neck not over my head. I don’t want to carry the stereotype too far but I will need the scarf if I go into a church, that’s one time where Catholicism and Islam aren’t so far apart. The dark, handsome bellboy with the gleaming black hair touches his cap in a salute as I walk toward the elevator. All the bellboys are dark and handsome. They look like bullfighters are supposed to look, their movements graceful and proud when they pick up a suitcase or unlock the door of your room and bow you inside, their eyes smoldering, glances full of a kind of contained passion that seems to suggest I would like to take you in my arms and call you mi amor.
Mmm, this country is great for the fantasy life. In the lobby, with the brocade and velvet sofas and chairs, and gleaming candle holders and glittering chandeliers, and Persian rugs, you can think you may have just walked into some palace out of the past. The women, are they guests or maybe hookers off duty, wear stark colors, white, black, or red, with lace shawls, their necks curved and mobile like swans, their hair piled all the way to heaven, the earrings swinging like huge pendants, and the way they stand, at once dignified and disdainful, slightly curved bodies in a maddening pose that has to be a threat and a challenge that if I were a man I would answer with violence, would be all over them in a moment, dragging them off to a bedroom and tying them to the posts of the bed. The men are sexy too, in dark suits and gleaming shirts, erect, centered, quiet, watching from beneath lowered eyelids, like that one at the desk who has just flicked his eyes my way for the tiniest of seconds, cool, a bullfighter surely for they say this is the hotel where bullfighters stay.
Do we ever escape our tradition? Our past? Or do we just drag it around like a huge suitcase on wheels, getting larger and heavier every year and more difficult to pull? I cross the street into a charming square named Plaza Santa Ana. So many names are a mystery here but at least Reina Victoria is familiar to me from the British nuns who never tired of telling us their convent was founded under Queen Victoria. There are stone and iron benches under leafy trees full of older people, and the beggar sitting on the ground, hair grizzled and white, his cap before him, looks up with an expression that takes me right back to Kabul to the one who used to sit on the same corner of our street in Sharinaw every day and look up as we walked by him on the way to school and his eyes stuck a needle into my heart, they were so sad, so full of pain mixed with faith, or a desperate hope, waiting for a reward in Jinat but now resigned to sitting in the dirt, to the laughs of young girls like my sisters, hurrying along, happy without knowing it because they are clean and well fed and dressed and I am the one to stop, stare into those eyes which silently teach me about my own mortality, and I hand over the pocket money I was going to use for sweets at the Indian spice shop, and then hurry down the street. We never once spoke, the beggar and I, though he was there for a year or more, and then one day he was gone, and that night I prayed that his soul was in Jinat, with the arms of the grape trees bending toward his mouth, the maidens holding him, rocking him to sleep at night, telling him that life had only been a bad dream and now at last he was really awake.
The question for me in Madrid was Am I awake? Is this really me, alone in a foreign city with no man to tell me what to do, no brother and no husband and no uncle and no strange man who insists on calling me sister, can I help you sister. I am free for a change, free abroad for the first time in my life without anyone to make demands. It’s nice to be alone with no sisters at my elbow, jabbering about relatives or borrowing money or trying to drag me to yet another mall to find just the perfect bargain in leather pants or jade earrings. Do they have malls here? I haven’t seen any yet, but maybe they’re in the suburbs if they have suburbs here. I know nothing about this city, nothing about this country, nothing about these buildings, with their ornate facades. I wonder what they call this architecture. I wonder what history these buildings contain. We never studied architecture and we never studied our own history very much and certainly not the history of Europe. Only Alexander the Great, how we were the only ones to defeat him, and the only ones to defeat the British and we did that twice. Aren’t we wonderful, we defeat everyone including ourselves, but nobody talks about that. Our history. I hated that long list of dates of battles and of emirs and shahs and poets and holy men, Timur and Ghengis Khan and Dost Mohammed and Rumi, but nothing about who they really were or how treated their wives and daughters.
The directions from the desk clerk are clear. I am to walk down this street named Calle de las Huertas, meaning what? I pass tiny restaurants and plenty of small stores, boutiques, with jewelry, scarves, jackets, shawls, and shoes, wonderful shoes but not shoes you could walk in, not with those heels, not on these cobblestones. It’s wonderful to walk where you want and have no men sidle up to grab your arm or push against your breast or call you a bad name for being alone. The men on the street don’t all look like actors as did those in the hotel, but I like their discretion, the way they look at me, see me, but not with a stare, more of a glance, a slight smile, of appreciation perhaps? I look good today. I know I look good when I am not working and harassed. They are wondering: is she one of us or a foreigner? The people are mixed here, you can see the combinations clearly in the body types, the skin tone, the hair color, the slightly beaked noses, the full lips that whisper of North Africa. A few are blondes but not real blondes. The kind of blondes you get in any dark country where hair coloring and peroxide drip to the roots.
I reach the archway the clerk mentioned and go through the shade of a tunnel and out into the sunlight of a huge square. The Plaza Mayor. What an amazing space! Enormous buildings with arcades and balconies and on one of them, huge paintings of nude women climbing and twisting up the facade. It’s like a stage setting for a great pageant. I see women in long, full dresses, holding silk parasols in one arm while the other is entwined with that of a man in a frock coat and top hat who carries a walking stick. You expect carriages with drivers and lackeys in uniform, the hooves of horses clattering over the cobblestones, while on those balconies women with enormous piles of hair and diamond necklaces drink champagne from crystal flutes and smile down on their inferiors. Right now the plaza seems both empty and full of life, café tables with bright awnings spill out of arcades, waiters in black jackets and white aprons hurry along with trays of food and drinks, guitarists, bongo drummers, and violinists play furiously with their instrument cases open on the ground to catch coins, painters at easels sketch portraits of bulky tourists, groups of furtive men in tweed jackets and hats, in this weather? cluster in a corner of a far arcade, arguing heatedly, buying, selling something small, very small—but what? coins? stamps? drugs?
I avoid the cafes for a stone bench not far from a bronze statue of a man on a rearing horse. Women alone in outdoor cafes are prostitutes, aren’t they; or taken for prostitutes. It’s the same thing. If I sit here I won’t have to deal with waiters or other foreigners like me, Americans or Brits who will no doubt ask where I am from. It’s a circular bench, a ledge really, around a tall iron street lamp. The sun is just sinking behind the buildings that line the square. I sit down next to two mothers with squalling babies in strollers. On my other side a very old one armed man who badly needs a shave and wears a summer jacket with the sleeve neatly pinned to the shoulder lights a match by flicking it with his thumb, then touches it to the cigarette in his lips, one of those foul smelling smokes that might as well be a cigar. Beyond the women is a figure I glimpse when sitting down. Benjamin. This is our famous meeting, but at the time all I know is that it’s someone who is very aware of me and wants me to be aware of him, only I want to be alone so I can enjoy the buildings and the space and the doings of Plaza Mayor without having to think or talk or be social.
One thing in life is certain: you are never alone for long. A slender young man with long, messy blonde hair approaches and asks do I speak English. He has a slight accent that I don’t recognize. I say yes and he stands in front of me with his head tilted slightly to the right as if there is something wrong with his neck, and his arms hang by his side, and his fingers twitch, and he begins a story about what sad and difficult things have happened to him here in Spain in the last few days. He is Dutch, and this was his last big vacation before going to work, he has wanted to come to Spain all his life. He starts a job next week, back home, in computers, software, but three days ago his backpack was stolen in a youth hostel, and his wallet was in the backpack, but the people running the hostel wouldn’t believe him and threw him out, and when he went to the cops they shrugged and said you Dutch are rich, just
