Four
From Córdoba, I had telephoned an old friend in Madrid who graciously met me at the train in the morning, offered me a bed, and promptly went off to work, leaving me to catch up on sleep. Later we met at a tapas bar off the Puerta del Sol.
Part of my appreciation for the sun came from summer visits with this man when we were children, in fact he was one of those who would fervently mumble prayers to idolatrous gods during my father’s interminable church services. Timothy Griggs was the only son of a small-time Broadway actor and a British actress who had made a name for herself on the London stage in the 1930s. My friend was attempting to live the docile life of a good bourgeois and, as far as I could determine, was generally failing. He had left the country, married a woman from Valencia, and settled in Madrid, where he supported himself by writing advertising copy. He was a tall, slightly portly fellow, with a brush-cut moustache and a Royal Air Force haircut, and he wore the clothes of a Yale graduate and spoke Spanish with an American accent. I noticed that in English he had somehow developed the fine, theatrical British accent of his dear departed Mum. Furthermore, married though he was, I gathered that he was still his father’s son and had not been entirely able to desert his past; he was out on the town every night.
I had lived in Madrid as a student on a narrow street not far from the Puerta del Sol, a plaza that had been named, I learned, for a gateway to the city that once stood at the eastern side of the plaza through which the rising sun shone.
From this center, old Griggs and I set out to explore the city, visiting some of my old haunts and stopping in at some of the new places that he was familiar with. We began at a flamenco club I had known where old men from Andalusia would gather on Thursday nights to drink sherry and sing to one another. Then we went around to the rooming house where I had stayed and paid a visit to the women who ran the place. They were from the south and were right out of a play by García Lorca—three pretty spinsters dressed in black, still living with a powerful old widow of a mother who always wore a veil of dark lace. They rarely left their quarters, except to attend Mass or lay flowers on their father’s grave. Like the old pension-keeper Anna in Seville, they too used to mother me, bringing me my favorite dish of eggs, pampering me with hideously sweet candies and sherries on Sunday afternoons in their dark parlor, and forever pinching my cheeks and sides and telling me that I must fatten up. Now they made us sit with them again while we drank cream sherry and talked of the old days in Madrid.
The old days in Madrid did indeed seem better, as they claimed. When I was last there, the traffic was not so heavy, the trolleys still ran, and the Puerta del Sol, although no doubt much in decline from its former years when it was the center of the city of Madrid, and thereby the center of Spain, and by extension the center of the known world, in a mere ten-year span had become a commercial hub, no different than Times Square or the commercial center of any modern city.
My first day with Griggs was becoming a tour of the streets of a lost youth for both of us. It was now seven o’clock, an hour when all good Madrileños flock to the tapas bars, and the two of us began to partake of sherry and vino tinto and seek out those bars that offered the best dishes. Crowds were thicker than I had remembered, and louder, and cars were polluting the narrow streets with noisome exhaust. But the old Spanish energy that had so impressed me as an innocent abroad was still boiling, and the gypsy beggars in their bright skirts were still plying the streets. The matchbook sellers were gone though, and there were no more impoverished old people selling lottery tickets and individual cigarettes to the nightly revelers. Probably a better thing, I said to Griggs.
“I don’t know,” he said, “I liked the old days when you could stumble into a bar, fall in with a group, drink all night and end up in the theater district at dawn dancing with fat putanas and acrobats.”
One night, Griggs told me, a few months after he arrived in Madrid, he had found himself in such a situation and was elected to become a sort of high priest in a black mass.
“I was half drunk, don’t you know. And new to this country, and they liked my clothes and carried me off to some cave. Here they were singing wildly, and there were many dwarfs and gypsies dancing flamenco and a great deal of hand clapping and foot stamping and smoke. Some great-bosomed painted lady stood on a table and sang one of the old zarzuela numbers and later they got the idea to crown me king in one of their cuadros, as they called them. They pulled off the tablecloth, placed a chair up on the table, and set me there with a bowl for a crown, the tablecloth as ermine cloak, and a carving knife as sceptre. They began bowing and scraping before me, and extending their arms in supplication and the acrobats were doing flips and juggling with glasses and knives and dropping them, since they too were drunk by now. Then things started to get out of hand, they began to make obscene gestures toward me and suggestions, and even encouraged the dwarfs to perform unspeakable acts with one another ‘to entertain his majesty.’ I announced that the time had come to leave and made my exit. They tried to keep me there, but in the end they hoisted me on their shoulders and carried me to the street. Walking backward, bowing formally and excusing themselves, they returned to their debaucheries.”
Griggs ordered another round of tintos from the barman, snapped up a deep-fried blackbird from a bowl on the bar, and, in the Spanish style, ate the whole thing, bones, head, beak, and all, holding it by the legs.
He stared off into the middle ground of the street for a minute, in remembrance.
“I say,” he announced, “would you like to go there, tonight? I haven’t been back since I married, wonder what it’s like.”
I could see where this was heading.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I’m trying to lead a healthy life, ride my bicycle every day, eat good food each night, worship the sun every day. Anyway I want to hear more about your Black Mass, sounds like a perverted solar ritual, just the kind of thing I’m researching on this trip.”
“You look healthy enough,” he said. “You look too healthy, if you ask me. We should go out on the town again.”
I said I’d think about it at dinner and we went over to the Plaza Mayor and found a good restaurant under the arcades where we shared a roast suckling pig. I was hoping he’d forget our evening plans, and in fact after the third course he began reminiscing about our old friendship in the United States and what each of us had been doing since college days when we had lost track of one another. He thought my expedition a mad lark and began grilling me on its purpose.
“You mean to say you’ve got some idea you’re going to find the essence of the sun on this trip?” he asked.
“It’s just a pilgrimage. You know all about pilgrimage here in Spain, Santiago de Compostela, the romerías, the gypsy pilgrimage to Roccio and all that.”
“Yes, but where’s your center? Pilgrims are always going to some actual place.”
“Well, I’ll find it. It’s somewhere north of here, at the end of the rainbow.”
“By God, I’d like to do that. Throw it all over, hit the road, as they say, ride all day, quench one’s thirst by night, free at last.”
I was dreading what was to come next.
“I’ve got an idea,” he said, pensively. “What if I were to come with you?”
“You’d hate it,” I said. “Up every morning, ride roads with dangerous trucks, sleep in cold meadows.”
“Freedom.”
“No. Rain. Days of rain. Broken equipment. Flat tires. Look at me, I’ve lost weight. I’m gaunt with hunger.”
“Well, maybe just a jaunt. A week or two. I’ve a bike somewhere.”
I nodded. I couldn’t say no to my old friend, but I figured he’d forget by the next day.
He went off to work in the morning, and I began scouring the city for a derailleur, which by late afternoon I had found and installed. I went back to the apartment and had coffee with Griggs’s wife, Desdemona. She was a pleasant woman with a wide circle of women friends, who seemed much amused by her American husband. At home in their third-floor apartment, she and Griggs played very well the role of the quiet bourgeois couple, setting out a fine table and offering me sherries in cut glass. But I could tell it was only another act in the theater of Mr. Timothy Griggs and for all I knew, the life of Desdemona as well—she had darting black eyes and a worldly air. He brought up the idea of joining me again at dinner and Desdemona seemed to like the idea very much, possibly to be rid of him for a few weeks.
“I’ll join you at Burgos,” Griggs said. “We’ll ride out to Santiago in the pilgrim style. Fix our hats with cockle shells like true mendicants and ride through winds and rain,” he announced.
“It will indeed be rainy, probably windy too, but really, I’m not going that way.” I said. “It’s too far west. I want to get up into France by April.”
“Well then we’ll meet at Hendaya, go up to Biarritz along the coast and stroll the promenades in the old style. I shall wear white flannels.”
“Not what I had in mind, Griggs, I was going to follow the old Santiago pilgrim route north.”
“There’s a great beach there, though. Sun. It’s one of the old-fashioned sun spots of decadent Europe.”
“I know, but I want to keep moving. I want to get to Scotland by June.”
“Scotland?” he shouted. “Why in God’s name would one want to go to Scotland? But never mind. I shall meet you in France, in Bordeaux. We’ll ride up through the Médoc and drink at the vineyards.”
There was no dissuading him, so I arranged to call him in a week to see if he still wanted to come, and promised to meet him in Hendaya and ride up along the coast for a bit.
Early the next morning, a gray day with lowering clouds in the north, I set out once more, dodging trucks and buses to get to the narrow road heading toward the old university city of Salamanca. I was thinking of Gil Blas, the picaresque hero of the eighteenth-century novel that I was supposed to have studied here in Madrid. He too had set out for Salamanca in his youth with forty ducats and a mule, and had encountered many people and had had many adventures along the way. Mine was not so auspicious a beginning however. An hour into my ride, hardly clear of the city, the sky opened and it began sheeting with wind and rain. I took refuge in a small rest stop with gas pumps and a bad restaurant where I ate suspiciously undercooked pork sandwiches and waited for the heaviest of the rain to stop. Around midafternoon I made another attempt, only to be soaked again. I pulled in to a roadside bar, fully drenched. The barkeeper became most concerned and made me a hot chocolate, which she laced with brandy.
“Drink,” she said. “On the house. We don’t want you to die here. It’s the storm of the century.”
In fact it was a horrendous deluge, the streets and side ditches running with muddied waters. Burros in the fields stood with their heads lowered, not even bothering to feed, their coats black with the wet. Birds fell from the sky with the rains, traffic died on the roads. For all I knew the seas were rising over the lands to envelop the earth.
I called Griggs at home and got Desdemona.
“Come back,” she said. “There is a train at four. I will meet you, Timiteo will be so happy. He wants to talk more about his upcoming bicycle trip.”
Every day for the next four days I tried to leave Madrid. And every day it was the same story. Heavy rain, cold wind from the quarter in which I was headed, and rumors of more rain to come. I took advantage of the hospitality of Griggs and Desdemona and spent my days sheltering at the Prado and the other museums of Madrid, including the Museum of the Americas.
Among the many plundered artifacts in the Museum of the Americas is a document known as the Madrid Codex, one of four surviving Maya codices. The codex consists of 56 stucco-coated leaves of pounded-bark paper, painted on both sides and describing the rituals and divinities associated with each day of the 260-day Mesoamerican sacred calendar, which meshed neatly with the 584-day cycle of the planet Venus. It was from these documents, as well as the written descriptions from the conquistadors themselves, and now the extensive archeological evidence, that the story of the complex, solar-dominated Mesoamerican cultures came to be understood.
Anyone with any sensibility who has traveled in the former domain of these various cultures and looked at their statuary and paintings and temples with any depth cannot help but feel that of all the civilizations that have come and gone on this earth, these groups were indeed some of the most enigmatic. Their art revels in monsters, it glorifies scenes of war and conquest, the torture of captured soldiers, human sacrifice, and death. Their temples, especially those of the Aztecs, were crusted with the dried blood of ages of ritualistic murders, their walls lined with racks holding rows of skulls, actual skulls, and also carved friezes of death’s heads on the walls outside the temples, still evident in our time at ruins such as Chichén Itzá. Even under the benign, green sun of the Yúcatan and the natural energy of the solar-driven tropical forests that surround and still threaten to overwhelm these temples, the horror lingers on. Whatever one may think of these distant, mathematically advanced, ingenious people, the fact remains that the darkest passage in the entire 50,000-year history of the human relationship to the sun occurred among the Toltecs and Aztecs of the Yucatan Peninsula and central Mexico in the first five centuries of the second millennium.
The Aztecs were the last of a native American high culture that had evolved out of the Olmec civilization, which had developed on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico around 1500 B.C. and worshipped as one of the prime gods a sort of jaguar man, or werejaguar. The Olmecs were followed in the third century A.D. by the great civilization of the Maya, the most refined of these groups and often compared to the civilization of fifth-century Athens. Although the Chacs, or rain gods, were important for the Maya, it was the celestial deities, the sun, the moon, and especially the planet Venus, who formed the trinity of their religion. The regular appearance and disappearance of these heavenly bodies became an organizing principle and critical element of their spiritual life. In fact the Maya were almost obsessed with time and celestial events. Their complex calendars and almanacs and their measurements of time were thoroughly integrated with their religious practices and the movements of the sun, moon, and planets. They worked out one of the most accurate calendars that has ever been known and were able to measure and calculate time past precisely, as far back as four hundred million years.
Each night, according to the Mayan cosmology, the sun descended into the deathly underworld, where he also reigned. Here he took the form of a dark jaguar god and when he came up each dawn he carried with him the lingering insignias of death, a pale weakened figure. It was this aspect of the sun’s daily journey that eventually emerged as one of the dominant metaphors of the two cultures that followed.
By A.D. 900 the civilization of the Classic Maya was in decline and the more warlike, aggressive Toltecs began to take over the Valley of Mexico to the north, where the city of Teotihuacán was located. Here before the arrival of the Toltecs was a vast cultural center with over 100,000 residents, complete with apartments, artisan workshops, markets, and temples. The ritual center consisted of a surround of temples that could hold up to 40,000 people during their festivals. The central edifice was the great Pyramid of the Sun, one of the biggest pyramids in the world. It was located at the end of the aptly named Avenue of the Dead.
Although decidedly different from the Maya, the Toltecs appear to have taken on some of their cultural attributes, possibly having learned of them from the Mayan elite who may have fled the ceremonial cities to the south. For example, they adopted the Mayan solar deity, only now, under the Toltec system, when the sun came up each day, he rose as a skeletal figure, gaunt, ill-nourished from his night journey, and clearly in need of sustenance. That sustenance turned out to be human flesh.
Last in this sad history was the arrival from the north of the Aztecs in 1325, an even more warlike people than the Toltecs who built the city of Tenochtitlán on an island in Lake Texcoco, the site of present-day Mexico City. They eventually gained dominion over most of the native tribes and chiefdoms in the region.
The Aztecs believed that they were living in a period of time overruled by the Fifth Sun, Tonatiuh. There had been four other sun eras before, each of which had perished, destroyed by either wild animals, wind, fire, or flood. The Fifth Sun would perish too, the Aztec priests had prophesied, under the violence of an earthquake, but he could be sustained by continued sacrifice, which required in turn almost continual warfare to obtain victims. These were usually enemies captured in battles or gained as tributes from vassal states, which is why the Aztecs never fully conquered many of the surrounding states. They needed a steady supply of ritual sacrifice victims and the elite concluded, wisely, that if they used their own people for sacrifice they could risk an uprising or a massive walkout, as perhaps had happened with the Maya.
All the Aztec gods had to be fed with human sacrifice, but the sun and his associate, Huitzilopochtli, the god of war, were the hungriest gods of all and lived on blood. Victims selected to feed the sun were frog-marched or dragged up the terraced steps to the very heights of the ceremonial temples; below in the plaza crowds gathered to watch the sacrifice. The victim was stretched over a stone slab and held down by four priests while a fifth plunged an obsidian dagger into his chest and withdrew his pulsing heart to feed to the sun.
The motivation behind the ritual sacrifices was the concept of what the Aztecs called tonalli, the animating spirit of all living things, something akin to mana of the South Pacific, or manitou of the Eastern Woodland Indians of North America. Tonalli in humans was believed to be located in the blood, which the Aztecs believed was concentrated in the heart when one becomes frightened, which is why the sun so hungered for the heart. Without this offering, all motion would cease, even the movement of the sun; so the sacrifices were absolutely necessary to assure the continuation of life on earth.
Not all the Aztec gods were as hungry as the sun. The benign wind spirit, Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, was a gentle god who was able to sustain himself on snakes and butterflies. Quetzalcoatl had deserted the Aztecs for the time being, or had been expelled in a dispute with another god over the necessity of blood sacrifice, but their legends held that he was coming back and would redeem the people. The Aztec priests were careful chroniclers of time, and through astrology and calendar work they claimed to know exactly when Quetzalcoatl would return. The glorious event would occur in the era of the Fifth Sun, in the year Two Rabbit. On the Julian calendar that year would have been 1519.
In that very year, in the great palace at Tenochtitlán, the fiery king Montezuma received messengers from the coast. Castles had been spotted offshore, floating on the sea. These castles had landed on the shore, the messengers said, and had discharged humanlike beings, or godlike beings in the shape of humans, some of them mounted on the backs of magical animals with flowing tails, long manes, and big narrow ears. Montezuma ordered his priests to cast their oracles to determine the nature of these aliens. Were they from the spirit world? Were they gods? Was it, as predicted, Quetzalcoatl himself?
The nobles grew restless. Montezuma, it is said, fell into a depression and retired to his quarters. He instructed that gifts be sent to the coast to appease the newcomers, whoever they were, and settled back to await their arrival.
We, of course, know who they were. Hernán Cortés had landed on the shores near Veracruz.
When I emerged from the Museum of the Americas, the world of the hungry god of the sun was suddenly obliterated by the smells, light, and noise of modern Madrid. The indifferent crowds of people, the cars, the exhaust even, seemed a welcome relief from the dark world of Mesoamerica. Furthermore, the benign southern European spring sun had banished, temporarily, the ominous rain clouds and was filling the Retiro Park with a silvery light. I couldn’t resist a walk and purposely got myself lost under the scented flowering of the horse chestnuts.
That night Griggs and Desdemona had a dinner party with a couple of friends who wanted to practice their English, and I had another late night of drinking and eating. Over dinner we all got into a heated discussion in a mix of Spanish and English over the meaning of the epic meeting of the two powerful imperial cultures of Spain and Mexico. Griggs, Old World imperialist that I took him to be, tended to argue the Spanish side, while their two guests, Charro and Pelayo, who were both from the north and left-leaning, tended to favor the oppressed Indians. Charro launched a passionate and unique argument at one point, claiming that the Aztecs were relatively harmless in comparison to the Spanish, and that the numbers of sacrificial dead were overestimated. The Spanish put anyone who wouldn’t convert to the sword and sent them down to hell, she pointed out.
“The sacrificed of the Aztecs,” she said, “they would turn into hummingbirds after death and fly up to the sun for eternity. And anyway, if the priests did not sacrifice people, the sun would not rise. This was a known fact. We would do the same thing if we believed that. I would anyway.”
“Yes, but would you be willing to be a sacrificial victim?” Griggs asked.
She shrugged. “No se,” she said.
“Here’s another thing,” Griggs said. “They kept people in cages before the sacrifices, like cattle. Cortés freed them.”
“Then he kill them if they no convert,” Pelayo said quickly.
“What about this sacred heart of Christ?” I asked. “Isn’t it interesting that both cultures opened the chests and revealed the fiery, sunlike heart. Odd coincidence, isn’t it?”
“Please, let’s stop all this talk,” Desdemona said. “If ever two cultures deserve each other, it is the Spanish and the Aztec. How do you say in English, ¿Que el diablo cargue con los dos?”
“A pox on both their houses,” Griggs said with a flourish of his wine glass.
The hours in the Museum of the Americas, the discussion over human sacrifice, and my immersion in the whole Spanish experience in the New World kept me awake for a long time that night. Mainly I was thinking about an account I had read on shipboard from Bernal Diaz’s The Conquest of Mexico that recounts the events surrounding the final days of the Aztec nation.
In February of 1519 Cortés sailed from Cuba with a force of some six hundred men, twenty horses, and ten cannons and worked his way along the coast of the Yucatan. Within months he had subjugated the natives, captured the town of Tabasco, and obtained captives and even gained allies. He then began negotiations with Montezuma, and in August marched inland toward the capital.
By then Cortés had a mere four hundred soldiers, whereas Montezuma had nearly 80,000 warriors in the city. But nevertheless, Montezuma decided to play the waiting game rather than attack this mysterious force. Hearing news of the approach, he planned to welcome the stranger into Tenochtitlán in order to determine his intentions. But as the Spanish grew closer, Montezuma seems to have changed his mind and sent out gifts of food and cloth and female slaves, and offers of gold if the Teules, as the Aztecs called the Spaniards, would turn back to the coast and not approach the city.
Cortés marched on. By November he came, finally, to the vast city complex.
What the Spanish beheld had never been seen before in the New World by Europeans. There, in the middle of a wide lake, was a shimmering island city with white towering walls of vast buildings with a major causeway linking the city to the mainland. Other causeways connected the various parts of the city, and there were multiple towers and shining palaces and airy apartments with spacious rooms and courtyards set with flowering trees. Bridges interconnected the causeways, and there were floating islands of gardens and orchards, with a wide diversity of trees, native roses, and the whole of it alive with singing birds.
The Spanish soldiers were overwhelmed by the splendor of it all. Some thought they had fallen asleep and had come into a dream, or a waking dream, and others thought they were seeing a legendary city out of the romance Amadís de Gaula, a popular literary work of the period.
As the Spaniards came into view, a great crowd surged out from the city on foot and by canoe to marvel at the newcomers, for they never before had seen so wonderful a thing as a horse. Then a brilliantly attired contingent of caciques and footmen came forward, greeted the Spanish, and instructed them to halt on the main causeway. Montezuma, the great chief, would come forth to greet them in person.
In time he appeared, borne on a golden litter under a canopy of green feathers and carried by robed servants. He was a man of about forty, in fine form, well groomed, with light bronze skin and flashing eyes and attired in bright feathered robes and shod with sandals of gleaming gold.
After a magnanimous exchange of gifts, Montezuma welcomed the newcomers with much ceremony and led the company of four hundred soldiers into the city in a grand procession. Forthwith, in review, marched armed warriors, and elaborately costumed troupes of dancers, masked stilt walkers, frolicking clowns, and lines of maidens bearing flowers. Following this display the Spanish were lodged in the former imperial palace where Montezuma’s father had lived.
The astonishment and delight experienced by those first Spanish visitors soon turned to horror when they witnessed the vast scale of ritual sacrifices that were taking place in the city. Before them rose the blood-stained pyramids, vast pagan temples of doom, whose walls were crusted over with dried blood. Inside the temples were long racks of skulls of the victims, proudly displayed. Nowhere in the literature of Europe, perhaps nowhere even in the Western imagination, not even in the Medieval images of the sufferings of the damned or the disasters of war, had the world witnessed such a scale of calculated horrors.
Over a period of weeks, there followed elaborate discussions and negotiations between the Spanish leader and the Indian king, mainly centering around religion and gold. Montezuma, in one of those curious surprises of history, seems to have been strangely humbled, perhaps because he still believed that Cortés may have been a god. Over the next month he was put under house arrest and eventually held hostage while Cortés negotiated for more gold. The Spanish soldiers had at first been given free rein in the city, but by the beginning of the next summer, partly because of the healthy suspicions among Montezuma’s family and the Aztec caciques of the Spanish motives, the mood in the city changed dramatically. Finally there was an Indian uprising.
Sensing trouble and realizing the end may be at hand, on a dark, rainy night in June, Cortés and his Indian allies attempted to escape along the causeways. In the chaos of the rain and darkness many Spanish were killed and forty prisoners were caught and placed in cages to be sacrificed. This glorious idea of a public sacrifice of the all-powerful Christian Spaniards to their own powerful sun god, Tonatiuh, caused many Aztec warriors to give up the fighting temporarily and return to the city for the ceremony, and in the confusion Cortés managed to escape. He retreated to the coast and began immediately to rebuild his forces.
At the end of that summer he returned with a full force of Indian allies and laid siege to Tenochtitlán. He constructed thirteen brigantines and had them dismantled, carried over the mountains, and reconstructed just outside of the city. Then he launched an amphibious attack.
Vast flotillas of war canoes sallied forth from the watergates of the city, but the light canoes of the Indians were no match for the larger, better-armed sailing vessels, and the battle began to turn in favor of the Spanish. Day by day, Cortés came closer and soon breached the walls and broke into the city. The Spaniards and their Indian allies filled the canals and causeways; they leveled the odious temples of death; tore down palaces and laid waste to the spacious dwellings of the nobles; and when, after eighty days, it was all over, the marvelous city lay in ruins. Broken spears littered the roads and the houses were roofless and the walls stained with the blood of battle.
After his victory, Cortés wrote home to Spain. In his letter he expressed regret for having had to destroy what was once, as he wrote, “the most beautiful city on earth.”
The heavy rains of Madrid came back in the night after dinner and continued throughout the next day until late afternoon. At dusk the sky cleared and before heading out for our nightly rounds of tapas and dinner, Griggs and I went up to the roof of his building. His apartment was located in a high section of the city, which itself sits on a plateau, and we had a good view of the evening sky. Wild bands of horselike herds of clouds with streaming manes were riding across the plains to the west, and beyond the city I could see the rain-freshened green springtime of the countryside. I was anxious to be off.
As we watched, something brushed the back of my head, just a hint of a breeze really, and a bat flitted over the roof, circled, and came back. Then there was another one, and then, beyond the roof on the other side of the streets above other roofs, more bats. Everywhere we turned, there were bats, little dark forms flitting and diving and whirling in tight little circles above the cosmopolitan city.
“I hate those things,” said Griggs.
But I was happy to see them, it seemed a portentous sign, and I made plans to leave the next day.
The following morning was sunny and warm. To save time, I strapped my bicycle on the back of Griggs’s car and rode with him to the outskirts of the city, where he dropped me off. I unhooked the bike, secured my gear, restrapped my lunch and a good bottle of rioja Griggs had given me for the journey, and bid him farewell. He watched me sadly.
“I would love to go with you,” he said. “Seriously. I’d as soon jump aboard and face the trials of the road than go to work today.”
“Well just drive up to France and I’ll see you there,” I said. I wasn’t entirely sincere, but I said it anyway. “I promise to call when I get there. You come.”
He shrugged. “I will,” he said.
The last I saw him he was leaning against his car, smoking a cigarette, watching me pedal off.
In one of those moods in which anything seems possible, I headed into a part of Spain I had never before visited and was ready to explore anything. My ancient bicycle seemed to have sprouted wings, and as I sailed onward I felt capable of flying over the dreaded mountain passes of the Sierras and the deep river valleys that stood between me and my goal beyond the wall of the Pyrénées. The road was smooth, and within a few miles I began riding through the old paisaje of Castile, with small farms here and there, and little gray brown villages, some with a small bullring, and roadside stands that sold roasted chickens. The sky was cerulean blue, there were little networks of clouds high up, shimmering with light, as in a Fragonard painting, and the weather, finally, was warmer. The wind shifted and was blowing up from the south, speeding me on my route. A fine day for a good cycle, a most excellent outing, fair winds and low hills, and the smell of grass and fresh-turned earth, and it was all brightness and light, and smooth sailing all the way, until I felt the dreaded wobbling instability that I knew meant one thing—flat tire.
Not to worry. I dismounted, carried the bike up into a pasture, and set about changing the wheel, only to discover that somehow with all my focus on the derailleur I had forgotten to get a spare. I tried to patch the split tire but the break was too wide. And I sat there in the pasture in the warm spring sun for a long time, trying to figure out what to do.
I had always loved the city of Madrid. When I lived there, I was in the habit of walking down a side street to a favorite café to take a coffee and sit in the sun. I spent long days in the Retiro Park watching the ducks and daydreaming, reading, and attending boring afternoon lectures on El Cid that would cause me to fall into a sort of half-conscious state of dormancy in which images of Babieco the horse and red-turbaned Moors would float before my mind’s eye. Then around seven I would head for the tapas bars for the evening. It was a good routine, a quiet life, but I wouldn’t wish to have lived that way forever. Nor would I, after my current sojourn there, wish to see Madrid again for a decade or so. But I seemed doomed to be stuck there.
The logical thing would have been to return, get the spare, and leave again. I was only about ten miles away. But then Griggs would discover me and insist that I stay on, or worse, prepare to come with me. I would lose days, having already lost too many days. In the end I limped back to a roadside bar I had passed, ordered a coffee, and chatted up the owner. Were there any bicycle shops nearby. No. Was there anyone around who could repair tires. Yes, but he was out of town. In the Spanish style, word of my dilemma got out around the café. Many advisors appeared to help me with my plight. But all of them—unfortunately—had the same answer. You must return to Madrid. About this time, an energetic little man in a white delivery truck pulled up and sailed into the café and greeted everyone. He was a known regular and soon joined the advisory council. He too said I must return to Madrid. But unlike the others, he offered to take me there.
I gave up and called Desdemona.
“Timiteo will be so happy …,” she said.
Things went downhill from there. Griggs, good soul that he is, claimed he had arranged to take time off to meet me in France, and said, further, that it would not be a problem to change the dates, and said furthermore that he would drive me over the mountains and deposit me in France, and that we two could pedal along the coast of southern France, stopping at the little seaside towns to eat and drink, and it would be a glorious time and that by driving over the Sierras rather than pedaling, I would live to tell the tale. This much I questioned, as I had noticed that Griggs had adopted the Spanish style of driving.
But in the end, I caved in, since it did make sense. And in any case, I had never set out to test myself in a marathon bicycle journey from Andalusia to Scotland. I was a solar pilgrim, not a long-distance bicycle racer.
That night we went back to the Plaza Mayor and ate at Botin, the most famous restaurant among American literary tourists because it was featured in the last scene in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Jake and Brett have lunch there in an upstairs room and drink rioja alta and then go for a ride in the hot light of the Madrid summer. Griggs had stuffed pork and a bottle of rioja, I feasted on kidneys and drank sparingly.
Two days later, having outfitted Griggs with the proper equipment—more or less—we left for France.