Quotes of the week: Cecilia

au pair's revenge

The other day, I was playing in the living room with the three girls and the boy from next door.  Nicolas, six years old, happens to go to the Lycée Français of Madrid, so I took advantage of this to get out my French, which has fallen into disuse lately.  While we were chatting away amicably  in the tongue of Molière, Cecilia had picked up on a foreign language being spoken in her vicinity.  How dare we say things that she might not understand!  She glowered at us with completely unconcealed disgust: “he speaks Spanish too, you know!”, she snapped at me before returning to more important affairs.

A rather different incident occurred during one of our “English lessons”, when I was quizzing the girls on various items drawn out on flashcards.  At one point, I held up a card with a representation of the steel instrument used for spearing food and generally accompanied by a knife.  Imagine my surprise when Cecilia shouted out, perfectly and precisely pronouncing a four-letter expletive beginning with the same letter as “fork”.  I was quick to correct her pronunciation on this particular occasion, lest this new addition to her vocabulary find its way back to her parents.

Although our relationship got off to a somewhat rocky start, Cecilia did still show some interest in me, particularly in anything regarding my family.  She was also interested in the country that had provided this inconvenient extra member of her family.  It is fair to say that she developed a fairly warped picture of my home country.  In Belgium, Cecilia argued, everyone was as bad as me.  Just like me, Belgians were apparently stupid and useless, and ate loads.  But she did concede that maybe, just maybe, my sister isn’t so bad.  After all, my sister, as she accurately pointed out, is a girl.

As a post-scriptum, and just to show how far Cecilia and I have come since those terrible first few weeks, she suggested to me her most recent cunning plan, meant to deal with the fact that I wouldn’t be in Madrid for much longer.  Perhaps inspired by my lego-building skills, she told me: “You can build yourself a house here in Madrid, so you can come and visit us”.  She paused, then added, as an afterthought: “But not too often…”

Of little green men

and little red men

My continued exploration of Madrid being almost exclusively on foot, I have come across a number of things to look out for when walking the streets of Madrid. Although there are a great many phenomena worthy of mention, there is perhaps none more vitally important, and I use this word in its most literal sense, than Spanish traffic lights.

In truth, semáforos, as they are known, play a fairly peripheral role in the streets of Madrid. For cars, a red light is a vague indication of when would be a good time to stop. The green light, on the other hand, signifies to the driver that the road is now rightfully his and, pending a few honks on his horn, is wholly subject to his will. The Spanish driver, of course, is not one for splitting hairs, and a just-turned-red is as good as green. The orange middle light, although bringing Madrid in line with other capitals of the world, is a strange addition to this piece of street punctuation: indeed, to Spanish eyes, it is merely a paraphrase to a green light, with perhaps a slight nuance of “accelerate”.

As you see, in Madrid, the car is king. This has serious implications for the population on foot, such as yours truly: always brought up to wait until the light turns green to cross, I have now modified this golden rule to “Wait until the light is green and then until all the cars have stopped moving.”

Yet in perhaps characteristic Hispanic manner, this newfound rule of mine has never occurred to the local pedestrians. Indeed, the general attitude to a “little red man” is a growing sense of “Sod this, I’m not waiting any longer”. Admittedly, traffic lights are long, and the Spanish, although in large part devoid of urgency, don’t take kindly to something as regulatory as a red light.

This is illustrated by the occasional solitary defiant foray in to the middle of the highway by a fed-up old Grandpa. Amid blaring horns and screeching tyres, Señor will stand in the middle of the street, waiting for the traffic in the opposite direction to subside before continuing on his way. This occurrence, repeated many times, leads to a staggering of pedestrians across the zebra crossing, with everyone edging forward as if playing a giant game of “What’s the time Mr Wolf?”

At odds with the decidedly Anglo-Saxon custom of all waiting until the light turns green, this approach is more easy-going and a lot less picky about which colour corresponds to which action. On the whole, it is another part of the Mediterranean way of life that is relaxed, unconcerned, and very dangerous.

Field of dreams

El Prado is arguably Madrid’s top tourist attraction; and without a doubt one of Europe’s leading art museums.  Located in between the Retiro and the Paseo del Prado, it lies in what is generally held to be one of the richest areas of art display on the planet.  Indeed the Reina Sofia and the Thyssen art museums lie not fifteen minutes walk away and form, together with El Prado, the so-called Golden Triangle of Art.  Although the two former museums also hold more than impressive collections, El Prado is unrivalled in terms of world-wide reputation as well as the sheer size of its collection.  It contains an astonishing 7800 paintings, of which only about 900 are on display at any one time, which is anyway a lot more than can be seen in one visit.  And in the unlikely event of an indifference to all of 700 years of European painting, there are also a further 10 000 drawings, prints, statues, sculptures, coins and other decorative objects.  This almost ridiculous amount of art, spanning from Roman statues to early nineteenth century painting, resides in a 200-metre long red brick structure along the West side of Madrid’s main artery, the Paseo del Prado.  The architecture, if grand in an antique column kind of way, is unremarkable, and puts one more in mind of an American high school than a tribute to the vast collection of art it houses.  Madrid’s 17^th-century answer to the Tardis, it consistently seems larger when seen from the inside; and invariably transports the visitor (and his awed assistant) to distant times and places.

The building was commissioned by Charles III in 1785 in his ambitious project to, somewhat anachronistically, ‘re-urbanise’ the Paseo del Prado.  The project was interrupted at the death of the king and did not resume until the end of the Peninsular War, under Charles’s grandson, Ferdinand VII.  The museum opened in November 1819, and was renamed as Museo del Prado, after the meadow the museum had originally been built in, when it was acquired by the state in 1868.  Its royal collections soon grew and the museum was expanded in 1918.  El Prado has since experienced multiple expansions and renovations over the course of 190 years of history, and is now a veritable labyrinth of artistic excellence.

The collection sprawls over two floors, both divided into countless rooms and corridors.  The paintings are at regular intervals on a plain background, presented in a tasteful understatement of priceless works on display.  Information panels inform the visitor, in miniscule Spanish text, that the painting on show ‘depicts a woman and her baby’, with no indication as to whether this is a unique jewel or one of the museum’s lesser exhibits.  If anything, this only amplifies the dizzying effect of El Prado, especially for the relative philistine I am as far as Art History is concerned.  The museum almost seems designed to lose the visitor in its maze of masterpieces, each room more impressive than the last.

Much like El Retiro, the Prado museum has become one of my favourite places to go during my free mornings.  Not only does it provide me with my pretence of intellectual stimulation for the day, it is also another blissfully peaceful place to walk around in.  At least, until the coachload of six-year-olds on a school trip arrives, at which point I scurry off to seek refuge in one of the more hidden away Goya rooms.  El Prado is a great place to have some quiet time, and has endeared itself to me further by virtually falling over itself to get me in free of charge.  I have got in for various reasons: being an under-25 citizen of the EU, being present on the 190^th anniversary, coming on a Sunday afternoon, and, most commonly, for being under 18.  So, having given up on ever being able to discover all of El Prado’s secrets, I content myself with a relaxing wander ever now and again and wonder what might have been, if only I had read Gombrich’s Story of Art.

Curious coins

I was recently in the City Museum, a place as fascinating as it is deserted.  It tells in a fairly jumbled manner the history of Madrid, from its beginnings as a small Moor fortress village, to the more recent story of a major European capital.  Exhibits are displayed somewhat haphazardly, teasingly leaving the visitor to work out how it fits in with everything else.  Although displaying a variety of objects connected with the city, it seems to be particularly keen on plastic models, the kind of which I thought were destined to live out their photogenic lives in places as  ostentatiously tacky as Mini-Europe.  Not so here, as scale models of neighbourhoods, buildings, monuments, even of the airport were all on display.  I admired these maquettes and, however condescendingly I may write about them, they probably furthered my understanding of the city.  I did, however, do a double-take at this example of plastic craftsmanship.  It was a fountain.  Or, at least, it was a model of a fountain.  With plastic water.  And, over the protective glass case, people had dropped coins into it.

Cecilia

hard at work

Cecilia is six years old and at the height of her powers.  Master of all her angelic little eyes survey; the eldest of my three charges lords it over the family flat in her parents’ absence.  With a single barked order, her sisters play baby, pupil, patient, or any member of society that happens to take her fancy.  Although Toñi, the simultaneous cook, nanny and cleaning lady very occasionally presents a tougher challenge to Cecilia, not always bending to her will as easily as her siblings.  However with a short burst of screams, an brief yet intensive shedding of tears, Cecilia usually gets her way.  Cecilia, in short, leads a good life.  Or at least, she used to.  Little did she know, at the end of August, that her years of domination were nearing an end; and that her authoritarian regime would soon topple.  She had not fretted away much of her busy life thinking about this new member of the family.  Indeed, why should she be worried by this jeune garcon au pair?  Granted, boys were stupid, and in fact hardly worth her precious time, but she was confident that this new arrival would pose no great problem to her.  How wrong she was.

You will have understood, by now, that Cecilia and I were destined to have a somewhat rocky beginning to our relationship.  I would describe her as having a bossy streak, if that were not misleading:  more accurately, she might have a streak about her personality which is not bossy.  This streak is fairly complex, and worth examining.  Cecilia is an intelligent girl who seems to do very well at school.  She works hard and, as you may have gathered, is exceptionally strong-minded.  Nevertheless, underneath the severe dictatorette façade, there is a more fragile and, to be frank, nicer side to her personality.  But let us leave the best until last, and concentrate for the moment on her more obvious traits.  Cecilia is the kind of six year-old who is cute at first sight.  In the right photo, she can look adorable.  Her blond curls and blue eyes atop her stout silhouette can hardly be said to imply a tyrannical character.

When I arrived, my first impression was that of a shy and reserved girl who just needed a bit of friendliness.   Yet, to my surprise, I soon grew accustomed to the sulky and determined face she reserved for persons as patently treacherous as me.   For Cecilia is not one for uncertainty:  she has to know where she is going, what she will be doing, how long it will take and what colour it will be.  And don’t you dare say you don’t know.  Importantly, Cecilia organises everything meticulously, and her acquaintances are similarly filed exclusively under MALO/TONTO or BUENO.  Needless to add which category I found myself in.  For Cecilia, I was basically the older brother she never really wanted to have.  She was doing fine without me, thank you very much, and didn’t need any silly boy, no matter how tall, to tell her what to do.  She has an aversion to even the merest pretence of authority.  Indeed, for a while, I could only pick up a very limited vocabulary from the six-year-old, most of it dropping into my bulging “childish insults” folder.  As a determined au pair, I tried every trick and strategy I could think of, and for weeks on end faced harm and humiliation in a hundred different ways while trying to win the ferocious little blond señorita’s heart of steel.

For obvious behavioural reasons, I cannot reveal all on this blog, yet the fact is that I somehow managed to get round Cecilia.  We now get on well: she rarely berates me quite as badly as before, and often begs for me to pick her up, carry her or tickle her.  She shares secrets with me, and explains the quite obvious facts of life to this stupid Belgian boy.  Our relationship remains always on the edge of Armageddon, however, and the occasional “random tantrum” does arise.  Nevertheless, this story can be said to have a sort of happy ending.  I have three weeks to avoid a tragic epilogue.