Totality

We'd driven six hours to be in the path, my partner Ines and me, because her cousin had a flat in a village nobody had heard of that happened to be exactly under the line, and the village had, for one afternoon, become the centre of the world. The square was full by noon. Locals, mostly, plus a scattering of people like us with the cardboard glasses and the slightly embarrassed look of tourists at somebody else's fiesta. The cafe had put out extra chairs. A man was selling the glasses from a folding table for a euro each and running out. There were kids with pinhole boxes made from cereal packets and an old man with a welding mask, which I gather is fine, and a woman with an actual telescope with a filter on it who was letting anyone look. I'm forty-eight. I'd never seen one. I'd seen the partials, the ones where you look through the glasses and there's a bite out of the sun and you say "huh" and go back to work. I'd been told, by people who had seen the whole thing, that it was not the same. I'd nodded. First contact was 13:12. A bite. Everyone looked, everyone said the equivalent of "huh", the kids got bored. For an hour it was a party with the sun slowly going away in the background and nobody quite believing it. Then, at about twenty minutes before, the light changed. It's hard to say how. It didn't get darker, exactly, not at first. It got thinner. The shadows went sharp. The colours went strange, like someone had turned down a dial that doesn't exist. Ines took her glasses off and looked at me and said, "Your face looks weird," and I said, "So does yours," and we both laughed and it came out wrong. Ten minutes. The temperature dropped. You could feel it on your arms. The swallows that had been doing their loops over the square started doing them lower, faster, confused. Two minutes. The light was going out of the world from the west, a wall of it, you could see it coming across the hills.

And then the sun went out. I took the glasses off, because you can, for those minutes, and there was a hole in the sky. A black disc with a crown of white fire around it, standing there, and everything I'd read about it was true and also useless, because none of the words had told me it would feel like the sky had been lying to me my whole life and had just, for a moment, told the truth. The square went silent. Three hundred people. Then somebody's kid started crying, and somebody else started clapping, and then everyone was clapping, and the old man in the welding mask had his mask pushed up and his hand over his mouth. The birds stopped. That's what I'll keep. Every swallow in the square went quiet at once, and there was a dog somewhere that barked twice and then didn't, and Ines had my hand so hard it hurt and I didn't say anything. Two minutes and eight seconds. I know because the woman with the telescope had a stopwatch and called it out. Then a bead of light on the edge of the disc, and the glasses back on, and the world coming back up like a dimmer switch, and the swallows all at once again, screaming, and the cafe owner going round with a tray of something free. We sat in the square for another hour. Nobody wanted to leave. A man at the next table, a local, older, said to nobody in particular, "Well. That's that, then," and went back to his coffee, and it was the most Spanish thing I've ever heard. Ines is already looking up the next one. It's in three years, and it's a long way away, and we're going.