In my novel Leaven, a neuroscientist, Sophia, grieves the loss of a pregnancy and the disappearance of a friend. She moves from Chicago to a mountain village outside of Madrid after a blackout plunges the world into temporary silence. She wants to get away from an uncanny new political reality. She wants to return to a practice which had long been core to her family’s identity, baking bread from a starter that was cultivated in Ireland by her mother, her mother’s mother, and so on.
I moved to Madrid twenty years ago. I arrived with my brother’s navy duffle mostly filled with books, a few pairs of jeans, and some western shirts. Like Sophia, I first got off the metro in Tirso de Molina, I looked around the city and saw the things she saw. I found a cheap wine with a free tapa, stayed in a cheap hostel until I found a cheap apartment. I went to the Cine Doré and watched cheap classic movies. There were no smart phones, no booking websites, no online recommendations… To find an apartment I used the personals in the English newspaper In Madrid and called the numbers from payphones or locutorios — the once ubiquitous shops that combined internet access and phonebooths. What I did have was a Lonely Planet guide, a free map from the Corte Inglés on Calle Preciados, my feet, and some instincts. I hadn’t planned to stay long, a year maybe two…
An important character
Fifteen years had passed when the pandemic hit. By then, the city had become one of the most important characters in my life, a character laden with story. Everywhere, flashes of past scenes: a door, a storefront, a bench, a plaza… sparks of memory shimmering against the dark flint of consciousness. I passed apartments I’d shared with Finns and Serbs, businesses I’d opened and closed, the bus stop that witnessed the first kiss with the mother of my first child… the sites of arguments, betrayals, a wall where I smashed a phone in despair, a sidewalk where I vomited after too much sidra and patxarán, a terraza, once the site of ambitions, now an emblem of dead ends. I passed the corner where my oldest son crashed his bike into the curb and was rushed for stitches, the boca de metro where I rediscovered love with the mother of my second child. Each moment a spark in the darkness, illuminating a history that had become me. It was the virus that finally moved me out of the city.
From the town where Ilive now, I can see the giant cross at Valle de los Caídos, the monastery at El Escorial, the television tower on top of La Bola del Mundo. I can drive up and over the Puerto de Navacerrada to La Granja de San Ildefonso where I once had an icicle fight with a friend who would later die suddenly and unexpectedly, or over the Puerto delLeón to visit my friend Bob’s brewery in El Espinar where I have learned more than I ever thought possible about fermentation. I can walk the trails that Hemingway and Dos Pasos hiked during the civil war, crawl into bunkers where soldiers fought in defense of democracy. If I hike high enough, I can see the four and a half towers that mark the city’s hesitant entry into the scrum of twenty-first century skylines.
Half my life
Madrid has been the setting for nearly half my life, and now I peer down at it from the stage of the sierra. In my novel, Sophia descends from Cercedilla into the dark halls of what was once Franco’s crypt. She sees the towers peaking over the peaks of the mountains. She climbs upto the solitary pine that overlooks Los Molinos.She shares horizons that have been my own. And when she connects, unexpectedly with a beautiful woman in the Mercado Antón Martín, when she fantasizes about a stranger that she spotted on the corner of Calle Atocha, when she splits the difference between guilt and ecstasy over a plate of pulpogallego, she shares my past.
This is how it works — for me anyway — the interplay between life and art. The people you know and the places you occupy, come to occupy you and define how you know. They work their way into your words, scenes, and characters. The poetry of a place cannot help but seep in. There is no such place — that I know of — as the underground river surrounded by sparks and flint that Sophia finds herself running through, but it is what night in Madrid has so often felt like to me, a space more than a place, a mindset more than any particular architecture, and the image was born from an ancient Madrileño motto: Fui sobre agua edificada, mis muros de fuego son, esta es mi insignia y blasón.