We’re turned out at seven in the morning from the Cruz Roja auberge in Catalayud, but I’m well rested, having gone to sleep at ten the night before. There’s frost on the ground and an icy mist in the air that makes me happy again to not be camping in the hills nearby.
That said, my money isn’t due until the evening, thanks to an eight-hour time difference between my bank and I. Jesus and I walk around for a while, to stay warm as much as anything, before I finally give up and drop my pack next to a comfortable enough chair in the train station. Jesus stops in from time to time during the day to talk, and the rest of the time I spend reading. Around five Jesus leaves for good, to a different charity run by las monjas this time, in search of another bed and another meal. It’s not an easy life; if travelers think having to sort out hostel reservations and ticket times is stressful, they should try doing so with no money. There is, in fact, a whole sin casa network of underground information, something like the old hobo codes in the States during the Great Depression; show up in a new town, sufficiently ragged to be accepted as a fellow vagabond, and you’ll be treated to reams of information as to the restaurants that give away free food after closing, the churches that open their doors on cold nights, the monasteries and convents that provide beds for the poor, the state services and the rules that accompany them, and the best ways to circumvent those rules.
But at six or seven I leave that network when an email informs me I now have money. I book a ticket to Madrid on the night train and eat the last of my bread and cheese en route, while breaking into a new book: Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, which is impossibly entertaining and unspeakably horrifying in equal measures. The first fourth of the book takes me all the way to Madrid.
Most of the hostels here have one simple purpose: to provide a place for people to fall asleep after a night, and possibly a morning, of hard drinking. Beds are utilitarian and crowded, as many as will fit, into small, plain rooms that nearly always have at least two or three people sleeping off a binge in one corner or another. Every hostel advertises pub crawls, sometimes in multiple flavors, and each boasts one version or another of a claim to being the best party hostel in the city.
But it’s a place to sleep, and I’ve long since gained the gift of sleeping through drunken roommates stumbling in at all hours of the morning. I even join one of the pub crawls, figuring it’s an experience I might as well have sooner or later. The “pubs” are loud bars, with a lot of flashing lights and electronic music, mostly full of other backpackers. What little conversation there is takes place outside, in clouds of cigarette smoke and shivering clumps of underdressed tourists. One of our fellow pub crawlers comes out of the bar swearing and goes off in a corner to sulk — a girl he was trying to sleep with has apparently started crying and gone home, and he views it as a personal slight. I stay with the crawl until the last stop, an artificial-smoke-filled club lanced with green lasers, and, tired, leave after a few minutes to walk home by myself.
On the walk back the difference between these two nights strikes me keenly. The people weren’t so very different — whatever proverbs may say, I’ve seen no evidence of poverty granting virtue. Maybe it was the means. In Catalayud, we had little — and my companions far less than I did — so things like hot soup and a comfortable bed became luxuries. In Madrid, the expectation for many young travelers is fun, drunkenness, and free sex, and when any of those things is denied, it’s cause for unhappiness. What does this mean, exactly? Jesus and my Romanian friends aren’t sages or saints, just normal people on hard times. It’s pretentious in the extreme to romanticize poverty from a perspective of wealth, but there is something to be learned from going without for a bit: there is happiness to be had in the very simple things, if we can just get past all the noise and flash of the luxuries we’re supposed to want.
I spend a few more days in Madrid, though I don’t book another pub crawl. Instead, I walk around, to cafes here and there, to some of the city’s famous art museums, where I have my first real personal encounter with the works of Picasso and Goya and Dalí. Picasso’s works are strange and fascinating, requiring you step back and bend your head and stand in confused attendance. Goya is realer than life, full of a liquid physical light and a playfully metaphorical dark; Dalí is entrancing, full of meaning I’m not quite able to grasp, full of detail that hints at realism but is warped by the special properties of space in Dalí’s universe. Every one of his later works is the clean-edged creation of a divine madman.
Madrid itself is, at first glance, a somewhat dirty and unassuming kind of city, with a brusque and utilitarian air that reminds me at times of Queens or certain parts of London. There’s a giant palace on one side, swarming with tourists and somewhat the worse for wear, and a cathedral that only looks the part from certain angles. But every now and then, I get a glimpse, through gateways and church doors, into cavernous and elegant interiors and garden-filled courtyards. I’m told by a local that there was a time here when taxes were determined based on what could be seen of a place from the outside, and so many buildings were set up to look poor from without while being luxurious within.
Overall, that’s the impression of Madrid I come away with. There’s a hard shell around the heart of the city, and it’s easy as a tourist to just bounce around outside it. But I have a feeling that, if you were to live here, and if you were to let it, the city would open itself up to you and show you what it’s really about.
