By Katherine Ashenburg. Reprinted from Zoomer Magazine.
Rather than hopping from place to place, Katherine Ashenburg chose to pause and find beauty in the unexpected benefits of age – the pleasure of slow travel.
Twenty-four hours after I moved into my smart Madrid apartment, I suffered the first near-faint of my life. Nine time zones away in Vancouver, my doctor daughter had to practise telemedicine on her rattled mother. She diagnosed possible dehydration, walking 16,000 steps that day, drinking a glass of wine without food or a combination of all the above.
I recovered, and thankfully it turned out to be the only hiccup in a new kind of travel for me: staying put. But not at home in Toronto; in a faraway place. At 79, my appetite for experiencing what the world has to offer is undiminished, but after decades of roaming, including writing many travel articles for the New York Times, The Globe and Mail etc., I’m ready for a new kind of adventure. I want to go deeper rather than broader. Knowing something about a great city in its most everyday aspects is the journey that intrigues me most these days.
So this spring it was Madrid where I chose to settle for six weeks, in a charming apartment in the gay-friendly neighbourhood of Chueca. It’s a city I’d visited for short bursts as a tourist: It’s compact and walkable, and a place I could practise (and perhaps improve) my faltering Spanish.
One of Madrid’s great lures for me is its Holy Trinity of art museums, the Prado, the Reina Sofia and the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, where I planned to spend uncounted hours. Ideally, I would do some writing – or not – and study Spanish, while forging a more than one-time acquaintance with the people who worked in my local café, the cheesemonger in the mercado down the street, the woman in the tintoreria who dry cleaned my clothes, and the bookseller who indulged my long visits to his libreria.
My most precious possession became a 27-euro card that gave me unlimited access to 10 Madrid museums. I used it to dip into the Prado or the wonderful Museum of Archeology or the charming Museum of Romanticism whenever I was in the neighbourhood and had time for a visit.
Much of this staycation was about luxury – not the luxury of the high-thread-count variety, but the luxury of time. When I went to the great modern art museum, the Reina Sofia, for the first time this trip, the admissions line snaked around a very large block. It was the week before Easter, schools were out and parents were trying to entertain their children. On a short trip, this would have been frustrating. But on my schedule, I didn’t have to stand in line; I could return after Easter.
I also had the luxury of perspective, a gift of years and experience. Semana Santa, the Holy Week before Easter, is punctuated by night-time procesiones, solemn parades where statues of Jesus and Our Lady are carried through Madrid on floats to the sound of brass bands. They are so freighted with ritual meaning in Hispanic culture that part of me wanted to stand with the watching throngs. Another part of me dislikes crowds and dreaded returning to my apartment in the dark, congested streets. I was able to remind myself of some procesiones in my past, a spectacular one in Cuzco, Peru, and a disquieting one in San Cristóbal de las Casas in Mexico, where the traditionally hooded men resembled figures from the Inquisition. Maybe you’ve seen enough procesiones, I told myself, and stayed home. Another reward of a long life.
I thought of Henry David Thoreau’s boast, “I have traveled a good deal in Concord,” as I travelled a good deal in Madrid. As it turned out, I did very little writing – my muse had gone temporarily AWOL – which left me more time to enjoy Madrid. In the mornings, along with my coffee, I drank in the views of my street’s rowhouses, restrained lemon-yellow residences whose black balconies were as close as wrought iron could come to lace. Wherever I walked in Madrid, the buildings, from the neo-classic gravitas of the Plaza Mayor to the over-the-top flourishes along the Gran Via, were a delight.
The paintings in great and small galleries, as I suspected, ranked high among my pleasures. Being able to look again and again at classics such as Velazquez’s Las Meninas or Picasso’s Guernica or Goya’s astute portraits of the royal family, was a privilege, but so was getting to know less famous works. Bronzino’s chubby-cheeked little boy from 1550, Garcia de’ Medici, won my heart early in my visit and never let go.
Eating was a more carnal pleasure, and almost always reliable. I adopted the Spanish rhythm, with lunch the main meal of the day, no earlier than one p.m. (Two p.m. was more the local style, but I could rarely hold out that long.) The menu del dia, or menu of the day, serving three courses and wine for as little as 14 euros, was a bargain. A typical menu del dia at Señora Smith, a cosy restaurant I often patronized, was sopa de fideos (noodle soup), grilled hake with vegetables and flan with berries. Because the desserts often included the Spanish favourite, arroz con leche, or rice pudding, I took a deep research dive into a beloved comfort food. The pudding at Señora Smith was more leche than arroz, too soupy. The one at La Nieta, a more rough-and-ready place, had the right consistency and came with a bottle of powdered cinnamon so I could season it myself. But the best was at Café Gijón, the rice and milk in perfect balance, with the merest suspicion of orange brightening its starchy perfection.
Before leaving Canada, I had joked that one of my projects in Madrid would be to be lonely. It was only partly a joke because, although I love my solitude and am almost never lonely, I wondered if Madrid might test that. And if that too would become part of the adventure.
My casual contacts with shopkeepers and service staff were not about to result in friendships, but their differences from Canadians interested me. Always polite and helpful, they had a certain formality that could appear cool but not cold. On the other hand, everyone I talked with, from the staff at my school to waiters, was completely unabashed about close physical contact. Men as well as women often held my upper arm while we chatted, and signalled the end of the interchange with a few friendly pats. I had occasional friends stay with me as they passed through Madrid, but my only ongoing human contacts were with Caro, the cleaner who came every Tuesday, and Henar, my funny, smart Spanish teacher. I was getting to know Madrid, and that was its own relationship.
The place that seemed most like home to me was the legendary artists’ meeting spot, the same Café Gijón that made excellent rice pudding. Gijón catered in its day to Salvador Dali, Ava Gardner, Federico Garcia Lorca and Ernest Hemingway, but don’t let that starry cast intimidate you. The waiters, in old-school uniforms with epaulettes, were like friendly uncles not above a practical joke or two. After a few visits, they knew my favourite table and that I was probably going to order the grilled shrimp with garlic.
Once, when I stopped in to make a reservation for dinner (Gijón rarely responds to reservation requests online), the waiter agreed and nodded at my corner table. “Don’t you want to write down my name?” I asked. No need for that, he said: “Recuerdo tu cara.” “I remember your face.” That seemed to exemplify the matter-of-fact attention I loved about Madrid.
I had no more near-faints, but I often thought back to that worried night and my blithe choice of a city where I knew no one. The experience left me with a sense of vulnerability that is probably not unreasonable. As a wise friend wrote to me, “at this stage of life we are liable to random afflictions that, while not necessarily serious, can derail our careful arrangements.” It reminded me of a line from Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle: “Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.” My new way of travel has its share of peculiarity, and I’m planning more dancing lessons.