Spring light

Last December, I took a photograph of the blue & white checked plaza I walked through on the way to the bus station every morning, talked about the quality of the light. I carried my camera through again in early April. By now the sun is so bright in Andalucía it’s become impossible to walk outside at midday without dark glasses, & the heat transforms the air, & the white buildings are made brilliant by it. It becomes impossible to imagine that it was ever any other way – as now, in Boston, it is becoming impossible to imagine that I was ever in Spain.

Going home

In Sevilla, rumor has it that disgruntled cab drivers are destroying city bicycles. Cloud cover & a muggy cool front this morning have ameliorated the city’s incredible heat. Salmorejo, cherries, & snails are in season, the roses are dying off, & strawberries have become expensive again. This weekend is Spain’s memorial day (literally translated, “day of the armed forces”); in what is probably a telling cultural distinction (as far as what constitutes national pride), I haven’t seen a single Spanish national flag. Barça is the best football team in the world, polls show the PP with a 4-point lead over the PSOE in next Sunday’s European Union elections, and the Real Madrid football team is having its own leadership shakeup. Front page of this morning’s Sunday El País has Florentino Pérez saying, “El Real Madrid necessita una revolución.” 

My last day of school was this past Thursday, the room I rented in Jaén is empty, white & scrubbed clean, & everything I own is in suitcases. I’m told unofficially that my contract has been renewed for next year, but that I won’t know my placement until the end of June.

Traveling again, dislocated & floating. Back to the States on Tuesday via Sevilla, Barcelona, & Munich. That’s me up there – I’m two years old, it’s early 1989, I think I’ve just been dropped off at my grandparents’ house while my mother goes to the hospital to give birth to my sister. That kid – I think I know how he feels.

Lots to think about when I’m sitting still again. Expect some of it to appear here, at length, over the next month.

Election year

The elections for the European Union parliament are being held this summer; they’re apportioned nationally, so that Spain votes for its Spanish representatives, and there are apparently E.U.-wide coalitions of national parties, on the general lines of right-conservative & social democrat.

Forests of placards, banners & posters are sprouting on busstops and alongside major roads, sponsored by  the two major Spanish national parties, the PP (Partido Popular) and the PSOE (Partido Socialista Obreros de España) – I just got up to have my morning coffee & neapolitana at the school café & heard a PP spot on the radio.

From my perspective on the streets of Jaén, the PSOE is everywhere – they have a series of posters modeled on the one pictured above at every other bus stop on my way to school in the morning. Two picture the leading parliamentary candidates – the other one is tagged, Trabajar por la paz VS. Sembrar el miedo - one has Zapatero & Rajoy facing off (Vencer la crisis VS. Approvecharse la crisis), and the rest are words on colored backgrounds, red for the PSOE, light blue for the PP. I particularly liked: Trabajadores VS. Especuladores. (they have a flikr photostream here, for those of you interested in critiquing graphic design)

“Este Partido Se Juega En Europa” is, as far as I can tell, a kind of pun – both, “This game is played in Europe” and “this party plays in Europe.” PSOE has been in national power since 2004, headed by Zapatero (literally, “Shoemaker”), though they took a hit in last fall’s regional elections, and it seems to me that Zapatero has become generally unpopular.

The PP’s tag is, Ahora soluciones, & their talking points since I’ve been in Spain have centered around opposition to an expansion of autonomous governance in Catalonia & to negotiations with the ETA in Basque country – they’re formulating themselves as a Spanish national party with a focus on Spanishness that had previously been avoided, I think, since Franco. Their ads feature the Spanish flag. They’ve been the opposition party since Aznar’s unflagging support of Bush’s foray into Iraq got him kicked out of office in 2004 (after 8 years in power; he also privatized, among other companies, Télefonica). A whole raft of regional PP figures have been indicted over the last year in a huge corruption scandal revolving around skimming millions off of  public works contracts – the indictment comes from the same Spanish judge, Garzón, that took down Pinochet, & has recently tried to indict members of the Bush administration for their role in authorizing the torture of Spanish citizens in Guántanamo.

Nationally, Rajoy (PP opposition leader) blames Zapatero for la crisis and for Spain’s record-high unemployment; he also accuses him of stealing the PP’s ideas to solve the crisis (this gets propagated a lot on talk radio), and of not having any plan of his own. Their leading EU parliamentary candidate’s first photograph on his personal campaign website is a meeting with the Pope; the second, of the candidate with a baby.

[disclaimer: I don't pretend to know much about Spanish politics aside from what I've picked up from the environment over the last 8 months; errors, misrepresentations, etc. are mine. I just look at posters every day when I take the bus.]

Staircase, con’t

 

Previously.

Man on horseback

José Martinez Rioboó
Third and last of the three photographs from the book I found over Christmas in a carmen house in the barrio Realejo-San Matías, the old Jewish quarter at the foot of the Alhambra.

I think I remember this as taken in Almería – it might be Granada, east, in the mountains. It brings me forcefully back to the backcountry trails  in Ojai valley, in California, where I rode horseback at 13 – the burnt crests of the hills, the boulders. Going over the ridge. Hobbling horses to graze in pasture while you set up camp & got the water boiling.

The railroad bridge & the white suit remind you that it was taken in the early 1900s, and also why spaghetti westerns were later filmed out here – essentially replicating what this photograph captures as contemporary.

_

I read today an A.V. Club interview with Jim Jarmusch, who just finished his most recent film in Spain, of all places. (His fractured western, Dead Man, was one of my birthday presents this March, & it’s the only American movie I have here). And not just in Spain, but Andalucía:

I’ve always been madly in love with the city of Seville, and always wanted to shoot something there. The place is incredibly magical and visual, and has a lot of Moorish influence in its architecture. It’s where all that tilework comes from in Spain. There are balconies everywhere that are tiled underneath just for the visual pleasure of someone walking in the street. The streets are very narrow, and it has that weird tower of gold that we have in the film, which was colonial Spain’s warehouse of gold. It doesn’t even have doors; you had to get in by pulling a sailing ship up alongside it, and enter way above the line of the ground. It’s just a really amazing place, sort of central to Andalusian culture, flamenco culture. And then the south of Spain, where we shot outside of Almería, is where a lot of the spaghetti Westerns were shot. So the landscape is oddly familiar to me, even sort of semi-consciously, from biblical Hollywood epics that were shot there, and all the Italian Westerns that were shot there. So those things were drawing me. Spain entered the film and then kept pulling on me, even though the story could have been set in South America, or in Turkey or Mexico.

The tower of gold he mentions is the Torre del Oro, on the river Guadalquivir; there is also a Torre de la Plata (tower of silver), where the other precious metal from the conquest of the Americas was offloaded & stored.

Of course, nobody in Jaén would say something like this about Sevilla, because that would just encourage the sevillanos, & they’re already puffed up enough about their city as it is.

Albaycín staircase

I took a second walk up the vertical staircase in the Albaycín covered in graffiti when I was in Granada two weeks ago, part of the circuit I’m running, in my free weekends, around Andalucía one last time before my flight leaves out of Sevilla on June 2. This time, I took a few more pictures.

The ancient hillside neighborhood – a village unto itself, really – is supposed to have received its name when Moorish refugees from reconquered Baeza encamped in the hills above Granada. Baeza being a small city a half hour north of Jaén, briefly wealthy when its local families were in favor with the royal court; they left, as spent carapaces, a number of lovely Renaissance buildings. Squint and, through a linguistic process I can hear but can’t describe, the Arabic prefix al- gets added to baeza or baezín or bayyasa or bayyasín, and ends up as albaycín or albaicín or albayzín. There are Albaicíns scattered throughout Grenadino pueblos & nearby cities, presumably all refugee neighborhoods, peopled & named by the same flight.

Street life

Late spring, roses the size of cabbage heads blooming everywhere in Jaén. On Thursday, largely unannounced, you started to see strangely costumed people appear in the city center, mimes, red balloons, shabby fairy wings, juggler’s pants, living statues. There were dreadlocks & the faint, wafting smell of marijuana, & mangy dogs, & Jaén, which is usually buttoned-up & disapproving, felt briefly like a different city entirely.

I was taking a walk in the sun near the Plaza de Constitución & stumbled onto the program, which was being handed out by girls in black costumes (reproduced above; La arte toma la calle means Art takes to the streets!), & ended up in the late sunlight standing beneath the awning of the Bar del Pósito (plaza photographed here; the bar’s out of frame to the left) with a bottle of Cruzcampo in hand, where La Batukada played a Spanish-inflected mix of Afrobeat, reggae, salsa, etc. – lots of group singing, call & response, center stage filled with drum, a saxophonist & trombonist & electric guitar.

The plaza was full of hippies, old men, and, in the center, right in front of the small stage, around 30 little kids, who spent the entire show staring straight at the performers in a kind of wonder & dancing their hearts out – one girl in glasses & a red velvet dress kept doing sevillanas, while the band sang about marijuana – hierba buena – & street performers drank cheap red wine out of cardboard containers.

I’ve said it didn’t feel like the same city, and I’m having a hard time making clear what I mean – it felt like somewhere nearer the coast, sun-drenched, somewhere with tourists to gawk at the locals & itinerant musicians & the sorts of people who later would be dancing barefoot on a barstool at the Bódegon. Maybe the word I’m looking for is lively, which for all Jaén’s good points rarely applies.

At any rate, what I liked most about it was the kids – that typically Spanish juxtaposition of outdoor drinking, pleasure-loving youth, & families out on the town for the evening. You see the same kids playing in the marble-tiled alleys outside of the bars by the cathedral all of the time, invariably in jumpers or tiny boat shoes.

Of course, I didn’t have my camera with me – a 35mm with no flash doesn’t work at night, and it’d been close enough to sundown when I’d left home that I hadn’t brought anything with me. You’ll have to imagine the expression on their faces.

Obreros ¡a la victoria!

I finished the Penguin edition of Orwell in Spain sitting on the floor of an overcrowded train out of Sevilla after féria, a collection mainly of Homage to Catalonia filled out by a lot of letters & a pre-September 11th preface by Christopher Hitchens written on May Day, ‘00.

It was because of Orwell that I’d recognized the red-yellow-purple tricolor of the Second Republic hung in fluttering rows in the féria tent of the Andalucían Communist Party, where I drank beers wearing a Burberry tie & a suit. Posters called for a Third Republic, and everywhere you looked were symbols dating from the Civil War.

Orwell was shot in the throat outside of Huesca in 1937 while serving with the militia of the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, & couldn’t sing for a long while afterwards. He fled Barcelona when the Communists started to ban non-Stalinist Marxist parties & imprison anyone associated with them; his journal, among other things, was stolen from his hotel by police, and a footnote rumours that it found its way all the way to the KGB archives in Moscow.

It’s odd to read accounts of the Guerra Civil now that’m familiar with little fragments of Spain — but because Orwell spent all of his time in Catalonia, none of pieces that surface are direct. They’re all asides, glancing references:

When the Fascists told us that Málaga had fallen we set it down as a lie, but the next day there were more convincing rumours, and it must have been a day or two later that it was admitted officially. By degrees the whole disgraceful story leaked out— how the town had been evacuated without firing a shot, and how the fury of the Italians had fallen not upon the troops, who were gone, but upon the wretched civilian population, some of whom were pursued and machine-gunned for a hundred miles. The news sent a sort of chill all along the line, for, whatever the truth may have been, every man in the militia believed that the loss of Málaga was due to treachery.  (Homage to Catalonia, 63)

Somehow reading it this way, summarized, a second-hand report, it’s as though Málaga just fell, that the stories were just emerging. Later, in a footnote I read on the train an hour outside of Sevilla:

1. General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano y Serra (1875-1951). Nationalist, who on 18 July 1936 in Seville, when commander of carabineers, ‘carried out an outstanding coup de main‘ and took Seville for Franco. From the radio station he made ‘a notorious series of harangues. In a voice seasoned by many years’ consumption of sherry, he declared that Spain was saved and that the rabble who resisted the rising would be shot like dogs’ (Thomas, 221, 223). In his most famous broadcast, he said, ‘tonight I shall take a sherry and tomorrow I shall take Málaga’ (520). In 1947, though now an avowed republican, he accepted a marquisate from Franco (948). (Orwell in Spain, 265-6)

Shortly after all of this, Orwell gives all of Andalucía this shout-out:

There was a section of Andalusians next to us on the line now. I do not know quite how they got to this front. The current explanation was that they had run away from Málaga so fast that they had forgotten to stop at Valencia; but this, of course, came from the Catalans, who professed to look down on the Andalusians as a race of semi-savages. Certainly the Andalusians were very ignorant. Few if any of them could read, and they seemed not even to know the one thing that everybody knows in Spain— which political party they belonged to. They thought they were Anarchists, but were not quite certain; perhaps they were Communists. They were gnarled, rustic-looking men, shepherds or labourers from the olive grows, perhaps, with faces deeply stained by the ferocious suns of further south. They were very useful to us, for they had an extraordinary dexterity at rolling the dried-up Spanish tobacco into cigarettes. (Homage to Catalonia, 89)

On the one hand, Andalucía was for a long time one of the poorest parts of Spain, & Orwell’s right, the most illiterate. After the Guerra Civil, Franco allocated educational resources at prewar levels, so that there were no new universities built in Andalucía or Extremadura for decades.

On the other hand, it certainly is an odd feeling to have the place you’ve been living transformed into this exotic, distant land beaten by ‘ferocious suns,’ filled with gnarled & dextrous natives. I got the same feeling when I told people in Valencia I was from Andalucía; a boy in a Valencian pueblo of 8 or 9 asked me if I thought the Andalucíans were stupid. I said something to the effect of what did he think?. “They are,” he said, reassuringly.

Let’s pretend this was written on May 1st.

Tourism, nineteen-fifteen

José Martinez Rioboó, ca. 1915.
“Grupo de socios del Centro Artístico en una visita a la Alhambra,”
Negativo estereoscópica sobre vidria (gelatino-bromuro) 45 x 107 mm.

_

When I was feverish in Granada over New Year’s with my family, I found a book of photographs taken by José Martinez Rioboó around the turn of the century. My sister had a digital camera; she took pictures of a few of the pages for me while I lay on the couch sweating & eating kiwis. (Digital replications of silver emulsions copied onto printed pages . . . )

There’s a whole chapter of photographs of the Alhambra before it was restored further – stones missing, leaning walls, birdnests, an abandoned ruin. It only became a thronging hive of digital cameras & images of crowds obscuring running water & mosaics relatively recently, in some ways thanks to Washington Irving, who was able to hole up in their for months & write Tales of the Alhambra – one of the myriad reasons why Andalucía has a perpetual tinge of exotic romanticism to Anglophones.

Belle Époque tourism seems like a tranquil affair, all said & done.

Painted tile

Front of a stair, garden park (I can’t remember which), Sevilla.

Mosaic fountain in Las Casas de la Juderia, a hollowed-out city block of terraces, atriums, & underground passageways turned hotel in the barrio de Santa Cruz.

Window column, the Alcazar. The palace is still occasionally used by the Spanish royal family as a residence.