El Camino a Chamartín

The first thing to say is that there is a lot of graffiti. Too much. Graffiti on almost everything - on the walls, of course, but just as much clinging to sidewalks and drainpipes, to postboxes and scaffolds, bus stops and train stations, mounds of the stuff in all their fluorescent colours and cartoon curves: less statement of youthful rage and disobedience and more akin to well-equipped toddlers with a penchant for radioactive yellows and block-capitalised swear words. It's not good graffiti, not artful or profound, it's just there, as permanent as the sun, stained on to brick and tarmac and concrete and then left to rust or fade or both, like the disaffected, disappointed, disenfranchised youths of Spain who left it there. Yes, this country has problems.

You see it in their eyes: tired, balding men who look down and speak quietly, their tone at once both dull and impersonal, putting the vice into service, or in the scalding retinas of languishing twentysomethings - no job, no home, no chance, but fire in their hearts and dreams in their heads as they beam back at the pale-faced Englishman in their midst. "London? Ah, London, si!” they exclaim. "I want to go to London."

Spain has fared badly in the opening salvos of the twenty-first century, its economy first slowing, then retracting and now sitting idle. In a world of near-constant commerce, a new age of instant access, instant communication, instant lives, Spain has toiled in its own heat and tradition - an afternoon siesta while others forge ahead. There are few jobs for its eager graduates, only travel plans, to France and Germany and England. Everyone here seems hot and bothered, rushed unexpectedly into action, from serving you in a restaurant to implementing austerity. The brave new European world, an order spawned from the final embers of borrowed excess, took this country by surprise. One day there were pensions and trust funds and comforting certainty in public-funded retirement, in the guarantee not just of a siesta in the afternoon but in the morning also, and then there was nothing, nothing but an alarm clock with the face of Angela Merkel and grave warnings - sinister almost, gleeful maybe - of bail-outs and rescue packages and "What have you been doing all this time?" and "What do you mean, you pay for your economy to function without anyone working when it gets hot in the afternoon?" and "How much did you borrow to keep this fiscal fiction alive?" and "Here, take some Euros, pay us back when you can, and do something about Santander while you're at it."

For years, Spain played football like it ran its internal affairs, tiki-taka extending from players to politicians: keep it between ourselves and we'll be fine, at least until a Teutonic boot lays down the new law with blistering effectiveness. Keep the ball between yourselves all you like, but that counter-attack is going to hurt. And you can tell they are reeling from this double onslaught, this end to the status quo, particularly for the men of Spain. It has made them churlish, boorish even, overcompensating for their dual loss of sporting honour and economic confidence with the animalistic ritual of the cornered, the endangered, the attacked: shouting too loud, laughing too hard, trying too much to appear nonchalant and uncaring, a primeval subterfuge engendered by fear and rendered hard and true with every curse and chant and spit and snigger and full-volumed smart-phone and lazy graffiti and continual, almost deliberate, ignorance of all the beauty that surrounds them - the beaches and bays, the dense forests and valleys, the cloud-cloaked hilltops and rocky gorges, the ancient palaces and churches and villas, whitestoned and dome-filled since time immemorial, burning and scalding and surviving under the harsh Mediterranean sun, all before them in a land they barely know, reflected in its rivers and lakes and seas, liquid rivers which see all and stare right back; reflections, then, that estos hombres would rather ignore than acknowledge. But the women - God, I love the women.

I love their hair, dark and mischievous. I love their voices, rapid and rapacious, as if their accent and the skill with which they roll their r's and bridge their consonants is as much a guide to just how wonderful they'd be in bed as it is to their ability to enunciate. I love their eyes, the depth to them, the sparkle in them, piercing and looking right at you, maybe even through you, wild and alert and seductive. I love their touch, generous and confident, full of possibility and intrigue and suggestion that the evening may just have taken a new and unexpected twist and it certainly won't end how it started and that's fine because now you're with Iria or Eva or Aranxa or Virginia and they're looking at you like no English girl could ever remotely get close to and they're promising you the moon and all the stars and dancing like that was why man made music: not for self-satisfaction or culture or progressive innovation, but for Spanish girls to make the world stop turning and for you to believe that you might just be someone different. This power is potent. It cannot be stopped.

I write all this on the slow train to the capital, staring out of a grubby, dirty window as Spain's forgotten countryside idles past. I see deserted towns and hamlets, baking hot fields unploughed and forlorn, guarded by single dwellings with cracked walls and peeling paint and rusting pick-up trucks, while beyond them the hillocks rise up with pines and birches, and streams - in need of rain - meander through from the distant peaks to the iron tracks of the line from Galicia to Castilla-Leon. Occasionally, electricity pylons will punctuate the horizon, even the odd wind turbine, while lush blue lakes and lagoons emerge from miles of forest and sit tranquil at the foot of the copses and mountains. Lone cars sidle down dusty single-track highways and the narrow platforms of small, isolated villages collect like the gravel on the banks beside the tracks: actual and tangible but irrelevant. Only at Quereño did I raise an eyebrow and a smile as two old nuns, wearing looks of concern just as specific as their habits, stepped carefully into the carriage, followed moments later by a young girl in a floral dress with sunglasses the size of frying-pans and bronzed bare flesh that said more about God than any catholic apparel. The majority of the passengers had been there from the start and would be in it for the long haul, the war of attrition between time taken and distance travelled. Vigo was long gone, its early morning turquoise giving way to hazy midday blue. The graffiti remained a constant. At one station it had found its way onto cart-tracks and carriage doors, the underside of the signal box, even the rails themselves. I don't know how or why anyone decided to spray there, but they did.

Opposite, from Vigo to Ponferrada, was a group of four. Three of them were men, with obligatory baseball caps tipped high to the ceiling, and shaved back-and-sides that allowed the longer tops to achieve a sense of graded contrast between central and peripheral follicular policy, as well as between specific epochs of male grooming. I wanted to tell them they had a phone call from 1998. It wanted its haircut back. I didn't, of course, because I was far more committed to the fourth member of the group, a beautiful brunette who seemed at once both ashamed of and delighted in her male conciliaries. I decided to call her Alba because I like that name and I first caught sight of her at dawn.

The four of them neatly encapsulated modern Spain, at once both beautiful and tantalising and equally lazy: in temperament and attitude as much as in actual ethic. The three male companions coughed and snorted and played their music and conspired and laughed and acted out their diffidence to the rest of the carriage while Alba slept or laughed along with them (maybe even precipitated their territory-marking masculinity), or else stared silently out of the window, looking but not necessarily seeing that she, unlike them, had options. She had them because I said so, because I wanted her to have them, because I saw for her a future far away from the tired, baking cobbles of her secluded home town, a future that did not include phlegm-strewing locals with nose rings and chains, but untold horizons, unburdened by time and circumstance, unblemished by experience, unseen and untouched and all for her beyond the millennial stone of Ponferrada.

I decided she could be an actress or a dancer, not simply because actresses and dancers seem to awake in me a very specific kind of longing and nostalgia, maybe even a longing for nostalgia, but because of the few brief moments of eye contact that we shared, when it felt like only an actor's words or a dancer's moves could lend substance to that serendipity, could transcend the time and space we shared inside a cramped and rocking train carriage and send all its power and glory out into a waiting world desperate for a story of passion and love, a story for the ages, a story they will tell one day on distant planets far from the soil of Eden. But no. The world knows enough of love and fate, it has its poetry already and, besides, girls like Alba are as the tide: everything will rise when it is in and all will be lowered when it is out. Still, she looked like she needed saving and while I have learnt to my cost that appearances are almost always deceiving (indeed, they are usually designed specifically for that purpose), there is nothing more attractive than a girl with ocean eyes going nowhere on a train and appealing to you, in a temporary ocular flicker at your one true weakness, to take her far away from here and start the world anew.

She left with the rest of her party, however, shuffling off to whatever future - if any - lay before them, while the journey settled back into its usual rhythms: sporadic wifi and the murmurs of hip-hop escaping from tin-pan headphones; wobbling passengers grabbing seat-backs and handles as they walk to and queue for the toilets; lone olive trees and iron-ore barns in yellowing fields of imperceptible crops; the yawns and digestive systems of bored and groggy commuters; a faint but constant hum of air-conditioned mechanics; my occasional startled reflection in the window during black stretches of tunnel. At Astorya, with the sun higher and the sky deeper and the weeds in the concrete heavier and drier, I saw a lone grasshopper struggle in the heat, gasping for water and shelter and finding neither. Lunch gave way to afternoon, the lay of the land flattened somewhat, the buildings more obviously southern and Moorish, the sunflowers taller and benefiting from a few hundred miles worth of extra planetary curvature, bending them closer to the star by which they are named, and even the trees began to change: no longer verdant and deciduous, instead sharper, harsher, preparing themselves almost for the desert beyond. There was desolation without and desolation within and great beauty in that desolation, the same desolation that will have transfixed and appalled weary farmers and conquistadors and pilgrims in centuries of old, cajoled into sunburnt appreciation of the sprawling arid land before them, staggered by its power and by its heat, by its inexorable southerly flow to golden sand and rip tides and a whole other continent.

We took on a larger group of new passengers at Leon at about three o'clock. It felt a staging post for the final long stretch to the centre and as we waited at the station - for once developed enough for elevators and shops and vending machines (all of them providing renewed opportunity for graffiti) - I looked out at the red bricks of the city and felt minuscule against the machinations of the world around me, cocooned as I was in a carriage on a train dawdling through the dry dust of southern Europe. I imagined, briefly but potently, that this was as my life had been intended: not the specific travels per se, but the whole tumultuous journey, the decisions and indecisions, the triumphs and regrets, the heartbeats and the heartaches - all of these had led me here, to a train station in Leon, and to whatever else lay down the tracks. In that instant I felt a flow of euphoria, of balance and comfort, and I allowed myself to smile in the rare satisfaction of it, for I have lost count of my dreams, lost count of my blessings, and here was a sound one, however short and haphazard. When we rolled past the abandoned football stadium and drew parallel with the autopista, I let the moment crystallise fully. I stared at beige stone and copper weeds forming in jagged concrete, but I thought of London and glass buildings and cuff-links and mobile boarding passes and cruising altitudes and reciting with confidence the purpose of my visit and broad American salutations and all the girls I have loved called Alba, all of the times my outstretched fingers have reached desperately out into the vast expanses just millimetres from theirs, straining muscles and ligaments and longitude and latitude and fact and fiction in search of a single mortal lock. I now realise that I am proud of that struggling, that in it is the fabric of life itself, part blunder, part bluster, and forever amending its logic and course and horizon. Yes, I needed that stop in Leon, needed that resolution, just as I needed the red rocks and yellowed wheat of its outskirts, the dust from which we all come and will all return, and the fields we may harvest in between, one for each of us to sow and for which we shall each be judged.

And now it is truly desert, bone dry and oppressed, little shelter as far as the eye can see, and still there is graffiti on the side blocks by the tracks outside Valladolid, for Spain is as much this certainty - the certainty of average graffiti - as it is the splendour of its art and culture, its cuisine and climate, its landscapes and cities. This is what it will be now, this constant flow of rocky desert followed by tired town until we reach our final stop, and as miles turn into provinces and the sun - the high, burning disc of fire in the sky - slowly begins its petulant descent into the late afternoon, I begin to imagine what it will be like when I arrive. There will be people, of course, and buildings, but both different to before. They will carry with them a sense of poise, of gravitas. There will be wealth, palm-lined avenues and perfect ground coffee sipped by businessmen and tourists in ancient squares that were once the homes of courtiers and generals, from which a whole empire was run, and because of which whole nations exist on the other side of the world.

When we arrive, the fiction of Spain will present itself to all who walk on her: not the fables of its history, its toreadors and flamenco dancers and cavaliering knights, but its modern pockets of affluence, its islands of galactico in a sea of stagnation. People will smile in expensive clothes. They will drive fast and bright cars. The water will be drinkable. They will pray in floodlit cathedrals to multicoloured cleats on manicured grass turf. They will trade and invest and work in the community of nations, a world apart from the toil of their own in the hot fields beyond the city. And soon there will be echoes, of memories and of dreaming, and they will play out under stars. So too will there be the white noise of information, of currency, of arrivals and departures, of footsteps and embraces, of shared glances and unshared stares, of community and commerce, of urgency and action, and I will slip myself into it, let it take me in and carry me off, a tide of humanity against which to rise and fall, to be known and unknown.

Yes, I can see it now, as we thrust forward and closer still. I will step off the carriage and on to the cool concrete of the platform. I will find another Alba. I will walk into Madrid.