Monte Carlo For Vagabonds

3

SLEEPING WITH PROSTITUTES

MADRID, JULY 2002

Irolled over onto my side, groggy as a drunk and dusty as a bag of bones. I peered through bleary eyes and spiky blades of grass, still too sleepy to celebrate the fact that it was no longer completely dark in the Casa de Campo. That I had made it through the night without incident.

Now that there was enough light to see, I couldn’t help but notice a woman in a minuscule, tight skirt and thigh-high black boots. She was bending over the driver-side window of a car pulled up on the road not more than forty metres away. I can’t tell you much about what her top half looked like because, like I said, she was very much bent over. Apparently trying to worm her way into the car’s window if at all possible, in fact.

It was the kind of casual, low-speed-limit road you get in some European parks, so it didn’t much matter that the motorist had rolled to a halt for what seemed to be a lengthy chat at what must have been around five in the morning. Even in that semi-drugged state that tends to characterise the first dozen or so minutes of any given day for me, I could tell it was pretty unlikely that she was an undercover cop in the process of writing him a speeding ticket.

The reality of the situation began to take shape in my slowly engaging brain. Choosing the darkest possible place in order to escape notice had clearly been a double-edged sword. The other edge of which was that I hadn’t been able to see what anybody else was up to either. And now that I could, it was becoming apparent that I’d spent the night in what could only be some part of Madrid’s informal red-light district.

This was proving to be a memorable debut for my new career as a rough sleeper outside of my home country, although perhaps a fitting one for somebody who’d first camped out in Johannesburg. Urban parks in big Spanish cities, as everyone knows, are probably among the few places in Western Europe that might make you stop and think about muggers (or worse) in the same way Africa’s powerhouse city does. Particularly if you happen to choose the seedier end of such a park.

If we’re to be completely strict about things, it wasn’t my first time sleeping without any formal abode in Europe. That had come four nights earlier, on the floor at Madrid Barajas Airport. An indoor escapade like that scarcely counts, of course, but I mention it here only to underline my commitment to saving every Euro – a currency that was only a few months old.

My flight from London, where I was spending the European summer scraping together every penny I could for a lengthy trip on the Trans-Mongolian railway, had rocked into the Spanish capital sometime around midnight. I’d only given myself a break from all that post-university stockpiling because some former school classmates from South Africa had egged me on to join them on their visit to Madrid. But skipping a few lucrative (they really seemed so at the time) shifts as night manager in a Surrey hotel didn’t mean I was going to dodge saving opportunities in Spain.

Quite the contrary. Which is why I ended up on the airport floor.

I had made peace with the idea of sharing accommodation with my friends during our stay in the city. Like anybody travelling with the crutch that was the South African Rand, they were going to be at least as budget-conscious as I was. Especially as all of them were still students (if only because they were studying real subjects like medicine and physics). But they were only arriving in town on the day after my flight arrived. That meant I’d have nobody to share the cost of a roof over my head with on that first night. Which wasn’t even a full night.

It was early in my travel career, but I had already established certain principles. One of these was that if you arrive somewhere incredibly late, and the climate is such that temperatures and daylight will allow you to start mobilising at five in the morning, then accommodation costs cannot be justified under any circumstances. If I’m going to pay at all, then it’ll be for a full night’s sleep, thanks very much. Plenty of places — ultra-cheap hostels in particular, counter-logical as that may seem — are in fact flexible enough to let you claim a room for the following night very early in the morning, allowing you the chance to dump your stuff and catch up on your rest not long after sunrise. And to think that people threw their hard-won money at airport hotels!

I’ve slept on many an airport floor since Madrid, and I can tell you the experience isn’t as uniform as you might think. Some terminals insist on blasting you with announcements every minute or two, invariably preceded by what sounds like a five-year-old practising their piano scales in your bedroom. After the music lesson is over, you’re then subjected to a robot woman reading out flight numbers in three languages, in so slow and monotonous a fashion that you want to hurl a shoe at the loudspeaker and tell her to hurry up. In fairness, there are times when the endless repetition does help you pass out, but I much prefer the increasingly prevalent ‘silent airports.’ Some terminals turn up the air-conditioning way too high; others leave you to sweat boundlessly and swat flies. Many are replicas of your local mall, with all of the same food outlets and nothing more. Some — clearly those with no grasp of the concept of captive market opportunities — offer no more than a small sushi-stand next to the gents.

Most airport floors are, unsurprisingly, cold and hard, but it needn’t always be that way. Last time I checked, the prayer room at Doha International had a reasonably lush carpet. And I know for a fact that I’m not the only patently non-Muslim traveller to have shamelessly taken advantage of its velvety comfort whilst passing the several hours you often have to wait for a connection if you’ve got a cheap deal with Qatar Airways. The exhausted and grumpy fliers in question always maintain an appropriately comatose attitude of prayer in that particular room, it must be said.

Where there isn’t a comfortable mosque or ‘interdenominational reflection space’ on offer, you’re left contemplating the floors in the main concourse. There are airports with the good sense to leave their interior walls uncluttered, but others — you won’t have noticed this if you’ve never tried to nap at the base of an airport wall — sadistically insist on running a chrome-plated bar around the perimeter of any given room. Look out for it next time you’re in a terminal: it’s usually about nine inches off the ground and a similar distance away from the wall, held in place by short connecting rods. Apart from giving the staff something to polish, I can’t imagine what its purpose might be. Other than making it impossible to sit quietly on the floor and sleep without contorting your lower spine, that is.

The metal bar wouldn’t much matter if there were reclining seats for all in the waiting lounges. (I’ve seen these at one or two forward-thinking airports, but they’re always in short supply and fiercely occupied by hard-snoring men and women who look unlikely to wake up any time this century.) Or if the folk responsible for such things didn’t insist on every seat having a fixed armrest, such that nobody can lie down across four of them for a nap. While this too has a waft of cackling cruelty about it, it’s true that people are selfish and would spread themselves out lengthways whilst leaving others to squat. While it’s frustrating when the airport is quiet and seats are in oversupply, this may indeed be one of those situations where we have to be protected from ourselves.

One thing every airport does have in common is that you always feel perfectly safe nodding off. If you’ve been through security, then you’re surrounded by people who can afford plane tickets and have been checked for weapons. Logically, then, you’re surrounded by people who have a degree of wealth and probably don’t need to steal. And even if they do, they’ve been stripped of any potentially destructive objects — and yes, that does include jars of Marmite (thank you, Edinburgh). It may be as artificial a situation as this world can offer, but nonetheless it does bring a certain tranquility to proceedings. Even if you’re not ‘airside’ — airport speak, I believe, for having navigated security and boarding pass control — you can be sure that the threat of street crime is almost nil. Muggers and thieves might not always be the smartest types, but almost none of them are stupid enough to try and conduct their daily business in a place crawling with police and (depending on where on the planet you are) perhaps even military. In short, there’s no place else on Earth where you can drift away with quite such certainty that nobody is going to sink a sharp object into your guts and gallop away with your possessions. Not many free sleeps come with such comforts as standard, I assure you.

In a world where people with authority seem increasingly enamoured with telling you that you’re not allowed to do things or be in places, I’m always quite surprised that airports never seem the slightest bit bothered about you hunkering down. But then, most of the halfway decent ones never close, and the people who work there come and go at all hours for their shifts. They’ll never be surprised to see a small-scale refugee camp lining most of the unclaimed walls. This is especially true at any ‘London’ airport with a high proportion of Ryanair flights scheduled for departure at times that require people to take taxis costing twice as much as the flight itself (but which then take off so late that you could have taken the train after all). There’s an unparalleled, laudable acceptance of transience at flight terminals, and I’ve often wondered how many days you could camp out at a big airport before somebody noticed.

At Barajas, I had decided that the best place to camp for the night would be behind one of those islands of plastic chairs airports like so much. For reasons I can’t recall, said island was in the middle of the concourse in front of the check-in desks. Which is to say, rather exposed. There wasn’t a lot going on in the middle of the night, however — with the exception of some preposterously enthusiastic mopping and sweeping. The cleaning staff paid regular visits to my personal space, sliding and swishing the various tools of their trade past my head at least once an hour. But, in their defence, they never once tried to shove my semi-conscious mass out of the way. They simply went around me.

Once the metro started running, however, I was outta there. The oldest line on the Madrid subway dates back to 1919, but its venerable age wasn’t apparent to me that morning. I only had the London Underground as a benchmark, you see. Compared to that the cars looked space-age. The platforms felt as spacious as football fields. Most noticeably of all, though, was that the tunnels didn’t have that trademark dankness about them. When a train rumbled in or out, it didn’t smell like half-finished tumble-drying.

I’d been to mainland Europe before, but only as a child and never to Spain. This was the start of official grown-up travel outside of South Africa and the relative familiarity of England. So everything was fascinating. The advertisements above the seats. The shirts people wore. The colourful lines on the map of the network. The stray pages of El País and El Mundo lying about the aisles. Even the robot-voice announcing ‘próxima estación’ before each stop had a certain je ne sais quoi. I had only faint recollections of travelling in a place where English wasn’t the main language, and I couldn’t get enough of hearing something so alien all around me. Nor could I wait to try my elementary Spanish on somebody.

(One of the advantages of working as a lonely night manager had been the chance to watch the language learning broadcasts that came on BBC television at one o’clock in the morning. I’d picked up a fair few principles with regard to Spanish, even considering the course’s novel emphasis on teaching viewers via analysis of interviews with disgruntled Guatemalan barrio residents. This curious approach meant I was now far better-equipped to complain about a shortfall in sanitary installations than I was to order a ham sandwich.)

I changed trains, heading on towards the centre. When the próxima estación was ‘Sol’, my ears pricked up. I found it sweet, this one-syllable name that translated to nothing more pretentious than ‘sun’. How could a place with a name like that fail to be a delight? In winter, I suppose, it might have seemed an ironic tease, but now, in baking July, ‘Sol’ seemed to stand for everything Madrid was about. What a pleasure to be disembarking there.

That heat was already cranking up as I emerged from the underground onto Calle Mayor. It was only seven o’clock or so, but I could already tell that the warnings about ferocious temperatures had been on the mark. This was going to be one sweaty trip.

I unfolded the map I’d snatched from the tourist information desk at the airport — older readers will recall how essential it was to do this before mobile phones came along — and walked the couple of blocks to the Hotel Resident Mondragon. This was the suitably cheap digs my friends had booked for us. Heather, Tracy and Cath would be along sometime in the afternoon.

I’m not sure exactly what a classic Spanish pensión ought to entail, but I’m pretty sure this guesthouse wasn’t far from the dictionary definition. If I tell you it was dark and basic you might be inclined to think negatively of the place, but in fact it was perfect for us. In this case ‘dark and basic’ translated to ‘cool and cheap.’ Which is all four overheating, cash-strapped South African youths really need in Madrid in high summer. The price, at €14 for a double room, seemed quite extraordinary for a city centre, even for a modest place in 2002. I remember wondering if they’d lost a zero somewhere on the conversion from Pesetas.

The place was run by a wizened old hag who had long since given up pretending to like people with backpacks shuffling across her threshold in the early morning and asking if they could take a shower while their room was prepared. She would only agree to this if they paid extra for the privilege. At the price, you couldn’t really complain — and thankfully there was no need to use any of my impeccable Spanish phrases pertaining to flawed drainage systems — but still it didn’t take the girls and me more than a few hours to conclude that she was the dragon in Mondragon.

She should probably have gotten with the times and started charging more for her rooms. Because as far as I can tell from the internet now, that pensión has long since disappeared. Probably squeezed out, like family businesses everywhere, by the ludicrous rates, punitive taxes and impossible regulations that have left Western streets either shuttered up or chain-store identikit. But I’m just guessing here. Perhaps, the old lady simply didn’t have an heir to leave it to.

Apart from the favourable price, there was another fantastic thing about the Hotel Resident Mondragon. The lodgings were at roof level and that — this being a Mediterranean land — meant certain rooms (ours, more importantly) gave onto a vast terrace. It wasn’t an outdoor space in the ‘feature’ sense of the word, you understand. It just happened to be there. No hammock, no potted cacti, no water feature or deck chairs or glasses of orange juice — grandma probably hung up her bloomers in the far corner if you were unfortunate enough to be there on a Tuesday morning — but it was a rooftop! In Madrid! And if you peered over the perimeter wall, you could look across a shady alleyway to a cocktail of slanting terracotta rooftops and improvised balconies.

More importantly, the terrace allowed the adventurous sleeper to trade the staleness of a rooftop room for fresh air. Out in the open, the sounds of urban Spain — buzzing scooters, in other words — could seep into their soul as they snoozed. All I had to do was roll out a towel on the concrete, snatch a pillow from the room I was supposed to be sharing with Heather, and bed down. I was surprised that none of the girls seemed keen to partake of this wonderful travel experience, preferring to stick to the comforts of a mattress. But I was slowly beginning to realise that when it came to pushing the bounds of where it might be acceptable to sleep, I was quite simply different from other people.

In all honesty, I could see where my travel companions were coming from. We’d paid for the rooms, after all. Concrete was a little harder than a mattress, to be sure. But I needed to test things out! I had every intention of sleeping rough on my last night, when I would otherwise have to foot the hotel bill on my own due to their earlier departure. Having borrowed a decent sleeping bag for Welkom, I now had to try my own brand-new one for three-in-the-morning temperature. Johannesburg had left its scars on my soul.

I would be lying if I told you I wasn’t terrified of the proprietress stomping out onto the terrace and lambasting me for making use of her linen outside of our allotted room. But it was worth running the risk, because this was too good an opportunity to experiment. Here, I could always go back inside if things got a little chilly. Alternatively, if the old lady breathed enraged fire on me, that would also warm me up nicely. The real world of rough sleeping didn’t offer that kind of safety valve.

After one night on the terrace, I had established that my sleeping bag was more than enough for Madrid in July. My habit of sleeping at altitude was still going strong, but now we were down to 667 metres above the sun loungers at the coast, and any effect seemed limited at this time of year. There was nothing like the same bite in the air in the dead of night, although I still needed the sleeping bag’s warmth for a couple of hours.

So I was all set. I would check out on the same day as the rest, and find some dark corner of this massive city to see out the last night before I repaired to Barajas and flew home. Until then, I would enjoy exploring — and have plentiful showers, of course.

It may be that my memories are skewed by the delicious novelty of travelling independently for the first time, but I really do think I liked Madrid. I can’t think of a much better city to really feel like you’re in Spain. That might seem an obvious thing to say about the capital of any country, but if you know anything about Spain you’ll know that it’s many nations within one. Barcelona is Catalan, Bilbao is Basque and Valencia is apparently Valencian. I wanted to see everywhere in this complex web at some point, of course, but where better to start than its Castilian core? A place where Spanish was actually the main language. A place where they really did stage bullfights. Where they ate supper late and danced until breakfast. The source of every stereotype about Spain, to put it flatly.

But there was more to it than that. Madrid is in the very centre of the country. It’s three hundred and fifty kilometres to the nearest beach — and all the better for that. I hadn’t yet visited Spain’s sunny beaches, but even I knew that most of it had been engineered to feel like some other place. Somewhere along the line it had been decreed that ray-chasing tourists from Newcastle, Rotterdam and Düsseldorf required — with the crucial exception of the weather — every imaginable comfort of home. So, if you wanted to take your pick of fish and chips outlets, watch bachelor-party oafs cackle their way through ordering ‘Oon sah-vey-sah pour fah-vaw’ or gather yourself around big-screen Bundesliga action, you went to Marbella. But if you were interested in actually seeing Spain, then Madrid seemed a good place to start.

I came with high hopes of seeing the streets go quiet at siesta time, but in this particular regard I was disappointed. The mid-afternoon nap, it seemed, was some relic only old people observed nowadays. A shame, really: I found the notion of an officially sanctioned forty winks in the heat of the day an enormously civilised one. Particularly in July. Still, there was nothing to stop us tourists observing the old ways as part of our daily ritual. Which we did with great satisfaction. Purely in the name of cultural immersion, you understand.

Without much in the way of money to divert us, we discovered the city by moseying about. So it was that two budding anaesthetists and one physicist on her way to a career flitting between CERN and California’s most acclaimed institutions, accompanied by a journalism graduate unlikely to ever do anything nearly so adult-sounding, simply wandered the roasting streets of Madrid. We enjoyed having them to ourselves whilst the rest of Europe was fighting over deckchairs in Alicante. We did that thing every tourist in Madrid does, namely buying biscuits from the nuns at the Convento de las Carboneras del Corpus Christi. The dear Sisters served you through a special hatch in the wall that kept them hidden from view. I’m not sure whether their order forbade them from interacting with outsiders, or whether they simply didn’t want to. I could understand the latter point of view — why talk to irritating tourists if you could get them to simply hand you money in silence? And rely on the fact that being studiously avoided would become an ‘experience’? A genius sales strategy perhaps. Either way, we were sold. The biscuits were zesty, by the way.

When it got too hot, we’d stop for a jug of sangría on some quiet square, usually named after some significant date in Spanish history. I hadn’t tried sangría before, and I went into the experience sceptical. Alcohol in general had long puzzled me. I’d never quite grasped humanity’s manic obsession with wine, beer and the positively repulsive liquid that is champagne. People had always said I would ‘acquire the taste’ for such beverages when I got older, but I was already twenty-two and still, when venturing the occasional sample of any of the aforementioned, my first instinct was to spit it out. I strongly suspected (and still do today) that a healthy percentage of people simply pretend to like alcoholic drinks. They do this simply in order to fit in. It’s a habit they pick up as teenagers and never drop.

Anyway, sangría wowed me in spite of all that. It was full of fruit juices and sugar, which made it taste more like soda pop than wine. Eminently drinkable, in other words. When the late afternoon sun made a clear glass carafe of the stuff turn a vivacious, tango-dress red, it even looked beautiful. Its name — based on the local word for blood, if you don’t mind — is evocative in a way English just can’t manage. To drink something with a name like that is to know you’ve travelled to the world of Romance languages. And because you could swig it in much the same way as you might glug down grape juice, I could actually see how one might get drunk on