Making sense of Madrid

“This could be Wisconsin Avenue,” I whispered to my mother as we sat down on the bus, and she smiled and agreed. My brother, who seemed not to have made the comparison before though he knows both streets well, commented that the two were even similar socially. While not lined with the embassies that fill a long stretch of Washington’s Wisconsin Ave., homes of some very wealthy madrileños pack the broad, sycamore-lined paseo, mirroring other stretches of Wisconsin. Mind you, in Madrid the rich live in apartments (whereas in Washington they might inhabit a house, apartment building, or row-house), and from the exterior, it’s not altogether clear that one building is any finer than the next. But the wide streets filled with cars, the interspersed homes and trees, and the sedate but sophisticated construction of the buildings in the residential parts of both towns are, in fact, quite similar. (The neighborhood in which we boarded the bus, near which my brother lives, was constructed in the 1960s, giving it a very different look than the grandiose old buildings that loom over the narrow streets and ubiquitous plazas of Madrid’s downtown areas.)

I first explored Madrid five years ago, when I flew there for my brother’s marriage to a Madrid native. Two years later, the two moved to the city permanently, and since then I have visited annually. Because the more recent visits have involved spending as much time as possible with my young nieces, whom I only get to see once a year, I haven’t gotten to know Madrid as well as I’d like; but we always take a few long walks around the city, and as I’ve come to not only recognize the places I’ve been before but learn how to get to and from them, I’ve studied the city and tried to shape a firm notion of it in my mind.

The tricky thing is that Madrid has never felt foreign to me. I am very comfortable there; the city is easy to understand (in terms of transportation options, cultural expectations, etc.). People are friendly and helpful and (perhaps most importantly) happy to speak slowly when they realize I don’t speak the language that well. They also tend to speak to me in Spanish, which may result from many Spaniards not knowing English but is often, I get the sense, because they think I’m Spanish. Now I’ve done enough people-watching throughout Spain to know that my facial features aren’t one bit Spanish, and as my sister-in-law points out, I’m too tall to be Spanish (only the rare Spaniard stands taller than about 5’8” (my height), and those who grew up during the Franco era and weren’t well nourished are quite short—many not even 5 feet tall). But, like just about everyone else in the country, I have dark hair. Brunette does have some variation there, but it ranges from honey brown to chocolate brown, occasionally reaching black. The “blonds” are a leap of imagination away from the light-haired girls I grew up with in the South. Thus, at a glance, I blend right in, and this I find a bit surreal, as I have nowhere else experienced it. But while the lack of intense heterogeneity of the United States is striking to me, my lack of immediately seeming foreign to the natives relieves me of any sense of being out of place.

I have, however, started to get a glimmer of an aspect of Spanish culture that makes it quite other-wordly to me. As we boarded that bus to head downtown, I noticed across the aisle three women whose dangling feet were all that showed below their fur coats, which covered them straight up to their coiffed hairdos; in front of me sat another fur-clad lady. It’s not the prevalence of fur that shocked me so—though it does surprise me when, just about anywhere I turn in Madrid, I see someone wearing one. It’s that the rich ride the bus in Madrid. For a girl who grew up in an all-driving city, where only the poorest of the poor would not own a car and thus need to ride the bus, this is earth-shattering. Even though, since Atlanta, I’ve lived in Boston and San Francisco—which both run heavily-traveled subway and bus systems and discourage reliance on a car for all transit—I still think that in the United States, the regular use of the bus by the very wealthy is, at best, a rarity. That it is the norm in Madrid is, to me, a blessed statement about the culture there. That Spain is led by a socialist party and has universal health care does indicate that it takes a different approach to class than the United States. But a government is not assured to be representative of all its people; these women on the bus are emblematic of their culture’s worldview in an entirely other way. Of course I understand that sharing a bus doesn’t mean there is no classism in Spain; but I still find promise in its being the case.