Madrid Again

by Soledad Maura

  Without a PhD, she could only teach part time at Middleton. When I was seven we moved to a town near Boston where she was offered a permanent teaching job at a private school. I never asked why we moved, and I didn’t want to go. I don’t think she wanted to leave either. It made me feel untethered. Middleton and Madrid were just about as much variety as I could take. On the big day, when the moving truck arrived at 6:00 a.m., I was covered in red spots and had a high fever. Chicken pox. It was my unconscious protest. We moved anyway.

  Not having a car in the new town was difficult. There was nothing but churches and a convenience store and it required a twenty-minute walk to reach them. Even the post office was in another town. Sometimes as we trudged along people we knew would drive by, honk, and wave. They were often going to the same supermarket, and we would see them driving off again, the car loaded up with brown bags, as we arrived. In New England people believed fiercely in Emersonian self-reliance, and surely thought we were getting some much-needed exercise. My mother, resigned to the fact that nobody would ever help us, or even give us a lift, would wave back with her best American smile. I never understood how people could just drive by and wave as we, carrying our bags, slipped and slid down the snowy sidewalks, which were never cleared because we were—as far as I could tell—the only pedestrians in town.

  For the first time I felt like we were foreign, and that having a single mother with a foreign accent was shameful. I tried to change my name from Lola to Rose, but it never stuck. There were two days that were unbearable for me: Parents’ Day at school, and the national holiday, Father’s Day. Everybody else had a father, or so it seemed to me. I lied and told some classmates that my father was dead. It was the best story I could think of, and it seemed it might gain me sympathy. It couldn’t even really be called a lie, because I didn’t know the truth. And indeed I secretly hoped he was dead, because that was the only excuse that would justify the fact that he was not with us, driving us to the supermarket in a Volvo station wagon, carving Thanksgiving turkeys, and putting up the Christmas trees. These were the images of families I had from the L.L. Bean catalogue that fascinated me. But even more secretly I suspected he wasn’t dead, and this led me to continue to wait for him, even though I knew, within the deepest level of knowing I could access, that if he hadn’t come back by then he never would.

  Though the new town was quite pretty, it was a school town, and many of the grown-ups seemed sad. Many of the teachers were spinsters and bachelors; some had families. Cottage cheese and black coffee was a common grown-up lunch. There was a stern ambiance at the school, which I sensed with alarm even as a seven-year-old. Everyone, including us, wore scratchy Shetland sweaters. The Fair Isle knit was the big look for girls. People were not as welcoming as in Vermont. There were exceptions, of course, and a few people invited us to dinners and holidays and were lively and wonderful hosts. There was an elderly female French teacher whom I adored. The school had originally been all boys, and the blueprint endured. The smell of the gym, the bad food, the lack of restaurants, cafés, or stores of any kind in the town. Some of the administrators had faint British accents that seemed to endow them with extra power. My mother was a young, extremely gifted teacher beloved by her students. Yet the transition was not easy. There were new customs, and she was assigned Dickensian chores. For example, though she did not have a car, or drive, and had to look after me by herself, she was at school daily from 7:45 to 3:15, at which point she walked a mile back home, but at 5:00 p.m. (which was dark for much of the school year), she had to return alone every day to the main school building to make sure all the windows were locked for the night.

  I walked to school and back with my mother, and then on my own when I was older. I walked to my piano teacher’s house in the afternoons. I loved to play the piano. Anything musical was always a great joy to me. My teacher and my mother said I had a gift for music, and this made me feel very special as I prepared for recitals. On Saturdays we took public transportation to a nearby town that had a mall. It was six miles away and the trip took less than fifteen minutes if you went by car; by bus it took us nearly an hour and a half each way. The bus stopped all the time. I knew that if it didn’t, it wouldn’t be accessible to us, but that was no consolation. We had to walk fifteen minutes to the bus stop, and never knew exactly when it would come, or if it would show up at all. Apparently there were different schedules for weekdays, holidays, and seasons, and the information wasn’t posted anywhere. Also, you needed exact change, which was a complicated combination of nickels, dimes, and quarters multiplied by two, one set for each of us. If a dime went missing we couldn’t get on the bus. My mother’s education in regimented Spain had made her fearful of uniformed officials, including the bus drivers of our suburban American route. After each of these day-long outings, we were exhausted.

  On certain days, without explanation, the same route required that we change buses in a town called Quincy, at the Quincy Center Station. This would add another half an hour each way. The station was full of sad Vietnam vets in wheel-chairs (often missing limbs), bag ladies, and stranded people, along with revved-up teens with feathered hair, nylon jackets, and huge combs in their back pockets, smoking and snapping gum at the same time. There were many small bottles of cheap booze in brown paper bags in people’s pockets, plastic purses, or worn out Filene’s Basement shopping bags.

  Sometimes we only went to Quincy, which was forty-five minutes away on the bus. The attraction there was a department store outlet called the Bargain Basement. It had no windows and little ventilation. The only place to eat after shopping there was a dark wood pub-like coffee shop, part of a chain, called the Pewter Mug. It served navy bean soup and Reuben sandwiches that had left their Jewish ghetto to become part of the American mainstream. I remember the silent footsteps of the waitresses in their burgundy polyester uniforms with nametags, pantyhose, and white lace-up shoes on the navy patterned wall-to-wall rug. There was a shamrock motif, and paper doilies on the tables near the worn little metal milk pitchers and plastic artificial sweetener and sugar holders. We learned about Quincy from my mother’s Cuban colleague whose own mother lived in a small apartment there. We went to see her once. Born in Havana, she had moved to be near her only son, and she lived alone. He had been brought to the United States during Operation Peter Pan in the early sixties. I didn’t know what any of this meant then, but it was hard for me to imagine that anybody could be better off in Quincy than in a place called Cuba.

  The Bargain Basement was not like more modern outlets that simply have surplus merchandise. This store was frequented not only by a couple of displaced Spanish speakers like us, but also by car-owning thrifty locals. It was full of rejected merchandise. The key word on the labels was Irregular, abbreviated as IRR. People would spend their day off sorting through trousers to make sure the legs were the same length, or microscopically examining the snag on a sweater to see how easily it could be repaired. There were clothes for the whole family. Some items were extremely irregular and had a further discount. Those prizes were only for the most talented menders and launderers.

  Quincy made me want to go back to Spain, where there was no wall-to-wall carpeting, and where the people we knew weren’t hell-bent on buying and accumulating inexpensive ugly things. The only item I remember from this store was a pair of gauchos. Gauchos were all the rage, a kind of skirt split to look like a trouser. All the girls slightly older than me had them, as did a few of the more fashion-forward in my class. I finally convinced my mother that I urgently needed gauchos, and we made our way to Quincy one day to find them. I don’t recall what, if any, irregularity they had. They may have been forced to exit the normal retail world because of their color: brick red. So after much complaining, and a round-trip bus ride, I had a pair of gauchos I couldn’t wear. They didn’t go with anything. And it was unimaginable to spend another Saturday returning them.

  Every time the bus left Quincy proper, it took a turn near the John Quincy Adams House.
I didn’t know if he was born there, lived there, or both. But it was a pretty house, white, and set off from the town that shared the president’s name. Many people on the bus carried large clear bags full of empty cans. They went around collecting them and took them to some supermarket to reclaim five-cent deposits.

  Compared to Quincy, another mall in the unfortunately named town of Braintree—also accessible by bus—was like Harrods. It was covered and warm and had cosmetic counters, which fascinated me. Heavily made-up smiling ladies in floral shirts and pantsuits offered to spray you with Estée Lauder perfumes. And there was a shop that was the closest thing around to a gourmet store called Hickory Farms, where we bought what to us were exotic snacks like banana chips and port wine cheese. We had lunch there at a restaurant called the Magic Pan, which had the most European offerings around for miles: crepes, potage St. Germain (split pea soup with sherry and sour cream), and a green salad with slivered almonds, tinned mandarin slices, and vinaigrette. There was also a store called the Lodge that had coveted rugby shirts, corduroys, and jeans.

  When we made it into Boston there were many hits and misses in our car-less explorations. We took the T, which also involved a long walk, and got off at Newbury Street, where my mother had discovered a good hairdresser, and where I had found vintage and preppy clothing stores. But our special place came to be Cambridge. We got there by trolley, and then the Red Line train. There were many homeless people around Harvard Square, which made me sad, but also it had bookstores, a Spanish restaurant called Iruña, and a gourmet store with European products called Cardullo’s. Though I never pressed for more information, I had heard my mother say once that my father had loved Cardullo’s, and that the three of us had been in Cambridge together for a few days when I was a baby.

  Iruña, a small place with wooden tables and chairs, was the only Spanish restaurant we knew of. Americans didn’t eat Spanish food then, and the only dish my mother made at home was sopa de ajo. The simple and delicious garlic soup had few ingredients: garlic, bread, Spanish paprika, water, salt, and olive oil. During one of our trips to Spain my mother bought little wooden spoons and we ate the soup with these out of brown earthenware bowls she also brought back. In my family’s house in Madrid we used silver, and antique French china. In America we had become folkloric Spaniards, nostalgic for a fantasy of an unadulterated culture. At the Iruña restaurant I remember having champiñones al ajillo, mushrooms in garlic sauce, that were delicious and tasted of our dislocation. I was always shy about speaking Spanish at the restaurant, as if it would be a test of my authenticity.

  We never would have admitted that we acted like exiles. Exiles for us were older and somehow different. When my father first lured my mother to America he took her to visit a Spanish professor and his wife in Western Massachusetts. They had never gone back to Spain after the Civil War. Thirty years had passed. They relished my mother’s visit. Not many young Spanish women from prominent families had graced their table. My mother was shocked at the Spanishness of their house. Their clothes seemed to have remained intact from the 1930s, and all the surfaces of the living room were covered by ivory-hued crocheted doilies the wife had made. Photographs of their ancestors in silver frames abounded. The wife had made rosquillas de santa clara, traditional anise-flavored biscuits shaped like donuts, covered with a lemon glaze, and served them with chocolate—the thick, Spanish hot chocolate. They played pasodobles on the record player. My mother said the house was a tract house—she described it as a shoebox—built alongside many identical structures, but that inside it was like a modest old Spanish prewar home. She felt that they had clung desperately to their identities, and that they also wanted to show her—freshly arrived from the homeland—that they hadn’t lost their ways. My mother was very moved by them. She remembered the husband saying that all he wanted was to be buried in Spain. Those were exiles. We were something else. I wasn’t sure just what.

  As we walked to and from the bus, school, or anywhere else around the Boston area, my mother would tell me about her childhood in Spain. The stories had no particular start or finish—she could get into them at any point, waiting for the bus, or during a long walk to the market on an uneven sidewalk crunchy with fallen leaves. She loved the Madrid apartment she grew up in. Though the flat had plenty of space, she and Inés shared a bedroom for many years. They used to whisper into the night. When they ran out of conversation, Inés would say “Odi?” and my mother would say “¿Qué?” and Inés would respond, “Nada.” Inés was afraid of the dark and sometimes they held hands from bed to bed until she fell asleep. My grandfather, who went on hunting and fishing trips every weekend, was rarely home and as the elder sister, Odilia was the queen bee. When she wasn’t in school she was fascinated by the running of the household. Once a year she joined in the waxing of the wooden floors, shimmying on rags down the central hallway and into the smallest corner of every room. She also liked polishing the silver, and picking the stones, insects, and twigs out of the dried lentils before they could be soaked and set to simmer with chorizo, onions, and garlic. There was a cuarto de los armarios, a dark, high-ceilinged walk-in closet that fascinated her, and later terrified me. This room held all the sheets, blankets, and towels, but went far beyond the scope of what we consider a linen closet. It was also the home of the colgaduras, which were massive heavy hangings in royal blue with gold trim that took up more square feet than the average New York City one-bedroom apartment.

  These colgaduras had originally been made for my great- grandparents’ balconies to celebrate royal occasions. They were first used in 1906 in honor of the wedding of King Alfonso XIII to Princess Victoria Eugenia of Battenburg. The wedding was held at the Basilica of San Jerónimo in Madrid, very close to my great-grandparents’ home, which still stands on the corner of Alarcón and Antonio Maura. Everyone who lived in the neighborhood dressed up their buildings to celebrate the royal marriage.

  My grandfather, the eldest of eleven children, inherited the hangings, yet their purpose would change. As of 1931, Spain no longer had a monarchy. After the Republic and the Spanish Civil War, the royal family were in exile. Franco’s dictatorship celebrated its victory every year on April 1. On the eve of this date the family would bring out the vast colgaduras and carefully hang them, one for each of the thirteen balconies. My grandfather was not a supporter of Franco, but peer pressure was a force to contend with during the war and the regime. My mother relished this household tradition, independent of its political meaning. When my grandfather was old and fragile, their building was sold to a developer, and he and my aunt moved to a smaller apartment near the Retiro Park. My mother and I were in the United States at the time. My aunt Inés was unable to cope with the downsizing and hated the experience of leaving her lifelong home. Her vengeance was wrought by leaving behind almost everything that could have mattered most in personal or economic terms: French antiques, thousands of valuable books, letters between my grandparents, and the colgaduras. Much later in my life, I met a well-known architect who had been hired to gut the building and turn it into smaller flats. He told me that in his first walk-through he had seen books with my grandfather’s ex-libris scattered on the floor, antiques, and more personal effects in my family’s storage space in the attic. He had taken one book for himself as a souvenir, but he was just hours ahead of the wrecking ball, and nobody even stopped to loot the remains. Everything was destroyed.

  My grandfather lived another few years after the move. My aunt looked after him, with help, when he became very ill. They started to pray the rosary in the late afternoons. My aunt’s bed was eventually covered with rosaries hanging off all four antique bedposts.

  We would never have used the colgaduras again—Madrileños now only kit out their terraces, balconies, and windows with flags of different kinds during major soccer events—yet somehow I wish I still had even a thread of one of them. I do have a rosary that my father gave my mother. It is made of rosewood and has a little leather pouch. Today, decades l
ater, it still has a wonderful aroma.

  None of my classmates in the Boston suburbs were hearing stories about colgaduras, nor were they making pilgrimages to eat mushrooms at Spanish restaurants or buy foreign books on Saturdays. They weren’t longing to go back to another country. I felt the need to connect with my history. My friends were playing tennis, ice-skating, skiing, or at their beach houses. I always secretly hoped that, in the long run, I wouldn’t have to fit into their world. I sensed that if I tried too hard, I would damage part of myself.

  I still missed Vermont, where we had somehow blended in, where I had been younger and more innocent. In the private school world near Boston, I felt crushed by the intransigent forces of conformity. I no longer hoped my father would return one day and complete our family romance. Then my mother took me aside one evening and told me that she had found out that he had died, in Cuba she thought, and that she didn’t want me to tell anybody. My only association with Cuba was my mother’s colleague, and something I’d heard of called the Bay of Pigs. And Communism. Having recently, along with my entire school, watched the television film about nuclear war, The Day After, my Cold War fears exploded. “Was he a Communist? Is that why the FBI once came to our house?” I asked, nearly hyperventilating from this fearsome possibility. “No, not really,” my mother said. Not really? What was she talking about? “He wasn’t really a political person,” she said. “I mean, he got swept up in things, but he was fundamentally a poet and an intellectual. And of course he’d been an anti-Fascist during the war. His family was Jewish.” What war? I thought she meant Vietnam. That was the only war I knew about. I didn’t know if this information made things better or worse. I didn’t understand how he could have traveled to Cuba. I knew it was not allowed. She shrugged and said, “Maybe from Mexico. I don’t know.” His death led to many difficult conversations and tears. I was sure that we were now definitely going to burn in hell, and how was I supposed to get over that? I was inconsolable.