My mother’s family had always come closest to representing permanence to me, even though I thought my mother and I had been largely deprived of it. But the more I learned about the specific circumstances of my parents’ respective families during the war, the more I realized that by comparison, my own dislocated life had been a model of peace and security. There had been no soldiers, no Nazis.
And yet I also sensed I had inherited some kind of perpetuation of the Spanish Civil War and of the values imposed by Franco, especially those that had constrained my mother. She left Spain in 1968, like Enrique Otte had left in the 1930s and 1940s, like Juan de Escobar had left in the sixteenth century. Like them, she left to seek a better life. I was to learn that my father left Madrid in the 1950s, and also would have liked to return to Spain to die, like Juan de Escobar. Different times, different motives, but the forces—of poverty in the case of Escobar, and social repression in the cases of my mother, father, and Enrique Otte—had been strong enough for them to abandon their homes and families.
12
BEFORE COMING TO SPAIN, before my sabbatical, I started therapy. I had first gone in the late summer after I moved from New York to Sheldon. In July, just before, I had been in Madrid, and learned that my aunt Inés had lung cancer that had metastasized everywhere. I did not know how to tell my mother, who had also been seeing doctors but was still teaching in America. For close to two years, she had difficulty going up stairs and had started falling unexpectedly. Just as Inés’s diagnosis was confirmed, my mother had a muscle biopsy and was told she had an untreatable degenerative neuromuscular disease. Finally, she knew why everything had become so difficult. Every muscle in her arms, legs, and throat was in the process of atrophying.
Despite her own intensifying weakness, my mother took a leave from her teaching to go to Spain and look after her sister. Because Inés had never married, she had taken care of my grandfather when his health seriously deteriorated. He lived to be eighty-six. Now she, just shy of sixty, was dying. She was in great pain, and they operated on her back when they shouldn’t have because the cancer was everywhere, and it only made her last few months an inferno. I couldn’t take time off because my job was new. The last time I spoke to tía Inés was by phone. Like everyone in the world she had just seen—from her hospital bed—the images of the September 11 attacks in New York, where she had come to visit me while I was a graduate student. We hadn’t told her just how bad her situation was. By phone from Sheldon, I tried to sound upbeat and said I would see her at Christmas. But she knew I was lying. “Nena,” she said, using her nickname for me, “I won’t make it that long. What I have is like las torres gemelas (the Twin Towers).” I knew exactly what she meant. When we saw one plane fly into the Twin Towers, we wondered and worried. When we saw the second plane, and the buildings collapsed, that was it. And it all happened so fast. Now she herself was disintegrating, and there was no way to stop or hide it. She also said she didn’t want me to see her “like that.” I didn’t yet know what she meant.
The doctor gave Inés six months, and so it was, to the day. On December 24, I was on a plane to Madrid. The city was rainy and cold when I arrived the next morning, and the hospital smelled of disinfectant.
I rushed to the room number I had been given. My mother was sitting on a pleather armchair where she had been sleeping for over three weeks, inseparable from the once baby sister whom she would have to bury. In the time it had taken me to go through customs and find a taxi to the hospital, my aunt had died, minutes before I arrived. The body I saw in the hospital bed was not Inés. There was nothing about this figure that I could recognize as my aunt, my “auntie,” as she signed all her letters to me, acknowledging my American side. My mother said, “Hold her hand.”
Feli the cook, family, and friends came to the wake and the burial. It rained continuously. Inés was buried in the family grave with her grandparents and my grandfather and his siblings. There was nowhere to engrave her name on the front of the tombstone, so it had to be squashed onto the side. Feli grabbed a handful of damp earth and tossed it into the grave. I wanted to do the same, but I didn’t dare. Nobody had told me about this, and I didn’t have her confidence, her connection to the earth or to death. She had been like a surrogate mother to my aunt.
Amid the heartache and gloom, I had been somehow heartened to learn that we had a family tomb. Not quite a mausoleum, but a collective spot. I mentioned to my mother that at least we could all be buried together. My mother said, “Well, we’ve actually just been informed of something: there is only room for one more.” Part of me started to wonder, where was I going to be buried? When I mentioned this to my therapist, he said, “Why don’t you cross that bridge when you come to it?” Of course, that made sense. And yet.
Inés’s funeral mass was held at the Convent of Las Descalzas, originally built in 1559 as a palace for Emperor Charles V. I was transfixed by the exquisite singing of the cloistered nuns hidden behind intricate wooden screens. It was fascinating to me that these nuns should still exist, and that only a very few people were allowed to see them. After many years at the Royal Palace, Inés had been transferred—at her request—to work at this convent, which also belonged to Spain’s Patrimonio Nacional, the organization that protects places of unique cultural value. Inés had grown close to the nuns, who often gave her lemons and other treats from their gardens. They had insisted on singing and organizing her farewell with my mother, as if Inés were a sister they were also losing. Inés had called the sisters “mis monjitas,” and they filled the church with flowers and special relics, highly polished pieces of silver and other treasures they had. Along with our family and friends, dozens of Inés’s colleagues from the Patrimonio Nacional were present, including higher-ups, electricians, and plumbers.
After Inés’s death my mother stayed, permanently, in the family home in Madrid. I eventually moved her things out of her house near Boston. She only wanted her books. I kept trying to send her other things, but she didn’t want anything from all her years in America. Not a button.
With Inés gone, and my mother ill and living in Spain, I felt very impoverished and fragile in terms of my already very small family. Inés had always been in Madrid, my mother had lived near Boston, and now Inés was nowhere, and my mother was far away. When I had taken the job in Sheldon, I thought it would be nice to live a couple of hours from my mother.
That’s when I started to see Dr. Cohen, who I now continued speaking to via phone sessions from Madrid. He had been sympathetic when my aunt died and when my mother was diagnosed, and I hoped he could help me find a way to rebuild my life on my own now.
He said that the change the sabbatical would bring, the chance to be on my own in a new place, would help me find myself. It sounded vaguely promising. I pretended to listen to this, the same way I’ve always pretended to meditate in yoga class, evincing an earnest expression while privately rolling my eyes with all the maturity of a fourteen-year-old. As soon as I hear “Close your eyes and take a deep breath,” I sneak them open and pretty much stop breathing until everyone else has opened theirs. Dr. Cohen thought I should embrace being alone and avoid romantic relationships until I had done more “work” on myself. Since I had recently broken up with Alex, my boyfriend from graduate school, I had developed a few crushes here and there but I hadn’t fallen in love. This was my goal. Alex and I had lived together in New York. But since, I had moved to Sheldon, and he had moved to Los Angeles to become a screenwriter. He had urged me to move with him, and to break with my past and try something new. My own professional life, and my desire to live closer to Europe weren’t really issues for him. I understood. We wanted different things. Who can compete with Hollywood? But the timing seemed terrible to me. Cohen suggested that once I did my time alone, I would be ready for a caring, healthy, trusting, mature relationship. This sounded nice, but highly unrealistic to me. At the beginning I was glad to have someone so sympathetic and interested in my life. Then I grew skeptical. Then I
forgot to think about it. He told me, in any case, I had to accept that I would probably not meet anyone in a real-life situation, and that I would have to face the online dating world. I didn’t want to believe this.
Cohen asked if I was writing my novel, which was something I had told him I wanted to do once I got my life sorted. “No,” I said, “you of all people should know I’m not writing. I’m busy trying to ‘find myself.’”
“Well, you should write,” he said. “It’s what you say you want to do. Plus, you’re never going to have a novel if you don’t write.”
“I’m trying to quit smoking, and I’m learning to be alone. With my mother.”
He was relentless.
“Are you running or doing some other kind of exercise? Anyway, you’ve got to start writing your novel.”
Easy for him to say.
The novel, I told myself, was a figment of my imagination. I started it and rued the day because it seemed unlikely I would ever finish it. How could I possibly work on a novel when I was questioning who I was, where my life was going, and I had a biography to write and a ton of academic deadlines ahead of me? Plus, who ever told me I could write a novel? Nobody ever told me I couldn’t, but nobody ever asked me to either. I had written personal pieces and poems, but they were short and scrappy and ended up in liquor store boxes at the bottom of closets in rental apartments. I took creative writing classes in college, but only once, while in graduate school in New York, did I pluck up the courage to submit a personal piece about—what else?—my parents. I was chosen to read it at a conference on memoir. My mother and friends came to hear me, and the auditorium was packed. It was exciting, yet after that, I crawled back into my shell and only wrote scholarly pieces. A novel, at least my first one, as I saw it, would have to be somewhat personal and that would inevitably betray my background, because I had been raised to value privacy and discretion above all else.
I thought about this conundrum often when I went running through the Retiro Park. My problems didn’t go away when I ran, but they diminished considerably and were put in perspective. As I sped along tree-lined promenades and grassy hills, I saw old people sitting on benches, parents with their children—some of them very little, in prams, some already grown up, some with Down’s syndrome, some in wheelchairs. I saw young lovers and illicit couples enjoying the anonymity of the city’s public spaces. The park was a refuge for those who needed respite from the hard business of the city streets. Including me. This was the same park where I used to play on the swings and the dusty ground.
At night I watched all the Woody Allen DVDs I found at my mother’s and bought more. This was pre-streaming. Purchasing them required a long walk along the Calle Claudio Coello to the Corte Inglés, that vast bunker of a department store that had been the object of my consumerist daydreams for years. I found two box sets and made my choice and wended my way to a register through aisles lined with video games—I’m not even sure they were still called that. Then I went to buy some new bed linens. It was so cozy to have new crisp blue-and-white striped cotton sheets and watch old movies.
What was to become of my future? How was I going to do the research for my biography, write a novel, or reconnect to my past when I felt my life was at a crossroads? I loved Madrid, but it felt unusual to be there for an extended period of time. I also had only a few close friends in Madrid at that point. One of my oldest friends from New York insisted via email that I forget about living, and just write.
And Cohen’s favorite topic was loneliness. “Why are you so afraid of being alone?” My answer was always the same: “Isn’t everyone afraid of being alone? Look at all those desperate people out there trying to find someone. It’s not that weird!” Did I mention I am an only child?
His prescription for me was to plunge into my fear headfirst, and live like Emerson or Thoreau, albeit in an urban Spanish setting with my mother and Concha, reflecting deeply on my fears, meditating, cultivating my independence. To make him happy, I pretended that this was my goal. It all sounded distantly appealing but impossibly vague, like “making a billion dollars.” I knew some people did it, but it was not in the cards for me. And there was a legion of enemies determined to foil his plan, a plan I was going to resist anyway.
My female friends and even mere acquaintances all seemed to have a potential paramour up their sleeve who would be “perfect” for me. I told a couple of Spanish friends about my shrink’s recommendation and they looked alarmed. In Spain there was nothing worse than being alone—it was tantamount to being a leper. “Why would he want you to suffer so? Life is so hard alone, so lonely,” said my old friend Mónica. The few people who seemed to agree with Cohen all repeated that infamous Spanish proverb to me: “Mejor sola que mal acompañada.” Better to be alone than in bad company. But the truth was that for me—and I finally understood this—this proverb was more of a posteriori consolation, something to be said to someone who’s been abandoned, than an a priori recommendation.
There was also an insurmountable cultural and gender barrier between Cohen and me that I never got past. The fact that I was bicultural, and bilingual, was never considered. Because my current life in Spain—and so many memories—unfolded in Spanish, I wasn’t just telling him things; I was translating everything. To him, Spain was a sunny resort that I was lucky to visit frequently. Good wines, beautiful landscapes. All true. When we talked in the winter, he complained about the multiple snowstorms in New England. Had I taken a sabbatical to come to Spain to hear about local blizzards in Sheldon from a therapist? On the other hand, he gave excellent advice if I had a specific conundrum, which I sometimes did.
Katya, my Italian-Russian friend from college, was living in Switzerland with her wealthy Spanish tycoon husband. She had all kinds of theories about men and about my life. I only ever saw her fleetingly because they traveled to attend parties, operas, and art openings. It was a full-time job.
She called me from their many houses and we had lengthy conversations. She gave me confidence, because I knew she didn’t like to waste her time, so I figured she thought I was a worthy investment. We were an odd phone-friend couple. She in their Swiss mansion or the Marbella villa, and me in my newly recovered teenage room.
The irony was that Katya was the granddaughter of famous Italian communists who had lived in Russia. She had always been beautiful, and her guest lists included arcane royalty and people famous just for being famous. I could have sworn she’d also become taller, but it may have been that she never wore heels before. She was my age but treated me with an older sister attitude. She was very entertaining. Her Spanish had a Russian accent but was fluent and peppered with expressions from her grandmother that gave her conversation a folksy edge. Of a mutual friend, Antonio, who was a bit of a pro with tricks up his sleeve, she said, “Tiene más conchas que los Galápagos.” He has more shells than the Galapagos turtles. My mother used many of the same expressions. One day I heard the Galapagos line three times. I was obviously way behind on life lessons because it took me a while, alone, just to figure out what the expression meant, let alone how to apply its wisdom to my life. Shells are hard, people are tough. I got it. They’ll run circles around me. But knowing it didn’t make me any tougher. Katya summed me up: “You know what your problem is? You’re a romantic.” This was clearly worse even than being a decadent bourgeois.
The months went by. It would be impossible for me, she admonished on a call from Lausanne, to find a new man. Impossible. First of all, because I worked too hard, always doing research and writing, which she disapproved of as she saw no clear reward to what I did, certainly no great money. She saw me as a small-time romantic. But second of all, she explained, even if I devoted myself to nothing but the pursuit of the male species, there were no men to be had. She was the prime evidence of her argument, a beautiful, intelligent, exceptionally well-educated, multilingual woman. It took her many years to find the ideal man, with unhappiness along the way. She had a theory, many theories, such as tha
t 20 percent of men were psychopaths, 20 percent were womanizers, the other 20 percent were alcoholics, the other 20 percent were gay, and the other 50 percent were married. The womanizers—the most fun and hence the most dangerous—she divided into Don Juans (bad, they hate women) and Casanovas (good, they wanted to give you pleasure while it lasted which would not be long).
However, all this convincing but fuzzy math did not stop her from energetically reviewing in detail the few men we knew in common, all of whose foibles she had sussed out as if she were the author of a neo-medieval treatise on humors. They were all to be avoided. Pierre-Yves, a historian, was single but had grown sad and stingy. Eduardo, who was quite brilliant, had three strikes against him: he was anxious, anxious, anxious. What about James, I asked? He was a longtime Irish expat in Madrid who I’d taken a shine to. She said he was the type who might never settle down, and who somehow managed to survive in Spain cobbling together documentary films. She said he was probably a commitment-phobe, and would meet someone else and I would be covered with horns—the Spanish expression for cheating on someone is to ponerle los cuernos, put horns on them. When she said this, I immediately pictured myself quite literally covered in horns, at least all around my face and head, and I shivered. “Not a nice image, is it,” she said. “No!” I agreed. I did wonder if she wasn’t giving James a fair shake because she knew I was interested. And yet. She spoke so confidently. Then there was Dmitri, the young Russian researcher she knew much better than I did, who seemed to have it all, and I brightened up. She sang his praises: he was hardworking, forward-looking, intelligent, healthy, resourceful, clean, tidy, and a fabulous cook. Encouraged by this break in her bleak outlook, I said, “Well, sounds like he would make a nice husband for someone.” “Sure,” she said, laughing, “a Russian researcher! Ha! A nice husband if you want to starve to death.” I have never been to Moscow, but I could imagine being cold and hungry in a dingy flat. Perhaps Cohen would get his way after all, and I would be forced into solitude and be like Emily Dickinson: out with lanterns looking for myself.
Madrid Again Page 8