Madrizzz
I dream of sleep
The past few months are a blur. Warmer nights, mosquito bites, ocean dips, and my dinners edging ever closer towards midnight due to lasting daylight hours and the heat.
But in the end, we made it out of the Andalusian suburbs. In fact, I’m back in big cities for the summer. First up Madrizzz (pronounced with a lisp at the end if you are one of the locals). We have been staying at my friend’s place since the beginning of June. Getting off the train at Madrid Atocha station, the hustle and bustle of a Sunday afternoon in a 3-million people metropolis fit like a second skin. A sorely needed one after weeks and weeks of exposure to beach sand had chafed me raw (I know now, once and for all, that I do NOT care to live near the beach).
I could talk about the book fair and libraries and exhibitions and free concerts and vintage shops we’ve crammed into the past month or so. Or the delight upon discovering a local cafe that stocks Oatly oat milk! But that would be the same old as what I wrote about back in London. Plus, I don’t have the energy to auto-analyse with the appropriate level of self-deprecation what my obsession with one specific oat drink says about me. So instead, I offer a portrait of what makes Madrid unique in three parts.
Madrid is Sunday mass on a side walk. Since we emerged from the Iglesia metro station in early June to turn onto our street, it has felt as if we live in a tonic water commercial. The walk to our front door is a riot of outdoor bars: voluminous hair flung over sun-kissed shoulders poking out of dainty linen waistcoats in beige and whites combined with tasteful trousers, no flip flop in sight. The scene is framed by rectangular street grids, straight like church pews, bordered by 4-storey residential buildings with wrought-iron balconies. Even the metro is prim and proper, usually half-empty and air-conditioned. On Sunday nights we fall asleep with the echo of free piano concerts in our ears. On Mondays we wake with the cries of a million swallows flitting across the baby blue morning skies hoovering mosquitos out of the air.
Madrid is a dried dog poo smeared across the neat tiles covering the city’s side walks. A hint at the scatological habits displayed by the city’s residents when nobody’s watching. Most residential buildings in Madrid are built around a central open space. This architecture + the unbearable heat (32+ C ever since we arrived) = too much auditory information about what happens when neighbours retreat behind their cream-coloured facades. One day spent behind our closed doors but with our windows wide ajar presents a cacophony of snorts and farts and squirts and coughs echoing all the way into the shared lift, filling the knowing silence as you ride downstairs with a neighbour you don’t know and yet know too well. The inevitability of the interior patio.
Madrid is a constant state of shudders. Shudders of disgust as tiny droplets of questionable condensation drop onto your bare arms from residential air con units while you walk down the street to the supermarket pressed against building walls to exploit even the slightest suggestion of shade. Shudders of shock as you step out of the house and the heat rising off the streets bakes you like a pottery dish until your skin cracks. Shudders followed by shivers as you step onto a 15C cooled bus, wondering how you’re ever going to get through this furnace of a summer without catching a cold. And finally shudders of resignation as you realise that you’re not going to sleep this night either, as you endlessly switch between turning on the air con, opening the window, raising the shutters, lowering the shutters, switching off the air con, putting on the ceiling fan and inserting your ear plugs all in a desperate attempt to reach a sleep-conducive balance between the right temperature and low levels of light and noise pollution.
The best thing about being here though, is how easy it is to navigate the different sides of Madrid, switching back and forth between the original-language cinema, the dentist, the hardware store, the cookie cafe, the artificial wave pool, the gym, the vintage shop and supermarket, all within a 15-minute walk radius. So no matter what disasters or delights I’m experiencing, I can make it through them setting one foot in front of the other.