Madrid by Bullet Train

Boarding the alta velocidad española (AVE) in Madrid.

Hazy recollections of my first visit in 1979 include drinking wine from a porron, a spouted glass vessel you extend in front of your open mouth, marveling at the giant canvasses in the Prado, and an excursion to the El Greco Museum in the hilly city of Toledo. In 2005 I came with a friend during the Christmas shopping season which was another unadulterated living hell and should have foreshadowed this recent visit, but then again there was a requisite Prado pilgrimage and an extremely moving flamenco show at a club called Casa Patas.

The same flight response that overwhelms me in big box stores plagues me in large urban crowds, even stadium sporting and musical events. I acknowledge, however, that Madrid has more than its fair share of stunning architecture, perhaps the finest we have seen in Europe, at least in the small orbit we explored for this short junket. In the downtown are grand buildings, many with sculpted bronzes of warriors astride winged horses, their spears sometimes pointing down at you. There are blocks and blocks of apartments with a regal yellow exterior stucco and masonry buildings with splendid brick patterns and residences with intricate façades and balcony ornamentation. The concentration of eating and drinking establishments boggles the mind.

Cafe art, Madrid.

We visited a highly touted tapas bar and restaurant called La Castilla. Our custom is to always arrive early, and we got there at 7:30 only to find that the doors didn’t open till 8. We looped around the neighborhood and returned by 8:05, lucky to secure a bit of standing room real estate against a marble counter wide enough for about two plates. I was in a cosmopolitan funk but La Castilla was clearly the spot to be. At one point Quince asked a group of ladies standing next to us to settle a discussion we were having about the Spanish word “caña” and the whole experience changed for the better.

A caña is a draft beer in a glass of a certain diminutive size, which is what Q was asserting, not merely a draft, which is what I thought. A caña is not to be confused with a doble which is twice its size and similar to a copa, usually reserved for wine, while a triple is more like a pint or una pinta not to be confused with the tubo, a slender 10 ounce glass of which it would take many to fill a pitcher, known as a jarra, the “j” sounded like an “h,” although jarra can also be used for a mug. I think I have this right.

The Madrileños seem to prefer Mahou beer on tap, which has a creamy head that is knifed off and retopped at least once before serving, although the ladies that we befriended each had personal favorites including Alhambra from the south. La Castilla has some delicious red and white wines and my favorite tapa was a plate of boquerillos, sardines perfectly batter fried and eaten head to tail that came free with a glass of temperanillo. Practicing Spanish with this group of friendly ladies helped to melt my initial icy reaction to Madrid.

For weeks I’d been on an unabashed Hemingway binge who claimed to have learned as much about writing from painters as from authors. So when I walked through the Prado for my third time in nearly 40 years I was trying to imagine what a writer gleans from a visual artist’s approach, all the while recalling the amazing paintings we’ve seen crisscrossing France and Spain. The Prado’s canvases are huge and the masterpieces are too many to count, but in reality, I could simply visit the Goyas and call it a very fine day. Between “The Third of May” firing squad scene and the two Majas, one clothed and the other a stunning reclining nude, along with the Black Period of exile and all of the portraits and stylistic variations in between, you are witnessing the crucible of human expression in a single visionary’s paintbrush.

It is impossible for me to visit museums like the Prado and not feel that I am witnessing a continuum, of giants standing on the shoulders of giants, an evolution that somehow seems so monumental and fluid and so vitally human. Dürrer’s “Adam and Eve,” El Greco’s “Nobleman with hand on his chest,” Goya’s “The Ember,” Velazquez’s “The Drunkards,” Gibbert’s “Execution at Malaga,” Carlos de Haes’ extraordinary “The Moncarbo Canal in The Picos de Europa,” which we immediately recognized because we hiked there, Sorolla’s amazingly modern “Chicos a la Playa,” and back to Goya’s Majas. Mastery on a grand scale and a ladder with no end that continues at the Reina Sofia museum’s phenomenal modern collection where “Guernica” is on display. The list of 20th century masters of Spanish speaking origin is lengthy and makes you wonder if there isn’t a direct correlation: Picasso and Miró and Gris and Juan Rivera and Dalí as well as the Mexican muralists Orozco and Diego Rivera and of course, Frida Khalo, and the Columbian, Fernando Botero. Within the treasure trove of Europe’s museums, so many accomplished artists I’d never heard of, driven to join this river of creation.

“The Moncarbo Canal in The Picos de Europa” by Carlos de Haes

On Sunday, January 21, an International Women’s March was organized in Madrid’s Plaza de Isabel II to commemorate last year’s global opposition to the inauguration of our pervert in chief. It was reassuring to see the square full of people and the many hysterically clever signs and the pussy hats and the international camaraderie. I pray for a course correction, as cold as an Antarctic gale that will put on ice all the hearts and souls and intellects of the white male and female voters who knowingly cast their ballots to put such an unqualified white supremacist misogynist in the free world’s highest office. May there be no mercy.