I reached Madrid yesterday, and thought to myself that I won’t blog till returning home on April 5. Take things easy, enjoy the cool, sunflowing streets, drink mojitos and eat tapas for a week, absorb this multiple culture with the streets humming at midnight.

And last night a friend and I went to see a Flamenco performance, the only thing I specifically requested. Flamenco de Leones, the Lions’ Flamenco, consisting of dinner and Flamenco by Pl. de Independencia, was the best in Madrid, we were told. Flamenco’s roots are primarily gypsy, arising in Andalucia, with Moorish and even Sephardic influences.

I was transfixed by the women, whose faces betrayed a passion of such intensity and breadth that I’ve never seen before. We were seated right up front, at a center table, and as the young dancer approached the edge of the stage, and even as she pirouetted holding up the pink lacy edge of her dress, everything was etched deeply on her face, fierce, unbridled, almost violent: love, hate, anger, love, tenderness, passion, love, ardor, grief, loss, love, love, love, love.

The man was almost the exact opposite: austere, disciplined, unrelenting, a curtain resolutely closed on emotions other than his piercing dark eyes and a body and feet that leaped to the loud clapping of the women behind him and harsh wooden clacks of his shoes on the wooden floor.

Is that how it always is, the man always self-contained, the woman outpouring love and anguish? Is that the secret to the sexuality between men and women? Our culture back home feels so much tamer and milder.

I will teach this evening by Zoom, and after that it’s all Spain till the morning of April 5. Will I blog? Who knows, as we will visit various cities and walk. Walk a lot. This I know: I will notice things and wish to write about them. Always write, and sometimes hate myself for doing that (you’re on vacation, take it easy, why are you so driven, etc.). A little, just a little like the dancers of Flamenco.