Hofkriesrath, war & peace

“They’re perfect ruffians, especially Dolohov,” said the visitor. “He’s the son of Marya Ivanovna Dolohov, such a worthy woman, you know, but there! Only fancy, the three of them had got hold of a bear somewhere, put it in a carriage with them, and were taking it to some actress’s. The police ran up to the stop them. They took the police officer, tied him back to back to the bear, and dropped the bear into the Moika: the bear swam with the police officer on him. . . . . That’s the intellectual sort of amusement the son of Count Kirvil Vladimirovitch Bezuhov indulges in! And people said he was so well educated and clever. That’s how foreign education turns out.”
- p. 32 

I’m reading War & Peace on a pebbly beach in a town just west of Almería, where the sand is so dark it leaves streaks on your clothing and there are billboards in Arabic. I borrowed it out of an over-developed sense of irony about my beach reads. The beer on tap in the bars here comes from Murcia, and the tapas here come free with your caña as in Granada & Jaén, but in no particular order; you choose what you want from a chalked-up list behind the bar. Night fishermen returning to port in the morning crowd the bus station bar at 6 am. The mountains of the entire province are terraced and covered in flat grey greenhouses, an immensely ugly monotony, beneath which grow a fantastic array of year-round fruits & vegetables; Almería province has been compared to Jaén, if Jaén were on the Mediterranean, the cliffsides along the highway (which reminded me of the PCH) dotted with little ruined watchtowers, a mecca of fruit & not of olives.

The migas I was served here, instead of coming with green peppers & chorizo, were lighter & covered in onions, dark reddish squid, little fried fish & zucchini. Salmorejo is uncommon, & the olives aren’t as good. The little beach bars are just beginning to open up this week & the next, the season beginning. 

The omnipresence of French among aristocratic Russians in War & Peace is interesting to me (the way the language people choose to speak characterizes them, an Austrian general’s obscure pleasure at getting a Russian idiom right when he gives a speech, society conducted bilingually) — as is the way the translation into a third language makes all that French-in-Russian something still more indirect.

On p. 89, Tolstoy invents a formidable German compound word: Hofskriegswurstschappsrath. The footnote: ’Literally, the “sausage-schnapps-war-council” (German); the neologism is a play on the German word Hofkriegsrath (“council of war”).’ Further down, we’re reminded that national stereotypes are always already fixed, undeniable, & as constant as water. See early 19th c. Germans as notorious cowards & military pushovers:

“Bonaparte was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He has splendid soldiers. And he attacked the Germans first too. And any fool can beat the Germans. From the very beginning of the world every  one has beaten the Germans. And they’ve never beaten any one. They only conquer each other. He made his reputation fighting against them.”

Back to Jaén on Monday, and goodbye again to English prose, in translation or no. I’m sunburned on only one side of my body & wearing pistachio-green pants & going to get some tapas.

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.

Writing samples

Sometimes, I make up teaching exercises almost purely to provide me with keepsakes & amusement. That was the case this week, which I devoted to storytelling in 2º and 3º de ESO – characters, description, madlibs.

(2º & 3º are equivalent to 8th and 9th grade, though the ages, because of kids who repeat, range from 13 to 17. Though I highlight my favorites here, it’s worth mentioning that a third to half of the kids in each section didn’t do the assignment at all.)

There’s no better feeling than when your kids surprise you. (The phrase I keep wanting to use in Spanish is Me hace gracia – literally, It gives me grace, but gracia here is a complicated word – something between amusement [a good joke at the right moment tiene gracia] and charm, a fittedness.)

Below, first, are two entries from the madlibs I gave to 3º B after the St. Patrick’s day lesson & before the slices of carrot cake with green frosting.

Francisco – I like this because he went out of his way to find the oddest words he knew in English, and because normally he’s not one of the better students, though engaged & willing & funny – writes:

It was a normal cold spring day, just like any other. The griffins were writing. Bruce had just eaten a breakfast of macarronis and watermelon and was taking a speedboat to his job as a neurologist. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a skeleton went out of London Tower. The monster was strong, sad, and black, with horrible happy feet. Bruce had never been so scared in his life. He didn’t know what to do. Then, the monster said, “James is horrible.“

Mágina, who sits with the three other smart girls in the back of my 3ºB classroom, blew me away by continuing the story, unprompted, and making into something that made sense. I have preserved minor grammatical errors (“to” in the last sentence is an artifact of the Spanish personal “a”):

It was a normal sunny spring day. The dogs were playing. James had just eaten a breakfast of toasts and oranges and was taking a motorbike to his job as a police. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a skeleton ran out of the bank. The monster was tall, thing, and white, with a horrible big nose. James had never been so scared in his life. He didn’t know what to do. Then the monster said, “I wan’t all your money.“

James started to think and what he thought about the “skeleton” was robber. James arrested to the skeleton. THE END.

In 3ºA, I asked the students to create a character for a story from scratch – what does the character look like, what are their emotions, their favorite things, what do they want? (This, I explained, was important – characters have to want something. Who knew fiction workshops would come in handy in an English lesson?) I’d done a little exercise previously on metaphor & simile, and told them that this could be used in personal description, too.

Enrique, also not one of the best students, but also still engaged & curious, writes:

My character is small, green, with one eye, he has no friends, he lives in a cave, he is a vegetarian. He wants to have friends. Is from Greece.

Isabel María writes:

A big English named Sam work in the sea with the animals. He is very nice and he’s a pink hair, a yelow legs and he always is smiling. When he is in the sea, playing with the animals, he is very crazy.

Cristina, who is better at French than English and rarely talks in class, writes:

She is friendly, her eyes are green like the grass, her hair is blonde and short. She likes riding a horse. She needs a new black horse for a race. She lives in a stable with her animals.

Maria Jóse, whose family runs the Paraiso, the bar-restaurant where I eat on Tuesday afternoons (I see her after school taking care of her little sisters & nieces, & working behind bar), is one of my smartest kids. She uses the opportunity to tell a story. Note the past simple:

She was a princess that lived in a scrappyard with wheels and chairs. One day, she woke and found a magic cat in(to) the car. She took it and went into the scrappyard. When she touched the cat softly it became a man. It’s incredible ! ! ! Then they got married.

EL PAÍS, domingo 8 de marzo

Above, the Sunday, 8 March El País boiled down to the size of two postcards.

Pérez Roque is named by the epithet, “talibán fidelista,” a Madrid designer coins the plural adjective “sexys” in an interview in order to make it line up with Spanish grammar, & the Spanish title of There Will Be Blood is Pozos de ambición.

An article in the peach-colored economics section uses a giant panoramic photograph of the olive groves outisde of Martos to illustrate its article on rural agriculture – Martos being the pueblo outside of Jaén where I was nine days ago, in a pleasant tiled courtyard with tables set with cups of different oil varieties, bread, water, & cubed apples, touring a traditional olive oil plantation.

I took notes again this week on the English loanwords italicized & used – this being the Sunday edition, I thought I’d net an even a bigger catch.

There were the usual suspects: Words for technology (web, online, banner [ad], blog, wi-fi), for celebrity & music (fan, celebrity, tour manager, memorabilia, shows).

Words filling up the business section – bonus, broker, cash flow, freelance, headhunters, hedge fund, marketing, outsourcing, rating, stock, subprime.

Words for consumption, fashion, nightlife – after hours, blazer, chaqueta de bomber, duty free, fitness manager, gentleman, glamour, grunge, indie, “it girl”, jeans, light [as in diet], “look”, outlets, play rate, pub, sexy, skate, sponsor, videoclip, video de aerobic, vintage.

Words for media – country, western, folk [music], thriller, “making of”, noir [instead of estilo negro], porno.

And the occasional outliers: “bloguero” [for blogger], dominatrix, doping, noodles, porridge, sheriff.

EL PAÍS, sábado 14 febrero

Reading El País, Saturday edition, 14th February -

El mundo es un pañuelo.

The world is a handkerchief? What does this mean? Why does the back page columnist use it as his first sentence? It may be an expression, but I can’t imagine its meaning, not even from context. The declaration is too blank, too absolute – taken as a given.

It reminds me of the first & last sentences of Erik Fosnes Hansen’s Tales of Protection (I looked for the originals in Norwegian, couldn’t find them) - “Life is a bird.” Eventually, he elaborates:

Life is a bird. And you are the branch that sways back and forth.

Actor de doblaje. Constatino Romano, still unwell; but his condition improves.

Who is Constatino Romano? “Como actor de doblaje, está considerado uno de los profesionales más prestigiosos. Es la voz de Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger en la trilogía de Terminator, y Roger Moore.”

Dubbed movies & television are omnipresent in Spain (& one of the reasons why English pedagogy is more difficult than in northern Europe). Spaniards speak with pride of their actores de doblaje as the best in the world, particularly during the 70s. I distinctly remember an Almodóvar film (Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios [Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown]?) where the principal action took place in a dubbing studio.

Imagine a world where Roger Moore and Clint Eastwood speak with the same voice.

Spanish friends tell me that when they get pirated DVDs from South America they’re distracted because all of the voices of the actors have changed; different dubbing studios.

Multilingual films are whitewashed beyond recognition; in Babel, even the Mexican voices (I’ve been told) are dubbed over with Spanish accents. In Vicky Christina Barcelona, Penelope Cruz speaks in Spanish over her own voice speaking in English; it goes from a bilingual movie to a monolingual one, & Javier Bardem shouting, “English! Speak English!” loses . . . everything.

A list of all English loanwords used, in italics, in the 14 February El País:

blog – chat – dixie – establishment – ferry – glamour – golden boy – hippy – kosher – lobby [as in lobbyist] – lounge – marines – mass media – marketing – merchandising – performer – online – resort – rhythm and blues – road movies – rock and roll – singular food [culinary movement] – spa – stand [as in booth] – vintage

Today in history

On this day in 1975, Francisco Franco, dictator in Spain for 36 years, died. He died on the same day as had José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange, who had been captured during the Civil War & executed in prison & was subsequently turned into a martyr of the regime.

[See Sandy Holguien's guest post on the Spanish Civil War at The Edge of the American West, linked above, from which I've stolen the "On this day in . . . " format].

Franco was toasted near the end of his life by President Richard Nixon, who said on his death, “General Franco was a loyal friend and alley of the United States. He earned worldwide respect for Spain through firmness and fairness.”

Symbols of Franco’s government, such as the national flag he inaugurated with the Imperial Eagle, are banned by law as of last year. Newspapers over the last few months here have been covering attempts by the judge who indicted Augusto Pinochet, Balthazar Garzón, to open an enormous case trying Franco & 44 of his top aides for disappearances & mass executions during the civil war. This includes finding the unmarked mass grave of the poet García Lorca, shot by fascists. [It looks as though the case won't go national, & will be parceled out by local courts.]

Meanwhile, a new sketch-comedy show on la Sexta, Generación D.F. (después de Franco)- that is, the dissolute youth born after 1975 – is advertised alongside a new biopic about the general’s last days, & his death. Yesterday night on “Sé Lo Que Hicisteis,” which is a kind of news-comedy program, a video sketch featured a disheveled, delusional Francoiststanding vigil outside the monument to his tomb & carrying on a conversation that went something like, General? General! You can come out now! Whenever you’re ready. Ok. Ok, I’ll just be waiting right here.

So, what do I say on a day like today? At the least: When you see graffiti on those whitewashed stucco walls like Fascism is a disease whose cure is a bullet in the head, on a day like today you begin to realize that “fascist” is more immediate & specific invective here than in the States.

I’m trying to think of comparisons – a television program in Russia that routinely redubbed televised speeches of Stalin, for example, to comedic effect – but I can’t. Most of the really horrifying stuff that the regime did – using the FalangeForeign Service to kidnap children from Republican parents abroad, for instance, or presiding over a decade of famine & irrational economic medievalism – happened during the 30s and 40s, and because Franco was in power so long, he had an opportunity to mellow & become familiar in a way that I can’t really find a precedent for.

Most vividly, I remember watching a Spanish film from the 60s in my third year high school class called . . . something about peppermint, I think, and learning that because of censorship, the cinema had resorted to elaborate allegory – in this case, a man had fallen asleep downstairs & had a dream about a little girl jumping on a pogo stick, the sound of which was dubbed over by the sound of jouncing bedsprings, because his wife or novia or whatever was upstairs with a different man, and this dream was meant to symbolize what in a more direct film culture would have been a simple storm-into-the-bedroom discovery scene.

I still get the feeling that every time someone swears on Spanish television or talks openly about sex there’s a little charge, a kind of feeling of triumphant reversal.

I’m not really equipped to quantify the impact of a four-decade fascist dictatorship in guise of monarchic regency, and the years of civil war that preceded on Spain – I feel like I can barely talk about it. It’s too big. Something is there for a half century, a fact of life, immovable, and then it disappears, & thirty years later, more, you can feel the effects even if you don’t really know how to say what’s happened.

Vocabulary lessons

Reading Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye in Spanish: a good way to find out that esposas means not just wives, but handcuffs.

Going to a gay bar called El Toro, featuring low lighting, a drag show, pictures of bulls made of words, & orange or green walls, with an Estonian girl, a Bulgarian, and an Austrian volunteer for a Spanish advocacy group that gives out boxes of condoms in red pleather wallets: a good way to find out that, in certain contexts, entiendes? means not, do you understand me? but rather, do we understand each other? As in, Are you gay, or what?

A vegetarian couple from Mexico I met at a dinner party (I bonded with them over our being fellow americanos) taught me the Spanish-Spanish word for gringo, too, but I’ve already forgotten.

On the eve of the elections

A week ago I came across these passages in both of my editions of García Marquez. I couldn’t think of a better way to commemorate the elections at a distance of 12.000 km. The first part is in Spanish; the second picks it up from the last sentence & continues in English. Banning public gatherings & prohibiting the sale of alcohol appears to be a common feature of international democracy – at the least, not just fictional South American elections in an indeterminate past, but those in Thailand a few weeks ago as well. Needless to say, Americans, in our infinite wisdom, don’t abide by this. I myself plan to be soused out of anticipation & worry, waiting for the results, & hoping perhaps that García Marquez’ gypsies will come back to town in an uproar of pipes & kettledrums, returning at last with their miraculous inventions: telescopes, flying carpets, magnetism, alchemy, whiskey, & just governance.

Seis soldados armados con fusiles, al mando de un sargento, llegaron y sino que fueron de casa en casa decomisando armas de cacería, machetes y hasta cuchillos de cocina, antes de repartir entre los hombres mayores de veintiún años las papeletas azules con los nombres de los candidatos conservadores, y las papelitas rojas con las nombres de los candidatos liberales. La víspera de las elecciones el propio don Apolinar Moscote leyó un bando que prohibía desde la medianoche del sábado, y por cuarenta y ocho horas, la venta de bebidas alcohólicas y la reunión de más de tres personas que no fueron de la misma familia.

Gabriel García Marquez, Cien años de soledad, p. 121-2

On the eve of the elections Don Apolinar Moscote himself read a decree that prohibited the sale of alcoholic beverages and the gathering together of more than three people who were not of the same family. The elections took place without incident. At eight o’clock on Sunday morning a wooden ballot box was set up in the square, which was watched over by the six soldiers. The voting was absolutely free, as Aureliano himself was able to attest since he spent almost the entire day with his father-in-law seeing that no one voted more than once. At four in the afternoon a roll of drums in the square announced the closing of the polls and Don Apolinar Moscote sealed the ballot box with a label crossed by his signature. That night, while he played dominoes with Aureliano, he ordered the sergeant to break the seal in order to count the votes. There were almost as many red ballots as blue, but the sergeant left only ten red ones and made up the difference with blue ones. Then they sealed the box again with a new label and the first thing on the following day it was taken to the capital of the province.

“The liberals will go to war,” Aureliano said. Don Apolinar concentrated on his dominoes. “If you’re saying that because of the switch in ballots, they won’t,” he said. “We left a few red ones in so there won’t be any complaints.” Aureliano understood then the disadvantages of being in the opposition. “If I were a Liberal,” he said, “I’d go to war over those ballots.” His father-in-law looked at him over his glasses.

“Come now, Aurelito,” he said. “If you were a Liberal, son-in-law or no, you wouldn’t have seen us switch them.”

García Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, p. 99-100

Baños árabes

In Al-Andalus, the Arab baths served the same type of social function as the Roman thermae, or the Greek gymnasia, or the Turkish hamam: public, communal, with rooms & pools of different temperatures, to be used over the course of hours, anointings of oil, scraping of sweat & dirt with bronze instruments, leisure.

I visited the resorted ruins of Jaén’s baños árabes, beneath a 16th century palace & museum, last Sunday – woke up early, took my café down the street, & got lost in the old town west of the cathedrál, whose streets are so narrow that at times I could not have put both arms out, and which process straight uphill, so that even lost I knew I was going in the more or less the right direction, and after I little while I found myself quite suddenly in a sunlit plaza in front of a palacio- de Villardompardo, as it turned out, all white stucco & dark hardwood frames, with a sunlit marble-tiled atrium inside. The atrium was enclosed by glass & was a kind of arcade, five stories high, with abundant darkleafed greenery & easily confused hallways leading this way & that.

The baths are below it all – they were closed when the Christians retook the city, running water & communal bathing being a despised quality of the Moorish enemy, and at one point used as a tannery. You descend stone basement stairways, walk over a long hallway floored with glass, over hermetically sealed Roman ruins – worn stones, foundations of buildings, with green moss growing on them, kept at a constant temperature by fans & humidifiers, your feet suspended above it all – an odd feeling – and descend further, into absolute quiet, cold stone. The ceilings are vaulted & domed in brick & have starshaped holes at regular intervals to let daylight in. I wonder briefly what the baths must have been like in rainstorms. They are mosaicced and tiled, although most of the decorative elements have been stripped. There is a quiet stillness, rooms of five different temperatures (now a uniform & unchanging chill), the ubiquitous horseshoe arches, the vaulting, spacious feeling Moorish architecture gives you. Very little remains.

Above is the real attraction – the baths being lovely and all, but the work of twenty minutes at most: the Museo de Artes y Costumbres Populares, housed inside the body of the palace above the ruins of the baths.

_

The museum (of popular [folk] art & culture) is nothing less than a history via artifact of the whole of preindustrial Andalucía. It’s as though somebody filled a room with the objective correlatives to Fernand Braudel’s The Stucture of Everyday Life. Rooms of the old palace, beautiful spaces in their own right, with ruddy tiling on the floor, potted plants, good light, are dedicated to Water, Grain, Olives, Textiles, the Home, Childhood. There are worn millstones engraved withwheat or ears of corn, unglazed clay jars for water, leather chests riveted with brass tacks, shovels & rakes made out of wood, brooms that are a bundle of twigs tied together, breadmolds, wire screens for sifting chaff, warped iron shears, a long series of implements & wood & metal machinery used to transform raw wool into yarn.

Everything is unique, worn down, repaired & re-repaired, mismatched, illfitting, made with a lack of precision completely foreign – to my eyes, to machine-made things. There are carts with wooden wheels, iron sheathing the rims. Saddles, bits, & bridles. Old classroom benches, painted green. Schoolbooks & picturebooks & a century’s worth of old dolls & tin or lead soldiers painted different colors & a metal cannon like the one my father played with as a child, that still is in my grandparent’s house and probably dates to the forties, an array of red or blue toy rifles & popguns, halfsize, with wood stocks. A set of 19th century handpainted playing cards, with different suits: Cups, Stars, Swords, & Clubs. There is no queen; the face cards progress from an unmounted man-at-arms, weapon in hand, to a mounted knight or cabellero, to the king himself.

There is an old mantlepiece icon: the Virgen de las Angustias, patron of Granada, the picture blackened by the soot of countless fires, the frame elaborate & engraved with words, the Virgen herself almost obscured completely, looming out of shadow, wearing a crown & hugely pregnant, on her womb a map of the world.

Everything is presented together, ahistorically, without dates – it could be three hundred years old, it could be eighty.

In a room with textiles & fabric are traditional clothes hung on mannequins. There is a traje de fiesta – an elaborate fiesta dress from Úbeda, worn for the paseo, for féria, rarely otherwise. Men wore linen shirts with collars, & a kind of rough brown wool cape, embroidered with thread. There is a sewing machine, black, inlaid with gold – the best machines here, the old handcrafted bourgeois machines, are works of art. One very long hall with a black & white checker tile floor and blue & yellow & white painted tiles on the facing of the fireplace is stuffed with lit glass cabinets of fine china, from floor to ceiling, notable & a little breathtaking just because of the length of the room and the accumulation.

Outside, there is a hallway witha series of old, sepia photographs – turn of the century. Andalucía at first looks like nothing more than a Sergio Leone western. I don’t know another way to put it. The similarity is striking. There is the interior of a one-room house, floored with unmortared tile, soot stains on the plastered walls, herbs hanging from the ceiling, the woman cooking in the fireplace. Men wear widebrimmed hats & ponchos. Women are all in headscarves. The floors are dirt, or rough woodplanks over dirt, or tile laid on top of dirt. A photograph of a town plaza during siesta shows about thirty men, and a few laden mules, lying in the shadow of one big tree. In the sunlight, nothing moves. Another one shows women carrying those ceramic jugs I saw lining up at the village fountain (pool?) for water, and men next to them watering their horses. One titled “La Féria” looks like Coney Island in 1905. Clothes are washed in midwinter in snowcovered streams. “Hombres Comiendo Migas” has seven or eight, half sitting, gathered expectantly around a sloping iron pan over a small fire in the middle of a terraced plaza.

-

After couple of hours I leave and go out into the plaza and sit down and think for a while. The palace has been built & rebuilt. You can see the foundations of different buildings, the differences in the brick, the patchwork. The plaza is planted with palms & with lime trees. In the fountain, a swan is strangled by a bronze snake, water spouting from its arched neck & gaping beak. The sun is out in full. In the center of town, in front of the Cathedral, thirteen-year-olds are getting confirmed, and afterwords, wearing bright red robes & little portraits on gold chains around their necks, they walk through the plazas with their parents.

I think, wordlessly, and I don’t really know how to describe it, of our alienation, our profound alienation, from traditional ways of life & from the past, especially as Americans. Braudel, whose book I wasn’t able to carry with me, writes, summing up his own point:

”It is quite easy to imagine being transported to, say, Voltaire’s house at Ferney, and talking to him for a long time without being too surprised. In the world of ideas, the men of the 18th century are our contemporaries: their habits of mind and their feelings are sufficiently close to ours for us not to feel we are in a foreign country. But if the patriarch of Ferney invited us to stay with him for a few days, the details of his everyday life, even the way he looked after himself, would greatly shock us.”

That the words survive, the ideas coincide, but that the very room in which he wrote, what he would have eaten or done after writing, is inaccessable to us. Lacking the book, all I can do for illustration is turn to John Leonard’s review in the New York Times:

Here is more than we may think we need to know about the hoe and the stove, pack animals and locusts, cod-fishing and iron-forging, white bread and Persian daggers, pepper and beards. Montaigne, for instance, didn’t use a fork. The Chinese word for “chair” is “barbarian bed.” Islamic scissors have hollow blades. After 1600, “State revenue from pulque in New Spain was equal to half the revenue from the silver mines.” Not all windmills turn vertically. The idea of privacy wasn’t invented until the 18th century. Tea is only popular in those countries innocent of vines that yield wine. As European “civilization” evolved toward what we now know as “capitalism,” it was distinguished by its inordinate consumption of meat and whisky, and its consummate sailing of the high seas.

There is nothing random in Mr. Braudel’s catalogue. [...] But general readers, perhaps inclined to a romantic view of the ages, will want to know why they should go through so many chapters on olives, wigs, table manners, gunpowder, mail delivery, water engines, soap and underwear. The reasons are various.

And for me, one of these is that, through catalogue, it becomes harder and harder to fool yourself into thinking that the past was like anything like postmodern American life. That in important ways, it is almost unimaginable.

Nick Tosches writes, in his elaborate headfake of a biography, King of the Jews,

We seek truth and meaning from the lost or shadowy precincts of the past. An absurd pursuit, as we cannot even find these things in the present, which lies – in both sense of the verb – clearly before us. In this search we feel more comfortable with set pieces of fable than with fragments of fact, for fragments can cut and gash and present themselves in isolation from the other, lost fragments of the unknowable whole.

We are drawn to the neatly wrapped sweet that can be grasped by the child’s clutch of our understanding. And we call it history. The fragment can tear and bloody that small, soft clutch.

But a fragment of real history – and thus, by nature, real mystery – is tool as well as weapon: a tool with which we can dig our way to the moment of the present.

For me, so much of the endless distraction, consumption, preoccupation that characterizes our daily life is predicated on forgetting, as often as possible, that the world was not always like this. Films transform the way we picture history front & back, the news cycle revises our eternal present up until the day before yesterday. It becomes impossible to imagine the world without digital media. Without cars whose workings are incomprehensible, driven by computers, the machinery encased in black plastic. Without fruit delivered by airplane. An object in a case doesn’t change any of that. But maybe it can tear & bloody that soft, small clutch.

I got up from where I’d been sitting, on a stone bench next to the fountain, & watched the kids playing in the plaza, and turned towards the cathedral & started to walk down another street I’d never seen before, to try and get lost again.

Idioms

I was sitting up last night trying to read my Raymond Chandler, but I ended up paging through my 4th edition University of Chicago English-Spanish dictionary instead, last updated in 1987, which has a directory of colloquial sayings. I was looking for le eché la vista encima (for reasons I’ve gone on about at length), but as soon as I read this one I got distracted:

Cada muerte de obispo.

Literally, Every death of a bishop; the dictionary lists it next to “Once in a blue moon,” though I like the invocation of apostolic governance better. I imagine gilded coffins & lillies & red velvet presiding over every rare event now.

My other favorites: Dar calabazas, “to give pumpkins,” – to give the brush-off, to avoid, to spurn.

Hacer buenas migas – to make good migas, or “to go well together”.  Migas being (I was described the method at length one day in my 1º de ESO A section) a catch-all rainy day food you make  with stale breadcrumbs dampened & dabbed with salt & paprika, left to soak under a wet towel and then fried up in a pan with olive oil, chorizo, eggs, peppers, garlic, & anything else you have left in the pantry.

Your spouse, your better half, is a media naranja – half an orange. To shoot someone point-blank? A quemarropa – to the point of leaving powder burns from the gun-barrel on clothing.

Almost better than the Spanish colloquialisms, though, were the English equivalents I had never heard before:

To be between the devil and the deep blue sea.
To be all talk & no cider.
To give one the mitten.

And (most enigmatically):

(To say one is) from Missouri.