The subterranean traveller had unexpected business surrounding nationality demands to attend to in as far away as Madrid, so he booked a seat on the 23.30 bus leaving from Estació del Norte. The buses, a couple of them every half hour, were mostly filled with strangers of every colour and stripe. The traveller sat in a deeply uncomfortable position next to a sweet smelling young woman who kept rolling against him in her sleep. The traveller wouldn't sleep at all.
After a torrid night on the smooth Spanish highway A2, some churros with coffee in a bar across from the Avenida América interchanger put the subterranean back on his feet again. His first goal of the day was to have the perfect pass photo taken, the only kind the subterranean's country crowd at the embassy deemed passable, to be obtained at embassy approved addresses. Moving northwards to the photographer of his choice, the traveller came through a quiet Madrid he didn't know, with tiny houses along narrow residential streets and an almost unnatural deep silence. Nothing happening here, apart from chemtrails being laid in the bright blue morning sky, as bright as blue skies get these days.
Having his picture taken for a reasonable price, certainly less than he was used to pay back home, the traveller went looking for a bar with wifi. To his amazement, none was to be found, not even around Chamartín, so he finally ended up in a Busters type coffee bar right across the street from the four smog scrapers, in one of which his identity was going to be re-established. Acquiescing to a cup of tea, the subterranean got some decent work done on his laptop.
The costly and mostly useless sideshow of going through the motions to produce what already existed to everybody's content, a tiny red booklet containing a picture clearly identifying the bearer, took place just before lunch time on the 36th floor with breath-taking views of the wrong side of the city. Why adults had to renew their hardly aging faces every five years was beyond the traveller. Was it to maximize public insecurity or just an ordinary money transfer? Afterwards, the subterranean traveller did what he was best at, riding the metro downtown. The train was full of people looking very much like they do in Barcelona, going about their business without being too glad about it, a bit more classically styled perhaps, bcbg the preferred decision lead.
Getting off at Tribunal he hit the local shopping hell, all the way down to Sol were he had an errand to fulfil, and thought very little of what he saw. Truth being the subterranean tried his best to see as little as possible of the shop windows and the people in front of them. Same shit everywhere. The traveller knew that nicer areas were round the corner, but he couldn't be bothered seen visiting them, fun not high on his hit list. He managed to cross Sol without colliding with one of the human sized comic figures looking for laughs from children and tourists, and took up his place in the scramble for attention from the assistants at la Mallorquina, a longstanding cake shop.
Back out on the street without the produce he was explicitly ordered to take home, winter apparently not the right time to dig up an old saint's soft, sweet bones, the subterranean decided to seek retreat from the pre-sale crowds in the city's main park, enjoying the last of the afternoon sun. Above the Neo-Roman garden an old man was playing Beethoven's hope for mankind on a gaita. High on the music, the traveller gave him a euro and the man played the song again.
After the park it was time to take a closer look at Kandinsky, a French selection of his work available at the town hall, one of those architectural monstrosities Madrid is full of, showing an immature need for excess and menace born out of the perpetual frustration of being in the wrong location. There's no need for Madrid in Madrid (nor anywhere else), surrounded as it is by a vast nothingness, that is the inescapable sensation the city always radiates. One wonders why they ever bothered to grow it so big. Frustration sure is a powerful emotion.
Taking up his place in the queue, having to outsmart a family of seven who still had to send their sons to buy the tickets, the subterranean traveller began noticing how in the fast fading light of the overcast afternoon the people around him on the square like pavement to a certain extent all looked like people he had met before. There was a friend's mother, a shoe maker, an old teacher, the girl next door, their faces were like leaves on a branch, taking up every look he wished to see in them (concept stolen from Patti Smith). The traveller felt he had come closer to Xmas than he had in years.
Kandinsky's was a slow starting career, the subterranean learned, producing rather unconvincing landscapes, until well into his forties he found the style that would set him out as one of the pioneers of abstract art. Contemplating the body of work stretching a period of four decades (though certainly not justifying an eleven euro entrance fee), it dawned on the subterranean how all of Kandinsky's abstract paintings departed from a clear image, often of emotionally heated people, sometimes of nature or modern inventions, which then was pressed against a mould of primary coloured geometrical figures. The subterranean traveller recognised a lot of Mirò and Picasso and he wondered who had been stealing from whom. Certainly something to look up at home.
Outside in the fast falling temperatures of early evening, the subterranean traveller made his way through Salamanca, all but shops and fancy restaurants. At the other end he had some lousy food in a Chinese bar and made friends while waiting for the bus back home. An even worse night saw him being dropped at Sants Estació. Time to go home and write down some impressions while they still lingered with him.
