Note from Paul
Tuesday, April 16, 2002, 7:00 am (EST)
Location: Brooklyn, New York
This is a brief summary of the rest of my trip in Spain, from Kelly’s flight back to Toronto on Tuesday, April 9 until my departure on Sunday, April 14. (Kelly’s description of our trip to Santiago de Compostela, after the departure of Patrick and Tom, is posted below, dated April 8). Those interested exclusively in the Tom-centric main plot may skip this section.
Kelly and I arrived by night train at Chamartin station in Madrid early on Tuesday, April 9. We’d had the four-to-a-compartment couchettes, which were reasonably comfortable, but the train was full and overheated, so neither of us had slept well. Kelly’s flight was fairly early that morning, so we took a cab to the airport. (For the record, despite this, Madrid has hands-down the best public transit to a major airport I’ve ever seen – quick, clean, efficient and cheap subway access (50 Euro cents).)
After Kelly had booked in, I took the subway downtown and found a café near the hostel we’d stayed at before (I’d booked a room for that night before leaving). It was still too early to check in, so I picked a paper and settled in for breakfast.
For most of the trip, I tried to read a greater or lesser amount of the main paper (El Pais) each day, both for language practice and to get a sense of what was going on in the country (and the rest of the world). El Pais seems to occupy about the same space as Le Monde – centre leftish, with the largest circulation and general acknowledgement as the paper of record. (A selected translation is included as a supplement in the local Herald Tribune.) It proudly trumpets its founding date (1976 or thereabouts) on the front cover, and by implication its impeccable post-Franquist credentials.
Some of the major preoccupations in Spain in the time I was there, a couple of them particularly interesting to a Canadian observer:
– The death of the leading taurine journalist, Joaquin Vidal, a fixture on the scene for over twenty years. This caused a huge outpouring of grief and remembrance. The writer was admired even by non-aficionados, I gathered, in equal measure for his brilliant literary style and for his preoccupation with the decline of the spiritual purity of the traditional fiesta in the face of crass commercialism.
– The Middle East, particularly with Powell’s stop-over. As a generalization, not a whole lot of pro-Israel sentiment to be found.
– Separatism and terrorism. The government is trying to put through a bill (the “Law of Parties”) to ban what sounds like the political wing of the ETA (think Sinn Fein) amidst loud accusations of political oppression and of inadvertently helping the terrorist cause. On a more pacific note, I read a lot about Catalan separatism, including a stupefyingly tedious editorial by the head of the most separatist party, which could have been plagiarized from the Bloc Quebecois. Of course, the federalization of Europe makes the debate more nuanced than the Canadian equivalent, but it’s pretty serious, with plenty of language politics wrapped up in it.
– Entry into the G-8. Perhaps not more (or less) unreasonable than Canada’s presence, for a country with 39 million people and a growing economy.
Later in the morning, I went to check in at the hostel. Fortunately, I was able to extend my reservation until Saturday. Since my room was ready, I went in for a nap which lasted most of the afternoon. With the day mostly gone, I went for a long walk around the city in the evening, then to bed.
On Wednesday, my main plan was to see the Reina Sofia museum, the one major art gallery none of us had been to the week before. After a late start (I picked up a cold somewhere along the way, and hadn’t been sleeping well) I spent a couple of hours at a very pleasant café just off the Paseo del Prado. With more luck than skill I packed up and headed to the museum just as the sky clouded over and the daily rain began.
The museum is in a converted palace, reasonably well laid out, although not the masterpiece of the Thyssen-Bornemisza renovation. Nice views of the city from the external elevators. The museum was busy but not unpleasantly crowded. A disproportionate number of the visitors were French, away on Easter vacation. Mostly travelling en famille, though, rather than the more alarming rampaging hordes of French schoolchildren.
The ground floor exhibition was a special exhibition of collaborative works by Warhol, Basquiat and Clemente from New York in the early 80s. These were large canvases with silk-screened corporate logos and deliberately crude, childish painted shapes and figures. Despite the best efforts of the audio-guide, I couldn’t see much in most of them.
The permanent collection, on the other hand, is superb. The major part of the collection is Spanish modern work, with large collections of work by Miro, Dali and Picasso (including Guernica, of course, which is a painting for which scale really matters, and it’s far more impressive than in reproductions). There were also some very good works by Spanish artists I didn’t know, including Jose Gutierrez Solana and the sculptor Pablo Gargallo (he did the sculptures in the Palau de Musica in Barcelona). In front of the one Francis Bacon painting I chatted briefly with an elderly Irish tourist. She complained that although Bacon lived his last years in Madrid, he had bequeathed his studio to Ireland, to be kept intact, which had been quite a hassle to deal with. Apparently it can be visited in Dublin.
The next day, Thursday, I went down to Atocha train station, again not too early, to book a ticket for Toledo. Despite earlier thoughts, I’d decided to stick to Madrid and environs for the rest of the week. Andalucia will have to wait for another vacation.
The train to Toledo took just over an hour, passing through the suburbs and then across the dry plateau (maybe it only rains in the cities in Spain). The station at Toledo is in the river valley, with a steep walk up to the hill-top city located in a bend in the river. It’s an impressive location, and the way into the city passes by stretches of the old Moorish city wall.
At the top of the hill, dominating the skyline, is the Alcazar, the old city castle. It’s mostly a reconstruction, having been largely destroyed in the course of an extended siege and battle – circa 1936. Inscribed above the main entrance is the motto “Todo por la Patria”. Inside is a museum dedicated to the heroism of the – nationalist – defenders of the city and castle in that battle. Unfortunately, it’s only open in the morning, so I couldn’t go inside. I was later told that the museum includes one heavily shelled, ruined command room which has been left in that state.
Most of Toledo consists of twisty little medieval streets and old buildings. There’s scaffolding and construction everywhere. Everyone in the city who isn’t selling things to the many tourists seems to be involved in construction/renovation work. Lots of Japanese tour groups here, the first I’d run across.
Other than wandering the streets, I spent most of the rest of the day in the cathedral. It’s a very large, airy gothic building with a wide nave and aisles. Although they don’t charge for admittance to the church per se, given that it’s a working church, there is a fee during the afternoon to visit the museums contained in the old chapterhouse and other side rooms. And you can only get into the church if you have a ticket to the museums. A somewhat subtle distinction perhaps.
The most notable thing in the cathedral itself is the highly decorated, mostly late gothic choir. The choir is very large, and only accessible from the East, with seats around the other three sides. Behind each of the seats is a high-relief wood carving of scenes from the reconquest. These are carved in extraordinary militaristic detail, with little wooden Spaniards storming battlements with ladders, cannon, crossbows and muskets, while little wooden turbaned Moors drop rocks on their heads. Queen Isabel appears in most of the scenes, looking regal on horseback, and watching the proceedings or graciously accepting the keys to the city from Boabdil & Co.
Next to the chapel of the Sacred Heart is a memorial erected to celebrate the spirit of 1968, as experienced in Spain:
D.O.M.
IN PERENNEM MEMORIAM CVNCTORVM SACERDOTVM ISTIVS DIOECESEOS QVI AB ANNO MCMXXXVI SAEVIENTE PERSECVTIONE MARTYRIVM SVBIERE SANCTA TOLETANA ECCLESIA HOC PIVM MNEMOSION A. MCMLXVIII
D.O.C.
The “museum” collections in the cathedral are also quite extraordinary. One room, a separate chapel no longer in use, has a number of El Greco pictures of evangelists and apostles, as well as a great Caravaggio of a young St. John the Baptist, and works by Rafael, Zurbaran and others. An adjoining room has a large collection of tapestries and vestments, including an Arab tapestry allegedly captured in battle in 1340.
On the train back into the city I met a French woman, Frederique, who was staying with her sister in Madrid but largely travelling on her own, and we made plans to meet for lunch the next day.
Back in Madrid I went out for supper to a Galician restaurant next to the Los Gabrieles tavern that Kelly and I had been to earlier. Desperate for vegetables, I ordered a salad from the disdainful waiter (I’m no vegetarian, but the Spanish diet really is a bit dogmatically carnivorous.) Iceberg lettuce and tasteless tomatoes, predictably. I chatted with the middle-aged Australian couple sitting at the next table with their son. They were running errands, having dropped off their daughter for a semester at Trinity School, Port Hope (yes, the one outside Toronto), stopped by to see friends in Chicago and museums in New York, and were more or less on their way home, no doubt remembering to pick up the milk and a loaf of bread on the way. Those crazy Australians.
Friday was another slow start followed by a long breakfast. I met Frederique for lunch at 2:00 outside the giant FNAC bookstore near Puerta del Sol. She speaks very good English, having done part of high school in Rochester and an MBA in Texas (but anti-American, of course, for all of that) and works in the risk management department for a small French bank. Thanks to a combination of the French 35 hour week and flex-time, she had some improbably vast amount of vacation time she was being forced to use up. We had a long lunch and made tentative plans to meet the next day at the archeological museum, which she was going to anyhow and I said I would go to unless I made other plans to head out of town.
Saturday I slept in again (the cold still), so didn’t make it out of town. Went to the archeological museum for 2:00 and met Frederique. We did a quick tour through the Roman engineering exhibit, then down to the permanent exhibition on the lower floors. That was where things got weird. She was feeling unwell and sat down to rest, then quite suddenly started to throw up and at the same time passed out and fell over sideways unnaturally on the bench – I was standing not far away and saw this happen. Very alarming indeed for a few seconds as I rushed over, until she (quickly) regained consciousness and I confirmed she was breathing.
The museum staff were very helpful in getting water and so forth and helping getting her cleaned up. She said it wasn’t something that had happened before, and thought it might have been food poisoning, maybe combined with fatigue from travelling. Who knows.
When she was feeling a little stronger, I got a cab to take us to her sister’s place; her sister was supposed to be out for the afternoon. As it turned out, the sister was there, along with her Spanish roommate and the roommate’s boyfriend. After a shower, Frederique was feeling much better. I certainly hope it doesn’t turn out to have been anything more serious. I stayed for a coffee and to talk for a while; her (much younger) sister was doing graduate work in archeology, coincidentally, with a focus on Peru.
So I didn’t get to see the rest of the museum, but I did get to do a good deed, and also to see how real Madrilenos live, in a high-rise apartment in an anonymous section of the city. Not that it was as dreary as that sounds – kind of a fun, studentish sort of apartment, full of clutter and objects and a large collection of the boyfriend’s world music. The most remarkable thing in it perhaps was the world’s largest house plant, a monster with tentacles running all along the ceiling and down several walls of the living room. They called it the “extra roommate”.
That evening I went for a final walk around the city and then to a late showing of the latest Almodovar film, Hable con Ella, which had just had a great success in the Paris film festival. It’s a beautiful movie and a lot funnier than it ought to be, given the subject matter. I’ll have to see it again with subtitles, as my Spanish isn’t nearly good enough to pick up all the dialogue, though I could follow the plot without trouble.
Thanks, Tom – all the best for the rest of the trip.
