A Year in the World

by Frances Mayes

  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.

  The landscapes, the superb collection by northern European painters, the still lifes, the Impressionists—three mornings would hardly satisfy me here. Even the twentieth-century group outshines most American museums’ collections. Now I must add Madrid to my list of places to visit regularly. We buy the museum’s book, even though it weighs about five pounds, because we can’t stand the idea of leaving.

  Late at night, after a strange seven-to-nine-thirty nap, we venture out to dinner, straggling back to the hotel after midnight, when the Spanish are revved. The famous cocido madrileño, a complete meal of soup, chickpeas, and plates of boiled meats, certainly warms the winter night. After the three courses, we tumble back into our Heavenly Beds (available for purchase) at the hotel, Ed cosseted by various pills and me by my biography of Federico García Lorca, his poems, and a stack of history and art books.

  We have come to Spain to see Andalucía slowly, as intimately as a foreigner can. For me, this is an ancient quest. When I was thirteen and joined an LP (long-playing) record club, I was sent Ravel’s Bolero by mistake. As I listened over and over—the first “classical” piece I knew—I imagined myself on an Appaloosa galloping across the Andalucían plains in a flowing cape, hood blown back, my fingers gripping the horse’s mane, feeling the gait in my body, the music’s switches in tempo like changes in wind patterns. The music forever has attached to the mem
ory of sitting at the dressing table amid my older sister’s bottles of perfume and silver brushes and seeing myself as dramatically other than the reserved southern child who stared in the mirror. Years later, when my first husband and I lived in graduate student housing at Princeton, a romantic economics student from Nicaragua, Carlos du Bon, used to read Lorca aloud to me under the trees as our small children played with box turtles they’d found in the weeds. Hard to explain such moments. He leaned against a tree in a good Italian suit, tie loosened and his legs crossed. His black, black hair, black as crude oil, his essential Latin nature, his good smell that made me dizzy, his iconographic representation of the foreign, sophisticated, literary possibilities of the world came drifting through to me in the words of Lorca. Green, green, how much I want you green . . . I was not-long married. I loved my brilliant and handsome husband, who came from my same southern background. I was transfixed by the white teeth of Carlos, who had studied at the Sorbonne and at El Escorial in Spain, who spoke Italian and French and German, as well as English and his own Spanish, whose mouth seemed to slide around the words of García Lorca, seemed to lure me toward some wide-open life I did not know. Even now I wonder if his skin simply smelled of the tropics he came from, of mango and salt and lime, or if he doused himself in cologne. I can see his brown fingers holding the book and his intent gaze when he looked up. Green wind. Green branches . . . how much I want you green . . .

  Tomorrow we go by fast train to Seville.

  We are walking across a plaza on our way to sample our first tapas when a genteel-looking older woman, dressed in a blazer and skirt, comes up to us, apologizing for interrupting. What a bad piece of luck she had travelling to Spain and losing her purse on arrival last night for a vacation with friends. The friends have been delayed in Tunisia and won’t be back until late tomorrow. “I have the key to their apartment,” she said, “but unfortunately, I have no money and no food. My friends have been gone two weeks and left nothing in their place except two oranges. Can you help me? You look like such nice people. I am so embarrassed to ask.”

  Ed takes out his wallet and gives her ten euros. She thanks us with dignity, and we walk on, talking about how awful it would be to lose your money and credit cards. We’re looking for the tapas place whose name we’ve written on an envelope. Later, we spot the English woman again, but she does not seem to see us.

  Just after we arrived at noon, the hotel called their doctor, who came to the room and gave us prescriptions for antibiotics, one for me just in case I caught the infection, one for Ed’s sinus pain. At the pharmacy, Ed is given a cup of water with his pills so he can start improving right away. Within hours he begins to feel energy seeping back into his veins. “I’m cured, as of tomorrow,” he announces. “Isn’t it odd how anything can throw you when you travel, an earache, a lost Visa card, a blister, luggage gone astray. You forget you’ve arrived in a place you’ve always wanted to see.” By the time we find the tapas bar, he’s elated enough to order so many tapas that we never go out to dinner at all. This Spanish rhythm will take some getting used to: the tapeo (tapas crawl from bar to bar) in early evening, then dinner never before ten. I like tapas because appetizers on a menu tempt me more than main courses. We try potatoes with a spicy mayonnaise and ham, marinated anchovies, chunky pork loin slices with a green pepper sauce, spinach with bacon and walnuts, and some mixed fried fish, all saucer-sized portions. The white wine tastes like sherry. The waiter tells me that when white wine is aged in barrique de Jerez, it picks up the sherry tones. I ask for something not from Jerez barrels, and the Muga, a white Rioja, he brings is light and spicy, great with the white torta del casar cheese, which is soft enough to eat with a spoon. Even though we are no longer hungry at all, there’s a vague dissatisfaction. Did we have dinner or not? Tonight we’re too weary to care.

  We fall into the big bed at the Don Alfonso XIII without a thought of when we will awaken and what must be done then. Tired at home, I’m usually overloaded with obligations and the prospect of tomorrow promises more of the same. But sprung, out in the world with a small stuffed suitcase and a notebook, tiredness promises big baths and closed draperies to shut out early light, and a telephone in case anything is desired from the kitchen downstairs, and the lovely allure of tomorrow when a foreign city will reveal undreamed pleasures.

  We begin early. The harsh two syllables of Seville, once here, turn forever into Sevilla, because the -ya sound of the double l seems so natural to this place, the three-note syllables rising and falling like musical fountains in the green and flowering courtyards we glimpsed last night. Next to the hotel is the Royal Tobacco Factory, Prosper Mérimée’s imagined locale for Carmen. Later Bizet wrote the opera that is now the darling of classical music stations. The formation of cigars by señoritas rolling tobacco leaves over their thighs was apparently a major erotic focus of smokers in the nineteenth century. I love the act of art that transfers to a real place an imagined person or event, thereby transforming that place into an aspect of the work of art. Carmen lights this place with her lusty presence. Equally fantastic is the place itself. Who conceived of a factory with arcades and fountained courtyards and chapels and gardens? Oranges grow, not one by one as they do on orange trees at home, but in bunches, like a grappolo of grapes. I feel right at home as we walk through the arched stone portal. The complex, second largest building in Spain, forms part of the Universidad de Sevilla. Bicycles, gangsta pants, tight T-shirts, unkempt hair, political posters, smoke—I could be in the San Francisco State student union if this building were not so grand. We loop around the building and find the Guadalquiver River. The only line I recall from the letters of the Nicaraguan poet who read Lorca to me comes to mind: a sky clean with light on the water. Such a simple line. The whole perspective of town and river looks like an early photograph of itself—the timeless silhouette of the dome, and the cathedral crenelations, the sky in layers of pewter, silver, and pearl, with the Islamic minaret and tower cut out and inserted between water and sky.

  On the Isabella bridge, we stop at a churrería. Big coils dance in the hot oil. The men turn them with long sticks, then lift out the crisp pastries and hand the churros to us in napkins with a paper cup of chocolate for dipping. How does anyone eat a whole one? They’re huge. From the middle of the bridge, a good point for surveying Sevilla and indulging in this churro tradition, we see many bell towers, fragments of old walls, and boarded-up cafés surrounded by orange trees. Summer must be enchanting along the river, but winter is splendid, too. Sevilla feels much warmer than Madrid, crisp and fresh but not frigid. Soon we are carrying our jackets. The sky has turned cerulean, streaked with broad-brushstroke clouds.

  Over in the Triana section of town the streets turn lively. We crowd into an olive oil stand that sells bulk oil and about fifteen different kinds of olives. Down the block, the owner of a dark shop specializing in the national passion, the local serrano and ibérico hams, has hung hooved hunks from the ceiling. Little cups attached underneath catch stray drops of fat. The skin looks like an old saddle, but inside the ham resembles the color of a split blood orange. We’re given a taste of chewy, streaky, deeply flavorful meat from an ibérico, a black pig, then a taste of serrano, a white pig. Both taste wild and robust, quite unlike the refined taste of their cousin, Italian prosciutto. The Spanish love their jamón, and every province breeds a different variation of this noble Spanish pig. Some are fed only in the wild, others are fed only acorns, some are cross-bred, and some are cured for longer periods—an intricate world of pig. We buy slices to go of an ibérico de Bellota. This little pig has gained much of its weight from acorn feasting and is considered the most exquisite taste.

  We stumble upon a street of shops full of mantilla combs, fake roses, shawls, coral earrings, castanets, and wild flamenco dresses for all sizes. You can even buy a case for your castanet, should you need one. How brazen that sulfur-yellow dress, form fitting until the kick and swirl of the bottom, all edged with white lace, with the typi
cal strap-over-the-instep flamenco shoes to match. Edged in wide black rickrack, the red polka dot number would fit a girl of five or six. These dresses are from the world of paper dolls—startling that they are real. Shop after shop all devoted to flamenco clothes. There must be balls and fiestas and parades where local women wear these because there are far too many for tourists to buy on a whim.

  A knife sharpener on his bicycle passes us, blowing a pipe that sounds like a piccolo. A woman steps out with a knife, and he pushes down the kickstand and reverses the bike seat. He has outfitted the back with two grinding stones. As he pedals, the sharpening stones turn. He sharpens her knife quickly, rotates the seat, and rides off, sounding his plaintive tune. “He’s alerting the neighbors to beware of dullness,” Ed says. I photograph him but can’t capture the tune.

  Ed points to a tiled church dome topped with a mustard-colored cupola that looks more like the top of a minaret than a Christian bell tower. I’m already in love with tiles. A baroque blue and white Madonna shrine against an ochre house, an iron balcony with the doorway extravagantly surrounded by a border three tiles deep, and even shiny store numbers encased in elaborate decorative motifs. Houses without tile are still decorated, with pilasters and window surrounds painted in vibrant mustard, the doors green or polished dark wood. On one apartment’s roof terrace and balconies, I count 125 pots of geraniums hanging from iron railings. The apartment sports blue awnings, bright-banded doors, and colorful ceramic plates on the walls. How bold! Will we go home and quadruple our potted plants? Order loud bougainvillea vines for every south wall?

  Already new words are becoming familiar. Azulejos: tiles. Not because azure was the color of most of the early tiles, but because the original Arab word, az-zulayj, meant “mosaic bits.” You can’t stay in Sevilla longer than a day without hearing the word Mudéjar. Some of the Muslims who stayed behind when their rulers were routed became Christians or professed as much for safety’s sake. Their style, craftsmanship, and artistic achievements identify themselves by this word. Their most intricate work—stare up until your neck aches—you see on their elaborate carved and coffered artesonado ceilings. Ed likes the words celosia, stone with perforated designs, and mihrab, the arch or niche in a mosque that directs the prayers toward Mecca.