From Mad in Greece: Antonio is handcuffed to the bed. I went to ask him if he wanted anything. Untie me please, he said. That’s what I think he told me. She was crying. I’ll call the nurse, I told him. The nurse said to me quite bluntly, “Mind your business. The last time we untied him he was banging his head on the floor. If we didn’t preface him, we’d be picking his brains off the floor. Did you understand? Relax and mind your own business.”
I didn’t speak Spanish. He only spoke Spanish. I enlisted what memories I had of my Latin, a little Italian that seemed to me, perhaps unjustifiably, the closest language to Spanish and all the Spaniards I knew. Goya, Picasso, Cervantes, Lorca.
Read the full Greek blog here and the English translation here.
