Benito's Barbecue, Franco's Old House, and the Beginning of the End

The period of despedidas, or "good-byes," has officially begun. My good friend Colin, with whom I traveled to Salamanca, left a couple of weeks ago to work in the Chicago area for Teach for America. Kathleen left about a week ago to begin a law-related job in Texas. (The next sentence is no longer true since I edited and published this post the following day.) It is 1:30 AM here in Madrid, and though I work tomorrow, I have been up all afternoon and evening helping Ali do her last packing, recycling, and cleaning. She and I just said our last good-bye, as she flies out tomorrow morning to begin working on the Obama campaign in Colorado. The end is truly here, and the formal farewells are driving that point home to me.

Though beautiful and interesting, the storks can cause
problems and be a nuisance due to the noise they create,
the food (animal guts and insects) that they drop, and the
weight of their large nests on the old church roofs

To take the fullest advantage possible, I have led a busy social and traveling life as of late. First of all, I went to visit Benito, his wife Nichol, and their two adorable children, Paula and Martín, in their new house in Soto del Rey, a nice, quiet town in the north of the Comunidad de Madrid. As always, Benito and his family treated me like royalty. Benito's wife is an incredible cook, and we ate a dense, moist cake that was to die for; fresh bread; a nice salad; and a paella so enormous in proportion and so spectacular esthetically that it was truly a shame to eat it. It was one of the best paellas I've ever had, and given how much pride Spaniards take in their paella, that is really saying something. Benito gave me a tour of the town, and he showed me the town's church that is covered in storks' nests. Many towns in Madrid house these enormous nests and their odd, partly elegant and partly awkward builders.

The "German Brewery" that Hemingway frequented, in Plaza
Santa Ana, which also houses statues of Federico García Lorca
and Calderón de la Barca, two of Spain's all-time best
playwrights. It's a very literary plaza, indeed.

My French-Canadian friend from New Brunswick, Mathieu, and I also have been able to hang out a couple of times before his cousin arrives and then he returns to his home in eastern Canada. Since I have long wanted to go into the brewery that was among Ernest Hemingway's main haunts when he would travel to Madrid, Mathieu entertained my desire and we went inside and had a great time. He and I were also able to go into the Prado Museum together, and though we were slightly distracted away from the artwork since we wanted to catch up and therefore tried to do both art appreciation and friendship building at the same time, I nevertheless saw a room or two that I had missed in my multiple visits there before and was impressed, once again, at how stupendous of an art museum it is. I will miss it dearly next year. It's not everyday that you get to live within walking distance of some of Europe's finest art from the Middle Ages onward.

A haunting painting in the Prado Museum of an auto de fe, a Spanish Inquisition trial
held right here in Madrid's central Plaza Mayor

The Palacio Real de El Pardo and the manicured gardens
outside of it

Having had my interest piqued last week at the enormous monastery and cross built by Franco at the Valley of the Fallen, I decided to pursue the Franco topic a little bit further, much to the half-jocular, half-serious dismay of one of my teachers. (I assured her I wasn't a neo-Franco fascist, and I think she believed me.) I went to the royal residence where Franco lived during his dictatorship from the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 to his death by natural causes in 1975, a relatively lavish but slightly isolated palace called Palacio Real de El Pardo. El Pardo was originally built by the Habsburg monarchs in the late 1500s to be used as a palace for hunting, given its strategic location in a sylvan area of the Comunidad de Madrid. The sumptuously wealthy monarchs ruled from other castles of theirs elsewhere but used this palace for their excursions into the woods to pursue game and try their skills at marksmanship and archery. The palace was beautiful, and a sizable portion of it is oftentimes not available to the public because it is currently used as a reception place for foreign heads of state, many of which have left autographed photos and comments in an interesting guest registry book. Some of the rooms evinced a clash of cultures and centuries, I thought, like a room built by the Bourbons in the 1700s that nevertheless had a modern plasma-screen television, for example, or another amenity straight from the 21st century. The most interesting part of the entire tour, however, was the Franco suite which, curiously, has been left just the way that he used it during his lifetime. Equipped with a personal theater in addition to the other predictable luxuries (bathroom, kitchen, and such), the strangest thing about the suite to me was that Franco and his wife slept in separate beds even though it was well-known that he was entirely faithful to her (not a common trait among Spanish aristocrats, many of whom fathered hordes of bastard children). Also strange was the fact that he kept the dried, skeletal hand of Saint Teresa in an elaborate box beside his bed, just like superstitious Felipe II did during his reign, as well. Catholic relics are fascinating. A rotten hand by your bed? Regardless, it was a great tour.

I always enjoy different forms of media and art, and though I sometimes intentionally follow a trend in my consumption of art, I oftentimes just let myself flow with whatever I find or whatever turns up. However, by coincidence, I had a week in which most of my media was somewhat intense and racy. To begin with, after having an enjoyable evening with Kelly, David, and Félix, David lent me three films by Almodóvar. Almodóvar is one of Spain's best film directors. He started producing his edgy films in the 80s, after the fall of the Franco dictatorship, as part of a movement called the movida

madrileña, a time when Madrid indulged in the excesses of drugs, sex, and partying that were prohibited under the former conservative regime. Almodóvar is a product of this time, and it appears constantly in his films in motifs that become almost predictable. I watched both La mala educación (a pun on Bad Education and Bad Manners) and  La ley del deseo (The Law of Desire). In La ley del deseo, Antonio Banderas is a jealous gay lover who goes to drastic lengths to be with the artsy, promiscuous film director with whom he's in love. In La mala educación, Gael García Bernal (who starred as Che Guevarra in Motorcycle Diaries) is a cross-dressing prostitute who avenges the death of his transsexual junky sister who was raped by a priest when she was a little boy. The movies are actually quite brilliant and much more complex than my reductionist synopses give them credit for, but they are intense, slightly kitschy, and turn many Spaniards off because of how excessive they often are in their portrayal of drugs and sex. I also went to see Shame with Ruth, the mother of the family to whom I give a private English class each week. We chose Shame on a whim, and it recounts the sad tale of a man addicted to sex. He is incapable of expressing intimacy and instead prefers prostitutes. He is so consumed by his need for pornography and orgasm that he neglects his weak, needy sister, is less efficient at his job, and gets beat up for saying lewd things to unavailable women flanked by their boyfriends. It was a sad movie and had a shocking, gruesome end that was hard to watch. Lastly, I went with James, the Brit with whom I work, and his Canadian girlfriend, Melissa, to a show called El agujero ("The Hole"). It was part comedy, part musical, part acrobatics, part cabaret. It was actually a brilliant production even though I had never seen anything like it and really only agreed to go as a gesture of politeness to James for having invited me. Having my feminist fenders up, I was surprised that the most body objectification and nudity in the show was male. It was interesting, to say the least.

In one hour I catch a bus down south to go to Sevilla, the heartland of flamenco, and then on Sunday, right after I return, I've purchased myself a ticket to see a bull fight. I'll be embracing some Spanish stereotypes and seeing what I get out of the experience! And a month from today, I'll be flying home. Can you believe it?