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.

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.]

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.

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.

Absence

Sometimes, after having been traveling & then sick, not having written enough in either condition, it’s hard to start again on the big things you’ve charged yourself to write, and their incompletion stops up your throat & leaves you unable to write anything at all.

So it helps to start with the small stuff. Do you know that the way someone will wave you closer in Jaén looks almost exactly like a shooing-away gesture? It is the damndest thing.

A week ago, Semana Santa: I stood underneath a rain of flower petals – a shower of them, rose petals, carnations, others innumerable, flowers I did not know the names for, red or stained white or yellow, in ankle-high heaps, children clutching them out of the sky or scooping them into bags, old men throwing them by handfuls at women, flower petals in my hair, my mouth, between my neck and my collar.

Then they went into José Arcadio Buendía’s room, shook him as hard as they could, shouted in his ear, put a mirror in front of his nostrils, but they could not awaken him. A short time later, when the carpenter was taking measurements for the coffin, through the window they saw a light rain of tiny yellow flowers falling. They fell on the town all through the night in a silent storm, and they covered the roofs and blocked the doors and smothered the animals who slept outdoors. So many flowers fell from the sky that in the morning the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by.

- One Hundred Years of Solitude
(Cien años de soledad), p. 144

I thought to myself then that I understood better García Marquez when he said he did not set out to write magical realism, that he’d intended instead to render the world in writing as accurately as he could, exactly how it was.

The blandest homesickness

Foods impossible to acquire in Spain that I wanted all at once after my stomach illness:

bagel with cream cheese
green, seedless grapes
ginger ale
apple juice
annie’s macaroni & white cheddar
whole-fat vanilla yogurt
frozen peas
cheerios
life cereal
applesauce
real peanut butter

I caught a stomach virus this weekend, & spent about 24 hours unable to keep water down, or food. After the bad part stopped, I stumbled around my kitchen, woozy, reaching for calories – and, in the irony of stomach illnesses, could find nothing I wanted to eat.

In my mind’s eye, my knotted stomach, visions of a whole host of foods: foods too bland to offend or perturb, foods to fill & recuperate. Comfort foods, though not in the usual sense. (The requirements were different – simpler, in some ways, stricter than others). The list I made, lying flat on my back on the couch in a kind of limp paralysis, became a map of familiar things, things left behind. Invariably from home, from childhood, or from the Co-op down the street from my last apartment in Central Sq. 

Of all of them, you can find not a one in Spain. An odd kind of ill homesickness – empty, barely able to move, not able to imagine anything in the entire country that can feed you.

On a train to Ronda

Como viene la primavera -

Spring comes in Andalucía when the almond trees blossom. Small. White or pale pink. There are purple wildflowers in the countryside now. Grass grows between the rows of olives.

I have no pictures. You’re going to have to take my word for it.

The window: Views slide past without effort. When we cross into Málaga there are gorges, bulls grazing in grassy orchards. Three goatherders, old men in windbreakers, wave at the train.

I have never touched an olive tree. A friend tells me the leaves are velvety. I have never touched an olive tree. How have I never touched an olive tree?

See something every day & it feels familiar even if you don’t really know it.

A platform that is just a concrete shack, scabbing white paint, young peoples’ names carved into the walls. The oldest dated 18th of July, 1999.

There is nothing near the platform. Fields. A dirt road. A man gets off at the stop, starts walking.

Broken glass & old metal thrown by the tracks. Town: Setenil de las Bodegas.

The mountains above Granada (I am walking to the train station, two hours ago): sheathed in snow – blinding white, ice, in the sunlight, the clear blue sky, and below, walking through a park where a grandmother sits, squinting, dirt paths, pines, a man with grey dreads lighting up a bowl, you can see them & hear birdsong. I think of García Lorca:

El río Guadalquivir
va entre naranjos y olivos.
Los dos ríos de Granada
bajan de la nieve al trigo.

Winter light

Every day I come to school in the predawn I see the sky blue slowly, from pitch-black to something lighter, like a stain spreading, until finally out from behind the mountains the sky lightens and the color begins to spill out over the ice that caps the ridges, clean & every day just a little bit earlier, imperceptibly earlier every day.

Above is the plaza in the Peñemefecit I walk through on my way to the bus station, photographed in late December; I finally got around to developing a roll of film. This kind of clean, tired winter light – it’s finally starting to brighten, like watching a Polaroid develop in front of you over months. Even the colors are getting better. The dead clumps of growth you can see on the trellises – I don’t know the species – were bright scarlet for most of autumn, & soon they’ll be greenleafed for the rest of the year.

Flora & fauna

The leaves turn here, in patches, at the same time as the orange trees bear fruit & the olives begin to be harvested. Palm trees tremble in pale, weak sunlight. Oranges ripen fat & plump next to bare branches. Autumn.

In honor of Santa Catalina de Alejandría, 4th c. martyr & patron of philosophers & students, who is symbolized by the palm, the sword, & the rueda dentada, iced sardines are roasted whole, scales & heads, on flat griddletops with sea salt, & the entire city climbs to the summit of the mountain next to the castle to eat them on her feast day with their fingers. You eat them over bread to soak up the oil, boned & peeled.

To the east:  hills greening in the early winter rain, the pass that is called gap-tooth, the beginning of the Sierra Máginas. To the west: the city, all of Jaén huddled around the base of the single mountain, the hilly olived countryside like a rumpled bedsheet.

Little things

I was in a good mood this afternoon for no particular reason, so in the spirit of Jackie’s admonition the last time I went listmaking, here’s a list of little things that have been making me happy recently:

A stack of blue & red checked airmail envelopes I bought for just ,50 céntimos.

Getting my first roll of 35mm developed, & having some of the pictures come out, even though I didn’t rewind it correctly & I exposed half of the roll.

The box of Navidad dulces, cookies, & miniature pastries flavored with almond slivers or orange peel that my school’s jefe de estudios bought & left out in the teacher’s lounge.

This sublime & ridiculous vermouth commercial, aired nonstop for the last month or so, in which George Clooney – in my Andalucían television? – inexplicably appears with a pencil-thin sevillano mustache to say a single word in Spanish.

My weekly bag of clementines.

The music that the local talk radio station plays during my early-morning car ride to school to start the news break, sung by what sounds like muppets backed by a syncopated juke joint piano & handclaps, the words to which are basically, Hoy es martes! Son . . . las ocho! and there are some handclaps & more Spanish and then the littlest muppet asks, “En Canarias?” and a basso-voiced news announcer replies, “En Canarias: las siete,” & the muppet replies, “Ah, vale.”

The sevillano hip-hop playing at a pretty sweet bar off the Plaza de Los Batalles last night, the flow of which was reminiscent of old-school N.W.A.

Getting away with singing this song with my 7th graders while I played the guitar, to teach long & short vowel sounds.

Having an excuse to play Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong’s “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” for the same reason. And: Not being able to explain the meaning of the word “saspirella.”

Fresh bread.

Cheap espresso.

Sunlight.