle to the coast.
Speaker 1: Several picked up during short touristy forays into the region.
Speaker 1: These two, regardless of age, regardless of the photographic technology,
Speaker 1: rendered the village with the same pale, unanchored effect. In
Speaker 1: the oldest black hand white ones, the buildings all but
Speaker 1: levitated against the hillside. Not dramatic shadow, not the chiaroscuro
Speaker 1: i'd expect from unfiltered southern daylight, but a persistent, unexplainable absence.
Speaker 1: The contradiction was now impossible to dismiss. In Seville, an
Speaker 1: hour east, the same white town houses baked under fang
Speaker 1: tooth shadows, line so sharp on the ground that the
Speaker 1: city's heat seemed doubled. Here, nothing held still. The brightness
Speaker 1: felt clean, but incomplete, like a language missing its negatives.
Speaker 1: I started collecting small, inadequate explanations. It was the local stone,
Speaker 1: perhaps limestone mixed with river clay reflecting sunlight unevenly, maybe
Speaker 1: a trick of latitude, or the angle of local streets
Speaker 1: tiled just so. But every theory contradicted something obvious. Why
Speaker 1: would every drawing, every painting by visiting students that I
Speaker 1: had seen in Elena's gallery, like the heavy definition of shadow.
Speaker 1: Why did not even the church spire cast a proper
Speaker 1: mark upon the ground at noon, no matter how sharply
Speaker 1: the sun carved through the probossis of bells and pigeons overhead.
Speaker 1: A camera, a battered digital inherited from a niece who
Speaker 1: prefers phone snapshots, became my confidant. Some days I'd mark
Speaker 1: an anomaly and try to document it several ways, at
Speaker 1: once the plaza at noon, the lane of cypresses in
Speaker 1: the park, a stretch of laundry fluttering from carmens and
Speaker 1: casting only a tender, pale echo on the wall behind.
Speaker 1: No matter how I adjusted the settings exposure, contrast, white balance,
Speaker 1: the image on the small screen and on print out
Speaker 1: afterward never delivered a true shadow. I snapped comparison images
Speaker 1: in Seville, clean edged contrasts, stone knife points beneath cafe chairs,
Speaker 1: the familiar physics of form and darkness, here only the
Speaker 1: shimmer and melting play of an ever cautious daylight. I
Speaker 1: was not the only curious observer. I discovered Elina reviewing
Speaker 1: a local art school. Submissions. Remarked that all the students
Speaker 1: struggled with anchoring the buildings in their sketches. She brought
Speaker 1: me several. One. A graphite study of the church square
Speaker 1: captured light almost hypnotically, but the trees appeared to float
Speaker 1: above the ground, their trunks dissolving rather than rooting in dirt.
Speaker 1: I offered the camera to Sophia, a French student who'd
Speaker 1: arrived with sketch books and a haze of paint on
Speaker 1: her hands, and asked her to photograph the plaza, trying
Speaker 1: to catch the shadows if you see them. She nodded,
Speaker 1: returning the camera an hour later. Say difficile, ice, she said,
Speaker 1: switching to halting Spanish. No shadow, only white everywhere you
Speaker 1: want shade so your eyes can rest, but you only
Speaker 1: get more white. She smiled, apologetic, but showed me her photos.
Speaker 1: Each failed softly. One morning I tried a test. I
Speaker 1: placed a water bottle upright in the sunlit square angled
Speaker 1: beside a stone planter rich with purple petunias, and stepped back.
Speaker 1: Even at the sharpest angle, the projected shadow was transient,
Speaker 1: a blurred oval that seemed to shimmer away from its
Speaker 1: own edge, dissolving before it could make a claim on
Speaker 1: the tile. As I clicked through each experiment's result, I
Speaker 1: found myself opening childhood albums, searching for even one photograph
Speaker 1: in which my cousins and I, in the midst of
Speaker 1: holiday games on these same stones, were joined by a
Speaker 1: proper ink double beneath our feet. Nothing only the subtle
Speaker 1: suggestion of gray memory, it seemed, had always left out
Speaker 1: the detail. Perhaps I'd never truly seen it. Perhaps I'd
Speaker 1: simply never asked before it became a kind of obsession,
Speaker 1: though I masked it with practical errands. On a visit
Speaker 1: to Carmen's for breakfast, I mentioned my puzzle to a
Speaker 1: pair of German tourists adjacently sipping orange juice. It's the
Speaker 1: southern light, the man offered, adjusting rimless glasses. You don't
Speaker 1: notice it after a while, it's more creamy, yes, his
Speaker 1: wife nodded. Everything bounces, she said, laughing gesture to the buildings. Here,
Speaker 1: the light is soft like milk. I tried to press them,
Speaker 1: but you're not bothered. No sharp lines anywhere. The woman shrugged.
Speaker 1: We are used to it. It feels RESTful, like a
Speaker 1: place with nothing hiding. But by the end of their
Speaker 1: second day, when I ran into them again buying figs,
Speaker 1: neither seemed even to recall the distinction that had struck
Speaker 1: them initially. Why should people stop noticing something so odd,
Speaker 1: the absence of a universal companion so quickly. Was it
Speaker 1: a trick of attention or something in the very way
Speaker 1: this place was kept year after year. If anything, the
Speaker 1: phenomenon's persistence only exacerbated my own sense that something quietly
Speaker 1: impossible was on show, day in and day out for
Speaker 1: anyone who wished to notice. It was hard not to
Speaker 1: surrender to wonder. Despite my training as a teacher, I
Speaker 1: taught children to make sense of effect and cause, to
Speaker 1: weigh up evidence with more skepticism than are now. I
Speaker 1: made entries in my notebook like test with mirror beside stairwell,
Speaker 1: no measurable repeatable shadow increase and corners of bread shop
Speaker 1: window angle of refraction. The scientist in me hurled itself
Speaker 1: at the wall of the unexplained. Was it the particular
Speaker 1: minerals in the local lime, creating a diffuse reflection too
Speaker 1: efficient for shadow. Was it the constant repainting a kind
Speaker 1: of unwitting photonic technology preserved through custom and labor. But objectively,
Speaker 1: the effect bled into every visible thing. Even a lone
Speaker 1: olive sapling projected only a hushed glimmer, never the strong,
Speaker 1: leafy profil one would expect at a sun's zenith. The
Speaker 1: domed roofs and tiny bell towers so beloved by painters
Speaker 1: became more vulnerable to the mystery the longer I studied them.
Speaker 1: Passing tourists adjusted with indifferent speed content to describe the look,
Speaker 1: if they commented at all, as an atmospheric or stylistic flourish.
Speaker 1: Several insisted they remembered seeing traditional shadow on their first day,
Speaker 1: but could not point to a photo or scene where
Speaker 1: it remained true. The university in me started ceding ground
Speaker 1: to something of the folklorest. I began to suspect there
Speaker 1: was more at work than reflected sunlight, that the effect
Speaker 1: wasn't just physical, but cultural, something more quietly entwined in
Speaker 1: the fiber of the place. It was to Mars who
Speaker 1: reinforced this sense unintentionally over a bier one afternoon, he
Speaker 1: described the games the neighborhood children played when we were small.
Speaker 1: We'd spent whole days playing Esconder and Cora, hiding mostly
Speaker 1: in corners, behind walls, under the covered market stalls, but
Speaker 1: never in the shade. Not really. There isn't any proper shade.
Speaker 1: You couldn't disappear the way you can in Grenada. Say
Speaker 1: you have to use the tricks people's business, or noise
Speaker 1: or the smell from the bakery. Never the shadows. Only
Speaker 1: in the church did it sometimes feel darker, But even
Speaker 1: there it was more cool than truly shadowed. He accepted
Speaker 1: this as ordinary. His laugh was gentle, but the implications
Speaker 1: stuck in my mind. Hide and seek in a town
Speaker 1: without hiding, places made by light and dark. That evening
Speaker 1: I walked past a primary school. The painted iron gates
Speaker 1: flung wide through the open classroom windows. I glimpsed children
Speaker 1: learning from a diagram of trees casting sharp black angles
Speaker 1: under stylized sun, a model rendered in the standard text book,
Speaker 1: issued presumably by a central office in Madrid. Scanning the schoolyard,
Speaker 1: not one real patch of ground matched that diagram's insistence
Speaker 1: on contrast, What did it mean to teach a physics
Speaker 1: lesson whose rules never functioned in real life? Just beyond
Speaker 1: the pane. Elena, who'd lived here a few years now,
Speaker 1: told me she had noticed the difference when she first arrived.
Speaker 1: I was dazzled the first summer, she remarked one evening
Speaker 1: as we walked together past the tiled steps leading up
Speaker 1: to her flat. And I even looked for somewhere to
Speaker 1: sit that wouldn't hurt my eyes. But after a few
Speaker 1: months I didn't miss shadows. You just see the light.
Speaker 1: You forget you ever wanted the other side to rest
Speaker 1: your eye, to have wait. It was a strange relief
Speaker 1: in a way, to hear her say it, relief, but
Speaker 1: also a dawning sense of isolation that I might join
Speaker 1: the other residence in a mutual forgetting, or that continual
Speaker 1: observation might leave me an outsider to a pattern everyone
Speaker 1: else had absorbed. I began to wonder was the missing
Speaker 1: shadow a quirk, a side effect of sun and stone,
Speaker 1: or was it, in fact a consequence of sustained attention,
Speaker 1: a kind of collective agreement not to anchor things too
Speaker 1: firmly to the earth, a longing for buoyancy, for luminous clarity.
Speaker 1: Over contrast, my curiosity grew fierce, almost resentful of its
Speaker 1: own boundaries. I wanted not just reconciliation with the town's
Speaker 1: soft radiance, but to know its root. So I gathered
Speaker 1: my evidence and paid a visit to the one person
Speaker 1: in Puente Salada whose memory I was assured outmatched even
Speaker 1: the town's minor saints, Don Alejandro, the unofficial historian, bureaucrat,
Speaker 1: and archivist of everything curious, dubious, or barely believed. Alejandro's
Speaker 1: house was a museum without intention. Rooms lined top to
Speaker 1: bottom with wooden shelves layered, I suspect to protect the
Speaker 1: contents from moods of dust, damp, and time. At the back,
Speaker 1: sunlight wove thin shadows between stacks. But even in his
Speaker 1: old study, clarity pulsed against every object, perhaps an illusion
Speaker 1: created by generations of white lime and open shutters. He
Speaker 1: made tea the old Andalusian way, sprigs of wild mint,
Speaker 1: a chipped cup, sugar cubes mashed by surprisingly steady hands.
Speaker 1: I gave him my most patient introduction. I've been trying
Speaker 1: to understand the phenomenon with the shadows here, I said,
Speaker 1: voice careful to bridge respect and urgency. I wondered if
Speaker 1: you had ever come across anything in your records or
Speaker 1: in the stories the oldest families tell. He considered me
Speaker 1: a faint gleam in his eye. Ah, I have heard
Speaker 1: every explanation at least twice. Witches, sun gods, some chemical
Speaker 1: in the lime. Take your pick. My great aunt used
Speaker 1: to say, we have no shadows because the angels look
Speaker 1: after us very closely. He smiled, neither dismissive nor credulous.
Speaker 1: We spent the afternoon sifting through his vast portfolio travelers diaries,
Speaker 1: painstakingly transcribed from Italian, German and English, faded architectural renderings
Speaker 1: on brittle paper, notes in thick black ink. Every image,
Speaker 1: every effort at realism, every water color, and every quick
Speaker 1: sketch shared the same spectral phenomenon. The village stubbornly refused
Speaker 1: to darken, no matter who held the brush, and produced
Speaker 1: one particularly old plan, an architectural sketch from eighteen twenty
Speaker 1: four of what was apparently the oldest house in town's
Speaker 1: hillside row. In the margin a neat but urgent script,
Speaker 1: Cassa's sin sombra construacy, Paula tradission, houses without shadow. Builders
Speaker 1: tradition dictates it's everywhere if you look long enough, Alejandro
Speaker 1: offered softly. Builders still use the rules, whether they admit
Speaker 1: it or not. Walls as pale as clouds, curvature this way,
Speaker 1: windows shallow, always with internal light wells. The reason, he shrugged.
Speaker 1: They'll tell you it's always been done. So has anyone
Speaker 1: questioned the origin? I pressed? Was it for safety, for health? Superstition?
Speaker 1: He shook his head, amused. No one here is truly superstitious.
Speaker 1: Most think it's just effective architecture. Keep the sun off,
Speaker 1: save your eyes, placate your grandmother. But the preference goes
Speaker 1: back generations. It's all too systematic. Maybe the answer is lost,
Speaker 1: Or may be it simply that we prefer to remember
Speaker 1: the light. His words lent every absence a new gravity.
Speaker 1: The lack of shadow was not an oddity bred by
Speaker 1: climate or material, but a living tradition, a thing made,
Speaker 1: cultivated and rebuilt again and again, even as the logic faded.
Speaker 1: The forced whitewash of every june, the pride in undifferentiated brightness,
Speaker 1: the careful curation of every surface. None of this was accidental.
Speaker 1: The town, perhaps unconsciously, conspired to preserve the absence at
Speaker 1: every scale. It struck me this was not a quirk
Speaker 1: of optics left to chance, nor a mere fluke of physics.
Speaker 1: The missing shadow had been made deliberately, then unthinkingly, by
Speaker 1: hand and by Habit woven into the architecture and more seductively,
Speaker 1: into vision itself. The shadowless effect was not just borne
Speaker 1: by local stone or sky, but by an inherited belief
Speaker 1: that darkness, at least visual darkness, could be made of unnecessary,
Speaker 1: by judicious labor, by shared assumption, by the subtle force
Speaker 1: of cultural expectation. The implications swelled behind my eyes like
Speaker 1: a growing storm. If the effect was maintained purposely, even now,
Speaker 1: how many generations had gone into its defense. What did
Speaker 1: it mean to raise not just the sight but the
Speaker 1: very memory of shadow? Was there danger, once perceived in darkness,
Speaker 1: long forgotten? Or was the town's identity, its pride, even
Speaker 1: its calm, rooted in this choice for radiance over contrast.
Speaker 1: I left Alejandro's house into a late sun that painted
Speaker 1: the village with the same incorporeal gold as every postcard
Speaker 1: before it. I crossed the plaza with my head spinning,
Speaker 1: unable to resist peering at the walking feet of a
Speaker 1: group of students, each in their own light, floating inches
Speaker 1: above a stony world without anchor. My curiosity, no longer
Speaker 1: a simple quest for an explanation, was now tethered to
Speaker 1: something at once older and more fragile than I had imagined,
Speaker 1: a collective vision, held together across centuries by memory, maintenance
Speaker 1: and perhaps a need for the world for once to
Speaker 1: contain only light. Elena met me under the jacaranda tree
Speaker 1: on the plaza, a rolled up pastel sketch tucked beneath
Speaker 1: her arm. There was still that sense that the world
Speaker 1: hovered rather than landed, that the sky pressed in so
Speaker 1: close that you became forgetful of any separation between your
Speaker 1: outline and the stone. You look like someone who's discovered
Speaker 1: the town's second heart, she said, a small smile tracing
Speaker 1: her face. She'd grown more knowing in the months I'd
Speaker 1: known her, or perhaps more patient with outsiders tripping into
Speaker 1: local mysteries. Carmen sent me, said, you left her bakery
Speaker 1: in a haze and forgot your order this morning, I winced,
Speaker 1: feigning embarrassment. You could say I found a question with
Speaker 1: slippery edges. We threaded through the heat toward her gallery.
Speaker 1: The windows pushed open to an hail the sharp noon air.
Speaker 1: A single fan circled slow as a stopped clock. Inside.
Speaker 1: Elena motioned to a display by the door, where students
Speaker 1: sketch books lay open, pages splayed out in a fan
Speaker 1: of white. Do you want to see the latest efforts
Speaker 1: at defining the indefinable? I paged slowly through quick graphite drawings, church, plaza, rooftops.
Speaker 1: As before, there was a sameness to them. Now, the
Speaker 1: shape still adrift, the sky dominant, the absence of anchored
Speaker 1: shade as striking for its repetition, as for the gradual,
Speaker 1: resigned precision in every hand. Every time I look, I
Speaker 1: imagine someone will rebel and give you a solid midnight
Speaker 1: below the benches, I said, Elena shrugged, pulling over a
Speaker 1: canvas of her own. I tried last spring lost the
Speaker 1: sense of the place altogether. It started to look threatening,
Speaker 1: not local, not familiar. The light here insists on itself.
Speaker 1: It's not interested in drama, insists on its I repeated.
Speaker 1: I mused on a Lejandro, on the decades of sketches,
Speaker 1: on Carmen's pride and to Mars's ordinary games on travelers
Speaker 1: who forgot their puzzlement after a single day. I pressed
Speaker 1: my palms together, searching for a pivot. Do you think
Speaker 1: the town chooses the light or that we see only
Speaker 1: what we're expected to see? Elina weighed this before answering
Speaker 1: I think both. When I left Madrid, I missed the heaveness,
Speaker 1: the way shadows anchor afternoons here, the first adjustment is
Speaker 1: to realize no one is searching for them. With you,
Speaker 1: people make the world together, even what's missing. She regarded
Speaker 1: me over the rim of a chipped mug, as I
Speaker 1: tried to give my curiosity a sharper edge when you
Speaker 1: first arrived, was it unsettling? Unsettling isn't the word, she
Speaker 1: considered dream like, perhaps like living in a half remembered painting.
Speaker 1: Then for a while it became RESTful, reliable. Sometimes I
Speaker 1: forget it still surprise newcomers. It was a relief, the
Speaker 1: explicit acknowledgment that I was not alone in this fracture
Speaker 1: of perception. That new eyes suffered confusion before they yielded.
Speaker 1: I left after an hour, promising to return Carmen's order
Speaker 1: by afternoon, but instead Deepwood along a side street that
Speaker 1: dipped toward the lower edge of the hill. Instinct tugged
Speaker 1: me back toward the oldest house, the one in a
Speaker 1: Lejandro's plan. I'd seen it only from a distance. A
Speaker 1: blocky layered facade, dazzling despite neglect, its roof curved into
Speaker 1: barrel like vaults and pierced by tiny high windows set
Speaker 1: so shallowly they seemed to leak light rather than block it.
Speaker 1: The house was set apart behind a wall, weeping boogain
Speaker 1: villier down to the gutter, a battered blue door padlocked
Speaker 1: with rust. I paused, not wishing to trespass, but unable
Speaker 1: to help myself, angling for a better view through a
Speaker 1: half open slot in the gate. What struck me instantly
Speaker 1: was the total absence, again, of any shadow here. However,
Speaker 1: it felt heightened, as if the building floated in perpetual abstraction,
Speaker 1: its base less substantial than the sky. Every surface had
Speaker 1: been whitewashed so many times that the stone gave off
Speaker 1: a low, cold glow, even where the setting sun swiped
Speaker 1: across the corner. The effect was a perverse refusal. The
Speaker 1: stone didn't block the light so much as drink it up,
Speaker 1: then pour it outward and immaculate, pearly evenly spread luminance.
Speaker 1: Footsteps crunched behind me to mars twol belts sagging off.
Speaker 1: One shoulder appeared clutching a battered ice box, as though
Speaker 1: summoned by local rumor. Don't worry, You're not the only
Speaker 1: one who stares at old walls here, he teased. That
Speaker 1: place has watched us all longer than anyone remembers. Have
Speaker 1: you ever been inside, I asked, glancing at the fortress
Speaker 1: upper windows. He shook his head, considering, just once, when
Speaker 1: I replaced a lock after the last owner died. I
Speaker 1: was maybe fifteen. Even then it was empty as a
Speaker 1: church before a festival. Strange air in there. You feel,
Speaker 1: I don't know how to say it, like you' entered
Speaker 1: a space that holds memory, not stories exactly, more like
Speaker 1: a strong silence. He peered at the facade, squinting. They
Speaker 1: say priests lived here, than a few doctors, wanderers from
Speaker 1: the north, always some one alone. But the house stayed painted,
Speaker 1: always kept shining. Now nobody wants to buy it, but
Speaker 1: no one wants to let it fade either. They say
Speaker 1: the council might turn it into a museum. More for
Speaker 1: the mystery than the stone. I grinned a museum for absence,
Speaker 1: exactly so he patted the iron gate. If you find
Speaker 1: a door, tell me the place is meant to stay
Speaker 1: shut until we remember why it was built the way
Speaker 1: it was. He left me with a new question, one
Speaker 1: combining both material and intention. It had not been enough,
Speaker 1: over the centuries for generations to simply live with shadowless light.
Speaker 1: Here there was a tradition that built the effect, deliberately
Speaker 1: reproduced it with architectural specificity, and guarded it out of
Speaker 1: something more than fear or practicality. My mind spun. Was there,
Speaker 1: encoded in these proportions and surfaces a secret, an old ritual,
Speaker 1: a deeper philosophical purpose, or simply an accident of collective
Speaker 1: will that had grown self sustaining. I set a challenge
Speaker 1: for myself find a way in, not through keys, but
Speaker 1: through records, stories, and perhaps community memory. For all its reticence,
Speaker 1: the town was porous in the places that mattered. Returning
Speaker 1: to Alejandro felt inevitable. This time he set aside his
Speaker 1: earlier patience and met my questions with a new seriousness.
Speaker 1: I fear everyone who visits here wishes either to see
Speaker 1: the world anew or prove it works like any other,
Speaker 1: he said, sorting through stacks of letters and diaries. The
Speaker 1: truth is always layered. What are you seeking the origin
Speaker 1: or the reason for its survival? I hesitated both. Maybe
Speaker 1: science has its limits. Every empirical approach I try records
Speaker 1: only indirect causes. No physical measurement truly explains why the
Speaker 1: shadow won't anchor, But the people here, the town itself
Speaker 1: behaves as if it's not just stone and sunlight but
Speaker 1: a worldview. Lejandro smiled, thin and knowing. He retrieved a
Speaker 1: bundle of papers, copies of early accounts by traveling clerics
Speaker 1: and traders, amateur sketches of ruined Roman baths, fragments from
Speaker 1: church ledgers. There is a theory, not often spoken aloud,
Speaker 1: that this custom predates even the Catholic Church. Here, some
Speaker 1: say the Romans tolerated local cults that prized pure light.
Speaker 1: One inscription, half lost in the crypt reads pureta's lusis
Speaker 1: purity of the light. Then in the Middle Ages you
Speaker 1: find stories of villagers repainting walls three times a year,
Speaker 1: invoking the house with no shadow to keep the darkness
Speaker 1: outside forever. He leaned closer, lowering his voice. You see
Speaker 1: every period reinvents the explanation. When the plague came, they said,
Speaker 1: more whitewash, more light less death. But even earlier, it
Speaker 1: looks as if newcomers learned to stop asking why after
Speaker 1: a season, simply joining the expectation. My note book filled rapidly,
Speaker 1: layer upon layer, not of explanation, growing clearer, but of purposes,
Speaker 1: accreting around the effect, a question that had over centuries
Speaker 1: shape shifted to become its own best proof. Lejandro pulled
Speaker 1: out a page, fragile with age, showing what may have
Speaker 1: been a builder's formula. Proportions of lime to sand, number
Speaker 1: of coats, emphasis on internal wells of reflection, all serving
Speaker 1: not practical necessity, but tradission de las, a tradition of light.
Speaker 1: I read the line aloud, Build so that darkness cannot stick,
Speaker 1: nor memory linger. There he nodded. Some thought it superstition.
Speaker 1: Others are kind of cleanliness. But the repetition, the consistency.
Speaker 1: He paused, searching for a word. It is intention, even
Speaker 1: if undefined by those who keep it. I could hardly
Speaker 1: sleep that night, so many thoughts orbiting the same kernel.
Speaker 1: Here was a physical anomaly, sustained, not just by climate,
Speaker 1: not even by engineering, but by generations of shared priority. Somehow,
Speaker 1: even the anomalies limits were impossible to define. Visitors outside
Speaker 1: as quickly then unconsciously adopted the local vision. Even documentation faded,
Speaker 1: as if the town edited itself with every fresh coat
Speaker 1: of paint. My restless energy demanded action. I contacted Elina
Speaker 1: and proposed an afternoon of focused experiment, not just observation,
Speaker 1: but participation with fresh, unsentimental eyes. We recruited doctor Garsha,
Speaker 1: a physicist on a brief study abroad exchange from Barcelona,
Speaker 1: whom I'd crossed academic paths with a decade prior. She
Speaker 1: agreed to amplify the day's investigation with scientific rigor, even
Speaker 1: as she greeted my trick of the eyes theory with
Speaker 1: a healthy dose of skepticism. We assembled just before midday,
Speaker 1: choosing the northern end of the main square as our
Speaker 1: experimental ground. Garsha came well armed, light meters, reflectometers, colored filters,
Speaker 1: and even a portable cube lined with different samples of
Speaker 1: stone and tile. Elena documented in her sketch book, and
Speaker 1: I kept the note books and questions coming. I explained
Speaker 1: the anomaly as precisely as I could not merely soft shadows,
Speaker 1: not just haze, an enduring lack of crisp definition, even
Speaker 1: under conditions where every other rule of optics says we
Speaker 1: should see it. Garsha nodded. Calibrating her instruments, she measured
Speaker 1: incident angles, reflectants from the plaza's tiles, even the odd
Speaker 1: clay samples that had been pried from the foundations during
Speaker 1: an earlier building restoration. Nothing unusual at the first pass,
Speaker 1: she declared. Scanning the preliminary data, diffuse reflection is higher
Speaker 1: than typical, but not adequate to eradicate shadow. So thoroughly
Speaker 1: we moved forward, methodically placing objects of different colors and reflectivities,
Speaker 1: measuring their projected forms under sun and shade, then testing
Speaker 1: the same samples in a nearby village with similar architecture.
Speaker 1: The differences, while subtle, were statistically significant. Here the glare
Speaker 1: measured wider, the transition from light to shade was grayer,
Speaker 1: always less distinct. Elina, after a half hour of careful drawing,
Speaker 1: looked up. Even when I forced my pencil, I can't
Speaker 1: find the edge. It feels like I'm trying to weigh
Speaker 1: a balloon with a stone tied to nothing. Garsha frowned
Speaker 1: at her data. This is still within the bounds of
Speaker 1: unusual but explainable. Likely a function of custom stone paint.
Speaker 1: Perhaps humidity, may be even the order in which buildings face.
Speaker 1: I considered her point. If that's all, why the consistent
Speaker 1: tradition of erasing memory from walls. Why the century's long
Speaker 1: notes extolling not just brightness but a literal absence. Carmen
Speaker 1: stopped by with lemonade, overhearing, you have to watch what
Speaker 1: you bring to a place like this, she interrupted, plopping
Speaker 1: a tray between us. When I was small, a b
Speaker 1: whaler said, if you don't let darkness in, it can't
Speaker 1: take anything away. You want to avoid bad luck, keep
Speaker 1: repainting until the world has no places to hide. Garsha started,
Speaker 1: that's quite superstitious. Carmen grinned. We all are some way
Speaker 1: or another. It's only a story until the paint dries.
Speaker 1: Then it's tradition. She wandered off to scold a child's
Speaker 1: slopping water in the fountain. Elina and Garsha returned to
Speaker 1: their records. I made a quiet note, folks story vow
Speaker 1: not to leave space for darkness, not fear, but custom pride.
Speaker 1: We experimented well into the afternoon. Despite careful measurement and modeling,
Speaker 1: Garsha's findings hovered always just short of explanatory. She conceded,
Speaker 1: in the end, something's missing in the theory, not false,
Speaker 1: not supernatural, but incomplete, like there is a fact and
Speaker 1: neither physical nor measurable. Perhaps the custom maintains a physical
Speaker 1: boundary that the mind, in time accepts as an unbreakable rule.
Speaker 1: I felt the boundaries of explanation begin to dissolve. The
Speaker 1: scientist's partial answers, the artists, techniques, the folk wisdom all
Speaker 1: described facets of a larger pattern. But in every case
Speaker 1: the anomaly resisted closure, not because it was hidden, but
Speaker 1: because it was made and remade day after day with
Speaker 1: deliberation that no one resident ever fully articulated. You know,
Speaker 1: Garsha reflected, Sometimes a community repeats an action so often
Speaker 1: that it's stopps questioning the need. Children here grow up
Speaker 1: never missing shade because they never see anything else. Maybe
Speaker 1: that's the rarest feature of all. I took her words
Speaker 1: with gratitude. For the first time. I heard not diminishment
Speaker 1: but wonder in her tone. In the days that followed,
Speaker 1: I pressed deeper into the archives and stories. Searching for
Speaker 1: a historic moment, a pivot, a cause for the tradition.
Speaker 1: I met a folklore researcher passing through from Cordoba who
Speaker 1: combed the archives beside me. She traced the building forms,
Speaker 1: not just to Roman and Moorish sources, but to medieval
Speaker 1: village charms. You'll find in northern Spain stories of chalk
Speaker 1: lines drawn to ward off spirits. Here you have a
Speaker 1: village built entirely of chalk, no place for a shadow
Speaker 1: to cross over, no line to be broken. She described
Speaker 1: accounts of people painting evil out of the world with
Speaker 1: every lime wash, as if stone and sun together could
Speaker 1: secure not just comfort but certainty. Still, every record drifted
Speaker 1: toward the same point, whatever its origin, superstition, epidemic, or older.
Speaker 1: No one alive remembered not having the tradition, and no
Speaker 1: document recorded the first moment of its enactment. This was
Speaker 1: the contradiction I could not untangle. Scientific analysis brought me
Speaker 1: consistently to the edge. A unique property perhaps of the
Speaker 1: local limestone, a tendency to diffuse rather than concentrate glare,
Speaker 1: an inherited maintenance ritual so finely tuned that the effect
Speaker 1: became self ree and forcing. But the missing piece, the
Speaker 1: part that held the rest in suspension, was simple but monumental.
Speaker 1: The whole town acted as if shadow had always been unnecessary.
Speaker 1: I approached the town council under pretext of discussing heritage
Speaker 1: and preservation. They debated the future of the ancient house,
Speaker 1: the one at the heart of every archival drawing. There
Speaker 1: was no consensus. Some favored open it to visitors, others
Speaker 1: preserving it as a sight untouched as our ancestors left it.
Speaker 1: All agreed, however, that its condition must be maintained, and
Speaker 1: that the whitewashing, even if purposeless by modern standards, must
Speaker 1: never lapse. The debate intrigued me. Here was communal agreement
Speaker 1: sustaining a tradition whose outcome was visually extraordinary but emotionally
Speaker 1: commonplace to its members. The mystery was not fear, but continuity,
Speaker 1: a consensus built so deeply into daily life that its
Speaker 1: circumnavigated doubt. On the way back from the council building,
Speaker 1: I lingered as evenings started to soften. Even the untouchable light.
Speaker 1: The streets quieted, and the heartbeat of the village slowed.
Speaker 1: I found myself at the edge of the old house
Speaker 1: once more, the sky blooming into apricot and indigo. I
Speaker 1: stood in the lane, camera lowered at my side, the
Speaker 1: notebook forgotten and watched. There were no hard boundaries, even
Speaker 1: in this rapidly dimming hour, no place where light yielded fully,
Speaker 1: no transition into true darkness. Window after window, each coated
Speaker 1: and recoated for generations, caught the last light and released
Speaker 1: it back, carefully, evenly, denying the world any foothold for
Speaker 1: the ordinary mechanism of contrast. That was when it dawned
Speaker 1: on me, quietly, thoroughly, as if the recognition was taking
Speaker 1: place not in my eyes but in my bones. In
Speaker 1: Puente Salada. Shadow does not merely fail to appear because
Speaker 1: of some technical material, trick or lost ritual. It is
Speaker 1: neither fear, nor accident, nor even strict design. What exists
Speaker 1: here is a complete collaboration, a century's old agreement, both
Speaker 1: conscious and subliminal, to favor not only brightness, but a
Speaker 1: worldview in which the act of perceiving, remembering, and recording
Speaker 1: shadow simply slips out of use. The physical is intertwined
Speaker 1: with the perceptual, and both are preserved through proud repetition.
Speaker 1: The people need not banish shadow with vigilance or piety.
Speaker 1: They simply act for light, in construction, in custom, in memory,
Speaker 1: until shadow no longer lays a claim. The result is
Speaker 1: not a town that has lost a part of the world,
Speaker 1: but one that has gently, insistently remade the world around
Speaker 1: its central desire, that there will be no place left
Speaker 1: to hide for trouble or for wonder. The phenomenon now
Speaker 1: seemed less an impossibility and more a fragile, luminous consensus that,
Speaker 1: in one place, for once, reality has softly bent to habit,
Speaker 1: until habit becomes the ground. Garsha Ilina, Carmen to Mars,
Speaker 1: even the quietest school child all become participants and inheritors
Speaker 1: of a tradition that speaks not so much about shutting
Speaker 1: out dark as about holding fast to a particular light,
Speaker 1: a tradition neither faithful to science's boundaries nor dismissive of wonder.
Speaker 1: The house I realized needs no museum label. Its glow
Speaker 1: has always been a marker of both the limits of
Speaker 1: reason and the reach of communal imagination, a quiet, patent
Speaker 1: refusal to see the world as others do. Generations polished
Speaker 1: and whitewashed, repinted, not out of superstition, but simply because
Speaker 1: their forebears did, and in time the impossibility ceased to matter.
Speaker 1: The result was lived when the town, the people, the
Speaker 1: persistent labor of countless hands and eyes, enact such a world.
Speaker 1: What remains unexplained is not the shadow's absence, but how
Speaker 1: easily it can slip out of possibility, how quietly the
Speaker 1: rules of experience can shift beneath constant, gentle effort and
Speaker 1: a shared will to see things as they have always been.
Speaker 1: I finished my observations at dusk, an odd kind of
Speaker 1: awe spreading through me, not for having solved the puzzle,
Speaker 1: but for understanding at last that the greatest impossibility of
Speaker 1: Puente Salada was also its most ordinary. The town's mystery
Speaker 1: required not just analysis, but a willingness to let go
Speaker 1: of explanation, to stand quietly among the stoneans, and except
Speaker 1: that the world, while measurable, may also be shaped year
Speaker 1: after year by what people agree to see and to forget.
Speaker 1: The following morning, I joined Carmen for coffee, feeling different,
Speaker 1: brighter but softer in my questioning. There was comfort now
Speaker 1: in hearing the town laid out in cheerful gossip, in
Speaker 1: watching Elena pause at a gallery door to wave as
Speaker 1: the sun caught her face in a pale corona. I
Speaker 1: realized with a start that I no longer searched each
Speaker 1: step for shadow, no longer audited the stones for what
Speaker 1: failed to appear. Have you made peace with us yet?
Speaker 1: Carmen teased, catching my gaze wandering the plaza, I smiled,
Speaker 1: I think I understand a little better, not just the light,
Speaker 1: but what you all keep alive. She shrugged, dusting sugar
Speaker 1: from her hands. It's nothing special, you know. If you
Speaker 1: stay long enough, you just end up seeing the world
Speaker 1: this way. Most people stop looking for what isn't there.
Speaker 1: But is it possible to forget something so universal? Carmen's
Speaker 1: laughter rang bright. What you call forgetting, we call tradition.
Speaker 1: Aren't you the one who always says the human mind
Speaker 1: adapts to survive? There was wisdom there, rolled up in
Speaker 1: ordinary speech. I sipped my coffee, wondering how such a
Speaker 1: gentle accommodation of the unexplained could pass unseen in the
Speaker 1: wider world. On my last day, I filled my bag
Speaker 1: with small tokens, a faded postcard, a sliver of limestone.
Speaker 1: The Sketchelena had gifted me her latest subjectless, just bands
Speaker 1: of shimmering light along a blank wall. As I boarded
Speaker 1: the bus, the hills pooled gold behind me, the lacquered
Speaker 1: roof tops blending into a whiteness so oddly content that
Speaker 1: I could almost believe the entire village was weightless. I
Speaker 1: scribbled a final note in my book, if sunlight always
Speaker 1: creates shadow, but here it does not. Is the world
Speaker 1: as fixed as we assume or as wide? Is what
Speaker 1: we are willing to notice? I traveled onward, but that
Speaker 1: thought stayed with me, hovering just at the edge of vision,
Speaker 1: A quiet invitation. When something as simple as a shadow
Speaker 1: can disappear and still life continues, what other impossibilities might
Speaker 1: we live alongside, unmarked each day? And that is the end.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening, and I will see you in
Speaker 1: the next one.