The Trip
“I love traveling,” my wife says as, full of dread, we drag our luggage through JFK airport, “I just hate the traveling.” The TSA agents don’t seem any happier about it than we do, shouting in a scolding tone for us to dump our things into the busser bins. The person manning the x-ray is looking everywhere but at the screen. Next thing I know I’m a grown man feeling foolish in dirty tube socks on a filthy floor — until I see the woman in front of me who wore sandals and so now is in bare feet.
Once aboard we find out that we are not on a plane, but something called an air-bus (is this an oxymoron?). I have no idea what the difference is — this thing has wings, thank God – but as we prepare for takeoff, I begin to get the idea. There will be no meal on the eight-hour flight, we are told. Pillows are five dollars, headphones to watch a movie, ten. Leg room, we quickly discover, is designed for people born before the eighteenth century. At six-two I am a decidedly 21st century specimen.
Out of pity, I guess, we’re eventually given a biscuit as dry as hardtack and a four-ounce bottle of Poland Spring.
Thank you, thank you, I want to say, we’re not worthy.
A quick layover in Barcelona and we are reminded, once again, that the American infrastructure is in a state of entropy. Compared to JFK, the airport here is like a Hapsburg palace. They even have an outdoor smoking terrace complete with a Starbucks, which is not why we came to Spain, of course, but for my nicotine/caffine-addicted wife, the very pinnacle of civilization. She is the kind of woman who would rather me bring her home a vente caramel latte than a dozen roses.
We’ve slept a total of twenty-minutes — combined — and the rush of over-caffinated beverages (Starbucks denies it, but we know better) keeps us just jazzed enough to get to our connecting fight.
Which is — uh, oh — another airbus.
We’re almost there.
Photos: Ty Wenzel
The Door of the Sun is Broken
I’d been to Madrid twice before, once in 1990 and then a decade later. Both times I stayed near the Puerta del Sol, which worked well, and so we went for the trifecta on this trip. The plaza is always bustling and has easy access to the metro and buses, etc., with all the major sites and restaurants in striking distance. Walking from the cab to our hotel, zombified from insomnia, we’re suddenly overwhelmed by the sound of jack-hammers — the Puerta del Sol is being renovated. I mean totally torn up, every last inch, like a bomb hit it. Luckily our hotel was just far away enough to miss the sounds of construction.
The Petit Palace is pretty cute, a boutique hotel with smallish rooms and plenty of exposed brick.
We lay in bed staring at CNN Europe wondering if we’ll sleep. I drink a beer from the mini-bar to take the edge off and slowly decompress. Both of us, almost at the same time, begin to crash, hard. I sleep so deep I’m too tired to dream.
When I wake I look at my watch I see it’s almost 10:30 and there is a slight panic. How will we get food? Everything will be closed! Then I realize it’s Madrid and that 10:30 is like 7 PM in New York.
We head to a tapas restaurant I vaguely remember from years back. The weather is spectacular — it’s 65 degrees — and the streets are teeming, absolutely packed, the restaurants and bars spilling into the street. This is the country devastated by Covid and rampant unemployment? And what’s with all the teenagers, laughing and flirting and messing around. Shouldn’t they be home in a darkened room killing zombies on a lighted screen? Not, apparently, in Madrid.
We sit on the street, ordering plates of Manchego cheese, white anchovies, grilled calamari, and some Jamon Iberico. If you don’t know already, Iberico is considered the best ham in the world, the animals fed one hundred percent acorns, which give the meat its unique character. We washed everything down with a bottle of Albarino, in my opinion, Spain’s best white wine.
The bill comes and we have our first lost in translation moment. In my “restaurant” Spanish, I hand off some Euros and ask for change and leave a twenty percent tip (five to ten percent is traditional, but I just can’t do it). The waiter abruptly returns to say I haven’t left enough money. My back gets up a bit, thinking he’s trying to shake down a tourist. Suddenly I realize when I asked him for change, he didn’t take the amount towards the balance, so I was only leaving ten euros towards the bill.
We need some more sleep.
Breaking Up With The Bullfights
Jet lag is hitting us hard, that first night setting a pattern for the week. We sleep in three to four hour bursts, waking exhausted but wide-eyed with our adrenaline soaring. I read Saramago, drink some Spanish brandy, and pray for at least another two hours. I get about half that and wake to see my wife staring at her phone. We give up and hit the city.
In the light of day I begin to see that Madrid has changed. What twenty years ago seemed like a picturesque, but slightly grey and faded metropolis suddenly looks spiffy, even sparkling. It’s as if everything’s gotten a vigorous power-wash, and some of the streets look almost Parisian with their bright white shutters and mini-balconies.
France has their croissants in the morning; Spaniards have churros and chocolate. Our hotel is two blocks from the most famous churros cafe in the world, San Gines. There is a line of course, which gives us time to look at the wall of black and white photos – basically every celebrity who lived in the mid-twentieth century. Finally we sit down with a huge pile of churros, which is basically a long slender donut shaped like a banana, which you dip into a cup of hot chocolate. Maybe we’re just still hungry from the air-bus food blockade, but — with some embarrassment — the pile of ten churros disappears. The cafe con leches, however, not so much.
Warning for coffee fiends — most of what you’ll find in Spain is not good. The restaurants use a blend of natural and factory processed beans, called torrefacto. This gives the coffee the taste of something approximating hot asphalt. In fact, the proliferation of Starbucks in Madrid – which you never see in Italy — may be a response to this. Luckily there are some newer, modern cafes in Madrid that use Italian espresso beans and which are very good, including Toma and Zapcoffee.
The streets are teeming once again, the teenagers are back — doesn’t anyone go to school around here? — along with groups of men waving Spanish flags and singing what I assume are national songs at the top of their lungs. Suddenly, a squadron of fighter jets begin to buzz the city — something is up. Google tells me it’s actually a National holiday, celebrating Columbus’s first arrival in the Americas. It seems there’s no p.c. hand-wringing over Mr. Columbus in Spain. The bars are full, the city is ebullient, and by the time I finish riding the metro to the Las Ventas Bullring, I realize that most of the city is drunk.
In 1990, intoxicated with Hemingway, I traveled Spain for a few months and saw perhaps fifteen bullfights, read the bullfighting magazines and even began to know the names of certain matadors. I bought it when Hemingway told me about the bull “dying with honor,” and the bullfight itself being a tragedy celebrating of man’s “dominion over animals.” Great writers are very convincing, even when they’re full of it.
Then, in 1999, I went back and saw two more bullfights – and began to feel slightly uneasy about what I was witnessing. Is this really what I was so enamored by a decade ago?
This time, I fear, was the coup de grace.
Incidentally, if you think bullfighting is on the way out in Spain, you’re wrong. The stadium holds eighteen thousand people, and on the day I went every single seat was taken. The crowd was boisterous, deafeningly loud, and very, very loaded. During second bull of the day (there are six, two for each fighter), I saw what was probably the best bullfight I have ever seen, the matador beginning the confrontation with the bull from his knees. The cape-work was extraordinary, and he let the bull’s horns pass so close to his abdomen there were gasps.
After the kill he was awarded not one ear by the judge (a great honor) but two (for the spectator, a once in a lifetime rarity).
This time though, for all the skill, and even, yes, the beauty, in the end it seemed like an unnecessary violence. The crowd, too, with their drunken antics and bloodlust made me think of the Roman Colosseum, though, we can assume, more artfully played.
Of course, I’m willing to entertain the possibility that this is a deep-seeded part of the culture, and something I just will never understand — I don’t think I ever really did. But I’m pretty sure I’m done trying.
Goya and the Censors
No life well-lived is complete without a trip to the Prado museum, which holds the greatest collection of Spanish painting from that nation’s golden age. I’ve been at least four times, but it’s been awhile. I have seen a hell of a lot more art since then, and so I return a with curiosity as to what works will hold up.
After all these years, Heironymous Bosch still astonishes, the triptych’s three panels moving from left to right like the first horror film; culminating with decadent Man succumbing to fire and brimstone. Francisco Goya’s “black period” works are similarly dark, with drowning dogs, agape mouths screaming in agony, and wide, empty spaces full of existential despair.
There is also Goya’s nude entitled the Naked Maja, an enticing piece of soft-core that got the painter questioned by the Spanish Inquisition. He escaped punishment by claiming it was merely “art,” though one look will leave you wondering.
El Greco’s impressionistic religious paintings, as ever, leave me shrugging, but his Burial of the Count of Orgaz, more in the realist traditional, has the clarity and perfection of a Rembrandt. Diego Velazquez’s Las Menias still holds as a world class masterpiece, not to mention a landmark of perspective (it’s also much larger than I remember), and I find I still have a soft spot for The Triumph of Bacchus, where the god of wine sits with a group of ravaged-faced — and very happy looking — drunkards.
Photos: Ty Wenzel
Four days later, the jet lag still nags. On a strangely lucid morning, despite another fitful sleep, I take a walk through the Los Letras neighborhood. This is the literary quarter of Madrid, and it’s picturesque winding streets, tiny restaurants, and upscale bohemian vibe will remind some of a Spanish Greenwich Village. People apparently still buy books in Madrid — how 20th century! — as I ran into at least three shops along my short walk. Cervantes, the godfather of the novel, lived here, and there is a plaque commemorating his house.
There also a slew of trendy boutiques selling expensive, and highly inventive, couture, rich with with bold colors right out of Almodovar. Also here is the premier street for a tapas crawl, Cava Baja. The legend is that this is the street the Moors retreated to once the Christians took back Madrid in 1085. What’s left is a narrow, lively calle lined with bars, and where hundreds of people wander from taberna to taberna sipping wine and nibbling small plates of food.
Our last night is spent at dinner in the Plaza Mayor. We know its reputation as a tourist trap, but don’t much care, the atmosphere and people-watching are too good. We have sangria and a seafood paella and watch the crowds mill about in the square. Do they know that this was the sight of countless executions during the Spainish Civil War, or that there used to be bullfights here? If so, they’re not thinking about it tonight. They look too happy. In fact, my wife and I reflect that this country, with all its economic problems — has perhaps the happiest faces of any country we’ve ever seen.
What’s the secret? Wake late, take a nap in the middle of the day, get out with friends at night, don’t work too hard, do media in small doses (or not at all), eat and drink well.
Madrid is, at its best, a life lesson.
