He sat at a table close to mine, this ageing man with cratered eyes, and we did not speak.

His middle-aged daughter was beside him, distracted from her coffee by a video call with her brother; the chatting FaceTime figure was a younger version of his father.

The old man’s bloodshot eyes wandered to his left, out the window of Café Papanatas, a place where the morning waiter asks you what kind of toast you want, not if you want toast.

As her upbeat conversation continued, Dad seemed no longer to follow his daughter’s conversation. He has departed to some far distant point out the window. Lips pursed, his gaze does not relent.

He is deep in thought.

**

The years notch differently when lived in Spain.

Take a 90-year-old woman, for example; a fine age for sure, but hardly unusual. Such a woman would have been born into the beginnings of the Spanish Civil War. She and her siblings may have hidden out in those hastily dug out ‘refugios’, built under cities to save the Spanish from themselves.

I once descended such a shelter in Valencia, which bore 1936 stencil signage on its whitewashed walls.

‘No Smoking and No Spitting’. The desire for polite order, in the face of mortal peril, stayed with me.

Being ten metres under the ground gives one a sense of existing in one’s own innards – an unsettling experience, especially for the young.

A generation of Spaniards was nursed in these wartime shelters, and their memory is witnessed by a prominent stencilled sign: ‘Capacity: 1,000 children’.

***

The slight man, whose grey eyes I now scrutinise, is not quite ninety.

Perhaps his older siblings told him of the refugios. Perhaps their memory became part of his childhood play. He, of course, will remember the end of Franco’s dictatorship, by means of the Generalísimo’s death in 1975, and Spain’s consequent struggle for democracy, led by a now-deposed king. He witnessed his country’s eventual return to a leading role in European affairs.

The old man’s knitted shirt is crisp. His walking shoes are solid, if a size too big. His sunglasses are distinctly fashion-forward.

‘Papa’, I imagine her saying, surrounded by his grandchildren during January gift-giving. ‘Papa, these are for you. We need to protect your precious eyes from the winter sun’.

***

Spain’s Camino de Santiago winds through regional villages and half-horse towns.

When walking it, I began deeply to admire how the elderly are visible and included in Spanish life.

This came alive in the eyebrow-pencilled dowagers I saw, three-to-a-bench and food-shopping-to-shins, sharing some gossip before lunch.

Once, an elderly gent saluted me from his moulded white chair, placed outside his front door. He had watched the village pass by all day. And his work was not done until the conquering moon would place the sun on notice.

One of the pleasures of walking the camino by moonlight was encountering such occasions.

‘Buen camino’, he may have hailed. I might have returned some words about the weather, the weight of my haversack, or the refugio which lay some hours beyond the hill.

***

There is movement in Café Papanatas. The kindly daughter has completed her video call.

She gently taps her father’s hand, pulling him back from his window-reverie.

They rise to leave, and I see his gait for the first time.

It is arched and somewhat rigid. She approaches the counter to pay, and he waits in the middle of the space. There is a mild gaping quality to his affect.

The precise nature of his thoughts and memories is a mystery – his appearance now having suggested lucidity, and its opposite.

She returns and takes his elbow.

The old Spanish man places his sunglasses back on.

He departs with grace, walking into the advancing light, and the long dark night to follow.