Madrid, Spain (September to December 1966)

On September 7, 1966, Sandra arrived at Madrid’s main international airport serving Madrid, the Adolfo Suárez Madrid–Barajas Airport, commonly known as Madrid–Barajas Airport, as appears from Sandra’s passport stamp of that date. The semester at the NYU program at the Facultad de Filosofía y Lettras at the University of Madrid began in early September.

On November 7, 1966, Sandra enrolled at the University of Madrid for the 1966-67 academic year. She first lived in an apartment that was owned an occupied by Carmen Ontiveros (a choreographer), her mother (a Spanish widow, dressed all in black, who cruised silently around the apartment), and an assortment of female foreign students. Carmen’s girlfriend, an occasional visitor, was a very butch younger Spanish woman who had spent part of her youth being educated in Russia and was an avowed communist, obviously at odds with the conservative Catholic regime of General Francisco Franco at the time.

Sandra remembers being intrigued by this apartment menagerie, but the apartment was crowded and noisy, as it was built around a central opening from ground to sky, where sounds from all the surrounding apartments echoed throughout the concrete vertical airspace. She struck up a friendship with another foreign-exchange student from Colorado who owned a motorcycle and together they explored the “cuevas” or nightclubs around Madrid that featured Flamenco dancing and singing and pitchers of cold “sangria.” The classes at the university were interesting and she recalled in particular one professor opining that Russia could not succeed in Cuba because the cultures and temperaments of these two allies were so different.

At the University of Madrid, one of Sandra’s class-mates, who was also on the NYU exchange program, was looking for someone to share an apartment, so together they found one and moved in. The two decided, sometime that fall, to hitch-hike to the coast and take a ferry to Majorca, the vacation island that lies off the east coast of Spain. Along the way, they were picked up by a man who lived in Barcelona and wanted them to meet his wife when they arrived there. During their visit with the couple, the man’s wife recommended that instead of going to Majorca, they should go to Ibiza, which was more natural and beautiful and less populated by tourists.