Moon of Bilbao

Moon of Bilbao

One night I took my dog out under the full moon. My dog is a red and white setter and he’s quite friendly towards strangers, though not at night. Still, he wasn’t frightened when a stranger came near. I could see this stranger approaching for quite a long time, from quite a long distance, and unlike my dog I was a bit frightened because it looked as if he was moving directly towards me. And he was. He was trying to reach the woman with the setter whose white coat almost glittered in the light of the street lamps.
The night was calm and the streets deserted. I don’t remember the weather or the month of the year. I don’t even remember the year. I only remember the full moon in the dark sky and the stranger coming towards me and stopping in front of me and saying:
–Do you speak English?
–A little –I replied.
He seemed disappointed. But still, he asked for some directions. Shy as I am, I did my best to show him the way speaking English, which I hadn’t done for years. He was a tall, good looking man, but I can’t remember his face. Time has bitten it away from my memory. He thanked me and went walking under the lime trees. The lime trees had leaves, so it wasn’t winter. The Englishman was looking for his hotel, but he wasn’t coming from a part of the city where you would expect a tourist to come from. I wonder what he was doing or how he got lost. I sent him right to the statue of the Sacred Heart that points to the Gran Via, the Main Street of the city, blessing it with his right hand. In good or stormy weather, night and day, the Sacred Heart of Jesus shows lonely foreigners how to get to Plaza Moyua, near from which the Guggenheim Museum can be seeing shinning at the end of a street. The park runs along this part of the Gran Via, between the Sacred Heart plaza and the Moyua plaza, at the other side of the houses that form the northern facade of the road.
I never saw that man again. He came walking in the light of the moon and he went away walking in the light of the moon. The moon of Bilbao, you see.