Flying into the sunrise on flight 68. The clouds look like a landmass and confuse my eyes. Is this continental Europe? Portugal? The mountain ranges appear, black and blanketed with mist. Beloved Spain, I am close to you now. I am awakening.
La Ochava, Calle Bustamante 27
As a fearful flyer, crossing the Atlantic is not easy. Those who share this fear understand the apprehension of setting foot on an aircraft: your fear is your freedom.
I’m sitting at the bar La Ochava, just outside Atocha. I have no idea how to move around in this city. In Madrid, at this moment, I am in completely unknown, unfamiliar territory. But two universal constants comfort me: one, a bar where you can have a caña and two, that unequivocal feeling of being at home.
The flight was not the greatest of my worries. This is precisely what I was afraid of, that I would come here, and fall in love again, fall in love with this place, with the accents words jumping playfully about me, tempting me to speak my truth, my life on these pages.
The bartender has just refilled my caña, although I had only taken one little sip, emptying just half an inch from the rim of the glass. Another set of constants: one, the power of cleavage, and two, woman sitting at a bar, writing, alone.
The relationship to wholeness is already here, a priori, as it should be. The sadness that enveloped me two days ago like an impenetrable fog disperses from my body and I feel that even though I am literally lost in this city, I am not lost at all.
Eating alone in Madrid. It's a handicap in this city of lovers. Refusal to serve only half a ración; these hearty appetizers are always meant for two or more. Fideuas and paellas at the ChampagnerÌa Gala are always for two, never for one. The host won't seat me, even if I'm willing to pay full price.
One evening I eyed a platter of ripe-green pimientos de padrón under at the bar and I decided to return the next night to savor this Galician specialty. Faithful to my craving, I returned, sitting at the bar of this modern, busy wine bar and restaurant, sipping a glass of crisp white alvarinho, I patiently waited for my table.
The waiter and I exchanged glances. I knew this meant table for one lady, assured. But when I stood to follow him, the couple next to me, a man and a woman who had been completely oblivious of their surroundings until that moment, leered at me and demanded a table because they had arrived before me. Yes, of course, before me, how appropriate, the world before ME. Single me out, yes, I'm a single woman, eating alone, and my only purpose in life is to keep this seemingly happy couple from the additional pleasure of filling their bellies. Well, I thought, perhaps they did arrive first, but I didn't have some handsome man fondle me while I waited for a table. Yes, yes, now that I think about it, they were before me, literally, flaunting their love, companionship, shared meals, conversations before me, in my face, as if nothing matter but themselves and their gurgling stomachs.
In the love-busy eateries of Madrid, you've got to wait for that, that unique request, table for 1, why, no one ever asks to be seated alone, unless you're an eccentric American writer.
The manager pours me a second glass of wine. Consolation prize. On the house. Sorry to make you wait, señorita.
And so I envision a rare restaurant where everyone dines alone, silently, blank gaze staring at the distance, looking into nothing or perhaps the memory of forgotten eyes, listen to the half-words of half-remembered conversations. What an odd, mechanical, lifeless restaurant that would be: only the clank, clink of silverware, the occasional slurp and the nearly silent wipe of a neatly folded cloth napkin against a hardly soiled mouth.
Yes, eating is social, isn't it? Eating alone is an anomaly here, but still, I'm human and I've got to eat. So I swallow my pride and wait.
The waiter who seats me is terribly busy. Service that is so slow by American standards, and which I normally enjoy, seems unbearable tonight, as if I had marked this evening with a musical direction of lentissimo, symphony of the reluctant diner and her humiliation.
The waiter seats me in the middle of the crowded plaza. The antisocial writer scribbles frantically on her napkin. I miss my book terribly. The menu arrives. Relief. They serve half raciones. I order dinner and when it finally arrives half an hour later, the pimentos de padrón are missing. I politely note the omission. But my heart silently demands, oh yes demands -- after all that, after feeling invisible, ignored, neglected, treated as a lonely diner -- those little green peppers mean the world to me. Twenty minutes later my waiter appears with a saucer full of the fresh peppers, tossed in exquisitely flavored olive oil and covered in coarse sea salt. One bite. Ah. I'm redeemed.
I lost my way to the church of San Francisco El Grande, although, as with most locations in old Madrid, I was never as far as I thought I was from my destination. But in order to avoid behaving as a tourist, I developed the habit of walking into an establishment and perusing my book-bound map indoors. Sometimes in the wc, sometimes while quenching my thirst.
I walk into this colorful Irish pub, drink a caña and stand at a corner to look at a map. Miguel from Córdoba and Carlos from Ávila walk in, stand right next to me and order two oxsanitas from the bartender. Antonio is loud, chubby, with a beard, and Juan is quiet, reserved and thin. He frequently and demurely lowers the lids of his big blue eyes. I gather they are socios from work who regularly stop by this quaint, little watering hole mid-afternoons.
Antonio asks me what I’m doing and I explain I’m an American writer looking for San Francisco el Grande. He raises his eyebrow and I see the spark in his eye. He doesn’t believe I’m an American writer lost in Madrid, but I show him the map, he points to a spot and of course I see that the Calle de Segovia, then left at Bailen, would have been the easier route. Another round of oxsanitas is ordered, but this time it’s three. An oxsanita, named after the lovely redheaded bartender from Roumania, is just a gin and tonic served in a squat table-wine tumbler.
I tell Antonio that I’m writing a book for single women travelers in Spain. “Soltera,” he says, “I have a brother, forty-one years old, never been married, a farmer in Avila, why don’t you marry him?” But I’m a writer. I don’t know how to milk cows. Antonio makes some remark about feeling nauseated. It’s my cleavage, he admits. It’s making him dizzy and it would make his brother dizzy too. Juan doesn’t dare to look. What a trio, I think. The lusty milkmaid drinks gin and tonics with Folly and Prudence, in the allegorical theater of Madrid.
Before I know it, Antonio and I are engaged in an unexpected, somewhat highbrow conversation about Don Quixote, its place in literary history, its characters and how it gave La Mancha such much-needed publicity in the middle ages. I’ve never read the epic, so I’m full of questions. A couple of oxsanas later, the brazen Sancho Panza and his melancholy companion Don Quixote return to work. By then it’s too late to see San Francisco el Grande on the inside. But outside, the sun is setting. Wandering aimlessly and free now, I come upon the Plaza Mayor. The center of Madrid is suffused in wide amber rays that deepen the terracotta hues of tiles and bricks. The city is awakening, just before night falls.
Guadalajara to Azuquequa de Henares, Cercanías Train
On the train a young punk girl sits across me. Her presence is anachronistic because punk “belonged” to the 1970s. Her presence is also common, all too common and not anachronistic at all, because the statement she’s making -- of not fitting into the Spanish mainstream -- well that’s as old as the first gypsy that set foot in Spain.
Her dark, short black hair and overly-done eyes don’t distract me. It’s the cheap cloisonné pendant with the image of Che Guevara that makes this ordinary train ride seem like a colossal tear in the fabric of time: if she only knew what my parents went through to flee communist Cuba. She’s wearing an emblem of a history she never lived.
How easily teenagers adopt the struggles of others, when they’ve got no struggles of their own. Some day she’ll wipe that make-up off with cold cream. Yes, I see it clearly: some day she’ll wipe that make-up off for the very last time and she’ll see her own face for the very first time. She’ll have her own struggles, with her own beautiful, tired face as its symbol.
The famous bocata de calamares is simple yet delicious: large, tender fried calamari rings, lightly breaded and stuffed between two halves of a fresh, foot-long baguette. No condiments necessary.
After having read so many praises sung to the bocata on MadridMan’s message board, I literally stepped into this café without even realizing I was there!
I sit under the canopy of trees just off the street facing the Atocha station. The floor is strewn with cigarette butts and napkins. Cleverly avoiding the hurried footsteps of busy waiters, pigeons and finches pick scraps off the floor. You can have a 40 euro lunch at the Ritz just 10 minutes away, but it doesn’t get better than this -- a bocata and a caña one August afternoon in Madrid.
People stare at me: the men lustily; the women suspiciously. Yes, I’m a woman and I'm writing at this table, alone, sitting here quietly satisfying my hunger and my need to write all at once. I realize this afternoon that I am profoundly bored I where I permanently reside, that my soul must travel in order to feed itself, that the words I jot down in my journal will sustain me once I return home: anything eaten in a state of freedom and happiness tastes much better and the memory of this meal is just as satisfying.
Do the little finches consider themselves Madrileños? These magisterial pigeons who lord it over the sidewalks of the world, do they have a sense of nationality?
There’s a lovely English couple sitting by the window overlooking the Paseo de Recoletos. They both wear beautiful grey hair: she, long and luxurious tresses and he, cropped short. The seem frozen in time, for in spite of their age, they are impossibly elegant, poised, youthful, smiles full of wisdom. He looks into her eyes gently and smiles knowingly as he pours another glass of white wine, as if they’ve had the same conversation a thousand times, and as if he would hear her speak again and again.
The waiter interrupts me with my first course, a Crema Bretona. Sitting here, a single woman, ‘singled out’ from the crowd, I write in my book in this café famous for its literary past.
I am a single woman always walking alone, eating alone, writing alone in this city of lovers. I feed on the lives of others, spy on their gestures of affection, observe the nuances of their body language.
I finish my meal of Trucha a la Navarra with a coffee and a slice of melon. I wondered what the lovers would do at 3 PM on a hot summer day in Madrid. Eat, make love and sleep, or simply linger in half-sleep with a belly full of pleasure.
I will walk instead. I will walk alone in the deserted streets of mid-afternoon and have the city to myself. I will walk alone, waiting for the city to awaken once more, for its pulse to quicken and carry me into the night.
He told me that I looked like her, Catalina Micaela, the daughter of the Spanish king Felipe II, in the 16th century portrait by Sánchez Coello. I failed to see a resemblance when I found her portait online. She was just an image on my computer monitor.
Months later when I found myself strolling through the rooms of the Prado, I had forgotten Catalina. But after a while, after my gaze poured over Velazquez and Goya, took in Ribero and Zurbarán, she slowly emerged, invisibly, out of many canvases. Where was she? In the Prado? Thyssen? Did I even know? It’s as if I began to miss her, to call out to her.
Around 5 PM I wandered into a room, my sight saturated with so much exposure to beauty, my feet tired, my mind groggy. A bell rang. Visitors rushed past me, bumping into my bag. I stood fixed at the threshold, staring at Catalina.
She didn’t look like me, but I recognized her. She was on the other side of the room, but she was real, almost in the flesh. Her presence was imposing, larger-than-life, coming out of the blackness of an oil canvas, begging to be three-dimensional, to be alive once again. I took her in all at once, with uncanny familiarity: the details of her ornate dress, the stiffness of her collar, the austerity of her life, the fatigue in the eyes of this woman, who died giving birth at 33.
The bell rang again. The room was empty. I took one step toward the painting and the guard told me to leave. I pleaded with an urgency that surprised me. “You don’t understand, I’ve come all the way from America to see this one painting.” She showed no sympathy. “Pues no,” she replied, pointing her finger to the Puerta de Murillo exit.
The next day, on my way to Atocha to take the train to Toledo, I stopped just past the Prado and turned around. Toledo can wait, I thought. But Catalina can’t. I was drawn to the Prado, to her. This time we would not have a chance encounter. I found her deliberately, looking at the museum map: Room 63 A, by way of Bosch’s room, just around the corner from The Garden of Earthly Delights.
He taught me how to drink the fino manzanilla properly: place the rim of the glass at the edge of your pursed lips, tilt your head back and let it pass directly to your throat. I wanted it to linger on my tongue, as with most other wines, and failed miserably to keep the sherry from missing the upper and lower clefts of my palate.
Our table was at back of the cramped bar, surrounded by posters of bullfights and enormous wooden barrels that held the dry, golden liquid from Andalucía. I sat across the writer while nibbling almonds and slowly taking in his tired expression. Life had dealt him a sore slap on both cheeks with the death of loved ones and later his own illness – all within a span of three years. His sense of time was different than mine. He had passed beyond death and returned. On this evening, I counted the minutes almond by almond, sip by sip of the fino, carried away by his lyrical cadences on the relative absurdity of our situation.
He tried to seduce me with words, this verbal Don Juan, but I could not play the role of transient muse, for I am also a writer and see through the veil of my circumstances -- two lonely souls sharing half a bottle of fino manzanilla and the bitter taste of unrequited love. We would never be lovers.
We walked arm in arm down the deserted Calle Echegaray, silent and floating. At the corner of the Calle Atocha I realized that my watch, a beautiful, handmade silver timepiece, had unclasped from my wrist.
I wasn’t surprised. I always lose my watch at the beginning of a trip. Usually it makes its way to the bottom of a suitcase somehow, to be rediscovered when I return home. But I knew this watch was lost to me for good, because I had recovered time, his time, the time that neither of us, in transit to death, could measure with the mechanics of a clock.
I kissed him quickly on the cheek just before crossing the stile. The last train to Villanueva was waiting below on the track. He said I was cruel. We smiled knowingly at each other as I passed into the darkness of the night. His muse had become eternal and the taste of almonds had become sweet.
Café La Pecera, Círculo de Bellas Artes, Calle del Marqués de Riera 2
I like this Café. On the other side of enormous picture windows cars on the Calle Alcalá hurry to their destination. But inside the "fishbowl," calm and quiet reign. Two tasteful black and white male nude lithographs flank the entrance. After a while I notice there are framed nudes on every wall, tastefully balancing the world of art and sex, body and representation. I drink coffee among bodies that are two dimensional, without forgetting that this very afternoon I denied the pleasures of my own.
The relationship to place: my heart swells, the backdrop of this day comes into full view. I feel so grounded, hot in the sun and cool in the shade. Leaving La Pecera, these bricks, these old granite slabs, support me as I turn the corner into the unknown of the immediate future.
There are no accidental tourists. I'm a stranger, sometimes, in my own backyard, but not here.
He opened the door for me and I stepped out of the heat on the Calle de Santa Isabel into the art nouveau lobby of the cinema, where lunch was served. Quiet and uncrowded, the restaurant would have been the perfect prelude to a casual encounter, but the gaudy blue velvet upholstery and bleach-white miniature columns made me feel like I was playing a part in an old black and white silent movie.
Over the first course, he confessed that he was convalescing from illness. I forgave the desperate hands that constantly wandered under the table or caressed my face, the fingers I had to push away so that I could finish my meal. His gestures and my rejection – the comical and pathetic replaying of an old scene.
Then I understood his desire to be love freely, to keep our acquaintance in the realm of dreams, fiction and sex, and not the mundane world of illness, work and death … but I couldn’t give him that.
I remember being at a milonga waiting for someone to ask me to dance the next tango. Couples swirled about me. And until I got to dance, I felt the absence of a partner deeply, intensely, no matter how discreetly poised I might sit at the end of my chair, enchanted by the dances unfolding before me.
Traveling alone in Madrid one August, I would see lovers sitting at benches, lovers holding hands, kissing, as if their pleasure was public, a story told only outdoors, as if their pain, arguments, separations, bereavements, were reserved for private occasions, behind closed doors. They say Paris is the city of lovers … but I’m not convinced. Paris cannot claim possession of something so universal.
Paris only adopted, but didn’t invent, the tango.
Someone once told me that in Buenos Aires couples always displayed their affection publicly, but not because of some cultural tendency toward exhibitionism. No. The explanation is quite simple really. They don’t have the luxury of privacy. Young adults live with their parents and aging parents live with their children.
El dia que me quieras … the day that you might love me. That day of possibility was born in Buenos Aires, in the throat of Carlos Gardel, but that day has never come. It can’t.
You see, tango takes place in this space of waiting, this space of possibility. Love is no different. And so is writing.
Writing takes place in the space of loneliness, where I see more keenly, my vision clear, not muddied by passion. I walk, write, eat, drink alone, a witness to life that seems much more real than the blank page. And when you finally ask me to dance, the plenitude of your embrace is blinding. I forget my words.
These lovers unwittingly tell me their stories. They are dancers embracing on the theater of the street, repeating that ageless ritual, a tango that takes place in public parks, sidewalks, restaurants, alleys, taxicabs. Lovers strolling, lovers saying goodbye at the train station, coming and going, lovers defying unto death the loneliness of the individual in the big city.
I still dance the tango, it carries me into the night, accidentally, unconsciously, and before I know it, I am shoved by the city’s pulse into the arms of the night, dancing this tango, the dance of drinks, of furtive kisses in a smoke-filled bar, of groping, of syncopated push and pull, of escorted walks to the hotel, of steps resonating in the alley, slowing down around the dark corner, the tango of begging, refusal, the tango of her cruelty and his banality, of his urgency and nothing more, that late-night dance of the American writer and the Spanish man who thinks she’s easy because she’s a tourist.
I think of that painting in the Thyssen B Museum, Hopper’s Hotel Room (1931). I imagine my body as a hotel room for transient happiness, an impermanent residence for would-be lovers. But I am so in love, deeply, irrevocably in love with this place, this freedom, this freedom to write, this freedom to dance, so in love with so much more than the image of that woman sitting at the edge of a bed in a hotel room, and for this reason alone, I refuse them. I refuse them all.
And so I claim that Madrid is a city of lovers. And that the day for all of us to love has finally arrived.
And I dedicate this tango to all lovers, to all lovers everywhere, to lovers of bodies, souls and cities, lovers of past, present and future, lovers who hold hands and lovers who dance alone.
Award-Winning Writer and Independent Journalist. I tell it like it is and write stories from the heart about whatever tickles my fancy and other parts. Learn more at Linkedin.
All posts under the Manola Blablablanik series, this blog's original nom de plume, are semi-fictional.
La Ochava, Calle Bustamante 27
La Fontanilla, Plaza de Puerta Cerrada
Bar El Brillante, Atocha 122
Café Gijón, Paseo de Recoletos 21, est. 1888
Museo del Prado, Paseo del Prado
Taberna La Venencia, Calle Echegaray 7
Dancing alone.
