Winter is not Andalusia’s best season. That might be said of most places outside the tropics, but there is something about the Iberian cordillera that seems especially dreary this time of year. With no elegant blanket of snow on the hills, no auburn-tinted marshlands or antler-limbed hardwoods, only a paling of the light, a shortening of the days, and a dramatic dive in nocturnal temperature, there is little to redeem it. In the absence of fall foliage, one scarcely even knows winter is coming. It simply drops in one day, an uninvited, ill-tempered guest with indefinite plans.
For a decidedly public culture, a population of walkers and talkers, cold weather presents a special challenge. The collective bundling up means it is even harder to make oneself heard than usual—dramatic gesturing is at once more critical and, given the restraining effects of puffy coats and mittens, harder to do. In winter, those state-of-the-art, fully-optioned strollers finally pay off: With double-reinforced zip-lock windshield fully deployed, mamá and papá can go on chatting—and chatting, and chatting—while bebé comfortably incubates. Sidewalk bars and restaurants rise to the challenge of the season by mounting enclosed street-side dining areas, so as to offer patrons the sense that even in the grip of winter they are still sitting outside, in the open air. Between the clear, plastic-tarp sidewalls and the free-standing propane heaters, walking into one of these enclosures can feel like walking into a community ICU.
It may seem just shy of demented for the abuelos to carry on gathering in the plaza and the niños to carry on playing in the street under these conditions, except that on a winter’s day in Andalusia, however cold it may be outside, it is often rather colder inside. That’s because when it comes to winter, the typical Andalusian home lives in a state of denial. For centuries, ever since the Romans, local building practices have shown greater concern for the hot months than the cold ones. The white limestone façades and spacious central patios, the cool stone floors and narrow shady alleyways—in June, July and August a resident appreciates this kind of thing. The problem is December, January and February. Because electricity is pricey, central air conditioning, like the clothes drier, is a rare extravagance. All of which is to say that almost wherever you go in Andalusia this time of year…baby, it’s cold inside.
I spent much of my first Andalusian winter in a state of bewilderment, reconfiguring one deeply embedded domestic routine after another. Instead of throwing off my scarf when I walked in the door, I learned to cinch it tighter. To warm my socks and boots of a morning, I put them outside, in the sun. In October a light sweater had usually sufficed for kicking back with a book on the couch, but now a heavy scarf and wool cap were patently necessary. Wherever I stood in the flat, I could see my breath, which is to say that, departing the cozy warmth of my innards and coming up against a relative block of ice, my breath was condensing. On the plus side, I no longer needed to bother putting milk, cheese, or eggs in the fridge. Given the refrigerating capabilities of the flat, I could as well have unplugged the thing altogether.
I would have fired up the oven and camped out beside it, but the oven didn’t work. What had once seemed like a mildly amusing irony—I lived on Calle Horno, or “Oven Street”—now seemed like a decidedly cruel one. The thigh-high cylindrical space heater included with the flat was so outgunned you had to enter into a personal relationship with the thing to appreciate any effect. It might have made sense to buy a few more of these devices, arrange them strategically about the flat, but with a salary of 700 Euros a month, I wouldn’t be buying any home appliances anytime soon, not even from the Chinese discount store. Instead I would be bundling myself up and toting the little cylindrical space heater around with me, from bedroom to den and back again, like an oxygen tank.
Meanwhile, outside, and especially in the sun, a day might turn out delightful by comparison. Having neither internet nor a dependable television, I rarely knew exactly what to expect of a day meteorologically, so that, while heading to work in my customary around-the-house wear—multiple layers of polar fleece, goose-down, thick wool, flannel—I sometimes found myself overdressed for the outdoors, breaking a sweat along the way. Because the high school where I was teaching also lacked a proper heating system, the multiple layers of fleece and flannel usually proved practical again—once I was back inside. On those days when an arctic blast down from Siberia jolted relative temperatures into a correlation I was more accustomed to—warmer inside than out—I found myself noting with alarm, Whoa—today’s REALLY cold. Even colder than INSIDE.
A body adapts. Humans may spoil easily, but we can make do, too, when we have to. In the history of human life on earth, central air is awfully recent. People have lived without it far longer than with it. Not even the Romans found a way to democratize it. And seeing as I myself had not actually invented central air conditioning, how much room did I really have to gripe? How many times had I heard Americans abroad bitching about a host country’s shortcomings—in sanitation, infrastructure, what have you—as though they themselves were singlehandedly responsible for developing Stateside systems of sanitation, infrastructure, what have you? WE have Chick-fil-A—why don’t THEY? the argument went. No. I wasn’t going to be one of those people. I wouldn’t complain. Or maybe I would, but not out loud, in public. If I couldn’t help being one of those people from time to time, nobody had to know about it.
Even so, it was bound to slip out in conversation one day, and when it did, I got to wishing I’d let it slip out sooner. Along about mid-January, my boss Máru and I were chatting in the teacher’s lounge. Máru asked how I was getting along, what with the unusually cold winter. I mentioned bundling up in scarf and overcoat to go from my bedroom to the kitchen, but then, not wanting to be one of those people, I cut the grievance with a wisecrack—I’m a cat on a cold stone floor—as though all of this were just a jolly exaggeration. It wasn’t.
Máru squinted at me, perplexed. “You don’t have a brasero?” she said.
“A what?”
“Surely you have a brasero,” she said, and approaching the long central conference table, she lifted a heavy floor-length tablecloth to reveal, evenly spaced along the floor under the table, four disc-shaped devices, each about the size of a hubcap. Within the vented metal housing of each disc, an electric coil glowed red hot.
“Try it,” said Máru.
“How?”
“Sit.”
I sat. Máru drew the tablecloth, which was not a conventional tablecloth so much as a blanket, over my lap, more or less tucking me in. The effect was almost immediate, like sinking into a Jacuzzi. Contained by the table-blanket, the heat radiating from the braseros within made of the conference table a kind of oven, a luxurious core of warmth in an otherwise icy room. In no time at all my lower body had thawed out, resumed circulation, and begun to comfortably roast. Simple as the arrangement was, I found it brilliant, and exceptionally effective. Now I understood why the table had been outfitted with the table-blanket back in December, and why so many teachers lately had been opting to do their grading and lesson planning here, rather than in their classrooms. This was cozy.
“What do you think?” Máru asked.
“I think I’m in love,” I said. I’d stopped by the teacher’s lounge on my way out, headed home to plan the evening’s class, have lunch and maybe a short siesta, but really, what was the hurry?
“I’m sure your flat has one,” Máru said. “It must. If not, we’ll have to get you one.”
Indeed. I thought I might even dip into the paltry paycheck for something like this, forego a few meals, if it proved necessary.
It didn’t. When I came home to the flat that afternoon, I found a waist-high mound of bulky wool blankets piled against the front door, with a note safety-pinned to the top fold:
¡Hay un brasero en el comedor, Charly!
Un beso, Rafi
Between the time Máru heard my flat could get a little nippy and the time I’d finally removed myself from the bank of braseros in the teacher’s lounge, a total of about an hour and a half, word of the situation had gotten to Rafi, my landlady, and she had done something about it. That local maternal instincts were so vigorous was perhaps dangerous knowledge for a single man. I knew Máru was grateful for my work at the high school, but this was extraordinary.
Comedor means “dining room,” but because the comedor at Calle Horno #3 was some three times smaller than the den, and because the room had a gloomy, ghostly atmosphere—I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone had died there, peacefully but certainly—I had not used it as a comedor at all, rather as a storage area for all the ceramic Virgins, plastic bouquets, and twee figurines I’d taken down when I first moved in. When I’d finished de-decorating, the comedor had looked and felt like the dusty forgotten backroom of an overstocked junk shop. I’d shut the door, and had not opened it since.
I’d like to say I tidied up the room up before re-commissioning it as a brasero chamber, or even after re-commissioning it, but the palliative effects of the brasero were such that once I set it up, and myself with it—brasero plugged in and placed under the small circular table; table-blanket draped over table; body tucked into table-blanket—there was no doing anything at all in that room, or anywhere else, that required withdrawing myself from the brasero. The only accommodation I ever made was to slide a wingback recliner from the den into the brasero chamber for what I figured would be the puta madre arrangement for reading on a wintry afternoon. That, it was not. Maybe four pages into The Story of English, I slid off into a solid, dreamless sleep, of the sort that commonly generates drool. #3 Oven Street at last had its oven, and the oven, its glob of baking dough: me.
Once I knew about braseros, I began to see them everywhere—in restaurant salons and hotel lobbies, in dens, dining rooms, and studies. One doesn’t note the actual brasero, of course, so much as the pleated table-blanket draped over the table and hanging to the floor. (These are still known as enaguas, or “petticoats,” the brasero system providing life support for a noun whose original referent, the petticoat, has long fallen out of fashion. Petticoats were called enaguas for their pesky tendency to drag en aguas, or “in the waters.”) Spot the electrical cord snaking across the floor from under the table, the people huddled close and cozy, and you can be sure a brasero is afoot, as it were. Rural haciendas sometimes fuel their braseros the old way, with hot coals from the fireplace. As some might gather around a barrel fire, a hearth, or an HVAC vent, Andalusians gather around the brasero. This time of year it’s just the place to enjoy a family meal, play a parlor game, visit with a friend—or simply thaw out after a walk across the room.
Much as pains me to say this about the brasero, there is a potential lado oscuro to the arrangement. A dark side. Beyond the very real risks of molten shoe-treads and catastrophic house fires, certain personality types, among them mine, may find the brasero habit forming. Once I am cuddled up close to a brasero, I am not easily persuaded to leave it. Soporific, potentially addictive, and bad for productivity, the brasero would no doubt be classified as a controlled substance in the United States. It would fall in squarely with the narcotic opium derivatives—pain pills, sedatives, tranquilizers, under whose influence a body doesn’t much care that it doesn’t much feel like doing all that much. En brasero as en opio, a person sinks into a sensuous body-bath of unruffled delight as the impulse to do something—anything—is quietly escorted off into oblivion.
The brasero can also be an enabler—of the winter siesta. Traditionally the afternoon siesta was a response to blazing heat: In the absence of central air, there are certain times of day, at certain times of the year, when making any sudden movement, or even a less-than-sudden movement, is best avoided. (When a newcomer to Andalusia asks for advice on surviving the summer, a common local response is, No te mueves. Just don’t move yourself.) Hence the siesta: a period of rest during the hottest part of the day, customarily following a big meal, and preceding another turn at work. My elders in the American South remember living by a similar daily regimen when they were coming up. Fishing for a nostalgic musing about the days before central air conditioning and 24-7 commuter commerce, I once asked a great-aunt if she ever missed the old way. Hell no, I don’t miss it, she snapped. It was hotter than goddamn hell. When she thought of the afternoon repose, she thought chiefly of the circumstance that made an afternoon repose so attractive: wicked heat.
The siesta was born of instinct; it was an intuitive means of coping with the hottest part of the day during the hottest part of the year; but in Andalucía it has long been a perennial practice, as customary in January as in July. Between 3:00 and 6:00 in the afternoon on any given day, in any given season, the people of the pueblo will for the most part be found not at work but at home, eating a colossal meal (think Thanksgiving dinner, every day), watching the news, visiting. For a lot of people, siesta is not about actually sleeping so much as it is about being with family. But for some of us it’s just the excuse we need, if we really needed one, to withdraw into a solid slumber in the middle of the afternoon. Having a nap after a colossal meal is, frankly, a right agreeable way to do things. The body obliges, even if the mind has its doubts.
But winter complicates the routine. In warmer months I find it easy enough to lie back on the couch with a book, windows open to a balmy breeze, and drift off, but in January the couch proves far less attractive after a big lunch than another horizontally disposed four-legged furnishing, this one with blankets and pillows. Climbing into bed in broad daylight is rather more challenging, physically and mentally, than flopping onto a couch. In winter it requires removing bulky outerwear and peeling back a heavy envelope of bedding into which one will then insert oneself and commence frenetically spazzing about so as to properly warm the icy sheets—all this only to wake up three-quarters of an hour later and face the prospect of now extracting oneself from what has at last become a right cozy chrysalis, then layering on the outerwear again in the frigid air of dusk, and returning to work. Psychologically, even the determined lifelong idler might find something inappropriate about the whole ordeal, something unnatural and ill-advised. If one is not gravely ill or working the night shift, one should maybe not be cocooning oneself away like this in the daytime. It’s harder to justify than just kicking back on the couch. Anyway, it seems an awful lot of effort, which kind of defeats the point of an afternoon siesta. So much productivity, in the context of the siesta, feels counterproductive.
Enter the brasero. Simply plug the device in, draw body up under the petticoat, and voila, a winter nap. The most potent concoction, the oxycodone of brasero culture, is an overstuffed recliner positioned close to the table, with the petticoat pulled chest-high. This arrangement makes a wintertime nap not only possible, but probable. I learned early that if I don’t want to doze off while en brasero, if I want to get some writing done, say, I will need to resist the formidable tug of the recliner and instead slide up to the brasero in a rigid straight-back. I like to be reasonably comfortable when I write, but I know I can’t get too cozy. A body’s got to be revved up in some way—indignant, overjoyed, bewildered—to sit down and put pen to paper.
Oh, and a body’s got to be awake. That, too.
First published in Threepenny Review, Winter 2017