As I was climbing up the centenarian stairs of my apartment building in Madrid last Tuesday, luggage and under-eye circles in tow, after ten days away in Valencia, and a four-hour drive back, a new sensation came over me. It was as if I was going back to an old place in which I had once lived, like, say, my old apartment in Paris.
That moment held the feeling of something foreign that had once been familiar. When I pushed the door open, the walls seemed to cave in, as if the apartment had become smaller. I walked down the corridor that had once seemed infinite, only to find myself on the other side looking for greenery and mountains and vastness, and yearning for the smell of spring orange blossoms to invade the air like it did in our house in Alzira.
When Nico came stumbling inside with the rest of the luggage after parking our car, he slowly looked up and started walking toward me. I could see his thoughts. We looked at each other in disbelief and started laughing uncontrollably. It was an uncomfortable giggle; we had both realized how impersonal and strange our beloved Madrid felt after so much earth and family and friends and sun and rain, and many profound Holy Week processions that had made up our stay in our other home.
We sat on the sofa transfixed, wordless, immobile. At the moment, it seemed like the most daunting realization: we preferred Alzira. Wait. Did that mean that we definitely would not be living in Madrid anymore?
Now a few days have passed since we came back from checking on the progress of our home renovation in Valencia.
It’s a beautiful mess. Nowhere near done. But we love it there. So much.
We’re happy to report that we have wooden window frames, no glass yet, but we’ll soon have exterior marble window stools. Once the house is fully closed to the elements, we’ll be able to start on the inside and finish up the outside. In fact, basically all the next steps hinge on the windows being completed.
Only, did I tell you that getting the wood window frames just right was an odyssey in itself? We even went to a village near Cuenca to meet the window makers. It was this little town where everyone is basically part of the same family and everyone is a carpenter. Our builder managed to find a company that specializes in windows like the ones we wanted, because a window is not just a window.
And what kind of windows did we want, you ask? In essence, wood windows that open many ways and that have integrated shutters.
You see, a window is also potentially a beautiful frame through which you see the exterior, important when you’re pretentious enough to think you’re creating the next Garden of Eden. And functionally, it’s a portal through which the wild Valencian wind must be siphoned, as well as a point of light that must be controlled in order to sleep well.
So off we drove two hours from Valencia to Cuenca in January to discuss the gritty details of our windows. As you cruise into the town, upon spotting the first window warehouse, you think you’ve arrived because you’d never think that past that one, there is another one, and another, and another ad infinutum. And they basically all have the same name.
The owner paraded us around his warehouse, proclaiming, “these windows here are going out to Madrid tomorrow,” and indeed, the shutters were the ones typical of the Spanish capital, like the ones we have in our home. “And my brother is taking these here in iroko wood out to Mallorca next week. The Germans love this wood.”
So yes, I had a moment when I saw our glass-less window frames sitting pretty in their place at our house. Concepts turned reality and all that.
Beyond our active construction site, there is only us and our hectare of red dirt. It’s rudimentary and still, waiting for us to start planting citrus and olive trees.
In the meantime, Nico busies himself pulling out the weeds that line the fence and the irrigation canals. And I like to roam the property and see with my mind’s eye where my chicken coop will go, as well as the flower beds and herb and vegetable gardens that will make up the orchard.
I used to do that a lot as a child, plan home constellations in my imagination. Within those universes, I was a prancing queen. I’d go out back behind our apartment complex in the wooded areas. The trees would serve as posts that delineated spaces, and I would speak to make-believe people who’d come visit my palace. Yes, through this grand hall here is the entrance, sit here. What is that you ask for, a glass of water? Leonor, please bring my kind guest a glass of water.
Yes, obvi, I had staff in my dreamworld.
To a certain extent, when later in childhood I came to have Barbie houses, they rather limited me, as they were not only fixed spaces, but I was no longer the actor of my own domain; my Barbies were. Looking back, I think I much preferred the wilderness as my home, which is how our house in Alzira feels now, as I frolic from one space to the next, as if inhabiting a place, a tree-house perhaps, suspended by giant araucaria and oak tree branches.
And then, when we weren’t playing make-believe, Nico and I jumped in our car to head to the beach, just to walk along the shore, no matter that it rained on us. We were damp and happy and dunked fartons in horchata as we listened to the waves land on the sand.
Time stood still as we strolled through the Albufera rice fields observing the birds land on the water to graze, then take off in their choreographed dance. Epic sunsets landed on the far-off horizon on our evening drives through the orange fields. And when we rolled down our windows, the soft chilly breeze came dashing in, bringing with it the unbelievably intoxicating, sweet smell of the nascent azahar, the white, delicate blooms that eventually become the fruit so closely linked to Valencia.
Hanging out with Nico’s aunts, women in their late eighties and nineties, gave us the impression that we could touch a time lost. La tía Milagrín talked to us in an adorable mix of Valencian and Castilian1, thinking she was only speaking the latter so I could understand. In reality, she spoke to us with her heart. Which is why I understood her when she said in her unintelligible and toothy mélange of languages that I should have the triptych of a feminine saint placed behind her. She sensed me admiring it in her house of relics, figures and icons. She even had a bust of Pope Pius XII, who I feel like I personally knew because he was a Parisian friend’s great uncle. Same Roman aquiline nose.
It’s cool outside, cooler than in Valencia, where this week it was already warm, but today I write to you, cozy, from my couch in Madrid where I am bundled up next to my love. We’re squeezed tight on our small sofa that turns into a bed that we brought here from Paris. It felt big in the 45 squared-meter apartment we had there.
For a while now, I’ve been contemplating changing out this cream sofa for a bigger one where we can snuggle with our legs spread out, and that also allows more seating space for visitors.
But now, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll wait to see if I keep getting the lull of Valencia when we come back to Madrid. Maybe I’ll wait to see if I am not craving the vast, wide open spaces that remind me of home, of Texas, if not in landscapes, in temperament.
Maybe I’ll wait and see.
Read My Latest Posts:
Full archive HERE
Castellano, or Castilian, is what what they call in Spain what is mostly known in the rest of the world as Spanish. Español is also used, but mostly people prefer to differentiate between castellano and all the other regional languages spoken in Spain: namely, Catalan, Basque, and Galician. Valencian, what a lot of people speak in Valencia, is a dialect of Catalan, though some would claim its the other way around. In that sense, all of those are also Spanish, as they are languages spoken in Spain. Confused yet? Suffice it to say that they speak a lot of languages in Spain, and I only speak Castilian.
100% de acuerdo, Viví algo parecido en el momento que tenía las dos casas. La de Madrid acabó sobrando ;)