Cinematographers call it the blue hour, that moment of transition between day and night, after the sun sets, but its light beyond the curve of the earth still sweeps the sky in phosphorescent indigo. It is my favorite time, this day/nighttime: the bright blue-bridging span of light so favored by Chagall, the same flood-sky when I fly in dreams, and the color of night when I first met Death in Madrid.
This is a true story.
I was teaching a summer class on Food and Literature, and “supposedly” the co-director of the Madrid Program at my university. I use those quotation marks advisedly. I wasn’t really the director: I’d never been to Madrid; I don’t speak Spanish; I don’t even cook. At best, I could say, I ate on a regular basis; and I do love to eat, man, love to eat. I can talk about eating for days on end: food as fuel, food as metaphor, food as heart-pumping, soul-saving, really great sex-inducing tidbits for the gods, fit for a Top Chef judge, at the very least, Oprah. And being an English professor, I could spin a good set of questions on how to describe the heavenly scent of chicken mole or the depth of flavor found in the most humble Spanish rice. That was good enough for my friend, who really was the director of the program, and who had lost her co-director two weeks earlier. She needed someone fast, to teach and to be fun, and I was more than willing to embrace teaching and being fun for a trip to Spain, though how successful I was at either is debatable.
The only place I did feel successful, or like I could be successful, or that I was in the right place at the right time, was when I was walking through the city—alone. I’m not a hermit, mind you, but I do like to walk: meandering slowpoke style, half-daydream shuffle, or even sometimes a bracing, fast-paced jaunt, as long as my surroundings are beautiful and I need not think in linear thought, or think at all, for that matter. My walks in Madrid were rich in that, and wonder, too, for the city is more than lovely.
These walks began the exact same way most everyday: through the garden of the Palacio de Justicia, which my apartment overlooked, then several blocks down to the main thoroughfare, a sharp right, and oh!—The Paseo de Recoletos, that glorious two-way street dedicated to Memory, or so I thought at the time. The road twists and turns for miles through the city, like some glorious river, past fountains and castle-like structures and souvenir stands and rushing cars, and tourists stopping and starting, in awe and delight, and these marvelous life-size replicas of paintings from the Prado Museum, superimposed on big cement blocks. And if you walk long enough and far enough, you’ll hit the real Prado, where those real works of art wait patiently in gold-gilt frames, waiting to be discovered as original.
I found that street on my second day, a free day from the students, and I walked the hell out of it, at a good clip, too, chirping “Hola!” to every passing stranger. Of course, no one ever hola’ed back. Did I expect them to? Just happy.
By the time I was heading home, I was moving in backlit neon blue, feeling the magic of that color and that light, for Madrid summer skies stay bright deep into the night. When I came upon a series of low modern-style fountains, straight-line and block-form, like a manmade cubist stream, I approached each one with a wing in my step, and each step I took turned on, or seemed to turn on, those tiny hidden lights that make the water shine. I’m sure they were all set by a huge computer buried in the bowels of the city, but it still felt pretty magical—as if I’d entered a time warp wrinkle, where my mind clock clicked with the city clock mind that lit up the fountains of Madrid.
In the distance, a tall, thin man was approaching. Nothing strange about that, save this man seemed to be making a beeline straight for me, his body moving up and down in gentle dancelike pulses. He was going somewhere, I could tell from his stride, near-gliding down the road I traveled up. His commanding walk and descending angle was such to pass through me, I thought, if he didn’t, or I didn’t, or we didn’t swerve or change direction.
As he came closer, I marked his strange ragtag dress, motley shades and folds flouncing gray and purple. A floppy hat of the same varied materials bobbed with his purposeful step. I wondered if he felt the same delight in this moment as I, so in tune we were, step for step.
When close enough, I greeted him with my big “Hola!” and he smiled at me, this magnificent, jubilant smile, and said “Hola!” in the same tone as my own (the only person in Madrid to respond in this way). And his friendly look seemed to say he knew me, was surprised and delighted to see me, and happy we met under such favorable circumstances. But at the same moment our eyes locked and we exchanged that cheerful greeting, I saw his face. A skull, near-glowing white in the shadow of his hat, the facial bones contracting and expanding to allow for Death’s bright smile.
This was not an illusion. Nor am I crazy. Of course this was a man, it had to be, dressed up to look like Death, off for some performance or party, though we were nowhere near to Spain’s celebrated Day of the Dead and his dress was not that of the Grim Reaper. But yes, yes, of course he was some man in a drab dress, with a makeup job to beat the band: stark skeletal-white theater paint, outlined by eggplant-purple shadows, suggesting, I suppose, the rotted places where flesh used to be, and that huge black-gummed, wide and white-toothed smile. Death Mask.
He swept passed me without stopping, obviously off to some previously-arranged engagement. But I stopped cold, the breath near knocked out of me, as the saying goes. By the time I got my bearings, he was a full block down, at the light on the corner, waiting to cross. And I waited, too, thinking I should do something—follow, quick, before he’s gone, and ask . . . Ask what? Are you Death? When will I die? What is the meaning of life? Or maybe just, may I take a photo? Really, when would this happen again? This was also the week’s assignment for my students, to get a picture with a native of the country and write a journal entry on their changed perspective from such a meeting. I had even promised myself to do each assignment, set a good example, be the model teacher we all believe we’ll be at the start of each semester. But asking Death to stop and chat—for a selfie? I hesitated; and in that Hamlet pause, I lost a chance I hoped would never come again.
One thing more: I should admit that I think about death a lot. I did so even before this chance meeting. My mother claimed to have seen him once—Darth Vader, no lie, standing at the foot of her hospital bed, on the day we buried my father. And I told her Death could not possibly look like that, that that alone was proof Death was not hovering nearby. For if Death would ever reveal himself, he would instead look like some nerdy Ingmar Bergman student, sporting a black beret, with a copy of The Seventh Seal in his back pocket. Or maybe Jeremy Irons, swathed in a red velvet smoking jacket, reading a classical tome—the kind bound in leather, with really small print, in French! (With all the time on his hands, Death must read volumes.) But now I think Death is how painters have always pictured him: just bones, rotting teeth, his brittle skull jutting out from under hooded cloak or hat. But hey, he’s cheerful. He doesn’t dawdle. And it’s not like he doesn’t know you.
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Marina Favila’s writing appears in Spiritus, Weirdbook, Jersey Devil Press, Harvardwood and Flame Tree Press anthologies, among others. Her audio piece, “Holy, Holy,” was a 2021 humor finalist for The Missouri Review’s Miller Prize (accessible online). She is professor emerita of English at James Madison University, where she taught Shakespeare for twenty-five years.
© 2024, Marina Favila
Halfway Down the Stairs 