Define "Amor'

It was at El Hexágono, an ugly, metallic-and-white-formica-and-mirrors, horribly large cafeteria in horrible Madrid. El Hexágono might or might not be in business now, but I don’t much care. I don’t ever plan to go back. Once was enough. If I am lucky, I won’t have to return to Madrid, either. You see, I really hate Madrid. It might not be Madrid’s fault at all, but I do hate it. There are reasons for my feelings, but mostly you should know that I simply feel out of place in big, crowded, over-populated cities. Guess you could say it comes with being a (very) small town girl.

That’s enough talk of hate, because I want to talk about something so much better and happier. Maybe.

The cafeteria meeting, as he called it, was technically a date, a first date. Our first. It lasted from about eight in the afternoon until midnight. We spent four long hours over just one café con leche each. It was (I was) a cheap date, a very cheap date. Even more important is what happened over the course of those four hours. That meant it was also a long date, a long time sitting in the same spot, looking and listening to things.

First of all, I sat quite still, glued to the molded plastic seat, elbows propped up on the hard white formica table to steady my coffee cup, then later, to steady my nerves. 

What nerves?, you might ask. Well, I didn't really know him well, and felt shy. I had next to nothing to say, which turned out to be a good thing. Being in a city of over five million people and twice as many cars running on low-grade gasoline had not yet provided much stimulation. 

Who am I kidding? I was lonely. I was there to study, but my friends were all back home and meeting people in Madrid was beyond the skill set of this small-town girl. I had said yes to going for coffee because I was desperate for company, you might say, and you would be right.

That snowy white table I mentioned previously was probably hexagon-shaped, right? Wrong. I think back now and imagine the name of the cafeteria had to have come from the six streets that fed into the famous Cibeles plaza and fountain. It is still there, still impressive, and big streets like Alcalá, Recoletos, and Prado still meet in the center of it. 

In case you're interested, Cibeles is the Spanish name for Cybele, who was a kind of Great Mother, a Magna Mater, goddess. She seems to be of Anatolian origin. Anatolia was where a large part of Turkey is today. Did I know all of this at the time of the coffee? Not hardly. I do like ancient history and even took a course in mythology in college, but even people from Madrid - who for some reason are called gatos - probably never learned about the origins of Cibeles.

There was no geometry involved in the name of the cafeteria, then, which was good, because I never liked math. When I was in school, girls weren't supposed to like it or be good at it.

Besides, when the date happened, I was pretty much focused on pronouncing the name of the famous goddess correctly. If memory serves, I did a half-way decent job. 

I needed to do a good job, since I was in Madrid to study Spanish and was trying to get all the phonemes and morphemes to behave. They say Spanish is an easy language, but easy is relative, if you want to become good at it, really good. I wanted to be really good at it, too, as you might imagine. 

Now let’s return to the hexagon thing, because to be honest, I wasn’t thinking about six anything. I was busy being bored by his insistence on controlling the conversation topic and simultaneously feeling intrigued by his eyes that seemed to read every word I said and those of the people at the nearby tables, and his voice. 

He was so intense, but the focus of his intensity was apparently something off toward the horizon. Thousands of complicated theories were marching along there, and he only had eyes for them.

Later I would discover that he was near-sighted in one eye and far-sighted in the other, which created a very unusual expression when he was trying to focus on objects. I discovered by accident - but not that night - that he also had the well-disguised trick of covering one eye with a hand or book while looking at things up close. The vision he had wasn't something to be ashamed of, and besides, you can order it now if you wanted to have lasik surgery on your eyes. It's a way to avoid wearing glasses, having one eye for close and one for far. He never seemed to get the hang of that.

He always kept the melodious voice, too, which I later dubbed his ‘voz telefónica’ and I thought must be a great singing voice, probably tenor. Despite having such a melodious voice when speaking, I never really heard him sing. In fact, he liked jazz, which in his case was always instrumental. It wasn't just singing; I never saw him dance except when he was clowning around. I still don't know if he has a sense of rhythm (he does like jazz) or is a really clumsy (you should have seen him with an electrical drill).

The mismatched eyes would eventually lose their appeal.

He was in full control of everything: place, time, length of time, beverage consumed.

Anyway, sitting there all that time wasn’t impossible. He could blab forever on any topic he chose, because I was hooked on the eyes and that voice. Did he know it? Not likely, because I do not swoon easily, if ever. I sit still and calm. He jabbed with the words, poked, strangled, abused, insisted. It was not my fault that the world was screwed up and the government where I was from had something to do with that. One does get defensive. That doesn’t happen with me now. I totally get where he was coming from. That didn’t make his choice of conversation a good one.

Maybe it was a clear, confident voice that was far superior than the ones of journalists on the daily news that made for the perfect way to get in some 'lab' practice. By that I mean I could listen to the recording and respond, since oral/aural practice is essential if you want to get good at any language. Hours on task, that's key.

Do I really want to bore you with an exact description of the topics - which were all pretty much the same topic - he brought up that night? No, but it's not for the reasons you might think. Let’s just say he appeared to think I needed to be educated, needed some doctrine instilled in me, and that he was going to do that. 

He definitely loved certain theories of philosophy and politics, but I won't bore you with the list. I don't even remember them all, anyway. His loves, his way to love, were the only way. He was a firm believer, and proud of it.

On the other hand, he hated certain people and places. My country happened to be one of them. It was all right, because he only got around to hating it directly in the years afterward. You might think I was offended, and I might have been back then, but not now. On the other hand, if I say he might have been, or was, right in his hatred of my country, you might be offended. I'm not, that's for sure.

In all the years I knew him since the first date, he never let go of the mythical string that guides the chosen (him) away from the Minotaur and on toward safety. He never exerted his (supposed) superiority, but he felt it within, felt his power, spoke it. I only saw it externally; that’s all that interested me. 

But those eyes? 

That voice? Yeah... (Not yay.)

Back to the topics of discussion, which as I have already noted were basically all the same: the world seen from the perspective often considered to be radical left. I was rather liberal at the time myself, but all political theory and no flesh is like all linguistic theory and no phonemes. Anyway, a hardcore political discussion was really all wrong for a first date, but he didn’t know that. I did, but had been able to focus on the two things I’ve already mentioned. 

If I hadn't, all that gnawing away at my imagined idiocy and rightwingedness would have prompted me to end the encounter much sooner. An hour, tops, plus maybe, just maybe, he was right on a few things. Which things we may never know.

Just for the record, in case you’re wondering why he even wanted to go out for coffee in the evening, creating our sort of date-y non-date, I think he basically wanted to let a person from my country know who really was informed. Yep, that had to be it. A lot of Europeans think they're superior. At least I thought they did. They might be right, maybe.

Over the years, though, and for the purposes of this story, not long after the coffee evening, I would come to agree with him. After all, he was so smart, so intelligent. He seemed to have read everything and knew if it was correct or not. Where did he acquire that self-confidence? I wished I'd had some. I think I understand now. I'm a slow learner.

So he knew his stuff, or thought he did. I thought he did, at least. However, that night you might imagine that I felt slightly attacked. Remember, please, that I wasn’t speaking in my first language, so it was all right to feel more vulnerable, perhaps. After all, nobody invites a person for coffee and yaps on one thing all might. I am still surprised that I put up with it, but I won’t tell you again why I did. 

It was, to be honest, a rather pleasant evening.

***

Years later, I think it's rather important that we, that I, clarify the eyes-voice thing. After all, I wasn’t some silly teen-ager with a crush. I had mature values and knew other things about a person were more important than looks were.

First. I had never seen eyes so dark, so slanting downward in a way that is not indigenous to the Americas but rather indigenous to the Celtic regions of Europe. 

I am serious about this, perhaps because to me the eyes are the most important physical feature in everyone’s appearance. They can reveal or hide everything. But that's because they are the way inward.

I couldn’t know that night that those eyes would indeed reveal something unexpected and I would freeze inside. At that point in my contact with Spain I had met few to no people from his place, so I had no clue as to ethnicity’s role in shaping his organs of sight. By that I mean that someone from his place had learned how to look at the world in a unique way, and that I was far from aware of how he saw things. 

I would learn.

His place wasn't exactly Spain. It had a different name. I don't need to bore you with it.

That lack of awareness would change, but it really isn’t part of this story. It can't be part of it. Not any more, and that is a good thing. I mean it.

Second. The term ‘voice’ as I have used it in this story might be slightly ambiguous. I use 'voice' to refer to intonation for the most part, but also to the strength of articulation or how quick-hitting the sounds seem when somebody is speaking. I'd better explain.

He had a very non-Madridian intonation, which means non-Castilian. He was also easier to understand, because the final -s and others throughout his words were all pronounced. He spoke with a lilt as well, much gentler than the madrileño who can end words with a quintuple warble of the final vowel: quie-r o o o o o. 

Maybe the four hours were just a lesson in listening to Spanish, as I kind of joked about earlier in this story. He spoke slowly and clearly and that was very nice. I should think about this a little more. 

Was it all just about learning to listen, to the language he spoke, in order to learn to speak? 

Wasn't it also about listening to very different - and boring - ideas? 

Was mostly listening a sign of weakness or could it be a good thing?

Whose voice mattered that night?

I can admit now that I had expected coffee and had also expected to be ‘hit on’. (There was that idea that locals would be on the lookout for prey in the form of an international student.) I think he had expected to hit on me with political theory I was too ignorant to comprehend without his guidance. 

Was he interested in me? 

What did I see in him?

Funny how I expected physical aggression and got the verbal kind. In the end, I did not reject the verbal kind. You have no idea how much I’ve chided myself about that over the years. I do, of course, consider myself to be a feminist.

I should mention that I became hungry during the coffee session, because we hadn’t had anything but coffee. He was oblivious, despite knowing that supper in Madrid is eaten around ten o’clock. At least by eleven.

Ten came and went. My stomach growled a little from time to time, but the clinking of the cups in the metal sink and the whoosh of steamed milk from the espresso machines drowned that out, thankfully. Still, it might have been rude not to suggest a bite to eat. Not even a sandwich or a tapa. Nothing. Nada.

Years later, there is no connection. I should have known better. We pulled the plug, as they used to say. Nowadays, they - we - say we turned off the internet.

We did more than that. We went off grid. We are off grid. To one another.

So, I don’t imagine he has given a whole lot of thought to that night, our coffee commencement. He was not then and is not now, romantic. Remembering things like that night was something he avoided, because showing affection was not his style.

Except he might still recall that at some point toward the end of the four hours I had spoken up. It had been to teach him the English verb “to bolt,” to leave without paying for the food or drink consumed. 

He liked that verb a lot, and I began to fear he’d suggest we do it, bolt. After four hours, the weary waiter would never notice.

Except that...

I’d like to ask him if he remembers, but he seems to have gone his merry way, perhaps forgetting me. It would be so much more painful to know he remembered the verb - to bolt - but had forgotten me. 

The me he never knew. 

The me who had loved what his eyes and voice promised for years afterward. Who had promised back. 

Who had loved a lie. 

Who is fine with that.

Who is writing this story.