Forever Now and Now

My eyes snapped open. The sheets are churned up around me. There’s a delay. It’s deep night. . . but. . . this is not my . . . Madrid. . . oh, right. . . our midterm getaway vacation: getaway from grading adolescent essays, getaway from the stultifying on-campus housing, and getaway from the pity of the faculty. We found a cheap five-day deal. We’d never been to Spain, but we had read and reread For Whom the Bell Tolls.

The nightmare replays: We’re caught in the demonic whir of the roundabout; our exit keeps flashing past us as we spiral around frenzied, trying to leave the town. I hear the bawling first, then the fist-pounding on the back of our car. A black man bellowing, then wailing, running wildly among the cars caught in the centrifuge of the rotary. A little girl sags in his arms, limp. I recognize her. We are speeding away out of reach. I’m straining, straining to see them out the rear window as they diminished from sight. I’m screaming, “Wait, wait!”
Over the blare of the traffic noise, I hear him, “We can’t stop. We don’t know the language. We don’t know where to go.”
We are helpless.

“Snapped open”? That’s a lame cliché. But, now shut in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet, logging in on my travel journal, I can’t seem to find another useful description. They snapped open. I heard my eyelids click. I tried several methods to latch them down. I did the “tense and release” of every major muscle group that my therapist had suggested. “Try to think forward, not backward,” she suggested. Today I’m going to have hot chocolate for breakfast, yummy, satiny smooth Spanish chocolate, thick as pudding. I’m going to have it with a side of churros, crispy dough-fried spirals crusted with cinnamon sugar. My eyes snapped open. Click.

I crawled into Mark’s bed. I tucked into the curve of his torso and tried to breathe with the whispering rhythm of his breath, my love, my love. He shifted toward me smoothing his hands through my hair and over my back. “It’s all right, baby. It’s all right,” he murmured through the twilight of his sleeping. I gentled down, calmed by the stroking metronome of caresses.

His eyes blinked open, suddenly awakened to the immense journey I had made across the chasm between our beds. We touched our lips together. I felt him hard against me, yearning for me to come to him again, open, trusting. His warm gentle hands slipped between my thighs, “Please,” his lips murmured into my mouth, “Please, Rachel, I want you back. Let me.”
But, I couldn’t. I could not. I was walled in, locked down tight.
So I’m here now, shut in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet, writing.

3/ 16 Segovia
We planned a one day trip. The car rental was at the Atocha Train Station, an elegant brick building that has the old-fashioned patina of a time when travel by train was genteel. Inside a Victorian atrium is overgrown with a botanical garden. I trailed behind Mark through the station searching for the Hertz office. Already he was the happy explorer on an adventure, charting a course through the station, and occasionally stopping to ask newspaper vendors “Donde esta la location de Hertz.” Mark translated, “The office is abuelo.” We traversed through the forest of the lobby several times before we found the Hertz office on the lower level. (Mark never uses the word “lost”.) When we found the rental office the clerk at the counter enunciated, in fluent English, that abuelo is the word for grandfather and abajo means downstairs. Mark joked, “I thought it was weird that the station had car rentals in a spot designated for grandfathers. The forest in the lobby must have confused my sense of direction. Next time I’ll use satellite navigation.” Later he confessed that he had only one year of Spanish in high school.

The rental car was a new BMW. My man was very excited about that. He was the designated driver while I sat shotgun as reference librarian. In my lap was our “Spain” file with various articles from The Times, Vanity Fair, Bon Appetit, then both Fodor’s and the Eyewitness Travel Guide, as a cross reference, then the Euro-City Map of Madrid with the city exits marked, and then finally, the road map that showed us how to get to the M-30 from the A-6 to Segovia. After the mix-up at the station, I felt especially tentative about my position as navigator.

I figured Madrid is modern, and, from what I could tell, the A-6 was the ring road around the city, but I didn’t spot the A-6 exit until it was too late.
“You weren’t paying attention.”
I said, “Their signage is bad.” He was right though, I had begun to drift down into my thoughts.
The good news -- or bad -- is that in Spain there appeared to be no speed limit on the highways. Mark in his math teacher mode did some computations from kilometers into miles. According to his equations, we made up the lost time the BMW humming at ninety miles an hour.

The M-30 was easier to pick off. The vista that spread out around us was the proverbial ochre “plains of Spain” with snow-capped mountains ranging purple as the scenic backdrop. “The Sierra de Guadarrama,” I read to Mark from the guide book. “The quaternary period carved the mountains’ profiles with glacial lakes, culverts, caves and dense forests. It was in these mountains that Ernest Hemingway fought alongside the Republicans resisting the fascists during the civil war.”

“Little rabbit, thou art very beautiful now. I love thee. You are very rare,” Mark paraphrased Robert Jordan to Maria, guerilla fighters – lovers -- in Hemingway’s story about that futile conflict. Mark grabbed my hand and kissed it. “Truly.”

“So what else does it say?” asked my hero. “The landscape is noted for its enormous rock formations and walls of granite. From these stones comes the legacy of the walled cities.” Everywhere we looked, the landscape was strewn with stone giants. Occasionally the ruins of a medieval castle appeared through the car windows as we hurtled down the highway.

Along the edge of the road, on dusty footpaths near olive groves, we saw Spaniards walking and talking. In Madrid they walk and talk in the city streets and the plazas twenty-four/seven. I can’t imagine living here. Don’t they ever sleep? How can they work? Mark and I flop into bed every night exhausted from the miles we’ve logged every day trying to check off Velasquez, Goya, El Greco, Picasso and everything else on our must-see list. Meanwhile, outside our hotel window the walking and talking continues until dawn. The morning streets of Madrid certainly look like a hangover after a raucous party. The street cleaners, wearing their green pennies, are out in force sweeping up mounds of cigarette butts and bottles. But, unfortunately for Mark, picking up dog excrement isn’t one of their tasks. . .

I continue reading from the travel book, “The greatest concentration of Spain’s 2,000 castles is in this area. In the 10th and 11th centuries this region was the battleground between Moors and Christians. Villages and towns were fortified as protection against one side or the other.”
“What informathion do we have on places to eat?” he says, imitating the Castilian accent, trying to make me smile.
“Fodor’s recommends Mesón de Cándido or Casa Duque. “Cochinillo is the traditional specialty of Segovia. Don’t leave the city without sampling it.”

Food poses a problem. My appetite has been irregular for months, and Spanish cuisine does nothing to improve it. Spaniards love meat. (Mark quipped, “Thank God we’re not vegetarians.”) I might be after this trip. All kinds of sausages and hams, hanging by cloven hooves, are proudly displayed front and center in every restaurant. The largest restaurant franchise is called The Museum of Ham. Spaniards don’t shrink from death. In the bull ring they aggrandize it and ritualize it. I told Mark, “Absolutely no. No bullfights.” He took me to a Flamenco concert instead.

We decided to walk first and see Segovia, then eat. We’d already fallen into the regimen of eating a late breakfast, a very late lunch, and drinks and tapas for dinner very, very late. It was then noon. We had several hours before we’d be hungry.

In Segovia we saw, courtesy of Fodor’s and Eyewitness Travel Guide:
1. The Roman Aqueduct: “One of the greatest surviving examples of Roman engineering. It spans a total of 2,952 feet in length, and rises in two tiers to a height of 115 feet. . . “
2. The Alcάzar: “This 12th century royal castle rising sheer above crags. . . appears like the archetypal fairy-tale castle. . .”
3. The Cathedral: “Dating from 1525 this is the last great Gothic church in Spain. . . The pinnacles, flying buttresses, tower, and dome form an impressive silhouette . . .”

I chose the restaurant called Casa Duque because it looked so charming. The house was located on one of those narrow medieval streets that meander through the old walled city. Its stucco façade was a tapestry of geometric patterns in pastel colors. I read to Mark from the guide book, “Segovia is known for this carved plaster technique called scrafito. It is a remnant of Segovia’s Moorish history when it was famous for its textile designs.”

Everything about the restaurant was inviting: the warm wood-paneled bar, the crisp white linens on the tables, the army of fawning waiters in formal uniforms, the lively crowd of neighbors, and the clink of wine classes filled with the local red wine. The home-baked fragrances made us hungry.

Fodor’s didn’t elaborate about the “cochinillo”, except to say that it was a famous Spanish meal of roast pork. Not wanting to be crass tourists, we ordered the specialty, a salad, and Ribera Del Duero wine.

We lingered. We sipped our wine. We doused fresh bread in the nectar of Spain, golden olive oil flavored with bits of fresh herbs and threads of saffron. “Forty-four percent of the world’s olive oil comes from Spain,” I read. Then a hush overcame our dining room as a vanguard of servers filed in, one of them had a huge stoneware platter lifted high over his head. With a flourish the platter was presented at our table for us to admire.

Nestled in the ceramic cradle was a dead baby, a chubby suckling baby piglet, seemingly alive but napping, its skin roasted tan, splayed out in a pool of its own bodily juices. Mark peered into my face to see what kind of triage would be needed. The waiters continued their performance, oblivious to our stricken faces. The waiter raised a china plate high, and using its edge like a guillotine, severed the eviscerated body into separate servings. The silent squeal of the infant roiled my gut. Two legs, with two tiny hooves still attached, swimming in broth, appeared on plates between our fork and knife.

Words froze in my mouth: I will be strong. I will not cry. I will not vomit. I must eat this sacrifice. I swallowed one bite without chewing, followed by a swig of wine. Two bites. A swig of wine. Three bites. Wine. Four bites. Wine. About ten minutes later Mark asked for the plates to be cleared, and ordered another bottle of wine. We continued swilling down the wine. It was clear to Mark, but not to me, that I was over the edge. I swayed out of my chair. Mark stood up, enveloped me in the nest of his arms, paid the bill, and led me out.

I need to pee. After I wipe myself I look to see if there is any blood on the toilet paper. No. My mind is seared with the drama of Segovia, the cochinillo, and the African running into traffic hugging his comatose child. We were spinning around on the rotary trying to get out of Segovia, trying to find the M-30 back to Madrid. Mark said, “Somebody will take them to the hospital. We have to hope for the best.” I will be strong. I will not cry.

I’m trying to deflect the memory but my mind keeps circling back. My uterus was Molly’s tomb. In the sonogram Mark and I saw her serenely swimming and sucking her thumb. Then she ceased. During the procedure laminaria sticks of seaweed were shoved into my cervix. The violence of that pain dilated with every increment of body fluid they absorbed. After her birth, Mark held her in the palm of his hand. She was the size of a kitten. Her body was perfect in everyway, ten tiny fingers and toes. Her tiny eyes were sleeping profoundly. My hand smoothed over her satin face. My fingers inadvertently brushed her jaw, her mouth opened and closed as if she were nursing. For weeks after, my milk would let down every four hours as if Molly were keeping to an infant schedule beyond the grave.

I check the yoke of my nightgown. Dry. . . Will not. . .

I stink. Spain smokes. It has permeated every follicle of every hair on my body and every thread of my clothing. Even though it’s the middle of the night, I need a shower. The acrid sweat, the electro shock of Segovia and the remembering needs to be scrubbed away. I want to start clean. No more walls.

The hotel has a sample of body butter. It has a soothing lavender scent. I slather it over the contours of my body. Standing in front of the mirror, wearing only a towel on my head, I strike a pose, arms raised behind my head. My figure reminds me of Goya’s painting of the titillating Naked Maja with pink breasts and belly, soft and round. The hot chocolate and churros seem to be transforming my body into a voluptuous seventeenth century ideal.

I remember the day at the Prado: Mark and I joined a group of nursery school children and their teacher in front of the Maja. They were sitting in a circle on the parquet holding hands, their eyes grew bigger and bigger as they looked, first at their teacher and then at the painting. They were so adorable, soft and cuddly little munchkins.

I can feel myself smiling.

Another memory flashes into my head: a snapshot of Mark at Scarborough beach, the ocean curls in perfect blue swells behind him, his body is tawny and lean, a happy trail of blonde hair runs below his belly button and slides down into his low slung board shorts.

Rachael and Mark. Maria and Robert: At the end of the novel they vow: “Yes. For thee and for thee always and only for thee. No other thing could happen more than this; that this was all and always; this was what had been and now whatever was to come. Now. And Now.”

I tousle dry my hair. Naked, my Maja persona silently tiptoes through the night shadows to Mark’s bed. I slip under the sheets next to Mark’s warm purring body. We can try again. . . We will.