memoirs, 1933–77 ❧ 27
fi nally [we land at] the airport at Madrid. Painful crassness of the Ameri-
can Airlines employees, better avoided. [I met] a pretty Spanish hostess to
whom I delivered the wedding veil confi ded to me in Rome, [went through]
the usual formalities of customs and money, and [took] the autobus ride
into Madrid. Little was yet to be seen of Madrid but the bloated elegance of
some South American metropolis and a few ruins from the civil war. Settled
in my Spanish-American hotel—as it turns out, only a few blocks from the
street in which Scarlatti died—I collapsed into a bath and clean clothes and
went to bed for an hour, thinking briefl y of the ruins I had seen in Tivoli the
night before, of the sweetness of Rome as compared with this hard, bitter
metropolis.
Later I ventured out into the murderous sunlight, only to go a few blocks,
slinking behind patches of shadow and taking refuge in a café. Abandoning
all hopes of exploration until the cool of the evening, I retired for an indi-
gestible Spanish-international hotel lunch and a siesta troubled by constant
and insistent thirst. Late in the afternoon, I set out through the back streets,
still blistering hot, wandering from one vista of tile-roofed eighteenth-century
Spain, past explosions of baroque doorways, through barren facades to dingy
churches, through the decayed Plaza Mayor with its indescribable fecundity
of odors and milling Spaniards, uphill and down out of the sun, persever-
ing, footsore, until I caught sight of the Royal Palace, its white marble balus-
trades brilliant against the sky, with the Spanish plain and mountains behind,
scorching in the afternoon sun. A curious mixture of grandeur and vulgarity,
much grander when one thinks of Juvarra’s original drawings and the fantasy
that welled up before their pedantic systemization and execution. Around
the palace, slightly run down and chipped with artillery fi re, [I was] fortifi ed
by a fearful variety of helados and citric acid; then down to the Paseo, foot-
sore and weary, [I] hobbled back to the hotel.
This morning I visited two churches, S. Martin, where Scarlatti is proba-
bly buried, and S. Ildefonso. The plainchant is particularly beautiful for it is
done without accompaniment, probably because the organs were destroyed
in the civil war. Evidently, both churches were desecrated and pillaged, for
the altars are new, hideously gilt in a cheap imitation Baroque style. I can
never enter a Spanish church without a chill of horror at the waves of bigotry
and religious intensity that assail one at the door with all the tangibility of a
physical phenomenon. Like an odor or a sound, the composite sight of the
kneeling, praying people, the intensity of their concentration and preoccu-
pied gestures, contrasted with the impersonality of the ritual and the raucous
boys’ plainchant, produces an immediate corporeal reaction. Spanish mysti-
cism is supersensuous, a heightening of all the bodily and spiritual sensibili-
ties, never a divorce. The old woman in a shabby mantilla, kneeling with both
knees on the pavement before me; the unctuous fat priests in their magnifi -
cent old robes; evidently the only church furniture salvaged or restored from
the fury of the atheists; the spastic, twisting and grimacing in his wheelchair
near the altar; the market woman in espadrilles with a fi lthy handkerchief
laid over her head; a constant procession of old women muttering prayers
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rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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