la impuesta gringa

Around day eight the price of the same tomatoes drops without ceremony. No one says a word. You hand over the coins you handed over yesterday and today they are too many, and the woman waves the excess back at you with a look that is not quite, not complete friendly. More like recalibration. She wasn't counting days. She has seen enough people arrive only to leave that she feels a rhythm. The way you feel the season in the color of the leaves. It's a beginning of letting you part of the way in. Day fifteen: the price drops again, steeper this time, and by then you have quit doing mental conversion because arithmetic has stopped being the point. What is actually being repriced is you.

I don't object. I am taking advantage of them in the precise measure they have been exploiting me, and the fact that the arrow head was reversed does not make the point of it clean. A transaction on twin sides, mutual and low-stakes and banal, the kind of casual swindle that long-stay travel runs on. (When it is not busy calling itself something loftier). The discount is not generosity. It is complicity from another direction, and I accept it the way I took the overcharging, without deciding whether it is my right.

What the price is really weighing is not tomatoes. It is whether I have become a known quantity. Familiarity breeds contempt, is the thing, except here, to the contrary, proximity breeds a markdown. A kind of provisional tribal membership, priced in kind, revocable. And once you see the machine in the cost of tomatoes you see it everywhere, the same admission granted through new doors, on new terms, yet never converting into anything you could call belonging.

This is what slow travel is, if you strip the laminate off the brochure. People-watching on an elongated time frame. You watch a place closely enough, for long enough, that it lets you part the way in; never all the way, and the gap between those is where you now exist. The tomatoes are just the metaphor you can put a number to.

The football win came from nowhere, well for sure from behind, one improbable go ahead goal in a match no reasonable person expected, and the street went off like something structural had given. Grown men hugging strangers. A street vendor banging a pot. Vuvuzelas!

Here was the same admission again, priced at nothing this time, granted by standing where it happened. I was in it before I decided to be in it. Borrowed joy, maybe stolen, for sure appropriated, a win that was mine by no possible claim except proximity. Whether I had a right to share the feeling? It arrived without asking. Unearned, and accepted anyway, the same as the discount.

Some drunk driver took the corner wrong and his car hit our building wall, and everyone who saw became, for ninety seconds, a tribe. Adrenaline sadness through osmosis. Membership granted by a moment, the same mechanic as the goal, same as the tomatoes, indifferent to content, celebration or crash. Proximity does not check what it is letting in. It checks if you were there; either way you are in until you are not.

And somewhere past it all, a harder version of that question, an interrogative the banter was built to postpone, a query that runs underneath the pricing and the joy and the wreck. When the jocular tourist patter runs down (it does, it has a fuel gauge) people get the time to decide whether they actually like you. You in particular. Not the friendly-stranger you, the real one. That is a different kind of membership, not conferred by proximity and not revocable by a change of stall, and you get to decide the same about them, and the answer can go either way, and nobody tells you when the deciding started. The markdown was never a verdict on that. It only ever measured how long I had been standing there, being priced without ever being asked whether I belonged.

and then that day arrives. They start in Spanish, and only then ask me, in Spanish again, whether I need English, where before they skipped straight to the gringo menu. Whether that is politeness or a genuine failure to place me? Either way it is a signpost: I am no longer legible enough to easily sort on sight. What it does confirm is that I do not belong. A narrower more specific kind of not-from-here, an otherness with no country attached to it anymore, not by accent or aspect. Yet something about the way I lean on things still gives me away even before I have uttered a word. That is the thing no discount buys.

Day thirty, I imagine, the price drops again.