February Snow

The tint of the sky between sunset and night. And wandering with you and your nephew in that maze, half-lost—Madrid of the Austrias—looking for Plaza of the Green Cross where, days before you arrived, an Opel with false plates was parked, its wheels straddling the curb, and so the van heading for the barracks that morning had to slow to squeeze past . . . Back at the hotel your mom is holding up her gift—Amethyst, she says admiring how light when passing through a prism bends. At his window that morning before we began my student said, ¡Qué bonito!, watching it drift and descend, settling on roofs and cars. And I think of you and your wife and daughter: getting to see Madrid in white, your visit winding down, and how I had wanted that lesson to end to get to the park—Retiro, they say, is the city’s one lung, and the way the feel and sound of steps cease when grass is completely covered as if walking on a cloud. The year before on a visit from the coast, a friend sitting at a window watched the flakes flutter and fall, dissolving before reaching the ground—aguanieve, he said while from a town near Seville B-52s were lifting off . . . I was in a trance that week though like most things the war in the Gulf was soon another backdrop, like the string of car bombs the following year. And yet that morning as soon as I heard, something led me not to the park but down to City Hall, workers in the street evacuated, sipping coffee, though I never reached the site—of course it was cordoned off, the spray of glass, the heap of twisted metal, and so later learned their names their lives. Of the five there was one: a postal clerk who as a boy, would plunge his hands into the white, the cold a sweet jolt whenever he got to touch the stuff, scooping it tightly into a ball like the ones he would dodge and throw years later at his wife-to-be: those weekends, those places—away from city air— a release . . . Miraflores, Siete Picos, Rascafría . . .It’s in his blood, she would come to say chatting with a neighbor about his thing for snow—the way it falls softly, blanketing roofs and groves, villages nestled in the Sierra’s hills: it is February and she is picturing him and the boy, up there now playing, horsing around