Chapter 5 - Southern Europe - exploring Madrid

I slept soundly for 11 hours - 11 hours! I had a beautiful dream – a mediaeval romance of a dream. You were on a large grey horse, standing over me, then you picked me up in a cloak of dark green velvet and we rode up the skies to spend eternity together. Delicious thrills went through me and I felt utterly at peace upon waking, lying there looking myopically at the chandelier. Every romantic bone and erotic place in my body was alive. I felt like a beautiful nymph, my hair all tousled and my eyes sleepy, the sort of creature depicted in great paintings or written about in delicate poems. Words you wrote once to me repeat themselves: “My day is rewarded when I awake, for you flower in my eyes. Sunlight streaming through the curtains to touch you, setting your outline afire.”


Of course that image shattered the minute I got up and looked in the mirror at the limp, brown creature that looked back at me. A cold shower brought me back to cruel reality. I am alone and will probably always be alone. Spending eternity with myself.


My mood lightened outdoors. It had been dark last night when I arrived, so Madrid now presented itself to me as if whisked into existence during my sleep. The busy streets are broken frequently with “Plazas” and wide, treed boulevards, fountains, parks and bakeries in equal profusion. A new prime minister was elected less than a year ago and everyone feels optimistic. My steps took me to the Naval Museum to see the maps, especially Juan de la Cosa’s world map from 1500, which I had been wanting to see since hearing about such an early map of the complete world, as it was then. Why was there never any map legacy from that voyage he took with Columbus in 1492? One of the great mysteries. There’s no visual record of Marco Polo’s voyages either. Of course having a map is not always enough to prove anything. Take Atlantis. And Lemuria. And Verrazano’s Sea. People really believed he saw the Pacific Ocean across the outer banks of North Carolina, convincing enough for mapmakers to copy it again and again. And it wasn’t even him, but his brother who mapped it in the first place. Oh dear, I suppose my teaching years have made me into a bit of a fact bore, even to myself.