South of Plaza Mayor by Plaza de Cascorro— past streets named Lettuce, Raisin, Barley— is Madrid’s outdoor market called El Rastro, hundreds of stalls, lean-tos, tents squeezed tight as niches where anything from a clawfoot tub, to a surgeon’s saw to a tattered La Celestina bound in sheepskin could be haggled down with raunchy bravado or the promise of beer. Mostly it was junk passed off to the tourists as pricey souvenirs, like plastic castanets, hand fans of silk (rayon really), or tin-plate doubloons. So what drew the youth of Madrid to this place every Sunday afternoon by the hundreds? None of us were bargain hunters or hoarders, just hippieish kids in patched dungarees, espadrilles, & wool coats frayed to cheesecloth, our pockets with enough pesetas to buy a handful of stale cigarettes. It was to revel in life, squeeze out joy from the lees of fate, make fellowship like pilgrims to a shrine. We’d sprawl against a wall or a lamppost long into the afternoon to talk, joke, carouse, eat cheese rinds with secondhand bread, drink wine more like iodine than merlot, oblivious to time & space, the crowds tripping on our legs, tossing butts into our heads, how they smelled like horses & we told them so, who then shot out crude medieval curses, but we didn’t care, for we felt alive as never before, singular in every breath, word, & thought, stubborn as wayward seeds that trick a drought & grow into hardscrabble woodland trees.
Copyright © 2018 by Orlando Ricardo Menes. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 4, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.