Читать книгу Spain from a Backpack - Mark Pearson - Страница 15

Madrid

Close Quarters

lauren guza

two months into my study-abroad program in England, I was convinced of my own invincibility. After all, I’d ridden the London subway without getting caught in the automatic doors more than twice. I’d trained myself to look to the right first when crossing the street. And I’d learned to speak British with admirable fluency.

When the university announced we would be given a week free from classes to focus on preparing for exams, I promptly booked a train ticket to Spain. I set out for Waterloo Station muttering flimsy justifications about the value of life experience. Dawn hadn’t yet seeped through the gray stillness, and the coming day was deep and wide and inviting. I scoffed at the airplanes taking off from Heathrow, cutting the sky with their hard upward angles. How blind those people are, I thought. Think of what they miss from 30,000 feet.

The first leg of the trip, from London to Paris, involved an anticlimactic passage under the English Channel. The conductor warned us that soon we would all be descending into the darkest depths of oceanic transportation, and anybody who suffered from claustrophobia, back pain, pregnancy or a really painful paper cut should please alert an attendant if requiring assistance. After this deliciously ominous introduction to the Chunnel, it was a bit disappointing when the 20-minute ride revealed itself to be not unlike a Los Angeles freeway tunnel at midnight.

I’d been ridiculously conservative in allowing myself most of the day to get to my connecting train, so I ended up spending six hours huddled beside my suitcase in the alarmingly cold Paris station, forced to keep warm by eating gooey chocolate pastries. I had christened the suitcase “Croque” (pronounced “Craaaawk,” with an obnoxious American accent), in honor of the perfectly melted croque-monsieur sandwich I’d eaten at a sidewalk café—and because I had to call him something when I spoke to him.

Despite its allure, Paris was merely a word printed on my itinerary, a logistical connection necessary for reaching my ultimate destination: Madrid. A red-gold name that made me think of spiced afternoons and Hemingway stories and orange peels. When the electronic board finally informed me that my train would leave in five minutes from Platform 7, I dragged lazy Croque toward the tracks, and within seconds was spectacularly lost, trying to communicate my situation to a nearby employee. My knowledge of French is derived almost entirely from Pepé Le Pew cartoons, and this particular fellow seemed to think my frantic inarticulateness was quite comedic. When I finally wrestled directions out of him, sprinted to my platform and leaped wildly through the train doors, I had only a moment to revel in oxygen-depleted glory before the engine began to nudge us out of the station.

Staggering down the narrow hallway, I located the door of the cabin that would be mine for the overnight trip to Madrid. I threw it open, peered inside and realized quite suddenly that when I’d called to book a bedroom, they’d thought I said closet. I, though perfectly accustomed to college dorm rooms and childhood games of sardine, could not believe that a space so small was meant to contain human life. It was about eight feet wide, and two pairs of chairs, metal with cracked polyester cushions, faced each other in such a way that any two people sitting in them would rub knees. The walls were plastic painted to look like wood, and trimmed with grooves that suggested four fold-out beds might actually emerge into this mouse hole. A single sink, sterile and separate, seemed to smirk at me from the corner. The windows were shrouded in stiff, institutional curtains. The closet’s purple shadows were barely dissipated by its one naked light bulb.

And suffocating the cabin with her wide, full body and expressionless face was The Woman—and her smell. It was a thick, fleshy odor, a scent of sweat petrified in crevices of skin. My breath caught in me, and I resisted the urge to run, thinking that might be rude. She’d nodded in my direction when I first opened the door, but now seemed barely to notice me as I wedged Croque into a corner. We were sharing space, sharing air, sharing lives, and yet her eyes wouldn’t meet mine. It occurred to me that perhaps she didn’t speak English, but even my nervous Spanish and barely existent French seemed only to confuse her, so we resorted to a vague vocabulary of grunts and shy smiles. She busied herself with her baby, whom I hadn’t noticed at first, but who now gurgled and bubbled at me through rolls of skin and saliva.

Though it was still early, I dove onto the top bunk the moment the attendant flipped it down from the wall. After contributing to the heavenly aroma in the cabin by changing her young son’s diaper, my roommate turned out the light, and we lay there, about two feet from each other, yet so very separate. I watched the smudge of moonlight through the tiny window for hours as the train lurched across the land. I thought how strange the shadows looked, how even the lumps my feet made in the thin blanket seemed unfamiliar and disconnected.

I kept my sweatshirt tucked close around my nose to ward off the smell, preferring death by suffocation to toxic inhalation. As sleep began to play with my eyelids, I had the hazy sensation that the walls were converging, mummifying my body in glass and plastic shadows.

The banging on the door sounded distant at first, like a nearly forgotten dream, but when it persisted I half-consciously opened my eyes and stared into the darkness. It must have been 3 or 4 in the morning, and I’d only just fallen asleep. I groaned and tried to ignore the pounding, but after several rounds of it my roommate rose, unhooked the latch and let the greenish light flood our room. I barely registered the low, hurried voice of the train attendant, her stilted English muffled by the night, but I jolted up from the mattress when I heard her whisper to my roommate: “Excuse me please, but the police. They want to speak to you. They need for you to come. Yes, please can you go outside now?”

“Excuse me please, but the police. They want to speak to you.”

Of course, I thought. Of course the foreign police want to interrogate my roommate in the middle of the night, in a land I don’t recognize, in this tiny room where nobody knows my name or my story. I could hear the heavy coats and tense murmuring of the officers shuffling in the hallway. For several minutes, the attendant wove fragmented English and clumsy French into her native Spanish, a language I’d known the day before, but which now seemed distant and impenetrable. Recognizing the confusion in my roommate’s eyes, I leaned toward the door and tried to translate the English into French for her. After one or two fumbled words, I remembered I didn’t speak French and sheepishly retreated to my mattress to hide.

And yet, without further conversation, they left her. Never mind, they said. We’re sorry. While I was relieved to see them go, it was rather alarming to find myself locked into this space with a possible fugitive from the law and only Croque to protect me. Sleep did not come for a long time. The train axles moaned wearily and the darkness felt wet and cold on my skin. Yet the air seemed fresh and tinged with adventure. I thought about what it means to be alone, and what it means to be alive, and I felt the two were joined somehow, in the world of this room, in the smells and the breathing and the purple air.

In the morning, Spain came bounding through the window in streaming, giddy strides. My first view of it was the sunrise—turquoise sky and orange hills, and the spray of foamy light on the cabin walls. The train whistle made musical punctuation. I touched the crisp page in my passport where the blank space had been surprised by an inky-red Madrid stamp. My eyes itched from the sleepless hours, but I woke Croque and folded my bed back into the wall neatly, watching my roommate bundle her son into her arms and disappear into the Spanish morning.

The room was suddenly quite empty, yet it seemed friendly, like it knew me somehow. As Croque and I moved slowly into the crowds and colors and voices, we let ourselves be swept up, feeling very much alive.

LAUREN GUZA graduated from Middlebury College in 2005, with a degree in English/creative writing. Her travel-writing career began when she was about 3. She would follow her imaginary friends around the back yard, making up stories about their adventures. Lauren teaches high-school English in Los Angeles, as a member of Teach for America. She plans to spend the next few years teaching, writing and wandering the world—with both real and imaginary friends.