I feel privileged. I am confined, like much of the world, and memories are awakened when I smell coffee or go out on the balcony so that the sun warms my palms. I am neither very old nor very young, but I am already a certain age, and we live in circumstances in which the consciousness and vulnerability of the body multiply. So, also like everyone else, but especially as those of us who dedicate ourselves to this profession of writing that hopefully will never be extinguished despite the trumpets of the apocalypse, the senses bring me to memory: the memory of those trips, places, people, those that one day I will return. Although now our place is the living room and we take out the passport to go to the bedroom. Google Photos sends me a message: on a day like today, a year ago, I was walking in a Paris that was not deserted because of the disease, but because the police and the Army were trying to anticipate the concentrations of the yellow vests. I was walking through the Tuileries next to my friend Isaac. We were alone and everything seemed surreal. We could not foresee what would be happening today. The sun hits my hands and I remember ...
1. What is not touched
In The Anatomy Lesson (2008) I wrote that on my first visit to Rome I did not get to reach into the Bocca della Verità, located in the pronaos de Santa María in Cosmedin. Not that I was lying, but I also didn't tell the truth. I do not like this type of initiation rites and I am a superstitious lay woman who fears that snakes or spiders will nest inside the hole in that mouth. A wet and slimy substance, unidentifiable, like the matter of Lovecraft's writings… With that lie I was telling truths about myself. How could I be there and not put my hand in? I put it in, took it out, and hope nobody makes rude analogies. I still remember that the touch of the marble was not entirely cold. It would be because of the number of fingers that had probed the darkness. Warming it up.
Yes I would have liked to run my hands over the Greco-Roman statues of the Louvre. For the body of the Victory of Samothrace, exhibited in the Parisian museum. Put your index finger between the folds of your clothing. I would have liked to touch the baroque anatomies of the Villa Borghese museum in Rome: Daphne metamorphosed into a laurel before the rudeness of an ill-accustomed Apollo. He would have experienced the softness, the reluctance, of stroking the hair of the baroque figures - not mythological but confessional - from the National Sculpture Museum of Valladolid. Running your fingers, as a braille reader, through the animals and fornicators and fantastic figures in the obscene stalls of the choir of the cathedral of Oviedo. But they have taught me that there are things that are not touched and perhaps learning is not bad. So I remember objects that can be desecrated: the warm and padded protectors of the toilets of the toilet in Tokyo and a carpet with magical history in the Tunisian Cairuán. Once there was a boy who pretended an accident, we picked him up from the road, we put him in the car and he told us where his father's house was. It was a carpet business. We bought two. That merchant from The Thousand and One Nights , grateful for the purchase and not for the pantomime of the rescue of his firstborn, sent an employee to take us on a tour of the rooftops of this beautiful city. He also took the tickets to visit the mosque. Today I run my finger over the carpet, embroidered with blue threads, on which my feet rest in the living room. I remember again. How I remember that blue of the Sidi Bou Said farmhouse and the impossible red color of the salt lake of Chott el Jerid. But the colors, the colorblind alterations of memory, belong to a different business.
2. I see, I see ...
I see the lights of Broadway in New York and imagine the Godzilla emerging between two buildings in the Tokyo neighborhood of Shinjuku, lit with so many bright signs that I am about to have an epileptic seizure. The colorful houses on the Malecon in Havana, the graffiti on the streets of La Candelaria in Bogotá and the colorful flip-flops on the stalls of the Quiapo district in Manila, with their cable trees and power line vegetation. I see the profile of Cehegín sand, in Murcia, and the white villages of Cádiz. Cities from the viewpoints: Berlin from the Alexanderplatz Television Tower, New York from the top of the Empire State Building, the reddish panoramic view of La Paz from its cable car, the Rio de Janeiro postcard from Corcovado. In Saint Petersburg I see the green painted facade of the Hermitage. And inside the Prado Museum I go through the mirror and enter the clean depth of Las Meninas . The red tulips at the Flower Market - which, of course, also smell - and Rembrandt's house in Amsterdam. I remember and visualize the great squares of the world: the Zocalo in Mexico City, the Grand Place in Brussels, the Place Bellecour in Lyon, the Commerce Square in Lisbon, the Plaza Mayor in Salamanca or Madrid, San Marcos in Venice, the Jemaa el Fna square in Marrakesh with its snake charmers. Tiananmen and the indecipherable Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven where Pekingese play strange board games and play musical instruments. Places where you do not know where to look and others where you lose your landmarks, such as the labyrinths of Fez with its concentric medinas.
I see the sublime natures, which in my case have almost always been limited to the profile of the Iberian Peninsula and its islands. Natures that do not fit within the eyes: Ordesa, the sickles of the Duratón, the Cañadas del Teide, the Roque de los Muchachos, the Sierra de Cazorla, the secret peninsula of Formentor, the Mediterranean on the island of Menorca and, below the sea plate, the electric blue, the green of the algae, the purple jellyfish, the gold and silver of the fish that are still fish because nobody has caught them ...
The trip through the interior of Ecuador comes to mind: from Quito to Guayaquil, passing through the Cotopaxi volcanoes and the overwhelming mass of Chimborazo, frozen, paved with stars. I attend a live street show going down Las Ramblas in Barcelona and I get dizzy when I see the flying sculptures of Madrid's Gran Vía: Diana Cazadora and her dogs. You have to look from top to bottom - how undulating and beautiful are the floors of the artist Burle Marx in Brazil - but also from the bottom up. I do not know the pyramids of Egypt, but I do know those of the Sun and the Moon in Teotihuacán (Mexico). I don't know the Rocky Mountains. Not Toronto. However, I miss Benidorm and its skyline . These are my memories and I'm not going to ask for forgiveness.
3. Aromatic memories
My childhood and now my maturity are linked to the Mediterranean. Alicante, Valencia, Murcia. Perhaps that is why I identify the good smell with that of jasmine. Also in Tunisia, men wear jasmine bouquets behind their ears. In Córdoba, for me the most beautiful city in the world, the Patio de los Naranjos, the San Basilio neighborhood and the Alcázar smell of green leaves. And how can you forget the oiliness of the oil mill aroma, which impregnates you in oil, when you cross the olive groves of Jaén and go around Andújar. The incense produces a certain dizziness and itching in the throat: it occurs inside the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. These days I also miss the smell, rotten, fuel and salt, of the sea in the ports of Galicia, Cantabria, Euskadi ... The wonderful essence, impossible to decant in a bottle, of the sea stirred on the beach of La Concha in San Sebastian. Smoke. Sardines in Santurce and spits in Malaga. In the Cimadevilla neighborhood of Gijón or Villaviciosa you can smell the cider that spilled from the edges of the glass. And near Haro and Peñafiel it smells of those wineries where the wine sleeps.
On my scent map there is an anosmia space: the Istanbul spice market was closed when we found it. A hot dog and fat stink the centers of a globalized and arteriosclerotic world: streets of central London, which also give off the smell of old paper from the bookstores of Charing Cross, Foyles and Blackwell's. In Munich it smells of beer while men dressed (not disguised) as Tyrolean or something similar take their mugs out of a locker. In Damascus, before the war, some small streets smelled of tea.
4. Time for gluttony
The drunkenness of smells leads me to taste, and I will be sparing here because the press is full of gastronomy supplements. I like to eat, but I'm not up to a gourmet height. I remember a couscous that I ate with wonderful women in Oran. A pizza in Naples and an oyster ice cream in a San Sebastian gastronomic temple. Of the raw fish in those taverns in Tokyo where you take your shoes off at the door and you can still smoke. Soba restaurants. A chicken with lobster in Maresme. Shrimp suck in Arequipa, a Peruvian city that houses the mysterious convent-city of Santa Catalina, the Niño Jesús Terremotito and a market with magic products against impotence and over a hundred thousand varieties of potato. In the Bellavista neighborhood of Santiago de Chile, we rejuvenated a thousand years drinking bottles with the students. And I remember an afternoon eating porchetta and drinking wine in Frascati. Later, back in Rome, someone ended up vomiting on Via Merulana. It was a tribute to Carlo Emilio Gadda.
5. Acoustic sensitivity
When we crossed the Republic Square (always in Rome), the noise of the starlings almost shook our brains. Passers-by carried umbrellas to avoid the impact of their droppings. I could not spare this detail. The inarticulate sound of those birds was undoubtedly orchestrated by Bernard Herrmann, author of some of the best music in film history. Now I seem to hear an aria at the Vienna Opera. The Berlin Philharmonic. La Scala in Milan. The imposing organ, played by Mozart and Handel, of the church of Saint Bavo in Haarlem, the Netherlands. I remember a concert at the Rudolfinum in Prague where, without being disciplined music lovers, we were dazzled by Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony in C minor : it only took a little sensitivity. Part of the public remained standing. Then I remember fados in the Lisbon neighborhood of Alfama, the street samba in the pacified favela of Santa Teresa in Río, the tangos in San Telmo: a man and a woman intertwine, with elegance and violence, for tourists. I never saw such an authentic imposture. Flamenco, out of the blue and unexpected, hides in Santiago and San Miguel: we are in Jerez de la Frontera and Caballero Bonald is our host. A group of kids with bangs play in Washington Square, but in Chicago we go crazy with their blues temples. And it is that some auditory experiences are supernatural: a woman sings Think about me in the Casa de La Trova, in Santiago de Cuba, and I still remember how water drips in the cisterns, the submerged palaces, in Istanbul and Cáceres: each city a its beautiful scale. The language of the fountains in the Alhambra in Granada or in the gardens of the palace of La Granja de Segovia, a territory of tamed water and an Aqueduct. The sweet buzz accent of my friends in San Juan de Puerto Rico ("Ay, Bendito!") Comes to me like heavenly music. I remember their voices and, from the living room of my house, I miss them, and I swear, squeezing a scrawny carrot, that one day, without Proust's cupcakes or virus, I will return to celebrate with them the five senses.
Marta Sanz is the author of the novel 'Little Red Women' (Editorial Anagrama).
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