...halved by light and dark...

Name:
Location: Madrid, Spain

I love eating Golden Delicious apples with peanut butter. I shop too much, drive an old car, and save my Starbucks money for traveling. Disillusioned women writers are my inspiration, especially Sylvia Plath and Sara Teasdale. I adore used book stores and fleamarkets.

3.29.2008

Semana Santa

The car is almost as old as we are. It´s a round-shouldered black ´87 Golf, and we name it Suerte, meaning Luck. If she survives until the summer, she will become Dame Suerte. We talk to her a lot, encouraging, praising, patting the dashboard to coax her up the hills.
"We" is composed of three: John, Brynn, and I. Brynn and I met in January and hit it off, and go out together every weekend. John we met a few weeks ago, and the car is his latest purchase. We are all 23, still new enough in the world to feel the scars of university days, still reckless and curious and undecided. We will spend Semana Santa, Holy Week, in Portugal.
Suerte is loaded with bread, sandwich meat, beach towels, coats, magazines, bottled ice tea. The Spanish countryside is flat, and grows increasingly green as we move away from the center of the country; just into Portugal, the landscape becomes hilly. Brynn leans out the window to take pitures of the hills, the sheep, the farmhouses, and all the castles. She takes hundreds of pictures of the castles, and I take nearly as many of the flowers.
Our first stop: Évora. Just inside the Portugal border, the town used to be contained within the massive walls of a fortress; recently, modern apartments and a factory have spilled outside the walls. We see a temple to Diana (presumably, as the guide book tells us, the best preserved temple in Iberia), the edge of a castle, peacocks. When it rains, we duck into a mirror-walled café and order wine, and a nearby shop attendant cheerfully assures us that this is the worst place on earth.
We make it to Lisbon on Monday evening, after 9 hours on the road and €13 in toll money. However, being impetuous, we have not made sleeping arrangements. Rather than paying for an expensive hotel room or crashing in a pay-by-the-hour hotel, we take the car to a campground and sleep there. Not the most comfortable, but it´s safe and the showers are hot.
In Lisbon, Eric is our tour guide. I knew him in college, and he is spending a year abroad for his master´s degree. He is thrilled to show us the city.
The first day: St. George´s castle. Impressively large, with a great view of the city and the bay and the Golden Gate imitation bridge strung across the water. All around the foot of the castle, the city has spread its white-walled houses. We climb steps to the different levels on the ramparts, and wonder at the usage of various stone discs and blocks set in one corner of the large hall. With neither ceiling nor decorations, it´s sometimes hard to picture the castle rooms in their original context.
We see several cathedrals and Brynn, who grew up Catholic, explains some of the rituals. We see the place of the Carnation Revolution, where solders, called up to shoot at the citizens, instead put red carnations into the barrels of their rifles. We see statues of kings on horseback, and a modern art museum, and the tomb of Vasco de Gama, and a watchtower from which priests would bless the outbound ships. We eat fresh cod in a sidewalk café, and cinnamon-crusted pastries in a former monestary. Eric remembers every date, every story, every battle and king.
I love Lisbon. It feels smaller, older, quieter than Madrid. Spain and Portugal lost their dictators at the same time (late 1970s), but thirty years have not been sufficient to restore Portugal´s economy. The nation hasn´t forgotten its peasant roots; the tiled walls and cobblestone streets echo them.
On Wednesday, as it rains, we say goodbye to Eric and drive to Porto Covo, a town along southern Portugal´s coast. John chose it randomly, since it was easily accessible and near the ocean. It was near the ocean - close enough to walk there in five minutes. We rent rooms from an old man who has portioned up his home - bedrooms for the tourists, kitchen for him - and spends the days playing cards with a friend. Both men are wizened, deeply tanned, cheerfully chattering to each other or us in Portuguese. We respond in a mixture of Spanish and English, or smile confusedly.
Mostly, it rains. We play cards and take long naps and read. Thursday morning, in a patch of welcome sunshine, we go to the beach. I wander barefoot along the beach, see a black sandcrab, watch the incoming tide wash away the prints my feet have left between the rocks. When the rain begins again, we take refuge in a wood-beamed restaurant at the top of the hill. The soil is sandy, but plants still grow - rubbery carpets and deep red blooms and green mats of leaves that crawl up the cliff beside the ocean.
On Friday, we leave. Suerte, by this time, is full of bread crumbs and toll receipts and sand. We stop briefly in Merida, a Spanish town that boasts some Roman artifacts: a temple, two theaters, a couple houses. But we are lackadaisical about the town, whether from overload or tiredness or an eagerness to be home. And so we drive on, skimming ahead of the weekend traffic like the foam on the waves we´ve been watching. We reach Madrid in the evening. Tomorrow, and the next day and the next, there will be time enough to look at the pictures.

3.04.2008

Household Change

Nuti quit yesterday. Dropped her keys on the counter, took the €20 Cristina had forgotten to pay her on Friday, and slammed the door. That was at noon. I was sitting at the kitchen table, eating two fried eggs, and very surprised.

Nuti was the maid. Is that politically correct? She was the woman who came five days a week to cook, clean, and do laundry. She was short, with long grey roots in her purple-red hair, and was usually unhappy. She told me there were too many people at her house to feed, and they always needed cigarettes, and there was never money enough; I learned to avoid all conversations that might lead to money. She had moved from Rumenia some ten years ago, seeking a better life. What immigrant doesn´t? Her better life consisted of a three-room apartment, a TV, and a new daughter-in-law, and she had traded dearly to get even these.

So last night, we trooped downstairs, Cristina and Maria and Miguel and I, to be initiated into the mysteries of the laundry room. We had a crash course in sorting clothes, in measuring detergent, in matching socks and folding shirts. Maria was soon bored but Miguel stayed, somehow intrigued. His folded shirts were wrinkly and uneven, but he was proud of them. And afterward, we celebrated with a rousing piggy-back-ride and a wild onion swordfight.