Hablando Mal en Madrid

“tras chocarlos, la luz del farol se apagó un instante, dejándolos completamente a oscuras”

We too stood in darkness in the very same alley as the two duelists recounted in La Leyenda del Cristo de la Calavera. Though I could only get the broad gist of what our guide on this Toledo nighttime tour was saying, as it was completamente en español. 

For a year and a half before traveling to Spain I’d been practicing Spanish daily. Upon arrival it helped me place orders in restaurants & coffee shops, but I still had a ways to go before being able to converse fully. I’d usually make the attempt, but most locals would immediately peg my accent and respond in English. A select few, such as our busboy at the Madrid restaurant En Busca del Tiempo who huffed off in frustration when I struggled to understand him, didn’t even bother. 

Practicing reading & writing really isn’t the same as practicing listening & speaking. So while I knew many of the individual words that people spoke to me, I had to spend so much mental energy pinpointing them that I had none left to formulate my reply. Or I’d start thinking up my reply before they’d finished talking, with the result being that I’d either interrupt them or miss some critical context. 

Algunos de mis colegas hispanohablantes me dijeron que mi gramática no era tan mala, but that didn’t help much when it took me so much time to effectively reply. To my counterparts it must have felt like ground control trying to converse with an astronaut. 

As you might imagine, for the best result I required a broken combination of Spanish & English, as when I conversed with a local passerby: 

“...y amo los estados unidos porque fue la primera democracia” 

“de mo crashia?”

“How you say… democracy”

“Ahhh sí sí democracia”

During our weekend in Barcelona, given their preference for Catalan and (very grudging) acceptance of tourists, I hardly even attempted to put my limited Spanish to use. We were there the night of El Clásico, so minutes before the game started, when we heard a loud commotion down the street, I assumed it was some kind of gameday parade. Imagine my surprise when we got closer and realized the participants resembled something more akin to William Bouguereau’s Dante et Virgile, as devils paraded around La Vila de Gràcia to the sound of drums, pops, and screams.

I imagine much more haunting screams would fill the air in the scene depicted in Goya’s The Colossus, of which I’d usually produce a photo of my own but the staff at the Prado – virtually uniquely across Europe’s major museums – intensely enforced a prohibition on photography, running across the room to yell at anyone who brandished a smartphone. Now as for los otros cuadros de Goya, I couldn’t imagine much sound at all in las Pinturas Negras. Maybe a bit of raspy whispering in El Aquelarre or El Gran Cabron.

My wife Corey & I felt a sense of disquiet from the beginning of our time in Spain, as Corey got sick the very first week and spent much of it in bed. As for myself, over our five weeks in Spain I never spent more than 7 consecutive days in our home base of Madrid, as besides weekend trips to Barcelona and Toledo I traveled both to Toronto and London for work. 

Walking to the metro near La Rambla after checking out of our Barcelona hotel, I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and turned around just as the person behind me changed direction and walked off. Upon reaching the subway stairs, I instinctively looked at my backpack and saw that the outermost two zippers had been unzipped – either the pickpocketer hadn’t found anything of value to them or I’d turned around just in time. 

To Corey, the bullfight that I dragged her along to on our very first night in Madrid was perhaps the most unsettling experience of our entire travels, its savagery a rude shift from the civilized ambience of Paris that we’d left behind that morning. Literally we dropped our bags at the airbnb, grabbed burritos to-go from Tierra, and ate them on our way down to the subway to Plaza de Toros de Las Ventas for the season’s última bullfight – an event I’d been keen on experiencing since I toured a bullring in Seville during a family trip nearly 20 years prior. 

La corrida featured 3 matadors who each faced off against 2 bulls. The ritual killing commenced with a short parade, and each of the three tercios really took some time – both for show and because it takes a while to tire out the bull to just the right combination of weak and frisky to make its final showdown with the matador (tr. “the killer”) entertaining. 

And by “tire out” it’s not just making the bull run futilely around the ring, though of course they do that. They bleed it with pikes and pins, starting in those tercios de baras y banderillas. By the time the matador came out for the tercio de muerte, a river of blood would be running down the bull’s flanks. It surprised me how docilely the bull would stand inches from his killer, too dumb to recognize his enemy until the cape flashed red in its face. 

Even with our minimial knowledge of bullfighting, from the way he strutted out onto the ruedo and solicited crowd reactions, we could tell that the final matador – Miguel Angel Perera – was the main event. Perhaps he was just una reina del drama, as indeed one of his flops outshone even the most dramatic futbolista. But by the end he proved himself el verdadero ganador, as unlike the other matadors he hit home on each of his first attempts at la estocada. For him and him alone the crowd waved white tissues in homage.

I didn’t help Corey’s impression of Madrid by ordering pig ears at dinner afterwards – perhaps in my own homage to Perera, who’d apparently nicked the bull’s ear a few times during his two spars. Which is to say he got the better of the bull than this woman depicted in the bar Santamaria got of that pig. 

If Corey was less offended by Picasso’s Corrida de toros, she was also less interested than I was. Ignacio Zuloaga’s Una Manola was way more up her alley. Esa manola would have been rather out of place at the Auto-da-fé at the Plaza Mayor – besides preceding her by two centuries, the auto-da-fé was a far darker death ritual than a bullfight. The painting contrasts sharply with the Plaza Mayor of today, in which we found a concert stage and both Mickey & Minnie mouse who came up to Corey trying to get paid in exchange for posing with her for a picture.

I suppose the closest thing that we experienced to the auto-da-fé – if only in terms of solemnity – was the Real Madrid game against Osasuna; at least at the beginning, with the dramatic rendition of Hala Madrid y nada más, the moment of silence for the recent floods in Valencia, and the supporters’ collective anxiety as Madrid failed to score throughout the first 33 minutes. Vini Jr put an emphatic end to that drought with 3 goals, and the fans took a collective step off the ledge they’d been standing on since their 4-0 defeat to Barcelona 14 days prior. 

We hadn’t planned our Barcelona weekend far enough in advance to secure tickets inside La Sagrada Família, but we viewed it and the Gaudi House from the outside. If you built an entire city full of such buildings then I suppose it would take hundreds of years but at the end you might end up with the closest possible thing to the Garden of Earthly Delight – though given that Gaudi respected God to the degree that he intentionally designed his flagship church to be just a tad bit shorter than Barcelona’s highest hill, I’d wager he was just a tad bit more reverent than Bosch.

From the Parc de la Ciutadella to the Retiro, we couldn’t miss the parakeets flying around and squawking any chance they got. In other words, they weren’t so urbane as the black swans that swam just outside the Palacio de Cristal, as if waltzing to the park musicians playing Can’t Help Falling in Love, the same song to which Corey had walked down the aisle at our wedding.

We walked from new to old when we went from Museo de la Luz to Palacio Real, and from old to new when we went from Cafe Ziryab to Salmon Guru – the latter taking us on a Journey of Flavor from the chocolatey Atómico to the extraterrestrial Chipotle Chillón.

Los mercados had either new or old depending on which stall we chose. Of course we never struggled to find the jamon iberico, or paella (de verduras para mi esposa vegana), but we also found fusion dumplings of pollo curry & salsa mango.

After wandering through Barcelona’s gothic quarter, I realized we were minutes away from Paradiso just minutes before its opening; the opportunity was too great to pass up. We got in line and were able to get in just as it started to rain. Given that we entered through a freezer (“hola buenas!”) I had little choice but to order their Supercool Martini – featuring frozen liquid ice & sprayed with white truffle – tempted as I was by the creative presentations of many of their more fruity cocktails featuring aztec pyramids, static electricity, and human brains. As I lifted the glass and felt the liquid freeze my lips, a deep rumble of thunder sounded from outside and the freezer door swung open again.

Thank you for reading! Next up will be our stay in Portugal.