Madrid on my mind

to listen, click here
for what's gone before, here

 Madrid and Moira on my mind 

Having escaped tying the rope around her neck and kicking the kitchen chair out from under her – what an extraordinary thing for a woman to do, especially one with no physical courage. But that’s a wrong thing to write. Write instead: “a woman who had never before displayed a drop of physical courage.” Having escaped all that, let's say, by having gone to Madrid ten or a dozen years earlier -

     There she would be sitting at a small café, outside in the gathering night. I don’t know where – I don’t know the city well enough – but not far from the Prado. She would have spent an hour there in the late afternoon, looking at El Greco’s John the Baptist and Saint John the Evangelist and wondering about the painter’s eyesight: Was there some sort of twist in one cornea or something about the way the image on his lens was transferred to his brain that made the world appear to him so elongated, narrowed, thorny? She could be thinking that, if she had the nerve to reach out and touch the picture, not only would some sort of alarm go off but her finger would be pricked; it might even begin to bleed.

     She would be telling this laughingly to those sitting with her, knowing she was mangling her story with her clumsy Spanish, making it even more comic than it really was. She felt herself tripping over her clumsy tongue, and she thought she could see the words stumbling into their clumsy ears, some of her fellow students gathered after their class: and they were smiling and laughing with her. The soft Russian was there across from her and to his right the tiny woman from Hong Kong; and to her – my sister’s – right the long, thin Angolan that might have been a shadow in one of El Greco’s works had not he, Agostino, been always so merry.

     Maybe he would come back with her to her room that night, Agostino, and they would “lie together.” That would be how she would be thinking about it, because that would mean to her that he would spend the night; they would sleep wrapped around one another. Maybe he would wake her, talking in his sleep in Umbundu. She would listen very, very carefully – with her brain as well as her ear. And she would ask him in the morning the meaning of the words. And there would be more laughing because she wouldn’t be able to get her tongue around them even as well as around her poor Spanish.

06.06.17

_______________

 *It might have happened, if she had only gone to Madrid.