Madrid Again

by Soledad Maura

  Copyright © 2020 by Soledad Maura

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Print ISBN: 978-1-951627-12-6

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-951627-27-0

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  For Marisol

  El otro lado está muy cerca de éste, no hay más que

  alargar un brazo, y ahí está, se toca.

  Es ayer otra vez sin haber llegado a ser hoy.

  The other side is very close to this one. You can just

  stretch your arm out and touch it.

  It is yesterday again, without ever having become today.

  —María Luisa Elío, Cuaderno de apuntes

  Contents

  Part I

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  Part II: Fifteen Years Later

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  Part I

  1

  . . . memory never stops. It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history.

  —Annie Ernaux, The Years

  DOWNTOWN MADRID. FOR SOME REASON La Gran Vía comes to mind, even though I never spent much time there. I can see its shadows. I can smell the cologne and the sweat. Mid-1960s. A black-and-white Fellini film, but in Spain, not Italy. The very bright light from the sun. Dark interiors of hallways and churches. Tiny cars. Crowds of people. Women with teased hair washed once a week, sleeveless dresses, kitten heels. Purses clutched tightly. Tanned arms and bracelet-covered wrists. Men in dark suits, narrow ties, and wool hats, despite the sweltering heat. Everyone wearing sunglasses, and gold chains around their necks with a cross or a Catholic medallion. People stopping to light cigarettes. Blind lottery vendors on every corner hawking their tickets with their repetitive cries, “¡Para hoy!” The images escape me and go into fast forward as people look worried, laugh, call out to someone, walk quickly, run for the tram, and honk their horns.

  This was my family’s world. A place where women had crucial roles but few rights. It was the capital city that my mother, Odilia, would leave to move across the world. She was the first person in her family to cross the Atlantic. She went to the United States alone, defying the conventions of a Catholic country ruled by a military dictator and a thoroughly paternalistic culture. Why did she leave? Many good reasons, no matter how you look at it, but it would have been so much easier to stay.

  My mother was quite unique compared to her friends, and to her sister. She had always been a big reader, and cherished English and American literature. In the early 1960s she started to meet some of the Anglo expats who were living in Spain. Through them she caught glimpses of other ways to live. I think her first American friend, Edith, had a big influence on her. They met in Madrid in 1965 when Edith worked for the American embassy. My family was predisposed to Anglophilia in all its variants. Though nobody had ever been to the United States, my grandfather was a lawyer for several American companies in Spain. He had studied in England, and his living room was a place in Madrid where guests could drop by for a martini or a bourbon on the rocks.

  Edith liked having a local girlfriend from a Spanish family, and my mother spoke English, albeit a Cambridge-inflected, literary version. She was studying English literature, filología inglesa, at Madrid’s Universidad Complutense. She was one of the few girls from her nun’s school, where she had been Head Girl, to continue her studies and attend university. Our family home was close to the American embassy and Edith started showing up every day after work. My grandfather took her on as if she were a third daughter. He enjoyed her sharp blue eyes, dark hair, and sassy repartee. The large flat, with its high ceilings, balconies, and long creaky central corridors, was a welcome respite from Edith’s pensión, and she was happy to trade in her fixed-price Spanish bar menus, or the stale embassy cafeteria sandwiches, for lunches and dinners carefully planned by my mother and prepared by the family cook who came from a village in Segovia. My mother and her younger sister, Inés, were both in their twenties, unmarried, and living at home. They had studied at the same convent school in Madrid. Their mother died when my mother was four, and Inés barely a year old. My grandfather never remarried. Inés had stumbled through school and dropped out of university, where she had been studying a Catholic version of journalism, a degree called “El periodismo de la iglesia.” My mother had been through two serious novios. One engagement had lasted four years, but all had come crashing down because of her father’s possessiveness and temper.

  Edith’s and my mother’s friendship blossomed as their group of Anglo-Spanish friends grew, and they took trips together throughout Spain and Portugal. Inés, shyer and more conservative, rarely joined them, but eagerly awaited reports and souvenirs when her older sister returned home from these adventures.

  The only shadow hovering over Edith’s and my mother’s friendship was that they were both twenty-eight, a definite cut-off point vis-à-vis the marriageable age. It was the time in life when, as the Spanish expression says, se te pasa el arroz—your rice gets overcooked. My mother had truly fancied two of her suitors, but none had lived up to her father’s standards, and she felt trapped between her desire for freedom, the pressure to get married, and her father, who once said, “I didn’t have two daughters for them to just run off and leave me to grow old on my own.”

  Thanks to Edith’s American outlook (and driver’s license), they drove down deserted Castilian country roads in a car borrowed from the embassy, stopping at rural village taverns to eat cheese and bread and drink rough red wine. My mother quickly realized that a certain degree of personal female freedom—which, as a Catholic, Spanish woman raised in the dark years of the postwar, she had never imagined—might in fact be possible. Though local men yelled out the occasional guapa and stared plenty when they heard the women speaking a mixture of Spanish and English, they were never really harassed, nor were they ever stopped on the road by the armed Guardias Civiles. These outings were revolutionary. Edith earned money as a part-time chauffeur for the American consulate in Madrid. She was like the plucky Deborah Kerr character in the Michael Powell film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. My mother had never met anyone like this americana. The thrill of being spontaneous, of exploring Spain without the protective gaze of a father, novio, priest, nun, general, or husband, was mitigated only by the sense that this lifestyle might come with a price. She couldn’t yet fatho
m how the bill would present itself, or if she would be able to pay when it did.

  Between excursions, they went to movies, concerts, and lectures. They started to attend an exiled writer’s literature and philosophy talks at the Ateneo and other spaces off campus because that was what cool Madrileños were doing. At least a hundred students crowded the room. The writer was a bit mysterious, which only added to his charismatic allure. Though his name, Zimmerman, didn’t sound Spanish, he had been raised in Spain, taught at Oxford, and spent long periods in the United States. Rumor had it that he had been a Republican hero during the Spanish Civil War, and that he had spent years in one of Franco Spain’s many prisons before leaving the country, but that was never talked about in the open. Some people said he was a Communist and that he was working against the Franco regime. He spoke English, German, and French. He lectured without notes: on Cervantes, Heidegger, Proust, Neruda, and Borges. The last two were personal friends of his. He couldn’t teach at the university or publish because of his political background. He had been officially purged, and his reappearance on the scene had an underground appeal. The male students, many of whom would face prison themselves because of their anti-dictatorship activities, admired him begrudgingly even as they resented how attractive he was to the females. Some of the young men had never left Spain, and some had come from the provinces to study in the capital. One fellow spread the suspicion that Zimmerman was an undercover agent working for the CIA, spying on Spanish youth organizations. How else could one explain his expensive and mysterious comings and goings, his custom-made suits? He even had a car. Nobody really knew anything, but everyone was fascinated by this older, worldly man. My mother and her group were no exception, and often ended up at his tertulias having a drink with him and a small group of bold followers at one of the new American cafeterias on the Castellana boulevard.

  Change was in the Madrid air. One evening after a post-lecture gathering, Zimmerman offered my mother a ride home. She declined, laughing. “I live two blocks away.” He ignored her and opened the passenger side door to his tiny white Seat 600. She got in, smoothed her skirt over her knees, and, embarrassed, looked straight ahead. Suddenly she didn’t want to leave that car or go home anymore. But she barely had time to think before he pulled up in front of her house. As she opened the door and started to get out, he said, “I’m leaving to teach in America next year. I know your English is excellent, and that you’re working on Emily Dickinson. I’m looking for a teaching assistant to come with me. Many students have applied, but I think you’d be perfect.” Standing on the sidewalk, dazed, she turned to look at him, and then shrugged, feigning coolness. “Who knows? By the way, I am not one of the applicants. And I don’t know what my father would think about you.” She headed toward the entrance of her building, slightly irritated with his tone, and wondered why she had not known about this opportunity to go to America. He laughed, and then she heard him say as he started to drive off, “Well, you’ll be hearing from me. I’m not afraid of anyone’s father.” She was trembling, and smiling, as she walked up the front stairs into her building’s lobby.

  2

  SHE HEARD FROM HIM OVER the summer. She got the position. She was going to America. It all seemed to happen so quickly. The next thing she knew she had official travel documents, a passport, and even her father’s blessing. Inés moped around a lot as she watched her sister pack to go so far away, for so long. She dreaded being left without her. “You promise to write to me?” Odilia rubbed Inés’s shoulder and planted a kiss on her cheek. “Of course I’ll write to you! Don’t be silly. I’ll only be gone a few months. And don’t steal all my clothes and purses . . . Or if you can’t resist, be careful with them, or you’ll be in trouble.” She said this with mock sternness, but the truth was that Inés was notoriously careless, and Odilia imagined her favorite skirts and sweaters, covered with ink stains, or shrunken in the wash. Inés promised, “I’ll be careful.”

  The flight was long, but the excitement made it seem much shorter. The stewardesses were impeccable and it was a wonder that their lipstick, shiny hair, and bright eyes stayed the same over so many hours. Odilia looked at herself in her compact mirror before landing and she thought she looked exhausted. She had been apprehensive about Zimmerman coming to pick her up at the airport, but was then disappointed when he wasn’t there. Margarita, a Cuban colleague of Professor Zimmerman, was there instead, and drove her to the Americana Hotel on Sixth Avenue. Odilia was impressed that Margarita drove, and that she knew her way around such a complicated, busy city. They had a sandwich together and walked around Fifth Avenue a bit before Odilia was left alone and given tickets to take the train the next day. She was sad to lose Margarita’s company. She stayed up for hours looking out at the skyscrapers. The next morning she took a taxi to Penn Station—trying out her English for the first time, alone—and took a train up the Hudson. It was a long trip. He was at the station the next day waiting for her. He was happy to see her and told her enthusiastically about the sections of his courses that she was going to teach. She was intimidated at the thought of teaching American students. But she had a couple of weeks to prepare, and she would audit his classes so she would know exactly where the students were. As she was swept into becoming a teaching assistant, Odilia did not have much time to absorb the culture shock. She would always remember the first day she stood in front of the classroom to lead a discussion on “El curioso impertinente,” one of the interpolated tales from Don Quixote. She had stayed up all night preparing her notes and questions, and every time she fell asleep she would wake up again and think of something else the students might ask. She had dozens of notecards on vocabulary alone, not to mention themes and influences. To her shock, the students had also prepared carefully and were generally responsive. She discovered she liked the work, and outside of class the students wanted to know all about life in Spain. She also loved the green lawns and the wooden houses. The simplicity she had imagined when reading Emily Dickinson. The leaves changed colors, the cafeteria had grilled cheese sandwiches, and the drugstore in town had inexpensive things she had never seen, that you could ogle and consider for hours without anyone pressuring you to buy anything. There was also a bookstore where she spent hours sitting on the floor surrounded by American literature. She didn’t have much money, but spent what she had on books, and always wrote her name and the date on the first page. She sent dozens of postcards of snow-covered hills and autumn leaves to her family and friends in Madrid.

  There were other female teaching assistants who lived on the same hallway, one from Paris and one from Rome. They were also PhD students and stayed up late talking about their classes and plans for the future. They shared a big bathroom with many shower stalls with the students, and each had a basket with her shampoo and soap and plastic flip-flops so their feet wouldn’t touch the bathroom floor.

  Odilia became somewhat overwhelmed by the newness of everything. What she thought was feverish excitement turned out to be a fever. She went to the infirmary at the university and they gave her the diagnosis. She had come down with mononucleosis. It was not a word she knew. “Round here we call it ‘mono’ or the ‘kissing disease’ because of how it spreads,” the nurse said jokingly. Her American students teased her and wanted to know who she had been kissing. She feigned offense and told them not to be ridiculous. The kissing disease. It sounded so strange to her, like something fun and frivolous, when she could barely move her legs and her throat was on fire. She was bedridden for weeks. Her friends from her hallway were kind, and Professor Zimmerman discreetly kept his distance, though he called her on the hall phone and sent amusing notes.

  She lay in her room for what seemed like endless days and nights. She had never slept so deeply. Some of her students came to visit and brought her food. She kept their gifts of saltines and ginger cookies hidden away on the top shelf of her closet. She noticed that her supplies seemed to vanish mysteriously in the night. As she started to feel better, she awoke one day
at dawn and saw a student who lived in the next room quietly rummaging around in her closet. She recognized her, a slim girl with long lank hair and big eyes, but couldn’t remember her name. The girl noticed that Odilia was awake and put the crackers back. She turned around and they looked at each other for a split second. Odilia said nothing. There were no more late-night visits. The thieving girl, the fever, the distance from home, and Professor Zimmerman all combined in her imagination. Odilia had a terrible premonition that something deep and irrevocable was being stolen from her in America.

  She slowly recovered and went back to teaching. Just as she started to feel like herself again, Professor Zimmerman started showing up at the end of her classes. He always seemed to be waiting for her with a tempting plan to take her for drinks and dinner at the college inn. The Manhattans were strong, and she felt happy sitting with him in front of the fireplace near the bar. The last day of classes, he drove her back to her dorm and told her that he loved her and wanted to spend the rest of his life with her. This was the night before she was set to return to Spain for Christmas. She spent the end of the semester parties with the other TAs and students in a daze.

  During her first week back home in Madrid, she was besieged by the confusion Professor Zimmerman had sown in her heart. Sitting in the dining room with her father and sister, she was initially unable to eat the food she had missed so much. But after a time, she readapted and the cocktails and the declarations of love seemed like faint strange memories. She made up her mind to stay home and leave the unsettling American interlude behind. They would have to replace her, but she wasn’t going to worry about that. The experience that had started so well had left her shattered: the kissing disease, the unbearable distance from Madrid and her family, and Professor Zimmerman’s attention. She would have liked to turn back time, as if it had never happened. In any case, she thought, it wasn’t too late. She wrote to him about her decision and said it was final. She tried to keep the tone light but firm, saying her father was not well and that she was needed at home.