The Botanist

or, a short story

Mar 21, 2025

Some time ago, I forget how long exactly, I visited a Spanish town whilst away at a conference. The town was in the mainland, far from the sea, set within the undulating countryside and bordering a river that wound through the land like a lazy serpent. It was a small town, like several in the area, the kind with a perimeter that could be walked in a single day, the short circumference belying its intricate and labyrinthine interior, an interior of winding streets lined by buildings of the purest white and with balconies overflowing with flowers blood-red and green. There was a languid air that permeated throughout, an air that spoke of a single, endless siesta where nothing was urgent and everything could wait, the wind blowing often from across the river and to the east to where a church took up occupancy upon a low rise, watching over all that it saw from its slender tower of bells. And in the centre of the town, existing like an organ that kept the whole place alive, was a plaza where locals and tourists gathered in equal numbers to eat tapas and drink tinto de verano long into the night.

I fell in love, of course. My body—grounded at once to the steps and paths of the picturesque streets—knew what it had found. There was an immediacy to it, a sensation that left me dizzy and stumbling, something I had felt only once before, far off in some other, unknown part of the world. Walking those Spanish streets, I found I wanted to embed myself in the rock and become one who lived within the white-fronted buildings, to water the flowers that overflowed from the narrow balconies and to sit in the plaza not as a tourist but as someone who was there, someone who belonged. I was overwhelmed by these feelings, flushed and somehow confused, and each morning, as the sky draped its azure blanket over that small Spanish town, I could feel everything stop—the world outside may not have existed at all.

I was lucky to be there, I realised. Such a trip was one of the few benefits of my work. My boss at the time had a fear of flying, and, what with me being junior, along with the fact that for whatever reason he seemed to have a soft spot for supporting my career, he would always ask me to go on such trips in his stead. Would you like to visit such-and-such? he would ask, and I’d respond with a yes, saying I’d be happy to, that of course I would go, asking him whether he was sure he didn’t want to visit, that it sounded like a pleasant trip and that he should go, and he would decline, making up some excuse or other, when in reality I knew that for him the idea of having to send his body halfway across the world inside a metal cylinder was, quite frankly, too terrifying to bear. Bring me back a cigar, he'd say, just as I was getting up to leave his office, a cigar for him meaning any kind of gift, something he could put on his shelf or tuck away in a drawer to look at every once in a while. He'd barely raise his eyes from his computer during this exchange, pausing only to look at me when he said the word cigar, his mind perhaps conjuring up ideas of what it would be that I would bring home as a gift, an object that would in all likelihood never turn out to be an actual cigar.

I had bad habits back then, in the time before my visit to the small Spanish town. I smoked and would often consult the start of each evening with two fingers of whiskey, or possibly a beer, or often both, and on Fridays, and sometimes also Thursdays, if the weather was nice or if it was gloomy, a certain malaise having descended upon my being, I would allow myself to indulge in the less salubrious activities that could be found in certain parts of the city in which I then lived. I had no conscious awareness of what I was doing, giving in to the ease of indecision and unwanting of anything beyond the transient desire of flesh, the concept of commitment as alien and terrifying as the freedom I thought I had but was too naïve to know did not even exist. Only later, in the bleeding heat of that Spanish town, would this change, but before then, before my visit to the town in mainland Spain, a town almost devoid of name and far from the sea, I was careless and carefree, I had no ties, and so to travel at almost no notice—at the drop of a hat, as is the phrase—was easy and I went where I was told, taking on the role that my boss would otherwise have assumed had he not been so terrified of the trivialities of travelling by air.

It was only natural, then, and by then automatic, that when my boss asked Would you like to visit S—? It's a small town in Spain, not tilting his head up from his computer during our exchange—not until the mention of a cigar, for him a cigar meaning any kind of gift—that I responded telling him of course, I’d be happy to go, allowing myself the routine of asking whether he was sure he didn’t want to visit the town himself, and then listening to his excuse—a thin veil of an excuse—of why he couldn’t go and that I should be the one to travel, that it’s good for me, him having a soft spot, for whatever reason, for supporting my career. And so it was that some time ago, I forget how long exactly, I made my way to that small town in Spain, the reason being for work, at least—as the phrase goes—on paper, but as it turned out for something more, something I did not realise until I was there, not knowing that it was a predestination, one that my body, through some inevitability or abstraction of fate, fell into, like a star whose density has built up so much that it reaches a point where it collapses in upon itself.

It was there that I was overcome by something. It was there that I experienced something I can barely explain.

It was there in that town that I met her—the botanist.

To be continued… (here)

SLAKE

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