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.

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.

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.

Marking time

I like the sundial painted onto the façade of this strikingly-colored church in Sevilla. And the way that the radial gaps between the hours have been warped to account for way the sunlight strikes the building.

I’m marking time, too; only a little more than a month left in Jaén, which seems like no time at all. The usual tightening in my throat, the crowded feeling, the listmaking – what things, undone, can I still finish? What promises to myself can I still fulfill? How much can be fit into four weeks?

I still don’t know if I’ll be able to come back here next year to teach again. I’ll know in a week & a half.

Churros

The best churrería in Sevilla (I’m assured, though asserting the best churrería in Sevilla must be like claiming the best pizza joint in New York) is a small white-tiled hole in the wall, like all churrerías, in one of the byzantine districts in the old city west of the cathedral: literally, a counter open onto the street with a little tiled alcove behind it, a painted icon of a Virgen, a steel produce scale,  confectioner’s sugar in a shaker, chocolate, dough rolled out on a smaller floured counter in back, a deep frier. Two women in white coats. Small as a shoebox.

The dough is fried in big looped spirals which the woman pinches off with her fingers into shorter curved sections, still hot & oily, onto sheets of butcher’s paper, which are folded, weighed out, & sold by the half-kilo. I take mine with sugar.

This photograph was taken in Sevilla about a month ago, on the rooftop of an apartment a block or two away. (I’m back in Sevilla next weekend for féria; the stone façade furthest away from the shot is part of the cathedral.) Note the American-style coffee in the mugs, which is not exactly a luxury, except in the sense that anything rare & formerly familiar is a luxury, and the glare, because the film I’ve been using is not proof against the sunlight here, and I need to figure out what to do about it.

_

Other breakfasts.

EL PAÍS, domingo 22 de marzo

I become ever-more ambivalent about reducing a print medium to collage, but it’s so difficult to fit the words in – and how many of my readers speak Spanish, anyway?

In this week’s El País, co-fraternities in Sevilla (who sponsor & carry on their shoulders the platforms & floats during Holy Week) issue a joint declaration stopping the display of anti-abortion signs during Semana Santa. The search for the body of Marta, the young woman whose murder at the hands of her ex-boyfriend has transfixed all of Spain, continues in Sevilla’s garbage dump, after the murderer admits that he did not put her body in the river Guadilquivir. The corruption investigation into key national members of the PP, the Partido Popular (right-wing opposition party to the socialist PSOE) continues, and Spain offers more troops to be deployed in Kosovo & Afghanistan.

The FMLN triumphs in El Salvador, & the paper surveys ex-guerillas in political power in Latin America. There are massive public demonstrations in Naples against the mafia. Isreali soldiers are wearing t-shirts that feature a pregnant Arab woman in crosshairs with the subtitle “1 Shot, 2 Kills.” An editorial by Timothy Gartan Ash, translated from The Guardian, compares Britain’s diplomatic strategy re: America to P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves:

Maneras impecables; una sonrisa discreta; siempre, perfecta lealtad en público; mientras que, en privado, no se deja de murmurar: “¿Es eso prudente, señor?”.

But, he continues, this has been a national strategy with fewer benefits every day, and one with no remedy in the circumstance that the boss, Bertie Wooster, goes insane:

¿Qué hace Jeeves cuando Wooster empieza a torturar a gente en un cuarto trasero o cuando hace que un carnicero marroquí se dedique a cortar penes en su nombre? ¿Qué hace cuando Wooster se embarca en lo que Jeeves considera una guerra peligrosa y equivocada? Por lo que sabemos hasta ahora, la respuesta del Jeeves británico fue murmurar, alternativamente, “¿puedo ayudarle, señor?” y “¿es esto prudente, señor?”.

Having gone to the Guardian’s website & looked up the original, I think I actually like the Spanish translation better.

Navidades, & el año nuevo

i.

The twelve days of Christmas, whose gifts given to the sweethearts of traditional English song are golden rings, and milkmaids, and partridges roosting in pear trees, begin on the day of the birth itself and last through the 6th of January, the Epiphany, celebrated in Spain as the Día de los Reyes, the day the three Parthian kings or sorcerers arrive bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, myrrh, & the day too that Spanish children are showered with brightly wrapped presents & swell the parks and avenues of the cities in the morning and the early afternoon, bundled adorably in woolen coats, proving out their jugetes.

If my 1º de ESO are any indication, kids receive money in colored envelopes, clothing, some kind of electronic gewgaw – mobile phones, or a Wii, or robotic dogs, or walkie talkies. Local news films parents painstakingly arranging the gifts that come from the imaginary los Reyes, a civic myth more enduring than the imported Santa Claus, with a lot of reassuring discourse: the crisis, our announcers report, has not dampened the inimitable spending power of the Three Kings, thank goodness, who continue buying expensive consumer goods & wrapping them shinily. This is followed always by street footage of the latest winners of the lotería de la Navidad, waving their tickets & spraying champagne into the air, surrounded by a cheering crowd of people from the barrio. Commercials advertise perfume & sparkling wine (cava).

The night before los Reyes there are parades throughout Spain – big illuminated floats & marching bands rolling through the main streets of Jaén, closed to traffic, Santa’s helpers & costumed childrens’ mascots throwing caramels & candies wrapped in wax paper by the handful from bottomless sacks into the crowds, people holding umbrellas upside-down to catch the sweets. The avenues are paved in confetti, colored plastic wrap, popped balloons, candy wrappers, noisemakers, and paper hats.

ii.

Something like 9/10 of Spain self-identifies as Catholic, even though a vanishingly small proportion are church-going. This gives an odd quality to religious expression in civic life, very different from the States: the iconography & trappings are everywhere & taken for granted; the actual practice is rare. Zapatero’s PSOE government (Partido Socialista Obrero Español), in power since 2004, has had an uneasy relationship with the Church, as socialists tend to, & there are murmurs here & there over, say, crucifixes hung in government elementary schools – articles in El País or El Mundo, for example, about religion in public life, or the subject cropping up parenthetically in casual conversation, so you know something’s going on even though you can’t quite say for sure what. While Feliz Navidad is what you say to the old woman whose stroller you carry up four flights of stairs in your apartment building, & while ‘Navidades’ are used to refer to the entire season (almost the equivalent of ‘holidays’ in English), you will occasionally see ‘Felices fiestas‘ in a store window.

Still & all, my instituto had in the lobby an enormous nativity scene, seen also in storefronts throughout Jaén, with hand-painted ceramic figurines of Nuestra Señora and the infant Christ and the Reyes Magos and some of the animals, decorated with wood chips & other trimmings the older students had done in art class & surrounded by colored electric lights. On some terraces in the pueblos hang red cloth banners, almost the quality of beach towels, imprinted with a cherub-like infant Christ, painted with the same loving hyperrealism of a day-glo portrait of Elvis on black velvet, raising two fingers in blessing, a halo around his head, and beneath the exclamation, ¡He Nacido! , roughly equivalent to “He is born!” – both share the characteristic grammar of Christianity, where the birth & death of the Christ are in the eternal present, his return always imminent.

Navidades are celebrated with jamón, sold as whole cured legs with the trotters still on, cava brut, paté, turrón, wines & cheeses, giant luxury fish, cakes, sweets, & magdelenas. A Christmas turkey is typically served. Santa Claus is well-known because of global capitalism – he tosses sweets out from the floats, between Disney princesses & soaring orchestral versions of Jingle Bells, or hangs, a plush miniature figure, off of a rope with his bag of toys, dangling from apartment terraces, as though he were trying to climb up.

iii.

On Christmas Eve I attended a Catholic mass in the cathedral of Sevilla, the third largest in the world, a massive & soaring Gothic-Baroque building built on the ruins of a mosque taken when the city was reconquered in 1248; the minaret tower & certain portions were preserved, the tower stripped & hung with bells inscribed with biblical verses. Inside, innumerable chapels dedicated to saints, & saints’ bones wrapped in red cloth in the sacristy tied with string, with the name written on a small label & sealed with wax & mounted in a glass & gold.

The high altar was behind a high iron cage, and there were folding chairs out to either side of the pews for Christmas crowds, and for the tourists, which were many – French, southeast Asian, Italian, English, some Americans, from what I could see. The bishop sang the mass, & there was no choir, & the whole thing was mostly conducted in vernacular Spanish, the liturgy & structure roughly the same as the High Anglican [Episcopalian] service I was used to. The Nicene Creed, for example, was note-for-note the same – a strange feeling, to say the least, sitting on a folding chair in that cavernous buttressed nave, lit up by electric lights, listening to a Spanish bishop sing the same song I’d fallen asleep to as a four year-old in Michigan.

The mishmash of ancient Hebrew, old Greek, & Sumerian translated into Vulgate Latin translated into King James’ English is what, unavoidably, I think of when I think of the Word of God, so I felt a shock of almost Brechtian alienation to hear a different language retranslate translation into the vernacular. It’s all wrong, you kneejerk unconsciously, and then catch yourself.

Spanish, for instance, doesn’t distinguish between ‘meat’ & ‘flesh’ – it is all carne, and the Word Made Flesh is la Palabra hecho carne, the word made meat. ‘Our Lord’ comes out as Señor, the most basic term of address. The word for ‘people’ strikingly, is pueblo, which means not just the town, but a people, a nation, a comprehensive & communal group linked by mutual responsibility & obligation. “The people of God” becomes “el pueblo del Dios” (‘We the people’ in the U.S. Constitution becomes Nosotros, el pueblo de los Estados Unidos), so that there is an identification at the basic, root, moral center of the godly language with the village, and not the City, of God. There is no such word in a Spanish Catholic mass as elevated as mankind. We are all hombre, man at the most basic. The language of the mass as a whole seemed more stripped-down & everyday than that of the Anglican English, words at their simplest, without the archaic flavor of, for instance thee and thou, or forgive their trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

I have a feeling of real communion, even though I don’t take it (being Protestant, after everything), seeing European & Asian & scattered world Catholics, rise, separated by language and culture and history, to take a communion wafer, and I reflect on the enduring power of this institution, the Church, even still. There are many tourists in the arcades & in the nave. We are made embarrassed by an old Spanish man, in a faded cardigan & three-day stubble & glasses behind us, who carries a black, well-thumbed hymnal & knows the words & responses & is the only one in this section of folded chairs singing back to the bishop.

iv.

You return to a city you visited once a different person, in a different capacity, & it’s like coming back to a completely different city – one that, even more disorientatingly, has the same important landmarks, has fragments that out of the unfamiliar will leap out at you & be suddenly, unmistakably home, in the midst of the rest of things, which have unfolded in a slightly different way & rendered themselves strange. The city you live in & the city you visit in a four-star hotel with your entire family & the city you bum through with a ragged crew of students and expatriates & the city you are shown by someone who grew up there are not the same city. Jaén during la Fería de San Lucas*, and Jaén shivering under the wet, slick onslaught of late November rains*, and Jaén* at the Navidad are three different places, and it seems to me you don’t know a place until you’ve seen it in all seasons, and maybe not even then.

v.

I ate two Christmas comidas this year. The first, the instituto’s Christmas dinner (lunch doesn’t quite serve, even though it started at 3; think of it as a Sunday dinner) was a prix fixe, four-hour affair before the break in a typical (there’s that Spanish again: típico) restaurant in the pueblo, el Mirador, with a private dining room & panoramic views of the infinite multitude of olive groves in fruit below the snowcapped Sierra Máginas & old rural tools, butter churns, ploughs, saddles, hanging from the ceiling or mounted decoratively in the corner. There were endless bottles of house rioja, & a succession of platters in the center of the table: a variety of cured hams, aged manchego, whole prawns, fried calamari, croquettes, four different kinds of olives, other bits & pieces, before the main plates arrived – chops of pork, a cut of beef, or fish, if I remember correctly. Every place setting had a full set of silverware, a wine glass, a beer glass, and a small loaf of bread wrapped in cloth, set to the left, which in Spain is practically a utensil.

A teacher had brought his guitar & made photocopies of the lyrics to villancicos, Spanish Christmas carols, which are adapted from popular preindustrial working songs (villancico comes from the same root as villain, or villager) – peasant hymns, harvest songs, centuries old, appropriated & laden with religious lyrics. A classroom full of my children taught me “Los Peces en el Río” (the musical characteristics of your typical villancico are, for lack of better English words, unmistakably flamenco in rhythm, the melody Moorish or gítano or Iberian).

American carols: I’d taught them “Santa Claus is Comin’ To Town,” written in 1934 for the NBC variety show, “The Chase & Sandborn Hour,” led by the famed comic Eddie “Banjo Eyes” Cantor, & “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” made up five years later by an ad man working the Montgomery Ward department store account.

Afterwards: flan, café, cigarettes, obscene improvised flamenco songs about people from Cadíz, chupetos of dark, sweet rum, and dense, nutty cakes wrapped in wax paper with white frosting & cinnamon.

My second comida, on Christmas day, was with the family, at the impossibly posh five-star Hotel Alfonso XIII in Sevilla, built over ten years and finished in 1929, with its glassed-in atrium, its vaulted dining room, the mix of Moorish & romanesque or Gothic motifs common in newly Catholic Spain between the 13th and 17th centuries and in vogue again at the end of the 19th. There, again, a small loaf of bread wrapped in cloth at every place setting, and again, a fixed menu for the holiday. A different wine paired with exquisite precision to each course. The prices had been lowered, slightly, to accommodate the crisis. I wore a tie. I never go out to eat in restaurants in Spain; in this, too, the city is different when your family comes, knowing no Spanish, and suddenly you are a group of 6, & sitting down at siesta. You can barely squeeze everyone in at the bodega de Santa Cruz, where, in the grand & overwritten tradition of Sevillano tapas bars, they really do chalk up your tab on the wood bartop with a kind of wet nub of chalk, lines splitting the clusters of people crowded around the cups of wine or beer, so that the bar is segmented radially, like a sundial.

vi.

I had a fever at New Year’s, in Granada, where the graffiti is cryptic & the interior of the cathedral is painted a blinding white in place of bare stone. But fever & all, I still found myself on a street off the end of the Gran Vía, running past the Reyes Católicos seated on their marble throne dedicated to Columbus, running because everyone else was running, towards the plaza de Carmen, so that we wouldn’t miss the New Year.

My black oxfords seasoned with champagne & confetti & broken glass. Cinders from the low rooftop fireworks in my hair. Having dodged corks, a bottle in everyone’s hand, going off with their hollow, muted pops at the start of the New Year, champagne spraying through the air. In Spain you eat grapes for luck (uvas de suerte), one for every toll of the bell striking twelve. There is no countdown. The night is not New Year’s Eve, but la Nochevieja, the Old night, and you do not shout the seconds until the new tips over & supplants the old – you swallow the last twelve tolls of the bell, the indeterminate place in between the ending & the beginning, the moment that midnight has struck but before it is finished striking, the moment of suspension. There’s no countdown – it’s a sendoff, not a waiting game.

In the plaza, there, packed with people, all of them holding a bottle of champagne & a handful of grapes, we didn’t even hear the bells. Nobody did. We started eating grapes, the seeds in, swallowing them anyway, when the champagne corks started to pop, & by the time we were done & drinking champagne the fireworks had started & they were exploding so low you could feel the heat. Me, black tie, sweating out my fever, seeds in my teeth, I had a swallow of cava with everyone else – ten days with my family & my Spanish had already depreciated, I was thinking in English – and I took in that familiar & unfamiliar city, Granada, the city that had been new before & would be new to me again, and I still don’t know what the new year’s going to bring or where I’m going, I think I know less than I did when I came here, if that’s possible, but still and all:

When you come back to school after the New Year you are greeted by every single teacher you see with a handshake or a hug or a kiss on the cheek, you take your coffee with them & they pay, as per usual, and they wish you & you wish them in return, “Feliz año nuevo.” This – you can’t help yourself – this feels like a homecoming, too.

Diferencias, iii

In Sevilla, capital of the autonomous region of Andalucía, built upon the ruins of the Roman city of Hispalis, birthplace of flamenco, taxi drivers at the bus station get out and push their cars along by the front doors to save gas. There are bikes on every block, city bikes, red-plated, on racks, for rent at a small electric kiosk that you take out and put away at another rack in the city, without having to worry about locks or theft, and technicians whose job is to go from rack to rack changing innumerable flats. Horse-drawn carriages leave the cathedral area just next to the tramtracks on which rides the sevillano metro.

Sidewalks, paved in marble or white- and rose-colored checked local stone, are dotted with flattened dogshit, & at the margins with trash & spittle, cleaned nightly but ignored otherwise, and the highways too are littered with trash at the side. At night, deliverymen on red motorbikes use the sidewalks, and the mail is delivered by young women wearing green boots & riding bright yellow Vespas with the royal crest & Correos across the side in dark blue.

The bigger the street, the more likely it is to be unsigned. All of the names changed after Franco died – in Jaén, la Avenida del Generalissimo is now Paseo de la Estación. Everyone still calls the Calle de Andalucía the Gran Eje.