I was traveling in Spain,
on a trip to study Goya, when the terrorists struck New
York and Washington
on Sept. 11. On the afternoon of that fateful day-when it was morning, of
course, in New York-my companions and I, a small group of American critics and
journalists, had just descended into the courtyard of the Escorial after a
visit to its great library, which is said to be the third oldest in Europe and
is especially rich in ancient volumes of Greek, Latin, Arabic and Hebrew
literature.
One of the guards,
clearly much agitated by something he was hearing on his walkie-talkie, took
our Spanish tour guide aside to give him the news of the horrific attack on New York. This splendid young man, who only a few minutes
before had been proudly discoursing on the glories of Spain’s artistic and
architectural past, suddenly looked as if he might faint. When he was
sufficiently composed to speak to us, he began by saying, in a choked voice, “I
don’t know exactly how to say this …” and then told us what little he’d just
learned.
We quickly returned to
our hotel in Madrid, and it was there, on the CNN and BBC television
broadcasts, that we had our first glimpse of the carnage in New York. There is no way to describe the combination of
fear, fury, isolation and helplessness that most of us were feeling at that
moment. Telephone contact with New York was severed, air travel grounded; there was no
hope of reaching our nearest and dearest, and nothing but one horror after
another on the television screen.
The fear was not for our personal safety, of course. We were
not in any danger. It was fear for the future of our country, which only a fool
could believe would not be permanently altered-and possibly even permanently
wounded-by this war, as President Bush promptly and correctly described it,
that had suddenly descended upon us. This is a fear
that, in my view, is unlikely to be abated in the lifetime of anyone now old
enough to comprehend its portent.
As there was no possibility at that moment for our group-all
of whom had come from New York or
Washington, D.C.-to
return to the States, we decided to resume the tour. Yet from that moment, our
art tour had acquired a somewhat surrealistic character, with exalted aesthetic
experience and excited conversation interspersed with the fears and the tears
engendered by our frequent recourse to television and newspaper accounts of the
massacre of the innocents in New York
and Washington. And when, a couple
of days later, we were at last able to telephone our families and friends,
their anguish only added to our own. Among ourselves, we joked a lot and we
drank a lot, and together we saw a lot of Goya-and much else besides-we had not
seen before. But much of the time, our minds were also occupied by those images
on the television screen, which even an inspired and disabused talent like Goya
could not begin to approximate.
What also added to the
bizarre character of our visit-for myself, anyway-were
our daily encounters with 21st-century Madrid, now a vibrant, prosperous, modernized,
cosmopolitan capital that, in everything but the dazzling remains of its
historic past, is unrecognizable for any visitor who, as I did, first knew the
city in the last days of the Franco regime.
In that period, Madrid
looked like a city stuck in a time warp: very proper and repressed in its
public life, while making discreet attempts on the fringes to modernize and
emancipate itself from a benighted and faltering authoritarian regime. On the
art scene, for example, there was a flourishing school of abstract painting
that was much admired in Paris
and New York-precisely the kind of painting that had been
banned by Stalin and Hitler. I daresay the painters themselves were emphatically
anti-Franco, as I was quickly made to understand when I was taken to a
late-night party in one of their studios. If they felt any qualms about lending
their prestige to Franco’s international image, they did not speak of it in my
presence. They did not have to, for their admirers in New York had already persuaded themselves that this mode
of abstract painting was to be understood as a sort of anti-Franco protest art.
In cosmopolitan Madrid
today, however, the greatest change is not to be found in the contemporary art
scene (which, for the most part, conforms to prevailing international trends),
but in the dress and demeanor of the young. Like their counterparts in Paris,
London and New
York-but at times going to even greater extremes-the
younger generation in Madrid
embraces every opportunity to flaunt freakishness and erotic provocation. The
young men with colored spiky hairstyles and dog collars to match, the girls
affecting braless bosoms and pierced navels, the open display of amorous
embrace in the streets and the pop music that is everywhere the anthem of
emancipated youth-at times, it makes the streets of Manhattan seem positively
sedate by comparison.
You don’t have to be a political expert to see that Spain
is now a highly democratized society; you have only to look at what the young
spend their apparently ample money on. This is democratic globalization at the
ground level, so to speak, with all of its attendant ghastly taste,
free-floating narcissism and compulsive consumerism. It’s to be preferred to
what it supplanted, of course, but it isn’t always very pretty. As for what it
portends for the future of high culture, that is a
problem by no means confined to Madrid.
Although I was abroad
for only a single week, it was clear from the moment we finally landed at
J.F.K.-by which time I had been traveling for some 16 hours-that the country
had entered upon a new historical epoch. I came back to a city in mourning, a
city in which the churches were now attracting bigger crowds than the movie
houses. It was Saturday night, and in the West 40’s where I live, a few blocks
from Times Square, the streets were almost deserted. When I turned
on the television set, it was something of a shock to hear the familiar liberal
voices earnestly attempting-not always persuasively-to master a
seldom-before-heard vocabulary of patriotism in reporting the news. Why, there
was even to be heard, from time to time, a grudging respect for President Bush.
This will soon pass, of course, but the long-term effects of
Sept. 11 will not. For better or for worse, we shall never again be the country
or the society we once were. We are a country permanently at war.
