Madrid; cameraless

It’s funny to be a photographer without a camera. You can’t help 
seeing the experiences before you photographically even though you 
curse the fact that it is broken. Still, maybe the experiences ring 
truer in your head because you’re not allowed to mystify the moment 
into a single photograph or succession of shots.

Madrid, especially the centre exists as a fluctuation of the same 
people, same faces. They appear, as if by osmosis long walks away from 
where you originally saw them, just as you do for them.

And then its stationary people make their mark - the man with the White Afro in 
a self-styled navy uniform sits outside the McDonald’s of Sol for hours observing 
people, but only the ones that meet his gaze straight on, like a 
focused camera or automaton war photographer. He does not beg, only 
sits there. The armless men shaking their plastic glasses with their 
mouths, making self-mocking rhythms out of their misery and desperate poverty.

You feel an urgent surge to ignore them and you revile your first reaction.

The gypsy women with romero in the Retiro, accusing you of having a 
friendly face and not living up to it. Americans with 
heavily accented tones shout ‘Plaaaasai Meiiiyour’ to denote Plaza 
Mayor, an Irish woman precisely and politely answers a Spanish 20 
something old boy with a hair bun’s questions, a couple get mugged at 
night 50 metres before us - the perpetrator snatches the bag so fast it 
is almost invisible to the naked eye. (If we hadn’t bought that barra 
who knows what could have happened… we ponder rather smugly).

On the first night Mark and I sit in Plaza Mayor and this South American chubby woman

in her fifties sits next to us, all dolled up with red top, white tight jeans and red heels.

This bald guy starts leers at her from a few metres away,  a 
Spanish equivalent of Grant Mitchell. She goes Niño, ven pa’ca
Realising that the older-than-Mitchell lookalike has been in the same 
spot for about a minute, I make awkward hand-gestures, trying to make Mark

 realise we need to leave. He innocently asks ‘why?’.

The fact that this conveniently rouged lipped woman is a whore doesn’t 
strike me with the poignancy of ‘The Boxer’, a Simon & Garfunkel song… 
Rather, I feel like belly laughing! She isn’t after all Iris in /Taxi 
Driver/, she in her 50’s, or at the very least in her 40’s… She enjoys 
the role too much for it to be anything other than funny. The strange 
man is after all, not a stranger, but more likely to be one of her regulars.

I can tell by the way they sit closely and chat amicably, 
like friends, and not two people about to strike a bargain.

Another day, I think the next, we’re waiting for the Metro to arrive 
and I can feel this strange, persistent and painful poking in the same 
area of my back, but I keep turning back and I can’t see who the 
culprit is. I finally clock him and expecting him to be a child, 
unwittingly glare at him. The culprit is in fact a man in his 80’s and 
the owner of bright green neon trousers. He declares: “Qué pase el 
ciego, hombre!” I quickly get out of the way to make way for the blind 
man. The old man treats his role in the situation gravely with a  knowing sigh 
and look in his eyes, as that of saviour, as if this simple, irritable but charitable gesture absolves him forever of all wrong-doing in his long and full life…