Madrid Again

by Soledad Maura

  As my mother waited, she gestured toward the tall narrow closet and asked the nurse to bring her the small, cream-colored suitcase she had brought. It was a sturdy Samsonite and had been an early gift from my father. He bought it at Loewe in Madrid and the matching cream leather key fob had the store’s name written in gold script. It was the perfect suitcase for romantic getaways, discreet and chic. It had reminded my mother of the overnight bag Grace Kelly took to Jimmy Stewart’s in Rear Window, a movie she had seen with her sister at the Roxy A cinema in Madrid. She had developed such a teenage crush on Jimmy Stewart that she had written him a fan letter, all the way from Spain, and he had responded, sending her an autographed photograph of him and his smiling wife sitting at a table at home drinking coffee. A family man. He had written “For Odilia,” and she saved it hidden away in her closet, in a striped hatbox where she stashed her special things. It was still there, in her room in Madrid, with all her clothes, the jewels she had inherited from her long-lost mother, and the life she might not see again.

  When Nurse Donohue opened the narrow hospital closet, my mother caught sight of her heavy, ugly rubber snow boots, her dress, her coat, and the silk scarf she had persisted in wearing around her head, although she noticed the American women wore woolen knit hats instead. She had put all her things away carefully before my arrival, and there they still were, immune to everything. She would have to put on those old things again, leave the way she arrived, as if nothing had really happened. Her old Polish American landlord had driven her to the maternity ward in his rusty Buick, chain-smoking during the long, slippery drive. She hoped Edith would get there soon.

  The nurse brought her the case, but my mother didn’t want to let go of me and asked her to open it. The case popped open, revealing a delicate, soft, white blanket trimmed with pink ribbon woven into the border. My mother reached for the blanket, and the nurse looked puzzled, as underneath there was a second blanket with a blue ribbon, as exquisitely made as the first. My mother spoke slowly in her clearest, firmest English. “Please put the other blanket back in the closet.” She fumbled for the right words. “There was a mistake. I thought it would be a boy. Then Dr. Kaufman told me I was having twins. He felt two heads. The other head was a tumor. He removed it. It’s been a long night.” Nurse Donohue looked concerned as she said, “Imagine that” and put the blanket and suitcase back in the closet, exclaiming cheerfully, “Well, Mary, you can save it for when the next one comes along.” She left the room. The snow continued to fall outside, and we were alone. I was wrapped tightly in the blanket she had spent so many hours making.

  After what seemed like ages, there was a knock and a “yoohoo” at the door. It was Edith in a plastic rain hat and a heavy coat, carrying a cocktail shaker plus two martini glasses. My mother started to cry when she saw her, then rallied and asked if her hairdo had survived the storm.

  The next day, we moved into an attic room at Edith’s mother’s farmhouse, and madre e hija lived discreetly. During that first year of my life, when Professor Zimmerman came to visit those few times, he always brought expensive gifts from Europe: Aquavit, silk scarves, art books, and records—all objects that were incongruous in that Vermont farmhouse. After the visits ended, he would call from far away, and send letters written on hotel stationery. The Algonquin or the Pierre in New York. The Parador de Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Then eventually he disappeared, forever.

  5

  ON THE DAY I TURNED one, we boarded a plane in New York bound for Madrid. Edith had driven us from Vermont. We had one-way tickets. My mother had packed our few belongings in two suitcases. She was going home and taking me with her. Enough was enough. She needed to build a life and could no longer fathom living at the home of her friend’s mother. Edith’s mother had taken us in generously and never asked my mother any questions. They had become like family, but we couldn’t stay there forever.

  Odilia found her home in Madrid unchanged, though Inés had naturally helped herself to her clothes. Neither her father nor Inés asked about my father. Sometimes being from a family that never talked about anything uncomfortable was a blessing. The “American” baby, with her big blue eyes and rosy cheeks, distracted everyone. She may as well have been flown in from Paris by a stork.

  But my mother’s return was spoiled because she was in pain and losing blood. We had been in Madrid for just a few weeks when she finally made an appointment to see a prestigious doctor, just a few blocks away. She had thought about seeing a doctor in America and had barely been able to afford the airfare to Spain, but now she was glad to be home, where there were people who could look after me in case she needed an operation.

  She was dismayed to see that the gynecologist was old, his thinning hair slicked back with brilliantine. He had a dark little moustache and gold-rimmed glasses. There were two pens in the breast pocket of his stiff white lab coat, where his name was embroidered in cursive blue thread.

  After examining her and asking a few embarrassing questions about her personal situation, the doctor told her to get dressed and meet him back in his study. Odilia was uncomfortable, but she arranged herself as best as she could before sitting across from the doctor to await his verdict. He asked about her husband, and she hesitated before saying that she was separated, separada. This was the most discreet term she could come up with. Divorce was not only a sacrilege, it was illegal in Spain. The doctor looked at her with disapproval. Did he think being separated was also a crime, or did he sense that she was not telling him something worse? She added, as if to explain, that the man in question was American. This did not help. The doctor frowned and raised his hands as if to say, that’s what you get for marrying a foreigner. In any case, she had been demoted. He was no longer giving her the obsequious treatment he had offered when she arrived, when he thought she was a young society wife from a patrician family.

  “I won’t have the X-rays for a few days, but I suspect you have several tumors, and I will definitely have to operate. I imagine they are benign, and you are in no danger. In fact, the operation will improve your quality of life dramatically, in every sense. I can schedule you for next week.”

  Odilia nodded. She asked “Will the surgery affect me in other ways? I only have one child. I just turned thirty-one. Is that it for me?”

  The doctor rubbed his hands together and smiled faintly. “Not necessarily. But again, I have to wait to see the X-rays, and then I’ll see what’s best.”

  The results came in sooner than anticipated, and three days later she was in the operating room. When she woke from the surgery she was in a dopey, euphoric state from the anesthesia. Inés was sitting next to her wearing a smart houndstooth suit and clutching her purse. The nurse went to fetch the doctor, who strolled in smiling, his hands clutched behind his back in a pseudo casual pose. As he spoke, he rocked slightly back and forth. “So, I am happy to say that you will no longer have any bleeding or pain. The operation was more successful than I had hoped, and I decided to just take everything out to make your life easier. I wasn’t sure about the hysterectomy, but for you it was the right choice. It simplifies everything, especially since you’ve terminated your conjugal life. You’ll be on your feet in a week or so, and then you can resume your normal activities. I’m sure you will enjoy having the free time that having only one child allows. You can live your life now. Go to the movies, the hairdresser, go shopping. Plenty of things to keep you busy. You shouldn’t have any pains, but I’ll expect you to come back for a follow-up visit in a couple of weeks.” He smiled, gave a slight bow, and seemed to click his heels together slightly as he turned and left the room. She could hear the soles of his shoes click against the polished, bleached tiles of the hospital corridor.

  His words, and the unfathomable news about what he had just done to her body, were unctuously enigmatic, yet everything made perfect sense. Though she had never heard the term hysterectomy, she now thought she should have known all along that this was what he would do. Inés, who at twenty-eight h
ad never had a boyfriend, nor been to a gynecologist, understood nothing. She clutched her older sister’s hand and smiled widely, her shiny bobbed hair, teased up at the crown, bouncing slightly as she nodded affirmatively. “Well, that’s good news! We’ll have lots of fun, you’ll see. You can just stay at home with little Dolores and live with us. It will be like the old days. I’ll come back with you to see the doctor in two weeks.”

  Odilia, buoyed only by the effects of the drugs in her system, and by the relief that the doctor’s face was no longer looming over her, pushed her sister’s hand away and clutched the edge of the sheet that covered her distended middle like a tent. “You don’t understand anything, Inés. I must return to America, and I am never going to see that doctor again. Please ask the nurse when I can leave.”

  Inés looked like she was about to burst into tears, and Odilia took her younger sister’s hand, “Don’t worry,” she said, lying, “It’s just that I have my teaching job there, and I’m used to my independence now. But we’ll stay for a few more weeks, and then one day you can come and visit us in America. You’ll like it there. You can wander into all the stores and spend hours looking around and nobody presses you to buy anything. It’s like window shopping indoors.”

  6

  MY AUNT INÉS DID VISIT us once or twice in America. I remember being very excited—somebody from Spain coming to see us, trying to connect our disparate worlds. But her trips were short, though I delighted in showing her our local treasures. Maple sugar candy. Covered bridges. It was fun but she didn’t seem to want to stay, and I think I wished we could have gone back to Madrid with her.

  My mother never learned to drive, which meant we never had a car, and that limited our experiences. Americans don’t offer many rides to people, especially to foreigners, so we walked a lot, took a lot of buses and trolleys, and rode subways where they were available. In the Vermont college town of my first years, Middleton, this didn’t really matter. We lived close to everything and my mother walked to campus. The one local taxicab drove me to public school every morning. He was an older man, and I thought it perfectly normal to hop into my taxi to go to school, with my little Snoopy lunchbox packed with a thermos of hot chocolate and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. We went to mass. The church was within walking distance. I walked to Sunday school on my own. I don’t remember much about what we discussed or read in those meetings, or how long I attended. I must have been around five years old. There weren’t many children in the group. Catholics were a minority in the area. The school was run by a priest, and he made me terrified of Hell. For a couple of years I would ask every grown-up I met if it was all true about Hell, and if we could really burn there. I never once got an answer that put my mind at ease. I insisted on having a first communion in Spain, and my aunt Inés organized one during our next trip to Madrid. I was earnest in my preparations. My cousins came and I had a glimmer of hope that I was en route to becoming a true Spaniard.

  Before we really settled in the States, we hovered, and my mother and I spent a few long periods in Spain. I now realize she was trying to figure out just where we could possibly fit in without suffering too much. The truth was, nowhere.

  I loved my grandfather’s house, where Inés, who never married, lived until she died. My grandfather’s chauffeur came to pick us up at Barajas airport, and his two nice sisters—the others were stern and haughty—enjoyed having una americanita as a grandniece and bought me beautiful clothes. As soon as I was old enough to wander through the house on my own, I discovered that the kitchen was my favorite part, full of life and the makings of tasty breakfasts—delivered to everyone in bed—and delicious three-course meals. The kitchen was also full of energy, movement, and laughter. It lacked the tension that infused other rooms in the house, though no space was completely free from the ominous threat of my grandfather’s moods and impatience. As a toddler, I had loved to crawl down the long wooden hallways, and if I was lucky I would get a splinter. They barely hurt, and led to exciting needles being flamed, and every female in the house paying careful attention to me while Feli, the cook, expertly extracted the tiny wooden shard.

  I often went to the market with Feli. Unlike the long New England walks to the fluorescent-lit anonymous supermarket full of iceberg lettuce and ground round, the market in Madrid was just a few sunny blocks away, and it brimmed with competing stalls of meat, fish, vegetables, fruit, olives, and cheeses. Feli confronted the vendors clutching her fat black leather change purse, wearing her black wool coat over a black dress and her black leather soft-soled shoes, which were exactly like the black felt slippers she wore in the kitchen. Her parents had died, and then her husband, and like many Spanish women, she had just found it simpler to stay in mourning clothes all her life. She would argue over every cut of meat and fish, the price and portions on the scale, until everything was exactly right.

  Feli wore a copper bracelet that was supposed to fight arthritis that left a green ring around her thick wrist. Her eyes were small, round, deep black, and sparkly. She fascinated me. She had a quick wit and a sharp tongue. She always had the last word, even with my grandfather, who nobody else stood up to. I had no idea that she didn’t know how to read, and that she had never been to the beach because she thought swimming in the sea was deadly. We went to the market every weekday, and then I stayed by her side watching the raw materials become the main midday meal. Beef or veal cutlets had to pass through the menacing blows of her large gray stone, shaped like a rather flat Idaho potato. Feli had brought the stone with her, decades before, when my mother was a child, and we only threw it away a few years ago during a once-in-a-lifetime kitchen renovation. Lunch was served in the most beautiful space in the house: a great corner dining room with three balconies. Linen table-cloths were smoothed over el muletón, a round piece of white felt that protected the table from scratches or spills. A huge chandelier hung over it.

  I was the only child in this household, and I wasn’t allowed to go out and play on my own, but with three family members and Feli I was entertained, except for the interminable periods between lunch and cocktail hour, from four to eight in the evening, when the adults all withdrew to their own spaces and the kitchen had been mopped and closed for business until evening. In any case, this life seemed fine to me. I felt at home. My mother only spoke to me in Spanish, so it was my native language. I never understood why we had to leave Spain, as we always did in the end, and go back to America, where we had no family at all, no loving Feli, no playful Aunt Inés, and no spacious home.

  We started over in the United States a few times. After we lived with Edith’s mother in Manchester, Vermont, my mother and Edith both got teaching jobs at Middleton College, and we moved there and shared a small rental with Edith. Then we rented our own apartment over a garage on a dead-end street. The only positive comparison to this last place was that in the movie Sabrina, Audrey Hepburn lived over a garage, but that made sense because her father was a chauffeur. Living over a garage and not having a car was not so charming.

  My mother taught novels and poetry, art history, and the Spanish Civil War. I knew that Picasso’s Guernica had something to do with it, and that an American named Hemingway had been in Spain. She also had LPs of the songs of the International Brigades. I remember the longing, cowboyish sound of one particular song that started “There’s a valley in Spain called Jarama . . .” and the flamenco beat of “¡Ay, Carmela!” But I knew nothing about the war, and certainly never thought my family had been affected by it. It was prehistoric for all I knew.

  At some point, a medieval history professor went on sabbatical and we moved into his house. Things were looking up. It had two stories, and was full of objects of great interest to me. There was a grand piano, and lots of books about Transylvania and Dracula. I had thought Dracula was just a Halloween costume, but from what I could make out from these books, he was a real person with a history. It was in this house that I watched the Sound of Music on a little black-and-white television, and
was told the strangest thing: the real Von Trapp family lived in a town in Vermont not far from us, and the two dark wooden chairs with lion paw legs and red velvet cushions on either side of the historian’s fireplace had been gifts, many years ago, from the Von Trapps. The chairs had come all the way from Austria.

  My mother put a little record player in my room, and I spent hours listening to every word and sound of two records that one of my mother’s students had given me: My Fair Lady and West Side Story. I had also seen the movies on television, and even as a small child I related completely to both stories. I hoped the Waspy medieval history professor would return and rescue my mother, like Professor Higgins did for Eliza Doolittle. West Side Story was about Puerto Rican immigrants in New York and the clashes between them and the local Anglos. The female lead looked quite like my mother and was named Maria—as was the star of the Sound of Music, come to think of it—and Puerto Rico was like Spain. New York was Vermont. My mother was Natalie Wood.

  My story, as far as I could tell, was recast everywhere. I cherished every lyric of my favorite songs, and never tired of them. My mother also loved music, and we each had our own record players and our own tastes. Records were the beginning of some kind of pre-adult identity that filled me with dreams. Edith, who was slightly younger than my mother, gave me some Beatles albums, and from there I eventually moved on to Patti Smith and Blondie, both of whom seemed, each in her own way, to be brave, free, and urban. I knew just through listening that one day I wanted to live in New York and Paris, wear black eyeliner and men’s white shirts, and have messy hair.