Of Books and Blues:

Homes of feminist friendship

Image by Kranich17@pixabay

I remember your toes.

Long, thin, white, with a bright blue polish adorning each nail.

A blue as bright as the Castilian sky, as the pool hidden in the mountain, as the turquoise stone that dangles from your wrist.

A defiant splash of colour in an otherwise sterile room.

It’s funny to think of friendship through toes.

But it was books that brought us together.

The Women’s Library, Madrid, sometime in late 1989. I was filing. You were standing, dressed in one of your signature button-down shirts, with the ever-present flip of blonde fringe sneaking into your left eye. Your hair was shorter then, shaved at the nape. You had a gentle southern English accent.

I don’t remember if I asked you how you came to be there that day. My own route to that old building on the Calle del Barquillo had taken me through unfamiliar narrow streets, up a wide, winding staircase, to Friday night meetings of the lesbian feminist collective. Through that door I entered new worlds, and for a precious period we travelled them together.

Those were days when my friendships were built through and around women’s spaces: feminist centres of activity where we gathered to plot the overthrow of patriarchy, and to bond with compañeras – not in arms, but to march with, arm-in-arm.

Maybe you and I were drawn to those darkened rooms on the second floor, with wooden floors and walls crammed with bookshelves, by the hope of immersing ourselves in Spanish women’s writing. Or maybe we thought our solidarity could take the shape of lending a hand with the English-language collection.

Either way, we were there too for the promise of friendship, and I struck gold.

I should stop before I paint a picture that stacks the books, the written words so high they block out the bars the clubs the endless mid-week parties who knows how we got home from to go bleary-eyed into glaring offices at 7 am to teach English to the workers. The train trips to Murcia, Alicante, Valencia for Fallas, where we dodged firecrackers by waving white flags through tears of laughter, watched giants burn to the ground and danced all night to The B52’s.

We closed that first year at the International Feminist Bookfair in Barcelona. There must have been talk of writing, panel discussions, cruising over the bookstalls. But what I remember most is endless drama with my first girlfriend, escaping our rickety old hostel in the Barri Gotic to hang out with you in your comfier room up the street.

Just a month ago, you sent me a WhatsApp message lined with laughing emojis after you’d found an old postcard from me, asking after our favourite gay haunts, the ones we lost entire Sunday afternoons merging into evenings in. On one of those you met the love of your life. I made your barrio mine for a brief time. Then Sundays in the Rastro gave way to letters across the seas.

Years later, when I wrote about my coming out years, you were right there, centre page:

eating gambas a la plancha in dirty bars — literally filthy — in Madrid in the late 1980s, peeling off the warm, hard flaked shells and throwing them on the floor amidst the sawdust, cigarette butts and olive pits while drinking small glasses of cold, frothy beer.

My Madrid of the past three decades is a map drawn over the homes and neighbourhoods you made with your beloved, where the two of you always kept a corner for me amidst the dogs and the colourful Spanish pottery and the books piled precariously on shelves, lining tables and leaning on the ends of sofas, a home from home to return to whenever I needed.

You enfolded me into your extended family and though years would pass where my wandering would take me in other directions, I could still show up at your wedding and pick out faces 10 15 25 years later, familiar, friendly, embracing.

This was perhaps your greatest gift to me – a tight knot of friendship and magical places amidst books and bars and buena gente that I could always come back to.

When I’m next in Madrid I’ll walk through the emptiness, stride the full length of Barquillo, from Alcalá up to the corner of Fernando IV, past four centuries of theatres banks houses cafés bookshops. I’ll stop outside number 44 and gaze up at decades of feminist history and 32 years of friendship. I’ll stand with what we’ve lost and wonder at all we’ve gained, what I won through you. At the many many many many journeys you helped launch me on, always with the promise of a warm homecoming.

And then I’ll walk across the street and a few doors down to the salon on the corner of San Lucas that was not there at the beginning but where, a few years back, we ended up after wandering the streets of Chueca under a searing August sun, you pointing out the best places to buy fresh vegetables and vegan food, exchanging summer plans and reading, talking love and politics, laughing.

Having our toenails painted blue. 

In memory of Antonia Bystram, 1963–2022

Pen in Fist is written by me, C Lou Hamilton, aka Dr Carrie. To find out more about my activism, follow me on twitter. You can access my other writing, and information on my editing and translating work, on my website.