Chapter 23: What Will We Eat in August?

“Will you be closed in August for vacation?” I asked the woman behind the counter at the artisanal bakery. She looked like both an artist and a baker.

In March of 2020, having moved to a new apartment in Spain with nothing to sleep on or eat with, my wife was singularly focused on trying to acquire the bare necessities of life in the middle of the COVID-19 lockdown. These included things like dishes, bedsheets, and toothpaste. My priority, on the other hand, was locating the best bread in Madrid.

While I was grateful to Kate for the sheets and toothpaste, it was my discovery of one of the best bread bakeries in Madrid — where the master bread-makers turn out rustic sourdough baguettes with crunchy crusts that give way to a tangy and chewy-but-airy interior — that brought true comfort to my new life. Unfortunately, it also brought anxiety: those perfect baguettes were often sold out within an hour. My last thoughts as I drifted off to sleep each night were about how to map out my morning to make sure I got to the bakery before the baguettes were gone.

“Yes,” replied the woman.

“I understand,” I said, “But what days in August?”

“All of August,” she patiently replied, without a hint of the smugness that her American customer probably deserved.

The name of the bakery is Panic. And panic set in.

I ordered six baguettes for July 31.

Pen in hand, the woman looked down at her ledger. But as I started to give my very common surname, my predilection for worst-case-scenarios kicked in. I imagined a long line of very Spanish Díazes snaking down the block, and our hard-ordered bread mistakenly landing in the wrong hands. I gave the woman my wife’s very uncommon surname: A-D-A-M-I-C-K.

My father, who maintained that he never went hungry during the Great Depression, nonetheless had a particular scarcity quirk: he hoarded bread. When I was about nine, he even bought an extra freezer that he kept near the garage door. There, he stored loaf upon loaf of Italian bread, stacking them like logs.

Alas, our tiny Madrid apartment precluded the addition of a chest freezer. I would have to carefully ration my six baguettes to last an entire month.

In Spain, August begins around July 15, when the closed-for-vacation signs start appearing on store fronts and display windows. They are in all manner of styles, reflecting the personalities or the bank accounts of the proprietors. Some appear to be hastily handwritten, black felt-tip pen on any paper found lying around; others are computer-generated beauties printed on card stock.

Frequently, the signs convey sheer elation. I recently noticed a restaurant’s chalkboard, normally used to promote the menu of the day, proclaiming in a very neat and excited hand: “CERRADO POR VACACIONES ¡Nos Vemos Pronto!” Vacation was underlined four times in a decorative curve. The rest of the board was festooned with a beach ball, a palm tree, and a sun.

I doubt that they will be returning pronto.

Other signs are very matter-of-fact. One of my favorites reads:

CERRADO POR VACACIONES

DEL 1 DE AGOSTO

AL 31 AGOSTO

(ambos inclusive)

DISCULPEN LAS MOLESTIAS

These are responsible store owners who care about their customers. They are not gloating that they are on vacation for an entire month. This is Europe, after all, and a month’s vacation is normal. They are simply apologizing for the inconvenience and reassuring us that they will be back. And even though September 1 falls on a Thursday, they are promising that they won’t add on another long weekend at the end. At least we can be grateful for that.

I find myself wishing that the out-of-office email messages back home in the U.S. had half the clarity of these Spaniards’ signs.

By now, our third summer in Madrid, we have learned to start planning early for the summer vacations of our neighborhood shopkeepers. “What will we eat in August?” we discuss over breakfast on the Fourth of July. Days later, we begin the ritual of asking the shopkeepers for details about their August plans. We do our best to look genuinely interested as they describe the small towns where their extended families gather or the beaches where they will sun themselves day after day. What we really want to know, though, is when they will leave and when they will return. We have meals to plan.

Of course, obtaining this information is not without its challenges. First of all, we are still nowhere near proficient in the Spanish language. Second, there are many such conversations to be had because of the sheer number of small, specialized food purveyors in Madrid. If you want to buy fish, you go to a pescadería. For fresh produce, you shop at a frutería. Meat will be at the carnicería and, of course, the most important of all — bread — comes from a panadería. For us, that means a seemingly endless number of conversations about August in a language we still struggle to speak. Fortunately, madrileños are famously patient, and a sure way to their hearts is to talk about food and vacations.

Adding to our challenge is the fact that we are very picky shoppers. We know exactly which frutería within a few blocks has the best lettuce and which one a block from there has the best Spanish bananas. There is even a store that sells only tomatoes, and we know when only those tomatoes will do. We know which butcher has the darker lamb similar to that which we buy in the States, and which butcher will grind together the beef and pork we select for tasty burgers. We know which fishmonger has the best clams, and which one will clean the calamari and save the ink-sack for us in a secure wrapper. We know which poulterer has the eggs with creamy orange yolks and the most flavorful chicken. We know which shop has the best cheeses from the north of Spain and which carries Italian staples. We know when to venture farther afield to our old neighborhood because a vendor there has the best nuts and dried fruits at the best prices. And when we are missing Asian food, we know which markets have bean sprouts and dumpling wrappers.

To aid us in remembering exactly when our untold number of vendors will be away, we use a huge wall calendar — the kind that autobody shops and insurance brokers used to give away in the States decades ago — given to us last Christmas by our favorite produce vendor. It’s taped inside a closet door where, along with the phases of the moon, we obsessively track the vacation schedules of our shopkeepers. Alas, there are so many to keep track of that the circles, lines, and scribbles make little sense no matter how many different colored pens we use.

What will we eat in August? This being our third August in Spain, the knowledge that we survived the first two has done much to ease our uncertainty this year. So far this month we have eaten well and plenty, even if it has meant walking a few more blocks to find an open shop. Rather than dread the inconvenience, we are grateful to be living in a country where people actually take the long vacations that they worked and saved for all year.

Starting next week, our shopkeepers will begin to return from their trips, and they will regale us with stories of their adventures. We will do our best to understand what they’re saying, knowing that we can always make up for our limited vocabulary by asking to see their cellphone photos.

As for our own vacation, we will be taking one in late September. We doubt that our shopkeepers will miss us as much as we have missed them.

©2022 Kay Diaz