1.

 

La Movida Madrileña—The Madrid Scene—belongs to the Malasaña district.

Here in Malasaña it is impossible not to be rapt by every lane’s levitating libido—breasts made visible through netted blouses and male intentions evident beneath skin-tight jeans. Women and men alike wear neon makeup intended not to enhance but to make over entirely. 

British, American, and Spanish punk music drifts down the lanes, leaking out of every open bar, as psychotropic as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band would have seemed twelve years ago if it’d been permitted here. The road is paved in black brick on Calle del Espiritu Santo. Rows of potbelly pigs hang upside down in front of butcher stores and tipsy girls in high heels loiter outside of small bookstores. It’s all gloss and grunge in Malasaña, where the undefined is defining itself and an orphan culture is finally giving itself a name.

Seth Moreau watches it all through blue aviator sunglasses as he ambles along the gypsy streets with his best friend and bandmate Dominic. Their show ended a half hour ago.           

Dominic stops to peer through the window of a carniceria where a pig is hung by its hooves. “Well, will you looka there? Way to lose my appetite. Shit, I can’t believe they actually eat this stuff.”

Seth pushes his hair back from his face to get a better look, an unlit cigarette fixed between his fingers. “You ever actually watched them eat it? Most impressive thing I’ve seen so far. Wasting any part is a mortal sin here. Brains, feet, intestines, ass—it’s all proper dining.”

“Once more, welcome to vegan hell, youngblood.”

Dewy-eyed, Seth smears the letters P-I-G over the window with his index finger. Spain has kept the boys in perpetual awe since arriving.

The hanging pig in the window is soon partially obscured by the reflection of a black form. In unison, the boys turn to face the officer that has approached. To Seth, he officer registers as a series of bold shapes—square bullet proof chest pads, block head in black cap, triangle feet in fitted leather boots, cylinder flashlight on straight hip. They are all simple shapes.

But the rifle the officer holds diagonal over his chest—this is a difficult shape. Seth quietly exhales, cracking the knuckle of his middle finger.

“Te podemos ayudar?” Dominic says to the officer, sliding his chestnut ringlets behind his ears. Dominic is a cartoonist’s version of pretty—Betty Boop lashes, a stout mouth, sapphire eyes perpetually shrouded by the heavy glare of his cat-eye glasses. If not for the peculiar lilt of his accent, Seth imagines his friend could pass for a Spaniard. Which could earn them favor if Dominic would play it to their advantage. After half a century of isolation under the Franco dictatorship, the Spanish are conspicuously most amenable to negotiating with their own kind.

The officer says something brisk to Dominic, then flicks on his flashlight, directing the beam into Seth’s eyes. With eyes snapped shut, Seth sees his heart beating in red clouds against the gold backdrop the flashlight has produced behind his lids.

“Your ID,” Dominic whispers.

Seth pulls his visa from his jacket, his heart outpacing his thoughts.

A new voice intersects the officer’s response. “Oye, tio! Dámelo!”

Gold fades to black. Seth opens his eyes. The officer has turned his flashlight to the owner of the voice, a girl who has snatched Seth’s ID from the officer’s hand. She sports a green aviator hat and with it, a sophisticated impudence that Seth is sure he’s seen before somewhere, though never in real life. Beside her stands Tony, his band’s lead singer, donned in the flowered kimono and black turban he purchased during the band’s last week in New York.

Hand clutched around the neck of a beer bottle, pinkie jutted out, the girl vehemently curses the officer. Miserable as Seth’s Spanish is, he knows the meaning of the single phrase that summarizes her litany—anda a cagar, tio! Go take a shit, dude…          

The wisps of white air her shouting produce go up like a smoke signal, drawing a crowd. The crowd swarms to the white against the night sky, to the revolution. Soon more than twenty in number, they begin a chant so loud Seth can’t deduce a word of it. Still, he understands the message so well that his heart begins to dance with the verve of the crowd he and his band Naïve performed to an hour earlier, a crowd who had not been able to decipher his words.

Their voices die slow and gentle, like a merry-go-round come to an end, as one-by-one they see that the officer has drawn the rifle from his side and aimed it at the girl.

The cop articulates so that the whole crowd, even Seth, can interpret his words without effort: Are you prepared to die tonight?

The girl’s answer comes easy as succulent truth: I’m always prepared to die. And you, sir?

Seth realizes then where he’s seen her impudence before. It was a newspaper clipping of Amelia Earhart giving a side-eyed glance into the camera before her first solo flight. It was from his eleventh-grade history book. 

The girl takes a step forward so that the muzzle of the gun is nestled sturdy between her breasts.

The officer traces the muzzle sensually up her torso. In response, she opens her mouth and closes it over the end of the rifle, sucking it with such finesse and urgency that Seth looks away, abashed at her insolence.

 A stiff grin forms over the officer’s mouth. The girl has won. Perhaps the officer has figured that while he may be justified in firing a single bullet through the back of her throat, he won’t have enough for the whole horde that will rush him after he does.

He shouts an order to the crowd—a final pissing—before he pushes through them and out of sight.

The crowd quickly splinters.

Removing her cap, the girl turns full on to Seth, peering up at him. She is simultaneously show and show-stopper—pixie-cut, pearl-blonde; burgundy lips; black leather pants and a matching vest which squeezes her breasts up to heights commanding a second glance. She wears no coat, as cozy in the cold as an arctic fox.

“Lucky devil,” she says in English, pressing Seth’s identification back into his hand. The pronunciation of her vowels is taut; she is Irish. “Were this a single day into the future, it’d have been off-with-your-head. Your visa expires tomorrow. And tomorrow will be today in less than an hour.  But I suppose there’s no need to have the guards harassing you while you’re still legal as breathing. They love to loiter ‘round these parts, vexing us freaks.” She takes a swig from the beer bottle she holds and gargles before jutting out her hand to shake Seth’s. “Betty Warner, your savior who has yet to die on a cross.”

“I met Betty at La Buena Vida last night,” says Tony. “Betty, this is Royal Young.”

Seth blinks away his initial bewilderment; though he took on the stage name “Royal Young” a full year ago, he isn’t yet accustomed to being addressed by it.

“You mean this here is him?” Betty exclaims. “This is the amazing Royal Young, songwriter of songwriters? Alas, I have stumbled upon the elusive bandleader who refuses to sing a single note. Might I offer you some advice? Your guitar playing is far too monastic. Far too on-the-clock. You’d do yourself a fine favor to jump off the rhythm periodically and beat the shit out of that axe of yours, Mr. Young.” Abruptly, she gasps. “Oh, I see now— you are Royal Young and your band is called Naïve. How dreadfully tacky of you.”

“We aim to please,” Seth replies, angling his shoulder away from her, a reserved attempt to partition himself and Dominic from Betty and Tony as they begin to walk. Her version of Amelia Earhart gives him the jitters.

“So now that your ass has been preserved for the evening,” says Dominic, “you’ve got time to go look for the glass slipper.”

Betty closes the space Seth created, abandoning the conversation she has begun with Tony to catch his response.

“It’s at La Fábrica,” Seth replies, referring to their practice space. “It has to be. It’s the last place I remember having it.”

“Maybe.” Dominic smiles, takes a squint-eyed drag of his joint. “You’re not exactly known for your impeccable memory.”

This time, Betty awaits Seth’s reply from behind the boys, her face now projected between their shoulders.

Seth chews on his lip. Tonight was to be a celebration of their last night in Madrid. He’d shaven and worn his Stooges T-shirt for the occasion. But the missing glass slipper—that box of one hundred tapes of the band’s five finest songs which they’d spent the summer recording—has put a damper on the evening. It will cost Naïve more in morale than money to replace if he doesn’t find them tonight.

“Don’t sweat it too much,” says Dominic, clamping his hand down on Seth’s shoulder. “You’ll find the tapes. It’s meant to be, trust me. Twenty minutes till 1980; it’s your year, dude. Year of The Young. Nothing but good luck is coming to us this year.”

Smiling faintly, Seth looks down, in time to see Betty kick out her foot in front of him but not in time enough to stop himself from tripping over it, his arms swimming for balance before he hits the sidewalk beside a small bar. Before he can examine the impression the concrete has made on his palms, Betty steamrolls him back against the bar’s brick side, her hands fishing and fumbling up his Stooges T-shirt as she forces her mouth onto his. Tony bursts into crying laughter, exaggerating his tipsiness for show.

Seth clutches Betty’s shoulders, drawing her back from him. He scrambles for the blue aviator sunglasses which have fallen off his face during the tussle.

He clears Betty’s saliva off his mouth with the back of his hand.

Tony helps Seth to his feet and examines his hands for cuts. “Honey, don’t be angry with Betty; this is her modus operandi. True, she is a filthy broad but—”

 “Oh, feck you, ya little—”

 “—but this filthy broad has one positive aspect going for her—she can get Naïve into any venue in Madrid if we decide to come back.”

“Screw me if I can’t,” she says, raising herself from the ground. “Shit, screw me if I can. And since I’ve already taken the liberty to accost you, Young, one can only hope that you are planning a similar revenge.”

“You said she’s like this all the time?” Dominic asks Tony, pushing his cat-eye glasses up with the heel of his hand.

“Why are you lads so sensitive? I’m trying to get to know Royal Young here. So, Young, what are your interests? Obviously, rock and roll. What about other recreational activities? Do you enjoy Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds?”

“Probably the third best song on the album,” Seth replies. 

Dominic nudges him in the side. “LSD.”

“Right.” Seth examines his fingernails; they need clipping. “Not really my—”

“How’s about other kinds of blow? Or better, what about orgasms, sweetheart? Do you fancy those?”

Tony fiddles with one of his large hoop earrings. “This sweet child here? Betty, dear, you apparently have no clue about my little cousin here.”

“What haven’t I a clue about? Please don’t tell me you’re suffering from a lengthy case of virginitis. Dammit—my radar’s defective! Well, I’ve got a treatment for what ails you, Young. Let me know when you’re ready to be cured.”

“Yeah, alright.” Seth finally lights the cigarette he’s managed to keep lodged between his fingers. “We should split now.”

 “You’re not leaving now, are you? Where are you lads going?”

“To see about a nail clipper.” He turns to Dom. “You ready?”

“Yeah, let’s go.”

A few yards on, Seth and Dominic turn their attention back toward Betty when she hollers out, “I fear you didn’t understand my question. Where are you going, Royal Young?  What is this all about?”

Betty hustles toward them, Tony trailing behind her, the arms of his kimono flailing at his sides.

Hooking her gaze on Seth alone, she continues. “What is this music endeavor all about? You should know I’ve a keen ear for lyrics. I heard every one of your lyrics at this evening’s show. Madness unbounded is complacency’s decree. Those aren’t the lyrics of a lad who only wants to play gigs for a good craic, are they? So, what is this all about, Young?”  

Seth  falls into a state of glowing wonder. What is this all about? In his pocket, there is a note—a scribbling of the answer to that same question which he’d asked himself eight hours ago.

Happy people, every corner of the earth. War, preposterous. Every species of hunger, a fairytale. Boredom, uncharted. Utopia, realized. Divinity, ocular. Police enforcement, laughably obsolete. Nothing so divine as melody. Nothing so colorless as a world without it. Nothing so meaningless as I outside of service to it. Who might my God be?

Betty Warner looks up at Seth as he touches the little scrap of paper in his jeans pocket.

“You must know the works of Pablo Neruda?” she asks.

Seth looks down, shrinking to the shyness of his adolescence. “Little bit.”

 “Perhaps you are his spiritual son. Or maybe you fancy yourself the lovechild of Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes?  Well, I can’t give you their impact. But one thing I can give you is their fame and you can do with that fame whatever you wish. One year, and I’ll change your whole life. That’s all it took Hendrix, right? All it took Clapton. All it took Lennon and the Lads. It all happened here first in Europe, you know.”

From her hefty shoulder bag, Betty produces a foil-wrapped sandwich. Slices of pork hang from it. “I suppose you think I’m shite-talking you. Rest assured, Young—shite-talking ain’t in me nature. I’ve indeed paved the way for quite a few local icons. And I suspect that if I can save your pretty American arse from the filthy Spanish guards, I may well be able to do anything for you. And I will. But first, let’s welcome in 1980. In the new decade, I’ll tell you all about what I can do for you and your band.”  She takes a bite of her sandwich, then juts it in Seth’s direction. “Have some?”

“No thanks,” Dominic interjects. “Young here prefers pig arse.”

Seth smirks, though he is yet mystified. In front of his eyes, a stream of famous faces passes as through a projector beam. Lennon, Guthrie, Simone, Mayfield, Gaye, Dylan, Wonder…

As they pass through the crowd, Dominic is the Aaron to Seth’s Moses, apologizing to the people in Spanish as they part the sea of kids going mad in anticipation of midnight.  Still too shy to test his own, Seth is alone with his English thoughts. Seeger, Baez, Cooke, Holiday, Marley…

“Hold it—hold it right here!” Betty shouts, coming to a halt in front of them and holding up her hand. “Over there—look.”

She points in the direction of a graffiti artist, kneeling beside a brick wall, putting the finishing touches upon his human-sized bubble letters.

Todos somos iguales, the graffiti reads.

Betty’s eyes go alight watching the artist mix his paint. “You know what that is?”

Dom shakes his head. Seth shrugs, hands in pocket.

She pushes her face forward, making a show of her disbelief. “Why did you lads come to Madrid?”

There are plenty answers to that, yet no immediate responses from any of them.

“Do you people have any idea what’s going on here? What they’re making here with their art is history. It’s like…it’s like…” She taps her chin. “Where you lads from originally?”

“Connecticut.”

“Connecticut. Faaancy.” She pauses to deliberate once more. “I don’t know nothing ‘bout Connecticut. Ever been to Washington DC, somewhere more socially literate? Oh, it doesn’t matter. Just think March on Washington. Think Vietnam protests. Think Bowie and The Young Americans tour. I was there in Washington for it. Best show I’ve ever had the pleasure of—”

“What is your point, Betty, darling?”

“Your patience is not only required but emphatically requested.” She begins walking backward, having made herself their unofficial tour guide. “Now, look ‘round yourselves. These kids got their freedom four years ago, when that muppet Franco died. All the outcasts living in the shadows under the dictator are free to roam in the light now. It’s a glorious time.” She looks up at Seth, a marvelous glint in her eye. “This is the world to come. You’ve arrived just in time for the future, Young. So you’ll be an illegal immigrant—you’ll be neither the first nor the last. All we need to do is get you a record deal before the authorities put an end to ya. That is what you  fancy, isn’t it? What say you, Young, what say you?”

Seth looks around at the twitching city. Fear and elation meet in the center of his chest. What his note didn’t say—what poetry refused to say—was that a record deal  would be the link to the notoriety that amplified a voice infinitely more than the most expensive sound system ever could. Dom and Tony won’t require must stroking to stay in Spain—Dom is as good as a Spanish citizen and Tony has a near religious devotion to luck. Besides that, Seth himself had already decided he would purchase a ticket to the first international city he heard over the intercom the moment they landed at JFK International. The United States was too great a psychological danger to ever return. Staying in Spain will save him the trouble.

 “I say yes,” he murmurs in reply to Betty’s question. “Yes.”

Betty winks at him—their little secret—then bounces on her heels. “Somebody, tell me the time!”

“Two minutes till midnight,” answers Dominic.

 “Where’s your grapes, lads?”

Tony smirks. “Oh, we have them, dear. It’s just that they’re referred to as balls in America.”

“Such a clever queen, this fecker here.”

“What are the grapes for?” Seth asks.

“We’re on the heels of midnight, lads. We’ve got to be ready.”

Reaching into her enormous purse once more, Betty pulls out a drooping plastic bag, bloated with grapes. “Spanish tradition, yes? You’ll try and stuff twelve of these grapes in your mouth as midnight is arrivin’. It’ll earn you the luck of the Irish. The mythical luck, not the historical one.”

Betty calls for the countdown from Dominic. At T-minus ten seconds, she opens the bag of grapes and they grab handfuls, filling their mouths quickly.

Betty smiles at Seth as he struggles to put the grapes in his mouth. His jaw, grown a little stiff by his exasperation with Betty’s chattiness, isn’t easily unhinged.

“You got a tiny mouth there,” she says, her own swollen with fruit.

At T-minus five, she helps Seth stuff three more grapes into his mouth. Their juice slides down his chin as Betty pushes the last grape into his mouth, in time with Dominic’s announcement of midnight. Barely able to swallow, Seth has his first full-bodied laugh of the evening, of the new year and new decade.

He looks up as if searching for God to thank. Through the blue lenses of his sunglasses, he watches adumbral clouds roll like fog over the brand-new sky.

His heart wheels up and over. The most important decision of his life thus far has been made. He will break the law; he will stay in Spain beyond the expiration of his visa. Liberated from the prohibition of time, Seth Moreau is free to ponder where on earth that glass slipper—that black box of demo tapes—has gone.

 

 

 

2.

 

Supposing the Mulatta had been born in Madrid instead of Livingston, Guatemala, she likely would have never ridden on an airplane.

Supposing her father had been a fisherman instead of a linguist, she almost certainly would have never developed a romantic handle of the English language.

Had her father not been the victim of The First Ruination when she was thirteen years old, the Mulatta could have been spared the trauma of moving to Spain in a confused flurry. One week’s worth of underwear, her father’s English books, a pile of pop records, and a sacred passport had inflated her buckled brown satchel when she boarded that September Pan Am flight to Frankfurt.

Next stop, Madrid, to her grandparents’ flat.

If she were still in Livingston making a living from the sea like most of its residents, the Mulatta would not be here now reading Kurt Vonnegut’s commentary on war and life and death. Perhaps the simplicity of sea life would have kept her ignorant of the way tragedy comes sweeping down like a bird of prey.

Yet, there is a part of her that knows that ignorance is the only real tragedy.

And so it goes…that the New Year’s noise outside the Mulatta’s window should accentuate her loneliness; yet, she is mature enough now to appreciate that she’s far less lonely this night than she was a year ago.

Her attention sways between purring acknowledgement of Vonnegut’s brilliance and engagement with a figmental Seth Moreau lying beside her. He could have been part Chinese with that satin-black hair, tucked behind his ears like a drawn theater curtain, and those eyes which narrowed cartoonishly when he grinned at the start of his guitar solo last night.

“What do you think of him?” said the other waitress working with the Mulatta that evening, the two young women dancing around each other as they mixed drinks behind the bar. “He is Seth Moreau, from America. I asked him when the band first came in.”

The Mulatta shrugged. “What do I think of him? He’s a puppy.”

“More like a white lion. Incredibly elusive,” her workmate replied, winding her way out from behind the bar counter, holding up a platter of bottles and shots.  “One-word answers every time I’ve tried to start a conversation with him.”

The Mulatta rubbed her lips together to evade a smile. It had not occurred to her workmate that the white lion likely didn’t speak a word of Spanish.

Still, the Mulatta’s workmate had conspired her way into this Seth Moreau’s path six times after the band descended from the stage. She went so far as to ask him to wait for her outside until she finished her shift. He apparently understood her well enough to unabashedly decline.

Enamored of his brazenness, the Mulatta watched from the long windows of the bar as he and his band departed. Staring at the folds that formed around his eyes as his grin held, she thought how she’d only ever met three Chinese people in real life and how they were all exceptionally kind, perhaps to partially make up for the fact that their Castellano never met the standards of people who must’ve believed they held sole custody of the language. She also thought how this boy Seth probably wasn’t part Chinese, being as tall as he was. Admittedly, the Mulatta hadn’t read much on the subject of race and genetics, but that didn’t matter because excepting the spindly arms that hung from his T-shirt like winter branches, Seth looked so extraordinarily healthy that she wouldn’t have passed on admiring him from afar even if he were Genghis Khan. Just like a Sears catalogue kid was this boy Seth—skin like the flesh of an apple, a generous mouth remarkably identical in hue to the pale rose of his cheeks. She noted the lethargic yet charismatic energy of his stride, at times laggard before he took an easy step forward to bring himself back to his bandmates’ side as they made their way out of La Vida Buena.

The Mulatta had stood there, lamenting his departure with childlike ardor, until she’d looked to the right of the small stage where that white lion had left a most miraculous gift.

The Mulatta sighs, reaching out to touch that gift—the black box full of tapes that now sits beside her mattress. On the top of the box, a note is taped, scribed in thick black marker: Property of Naïve: Listen at your own risk. She recalls Seth Moreau’s slim, delicate hands playing his guitar. Had they written that note, so neat, so slick? Hands so skilled—what magic were they capable of?

 The Mulatta’s fantasies are traveling the distance tonight as she reads and re-reads the faint eroticism in the part of Slaughterhouse Five where Billy Pilgrim spends the first night with his new wife Valencia.

Now, supposing that the Mulatta were not kept awake by the sweltering her reverie generates from armpit to inner thigh, she would not have restlessly risen from her bed at a quarter till one in the morning.

The Mulatta throws the covers off herself and zips over the parquet floor leading to the balcony. She grips the iron railing, looking down at the black-brick streets below, where none other than Seth Moreau seems to stare up at her briefly in the midst of the New Year’s crowd. From this distance, his black hair and fair skin under the city lights give him the appearance of an Oriental porcelain doll.

He offers a quiet smile and a soldier’s salute. Then, hands in pocket, he turns on his heels, drifting away. As was the case last night, she knows that he does not really see her; he is simply routinely polite.

She turns back into her apartment, away from the commotion and the world that has so frequently touched her but which she has yet to voluntarily touch.

For several years, the dangers for someone as illegal as her—as criminal as her—have bridled her desire to know the world as it is. Not so tonight…