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A morning in late November, leaves scattering in the wind, shorter days, colder days, Madrid exhaling the last sighs of summer. My last day in Spain. I didn’t want to say goodbye.

John Singer Sargent, it was said, often chose a subject to paint by walking awhile, pausing, then spinning around once or twice, trusting. He’d stop and then set up his easel in whatever direction he happened to be facing. In a similar mood, I wandered through streets and alleys in the old neighborhoods with a sketchbook and no goal in mind.

By chance I found myself on the north side of the Prado. Crowds milled about, awaiting turns to enter the museum. Attracted by sunlight on the hillside, I sat on a stone bench and drew for an hour or so until the shadows lengthened. My bum got cold. I was getting hungry. Time to move, but the drawing felt empty. No problem: I’ll just take a photo of the scene and use it for reference later. Then I remembered: I don’t have a phone! It was stolen 3 months ago at Chamartín Station when I arrived in Spain.

Now what?

Stand up, stretch. Trust. I approached a stranger in the crowd. Would you help me? I showed him my sketch and explained the problem. He was a tourist from Mexico City and spoke no English. He agreed to take a photo of the scene with his phone and send it to me via email. We chatted about thieves in our respective countries, and laughed a lot. Hours later when I returned to my hotel, there was his photo on my laptop.

Madrid, city of my heart for more than 40 years, you are a parenthesis: On my arrival, you steal from me; when I depart, you offer me a friend.

The silver crescent of May’s first moon rises over the valley to the south of the
hospital where a silent ambulance waits below a sign in red letters: EMERGENCY

In an x-ray room at the end of a long hallway a technician in a blue smock assures
a white-haired woman that the fracture in her left foot will heal but not soon

Awaiting his turn with a therapist a man whose bride of sixteen months ago has left
him is enduring a panic attack and stares blankly at a wall in a crowded corridor

The father and mother of a boy who has been crying about a rasping pain in his lungs
are slowly being swallowed by their cell phones and slowly they disappear from sight

Two female EMT’s strap a roofer who has fallen off a ladder and fractured his pelvis to
a gurney and wheel him past security guards and sheriff’s deputies into the ambulance

The white-haired man of the white-haired woman waits on the far side of a waiting
room with a book and pencil and pen observing nurses pushing women in wheelchairs

Nurses give the roofer pills for pain and tell him that this hospital has neither doctors nor
equipment to treat his wounds but he will be taken care of in a trauma center in the valley

Crying softly, the boy lies down to sleep and a nurse covers him with a sheet as the white-
haired woman receives a metal four-legged walker to replace the foot she has broken

The ambulance with the EMT’s and the broken roofer pulls away from the curb and descends into freeway traffic toward the May moon crescent still rising in the twilight far to the south of the hospital.

Those who were paying attention in 1935 knew that it was a dark year. The economic catastrophe of the Great Depression raged throughout the world. Josef Stalin killed hundreds of thousands of his fellow Russians and deported millions more. In Italy the Blackshirts crushed any opposition to Mussolini. In violation of the Treaty of Versailles Hitler began rearming Germany. His Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of their citizenship. In Spain, generals in the army began plotting to overthrow the Republic.

Those who were paying attention also intuited that 1935 was a tremor, a shadow of a bleaker darkness yet to come. In 1936, Franco and the Spanish generals staged a coup d’état; the resulting civil war would not end until 1939. Hitler’s armies invaded Poland in that same year and began constructing the death camps to which in 1942 he began deporting Jews, gays, Blacks, the disabled and other perceived threats to his regime.

In Picasso’s print of 1935, all the figures, except one, are paying attention. A half-human/half-beast is hungry. Two women gaze at a dove. A man tries to escape up a ladder. A girl-child confronts the monster with her innocence. A beautiful matador lies asleep on a panicked horse, unaware of the menace around her.

Ninety years after 1935, another darkness and other monsters are everywhere. Even here in the United States of Amnesia. I have a dream: The girl awakens the woman and shares the light and flowers. They make a bridle, mount the horse together and challenge the beast. It drops its sword. The women break the blade into bits.