Dramatis Personae

Dramatis Personae:

Keith, or Bear, a 61 year old male

Jody, or Beaver, a 57 year old crippled female

Bloodroot, or Goat, our 27 year old son

Bird, our collapsible manual wheelchair

Tinky-Winky, my walker

Friday, February 24, 2017

Sunday, October 18, 2015 El Escorial

Today we plan to visit El Escorial, Philip the Second’s masterwork. We take the Metro to Moncloa again. After careful research (Rick Steves and the internet), we decide to take the bus, which leaves from the Moncloa metro station, instead of the train. I think that Americans fear European busses. We shouldn’t. Checking our options, we find that busses can be faster than trains and also drop you closer to your destination. Today, the bus terminal lies closer to our destination, so we choose the bus.

Reaching Moncloa, we wander up from the subway to the bus station terminal. We approach the bus driver, explaining that we need the lift. Like the bus to Bilbao, this one has a lift in the rear. The driver loads me into the bus and straps Bird onto the bus floor. She wiggles into a comfortable position. Personally, I would rather transfer to a regular bus seat (sorry, Bird!) but decide it best not to make waves.

Quite rapidly, only half an hour later, we arrive at the bus terminal in El Escorial. Using his iPhone, Bloodroot leads us down a zigzag path through the hilly streets of the town to the centrally located basin. Here, the claustrophobic medieval town flattens out into an ugly barren brick-scape, where at long last we find the monastery and palace of San Lorenzo de El Escorial.

Philip II built and named his creation after one St. Lawrence (San Lorenzo), whom the Romans roasted over a slow fire. The myth has him (St. Lawrence) calling to be turned over halfway through the process, making him the patron saint of humor. Finding the entire myth rather gross, we discuss whether Phillip II found this, and only this, funny.

Philip II considered himself the leader of the counter-reformation. He visualized a united Catholic Europe under his control, funding numerous armies to achieve this elusive and hopeless goal. Once again, times had progressed, eliminating the possibility of a return to a more medieval world, featuring one ruler and one way to believe.

His lasting fame in the English world comes from the armada he launched to depose Elizabeth I of England, forgetting that God is a Protestant. Bad weather and Sir Francis Drake scuttled Spain’s armada, thwarting Philip’s mission. His bellicose failures contributed to years of sorrow to Europe, all with the best of intentions. Brings to mind the bloated military of the USA today, busy making costly humanitarian crises and messes throughout the world.

During Philip’s time, the Church would sell anything to make a buck. Costly indulgences gave you free entry to heaven while simony bought you a nice Church office. Nothing remained sacred. Smarting from accurate Protestant charges of corruption, decadent luxury, and soft living amongst a money-mad clergy, the intensely Catholic Philip II built El Escorial as a cornerstone of the counter-reformation, austere and forbidding. He ran the Inquisition from here. While other counter-reformation edifices lured the peasants back with beauty, Philip’s work emanates power and power alone. The palace/monastery laughs at luxury and soft living. Philip II set up both his and his daughters’ bedrooms facing the basilica high altar. When they awoke, still laying abed, a mass greeted them.

As the sole uncontested world power, Spain wallowed in monetary glory in the 1500s, pumped up on tons of silver and cochineal stolen from the Americas.  But Philip’s masterwork easily swallowed the arriving treasure, leaving Spain virtually nothing to show from her Golden Age, her period of peak power and influence.

As we travel south through Spain, into the old centers of power, we leave the joy and mercy of Mary behind, in favor of a grotesque fascination with hideous pain. The sixteenth century cult of death replaces Mary with Jesus’ tortured body and ghastly fulsome depictions of martyred deaths, generally at the hands of the Romans. I grow heartily tired of these gruesome, glorified horrors. I strongly considered conversion at Montserrat, because I love Mary. Subjected to this incessant cult of death, I revert to staunch atheism. Besides, Keith says that he’ll leave if I become Catholic or adopt a cat. “What about a Catholic cat?” I query. Not amused, the Bear grimaces in a stoic silence.

Back to the palace. Thanks to both the Catholic penchant for kindness to cripples and the lack of accessibility, I enter gratis. We walk down a dimly lit hallway showing scenes of a battle that the Spanish won against the French (Battle of San Quentin). Bloodroot disappears, heeding his own inner exploration call. Due to my lack of Spanish fluency, Bear and I end up in an endless church service. We eventually escape, garnering looks of disgust from the other parishioners.

While walking through this endless, very large building made of ugly, forbidding gray stone, we enter a room where Prado curators have lovingly restored Rogier van der Weyden’s Calvary. Taking four years, the curators brilliantly resurrected the intense reds of the painting along with the beautifully crafted faces of Saints Mary and John standing at the base of the cross, crying over the dead Jesus above them. Bear basks in heaven as he views the room’s excellent explanation of the exact restoration process. Exhibits include a “before” photo of the unrestored painting, dull and grayish under the burden of six centuries of grime and dust. Gazing at the gloriously restored painting, I remain struck by the intense reds of the work. In an age preceding chemical dyes, would anyone have seen this brilliant color outside a church?

Bloodroot rejoins us. The boys visit the mausoleum downstairs, off limits to me. Keith reports descending into a solid marble crypt, as if entering a marble cave. “Quite amazing”, he says, “Eerie and beautiful at the same time.” He feels no sense of death at all. The bodies lie unseen behind highly-polished stone. Philip II built the tomb to house his family in perpetuity, but it’s already full. Perhaps he expected the world to end before now. Where will the bodies of Juan Carlos and Sofia, much less Felipe VI and Letizia, lie in state? In Sofia’s snazzy art museum?

Tiring of Inquisition ghosts, we return to the bus station, taking a far less convoluted path than we initially embraced in the light of morning. Ravenous, we eat some incredibly bad bus station food while we patiently await the 3PM bus. The busses run every half hour. When the bus arrives, the operators claim that the lift has broken, instructing us to wait for the 3:30 bus.

These older busses have lifts in their centers, where the newer lifts live at the back of the bus. At 3:30 the next bus arrives. The employees can’t work this lift either. They proffer various tools to the ascender gods, to no avail. They order another bus but can’t work the lift on it either. They turn to us, telling us to wait for the 4 o’clock bus. Realizing that the problem relates to employee incompetence, we doubt that the 4 o’clock bus will resolve our dilemma. We decide to board the bus.

The line gives way as the boys push Bird and me to the front of the bus with its daunting five steps. I stand, allowing Bloodroot and a random stranger to load me onto the bus. Bloodroot moves my feet while the other gentleman holds my torso erect to prevent me from toppling back down to the ground. I sit in the front seat closest to the driver. Keith loads a vociferously complaining Bird into the storage space under the bus. As Blanche Dubois in a so purring Southern Bourbon-filled voice long ago quipped, “I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers.”

The bus returns to Madrid. The entire trip back, I shake in terror at the thought of my impending departure from the bus. I have a bad case of the bejeebers! As usual, I worry needlessly. To exit the bus, Bloodroot holds me upright while Keith moves my legs. The driver congratulates us as we shake his hand. We ride the subway home.

We exit the metro’s shelter, stepping out into the pouring rain. Walking home a short block, we nearly drown. Arriving safely home, we dry ourselves.

The boys want me to sleep to recover from this adventure. However, the whole event has greatly unnerved me. I have a glass of wine and only then can enjoy a well-deserved nap.

Bloodroot decides to run out in the rain to return the empty bottle from the hard cider he bought Thursday. He now faces an absolute downpour. He steps in a puddle cresting the top of his boots, soaking his feet. He returns, reporting that the streets are rivers. He can’t return the bottle because the bar is closed on Sundays. He suspends his boots from the ceiling and begins attempting to dry them with a hairdryer. As an homage to Dali, Keith snaps a photo labeling the picture Son Drying with Boots.

Our neighbor Miguel drops by. “Oh,” he says, “You went out to El Escorial. That’s why Spain doesn’t have any money.”  Touché! I savor the moments when people echo what I’ve been saying all along.

Tonight, Bloodroot, finding us far too lazy and old, researches restaurant choices, seeking an interesting, high-quality place that cares about its food. He finds a restaurant called D’Fabula, which reviews alternately describe as “Bizarre” and “Delicious”. Sold, he makes a reservation. Bear and Bloodroot get a well-deserved break from cooking.

Unfortunately, the sky has opened, pouring down rain. We discuss staying indoors, at home, and cooking, but decide we should go out to celebrate our last night in Madrid. Around 8 o’clock, the clouds close up, the rain magically ceases. Fickle Spanish weather! We venture forth to the restaurant, in which as advertised, we find food both delicious and bizarre. The chef creates many quirky dishes for us with perfect wine pairings. We rejoice in finding a restaurant that cares more about glorious food than it does about fleecing tourists. Phillip II, despite his purported uber-austerity, would be jealous. We enjoy great food and wine. The restaurateurs are artists. We linger at the restaurant, staying out late (for us), the stress of our high-test traveling forgotten. We reminisce already about our stay in Madrid.


Sunday, February 12, 2017

Saturday, October 17, 2015 Museum of the Americas

On today’s agenda: The Museum of the Americas, highly recommended by a curator and friend at the Denver Art Museum (DAM).

Our centrally located Airbnb flat in Lavapiés has allowed us to thus far skip the subway. We’ve walked to every major Madrid museum. But today, we make to bravely travel farther afield (splitting infinitives as we go), beginning by venturing onto the Metro. We enter the underground system at our local entrance — Lavapiés. We buy tickets, paying for three of us, although the mega-gates for luggage and wheelchairs open following one swipe of my ticket. Good thing that we’re honest people, and pay for us all, eh?

Descending into the subway, we take the yellow line six stops to Moncloa. We find Madrid’s subway to be very nice, clean and brightly colored, by far outshining Barcelona’s. The trains don’t run as often, though. Here the train appears every six minutes while in Barcelona one stops by every three.

Leaving the subway, we cross a busy street, walk through a college campus and eventually see our quarry up on a hill. Gazing ahead, we find The Museum of the Americas not in the best of shape, looking as though it could use some exterior renovation. Bricks and mortar have worn thin, and the grounds are unkempt; to enter, we circle past many barred and shuttered doors to the only open one. We convince Bear he’s foraging.

Entering, we discover, as foretold, a unidirectional museum with displays entirely in Spanish. We begin with Columbus discovering the New World. I stick with Bloodroot this time so that he can help me with my translations. The small museum has significantly less stuff than the DAM. We find this wonderful and considerably less overwhelming. Numerous small statures refreshingly depict sex as a normal part of our existence. Some of the sculptures depict people copulating, at times, men with men. Unfortunately, we find no artwork showing women with women. Bet the Church didn’t like this. Have fun on earth? Heaven forbid!

For the grand finale, the museum displays their most prized possession, one of the three surviving Maya codices. I see a comic book-esque series of pictures with boxed-in captions in ancient Mayan, written on deer skin and involving lots of dragons. Can I make heads or tails out of it? No, but I’m excited that Diego de Landa, the Hitleresque Spanish bishop who tortured the Maya, didn’t burn everything. Ironically, de Landa preserved much Maya knowledge we have today as he fluently spoke the language and wrote about the Maya world in Spanish, before embarking upon his orgy of destruction. (For more on de Landa, copy and paste into your browser: http://theunion4ever.com/1000-centuries-of-death/diego-de-landa/)

Returning to the Metro, we travel two stops toward home on the yellow line again, exiting the subway at Ventura Rodriguez. Leaving the station, we head over to the Temple of Debod; Egypt gave Franco an actual Egyptian Temple to reciprocate for Spain’s assistance in moving the Egyptian Abu Simbel temple imperiled by the construction of the Aswan dam. Bloodroot enters the Temple and checks it out, finding it pretty cool. Unfortunately for Bear and me, everywhere we look we find stairs, small rooms and tiny doors. Bird says no way! Bear enters the Temple, looking for access for me. He returns, declaring it impossible.



While we’re waiting for Bloodroot the clouds begin to sprinkle. Perhaps moved by his goat-like instincts, Bloodroot senses now as the time to quit the temple and rejoins us. We return to the metro and head home. We put on our raincoats to get to the subway, a good move.  Unfortunately, when we exit at Lavapiés we eschew raincoats, deciding we can make it home. This turns out to be a tactical error.


But was our DAM curator Donna right? Was the museum and codex worth the soaking we received? Absolutely! Although I could be drier!


Returning to our flat, we dry off and hang our clothes to dry. (Spain has no clothes dryers.) The boys fix a nice meal. Warm, full and dry, we turn in for the night.