Suddenly, overnight, it's November. And I find myself asking an old, familiar question: how the hell did that happen?
It's easy for me to lose track of time's slipping forward here at this time of the year, given the lack of Stateside seasonal affect. Halloween? Not much of a cultural touchstone, barely puts in an appearance, and what there is seems largely to be a function the occasional store window display or a bar looking for an angle to bring in customers, at least here in the city center. A recent arrival as holidays go, carrying little weight, especially compared to, say, today (All Saints Day, el Día de Todos los Santos), or even tomorrow. A national holiday, many businesses closed, many folks away for the four-day weekend. Huge numbers of people bolted on Friday, causing massive traffic jams that groups from the agricultural sector took advantage of, blocking a major highway or two to call attention to their unhappiness with spiraling gasoline prices and the current level of government support. (News reports showed footage of swarms of men clustered across a highway, stalled traffic extending off into the distance, police trying to clear away uncooperative protestors.)
My friend Jorge invited me to join a group of friends heading off into the mountains for much of the weekend, I decided to do an overnight, returning to the city with a woman from the group late on Sunday. Packed a bag late Saturday afternoon, made the ten-minute walk to rendezvous with Jorge and a friend of his, Tony, waited while they crammed bags, bicycles, related detritus into Tony's tiny Kia, found myself stuffed into what free space remained of the back seat, trying to peer out through darkly tinted windows at the passing streets of Madrid. Windows tinted darkly enough that I finally gave up, settling for the teeny slice of untinted view I could see through the windshield.
A rendezvous followed in one of Madrid's new northern 'burbs, construction happening everywhere, blocks of flats and office buildings being thrown together along newly created thoroughfares, shopping centers sprouting up amid it all, traffic around the rendezvous point bumper to bumper, moving at a crawl.
Jorge spotted one of the group, parked in a service station/convenience store island, directed Tony into that compact zone, through cars, gas pumps, pulling up by a concrete barrier, Tony complaining the entire time. A slender 30ish woman got out of the other vehicle (María), came over for hellos, stood by Jorge's window chatting until we got out to stretch legs, when a third car appeared, containing the group's final two members (Juan Carlos, Almudena), folks I knew from excursions and evenings out last spring. Greetings, conversation, then individuals re-distributed themselves among the three vehicles, me ending up with María, happy to be in a front seat, surrounded by undarkened windows.
We were to follow Tony/Juan Carlos, that plan fell apart once out on the highway, between María's lack of driving testosterone and her car's modest horsepower compared to Tony's, who floored it, disappearing off into the distance as we headed northwest, evening falling as the mountains gradually drew near. We're driving along, making conversation, my Spanish feeling a bit sloppy, me realizing it was because I was tired (my bod dreaming about getting horizontal, me knowing that wasn't in the cards for many hours). María had spent a month traveling around the States a year, year and a half ago, we talked about that for a while. Time passed, it became clear that we'd truly been left in the dust, neither of us had any idea how to get to our destination. María's mobile phone got dug out of her shoulder bag, I found myself on the horn with Juan Carlos, whose family's country place we were going to. He began reeling off directions, enumerating names of exits, towns, landmarks to look for -- I knew within seconds that I'd never remember any of it without having it on paper. With no writing implements in easy range, I shoved the phone at María, she gave JC some heartfelt shit about them leaving us behind, went through directions with him, seemed to do all right.
Seemed to. But suffered from a certain vagueness, a chronic uncertainty that took us off the highway too soon, through a pueblo whose points of reference were not a match to Juan Carlos' directions. We bumbled along, eventually finding what seemed to be a correct turn, winding up on a country two-lane, no lights anywhere, the occasional car that came up behind us riding the rear bumper, passing as soon as they could, immediately impatient with Maria's slow, vacillating pace. Her headlights were out of adjustment, illuminating little of the pavement ahead on low-beam, she clicked back and forth between high-beam and low with nervous frequency.
Juan Carlos had told her, she said, that the village we sought would appear quickly. Twenty, twenty-five minutes later, we continued bumbling along, finding no mention of the village on road signs to that point.
[continued in next entry]
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Someone at El País, Spain's largest-selling daily, may be trying to channel Raymond Chandler.
From an article on the Italian fútbol league in yesterday's edition:
"The fury of the melancholy is usually terrible, because it's a cold, methodical fury, born of will. Milan, the most melancholy team in Italy, ran over Juventus in San Siro, they hammered them to death and only refrained from tossing the body into the river because the law doesn't allow it...."
Madrid, te quiero.
rws 7:48 AM [+]
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