MADRID - Friday morning and a train blew up yesterday at the museum I get lost in every Wednesday night.
The building's an old hospital, with long tall halls and sight lines that are more than smart; they take your breath away. Class gets out at 6:30 p.m., but I spend an hour every week turning around and around and standing in front of Guernica. The first time I saw it I cried, because it's huge and gray and painful and flanked with months and months of preparatory sketches, of women and toros crying and screaming.
During the civil war, the pain was more than that, it was llorando, gritando. The words translate directly, but they mean more in Spanish. I wanted to understand the Civil War, something I could never know, never more than the tiny viejas in the supermarket, than the mask of a man gritando in 1937, of destroyed buildings whose broken foundations still show on the small streets east of the palace.
In the last eight weeks, I have figured out more, why Complutense, my university-turned-battlefront-turned-university again, was built all at once from the same cheap bricks. I saw the political references and caves of "For Whom the Bell Tolls." I felt a pit in my belly in the little room in the corner of the museum for Nicolas de Leokas, the 23-year-old proto-genius blown up in 1937 by a nationalist bomb.
The statue out front, the one I sketched my first day, is called "Un pueblo espanol tiene una calle que camina a las estrellas." A Spanish town has a street that leads to the stars, because there was nowhere else to go in 1938. I want to cry for them or something more, but it is not mine - I do not understand, could never understand more than the romanticized version of Hemingway, or the sterilized version of my history textbook.
I wrote out outlines, hoping they would change things, hoping they would explain the propaganda posters from 1934 I saw last week at Circulo de Bellas Artes. It helped. The small squares of the graph paper and the winding streets almost completely rebuilt, and I had the thought that I was finally making progress.
Friday morning and a train blew up outside the museum I had been at 12 hours earlier. It was once a hospital but now the walls inside are perfect and white and covered with Rothko red, coated in dust from the explosion out back. I went to class in the morning because I didn't know better, because I'd been up thinking about art and people from home.
Walking to class I realized I'd forgotten my metro pass. My professor came in, looking upset, speaking quickly in hushed Spanish. It takes my ears a few minutes to switch to my second language, but I knew instantly he looked too grave to be talking about exams. I asked a classmate, who whispered something about bombs in trains.
We didn't know, so we kept going, talking about Franco's closed economy and the failed market for Spanish cars and I don't know what else, because I forgot all my Spanish with worry and watched traffic jams and ambulances out the window at traffic jams and ambulances. Even by me, on the opposite corner of the city, you could hear the sirens all day.
It doesn't feel the same as the last time Spain was blown apart, but I felt the same. I am trying so hard to understand what happened, but it's not mine to understand. It's in Spanish and I'm an American who could never understand because I traveled to Spain for Gaudi, reading the romanticized version of life on the plane over. Twelve years of ration tickets, of hunger, of 200 now dead at the train station - there is nothing romantic about that life. It's not mine to take. But sitting in Madrid, the day after a bomb blew up in the train station I stopped in four times in three days, it's all I have.
Emily Nemens '05 is studying in Madrid this semester.
