As always in Madrid, the suggestion is made once the litrona of beer is coming to an end. “Do you want to go to some music thing?”

This is common: ex-pat musicians are scattered through a set of English-friendly bars every night, interspersed with Spanish kids playing acoustic guitars and singing in heavily accented English. Once the cops start giving the troubadours of the plazas mean looks, they crowd their instruments into the cavernous bars in the center of Madrid.

On Calle Pez, there is an ocopa called Patio Maravillas. An ocopa is an abandoned building, used for whatever purposes the squatters find useful. Although the front is covered from street to roof with lude and intricate murals, it somehow hides shyly in the flashy madrileña night. The foyer is covered in the same kind of anarchic art, with the high ceilings of 19th century apartment buildings that make up the city. To the right of the grand entrance is an empty room, the floor sunk low, advertising salsa lessons. To the left, a smoky bar, with at least one group of superbly dressed and drunk young people, yelling over each other in Spanish. There’s no live music to be heard yet, but persistence in the face of confusion is something ex-pats learn quickly.

Past the bar and the salsa studio, a door painted red barely hangs from its hinges. In fact, it is quite kind to call that swinging slab of wood a door. Behind it, an old staircase twists up and around itself. On the first landing, a set of four kids each smoke a spliff to themselves. On the second landing, a couple is so intertwined with each other, it is hard to tell who is who amidst the limbs and the dark, draping clothing. On the third landing, a group of Spaniards hold a heated argument about the best food to be found in the city: “Me cago en tu puto lomo! Ademas, me cago en todo tu puta familia!”

The fourth landing is empty, except the distant sound of guitars, and the only instructions are to follow the music. Piso 4B opens into a dusty, dark corridor. Hallway after hallway, the music gets a little louder. Doorless rooms full of abandoned furniture, tools, and bare pipes. Painted sheets hang from the walls. One could get contentedly lost in the labyrinth of pipes and floor-to-ceiling plastic poles, investigating some giant, sexual mural, and enjoying the still-soft playing of Spanish guitar. Through a draped sheet and under an archway of pipes, after having lost all idea of how long you’ve been there, and where you are, is a room with two men playing a mercilessly fast song on their Spanish guitars. They stare and smile intently at each other. They burst into laughter as it finishes.

On Thursday nights, these men gather in this back room to practice their dying (so they claim) art of the Spanish guitar. Under their feet lies a red rug, or a rug formerly known as red. It’s greyish and brownish from ash and countless muddy shoes pounding out the beat. Pipes along the walls give the room a cavernous, steely ambience. Underneath, faces of different colors and expressions and species are painted on the walls.

People begin to stream in and we pull up ratty fold-up chairs that line the room. It fills with smoke. A man who looks like he could be your 7th grade math teacher joins, with his grey hair and khakis. His job seems to be to provide intoxicants and play the harmonica. He incessantly rolls spliffs and passes out pieces of moist, weed-butter cake with glasses of absynthe con hielo.

Most of the guests don’t talk much. They are there to play. They communicate with intricate solos of passion and angst. An occasional burst of “como que suena!”

One man in the corner does like to talk; he does so with a laid back confidence and wit. A cowboy hat is perched on his wavy, salt and pepper hair that reaches past his shoulders. He wears a red and grey poncho, tattered. He speaks in the slurred, quick, and obscene way of the people of Madrid. The whole focus of the room orbits him as he gives sermons about the best way to feel music (with your gut and your genitals), how not to spill your drink (“don’t leave it on the floor, coño!”), and the importance of place like this. He tells everyone to get obscenely drunk and spend the night, for there is room for everyone here. It is a place, he tells us, of love. It is a place for people who have nowhere to go, who have no one to turn to; it is a place for people who can’t help but shut their eyes when they hear a sweet song; a place where people love their fellow stranger. The man leans back in his chair and gives a young Chilean a rambling lesson on the art of soloing, how you have to paint the music into the air, like how you would paint smoke.

The walk from Patio Maravillas is a hazy, floaty journey. There is a seedy sort of freedom in returning to the streets of Madrid. You try to remember all that was said and exactly how it was said, but Spanish words always seem to dance away, beautiful and teasing, just out of reach, leaving just the knowledge that something lovely and raunchy had been said. And walking past the crowd in the streets, that’s enough.