On a night out in Madrid, Spain, an American finds herself drawn into conversation with a Spanish movie director, whose entrancing passion for his art–his duende-leaves lasting lessons on the transformative power of a chance encounter.
We were speaking over the music in a way that was new to me, leaning forward to one another’s ears and then pulling away when the conversation paused. This felt intimate, disquieting: his breath was warm, tinted slightly with the curdled scent of (what I now know to be) leche de pantera, “panther’s milk”. My sister spoke to them, him and his friend, leaning into his face, swaying forward and then backward, drunkenly elegant. The bar was crowded. I had failed to catch their names when they had introduced themselves: I was busy translating words from Spanish to English and back again, forgetting to conjugate, some gibberish about Nueva York and la universidad falling off my tongue.
They invited us outside, wanting to free the conversation from the constraints of noise, as freeing it from the barrier of language was proving difficult. We followed them through the crowd, the wet heat of bodies shifting to the perpetual dry heat of this city. The street was quiet and dark.
Manuel (as I figured out his name was, hours later) licked his lips, placed a cigarette between them, and lit it, somehow still smiling at us as he did so. Izan, he called his friend, who looked over at him. Their English improved outside the bar, as did our Spanish, and we spoke in that candid way that you find yourself doing when a person feels transient.
“It is rare,” Manuel began, and I could see the words spelled out in his mind before he said them, “to meet someone who is new in the city.”
I nodded, although I had no idea what he meant–the city was filled with expats, tourists, students like myself. I just wanted him to continue.
“I have lived here my whole life. It is my dream to go to the United States, to California. I am a director.” He said this last bit so declaratively, almost commandingly, that I laughed.
He was a director, though, and we spoke about American films for a time–Before Sunrise, La La Land… every film I mentioned, Manuel would begin praising like a street preacher, his English becoming smoother and faster as he did so. Eventually, I asked him what his film was about.
Some 350 miles and 90 years from where I stood, Federico García Lorca was assassinated. Three years prior to that, the poet identifies a sort of mania in artistic creation. He calls this duende. In his lectures on the subject, he says, “the duende has to be roused from the furthest habitations of the blood.” Unlike other forms of inspiration–the muse, the angel, the Earth–duende comes from within, from an instinct for death: one thinks of the unchoreographed dance of the Matador.
Manuel exhibited duende in his passion. Whether or not there was substance to what he was saying–hours of film and editing and action–was irrelevant, enraptured as I was with the intensity in his voice. Responding to my questions, every description of his film had a rhythm, like a second heartbeat below his own. He tells me it has taken over his life; he tells me that he cannot walk around this city without thinking about what needs to be recorded. His art comes from within, clearly–he is inseparable from it, as he is inseparable from the city that has reared him. I wished, vainly, for artistic passion like his. I hoped to find it in Spain, as Manuel had.
The sparseness of his English gave each word more weight, and he said, “My movie, it has been my life. For two, three years. It is about love, in Madrid… and you are new to the city: you do not know about this yet. It is about people, stories of people in the city, those that have passion and leave one another, and then two that find love despite of this.”
He went on, describing the city lovingly, a bit desperately, the way a mother who has lost their child in a crowd might describe them to a stranger. He mentioned roads, bars, metro lines. Drug addiction, youth, Catholicism. Looking past his shoulder, all I could see of the city was a neon green farmacia sign, a shuttered restaurant, and, through a window, the interior of an apartment kitchen, awash in pale yellow light. The possibilities of the city revealed themselves to me through his speech–beyond the hush of the street, I imagined I could hear a din of voices, reggaeton from discotechas, the street cleaner’s cars. I felt I could make out Parque Retiro in the emptied gloom, its fountains bubbling unheard… I could see the boundless Iberian countryside, dry low shrubs, and Mudejar ruins… The world expanded out from the four of us–Manuel, Izan, my sister, and I.
The ringing of my sister’s phone brought me out of my visions of Madrid and back into the actual city, where a drunk man was asking me if I had fire. Tienes fuego? Tienes fuego? In response to this question, Manuel reached into his pocket and lit the man’s cigarette for him, cupping his face a little with the heel of his palm as he did so. This felt intimate to me.
Watching my sister answer the phone and wander away from us, I asked Manuel how to say home. Casa, of course, he replied. I smiled at him and shook my head no, saying the other home, la otra casa, and gestured to my heart. Hogar, he said. I repeated the word, and thanked him, in Spanish.
We bid Manuel and Izan goodbye: an exchanging of kisses near one another’s faces, leaning forward and back again, my sister and I laughing a little at our clumsiness in this ritual.
It was late in the night, early in the morning. La madrugada, I would later hear the hour called. Unbidden, I felt an unfamiliar sense of contentment characterized by momentum and simplicity: I was where I wanted to be, and there was nowhere I needed to be, not yet. I knew I wouldn’t be consumed by the city, I would return changed, but recognizable–I would live here mostly in groups of English-speaking peers, and I would be content here, happy. My excitement was dimmed, slightly, at this thought: something in me, call it duende, call it hamartia, wanted to be threatened by my life here. In the ‘80s, Manuel had told me, after Franco’s death, the city’s youth arose from the churches and entered the night with a tequila-slurred cry: ¡Madrid me mata! Madrid kills me!
I thought of them now, that first generation of Spanish kids, of their wild new lives. I wished then to never write home, to be thrown into panic, or struck by grief, to wander the streets alone, to leave the ivory tower and find myself living a life so unthinkable and undeniably authentic that it is forever relegated to the world of mere potential.
Still, there was potential. This city and these unknown people and red metro cards, paid for 30 days, and a new blank Moleskine journal, even with a return flight bounding the boundlessness.
We walked away from Manuel and Izan and the drunk man, and I thought of the not-yet of my life here, of Manuel’s potential, of Izan’s, of all the nights like this yet to pass. I could see the outlines of the people I imagined I would meet–artists, of course, and bus drivers and professors and baristas. They would construct my life here into something real, something with flesh and voice. In that moment, however, I relished this weightlessness between jumping and landing. The raw texture of fate was palpable in the nighttime streets and wooed me.
