My apartment

My apartment is on the fourth floor of a terraced building in a neighborhood where all the streets are named after men, some with doctorates. There are new hardwood floors, and white-painted nubbly walls. The rounded ceilings in the front hallway are peeling & flaking because of water damage. There is a mirror framed by squares of colored glass, & a handwoven runner. The front door is thick, varnished hardwood, with a porthole with a little brass sight that can be closed by means of a hinge, & has a handle low & in the center like many doors in Europe.

The kitchen has granite countertops and blue & white tiles on the walls, & maroon tiling on the floor, and a small wooden table, and a gas heater installed around the water pipes next to the refrigerator that you light in the morning when you want a hot shower. The stove is gas also & is not self-lighting; you use one of a number of little lighters in the drawer next to the forks & spoons & perform a delicate operation that involves lighting the flame not too closely, because there is no oxygen for the flint to spark, & then jumping back reflexively from the sudden whoosh of blue flame & swearing inexpertly in Spanish.

The washer is in the corner, and a line for hanging laundry to dry runs out the window on a pulley & to the wall of the next apartment building. When it rains there is a small drying rack indoors.

The living room has two couches covered in bright, cheerful yellow throw sheets, & the terrace has been enclosed with glass & made a part of the room in order to make it appear larger, & the thin linen drapes are usually kept partly drawn. On the couches are bright red or blue throw pillows, with stripes. There is a television that receives a number of channels that show dubbed American action movies, Spanish sitcoms or soap operas, gameshows, & an historical bodice-ripping serial drama about heroic Iberian resistance to the Napoleonic invasion called 2º de Mayo which I watched two hours of last night, aided by a half bottle of rioja crianza, and which merits its own entry.

There is a spare white bookshelf with black vases & knicknacks, stark, sophisticated monochromatic bits & pieces, and the two shelves of prestigious white hardback classics editions I mentioned, in their bewildering eclecticism, which I see now includes not just Freud, Capote, Camus, Pablo Neruda, García Lorca, Cotázar, Borges, & Hemingway but also Steinbeck’s Of Mice & Men, and Proust, & Faulkner, who for some reason I cannot imagine in translation.

The bathroom is all orange & white tile on the floor & up the walls, and there is a sink, & a toilet, & a toothbrush stand, as you can imagine, and inside the prodigious shower which has not just a showerhead the size of a hubcap but also six middle of back-height massage nozzles, there is another small window, & it is separated from the room not by a curtain but by a head-height divider of opaque orange & clear glass cubes.

In my bedroom, which is smaller, the dark wood armoire is built into the back wall, & there is an infinite amount of shelving & hanging space for the possessions I didn’t bring, and also a small & mysterious collection of little figurines & ceramic nothings I found when I came into the room and hid in a drawer – a couple of witches, a little wood chest, a glass ball.

There is a writing desk, where I have installed my typewriter, & two little wall shelves for my books & other things: a bilingual edition of Borges’ collected poetry; the University of Chicago Spanish-English dictionary; Gabriel García Marquez’ Cien años de soledad in the Spanish & in the English translation; an edition of Pablo Neruda’s poetry I bought in Sevilla that turned out to be choked up by academic footnotes that kudzu the pages disappointingly & drown out the stanzas in useless biographical speculation; a disposable Kodak & my 35mm camera; a yellow painted teacup mass-produced in China; a calfskin planner with light blue, extremely thin pages edged with gold; a stack of green envelopes; my stationary; a pile of pens; three different maps of Jaén, only one of which is useful; loose change.

My bed has a cheery striped bedspread, cream with orange, navy, & green, & a heavier blanket for underneath when it gets cold at night, and it rests in a kind of child’s bunk crib with more storage in drawers underneath, so that the mattress is edged with the wood lip of the crib, and I bruise myself when I leap into bed to go to sleep at night. Through the window, as I have said more than once, I can see across the street to the neighbors’ terrace, hear children playing in Spanish down in the street, see the laundry on the line, a pair of tennis shoes, a jug of water, the pigeons on the Spanish tile who raise their wings & duck their heads down into the downy feathers on their chests & stand very still when it rains, and above, on the top of the mountain, finally, the castle, which is lit up at night, and that looms over the city always.

Diferencias, ii

In Jaén – a city last in anyone’s thoughts when it was an emirate whose surrender via treaty made it the tip of the spear against Moorish Granada, and where, since then, the anticipatory splendor of its cathedral & mountaintop cross & high walls & eleven gates named after saints has withered on the vine and grown dusty and is now a distant memory – cryptic neonazi & anarchist graffiti duel on the walls of alleys & parks. It is suggested, darkly, that the cure for fascism is a bullet. Falange, the coalition of Catholic priests, corporate power, & military ambition founded by Primo de Rivera back in the 30s, is scribbled on alley walls. Anarchist As blot out the swatiskas.

Posters for the last correos of the season, the monumental battles of torros & matadores, are defaced & refaced in turn: (The schedule of correos is papered over by signs featuring the sillouhette of bulls & the words: No la tortura – and replaced in turn by affirmatives: Sí a la féria - until the spraypaint is pulled out, a mute: NO, in red. Elsewhere: La tortura animale no es arte ni cultura.)

Apartments for rent, nannying, & private classes are advertised ubiquitously by poster as well, & by neighborhood flier (do not try to find an apartment in Spain by looking online), so that the street even in silence is a murmuring babble of sign. There are the graffitis, unpoliced, & the constant mute presence of ruin – the ancient foundations of houses next to the cathedral’s five century old rear façade are used as rubbish pits, and the side of the building adjacent is painted orange. Unanswered phone calls are free; the young ring each other once, twice, three times without picking up as a signal to meet in predetermined locations, cafés or bars.

Cerveza & café are available almost everywhere, and so the American liquor store is almost nonexistant. The babble of the street & the cheap meeting at the café makes redundant the faceless contact of the internet. In the evening, old people, small children, families & young couples walk the plazas & the public places.

And because of all of this the chance meeting on the street & the face-to-face discussion are valued more than appointment & indirect messages.

Americans, of whom in Sevilla there were at least a dozen in the lobby of our hotel at 2 a.m. on a Saturday night, roaming from outlet to outlet, knocking over lamps to find power, moaning the irregularity of the wireless internet, are known for their umbilical connection to keyboards & screens, their rootlessness, their habitual distance from the people they love. Americanos son un poco fríos, ¿no? my roommate said to me the other night, while I was telling him that I hadn’t been home regularly since the age of 13.

In that hotel lobby in Sevilla two weeks ago: a dozen people, ears plugged by headphones, mumbling into screens to the pixelated shadows of loved ones, not looking at one another, anywhere but where they were.

This morning

Walked down the Gran Eje to have café & read in the paper, unable to suppress a smile, that Fidel Castro, who has intrigued revolution & assassination in four countries, survived exploding cigars, deadly fungal scuba gear, & poisoned sweets, entangled himself in the gravest affairs of state of the last half century, plotted rubber flotillas of madmen, .38 calibre pistol shots in Bógota & collusions with dour Soviet spies in Mexico city, has now, in his old age, become a kind of sedentary newspaperman.

In this week’s column he writes, “De puro milagro que el candidato demócrata no ha sufrido la suerte de Martin Luther King, Malcolm X y otros.” The scandal being not, I think, that he implicitly compares Obama to MLK – but that it is the closest anybody has come to sharing my quiet & continuing (& welcome) surprise. I still remember a poetry professor of mine, three full years ago, saying with certainty: “They will kill him if he wins the nomination.” But that was late at night & in the quiet of the living room, surrounded by rows of silent pottery & handwoven rugs. This is headlining the inner pages of Spanish language dailies out in Jaén, of all places. I cannot even imagine what the reaction in the English press is.

And Castro, that lounging provocateur newspaperman, I picture in a small room somewhere with photographs of the violent & tumultuous crises he has survived pinned up on the walls, his joints aching, getting served coffee, taking small pleasure in its aroma, in cracking his knuckles, in being able to write exactly what he wants at any given time without editors and watch the press explode in furor & stern-faced speculation. I suddenly sympathize.

How can you do anything but chuckle – disquieting thoughts of our own decade of revolution & assassination aside? In the same article, Castro writes happily that the only thing abundant in McCain “son los años (tiene 72), y su salud no es en lo absoluto segura.” The gall to express worry over McCain’s health and advanced age, when Castro is ten years older and abdicated power after a hospital stay! You have to admire it.

And Palin? He calls her “la señora de rifle e inexperta ex gobernadora de Alaska” and then:“Se observa que ella no sabe nada de nada.”

“Se observa”? Now I have to picture him watching the debates – he can read English, but doesn’t speak it, so perhaps there is somebody translating – and mourning the decline of intelligent political discourse in his imperial enemy to the north. It’s too much.

I left the paper & my finished café con leche and when to the bakery on the corner to buy a baguette. Imagine, for a moment, that you are working behind the counter, a man in slacks & a light brown sweater comes in, you say in typically direct Spanish, “Dime,” and he says, “I would like – pardon me, I do not know the word for this – a part of bread?”

El largo adiós

In my new living room is a bookshelf full of a numbered series of white, hardcover “classics” translated into Spanish, a puzzling & sometimes eclectic series of titles – not just Joyce, Camus, Borges, Neruda & Cortázar, but Hemingway – The Old Man & the Sea, of all choices – Truman Capote, & Sigmund Freud -

- and Chandler, whose “El largo adiós” I started last night, & spent five minutes wrestling, dictionary open, with the first line:

La primera vez que le eché la vista encima, en el interior de un Rolls Royce Wraith, junta a la terraza de The Dancers, Terry Lenox estaba borracho.

“Le eché la vista encima” – this makes almost no sense. Which as near as I can make out means that, in the great game of telephone that constitutes literary translation, especially from Spanish, already a terse language and one liable to destroy the rat-a-tat laconic sneer of the noir original, a genre that the Spanish call negro, the literal English opening of Chandler’s immortal The Long Goodbye, that in its original does not have a single word in it longer than a syllable and clocks in at two dozen words, is:

The first time that I threw out or cast off or tossed away an overhead, as though from an outcropping, wide view upon Terry Lenox, (from an outcrop that was on the inside of a Rolls Royce that itself was adjacent to the terrace of The Dancers), he, Terry Lenox, was and had been drunk.

_

A belated consultation with the original informs me that le eché la vista encima means, “laid eyes on him” – four syllables to eight, Chandler wins by a factor of two – and it is almost enough to make me give up altogether.

Diferencias

In Jaén province, in the southern autonomous region of Andalucía, where the accent is more castellano than andalús and less likely to drop the final syllable or lisp as heavily as in Sevilla, most rented apartments are furnished & have washing machines. Clothing is dried on the terrace, on a laundry line hung between adjacent buildings, or on racks indoors. The elevation is higher, the air drier & its quality variable. Below in the valleys, ground cover & brush are raked out from under the olive trees, rows of which tromp up and down the low hills geometrically as far as you can see, and are burned in little clumps in the morning, so that taking the bus to your pueblo for school, on the higher cliffside roads, you see early dawn fog mingling with smoke & open flame. The last time it snowed here was two years ago.

Beer, wine, bread, coffee, & housing are cheaper than in the United States; bourbon, peanuts, & consumer electronics, more expensive. The local cerveza is Alcázar, sold in litre bottles discounted for the féria, and it costs only a little more than water. Supermarkets sell whole legs of cured Iberian pork, with the trotters & the close-shaved hair still on, tied by twine in displays & wrapped in cheesecloth or left uncovered, hung by the dozens; these are graded on a scale, from J to JJJJJ, based on provenance & feed – the highest quality are fed only acorns. Also sold in supermarkets are quails’ eggs, next to the hen’s eggs, and pan moldado with the crusts already cut off, and fresh fish on ice.

On the major avenues, the sidewalks are paved in stone tile, in a checkerboard pattern, rose & white – and this not just in Jaén, but in the pueblos in the provinces, in Bédmar, where my school is, and in Jimena, built on the side of a cliff. The parks are tiled or floored with packed earth, not with grass, and there are many broad-leafed trees and planted bushes. In Jimena and Bédmar, they hang strips of decorated leather or heavy fabric in a kind of curtain in the doorways, maybe to keep the dust out, or insects, or as a kind of screen in the summer.

Por favor and gracias are uncommon in comparison to the profligate courtesies of the United States – overuse is considered insincere, & the language taken as a whole is more direct. A non-native speaker translating the circuitous prefaces of English to Spanish finds the correct usage a replacement of four or five middling words for one direct verb, and the present progressive is rarely used, replaced by the present simple. Foreigners find this impolite; on the other hand, it is considered unthinkable not to greet people upon entering a room, or a store, or on the street of a small town, as the foreigners do, thinking that as long as they apologize they do not need to recognize other people except when necessary.