A Year in the World (3 page)

The wind howled down the ravine, the rain lashed our windows, the thunderclaps sounded through our thick walls and interjected a lugubrious note into the children’s laughter and games. The eagles and hawks, emboldened by the mist, came down and snatched away our poor sparrows from the pomegranate tree right in front of my very window. The stormy sea kept the boats in the harbor; we felt like prisoners, far away from all intelligent help and any kind of proper friendliness.

George Sand’s memoir of a horrid season spent with Frédéric Chopin in Majorca makes me long for California, where the hills are greening with the winter rains and already the daffodils are blowing their yellow trumpets in the new grass. Count this as an inauspicious arrival, Janus. In Scarlet’s immortal words, tomorrow is another day.

But as I turn off the light, I invite Madrid to come into my dreams.

Madrid
on a bracing January Thursday. Wind cleared the air. I’m out early, stopping for
churros
, those sweet fritters—a short rope of dough fastened into a circle—just made to dip into hot chocolate on a winter morning. Ed would love them if he weren’t in bed with his sinus tightening like a vise, his throat flaming. I circle the Neptune fountain, then head for the Plaza Mayor. A side street looks more intriguing than the big-city business street I’m on, so I turn and soon am rambling among small cafés, bodegas, and food shops. Seven degrees (42° Fahrenheit). The sky
looks
colder than it feels. Or maybe the neighborhood just seems warmer. In the window of the Santeria La Milagrosa I see a black magic altar, little bags of dust, snake skins, geodes, and belts. Wonderful! A ju-ju shop. I go in, breathing in strange aromas of wax, powders, roots. There are tarots, conch shells, coin conjures, little fetish dolls, and special pins for pricking them. I buy soaps that protect one against the evil eye and a wish-fulfillment candle to light for Ed to get well. One of the wish candles is a big pink penis, another a dollar sign. I find everything I need to attract what I want, repel what I don’t, cure what ails me, and destroy gossip, too.

I stop at a café on the splendid Plaza Mayor for a fried pastry, the famous
buñuelos de viento
, puffs of wind, and buy
El País
, a Madrid newspaper, an excellent prop for feeling like a native. With a long-ago summer of study in San Miguel de Allende coming to my aid, I make out that Camilo José Cela, eighty-five, died yesterday. Preparing for this trip I read
Journey to Alcarria
and years ago the novels
The Family of Pascual Duarte, The Hive
, and some stories. The paper lists poetry, drama, many other novels. He was a totally literary animal who dipped into every genre. A man of contradictions, he began as a young Franco soldier; later he became vehemently antifascist. Blunt, prolific, curious, a high-living bon vivant, he turned Spanish writing away from lyric roots toward a dark and brutal realism. His own life was tumultuous. He abandoned his wife of thirty years and took off with a young woman. He was alienated from his only son. Even as he died, he was involved in a lawsuit, the nature of which I can’t make out. Odd to think he was dying as we landed. His last words—what consciousness at the end—were to his wife of many years, “Marina, I love you.” And then, more astonishingly, he said, “
Viva
Iria Flavia,” which is the small town in Galicia where he was born, the town where an Englishman had arrived in 1880 to build a railroad and whose destiny was to become the grandfather of this writer, Don Camilo José Mañuel Juan Ramon Francisco de Jerónimo Cela-Trulock. How jarring, that last tacked-on Anglo-Saxon
Trulock
.

So his last thought turned back to the place of origin, the region where he was shaped. As one formed by black swamp water and red clay and baked in the Georgia sun, I too feel the metabolic correspondence with a taproot. I’ve never said his name aloud but do now.
Tha lah
, the Ce- undergoing an unlikely transformation.

Ed
is up when I return before lunch. He has lurched to the window and looks down at the street with longing. “The Prado,” he whispers. “We’re in Madrid. I want to go to the Prado.” Soon I hear the shower and the buzz of his electric razor. In the black suit that earned him passage
senza passaporta
, he emerges a new man. Downstairs under the stained-glass dome of the lobby, among the poshly dressed Madrilenians, we have a quick bite. The hard January light through the yellow glass softens and pours in like
vino blanco
, fluid and translucent. In the late morning sun, the wooden supports and buttresses behind the dome are visible through the panels, flowers, and leaves. I wish I hadn’t noticed because I’m distracted by the structure. Ed, instead, is staring at his
tortilla de verdura
with garlic sauce. He pushes it toward me, and because I have walked all morning and am starving, I eat his and mine while he sips tepid water.

“Are you sure you want to go out?”

“It’s just across the street. Let’s
vamos
.”

Poor
Velázquez. So many portraits of the royals. Those were some plug-ugly people. Wouldn’t Velázquez rather have painted crocuses instead of staring into rheumy Hapsburg eyes? Imagine him searching for a shade of puce to plump up lumpy Bourbon faces. I’m sure he did his best to flatter them. I think again of Camilo José Cela, dead yesterday. His serious realistic style was known as
tremendismo
, and in all the literary criticism I’ve read, his
tremendismo
is posited as a counter to Spanish lyricism. A friend in Cortona, when his son is just too much, says, “Andrea is
tremendo
.” Intense, persistent, overwrought, headstrong.

Cela’s
The Hive
indicts Franco’s fascist rule by depicting characters driven into poverty. Who has more zeal than the convert? Looking at these tortured painters, I think Cela must have taken his instructions from them, the exaggerated realism of El Greco, the dark lonely stares of the Goya portraits, all this black and gray paint. These are Cela characters, a few generations removed. His travel narrative,
Journey to Alcarria
, shows a different strain in his aesthetic. He moves closer to the Don Quixote tradition. His amiable wanderer through the countryside encounters others, picks up and leaves off, unhurriedly observing and moving on. This wanderer exhibits the spirit shown in the quote Cela said he wanted as his epitaph:
Here lies someone who tried to screw his fellow man as little as possible.
The abandoned wife might disagree.

The Prado has nearly nine thousand paintings, though they display only a fraction.
La Maja
of Goya, the reclining, languorous nude, looks so much like my college roommate that we buy a card to send to her. We find an Annunciation by our friend Fra Angelico, who lived in Cortona for thirteen years, amid a glorious cache of Italian works by Titian, Botticelli, Raphael, Messina, Mantegna. Then we come upon Hieronymus Bosch’s
The Garden of Earthly Delights
and so many other world treasures, long familiar but never seen. The Prado’s still lifes dazzle. I would like to touch the chocolate-brown background against which Zurbarán painted his four incandescent vessels in shades of ochre and gray. For years I had a poster hanging in my Palo Alto kitchen of his still life of citrus fruits, against the same rich brown, with the lemon trees outside my window echoing the light those fruits can gather into themselves.

Our
short time in Madrid passes quickly for me, agonizingly for Ed, who keeps struggling out until he feels weak and must return to bed. Like pilgrims, we go to the restaurant Botin, because it has served everyone under the sun since 1725, including Hemingway, who sat his characters Jake and Lady Brett Ashley there for martinis and solace. We try to imagine Papa digging into the
cochinillo
, the suckling pig, which I choose. Ed orders, then stares at partridge with fava beans, sips half of a glass of wine, and forgoes even a glance at the dessert menu. Later he dreams of crouching in a foxhole while bullets fly. Some page from
The Sun Also Rises
has floated into his sleep.

A visit to a capital city usually proves to be the best introduction to a country. During these first days I’m glad we get to see the Museo Arqueológico Nacional, treasure trove of the Spanish monarchs. As we walk through the Egyptian collection, Ed says, “There’s a sheer
quantity
of Egyptian objects in museums around the world. Seems like not a single scarab from that civilization was ever lost.”

This museum reminds me of Spain’s tentacles reaching out into the Mediterranean world and beyond, and also of Roman roots, the Visigoth era, then the seductive centuries of Arab-Moorish rule, which was firmly established by 756, and the later periods of the Bourbons and Hapsburgs. Layers and layers fuse, as we move from room to room, era to era.

One remnant of Magna Graecia (the South of Italy) is the fabulous statue of the second wife of Augustus, found in Paestum. She’s as majestic as the columns of the temples there. I wish I had a full picture of the astronomical, seasonal, and religious mosaic, a Roman survival, and of the Roman well with a relief of the birth of Athena. A stash of intricate, ancient gold jewelry; golden bowls of a Bronze Age solar cult; a small and richly decorated covered jar in
marfil
, ivory, from tenth-century Córdoba—all are exquisite. The Arabic ivory jar was a gift to a caliph’s (ruler’s) favorite, a woman named Subh, Dawn. Surely she was mightily loved. Cunning carved tiny deer, peacocks, and grapevines cover the surface. A group of eleven Visigoth artifacts surprise me most. I envisioned them as barbarian hordes sweeping down upon Italy, France, and Spain as the Roman Empire eroded. These delicate marvels, crowns and crosses of
oro y pedrería
, gold and semiprecious stone, prove these Germanic people to have been high-caliber artists.

Neolithic, Bronze, all the ages from prehistory onward show the strength of the artistic impulse in the making of knives, vases, gravestones—anything to do with living quotidian life. The impulse to create beauty where you draw water, where you stow your saffron, where you walk, that impulse is intrinsic to life, as it ever has been and will be, and from this place where such remains are gathered, we can only exit with a sense of renewal and joy.

The highlight of Madrid for both of us—easy choice—is our morning at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, one of the primo art experiences of my life, and more so for being unexpected. Three floors of meticulously curated, stupendous work housed in a
palacio
. “Who started this museum?” I ask the taxi driver who has picked us up.

“People with too much money,” he answers. But what a gift they gave! There’s Piero della Francesca, another local boy from our part of Italy, with a portrait in profile of a blond boy against a dark background. There’s Dürer’s sublime Adam and Eve, Cranach’s very Mediterranean conception of the Madonna, with a palm tree in the background, and her baby about to eat a grape from the bunch in her hand. Is this the only painting where baby Jesus eats solid food? I recall him holding oranges but never in the act of eating. And there’s Raphael’s stunner, the portrait of a young man who looks as if he might speak to you. Caravaggio, de Hooch, Carpaccio, Memling, Bellini, on and on. Easy to miss because of the small size is
The Virgin of the Dry Tree
by Petrus Christus, a fifteenth-century painter from Bruges. Mary wears blood-of-Jesus red and stands in a tree, completely encircled by bare branches that resemble a crown of thorns. The letter
a
dangles from fifteen branches. We stand before her trying to imagine the mind of the painter. The letters, we read in the museum guide, symbolize Ave Marias. Why fifteen? Why did Christus paint her in a tree, like a wild bird? Her eyes are moon-lidded, her baby is delicate, and she holds him tenderly, the thumb and forefinger of her left hand idly taking the measure of his foot. She poses a rich mystery.

We do not tire, do not flag. Each room shocks me with new energy. We circulate among the paintings as among friends at a party, while meeting strangers we immediately love. Pleased to meet you, Pierfrancesco di Giacomo Foschi, and
gracias
for the portrait of a Florentine lady of the sixteenth century. I like her distracted expression
(I have lost my true love in the bloody conflict
, or—
where did I leave my wretched house keys
?), the noble folds of her puffed salmon-pink sleeves, and her ringed index finger holding open her place in a small book. Also well met: Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, lucky to have absorbed well the lessons of his teacher, Leonardo da Vinci. His portrait of a lady represents Santa Lucia. So beguiling are her almond-eyed glance and peachy-cream skin that it takes a moment to notice the half-closed eye stuck on a pin, which she holds in the left-hand corner. This attribute reveals her to be Santa Lucia, whose portraits always have beautiful eyes, just to remind the viewer that she was blinded in her martyrdom.

I want to do a few dance steps when I come to Ghirlandaio’s
Portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni
—what a joy. The beauty of the young woman, seated against an unlit background, shines with such luminosity that her body looks lighted from within. She must have seemed so to Domenico Ghirlandaio because painted just behind her is an epigram from the Roman poet Martial that translates: “If you, oh Art, had been able to paint the character and virtue of the sitter, there would not be a more beautiful painting in the world.” Her squiggly curls and twisted chignon soften her incised profile, and the cloths of her dress must have been the most sumptuous the Renaissance had to offer. What pure pleasure for Ghirlandaio to have rendered those sheens and designs to glorify La Giovanna’s grace. I find equally as compelling Zurbarán’s full portrait of Santa Casilda, a dark Spanish beauty with her hair tied in a thin red ribbon. She’s resplendent in a jewel-bordered crimson dress, which she lifts in front of her in order to walk, giving the impression that she has paused and half-turned to look directly at someone who has spoken to her. I feel lucky to be that viewer, drawn close by her gaze. She, too, was martyred. When she was caught giving bread to Christians, the bread miraculously transformed into flowers. Was it okay to give flowers but not sustenance? I wonder if the stylized white flowers on her skirt symbolize her martyrdom. The portraits in this museum counter, quite wonderfully, all the Prado’s dour faces, their fleshy noses and gray skin.