parada

The elementary school where I work four days a week is in Perales del Rio, a tiny bedroom community outside of a suburb of Madrid. If I were to hop in a car, it would take me about fifteen minutes to get from my downtown apartment to my school. Since I don't have a car, I spend a little under an hour in commute each way in a foot-subway-bus combo. At first it seemed awful, but I got used to it and eventually came to actually enjoy it. It's a good opportunity to get some reading in,and occasionally I cross paths with some interesting people.

As I approached the bus stop in Perales the other day, a woman of seventy or so, looking rather agitated, began throwing questions at me before I had even stopped walking. She´d been waiting for this damned bus for nearly half an hour, she said, and was losing patience.  She supported herself unsteadily on a garled wooden cane and was missing several teeth. Her clothes were neat but simple. I told her the bus would arrive in about ten minutes.

´I remember when this area was nothing but open field,´ she says, gesturing to the little village, whose architecture and young trees indicate no more than twenty years. ´The city was smaller then.´ She says the same thing has happened to downtown Madrid, where she has spent her entire life. ´There was a public hospital on Atocha Street, right by my house.´ She´s wistful. ´Now they´ve moved it to the middle of nowhere.´ Everything in Madrid´s city center has been slowly migrating into the peripheral areas, she laments. ´I´d never leave downtown if it were up to me. But a good friend lives way out here and doesn´t like to come into the city. I didn´t have kids because I didn´t want to complicate my life, and now my friends complicate it for me. But it´s nice to see old friends.´

It´s not all reminiscing, though. Although she remembers the city as smaller, maybe more quaint, she spent her youth under an oppressive dictatorship. ´I saw people starving. Dying of hunger in the streets. Sick and dying.´ Spain´s fascist regime, which lasted forty years and fell only upon the death of leader Francisco Franco in 1975, was initially intensely isolationist, cutting off international trade and further stifiling an economy already ravaged by civil war. In the latter half of Franco´s reign, the economy grew, but this growth was enjoyed largely by the upper classes. ´You weren´t yet in the world, honey, but believe me, it was hard.´

A couple of years ago Levi and I had lunch with an retired neighbor in Zafra, a stately, sweatervest sort of fellow with a modest but very comfortable downtown flat. He showed us the Franco-era pistol he keeps in a velvet lined box and his collection of Franco coins, lamenting that those were better times, before the euro, before these liberal Popes and progressive governments, when people had money and stability and Spanish culture was at its most glorious heights. Those were the days.