When Beatriz Flamini was growing up, in Madrid, she spent a lot of time alone in her bedroom. "I really liked being there," she says. She'd read books to her dolls and write on a chalkboard while giving them lessons in math or history.
As she got older, she told me, she sometimes imagined being a professor like Indiana Jones: the kind who slipped away from the classroom to "be who he really was." In the early nineteen-nineties, while Flamini was studying to be a sports instructor, she visited a cave for the first time. She and a friend drove north of Madrid to El Reguerillo, a cavern known for its paleolithic engravings. "We stayed until Sunday and came out only because we had classes and work," Flamini recalls. El Reguerillo was dark but cozy, and inside its walls she experienced an overwhelming sense of love. "There were no words for what I felt," she says.
After graduating, Flamini taught aerobics in Madrid. She was admired for her charisma and commitment. "Everyone wanted me for their classes," she says. "They fought over me." By the time she turned forty, in 2013, she had a partner, a car, and a house. But she felt unsatisfied. She didn't really care about financial stability, and, unlike most people she knew, she didn't want children. She experienced an existential crisis. "You know you're going to die-today, tomorrow, within fifty years," Flamini told herself. "What is it that you want to do with your life before that happens?" The immediate answer, she remembers, was to "grab my knapsack and go and live in the mountains."
Flamini moved to the Sierra de Gredos, in central Spain, where she worked as a caretaker at a mountain refuge. She became certified in safety protocols for working on tall structures, and she learned first-aid skills, specializing in retrieving people from deep crevices and other perilous locations.
Bu hikaye The New Yorker dergisinin January 29, 2024 sayısından alınmıştır.
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Bu hikaye The New Yorker dergisinin January 29, 2024 sayısından alınmıştır.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Giriş Yap
INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase \"the banality of evil,\" popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as \"This Gun for Hire\" (1942) and \"Murder by Contract\" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.
WHATEVER YOU SAY
Rereading Jenny Holzer, at the Guggenheim.
SUBCONSCIOUSLY YOURS
Does every generation get the Freud it deserves?
BY A WHISKER
Louis Wain and the reinvention of the cat.
Beyond Imagining
Bessie, Lotte, Ruth, Farah, and Bridget, who had been lunching together for half a century, joined in later years by Ilka, Hope, and, occasionally, Lucinella, had agreed without the need for discussion that they were not going to pass, pass away, and under no circumstances on.
STATES OF PLAY
Can advocates use state supreme courts to preserve-and perhaps expand-constitutional rights?
THE LONG RIDE
The surf legend Jock Sutherland's unlikely life.
ARE WE DOOMED?
A course at the University of Chicago thinks it through.
GOD EXPLAINS THE RULES OF HIS NEW BOARD GAME
Guys, want to play this new board game? It’s called Life. No, it’s not “one of God’s impossible-to-understand games that take three hours to learn.” It’ll be fun, I promise!
RED LINE
With the election approaching, the U.S. and Mexico wrangle over border policy.