By breakfast the next morning, my nerves were shattered. Even though it was early in New York, I needed a lifeline, and I called my old college friend Leah as soon as it was a decent hour in the States. She was an actress and had late nights, so it may not have been a decent hour for her. I was alone in the garden and happy to hear her voice. “Where are you?” she asked.
“I’m at Katya’s house in Marbella.”
“Marbella? Wow. Is it warm there?”
“Warm and sunny,” I said. “Microclimate.” I had just learned this fact and was eager to show it off. There she was at Whole Foods on Houston Street. I imagined the clear plastic containers of wholesome oat bran and raw cashews, the refrigerators full of soy yogurt, and I started to cry.
“Sweetie,” Leah said, “I’m at Whole Foods, and you’re in Marbella, and you’re crying? What is wrong with this picture? Should I get on a plane and come join you?”
Somewhat comforted by her reliable humor, though mainly confused by the transatlantic connection to grocery shopping, I went back to my room. In the late afternoon I had a bath, and then dialed 26 to finally order a gin and tonic. A butler brought it and I started worrying about how much I would have to tip him when I left. I never knew about these things, and I didn’t have much cash. Katya appeared and lay down on the chaise longue near my bed. I sat near the balcony in my robe emblazoned with the house’s name—LAS PALMERAS—and smoked a cigarette. The marquis was coming for dinner and I had to do my hair and choose a dress, but after my sleepless night I didn’t feel like doing anything. Katya picked one out for me, rushed off to change in her room, and soon we were having more cocktails and BBQ Fritos with the Marquis and Mr. X.
Mr. X liked the marquis, who knew how to amuse him. The Italian was a former pretty boy, with Alain Delon-like features, and was still good-looking in a ravaged way. We were stuck with each other for the night, but it didn’t matter because we got along. It turned out, though we’d never met, that we were distantly related on my mother’s side. He could play anything on the piano, and after dinner he played and I sang. Wow, I thought, I was literally singing for my supper. But I was a fool for music and for a few hours I forgot about the attack dogs, the possible guns, and New England. I had never sat down on a piano bench to sing to anyone, but I sat there that evening as if it were something I did regularly. We sang tunes that in any other context would have made me cringe, the most obvious Beatles hits like “Let it Be,” Elton John and Kiki Dee songs. The marquis’ musical evolution seemed to have peaked in the 1970s. We refilled our glasses with whisky, which I in fact hate.
In Spanish there is an expression, “la mancha de la mora con una verde se quita,” literally “a ripe blackberry’s stain can only be removed by a green berry.” It’s often just shortened to “la mancha de la mora . . .” and everyone knows what it means. The only way to get over past relationships is to meet someone new. I was in mourning over being alone, and apparently needed to try and move on. Thus the marquis, who might previously have seemed a comical character to me, was of interest simply by virtue of being a potential green berry. He was not for me, but through this fun evening I realized that someone would be again.
15
BACK IN MADRID, I STILL had to finish the research for my biography project. Not to mention the article about Hitler and Franco.
So I tried to get my work done, and to lie low like a chameleon in the jungle. At the same time, I still wondered about love. The candidates were not promising. Adventurous Leah in New York and Katya both insisted I try Facebook, but social media gave me the creeps, and I hoped to just stumble across someone in real life and fall in love. In a café. Someone reading an interesting book. Nobody thought this plan would work. The riskiest of the possible real-life people seemed to be the expat James, and—inevitably—he was the one who intrigued me. According to him, our perfect future was right around the corner. He made films and traveled. Six months in California, eight months in Paris or New York. Always just out of reach. He appeared and disappeared and had a style that I fell for repeatedly. Also, I had met him in real life. We had locked eyes across a room at a history conference. Or something like that. One of my oldest friends, Manolo, was fascinated that I had fallen for this man. He asked me lots of questions about him, and I lied in all my answers. At the time of this conversation James had disappeared and I was unhappy with him. “Is he handsome?” Manolo asked. “No,” I said. This was not really true, but I was angry at myself and at James, and didn’t want to even concede that he was very good looking. Was he tall? I shrugged. Tallish. He wasn’t a basketball player or anything. Was he rich? No. Was he accomplished? No. Was he well educated? Nope. Was he kind? Most definitely not. I wasn’t giving him any credit. Manolo rolled his eyes in awe and banged his fist on the table, saying, “This guy must be a genius! I wish I knew his secret.” I love Spanish chivalry. My shrink said it was impractical to be interested in such a man, but Manolo praised James’s talents.
James, originally from Dublin, had lived in Spain half of his life. He was bilingual and seemed to understand my Spanish and American sides. He had a sense of humor and a laid-back (too laid-back?) attitude. But I tried not to think about him and focus on what I knew: my work. I loved my research. Even though it would not solve any of my fundamental problems. The book that would result from it would put another feather in my academic cap and be published by a good press, bought by university libraries and reviewed in journals. As my sabbatical year sped by, I realized I had no choice but to return to Sheldon. The funny thing was that I missed Sheldon. I needed the academic calendar and my classes and my office just above the humanities library. That was me. I didn’t see how I could have a dignified life and live in Spain; the two seemed mutually exclusive. Yet my mother needed me, and I liked having a family. My grandfather and Inés were gone, and only she and I were left. How could I leave her and continue to live on another continent?
I got to work and started writing Consuelo Marqués’s biography. She had to leave Spain for the United States in 1939 and then spend her exile in Mexico. The more I learned about her life, the more interesting and complex she became. She had met Eleanor Roosevelt, Hemingway, and Malraux, and had married an aristocratic Communist pilot. Then she had died young in a car crash after World War II.
I kept some photos of Consuelo on my desk for inspiration. It had taken me over a year to track them down. One was of her with Stalin; another with Tina Modotti; and my favorite, one of her alone, smiling somewhere in Mexico dressed in traditional clothes, a la Frida Kahlo. My editor and one of my mentors told me that had she been prettier, the book would sell more. Men. Though she was not beautiful by conventional super-model standards, I was always shocked when people brought this up. She was tall and had a radiant smile, great natural teeth, shiny brown hair, and large dark eyes. At one point I considered using Photoshop, but the truth was that I didn’t give a damn about what she looked like. We had a deeper relationship.
I had a phone number for a nephew of hers who lived in Madrid, and I was hoping he’d let me interview his mother, Consuelo’s sister, Concepción. I looked at the phone number for weeks. Diego Marqués. Every day I said to myself, I will call. Finally, one day I took a notebook to the pool and started writing questions for Concepción. I got excited. I was a bit nervous because the two sisters barely had any contact after the end of the Civil War, seventy years ago. Consuelo rebelled and fell in love with a Communist, and Concepción and her other sisters were pro-Franco.
I called Diego. He spoke very quickly, and I could hardly get a word in. I told him I would like to interview his mother. He asked me to meet him at a bar on the Calle Velázquez. I wanted to look professional, but it was over 100 degrees outside. I chose a new dress with pink flowers on it, below the knee, a bit retro fifties. I was really hoping this interview would go smoothly. The dress was lined in silk and the bodice was tight. It was truly too small, but it was so pretty and the only one, and it was on sale. As soon as I step
ped onto the street, notebook in hand, I felt like I was wrapped in sausage casing. I wished I had money for a taxi and watched many of them zoom by as I waited at the bus stop, thinking at least I’d have something useful for my progress report for the grant. Interviewed subject’s sister. I loved the word “interview.” I had never interviewed anybody before, and I suddenly thought of this as my new, blossoming Christiane Amanpour side. After the interview I would have a whisky somewhere glamorous. I didn’t even like whisky.
Diego was in his late fifties, tall and handsome. From his clothes I could tell he spent more time in the country than in the city. The Marquéses had a huge estate in Extremadura. Bulls and horses. He was the human equivalent of a mud-splattered Range Rover. We had a glass of wine at the bar. I explained that I was a professor doing research on the Spanish Civil War. I mentioned, almost casually, that Consuelo had had an interesting role in the war.
He waved his hand and chuckled at my interest in his long-dead Communist aunt and paid, saying, “Let’s go to my mother’s house.” The wine, the heat, my corset-like dress were all making me dizzy. We walked to Principe de Vergara, the streets ablaze with the white summer light of an August Madrid afternoon. The apartment building was regal, iron gates and a cool marble lobby filled with potted palm trees. The elevator had original wood and glass doors and a faded red velvet banquette and a mirror. When I was little, everyone seemed to live in these buildings, and I remembered going de visita with my mother, who would always have a comb handy for last-minute touch-ups in front of these elevator mirrors. Suddenly the elevator felt a bit tight. I was relieved when it stopped.
The flat was vast but dark, as if most of the rooms were never used. In the dimness I saw oil paintings, silk upholstery, and tapestries. I suddenly wished I wasn’t there with this fast-talking boar hunter and my notebook. “Follow me,” he ordered as we walked through the main rooms and a long hallway. Toward the end I saw light, and I followed him. He was yelling “¡Mamá! ¡Mamá! Look who I’ve brought to see you! Una americana. She’s writing a biography of Consuelo!” I didn’t know why he was yelling.
I finally saw her. Could this be Concepción? She was sitting in a beautiful straight-backed chair by the window. She was thin, with large eyes, high cheekbones, and long legs. She could have been painted by El Greco. Her thick gray hair was short yet abundant, and she was wearing trousers and a sweater. I felt terrible that she had no warning of our visit. Diego grabbed my arm and said, “I forgot to tell you, her health is quite good, but sometimes she’s a little out of it.”
I wondered if this was what Consuelo would have looked like had she lived to be ninety-eight. I wondered if this interview was such a great idea. Concepción started to speak. I thought she was asking who I was, but I really couldn’t understand her. She asked me something I could not decipher. I smiled politely and said, “¿Cómo?” There was no air-conditioning. My notebook full of questions had become an absurd object. I finally understood what she was saying. “Do you have any news from Consuelo?” I was so excited to have understood this question that I nodded enthusiastically. “That’s exactly right,” I said. “I’m working on Consuelo.”
“How is she?” she asked.
“She’s dead . . . she died many years ago,” I replied. She looked at her son, “Why is this person telling me that Consuelo is dead? Is it true?” My smile was straining. Before he could answer, I took Diego slightly aside. “She clearly wasn’t expecting us. Perhaps I could see her another day, now that she at least knows who I am?” I followed him into another room. “Wait a minute,” he said. He brought back two very old photo albums. “You’ll find pictures of Consuelo here. You can use them for your book. Take your time. I’m going to take my mother out for some air.” They just left me with the photo albums, alone in their home for a few hours. All the photos were from before the war, of course. I took photos with my phone, seeing the prim and proper upbringing Consuelo had, and wondered how she had strayed so far from her family, with two formidable parents and two sisters. When they came back, Concepción understood what I was doing, and she was very sweet to me.
When I got home my mother was sitting in the living room reading. She asked, with genuine curiosity, “How did it go?” I told her I would tell her later. “Weren’t you hot in that dress?” No, I said, I was fine.
“Did they give you any useful information?”
“Great photographs. It was amazing to meet her sister. Her son was very nice.”
I had a shower and lay down in my air-conditioned room. The air-conditioning was part of my American side, and my mother disapproved. Don’t think Madrid is New York and you can just pop a Friedrich AC unit in the window and plug it in. It doesn’t work that way. The windows are different, for starters. I paid 800 euros to have it installed, a process that involved three men and considerable drilling that I thought would bring the whole side of the building down.
Clearly Consuelo’s sister would not give me much information, and this made my research all the more important. People who had lived through the periods I was interested in were elderly, if they were alive at all. I looked at my notebook. I looked at the copies of documents I had ordered from the historical archive of the Spanish Communist Party and the archive of the Spanish Civil War. I looked at all my notes from the books at the research center. Had Consuelo been murdered? Why did she become a Communist? What happened to her daughter? Did she ever see her family again once she left Spain? How did she adapt to her exile in Mexico? Why did her second husband leave her? Where were her papers? Who was going to answer these questions?
I passed a week rereading Consuelo’s memoirs and tried to imagine her working in the foreign press office in Barcelona for the Spanish Republic. The Consuelo book took on a life of its own. I worked on it daily, piecing together bits of archival materials, conducting new interviews with people whose parents had known her, and gathering information from an ever-expanding collection of books that threatened to swallow up my bedroom. She had been so politically committed, had risked everything for what she believed in. She was a friend of Robert Capa, the dashing and brave war photo-journalist who had inspired the James Stewart character in Hitchcock’s Rear Window. There were many gaps in her story, and trying to get to the bottom things became addictive.
I was trying to quit smoking and it wasn’t easy while writing. I hated gum. It was probably not the best time to quit. Leah, my loyal friend who was holistic and vegan, emailed often from New York and offered more advice. She suggested cinnamon sticks for the smoking. I was intrigued, at first. I bought some, and the next time I wanted to smoke, I put a stick in my mouth. I tasted its cinnamon, woodsy flavor. I chewed. I thought about Inés. An email came in from Alex. “How’s my favorite researcher?” There was a photo attached of him standing on the beach tan and shirtless, his hair longer and blonder, proudly holding a surfboard. I hit delete.
The cinnamon stick started to shred and filled my mouth with large, damp splinters. I attempted to push them to one side, but they seemed to be expanding and made me gag. I got up and spit them into the wastepaper basket, grabbed my bag, and counted my change as I walked, tears in my eyes, toward the cigarette machine at the grotty local pub. But it was Sunday and the pub was closed. I went back to the gum, plain old Spanish strawberry Chiclets, and started to write furiously. I never smoked again.
The great war correspondent (and Hemingway’s second or third wife) Martha Gellhorn had been a close friend of Consuelo’s. I was reading the Gellhorn diaries to see if she mentioned her, but she didn’t. However, I discovered that Gellhorn—who I’d thought was tough and could laugh everything off—also suffered, and survived, and she became something of a role model for me. It was possible, apparently, to be eloquently lost, unhappy, and still live intensely.
16
ONE NIGHT I WAS OUT at a small bar and cheese shop on the Calle León with Manolo and Mónica. The plan was to have a few glasses of wine and then hit a flamenco disco on the Calle Echegara
y. I had met them both when I was a child. They were slightly older and each had kids, but every few weeks they would take a night off to hang out with me.
We were sitting at a small table in the corner, and suddenly I saw a young woman approaching me. It was dark and I couldn’t see much, but she was definitely making a beeline for me and had a very pretty face and sweet smile. As she approached, she said “Lola?” I couldn’t believe it. Nora, one of my closest friends from high school. We had stayed in touch through college, and had seen each other in New York and Boston a few times. But then we had been separated by life, boyfriends, geography. A few friends from school had come to Madrid with me during vacations, but Nora wasn’t one of them. She was on a work trip and had just come into the shop to buy a bottle of wine. She ended up at the flamenco disco with us until three in the morning.
Nora had become an artist and lived in Brooklyn. Her trip to Madrid was supposed to be for a day or two, but her next big meeting in Paris got postponed and she was able to stay for a whole week. She came over to visit my mother, and I thought how ironic it was that we were all chatting away and having a drink together. So grown up. When Nora and I had last had a drink together, it had been behind our parents’ backs hiding away in my room, or at a bar in Boston where we wouldn’t get carded.
We spent several days together, and I took her to all my favorite places and even a flamenco class, which she may not have been as excited about as I was. We shopped in cool little stores in Chueca, and then went out to dinner wearing our new clothes. Just like high school. I showed her where we lived when I was little, and the beautiful street near the park where my grandfather grew up. As we walked around the city, we caught up on the snippets of information we had about people from school. We talked about our lives, the ups and downs. I told her all the things I had discovered about my family. Talking about it with someone who had known me for so long gave me perspective. She was also an only child, and her parents were still together. I remembered sleeping over at their house when I was a teenager. On Sunday we all went to mass early, by car, and then drove to breakfast at a coffeeshop. I had found this exotic.
Madrid Again Page 10
