Madrid Again

by Soledad Maura

  Subject: Barcelona

  Atentado terrorista en las Ramblas al lado de la Boquería, furgoneta arollando a gente. Siguen informando. Besos. (Terrorist attack on the Ramblas by the Boquería market, a van is running people over. Developing story. Kisses.)

  I called her immediately. I could hear the TV news booming in the background.

  After we spoke I thought of las Ramblas, imagining it packed to overflowing with tourists taking pictures on their phones, drinking wine and beer. I thought of the locals running their stands at the Boquería market, a celebration of fruit and vegetables, all the varieties of fish, cheeses, and charcuterie. The market was near the Liceu opera house, just blocks from my maternal great-grandparents’ former home. My great-grand-parents who had been swept into the Spanish Civil War with three children, and had come out with none. Their only consolation had been their two granddaughters, my mother and Inés.

  My mother spent many periods of her life in Barcelona with her grandparents until they had both died when she was in her early twenties. She frequently used their box at the opera, dressing up in an old black astrakhan coat of her mother’s. Her grandparents (and their relatives) were all Catalán, and they spoiled her, their young and motherless granddaughter.

  She was eighty years old now, and as she watched the nonstop news on the Spanish television about the attacks in Barcelona, she saw how the van entered las Ramblas and drove down toward the market. She saw the streets of her youth.

  I couldn’t bear to watch any videos of the attack. I looked at some photos online. One image stuck with me: an elderly couple that had been mowed down, still clutching their plastic supermarket bags from Carrefour Express.

  1Evocación de Don Tomás Navarro Tomás, Luis Flórez. Thesaurus. Tomo XXXV. Num. 1 (1980). Centro Virtual Cervantes.

  19

  I REMEMBER MY MOTHER PREPARING her classes on Guernica and the Spanish Civil War at Middleton College, between the burlap walls of our apartment over the garage.

  My room in Madrid was still full of the boxes with all the pristine china from Barcelona, including the pieces used only once, for my grandparents’ wedding.

  I’m walking around my backyard in New England. I’m on the phone with my mother again. I’m looking at the hydrangeas I planted when I bought the house. I love them, and they have somehow helped to make Sheldon my home. Their trunks are still slender and pliable, like a newborn pony’s legs, and last night’s rain has knocked them down. I keep meaning to get posts to hold them up. It’s peaceful here in this garden, but it is quiet and isolated. When I have free time, I take walks around the pretty parts of the town and admire the grand old houses and the lawns. At the same time, I miss seeing people on the street. I miss Spain.

  History is so weird. The flowers in my garden remind me of a building on a leafy central avenue in Madrid. Today it is a nursing home and the elderly sit outside in the courtyard, which has a garden full of robust hydrangeas and rosebushes. The building was a prison during the war. My father was there for a year or so, and at least one of his close friends died there. It was later turned into a convent, and is now a home for the elderly. Variations on a theme. There is a small plaque on one of the walls, but its place in memory is tenuous at best.

  James visits me, and I’m thinking about how to tempt him to stay for a while. After many years in Spain, he is actually looking forward to coming back to America to be with me. We take a walk up a picturesque hill. It’s always a bit hotter and more humid in New England than I would like. He loves my house, and thinks Sheldon is quaint. But he worries about my small-town life. I tell him I’m never bored here because I teach all day and love my classes and in the evening I work on my writing. I have some friends. I have a fireplace. He is not convinced. “Shouldn’t you do other things in the evenings? Go out? I think of you as a bit more urban.”

  We’ve reached the top of the hill at this point. The views are very beautiful. I look up at James and ruffle his hair and say, “This is my land. I’m both. Or neither.”

  We kiss. Nobody can see, I hope. Down below there are dozens of church steeples in Sheldon and the next town over. I look at him and ask, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  He nods. “I’ve never seen so many churches in my life, and I’ve been around the block. I think we need to get you out of here.” I tell him I like seeing all the steeples. I look up for another kiss, which is cut short as I see someone I know marathon-training and pounding up the hill, her face red with exertion. I pull away from James, but the kiss has had its effect. I feel dizzy and happy. James asks, “What’s that smile about?”

  I ask him, “Have you ever heard of the kissing disease?”

  He frowns. “Isn’t that what they used to call mono?”

  “Yes,” I say, “but to me it means something else. Anyway, I think I have it. Maybe.”

  James leaves, and once alone in Sheldon, I vow that on my next trip to Spain I will properly pack up the porcelain tigers and nymphs and ship them to New England. They will be displayed in my small house, with all the china and glasses, somehow, somewhere. Even as I think about this, I sense that these objects will only be in America temporarily, before we all, finally, go home to Spain together.

  It’s late August and my mother is virtually alone, across the ocean in her Madrid building with her caretaker. She meets two friends at a shady bench in the late morning before lunch.

  She tells me, by phone, that both her friends, who have children and grandchildren, are selling off their china, linen tablecloths, and silver. “Their kids don’t want these things. Nobody will ever use them again. And they’re not even worth much. They were our treasures.”

  James calls me a few days later. He says there has been a change of plans, which makes me anxious. It turns out he will be shooting a film in Barcelona the following year. He asks me to move there with him. He’s always wanted to live there—but, he says, only if it can be with me. I can’t take another sabbatical so soon, so I would have to leave my job or ask for an unusual leave of absence. I don’t think I can do this, but a glimmer of irrational light appears in my imagination as I realize that I might very well want to move to Barcelona and see what happens. James reminds me that the AVE fast train can take me to Madrid in just over two hours, so I can see my mother whenever I want. No driving involved. He asks if I’m afraid because of the recent terrorist attacks. No, I’m not. In fact, if anything, they have made me feel closer somehow to Barcelona. His movie is about the tensions around Cataluña’s Independence movement, and I know things won’t be easy there in the near future. And yet, I want to go. With him. What if this is what I have always wanted, without knowing it?

  We decide to talk the next time he comes to visit. As it turns out, the financing for the film gets delayed, and he comes to Sheldon to live for several months. He starts working on a novel set in Ireland. He has to travel back to Spain every once in a while, but, much to my surprise, he loves New England. He ships over most of his things, which are very few. He is a bit of a Spartan, unlike me who never has enough closet space for clothes and shoes. For my birthday he gives me a black-and-white Tibetan terrier that we name Paco. Every day that they can, James and Paco walk up the long hill from where all the steeples are visible. James finishes a book about Spain he had been working on for a few years, and the Spanish consulate in New York organizes a reception for him. We buy a car and drive around the countryside. We go to Middleton one weekend, and I show him the house with the apartment over the garage. We have dinner with Edith, who is retired and lives nearby on a farm. In Sheldon, James and Paco are more sociable than I am, and we have started to see more of a few people that I already knew and others I had liked from afar. We become a small family. Everything, including going to the supermarket in a car, becomes fun.

  Just as I start to worry that we are getting too comfortable in Sheldon and will never get back to Spain, James’s producer says that the money has comes through. The plan is to start shooting in B
arcelona a few months later. By now it is clear that we will not move there, but I manage to take a semester off to go with him. When the time comes, we fly to Madrid first, with poor little Paco in cargo, and visit my mother as we look online for short-term pet-friendly apartments in Barcelona.

  I start dreaming about a large apartment with high ceilings where all the porcelain will finally have a home—where it actually came from. I know this doesn’t make sense because it is temporary, but I can’t help dreaming about Barcelona. I go to the Catalán bookstore on the Calle Alcalá in Madrid and buy materials for a crash course in the language. I start to drive James crazy with the repetitive audio.

  “You know, you don’t have to learn Catalán, you’ll just pick it up,” he says. He just picked up Spanish, but I am different.

  “I’m sorry to be so uncool,” I reply, “but this is actually really fun, and when we’re there I’ll have entire conversations and you won’t be able to understand a word.”

  On one of our last days in Madrid I go to the Biblioteca Nacional to print out a couple of articles I need for my research. My old ID has expired, and I am dreading the complications of getting a new one. As I start to explain who I am and what I need to the guard at the front desk of this vast, majestic library, she gives me a sheet with descriptions of the different cards I can apply for. As I scan the paper, searching for the one with the least red tape, I see “Author.” I tell the guard, “I am an author.” She asks if my book will come up in the library holdings. I nod. She plugs in my name, sees my book, and I instantly get my fanciest card ever. The last time I used this library I had never published anything.

  I leave all my things in the required locker. The digital databases have been modernized since I last used them, and when I sit down at the computer in the beautiful reading room, I download the articles I need. Just before logging off, I type in my father’s name. I have done this before and am prepared to find nothing. However, the search pulls up something new: four studio photographs of my father, aged eighteen or nineteen. He looks so luminous, young, and handsome. The photos look like headshots of a 1930s screen idol. I click on the order box and request the highest quality reproductions. My father before the war, before his family was destroyed, long before meeting my mother, before America, before disappearing. I won’t frame the photos, but I keep them close to me.

  As I leave the marble halls and walk toward my locker to pick up my bag and coat, I see a newish plaque on the wall. It is quite large, and as the letters come into focus, I recognize a familiar name: “On the occasion of the exhibit ‘Library at War,’ the Biblioteca Nacional pays homage to its director during the years of 1936–1939, Don Tomás Navarro Tomás, and to all the librarians who, in such difficult circumstances, were able to preserve this legacy.”

  Before I go home to have dinner with James and my mother, I walk out of the library and head toward Cíbeles and onto the Gran Vía. The streets are crowded and thronged with tourists, people on e-scooters, and Madrileños going about their business. It is sunny and I can’t help smiling as I think that I have unexpectedly found new bits of my father, and that Tomás Navarro Tomás, who died in far-off New England, has finally been honored at his library. I call James and he asks how the biblioteca was. “Amazing,” I say. I realize I am walking by Chicote, the bar where Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Langston Hughes, and other foreign correspondents hung out during the Spanish Civil War.

  James sounds puzzled. “The library was amazing? Did you get what you needed?”

  “Yes, and so much more. I’ll tell you later. And no, I haven’t lost it. I think I’m done with my personal research for now. I’m just taking a walk on Gran Vía and I love it. In fact, do you want to meet me at Chicote.”

  “I’ll be there in ten minutes. Actually I have to pick something up nearby, so that’s perfect.”

  I know that I won’t be back to the archives again anytime soon, not to look up my own family, at least.

  The past that destroyed so many people will always overshadow my life. The 2020s or 2030s will never be free of the 1930s, or the 1960s. I know the china might break in shipping, that we may be lost in whatever history brings next, that someone will get my obituary wrong, or that I may never have one. I may never know where to be buried. Nobody might remember my mother or me, or my family’s complicated histories; our lives in two countries where we never knew what would come next, and nothing was ever as it was supposed to be.

  James arrives at Chicote and we kiss. We sit at a table and he goes to the bar to order martinis. I people watch through the window, and also look at him as he walks back toward me. The waiter brings the drinks. James says, “I know you prefer olives, but this one has a . . . twist.” I look down at my drink, see a glimmer, and fish out a ring, white gold with a crescent of diamonds. It looks like an antique design.

  He clears his throat. “It was my mother’s. And yes, I want to marry you. But you don’t have to answer now.”

  “What? Was that a statement or a question? Anyway, I don’t have to wait to answer. Yes!”

  I dry off the ring and put it on my finger. It has just been cleaned and polished at Grassy, the old jeweler right on the Gran Vía. He has picked it up on the way to the bar.

  James smiles. “We can do something very low-key.”

  I look alarmed. “Why?”

  “I just thought you might prefer that. Eloping or something. I’m happy either way.”

  I shake my head. “I might have preferred that in the past. No more subterfuge for me. I want a proper wedding. Don’t ask me what that means right now. It can be simple, but everyone who counts has to be there. And it has to be in Madrid… Or in Massachusetts. Or…” How could I ever choose?

  Barcelona, January, 2020