The Daily - The Sunday Read: ‘The Man Who Made Spain the Magic Capital of the World’

Episode Date: February 5, 2023

Going out to dinner with Juan Tamariz in Madrid is a little like accompanying a cartoon character on a journey to the real world. As Shuja Haider, the author of today’s Sunday Read, walked with him on side streets off the city center’s main drag, the Calle Gran Vía, heads turned left and right.Mr. Tamariz, 80, has been a professional magician for 52 years, and in that time, he has managed the singular feat of becoming both a household name in his home country and a living legend in magic everywhere. David Blaine has called him “the greatest and most influential card magician alive.” But in Spain, Mr. Tamariz is an icon, less like Mr. Blaine or David Copperfield and more like Kermit the Frog.In the United States, the most visible performers of magic in the late 20th century were stage illusionists who worked with big boxes and flashing lights. But Mr. Tamariz appears on stage and screen armed with little more than his two hands. He introduced Spanish viewers to the style of magic called “close-up,” done with ordinary objects, in near-enough proximity for a conversation and incorporating the participation of spectators.This story was recorded by Audm. To hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.

One of the most important things that art can do is remind us that the world is not always what it seems. And magic really emphasizes this. Magic is an art form, and it's an art form that shows you something that definitely should not have happened, considering everything you know about the world. And yet, you did see it happen. I'm Shuja Hader, and I'm a contributor to the New York Times Magazine. So, magic was actually the first

interest I ever had as a kid. Lots of kids are into magic, they get magic sets, and so on, but I actually won a magic competition when I was 13 years old. I can still remember the Dewey Decimal Code where you find books on magic at the public library. It's 793.8.

So, are you ready for some magic? I remember seeing this TV special in the 90s called The World's Greatest Magic. We're going to do some things tonight that have never been done before. It was full of these big stage illusions with boxes and tigers and so on. But my favorite parts were the bits of close-up magic, where someone's actually interacting with the magician. There's a special kind of magic that's performed not on the stage, but in intimate surroundings. It's called close-up magic.

Someone's asked to pick a card or hold an object, and the trick goes from there. In a way, it's even more amazing because the miracles happen only a few inches away. It's unique in that it has to take place in person. Someone else has to be there. So it becomes intimate, and it's often for an audience of one or a small group. If you're there, it can actually be really moving to be part of the experience.

One of the most unforgettable magicians I saw on World's Greatest Magic, I later found out is widely considered to be the greatest living magician in the world today. Juan Tamariz. Performing at Cleopatra's Barge at Caesar's Palace, here he is, Juan Tamariz. You know how someone might call you Houdini if you impress them with something amazing? People in Spain would call you Tamariz.

Now I'm going to do a special thing, the most special thing in the world. For this week's Sunday Read, I spent a week in Madrid with Tamariz. He's a man who's so iconic in his home country that he made me think of Kermit the Frog. He's been on public television, he's instantly recognizable, and he has this sort of larger than life persona. He's now 80 years old, and he told me that he can't remember a time when he wasn't interested in magic. His first TV appearance in the 70s was during a time of cultural renewal in Spain, so he's been this archetype of a magician for the Spanish public for decades. Magic is so often depicted as kind of an object of ridicule in popular culture. Will Arnett's character on Arrested Development comes to mind, but there's a lot of examples. But I think that people who

are deep into magic know that it can actually be incredibly complex, and it's not easy to do. Tamariz's act is all about the interaction between the magician and the spectator. He's not just doing sleight of hand, though he's very good at that. He's also telling a story, and you become a character in it. You don't just watch something happen, it happens to you. I had a deck of cards with me one night when I was with Tamariz at his apartment, and he finally agreed to perform for me. And at every stage of every trick he did, I was holding the deck or shuffling the cards or doing the counting. It's like he wanted to emphasize that I was the one in control. That night, there was one trick in particular that I did think was flat out impossible.

But then it happened. It happened right in front of me, literally in my own hands. A lot of people have asked me since this story was published if I know how Tamariz did some of this stuff. Hand on heart, I have to tell you. I have no idea. So here's my article. The Man Who Made Spain

the Magic Capital of the World. Read by Anthony Ray Perez. Visit AUDM.com for more details. Going out to dinner with Juan Tamariz in Madrid is a little like accompanying a cartoon character on a journey to the real world. As I walked with the 80-year-old magician on side streets off the city center's main drag, the Calle Gran Vía, heads turned left and right. Tamariz has been a professional magician for 52 years, and in that time he has managed the singular feat of becoming both a household name in his home country and a living legend in magic everywhere. He is referred to by magicians all over the world and waiters all over Madrid as maestro. David Blaine has called him the greatest and most influential card magician alive.

But in Spain, Tamaris is an icon, less like Blaine or David Copperfield, and more like Kermit the Frog. A cluster of young men smoking a joint, heads bowed and pupils dilated, whispered, Tamaris? Uncertain if they could believe their eyes. Imagine getting good and baked in public and seeing Kermit strolling by. One passing woman did a Buster Keaton grade double take, culminating in an expression of such uninhibited delight

that witnessing it seemed to amount to a violation of her privacy. Tamaris is used to this. He will pause mid-sentence to say hello, or pose for a picture, before returning seamlessly to whatever conversation he was engaged in the previous moment. A preternatural night owl, he often goes to bed when he sees the sun coming out. Tamaris is the last to leave any restaurant he dines in,

permitting just about every other customer to approach him on their way out. They always make the same joke, he whispered to me, after a man asked him to make his wife disappear. But Tamaris reacted as though it were the first time anyone had come up with the notion. I had just attended a performance by Damaris at a hotel in the trendy Malasaña district, where 40 or so local residents came out to see him in the flesh. The size of the audience, spectators in the magician's parlance, allowed them to sit just a few feet from Damaris, which is his preference these days.

Most of them joined him at the front at one point or another, and much of the magic seemed to be executed by them. As often as Damaris had someone pick a card, any card, as standard operating procedure dictates, he had them simply name one or even just think of one. At times, he guided spectators through a procedure that led to an impossible result, without appearing to touch the cards himself. Two volunteers shuffled the deck and cut it into four piles. Without knowing it, they had found the four aces. They each chose a card and replaced it in the deck, dividing it in half between themselves. Cutting again, each located the other's card. In the end, two spectators shuffled separate decks, both of which were then found to be in the exact same order, down to the last card. same order, down to the last card. The crowd gasped and squealed, and when each trick was over,

those remaining craned their necks to catch the maestro's attention and be called up next. In the United States, the most visible performers of magic in the late 20th century were stage illusionists. Doug Henning, David Copperfield, Siegfried and Roy, all of whom worked with big boxes and flashing lights. The sort of magician, in other words, who might actually make someone's wife disappear. This put them as much in competition with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas as with their predecessors in magic. They were creators of spectacle, witnessed at a distance. But Damaris appeared on stage and screen armed with little more than his two hands. Instead of relying on carefully engineered contraptions, he engineered the attention of his audience. He introduced Spanish viewers to the style of magic called close-up, done with ordinary objects, and near enough proximity for a conversation

and incorporating the participation of spectators. Damaris has performed on American television once, on a 1994 NBC special called The World's Greatest Magic. By then, he had mostly retired from Spanish television after regular appearances over the course of nearly 20 years. But he was introduced by the host as the world's greatest close-up magician, perhaps the greatest that ever lived.

He was certainly nothing like the American archetype of a stage magician producing doves in black tie and tails. Damaris sat at a small casino table wearing a purple top hat. Now I'm going to do a special trick, Tamariz screamed. He handed out a deck of cards demanding shuffle, shuffle, shuffle.

He picked up the table to show that there was nothing under it. The spectators jumped at his abrupt shifts in volume. The trick he did is called El Cochecito, and it is one of Tamariz's signature pieces. In it, spectators are shown a toy car, the cochecito, and one is invited to choose a card from a deck. The deck is shuffled and spread

out on the table. Tamariz then invites another spectator to push the cochecito along the length of the deck. It eventually seems to hit a snag and stops in front of one card, resisting the spectator's hand. Tamaris eliminates most of the cards, laying out those remaining in a different configuration, face down. But no matter the path it travels, the cochecito still seems to stop at the same card. The ending, like a perfect rhyming couplet, is both unexpected and inevitable. It is, of course, the chosen card. Damaris punctuates the moment of climax by stroking an invisible violin, droning out a melody as he saws away.

Three years later, David Blaine's Street Magic special popularized the close-up style that Maris pioneered on television in Spain. Since then, close-up has turned out to be better suited

for online video and social media than the smoke and mirrors that once prevailed. A phone camera can easily capture a pair of hands within its frame, and a surprising visual effect makes for an easily distributed miniature. Magic Tricks sits among TikTok's main browsing categories between daily life and comedy. On Penn & Teller's Fool Us, a TV show on which magicians attempt to perform a trick that the duo can't figure out, Damaris is often invoked by name. Spanish magicians appear on the show on a regular basis and get the better of the host at an exceptionally high rate. and get the better of the host at an exceptionally high rate. When we see and hear someone with a Spanish accent doing cards,

Penn Gillette says in one episode, we get terrified. In an interview, Gillette credited their success to Damaris, who created a whole culture in Spain of people taking magic seriously. That may be an understatement. In the 1970s, Tamaris decided that magic needed an established school of thought, like the French Surrealist movement,

and composed a manifesto. It became the founding document of the Escuela Mágica de Madrid, a collective dedicated to the advancement of their craft. If the group modeled itself on an artistic movement, it operated much like a research laboratory.

The magicians conducted clinical trials, gathering spectators to witness their performances and soliciting feedback, and produced a peer-reviewed journal, Circular. Magic is not often counted among the fine arts by outsiders, but Damaris makes a strong case to the contrary. That he does so while wearing a purple hat, playing air violin and screaming at the top of his lungs is the kind of paradox that troubles cultural critics, but not the viewing public. And as ubiquitous as his presence has been on Spanish television, Damaris' work can also be found on the shelves of any magic shop on the planet.

Unlike most literature in the field, many of his books don't consist of methods for tricks, instead expounding in dense philosophical detail on the aesthetics of magic, the question of how to cause someone to experience something that could not have taken place. In Damaris' writings, a deck of cards is a medium for the investigation of human perception. On stage, it may fly through the air at any moment. In Spanish, a magic trick is called a juego, a game, which Damaris prefers to truco, with its implications of cheating. It's often lamented by magicians that the general public considers magic to be best suited for children. The edgy presentations of Penn and Teller or the risque choreography of David Copperfield seem like attempts to challenge this perception.

Tamariz inverts this concern. For him, magic is only for children. In the presence of the impossible, an adult will regress to the pre-logical state of childhood. Juan Tamariz Martel Negrón himself first experienced the impossible at four or five, when his father took him to see a stage magician in Madrid. In short order, a child's magic set gave way to a book by the Catholic priest and amateur magician,

Padre Wenceslao Ciro, which laid out the techniques of sleight of hands with cards. Tamariz still performs tricks he learned from it. As a teenager, Tamariz finally stumbled across the rabbit hole he had been looking for in the form of Spain's organization of magicians, the Sociedad Española de Ilusionismo. He began attending meetings, despite being too young to join. There he came into contact with Arturo de Ascanio, a lawyer by trade who was becoming the eminence grease of the Spanish scene. Ascanio applied the systemic approach of law to magic, generating a terminology to identify the mechanisms by which magic comes across to an observer.

For Ascanio, there was a deceptively simple kernel at the core of any magic trick. The contrast between an initial situation and a final situation. A trick creates an effect without a cause, at least not an apparent one. Ascanio called the gap between the two the parenthesis. Though there must be a hidden method, it cannot be perceived. It is supplanted by a magical gesture, like the sprinkling of magic dust. Ascanio was the great theorist of the concept of misdirection, the means of controlling a spectator's attention in order to conceal the magician's deception. He believed this strategy should be carefully

integrated into the course of ordinary motion, which puts Spaniards at an advantage. We Latins are blessed, Ascanio wrote. We possess an abundance of gestures and manners, when we speak, that come naturally to us. If the theory was codified by Ascanio, it was most perfectly realized by a frequent visitor to Madrid, Tony Slaidini, an Italian-born magician who talked with his hands and spoke like an upscale Chico Marx. Slaidini practiced a sui generis style of sleight of hand that was a balletic extension of his expressive gestures. When Slydini taught Damaris how to vanish a coin, it wasn't the secret move, he emphasized. It was the gesture of sprinkling his closed fist with invisible dust.

Slydini deemed the young man's execution unconvincing and instructed him to carry around a bag of talcum powder to practice with. In adulthood, Damaris pursued his vocation with monastic focus, not only fine-tuning his technique, at times to the accompaniment of a metronome, but studying philosophy and art history for application to his developing ideas. His biggest breakthrough came not from a fellow magician, but from a historian, Mircea Eliade, a Romanian scholar of religion known for his writing on esoteric subjects like alchemy and shamanism. In his book Mephistopheles and the Androgyne, Eliade offers an exegesis of a likely apocryphal legend, the Indian rope trick.

The story, in its many variations, describes a magician causing a rope to rise, of its own accord, into the sky until the far end disappears from view. A boy is commanded to climb it by the magician. After he too disappears from view, the magician throws his knife skyward and the unfortunate assistant's limbs fall to the ground. In the end, the boy returns in one piece. Subsequent scholarship has found slim evidence that the trick was ever actually performed, But Eliade's concern was the ubiquity of the rumor, which he found documented not only in India ancient and modern, but also in in China, in the Dutch East Indies, in Ireland, and in ancient Mexico.

Like an ancient myth of resurrection, Eliade argued, the Indian rope trick used symbols to reenact events both cosmic and worldly, the origin and end of the universe, the life cycle of death and rebirth. Damaris began to see a symbolic dimension in all the classic effects of magic. The most obvious case is the cut and restored rope, in which a rope is cut in half and magically joined back together, enacting the parable of destruction and resurrection that recurs in myth. But the same principle applied to as seemingly frivolous a trick as the egg bag, in which an egg vanishes and reappears in a black bag. To Damaris there could hardly be a more literal manifestation of the

creation of life. It was even apparent in as abstract an effect as the ambitious card, made famous by the Canadian magician Di Vernon, who fooled Harry Houdini with a version of it in a historic encounter between the two magicians. A card chosen by a spectator is repeatedly inserted into the middle of a deck, yet is again and again discovered at the top. To Tamaris, the trick is a hero's journey. The card, representing the spectator, lives out a rise to power, an ascension, and liberation. Tamaris's most detailed description of the experience of magic comes from an essay in his book, La Via Magica, called The Theory of False Solutions and the Magic Way. The path is depicted in a painting by Tamariz's partner at the time, Marga Nicolau. The spectator rides

on a carriage pulled by two horses, one winged and one earthbound. The path takes various turns, some of which represent false solutions, any idea the spectator may come up with for the method behind the effect. The magician must prevent spectators from entertaining even the false solutions in the process of leading them away from the real one, too, leaving the impossible as the only logical explanation. The magician makes use, in other words, of our own capacity for empirical observation. Our active interpretation of the material of perception can permit us,

if carefully guided, to see what isn't there. I had tracked down Tamaris through his English language editor, Stephen Minch, who warned that it might be difficult to coordinate with the maestro, given the number of projects he had underway. Long after I first wrote to Tamaris, suggesting that I visit the following spring, I heard nothing and began to think the idea might never reach fruition. But in February, I received a reply. Middle of March is good, he wrote, and not much else. Even after we settled on dates, I wondered if I would turn up in Spain and never manage to track him down. One of Damaris' current engagements,

Minch mentioned, was a documentary about his life and work being produced by R. Paul Wilson, a Scottish magician and filmmaker. I sent Wilson an email and we discovered that Damaris had double-booked us to visit him at the same time. In the mid-20th century, at the behest of Ascanio, Spanish magicians like Damaris learned English in order to study the canonical literature of the craft then emerging from North America and the United Kingdom. In its way, a small act of rebellion against the parochialism of the Franco regime. But today, Wilson is one among many magicians of his generation who have learned Spanish in order to study the work of Tamariz. He discovered that an exclusive coterie of magicians across the world had done the same. More important for me, a Duolingo dropout, he wound up acting as my translator.

When I visited, Tamariz was living on the sixth floor of an unassuming building along one of the narrow streets of the neighborhood of Arguelles. Wilson and I arrived together, rang the doorbell, and were greeted by Tamariz and his wife, Consuelo Lorgia, herself a magician from Colombia. We stepped into their living room, which was filled with books on art history and a large collection of VHS tapes, including American movies like Atrapado en el Tiempo, Trapped in Time, or, as we know it, Groundhog Day. Before the twist of fate that would start his career,

Tamariz spent the late 1960s studying film at the Escuela Oficial de Cinematografía, inspired by the European avant-garde of Bergman, Fellini, and Antonioni. I didn't want to become a movie director, he told me. It was only to learn things from art to put in my magic. In those years, student resistance to Franco led government ministers to harshly curtail university education, and the school was shut down days before Tamariz was meant to graduate. Times were changing in Spain. By 1975, the Franco regime had come to an end, not with a revolution, despite the best efforts of students like Tamariz,

but with the dictator's death of natural causes. It was that same year that Tamariz and his friend Julio Carabillas walked into the offices of the state-run Televisión Española with a proposition, close-up magic on television. The programming director balked. He didn't care for magic. Tamariz showed him a trick, a color-changing pocket knife. The director was impressed but unconvinced. Tamaris showed him a trick, a color-changing pocket knife.

The director was impressed but unconvinced, so Tamaris did something he had never done before and has never done since. He gathered everyone from the office floor together and performed the trick again with the director behind him, allowing him to witness the secret method. The ploy worked, leading to Damaris' first show, Tiempo de Magia. On Tiempo, he appeared before a studio audience dressed in a turtleneck, slacks, and a smoking jacket with five-inch lapels, eschewing the customary tuxedo. At first relatively reserved, he celebrated the discovery of a spectator's card

by stomping his feet and yelling, Nonsense syllables that are his personal version of abracadabra. Over the years, the loungewear gave way to a hippie vibe, jeans and a loudly patterned vest, a sparkly top hat over increasingly shaggy hair, his exclamations accompanied by the strains

of his invisible violin. In a country still adjusting from the cultural isolation and censoriousness of the dictatorship, television was a precious resource, and Televisión Española was the only game in town. In his book, The New Spaniards,

the journalist John Hooper writes that, In the early 80s in Andalusia, which is the hottest region in Europe, more homes had television sets than refrigerators. Down a slim corridor from Tamaris' living room, lined with vintage posters of magicians from the early 20th century, was a small room where, you might say, the magic happens. In a civilian residence, it might be a storage room, and household items were piled up in its back corners.

But it also housed Tamaris' greatest treasures. His library of magic books accumulated over half a century. It was a space for practice, for reflection, for writing and for the exchange of ideas with compatriots, and sessions that often last until the early morning, when his guests depart to go to sleep, and Damaris stays to continue to practice, reflect, and write. At home, Damaris trades his usual Panama hat for a brimless cap, giving him the aura of an ancient mystic. His English is littered with pet phrases that sound

more natural in Spanish. Very much indeed, and what a pity. Though he is nothing if not expressive, he is difficult to quote, with his speech shifting back and forth between narration and reenactment, punctuated by sound effects. He laughs, jokes, and yelps, as he does in performance, but can also be sober and introspective, liable to quote Schopenhauer or Borges in conversation. At times he seems almost melancholy about the impossibility of conveying his depth of feeling for his chosen craft. I feel I am more my own self when performing magic than I am in many other circumstances of life, he writes in his most recent book, The Magic Rainbow, where my shyness prevents me from expressing myself as freely as I would like.

These are the books that I love most, Tamari said, gesturing to a glass case containing first editions of 19th and early 20th century texts. He gave me a tour of his library, delivering an off-the-cuff historical lecture along the way. Damaris traces the origins of his approach to the French magicians of the 19th century, particularly Jean-Eugène Aubé-Odon, along with the Viennese Johann Nepomuk Hofsinze. Back then, what we now think of as magic was mostly associated with either the occult or petty crime, two spheres that, depending on your point of view, overlap to at least some degree, and each of which sometimes makes use of a deck of cards. But Obeah Odon and Hofsininsa presented themselves as respectable gentlemen of European

modernity, legitimizing the idea of deception as entertainment. Together these figures represent the central dialectic of Damarician magic. Less is known about the work of Hofzinsa, who never published his methods. Those that magicians since have been unable to explain are known as the Hofzinser problems. As for Robert Audon, his influence extends far beyond magic. Not long after his death, a shoemaker's son named Georges Milias purchased the theater Robert Audon, and upon seeing a demonstration of the newly invented cinematograph by the Lumière brothers, acquired his own projector. He eventually constructed a camera and turned the theater into the world's first movie studio. In making his own short films of quiet scenes in Paris, magic acts, or trips to the moon, he discovered that by stopping the camera and changing the scene,

he could achieve effects too impossible to reproduce on stage. This technique, now known as editing, became the foundation of modern cinema. It was the core principles of magic, Damaris argues, that made the art of film possible. After all, what is a movie but an illusion that tells a story? I think Juan's genius really is live in front of you, says the magician Ossie Wind, who has been a consultant to David Blaine. It's like food. It could look good in a brochure or on video or whatever, but you need to taste it. Though Damaris rose to fame for his appearances on Spanish television, his legend among magicians rests on spontaneous performances

in person, often well past midnight in hotel lobbies and magic conventions. I'm somewhat familiar with magic myself. I competed in and won a close-up competition

at the Ohio MagiFest when I was 13, and it was this kind of performance I was most eager to see. So after spending a couple of evenings with Damaris, I asked him to show me something at his apartment. But he demurred.

One spectator, he said, was not enough. There ought to be at least one more person. His ideal setting, Damaris said, is like a flamenco performance. The artist fully surrounded in communion with his public. It should be said that this is also the most difficult environment for executing sleight of hand. He suggested we wait for another occasion on which Wilson was present. That occasion arrived the next evening, between one of Wilson's interview tapings and that night's outing for dinner. We each had a deck of cards on our person, and Damaris asked to borrow one. I had not started

my voice recorder at that point, and it would have seemed an unforgivable disruption of the magical atmosphere to stop him in order to do so. I'm glad I didn't, because it would have interfered with a phase that Damaris considers part of the magical effect. The time that elapses after the trick is over. Like Melies, Damaris accomplishes this by turning off, so to speak, the camera. With careful management of attention, a spectator can be prevented from recording certain events at all. Even those that they do witness can be eliminated. Neuropsychology has shown that short-term memory lasts 15 to 30 seconds,

after which it either has to be encoded as a long-term memory or it decays. The reason you can't find your keys minutes after you set them down is part of what can make a magic trick impossible to reconstruct. Our memory is a game of telephone with ourselves, subject to revision and open to suggestion as soon as the moment has passed.

I lost track that night of which deck was in play at which time, and I shuffled each of them, repeatedly, all of which is standard for a Tamaris session. He started slowly, gradually building up speed.

I shuffled a small packet of cards and dealt them into two equal piles. Tamaris asked me to perform a magical gesture to cause some of the cards to pass from one pile to the other. I misunderstood and gestured symmetrically with both hands. Oh, Tamaris said, looking disappointed. He informed me

I had changed the outcome and invited me to turn the cards over. One pile was all red, the other all black. I don't remember him

touching them once. Then Tamaris removed the aces from the deck. From its remainder, he had me pick a card. I don't remember the value, but the suit was hearts. Tamaris spread the whole deck in front of me face up to demonstrate that all the cards were different. Then he picked up the aces, and as he spread them out,

they both transformed and expanded, yielding the whole suit of hearts, in order. Wilson smiled quietly. It was getting to be time for dinner, and bit by bit we were gathering our things. Then, like Columbo scratching his head and turning back for just one more thing, Damaris picked up a deck. He handed it to me and asked me to cut it in two. From one half, I freely selected a card, the four of spades.

I replaced it in the half it came from and cut it, more than once. Then Tamaris asked me to cut the other half of the deck as many times as I wanted and look at the card I had arrived at. It was a queen, which in the counting system

of a deck of cards, with aces at 1 and kings at 13, holds a value of 12. No, I said out loud, knowing what was coming but not believing it could happen. The circumstances implied an inevitable conclusion, that if I counted 12 cards down in the first half of the deck, I would find my four of spades. There was no conceivable way I could have cut one random card to a location matching the value of another random card. Still, he suggested I check. I counted twelve cards down, where I found the four of spades. The problem with describing what happened is that the only account I can give is objectively impossible. Except in the case of a highly unlikely coincidence, I see no way this effect could have been achieved.

Coincidences certainly occur, but they can't be relied on by a magician. The number of possible arrangements of a deck of cards is so high the factorial of 52, which is 8 followed by 67 digits that every time you shuffle a deck it is very likely in a sequence that no deck has been in thus far in human history. That night, I had put the cards in an order unique to me, to that moment, and to that place, in the middle of March, in Arguelles, Madrid. If there is something missing from my memory, I never want to know what it is.