The ice-cream man, and the chestnut seller

This summer, while walking through the old quarter of Santiago de Compostela, I recognized a man’s face. The recognition brought surprise and discomfort, like finding something familiar where it no longer seemed to belong.

He did not recognize me. When I was growing up in a small city, shopkeepers and street vendors felt like legendary figures, although we may have been only customers to them. But this man was not the ice-cream seller of my childhood. He was the chestnut seller.

In the Galicia of my childhood, Magosto was an autumn celebration. For weeks, schools and families roasted and ate chestnuts. I remember it as a warm and happy season, but above all I remember his face: the wrinkled, scorched features, the blue hat and apron, and the immense line of neighbors waiting at his corner.

He would reach into a small train-shaped mobile oven and pull out handfuls of chestnuts from the flames. It seemed like magic. His bare fingers entered the fire without gloves or any other protection. With his oven carriage, he was one of Santiago’s best-known characters.

That is why seeing him transformed into a modern, sunny ice-cream vendor unsettled me. His identity had seemed built from the wool hat, the steaming chestnuts and the autumnal face. Yet when I looked at him from a distance and he looked back, I understood that changing does not mean ceasing to be oneself.