there, about two feet from each other, yet so very separate. I watched the smudge of moonlight through the tiny window for hours as the train lurched across the land. I thought how strange the shadows looked, how even the lumps my feet made in the thin blanket seemed unfamiliar and disconnected.
I kept my sweatshirt tucked close around my nose to ward off the smell, preferring death by suffocation to toxic inhalation. As sleep began to play with my eyelids, I had the hazy sensation that the walls were converging, mummifying my body in glass and plastic shadows.
The banging on the door sounded distant at first, like a nearly forgotten dream, but when it persisted I half-consciously opened my eyes and stared into the darkness. It must have been 3 or 4 in the morning, and I’d only just fallen asleep. I groaned and tried to ignore the pounding, but after several rounds of it my roommate rose, unhooked the latch and let the greenish light flood our room. I barely registered the low, hurried voice of the train attendant, her stilted English muffled by the night, but I jolted up from the mattress when I heard her whisper to my roommate: “Excuse me please, but the police. They want to speak to you. They need for you to come. Yes, please can you go outside now?”
“Excuse me please, but the police. They want to speak to you.”
Of course, I thought. Of course the foreign police want to interrogate my roommate in the middle of the night, in a land I don’t recognize, in this tiny room where nobody knows my name or my story. I could hear the heavy coats and tense murmuring of the officers shuffling in the hallway. For several minutes, the attendant wove fragmented English and clumsy French into her native Spanish, a language I’d known the day before, but which now seemed distant and impenetrable. Recognizing the confusion in my roommate’s eyes, I leaned toward the door and tried to translate the English into French for her. After one or two fumbled words, I remembered I didn’t speak French and sheepishly retreated to my mattress to hide.
And yet, without further conversation, they left her. Never mind, they said. We’re sorry. While I was relieved to see them go, it was rather alarming to find myself locked into this space with a possible fugitive from the law and only Croque to protect me. Sleep did not come for a long time. The train axles moaned wearily and the darkness felt wet and cold on my skin. Yet the air seemed fresh and tinged with adventure. I thought about what it means to be alone, and what it means to be alive, and I felt the two were joined somehow, in the world of this room, in the smells and the breathing and the purple air.
In the morning, Spain came bounding through the window in streaming, giddy strides. My first view of it was the sunrise—turquoise sky and orange hills, and the spray of foamy light on the cabin walls. The train whistle made musical punctuation. I touched the crisp page in my passport where the blank space had been surprised by an inky-red Madrid stamp. My eyes itched from the sleepless hours, but I woke Croque and folded my bed back into the wall neatly, watching my roommate bundle her son into her arms and disappear into the Spanish morning.
The room was suddenly quite empty, yet it seemed friendly, like it knew me somehow. As Croque and I moved slowly into the crowds and colors and voices, we let ourselves be swept up, feeling very much alive.
LAUREN GUZA graduated from Middlebury College in 2005, with a degree in English/creative writing. Her travel-writing career began when she was about 3. She would follow her imaginary friends around the back yard, making up stories about their adventures. Lauren teaches high-school English in Los Angeles, as a member of Teach for America. She plans to spend the next few years teaching, writing and wandering the world—with both real and imaginary friends.
Madrid
Life as a Metro Musician
garrick aden-buie
my voice echoes down the tunnel that connects lines 2 and 10 of Metro de Madrid, filling up the space left empty by the stale air and white-tiled walls. Fifty meters above me, it’s a January afternoon in Spain, cold and clear.
Down here, I’m singing classic American rock songs and playing guitar in the subway. My stage is the longest passageway in the entire metro network, without the typical moving sidewalks that would drown out my acoustic guitar and ruin my chances of eating the supper I’m singing for.
A short, elderly woman, wearing an oversized mink coat that swishes lazily against her hips, drops a coin in the guitar case at my feet. A group of rowdy boys walks by behind her and starts singing in mumbled approximations of English words. I dance with them for a moment, not caring if they throw some coins my way. After all, I’m a metro musician in Madrid, and I am living a dream.
I’ve always had a peculiar fascination with the concept of imposing music on a disinterested, passive crowd. When I visited New York City, I spent nearly an entire day in Times Square listening to a Boyz II Men wannabe band belt out gospel standards in four-part harmonies. Years later, I went to Montreal and ended up following around a street performer who banged away on a cheap acoustic guitar in minus-10-degree weather, singing pop tunes for drunken college students. Neither was that good. It was the idea of playing to the unknown faces of the casual passersby that attracted me.
After all, I’m a metro musician in Madrid, and I am living a dream.
Now it’s my junior year abroad in Madrid, and I’ve discovered metro musicians: Eastern Europeans slinging accordions and car-hopping metro trains; gypsy vocalists singing off-key a capella through karaoke amplifiers; a German opera singer wailing in dissonant harmonies that can be heard over metro rumblings two cars away. My dream, once an idle fascination, is staring me in the face. Every station I walk through, every street corner in the center of Madrid, every empty bench in every park looks to me like a potential stage. Spaces like these simply don’t exist in my hometown in Pennsylvania.
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