I flew to Spain. Not because I had any grand desire. I had a week to kill and there was a cheap flight in, a cheap flight out. I knew I liked Spanish things – El Greco and Velazquez, Bunuel and Almodovar. I was in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I was surrounded by Satmar Jewish women in identical sheitel wigs with babies, by goyische women in identical Patagonia fleeces with corgis and miniature poodles. I saw Woody Allen and Sun-Yi Previn looking more miserable than I, hailing a taxi outside the Kurlansky Gallery in Chelsea, and they had a miniature poodle too. And then I flew to Spain.
The outer suburbs of the
city by the sea are filled with sad-eyed heroines I know from Todo Sobre Mi
Madre and Hable con Ella, the prostitute dancing on the mattress and
drinking cheap tinto in Biutiful, the immigrant children poking
their heads out from screenless open windows above.
Of course, it shouldn’t have surprised me that I hated Barcelona at first sight. I had the misfortune to have booked a room near La Rambla, a place which, like the Old Town of Prague or the inner canals of Amsterdam, was clearly once gorgeous and now caters to the shittiest and lairiest of tourists from Great Brexit, made all the worse by it being a Barca/Real game day. Overpriced reheated tapas and streetside bars offering the ubiquitous pornstar martini (a drink that I can only imagine tasting good after the second line of molly), bachelor parties with the whole gang of lads wearing t-shirts with graphics of stick figures of brides and grooms and the phrase UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT underneath, drink specials in David Guetta-blasting nightclubs and weed vapes and sex museums, a supposed Southern naughtiness to counteract a supposed Northern primness, revealing the actual Southern desire to milk the tourist dollar and the actual Northern desire to self-obliterate. The Southerners succeed in this respect, they leave with a tidy stack. The Northerners wake up with splitting hangovers, hacking coughs, hotel rooms spread with latex and handcuffs, and just as much misery.
It is gorgeous. Which in
the age of Instagram is a curse, and Barcelona’s own Antonio Gaudi has the misfortune
to be the most Instagrammable architect. In much the same way that increasing
access to information leads to greater stratification in terms of consumer
goods – demand shoots up for every quality piece of cookware, for instance, promoted
by culinary influencers – social media has created a stratification of
locations, with the Barcelonas and Lisbons and Tbilisis of the world playing host
to rapacious Airbnb owners and braying digital nomads. To visit Sagrada Familia
you need to buy tickets a week in advance. And download the fucking app.
But as I move further away from La Rambla and the more conspicuous Gaudi buildings, my heart grows with each glass of Monastrell and Penedes, every Miro painting, every braised pig’s trotter and screamingly fresh razor clam. And when I reach the Parc de la Ciutadella, my heart absolutely sings, elderly couples, families with kids, groups of Goth teens smoking weed, African migrants, solo readers, people engaging in more or less every musical and athletic pursuit imaginable, all united in their desire to enjoy a perfect sunny afternoon surrounded by cypresses and Canarian palms and bitter-orange trees and Catalan tilework, without being charged for the right to do so – something akin to what I imagine my ideal society to look like. The sort of thing Orwell might have written an homage to.
Yet this the landscape of
the charming Mediterranean fringe. The innermost country is an arid, sandstone
land punctuated with olives and grapevines, distant views to the snow-capped
Pyrenees over the barren, chalky soil, a landscape closer to the harsh
scrublands of, say, Eastern New Mexico than lush, decadent Mediterranean
fantasy, cruel and wind-whipped, the sort of place where windmills could
readily turn into enemies, where Torquemada’s ghost is not far behind, leaving
a whiff of burned flesh in his wake.
And at its heart is a city few people could say much about. Because what do you actually know about Madrid as a place? Its sights, its architecture, its local culture, its music scene, its gastronomy? Probably not much at all. I know I didn’t.
After breezy, Mediterranean
Barcelona, Madrid was freezing cold and consistently raining – a rarity for
this semi-desert city. The mist gathered in the Gran Via and the Plaza del Sol,
Madrilenas shivering in their skimpy tulle-and-lace Halloween costumes,
the lights of taxis flashing in the drizzle, with neon advertisements on
glorious art-deco skyscrapers, posters for Spanish-language stage interpretations
of Hollywood cinema (Legally Blonde becomes Rubia Legal), and one could
be forgiven for thinking not that they are in Castile but Times Square.
I was there with a primary purpose, to see the wonders of the Prado. To see the greatest manifestation of that semi-arid land, the haunted and contorted saints painted most famously by El Greco, less famously by Jusepe de Ribera, deathly pale bodies in the darkness of Spain during its ostensible Golden Age, failing to rise to the light of heaven.
And when I saw the singular, dark room, the dead-end gallery of Goya’s Pinturas Negras, how could I do anything but scream? Sure, we all know about Saturn eating his children – but that is perhaps the least horrifying… this is Goya’s index of every senseless stupidity, cruelty, and violence inflicted upon the world, every gathered mob, every sickly midnight cackle. And at the end of the room, there is a painting of a single dog, barely peeking through the distorted charcoal gray and burnished gold background, eyes straining to find some kind of hope in the sheer misery. And devoid of any context, it breaks your fucking heart.
And then to step out into the streets, to the palaces and cathedrals built from the corpses of the massacred natives of Mexico and Mindanao.
The so-called leyenda negra,
the myth of Spain’s uniquely rapacious and perverse colonial history, is often
dismissed nowadays by modern historians as a product of the quivering and prim
Protestant imagination, an attempt to rationalize the colonial projects of more
northerly countries as civilizing missions, while condemning the Spanish Empire
as a den of iniquity. But that is to ignore the fact that during its largely
hegemonic period, the conquests and tortures carried on, and woe to any Navajo
or Mapuche who stood in their way.
And it’s hard not to see that legacy percolate down through every Opus Dei self-mortification and Francoist lockstep that was to follow.
But the thing about
darkness is that it has a way of preserving things forgotten, and it even
allows a few flowers to bloom.
The rain fell heavy as I made my way through darkened streets, to the old sherry bar where the Amontillado and Palo Cortado were poured from heavy oak barrels, faded posters of the World Sherry Festival 1977 or whatever, cheeses and sausages dangling from the wall to be sliced into hearty drinking snacks by the aging punk bartenders, my bill written in chalk on the marred wooden counter. And I felt for an hour or so, like I was in the last real place on earth.
I flew in from New York,
where I encountered the horror and ugliness of contemporary power in every repulsive
luxury design condo, every Succession extra jogging along the High Line, every once-proud
warehouse turned into co-working space for those who would better serve the
world as nourishing cadavers, agents of the powers that be.
I flew out from Madrid, where I saw the million flowers that grow from the ashes of the old powers that were.
