jazz bar, balconies, bikers, busker, moth, Madrid

The moth which landed in the glossy black curls of a woman sitting on the Metro so lightly and delicately without her noticing, and which spread its dun linen wings like opera skirts to reveal the sheer, white gauze underneath. The two boys who jumped on and played joyously, their guitars facing belly to belly. The long, arching trees filling curving streets with greenery and palpably articulating the breeze into soft whistles and dim spirit presences, into a welcoming and retired song, almost a language. The man and woman whose voices caught my attention from above and whose conversation diagonally across from his first floor balcony to hers on the third seemed frank and gossipy, reflective, unhurried. The jazz bar with windows open right onto the street and spilling glorious plants, which served gin and tonic in round-bellied goblets with surprisingly sweet, chewy, nutlike juniper berries bobbing against the cubes. The lovely dog opposite, above the antiquarian bookshop, who stands on the balcony and gazes up and down the street with such a mournfully intent expression; the man playing a baby grand under a white cloth in his open window and gesturing to his colleague, playing violin, and the crowd of silent witnesses standing with their phones and faces raised on the curving road underneath. The security guard reading a volume of poetry on the underground, so intent he almost missed his stop. The three tiny ladies chatting loudly and volubly on the train who parted with light, smacking kisses at Nuevos Ministerios. The BMX bikers who practice outside the opera house every day, every day, waiting their turn and daring each concrete bench and set of steps to rout them like ballet dancers swimming far out to sea. The low doorways and Metro tunnels against which my sweetheart has to watch his head. The expressiveness of public life with a girl flying into a passion of sobs at the post office counter, a woman crying openly as she was talking on her phone walking through a crowded restaurant district at lunch time. The yoghurts brewed in little glass pots desde 1992 which we top with strawberries, blueberries, bananas; the milk section of the supermarket which is on shelves unrefrigerated because everybody likes powerfully adulterated longlife milk yet luscious, unpasteurised, handmade yoghurt. The quiet, hot siesta hours when shops are barred and windows shuttered and the Metro crammed to the gills. The people who gaze up so curiously, so unjudgingly, at me and my two metre tall lover as we bow our heads to enter the train. The busker in orange top hat who tied his dog to the railings and turned aside into a shop window to tune his guitar. The little backstreet shops which build guitars and the man with his cardboard box desk on the shopping street who carves crosses out of two sticks and binds them together to sell, one after another, he was here at Easter and he is still here now, filling the paving creases with whittled shavings as though there can never be enough crosses in the world and he must fill the lack.