Madrid

‘You can’t pick your parents, but they get to pick your life,’ Jonathan Tepper points out at the beginning of this extraordinary coming-of-age story. And: ‘If your parents are missionaries, it changes everything... They decide where you’ll live, when you’ll pack your bags and go, and you’ll get roped into their work saving the lost.’ In the 1980s and 1990s Jonathan’s parents, Elliott and Mary, were American missionaries in San Blas, then the poorest part of Madrid: ‘Our neighbourhood was the biggest drug supermarket not only in Spain but in all of Europe.’ At a time when Spain hadn’t started spending on prevention or rehabilitation, Jonathan, aged seven, along with his two older brothers – all of them blond and blue-eyed – saw junkies lying dead in ditches.

As I reached the final pages of the German writer Gregor Hens’s essayistic travelogue The City and the World, news of the blackout across Spain and Portugal snatched my attention. Madrid and Lisbon were at a standstill. Images of gridlocked round-abouts and commuters rushing out of pitch-dark subway tunnels plunged me into a fatalistic mood. When will it happen here? Hens, I realised, had nailed an important point: the ‘stunning complexity’ of modern cities makes them fragile. The metropolis, he writes, has become so intricate, its limits so stretched, that in it, ‘we are always living on the verge of catastrophe’.

The great Spanish artist Francisco Goya was born in Zaragoza in 1746, the son of a gilder whose livelihood was doomed by the new fashion for marble. The young Goya first studied in his home town before graduating to Madrid, rising through academy and court circles and navigating his way through the reigns of three Bourbon kings and the intervening rule of Joseph Bonaparte before retiring to Bordeaux in his late seventies. From early commissions for religious frescoes, altarpieces and tapestry cartoons for royal palaces, he went on to paint celebrations of everyday Spain en fête and to establish a portrait practice encompassing all the leading figures of the wildly fluctuating political scene in the capital.