Madrid Again by Soledad Maura

Author:Soledad Maura
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781951627270
Publisher: Arcade
Published: 2020-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

11

I TOOK A TAXI TO my mother’s house in Madrid around ten the following morning. Some people had large groups of family and friends waiting for them at Barajas who received them with kisses and signs, and even balloons, but not me. My mother had been waiting for me impatiently at home. I knew from experience she had been awake for hours, periodically peering out the window of her 1950s brick apartment building, “just in case.” This building was the most recent incarnation of the downsizing that had beset our family’s former grandeur in Spain. The history of my family was one of shrinkage: financial, residential, and biological. My grandparents and great-grandparents had had estates on Mallorca and private townhouses in Madrid near the Prado Museum. The women had their clothes made at Fortuny, and Worth in Paris. The men had tailors in London.

We had lost the original apartment that my mother, and later I, intermittently, grew up in years before, and my grandfather and aunt had moved into what was now my mother’s place. Both of them were my homes, the only semi-permanent places there had been in my life. After three decades of living and working in the United States, my mother had finally made it back to Spain and stayed. The landscaping around the building made me happy: palm trees, cacti, and hydrangeas. Its dry southern air calmed me.

I was greeted by Concha, who looked after my mother and was from Extremadura, who gave me kisses and a big smile. She was in her early sixties, and had been a beauty in her time. She was still impeccably turned out, even to come work at our house. She looked a hundred times better than most of the señoras she had worked for. And she had raised three children on her own. Yet the most amazing thing about her—which I remembered each time I arrived from the States and then forgot as I got used to Spain and its paradoxes—was that she was illiterate. How she managed, I had no idea. She’d only confirmed this twice. The first time when we tried to give her a shopping list, and the second while lamenting that she had no man in her life and that internet dating was off-limits to her because she couldn’t read or write. She left her husband years ago for the owner of bar, but then he had left her, and her husband wouldn’t have her back.

Concha stepped aside and there was my mother, waiting. She had a debilitating neuromuscular disease, which had appeared out of the blue when she was sixty and forced her to retire early. She was physically fragile now, but ever beautiful with her dark hair and sparkling eyes, and her mind was sharper than ever. I embraced her and we both began to cry, and then to laugh at the fact that we were crying. Here she was, the same woman who had been an independent young mother in New England and who played with me in the snow.

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