Woke up this morning with an Elvis Costello going through my head on a repeating loop. (Oliver's army is here to stay, Oliver's army are on their way....) Why that song? Why this morning? Don't know. Persistent bugger, though. Did not want to go away.
Pulled myself out of bed at an excessively reasonable hour, dragged myself out the door, headed in the general direction of the gym.
And what a beautiful morning. After coyly backing off for a couple of weeks, spring has decided to get serious, producing radiant weather that has locals walking the streets with a strange uncertainness to their step -- blinking up into the sunlight, clearly pleased, though in a tentative way. Half have shed their cold weather gear, the other half haven't, apparently not yet trusting the turn in conditions.
During the trips to and from the sweat factory, I saw numerous middle-aged couples strolling together, holding hands. Other folks walked dogs, the animals clearly overjoyed to be outside and alive. A woman with a cocker spaniel stood in the middle of the plaza down the street, breathing in mild air, the dog nearby, contentedly wandering, nose to the ground. "Venga," the woman finally said, "vámonos" ("Come on, let's go."), the simple sound of her voice provoking ecstatic four-legged bounding about.
A 60ish couple walked accompanied by a malamute, the dog unable to contain its happiness at simply being outdoors with its people on a spring day -- bouncing up and down on spring-loaded legs, barking joyfully at the man and woman (the malamute version of joyful barking: Wrooooo! Wrooooo!), them talking back, smiling.
Trees around the city center are well along in greening up, beds of flowers provide plenty of complementary color. Wandering along a mid-boulevard park in the barrio of Salamanca, I saw the season's first dandelions poking up from rapidly growing grass, providing touches of soft yellow (though one had already made the leap to white, obeying an amped-up biological imperative).
It may be that all this feels more sweetly poignant than normal in light of the recent weeks' happenings here. Last night, turning on the television to catch a few minutes of a Spanish league fútbol game, I found myself watching live news reports of the moments post-explosion in Leganés, one of Madrid's southern suburbs. Given that everyone but official personnel were kept well away from the actual scene of the explosion, all reporters could do was try to find a local resident with some idea of what had happened (unsuccessfully in the bit I saw) or expound theories about the event as cameras panned around, showing nothing but normal folks standing in the street, kids clustered together in front of the camera person to wave, pointing at friends while mouthing rude commentary (behavior the news people stoically ignored).
This morning's papers put across the gravity of the event with more success, front pages featuring stark photos of a billowing cloud of smoke and dust as it swallowed up neighborhood streets in the moments post-explosion. At the local news kiosk, people picked up copies of papers, movements slowing, stopping, as the images and headlines sank in. Some looked at each other in dismay, talking quietly, heads shaking, before moving off into the morning and normal life.
There's a strange equilibrium being maintained here by many, walking a line between full awareness of all that's happened and deliberate, willful forgetting about it when possible. Normal, I imagine, if one doesn't want to cultivate overwhelming fear about what each successive day might bring. The intensity of 11-M and the days immediately after produced the catharsis of the elections and the clearing out of the ruling party, el Partido Popular, whose general manner did not tend to cultivate peace of mind. Whatever relief came with that change disappeared quickly as the PP went into a post-loss full-court press, party higher-ups appearing on every television and radio program they could shoehorn in during the two weeks after the elections, attempting damage control after their disastrous management of the days between March 11 and 14. Which might have had some effect if they hadn't done it in their standard aggressive fashion, denying wrongdoing or mishandling of any kind, blaming their misfortune on unnamed groups and individuals.
During all that, the outgoing president, José María Aznar, conducted an auxiliary campaign via the media and one or two face-to-face events, attempting to force or coerce the incoming president, Zapatero, to change his long-standing pledge to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq if the U.N. does not take over the mandate, despite the ongoing overwhelming public opposition to Spanish participation in Iraq. A notably unsuccessful campaign -- Zapatero generally refusing to engage -- which has finally subsided during the last few days, a lowering of volume that's added to the general relief of the beginning of the Easter vacation season. Feeling like a fragile kind of relief at times, given the news reports of the last 48 hours, but a relief the turn in the weather is abetting. A sense of relief most seem determined to cultivate.
And speaking of relief, after the continued ceaseless cycling of Oliver's Army through my head, I finally headed out to a movie where the song for the end credits elbowed aside the Costello number. An ending-credits ditty unmemorable enough that it faded soon after I left the theater, leaving me with my little brain, unpossessed by any particular melody or lyrics.
Much better.
Madrid, te quiero.
rws 8:23 AM [+]