It was Easter week, and Madrid was bustling with tourists, my friend from Albuquerque and I among them. But for all the people arriving in the capital, even more appeared to be leaving, many of them by train for points south. In Spain, practicing religion seems to mean not so much going to Mass as attending the processions, and they are nowhere better than in Seville or Granada during semana santa, Holy Week. You must see them some time, I had been told. To judge from the packed Atocha station and sold-out trains heading south to Andalusia on Thursday, many thousands of others had heard the same. My friend and I joined them, outward bound.
We didn’t go far. My friend wanted to travel by high-speed train, so we’d planned to ride the AVE for about an hour, get off, walk around, and then about two hours later, return to Madrid. Cuenca was the destination of choice, but all the trains going there were sold out. Same with a few other places. What about Ciudad Real? My friend, in Spain for the first time, was amenable to anything, and I had never visited the city. So Ciudad Real it was, a reputedly dull town some 170 kilometers south of Madrid, just one hour by rail.
The train was close to full. We had tickets in the same car but not together. “I’ll sit here with you for now,” I said when we boarded, taking the spot next to his. After a few minutes a woman paused beside us. “Is this your seat?” I asked. Frowning at me, she said it was. I explained that my seat was three rows back, also an aisle seat, and asked if she minded switching with me so my friend and I could ride together. Her frown deepened. She’d have to see the seat, she said. I showed her my ticket with the seat number, and she continued down the aisle past us to check it out. After a moment, in a voice full of relief, she called out that it was fine. And that was that.
What had she thought she might find to necessitate a refusal? A dirty seat? A dirty seatmate? A dirty window or a noisy child across the aisle? I recalled David Sedaris writing of a woman beside him on a plane who did not take it well when he declined to trade seats with her husband in the bulkhead so that the couple could sit together. The bulkhead was the stumbling block, a seat where Sedaris would be unable to fold himself in, knees against the seat in front, as was his habit. But why, I wondered on rereading the essay after Easter, hadn’t she switched with the other passenger to occupy the bulkhead with her husband? Isn’t there always a solution, or half a one?
On the return train, my friend and I had adjacent seats. In fact, we had most of the car. Six o’clock on Holy Thursday, and no one was jockeying for a ride to Madrid. It would be a different story three days later when the madrileños returned, thousands of them on the AVE, destination Atocha. By then I was back in Asturias and my friend was safely home in Albuquerque, where a white landscape from a surprise spring snowfall had welcomed him—all the joy of the familiar with the pleasure of the unexpected. Of Spain he could now claim, been there, done that. Of home he could brag about a white Easter. Could anything be better?
