Old Hands, part 12

There was so much talk about the wild nightlife of Madrid that we felt left out. Even a dinner-and-movie night often lasted till 2 a.m., since dinner was at 10 and the movie would be at midnight. But that was still too early for nightclubbing. Clearly we were too old to sample this aspect of Madrid.

“Nonsense!” said Huibrecht as we discussed this one day. “We have to do it. We can do it together. We’ll all keep each other awake.”

“How are we going to do it?” I asked. It was still a mystery to me how anyone stayed up that late.

“We should take a nap,” Amy Levine said. “Take a nap around 8. Go to dinner on the late side, maybe 11. Go someplace for drinks afterward. And maybe after that it will be late enough to try a nightclub.”

“We can go to the rodizio place,” Clarice suggested. We’d been talking about going to Plataforma, a Brazilian barbecue place. “You can spend a lot of time there, and it’s fun and lively. It will keep us awake!” Huibrecht, who had lived in Brazil, was in favor of that.

Plataforma was busy and pulsing with music and energy. The Gronningsaters, Krugers and Scarritts were with us. With white walls, colored lights and huge windows, it looked nothing like a barbecue joint, but rodizio was not an ordinary barbecue. Waiters came by with huge skewers of meat and cut off portions for each diner. Every kind of meat came by—beef, sausage, lamb, pork, chicken—and it kept coming and coming. There was salad, too, and beans and rice. We ate until we were stuffed. And to wash it all down we had caipirinhas—the Brazilian drink made of fermented sugar cane juice, lime juice and sugar. A lethal combination, especially in people our age: “Will it make us crazy or just put us to sleep?” Eric asked.

By the time we left Plataforma it was late enough that we saw the streets being washed. We staggered on to somebody’s idea of a nightclub—maybe it was a young Price Waterhouse colleague who had suggested it. This place had several rooms with different décors—one futuristic with blue light, one beige and heavily ornamented, and so on—in which younger people would probably be dancing at some future hour, but we were pretty much alone in there.

Undaunted, Amy goaded us to dance. “We’re here, we paid the cover charge, we may as well enjoy ourselves!” she insisted. So the eight of us did our fortysomething dances for an hour or so before giving up, laughing, and heading home.