Every so often the camera in the Caja Magica swerves straight upward and gives you a view of the sky above Santana stadium’s squared-off roof. It’s an intense sky on a sunny day, one that vividly brings back the trip I took to the tournament and the city two years ago.
I wonder sometimes if tennis does enough with its locations, if it promotes the travel possibilities that exist around the sport. Not everyone can afford to spend a week or even a couple of days in Paris or Monte Carlo or Rome or Indian Wells or Madrid, but a tournament fits into the mix of a trip very well. You go for a couple of sessions, you get a break from having to navigate a city’s streets and tourist stops, and best of all you get to know what the grounds of that event feel like, which you never really forget when you see it again on TV in future years—now the main stadium in Madrid gives off that same feeling to me when I watch it from New York as it did when I was there; I watch with an extra sense, an extra bit of knowledge. Rome, Paris, Madrid, I’ve been lucky enough to go to all of them, and I’m lucky to be able to carry a little piece of each back with me.
This week I’ve been reminded not just of the tournament, but of that trip and of Madrid. What did I take back with me? What mental souvenirs remain after two years? Let me look and see.
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Walking in the Retiro, the large and regal park at the city’s center and across the street from its famous museums, on a crowded day, two young American women jogged past me the other way, talking as they ran. It was obvious, or at least it seemed obvious at the time, that they lived in Madrid. What were they doing there? Whatever it was, it seemed, for that one second that I saw them, like a glamorous thing to do in your 20s.
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Tracking down a famous, hole-in-the-wall seafood restaurant in the city’s Chueca section. There was no awning out front, just some ugly lettering on the stone front. It looked dead from the outside, but it was a madhouse for lunch—the serous lunch that Spaniards take, unlike my sandwiches at my desk in New York. Everyone ordered the same thing, a colossal and perilously sculpted mountain of shellfish of all shapes and sizes. None of it was easy to eat, but all of it was worth it. Stingingly good, especially the little black barnacles that you turned inside-out to eat. A delicacy by any other name. Why does Madrid have such good seafood?
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Going to the Sofia and, as a New Yorker used to the world’s wealthiest museums, being a little disappointed at its relatively run-down status. That was, until I got to the room that counted, the one that houses Guernica. There’s nothing to that room, either, and only one unprepossessing female guard stood next to the massive painting, which wasn’t even hanging on a wall; it was standing on the floor and leaning against the wall when I was there. But I’m not sure I've looked at anything for so long.
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That same afternoon, walking across the street, into the Prado, up the stairs, and into the room holding Velazquez’s Las Meninas. It’s huge, it’s on the central wall across from the door, and it blew me away. But not for the first time, I was left wondering why it blew me away—because of its greatness and beauty and genius, or because of its fame? Or are those things inseparable at this point in a work of that stature?
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Getting lost one afternoon and getting hungry and having to find yet another place to eat—a downside to traveling. I see tourists in New York peeking into what I know are useless restaurants and I want to say, “Jesus, don’t go in there.” But I’ve done the same many times out of desperation in foreign cities.
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Sitting in a woody, atmospheric bar that had been a haunt of Hemingway’s. On one level realizing it’s a terrible cliché to go to a place where a writer from the 1920s went, but also thinking that it was pretty cool to imagine Hemingway in there.
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Stumbling on a picturesque outdoor restaurant off the Plaza Mayor that served an egg and blood sausage dish that would make the world’s finest hangover food. You could open a restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and just serve that one dish on weekend mornings and make a million dollars.
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Disliking the vibe at the Caja Magica as a whole—too much steel, too much concrete, the feel, even on brilliantly sunny days, of an indoor event, with two major courts completely sealed off. But liking the main stadium; it’s airy, light, civilized, calming, with nice red seat-backs and no bad seats. It keeps the concrete at bay.
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Drinking a can of Coke and watching Nadal and Djokovic on TV in a café with an exhausted wedding party and an American tourist party. Best Coke ever. Good match, too.
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The odd sense, while watching the final between Nadal and Federer, that tennis fans in Madrid, as in many other places I’ve been, are too civilized to really go at it as fans. They wanted Nadal to win, but they didn’t want to be gauche about it. I said it a few weeks ago when I talked to James Martin on this blog, but there’s an ambivalence among tennis fans about their own sport that doesn’t exist in, say, soccer. Of course, if Nadal had mounted a comeback, all of that ambivalence might have vanished. Even Federer sensed it: Afterward, he said, "Sorry for spoiling the party."
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The sun, the same one I mentioned at the start of this post. Madrid is in the mountains, and I got the sense while I was there that I was closer to the sun than I had ever been. It’s hot in a different way; it also always seems to be there, above you. The blue of the sky and the white of the clouds are both very distinct there. The sun has a presence in the sky that it doesn’t in New York. It feels good, but a little dangerous. I’ve felt those feelings—warmth, fear—again when that camera has swerved upward and out of Santana arena this week.