Free Lime's Photograph by Leif Davidsen Page B

to detail and my ability to combine them in the right order with the right timing that made the result uniquely mine. I said goodbye to the young woman who looked after Maria Luisa during the midday break, ate a quick sandwich and went out into the afternoon summer heat, round the corner to the Japanese karate institute. They were old friends and had been my trainers for 20 years. When the institute had first opened, I had done the publicity shots and helped them through the tortuous Spanish red tape. They didn’t have any money, so they had paid me with lessons. Now they had loads of money, as did I for that matter, but I still regularly took photographs for them and they let me trainat the institute when my body needed the restlessness knocked out of it. Karate training kept me fit, and I enjoyed talking with the old trainer, Suzuki, who had the ability to look at life from a distance and put it into a perspective, which reached beyond the everyday. Talking with him was a bit like talking to the priest I could never believe.
    Oscar had thrown himself into golf with the passion which only middle-aged men are able to invest in a new vice. He was far too tall to be particularly good, but he worked at it as if it was a matter of life and death. He had taken me out on the course a couple of times, but it didn’t really appeal, even though I suspected that I might have been better suited to it than he was. Oscar had more than enough money, so he invested in expensive coaching and he had improved a lot over the last couple of years, but I stuck to karate and the discipline it demanded. That self-control which Suzuki drilled into me on the mat and in our conversations afterwards.
    The Madrid heat hit me in the face as I stepped out of the door and was instantly enveloped in the smells and sounds of the city. The boisterous song of the streets. The smell of freshly boiled squid emanating from a big bluish-red creature hanging over a steaming copper pan in a restaurant window. The blind lottery ticket seller’s keening chant as he promised to plead to the goddess of fortune in the next big Los Onces draw. The clattering rattle of a three-wheeled delivery scooter and the quiet hum of a Jaguar. Madrid’s and Spain’s ceaseless and conspicuous cacophony of contrasts, of old and new.
    I walked past the Viva Madrid café and a few metres on to Calle Echégaray, one of the oldest streets in Madrid. I posted my letters and walked on feeling quite content. Bars and little boarding houses sit side by side. The pavement is narrow, so you have to press yourself against the buildings when the cars clatter past. In my young days I had lived at Pension las Once, halfway down the street opposite the Hotel Inglés and the Japanese karate institute. They had openedthe year that I had moved in, renting a small room on the fourth floor from señor Alberto and his señora. Their Galician domestic help, Rosa, was 30, maybe a virgin, illiterate and so sharp-tongued that I told her she could marry only a member of the Guardia Civil. Rosa couldn’t be called beautiful. She had regular but coarse features and a clumsy, round body. She looked like what she was: the daughter of a poor day labourer and a mother who was worn out because, like so many other poor Spaniards in those days, she had to grind and toil to keep the home together. Rosa always wore a pink overall when she cleaned and cooked with the señora. She came from a small village far away in green and hilly Galicia, born into a large family of poor farm workers. Her father had lined up every morning along with the other men on the village square, in the hope that the landowner’s foreman would give them a day’s work. Poverty was widespread, exploitation gross and the class barriers high. Rosa had been in service since she was seven, but I never discovered how she had ended up in Pension las Once in Madrid. In the evenings, the señora would sit with the ABC newspaper and try to teach her to