Midnight In Madrid

SIXTY-FIVE

MADRID, SEPTEMBER 18, EVENING

The local police granted Alex permission and provided keys to the forgotten underground Madrid. The Policia Nacional offered her a backup, but she declined. She went by herself, stubborn and overconfident, bearing her weapon, a hand lantern, and a GPS compass that she had bought for the occasion.

She unlocked a creaking old door that led to an old service passage that was at the far end of the Metro stop at Nuñez de Balboa. She prayed she wouldn’t get lost in the subterranean labyrinth.

Carrying a lantern, she found herself wandering long-forgotten underground chambers that were unknown and unimaginable to the people of modern Madrid. Outside light disappeared quickly, and she relied on her lantern. There was movement around that was nonhuman. First she saw one rat, then she saw ten. First she had ample overhead clearance and then, as she neared the newer construction near the embassy, she had little. Then none.

She walked in a crouch. In her free hand, she carried a piece of chalk, marking passages as she went through them. She encountered stray cats, some alive, some dead. She came across a rat writhing in the agony of a poisonous death. Her nostrils were assaulted by the rancid odors of sewer leaks and the ground was wet and uneven under her feet.

It was cold. Then it was hot. Then it was cold again. An hour passed.

Then a second. She continued to prowl through the winding maze of underground tunnels, crawlspaces, and abandoned passageways that led toward the United States Embassy from the Metro stop at Nuñez de Balboa. As she moved, she constantly consulted her handheld GPS.

She felt as if she had stepped into a moonscape or a surreal bombed-out world of a future that had endured a nuclear catastrophe or a plague or maybe something even worse. She sidestepped old sewers and crossed dried-out viaducts. She passed mute walls that had once been basements, some of which even bore graffiti or artwork. Damaged structural supports sagged overhead, and water trickled in various filthy urban streams. There were old plaster walls, etched with names that appeared to be those of soldiers because many bore ranks before their names, and some had written prayers also. She wondered how many of the prayers had been answered or whether a single one of the names on the wall still belonged to someone living. She doubted it.

Alex recalled that during the bloody final days of the Civil War, troops massed underground and then came up out of manholes into the streets to kill their enemies or be killed by them. On other walls, legions of live insects fed on smaller insects.

She wandered through derelict bunkers where white plastery stalactites hung like daggers, and she crossed an obsolete rail track where no train had probably passed within the last century. At some points, the passages were peaceful, the way a crypt is peaceful, and at other times there was a stinking fetid squalor beyond comprehension, and she had to hold her hand to her mouth for fear of getting sick.

Her compass told her, however, that as she worked her way through the underground maze, she was indeed drawing closer to the area under the embassy, which meant that if she could access the area, anyone could.

More graffiti. Then a handful of murals, some of them pornographic, by artists no doubt long dead. Decrepit rungs that led nowhere marched upward on walls that had been truncated by newer construction. It was utterly silent in most places, and yet from time to time a cool wet breeze slapped her in the face, and she felt as if she were a frightened little girl exploring the basement of a haunted house.

Another mural, one of a man in prison. A mess of terra-cotta tiles. A quote from Cervantes in Spanish and a poem about tuberculosis written in black paint on yellow brick. Old shoes and bottles and newspapers emerged in the ray of her flashlight, and then another mural, a breathtaking rip-off of Dali’s Melting Clock.

Old steam pipes. Meter after meter of them. Sealed vaults in the walls. Bricked-over exits. A tipped-over rusting gurney. Pools of water, red with rust. Ghostly staircases that led into uneven walls of concrete or granite. Utter blackness, relieved only by her light.

Years ago, she had read T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and now as she prowled under a modern city, she thought of Eliot’s unreal metropolis where dread lurked in the shadows, terrible things emerged by the gleam of light, her shadow near midnight rose to meet her and where she saw fear in a handful of dust.

In another thirty minutes, she found the flashlight most recently discarded by Jean-Claude, outside a low crawlspace that led to a narrow tunnel. According to her GPS, the tunnel would lead the final few meters toward the embassy.

Alex looked at the flashlight. She knelt down and looked into the tunnel. Incredibly, there seemed to be light at the other end of it. The tunnel looked to be secure and wide enough for passage.

She picked up the flashlight. The bulb was dim but she could see.

Decision: go forward or head back? She had always learned to go forward. She decided to do something impetuous and stupid. She took off her jacket and knelt. The tunnel didn’t look too bad. She would crawl in.

Time to get dirty.

She got down on her stomach and leaned in, pushing her own flashlight ahead of her. And she entered the tunnel. A few seconds later, she was on a slow horizontal crawl through a wet partially man-made tunnel under the streets of Madrid. It was no one’s idea of fun.

She crawled her way through the passage for ten feet, then fifteen. Moving slowly. The walls then started to seize up around her.

Uh oh…The flashlight started to flicker. So that’s why it had been abandoned. The tunnel narrowed slightly.

Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Just so that she understood her options, she tried to move backward. Okay, a few paces. She could go either way.

Bad idea! Bad bad bad idea! Claustrophobia started to settle in.

She started to cough.

Oh, Lord, no!

The coughing stirred up dust and mortar, her eyes smarted. She coughed more.

She tried to back up.

She couldn’t.

She was stuck.