That time we went to Italy: On pretty Spanish flight attendants, aesthetics and casually waiting to get our bags in Italy

 There are some positive features of waiting to fly out of Madrid beyond the endless ham sandwiches. After five hours of watching the flight board change we finally saw a sign that we would be leaving in an hour, what had brought about this unprecedented breakthrough? We’ll never know, because the only thing more difficult than having your flight status explained to you in an American airport is having your flight status reported to you in a foreign city. For all I knew the airport staffer was saying something like:

Staffer: I’m sorry. (Followed by a foreign language) Wooly mammoths have been unfrozen and temporarily taken over the flight you were supposed to be on.

Me: So it leaves when?

Staffer: I’m sorry. The mammoths are not particularly good at flying, so they are off course right now. I suppose it’s to be expected.

Me: Will ham sandwiches be served on the plane?

          The positive feature of waiting five hours at the Madrid airport for some Byzantine strike related to drama to resolve itself is that all of the union gains that have been made over the past fifty years or so when it comes to flight attendants fly right out the window and the entire flight is staffed by a fleet of women who basically look like various incarnations of Penelope Cruz. This is the sort of observation that you are allowed to make exactly once to your partner, who is polite enough to nod and note that they are all quite pretty. When you mention it again, waiting at maximum about two minutes, you get a dirty look, and a reminder that you are not traveling with any of them to Italy. Though halfway through the flight she’ll lean over and marvel, “They are all gorgeous,” to which I respond, “Yeah, these are great arm rests.”

         

          Aesthetics are strange. I don’t know if I was the first person to be surprised that beauty is still beauty even after you’re hitched. I don’t know why I thought that it would be any different, as if the mere fact of having seen the Rockies would have suddenly made every other mountain range a meh experience. Aesthetics and beauty are slippery concepts though, conditional things, based upon things like race, class, and culture. And yet, we are all products, whether we like it or not, of the time that we live in, and are thus pretty much subject to the aesthetics of our cultural milieu.

          What’s strange is that the realization that we are products of our cultural prejudices rarely does anything substantive to change our perspectives. Humans are curiously obstinate creatures, content; No; fiercely comforted, by our own rather narrow understanding of the world. A view which has usually been informed by a perversely small number of people and ideas, though ours nonetheless. And so, as in many adult trials and musing, we come to an understanding with our deficiencies without really confronting them. As you probably know confronting our own shortcomings would leave us all rather short of breath and out of time to do anything but wallow in our own self-loathing. For instance, look at the persistence of the modern Republican party, which insists that its roots are down home and often by extension, Christian, and yet fail to acknowledge that the only two commandments that Christ lays claim to are loving the Lord and loving your neighbor as yourself. To live in such a contradiction seems ridiculous, and yet, religious or not, we are all bathed, suffused, and sustained in such contradictions.

          This is an unusually salient argument given the context of this particular flight, which was not only populated by a bevy of Penelope Cruz’s but also the most beautiful, aesthetically mind you, couple we have ever seen. The most beautiful couple I’ve ever seen in actuality are an elderly couple in Canada that I experienced through S’s stories. They have been married for decades and are apparently very much still in love and prepared for their impending journey into the unknown of death. Part of what makes them a perfect couple is their incorporeality. Nothing spoils a good fantasy like flesh.

          I don’t know what to make of our shortcomings in this way: identifying virtues with external beauty, a fact, unlike generosity, humility, and kindness, which people have very little control over. It is troubling, as many things: natural disasters, absence of Old Testament style miracles, what everyone did with those frilly skirts that were so popular in 2003, are troubling.

          I suppose the best that a person can do, if they are unable to overcome societal pulls, is to speculate then upon the nature of beauty. And I can confess to you that S and I felt this particular couple to be the most beautiful iteration of couple that I had and have ever seen. In retrospect, what I believe made them so aesthetically immaculate was their Europeaness. And what I mean in this case is a certain carelessness that accompanied their attractiveness, which was something akin to honey in a bee’s hive. No people should rightly look as unstudied and gorgeous as they did.

          The man, who was, in my humble opinion, perhaps slightly more perfect than the girl, was wearing a pair of slim jeans and a belt, loosely fastened, along with a tight knit long sleeved shirt. Perhaps it was grey. The woman, skinny, olive skinned with her hair down, leaned against him slightly as they waited for their bags. Perhaps it was their very unfamiliarity, which made them so alluring. Though I think that it is not entirely true: what made them so immaculate was the fact that they were not trying to look like Greek, nay, Roman Gods, and thus embodied them more completely.

          It’s hard to catch an American girl unstudied in her beauty. I walked by a woman today, perfectly wonderful, and studied in it, dressed to the nines, looking in all ways like the very picture of an attractive woman. Except, the effort was so palpable, the make up just so, that the whole affect was somehow lessened. The same is true of men, often young, who look so fresh faced and spun out of the nearest gym with firm biceps and Crest smiles so white that you can see your own reflection in them. Though you suspect somehow that they are seeing themselves in the reflection in your eyes, in each case, the aesthetics are lessened by their obvious attempt at beauty. I’ve no idea why this lessens the impact. It’s not  as though I judge Brunelleschi’s doors or Michelangelo’s Pieta as trifles because they make a clear attempt at achieving a kind of perfection.

          In reality, perhaps this particular prejudice is rooted in my discomfort with the aesthetics of beauty, which I’ve enumerated above. Since it’s nothing that anyone has done much to deserve, it seems rather gauche to pretend it’s anything other than it is: a random collection of atoms, body parts and shading that is pleasing for a particular moment or decade in time. Thus, to be nonchalant, unprepossessed, is in some way to embody the very essence of aesthetic beauty. Look at what a wondrous accident I am.

          The couple then was a perfect Bernini like representation of form, in part because they were so casual in it. S and I, as I noted before, not two totally unpleasing forms ourselves, identified them as the most pleasing configuration of atoms that we’d ever seen in such close proximity, though I suspect our words were not so quasi-scientific. She leaned into him, and he supported her casually, waiting like the rest of us for their bags to arrive. They arrived near the beginning, and he swung his bag over his shoulder, and she pulled her suitcase behind her, leaving our lives forever, the most pleasing representation of the human form that I suppose I’ll ever see.