My last weekend in Madrid was a weird one.
I thought I would be staying longer, I had planned to stay in Madrid until 17th of July and fly home with my dad as he made a return leg of a business trip. As I looked over my finances, I realized I’d run out of money before then, so I emailed my dad and told him I’d need to go home before then (I was thinking mid-June). He said cool, when in the next week did I want to go home? I tried to explain that’s not what I meant, and he told me next week or I could find my own way home.
So, without even an nth of the money necessary to buy a ticket home I conceded. I picked the Friday after classes were over.
OOPS! There are no flights that day, only Monday.
So the last week of classes, I went from expecting to leave July 17th to knowing I was leaving less than a week away.
It was frustrating and panic-inducing to say the least.
I finished out my last week of classes, and Thursday evening had a huge going away girls night out. Why? Because everyone was going out of town for the weekend, or was going home.
My last weekend in paradise was alone.
Friday I moved out of my piso that had been home for 5 months– that was traumatic enough all on it’s own. I had never had such good care taken of me.
All the girls had left on trips that morning, so I shuffled over to my life long friend’s place, where I’d be set up for the weekend. She, too, and her two roommates had left for the weekend. There was a key left for me. I sat down my things and turned on Netflix. I watched Netflix all day Friday, even passing up a chance to drink in the park with friends who were leaving Saturday.
I had slid deep into a slump.
The next day my only friend who was still in town texted me. I had half forgotten she’d be in the city, but we had talked about spending the lonely weekend together on Thursday.
She had a friend in town, a Brit on a cane (skiing incident) whom she’d attended grade school with.
He wanted to go to a bull fight, something I had managed to go without the whole of my time in Spain (purposefully, I might add).
We showed up late, he’d bought my ticket (neither Lorena nor I wanted to be there), and because the Spanish are quite serious about their bull fights, we weren’t allowed to sit until the next bull was brought in.
So with just a few minutes in between bulls, we were expected to sit down.
Problem one: the steps up to the seats aren’t even a foot’s length deep, and are quite steep— hard for someone with a cane, so that took a second to herd him up.
Problem two: there were four Spanish students in our seats. Since we hadn’t been there for the first corrida, they probably figured the seats were open, so they sat in them (much closer to the stairs). When I told them those were our seats, they quite literally ignored me (not terribly unexpected from typical Madrileños). I repeated myself, while Lorena’s friend winced behind me because his damaged leg is turned at a weird angle because of the steps, and only one student bothers to even turn and look at me, only to turn back away.
ANGER
Now the security guys are like, “YOU HAVE TO SIT DOWN.” Again, the Spanish don’t full around with their corridas.
THEN a Frenchman behind us starts arguing with me about how we need to sit down. I try to explain to him there are people in our spots, we can’t, but he doesn’t seem to understand.
I tell (read: shout at with the full force of my not inconsiderate anger) the Spanish kids to move again. Nothing. The Frenchman squawks at me, when I was trying to help him by getting us our seats (his were beyond ours, so the students moving would help him, too).
I angrily demand our spots from the quad again (our injured companion grabbed my wrist and soothingly tells me to calm down), as a guard comes up the teeny steps telling us to sit, the fight has just begun.
One of our party explains to him what’s happening while the Frenchman (with a huge backpack on) climbs over us, the people sitting, and the Spanish students to get to his seat. Whatever.
Then a Spanish woman literally kicks the kid who’d turned to look at me and tells the group they had better get up, they were Spanish, they new better than to act so beneath themselves. Why were they not sitting in their assigned seats, that wasn’t proper*, they knew better. So they quickly get up and move several seats and a row over to their spots.
I give thanks to the lovely Castilian woman, and we inch our ways over to our spots, but there is literally no foot space whatsoever. People sit one row right up against the next, no foot space factored in whatsoever. This was interesting with someone who had a torn MCL and ACL. So after arranging with the people in front of us to get the guy’s leg positioned in between them, we find they’re Americans, too. They were sorry they couldn’t help with the seating arrangement, but they don’t speak the language and I seemed to be the kind of person who would have dealt with it one way or the other (yikes?).
As we settle in to watch the fight, we realize there is a lot going on we’re not totally sure about. I’d had the concept and some of the traditions of the corridas explained to me by professors, but it wasn’t everything.
The Castilians sitting behind us clearly knew everything, as their running commentary suggested. It was two couples, one half comprised of the woman who’d helped us. I turned to thank her again, and ask her and her group a question about what the hankies people dangled meant (mercy), why they boo’ed the man in the most beautiful black bull fighting costume I’d ever beheld (he was Mexican), what the wee spikes used on the bulls were called (I forget now), and what the fighter on the horse was called (again, forgotten). The husbands told us all the answers, and filled in some of the cultural Why’s for us, too. They were amazing, and so, so sweet.
They may have only helped us because they didn’t want me to angrily shout through their precious bull fight, but I’m happy it happened.
Throughout the corrida, the charming Brit kept a running commentary that had the whole little group of English speakers laughing out loud, which our Spanish friends wanted translated, and ended up chuckling over, too. He was well pleased we’d given in to his plans, and surely making it a pleasant experience.
Because of the lack of foot space, the other friend of Lorena’s was literally wedged in between my legs, so that was a bit of an interesting ice breaker.
Hi, my names Miranda. Oh blahblahblah it’s nice to meet you. Oh sure, here sit right between my legs, of course (which is why there’s that head of hair in the bottom of my above photo).
The bull fights were shocking for someone that the fall before had dabble in veganism. Lorena straight up yelped and turned away red-faced after one rather sudden defeat. It was bloody, but I could see quite quickly what Ernest Hemingway had spoken of.
The sad, dark beauty of the bull fight, the same of sad, dark beauty in so many of Goya’s later paintings, and in the grey shades of Titian’s most famous works. The man dressed all in black, as mentioned before, moved so beautifully, in such smooth, incremental motions that I could not look away.
He was what a corrida enthusiast professor had described as a master. She had gotten into a pleasant little titter about the sport with us one day after someone had presented on the tradition. She and her husband attended regularly, and she covered some of the rules, some of the big festivals that great corridas corresponded with, and some things a master displayed.
This guy had them. The red cape (actually yellow and hot pink), moved as if a rippling brooke possessed it. His footsteps were mere glides, shadows of the spots they’d just held. He seemed to not move, yet avoided every attempted gore by the bull. He inclined himself this way and that, a mirror pond next to a beast the size of the cars parked on the street. It was a reverential thing, it awed me in the way Easter mass does. How someone could be so still, graceful, and calm bamboozled this someone who is Loud, Enthusiastic, and Frank. Watching him any lingering regret about attending melted away.
He was the last matador.
The crowd after, a moving mass of bees on the comb, in the Plaza del Toros, we parted to head to a friend of a friend’s place. The street was rivering in Spanish- both the Castilian language, and the decidedly Spanish look.
Boys who looked like travel posters for Spain in the 20s, their black hair parted at the side and slicked over.
Women with light eyes and hair— some in between of blonde and brown.
These were the people I had imagined when moving to Madrid, but hadn’t actually seen much of. Turns out, they’re the really wealthy who live in the Salamanca district of the capital and attend corridas. It should have been no surprise the young men who looked like the bull fighters on antique airline posters live in the neighborhood where the bull fights happen.
For a night entered with much trepidation, in the shadow of the heart-crushing reality that I had to leave my Home for my home, it was such a good evening.
*events seem to be somewhat different in Spain, people really do sit in the seats their ticket assigns them to. At least, that’s what football matches, a concert, and this showed me.
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