THE WASHINGTON POST MAGAZINE 25crusty, dusty, machismo quotes and photos of his travels in
northern Spain. I flipped through it quickly and tossed it aside,
profoundly uninterested. Probably for too many years of my life, as
a traveler and a writer, I followed what Hemingway wrote a little
too closely. Now, in the middle of a pandemic, and 50 years old, it
seemed ridiculous or irrelevant, or worse. I didn’t want to kill the
night, or anything else. I just wanted to eat tapas and nap. An
endless siesta seemed perfect.B
efore my isolation in Haro, I’d spent the previous 10 days with
my friend François, a writer who lives in Madrid. François is
Belgian, but his wife, Rosa, is Spanish, and he’s lived in Spain for
many years. When I arrived in Madrid, I realized that Rosa, a
teacher, was off on a summer holiday with their daughter at her
family’s village near the southern coast. “I’m a bachelor this week,”
François said. “Estoy de Rodríguez.”
In Spain, when a man says, “Estoy de Rodríguez,” it means that
he is home alone while his wife and children are elsewhere on
vacation. It’s a corny, dated, idiomatic expression that roughly
means “When the cat’s away, the mice will play.” Some say it dates to
a mostly forgotten 1965 comedy, “The Hot Summer of Mr.
Rodríguez,” in which a husband dreams of an extramarital affair(Continued on Page 28)the pandemic — with its lockdowns and working from home and
narrowing of the world — had led to a rekindling of their relation-
ship with the siesta.
After the initial shock and scramble of travel logistics, I gave in
to the rhythm of the isolated days. I loved watching the daily
routines of the town from a distance. How the cycle of temperatures
governed the day in the cafes below, people sipping coffee in the
cool early morning, bustling through the first part of the workday,
and then a stillness in the stifling hot midafternoon, only to come
back to raucous life at twilight. Then, around midnight, as the bars
closed and the square quieted down, a cool wind always seemed to
blow into town.
My suddenly quiet nights were quite a different experience from
my other dozen or so trips to Spain. On those trips, at that hour, I
might only be finishing dinner, sipping a gin and tonic in a giant
balloon wineglass, and getting ready to head out into the night.
More than a few times over the years, I’d found myself behind a bar
at 3 a.m., mixing cocktails for a crowd of new friends. Like many
American men visiting Spain, I was perhaps channeling a boozy,
aging Ernest Hemingway, who wrote in “Death in the Afternoon,”
“Nobody goes to bed in Madrid until they have killed the night.”
Coincidentally, the only book on the apartment’s shelves was
something called “Hemingway Traveler,” a flimsy tourism paper-
back published in Spanish, Basque and English, full of the author’s