What did you come for?

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Madrid. Night.

Even on a steamy night in June, the old men sit below two mulberry trees engulfed in thick cigar smoke playing ajedrez while drinking glasses upon glasses of manzanilla.

Have something to report? Tell us in text, photos or videos.

They will become drunk as the night goes on, and they will not let me go until I become drunk with them. I do not even know them, I only met them now, but I have no choice but to give in into their intoxications, because that is what one does in Madrid, this most Spanish city in Spain, said Hemingway: the capital of the world.

As Madrid becomes night, it becomes loud with revelry, screams of ¡Ole Ole Ole!, fill the corners of its tight streets with upside down exclamation points. Young Castilians challenge the gypsies in the corner of the Gran Via in what appears to be a group courtship ritual lit by the headlights of the Fiats. I look behind my shoulder, and the purple-haired whore throws a rock that lands squarely on my feet. What does it mean for her to do this? Should I? Drink from her cup? She sits in the shadows red and blue.

In Madrid, the nights remain young for a loonnnnng time. Street corners host the young and old, the quick and slow, the drunk and his cousins. There are many guys named Paco in Madrid, and Paco 1 throws up on Paco 2 in the spot where the Gran Via meets the Plaza Mayor. The fake gypsy collects coins from the tourists as the gentleman with the accordion plays Cuban ballads.

Hola Penelope

I must get to the food.

The tapas call out my name. There is the morcillas, blood sausages that smell of rust and garlic. There is the gambas al ajillo, shrimps beheaded, drowned, and smashed in garlic oil. Paellas black with the ink of Mediterranean squid land on my table. I did not order this, I question, but the folks in the next table owned up to the gift: for our Filipino friends, to 400 years, to colonialism! The wines come next: the txakolin, poured three feet above the glass, is a cascade of the sweet life. The rioja whispers beautiful phrases down my throat: ¿si al mundo vino y no toma vino, a que vino? When in Madrid, it is not easy if you wish to be alone. Come to a bar, a restaurant table, and pretty soon the strangers are no longer passersby, they become for the duration of the evening, long lost friends.

My long lost friend Penelope Cruz sits across the bar eyeing me like a schoolteacher.

I want to meet her later during siesta, catch up, but she disappears before I could ask her. I wonder in Madrid, do all of them look like her? Where did they come from, these faces of the Madrileñas, not quite perfect, molded in a rush, fighting against beauty but losing every time, just like Pablo Picasso once did.

Oh sorry, where was I? I was supposed to write a travel article, to tell about the Prado Museum and Goya’s naked maja, the bullfights and the Iberian temperament, Sunday strolling in the retiro, report on where the tapa is good, and what color Almodovar’s hair is today; where to go and how to get there (take a flight to Madrid), but I won’t! For that, the Frommer’s guide online.Frankly, I want Madrid undiscoverable.

I don’t want to know what seductions it has done to me that I am so enamored by this city, its language, its music, its noise. I don’t want to know what these people are made of. Why so damn happy? Why so open? I want to live and sin and die here, as the Spanish phrase has it, lleno de ilusiones, full of illusions.

Seduce me

In Hemingway’s short story “The Capital of the World” set in Madrid, the protagonist Paco, seduced by this city and its many tricks, dies before becoming disillusioned by life.

“He had no idea how they really lived nor how they ended. He did not even realize they ended. He had not had time in his life to lose any of them, nor even, at the end, to complete an act of contrition.”

Hemingway might as well have written about me.

P.S. the Spanish phrase that ran down my throat meant: if to this world you come and you don’t drink wine, what did you come for?

*Dale Santos Jabagat belongs to a collective of Filipino photographers called The Every2nd Project www.every2nd.net. (Dale Santos Jabagat)