from the Spanish Diaries (October 2009)
– Madrid.
They
are there in every city of any size. The man talking to himself, gesturing –
not crazy, making an argument to his overbearing boss or the woman who is about
to leave him, if only they would stop to listen. He does not stop, but walks
on, though with a hitch in his step in case he wants to turn back. The long-limbed African, dark as night, slim as a skeleton. The woman in black, darker
than night, eyes rimmed with coal, and the man who looks after her as she turns
the corner.
The man in a fedora, charcoal suit, coral shirt open at the neck, practicing his walk, hands behind his back,
shoulders shrugged, toes turned out. The African diplomats in their gray suits, red and electric blue ties against shirts whiter than paper, pointed shoes polished to a
patent-leather shine, walking wide, boldly. One stops, takes
off his coat, drapes it over a shoulder.
The Japanese tourists, shying behind
their cameras; the Germans claiming space; Americans looking friendly and
confused like dogs looking for a hidden treat. (Which hand?)
The girls glistening in
pairs looking like students or like hookers, innocent as unpeeled oranges and ancient as the gray-stone buildings burnt with soot. Plain girls walking-proud
with boys; striking girls walking-proud alone.
The street musicians, a classical
guitar in a snap-brimmed hat; a baritone sax stretching out standards from
the American Songbook. Old women limping one by one. Old men on benches, arguing and laughing.
The aging boy with the notebook,
footsore, wrist sore, recording.
Leaving the Plaza de Mayor he looks back when he sees his poor sister, walking,
almost contentedly, alone, dressed just as she would be – T-top, gray skirt,
thick-soled white sneakers. Not older than when she died ten years ago – or ten
years younger, as if she’d aged backward since then. He thinks: She should have come here.
She might have been alone at first but
not in the big city marked by it, marked out, dis-graced by her loneliness. She’d
have found friends in her Spanish class, that odd bunch that comes from everywhere:
a grandmother from Serbia; a young au pair from Denmark; a mad, never-quite-sober Russian; a gay Angolan (already fluent in Portuguese and French). She’d
have met men and had affairs. She’d have found a remedy, some concoction of: alcohol,
coffee; sex, abstinence; fresh fruit and thick bread; sun; books; and an agnosticism
that made her ups less frantic, her downs not so achingly deep.
Not perfect: no elixir of life, no nectar
of the gods that relieved of all suffering. But something that worked well
enough, in this other place. He’d had always a foolish but almost complete faith in
the power of escape. So this October
afternoon instead of that one, he sees her run into someone she knew; they’ll go
for a glass of wine. She may go home to eat her own cooking and read a Lope de
Vega play. She may go to bed alone – but not stuffed with pills; with her window
up, the clack and murmur of the city blowing in and woven into her dreams of
him. For if he still dreamed of her, why shouldn’t she of him?
****
“Madrid
never sleeps,” someone told Roz, or so she told me. But it does, if only in
fits and starts. It nods off in the heat of mid-afternoon, in the satisfied early
evening after supper, in the false dawn of two o'clock with the reading light still
on; then it jerks awake, wondering how many moments are gone, not forgotten but
missed.
f
No comments:
Post a Comment