Year in review

It seemed appropriate that a hazy, flawed photograph, taken absently on one of my last days walking to the bus in Jaén, should head an attempt to survey what got written this year, before my amnesiac return.

The oddest thing about coming back hasn’t been anything I expected. It is very easy to put one foot in front of the other. I am not viscerally shocked. There is too-quick familiarity, there are easy lapses into old habit. I stuff myself with everything I missed – breakfast burritos, Thai food, peanut butter, craft beer, manhattans perfect. I haven’t forgotten how anything tastes. The weather is cloudy & raining in Boston, in Los Angeles, in Michigan – I don’t really remember Andalucían sun, if there was such a thing. Even my sentences slip into an eternal present tense. Odd differences, little things shifted, but if you asked I couldn’t tell you what it all meant. It’s a relief to speak Spanish with somebody who understands me, but I don’t have all that many opportunities, and I don’t seek them out.

What it feels like most of all is that the last year was a kind of waking dream, now interrupted, and I worry that instead of being able to reflect on Spain I’ll barely be able to write it at all. It feels odd, and it feels normal, to be home, and I don’t know which is more strange.

In the meantime, while I remember how to remember, here are things written when writing was as easy as looking out my window and listing the things I saw.

When things were still new & I was about as green as you could get, I wrote breathlessly about the smallest things, my prose riddled with casual errors & opacity: cultural differences, the féria, popular music.

I thought a lot about words, but in an uncertain manner, sweat my way through a Spanish translation of Chandler’s The Long Goodbye,  and wrote about Castro & buying bread, and the colloquial expressions in the Spanish-English dictionary published the year I was born.

I wrote about local festivals in Jaén – the bonfires of San Antón, the sardines of Santa Catalina. I wrote about breakfast, pomegranates, churros, hand gestures. About poppies, old photographs, afro-beat concerts, the word “oodles.”

I walked around with my mother’s 35mm camera & took pictures of Jaén. When I forgot my camera, I wrote pictures anyway. I drew maps of American music. I made lists.

Occasionally, I abandoned pointilism & wrote essays – about Obama & racism in Spain; feeling like a child abroad; an incomplete series about my teaching, two parts; Christmas & the New Year with my family. I wrote about reading the newspaper a lot, & sometimes it had to do with Stateside politics, and when it did I usually found some way to talk about The Wire.

The itemized retrospective done, we’ll move on tomorrow to ammendations & corrections, to thoughts about method & purpose, & to (finally) some honest-to-god new writing.

Small gestures

Photograph cut out of the El País Sunday magazine supplement.

Maybe it’s the big, structural differences in society that are its warp & weft; but how does someone arriving to a culture for the first time describe them without flat generalization and casual error? Not only is it easier to stick to the ants’-eye view (and what have I been doing here if not that?) – it hews closer to replicating the experience of someone who’s just arrived. The things that disorient and impress you are the little changes, the small gestures.

In Jaén, when a person wants you to come over (I’ve mentioned this, but didn’t do a good job of explaining what it looked like), they tell you with the palm down, facing the floor, & wave the back of their hand back & forth (try it at home), & it looks exactly like they’re shooing you away frantically.

The Andalucíans don’t have an entire vocabulary of gestures & hand movements like the Italians do, but one more comes to mind – sticking your first & pinkie finger out and clenching the rest of your fingers into a fist, (the fingers should be on top of the gesture, so that it looks like a bull’s head); this is calling someone a cuckold (giving them horns), and is a really easy way to start a fight.

There are a collection of small sibilant sounds made with your tongue at the front of your teeth that I hear in Andalucían speech quite a bit. One kind, a short tsk, is used as initial punctuation – you signal you’re about to speak,when you’re talking with a group of people, or you use the noise internally, in the pause between a phrase. There is the louder, longer hiss you make to get somebody’s attention across a room or for emphasis (and it is a sound that is unspeakably rude in the States; I used it once accidentally with my mother in Granada and she told me to stop it).

The open eh sound while you’re thinking of something instead the uh of an English speaker. (A lot of getting an accent right is making the correct noises between the words, pausing in the right places instead of importing English pauses & rhythm.) The noncommittal sound eh-ah (spelling gummed up for English phonetics), which you can make in response to just about anything, somewhere between mm-hm and yeah.

You can think you are starting to read Spanish pretty well and then get completely thrown by text & internet writing, which replaces certain sounds with one-letter equivalents – quiero becomes kiero, guapo is wapo, chico is xico. Laughter is spelled jajaja. The animals all make different noises.

And things as well as language: In Spain the clocks can strike thirteen, just as in Orwell’s 1984 (digital clocks & bus timetables are given in 24 hrs instead of 12). Paper is a different size – the height/width ratio of European paper is the square root of two, and if you put it into an American 8½x11 notebook a little piece sticks out & gets bent & creased. The water faucet marked “C” is for caliente, not cold. The stopsigns, impossibly, still say STOP in white capital letters.

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.

Children abroad

i.

At Unfogged a few weeks ago, heebie-geebie writes about passing out in a castle in Poland from jet lag & exhaustion, having just landed there that day for a conference, without sleeping on the plane:

I kind of caught myself as I hit the ground, and woke up, and I was so disoriented and confused. My big emotion was a wave of shame and embarrassment, in this really little-kid way. I felt like I’d thrown up in school, or wet my pants or something. It was a really odd, long ago feeling, that I hadn’t meant to violate some etiquette of a basic bodily function. It wouldn’t have been so intense except I was still half-asleep and disoriented, and couldn’t quite get a handle on what was happening.

Everybody was sort of perplexed, but sympathetic, and I was guided over to a bench by the gift shop to sit by myself for the duration of the tour. Which also felt like elementary school all over again: being led through a maze of a castle that was too complicated for me to understand, and then being parked somewhere for my own good. (“Am I in trouble, Mom? It wasn’t my fault.”)

A few of the 316 responses in the thread, which is where the body of Unfogged posts reside – and before the discussion turned to drinking it hot tubs & the effects of mixing heat & alcohol – returned to foreign experiences, which I found revealing. (Upon later inspection, most of what I was thinking of came from another thread that ended up being about the Peace Corps & alcoholism).

This feeling – of being in elementary school again, of having to be guided around, of not being in control – is something I’d almost forgotten about until I lived abroad. Not being able to speak the language, not being fluent in the culture. You’re taken where people take you, for the most part.

ii.

Here, I’ve been a child. I have needed the simplest things explained to me. I have lacked words for everyday objects, been reduced to pantomime. People do not necessarily ask my opinion about things, because when you’re talking with somebody who doesn’t have a full grasp of the language, it’s easy to forget that they’re a functioning moral agent.

I’ve thought many times, that if somebody didn’t want me to understand something, or wanted to deceive me, it would be pretty easy to do it. (My older students try this habitually – “No, James, you don’t understand. The teacher told us the test was cancelled. You’ll see.” – but you get used to not trusting 16 year-olds when they speak Spanish to you after a little while.)

(This feeling of dislocation & suspicion can really reach its apex if you get drunk in a foreign country with people you don’t know well, which is most people. After a certain point, it’s all you can do to follow the conversation, & for all you know they could be talking about you, or laughing, not at your jokes, but at something else, and you have no way of knowing. This is a queasy kind of 4 a.m. feeling.)

So much of fluency is about reading cues, catching things from context, is about having a conversation partner who’s willing to pick up a little bit of the slack. It’s like dancing; I speak better Spanish with some people than I do others.

Sometimes, particularly at the beginning, I’d have an entire conversation & be unsure the entire time what it was about, until the very end, and then something would click & I’d retrospectively understand the entire thing. And so a lot of apparent fluency is being able to smile & nod while you try to catch up.

I ask more questions now than I did at the beginning, because the number of things I don’t understand has diminished to the point where the number questions I have are few enough to ask.

… reading cues, catching things from context … - this is true even of my students. I recently put on a spelling bee, & it’s amazing how they flounder when you look at them with a notepad, straightfaced, and say, “Coffee.” They’re so used to getting cued along that they get really flustered when you just stand there, waiting. “C . . . – es ‘c,’ ¿no? ¿No? ¿Sí o no? Vale, vale. C . . . o . . . f . . . f . . . e. Café.”

iii.

There is a surrender to fate that accompanies this radical powerlessness, this lack of agency. You don’t have a stake to lose; you can do or risk things you wouldn’t normally do or risk. And I’ve found, at least, that when I let things just happen, it generally works out better than when I try to plan; I don’t know enough to plan well, here. Even still.

And generally you just putter around & follow people, which sometimes leads to situations like when you’re six and you start holding an adult’s hand that looks like your mother from the knees down, and then after a little bit you look up & have that mutual moment of shock – Wait. Why am I here? With this kid/stranger?!

(Maybe one of the good parts of growing up is being on the other end of that, looking at the kid’s face change, and knowing exactly what they’re thinking.)

iv.

On Tuesdays, I stay in Bedmar for the afternoon, because we have a faculty meeting at 4 and, even though I’m not actually required to be there, the last bus leaves before my last class ends & the professors who would normally give me rides are all staying anyway. So I eat lunch with a group of between four and a half dozen teachers who all go, each week, to the Paraiso, a restaurant/bar near the center of town, by the first of the two bus stops & the fountain.

It’s owned by the parents of one of my students in 3º de ESO (thankfully, one of the smart ones). I now have a reputation for cleaning my plate. You order the menú del día - the fixed comida of daily specials, with a first & second course, a basket of bread, wine or beer, and dessert or coffee afterwards. The first plate is invariably cocido – a traditional stew with chickpeas & ham fat & vegetables – or tortilla, or lentils; the second plate always a cut of ternera a la plancha; pollo either en horno or a la plancha; a type of fish; or some other special, served with potatoes panfried in olive oil & seasonal vegetables on the side, like pumpkin stewed in oil, or green peppers.

We eat, take our coffee out at the bar (nobody really eats dessert with lunch in Andalucía), pay & come back in time for the meeting.

I no longer feel like such a child;  I can speak, more & more. And still -

Last week, I started walking with the castellano & history teachers, who live in the pueblo – we’d been talking, it seemed natural to walk out with them, and they were making jokes about chicken hamburgers. Five minutes went by, I realized we weren’t going towards the center. “You’re not going to the Paraiso?” I said.

They looked at me. “No, we’re having lunch at home.”

“Oh,” I said. I felt foolish. How was I going to explain this? I’d wandered off uphill to take in the view?

Emilio, castellano teacher, looked at my face & started laughing. “Here, come on,” he said. “You can eat with us.”

Bonfires & san antón

Yesterday was the festival of San Antón [Saint Anthony the Great], the 3rd C. Egyptian saint protector of animals, & founder of monasticism. In Jaén the feast day coincides with the end of the olive harvest, and in dozens of plazas in every barrio of the city, great mounds of olive branches are burned in bonfires, the green leaves firing brightly before being transformed into a rain of weightless ash.

I was in the plaza de la Mercéd, a small bare stone plaza in the old town, in front of a 17th C. palace & an unadorned plain stone church with three stained glass windows over the facade, a statue of the Virgen in the niche above the entrance, an iron cross against the front. The plaza was cut through by one small street, and another looped around the church and went down a shallow stairway, & there were orange trees in front of the palace. Everyone stood in crowds by the churchfront, or in front of the palace, or across the narrow street by the even smaller square where there was the busier of the two bars & apartments, and ancient stonefronted fountain with potable water for families & horses.

In the center: the bonfire, radiating heat, and a mound of big six or seven footlong olive branches, leaves on, fed in constantly by a couple of men wearing field clothes & using a firehardened wooden stick as a poker & flaring as the leaves caught. There was a temporary zinc-topped bar set up in front of the church & another in front of a small apartment, selling plastic cups of beer & tinto con limón & skewers of chicken and bread & chorizo & great bags of popcorn, which everyone had in hand; the bags came free with the drinks; you bought small paper tickets from the moneybox and then presented them to the two men pouring the cañas or the tintos.

Children would rush up from time to time, daring the heat, to throw their own smaller branches in. The smoke columned up, with the particular fragrant odor of burning olive wood, & ash peppered hair & jackets & floated inthe drinks, almost a baptism of ash, and when the fire began to die children began to run up from the tiny sidestreets with flammable objects – cardboard, staves of wood, a red leather armchair, a carseat – to feed it still, and near the end of the fire in la Mercéd a dozen or so older men & women, grandparents, began to sing & made arches with their hands, pairs of them, the last pair rushing under the arch to be the front of the tunnel of dancers, the whole unit moving around the dying fire & singing, what must have been a traditional dance, a rural dance, something done during the harvest, but now only the older folks were dancing, & one father & his little daughter, and fewer people knew the song.

On the Avenida de Barcelona, near the nightclubs & the newer part of town, the bonfire was in a bit vacant dirt lot with a chainlink fence around it, next to apartment buildings and across the street from a park, one big fire in the center, low when I got there, just embers, and a dozen small conflagrations of hot coals scattered around, and crowds, not just young people but everyone, some with plastic folding tables, engaging in the botellón.

At one small firepit, back in the corner, boys of 10 or 12 lined up to jump over the flames. I was drinking my vodka tonic out of a cardboard Don Simon container, because my plastic cup had broken, and so was reliving the youth of the Spaniards I was with, teachers in Jaén at the schools of American friends of mine. They’d done this, I was told, in secondary school & the university because cups were too expensive.

Soon four or five of us were lining up with the children, we twice their size, to jump the bonfire. I myself made it over the flames unscathed.

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.

Desayuno

From California-based photographer Jon Huck's series of portraits of people with their breakfasts.

i.

You typically don’t eat much of a breakfast in Andalucía. My kids tell me in class that they eat milk-and-biscuits, “biscuits” here meaning galletas, which straddle the cookie-cracker divide. They are marketed as digestive aids, made with whole wheats or grains, vegetable or sunflower oil, and sugar, though they are sometimes unsugared, and there are so many different varieties sold that I have actually stood before the supermarket section in bewilderment, trying to figure out what I’m looking at.

The whole milk is generally heated in a saucepan on the stove, with cacao powder or soluble coffee stirred in afterwards: early morning food, the blue gas flame hissing in darkness, dull grey light outside.

You see more croissants in Boston than you do Andalucía.

ii.

A little later in the day – ten or eleven a.m., say – you have tostada- a short barra de pan sliced in half & toasted – usually served con tomate y aceite in Jaén – that is, with olive oil, salt, and tomatillo spooned out of a communal ceramic bowl and spread on the hot half of bread over the oil, which you drizzle on out of a spout.

You drink a café con leche in the morning, espresso & steamed milk, which varies depending on locale from a café au lait to something approaching a very wet cappuccino, and I’ve seen it with and without foam.

This is generally what I do at school, just before recreo, the half-hour break at 11:15 – I order my tostada & café at the little school bar, & talk about the weather, & chat with the teachers, my second breakfast.

There is, of course, no lunch served in an Andalucían school. You don’t eat until you get home at 2 or 3, la comida.

One more. This is something you would never see a Spaniard eating before 3 p.m.

iii.

If you don’t have tostada, or milk & biscuits, or a stomach filled running with espresso & steamed milk, you might go to the Plaza del Pósito & lean up against the zinc-topped bar of the café that opens onto the cobbles & the wicker chairs & the tables & the gas lamps, and you could order a croissant & a fresh-squeezed orange juice, even though it’d be a little touristy, & the croissant would be split in half with a pat of butter inside & toasted & served with marmalade, and honestly there is nothing I like better than to read the paper & eat a Saturday breakfast in a café in the bright clean morning light & listen to the city start to wake up, even though I do it very rarely.

You could, as I did on my first day of school, eat churros, those fried loops of dough, served with chocolate for dipping (though I didn’t know to order it), at the diner at the bus station while birds cluster around the newer church bell across the way.

And if you’re in Granada, sleeping on a seteé in the Albaycín courtesy of a Parisian friend of a friend of a friend who lived for 6 years in Mexico – then in the morning, rain outside pooling in the white courtyards, the red flowers in the windows, you might have crêpes with chocolate & strawberry jam, a plate of kiwis, a loaf of nutty bread, tea.

But Granada’s a different sort of place.

iv.

I like Huck’s series, if you can’t already tell – it’s aesthetically well-presented, & has a nice hooky concept, and I like the pinched, ascetic faces of those with a single cup of coffee below them, the number of different ways something so fundamental gets consumed.

One thing I notice now, though, after living in Spain, is how heterogeneity is itself a kind of American cultural marker. The photographs aren’t anthropology; they’re drawn from what seem to be Hurt’s friends & acquaintances. It all reads very California – and not just any California, but a California made up of a particular class position & aesthetic. All of these people look interesting, atypical, their personalities defined by the care & beauty of their consumption.

What would happen if you took these pictures in Bédmar? Jaén? (Granada doesn’t count – cosmopolitan cities have more in common with each other than they do with the countryside. New York hipsters would get on better with the grenadinos than with our equivalent of a campesino – Appalachian mechanic? itinerant strawberry picker?).

Spain is, as I’ve already noted, a pretty homogeneous place. You define yourself as a Spaniard by the things you take part in communally, that you do just like everyone else. A common approving adjective I hear is típico (de España). “Typical Spanish,” my dueña generally announces, to translate for me, even though I’ve understood. You would say of a good tapas bar, this is a sitio típico. Everyone eats what everyone else eats, because this is what it means to be Spanish, to be typical, & to be typical is what you aspire to, not what you define yourself against.

Those photographs – Jaén, Bédmar: row upon row upon row of small ceramic mugs, hot milk, a few galletas piled up, children’s faces above. Row upon row of old men’s faces, creased, wearing a collared shirt & a buttoned cardigan over immense bellies, dark pants, hair combed always straight back from the forehead, tostada con aceite y tomate below, a few with a shot of anís liquor & a glass of water in front of them & nothing else. Miles of café, steamed milk, sugar stirred in.

About a week ago, in my Wednesday 1º de ESO Íngles B. Picture this: A 12-year-old girl says to me, “Eggs?! You eat eggs for breakfast?!” – and dissolves into incredulous laughter.

Obama, or “el presidente negro” [El País]

Headline from EL PAÍS, 5 days after the election.

I.

I typed this on 5 NOVEMBER, 7:35 p.m. Woke up this morning later than I would have normally, like on Christmas when I was younger, when I’d lie half awake and feel the weight of the stocking at the foot of the bed & go back to sleep on purpose, to prolong that feeling of suspension. Had the heel of a barra de pan with nutella & a banana & watched the news with the sound off in the predawn darkness. It was an hour after midnight in the U.S. The first thing I saw on Canal Uno was a blue map of the States, a tally in the corner, a whopping number, a landslide electoral tally. I changed channels & saw Obama speaking, his lips moving, a Spanish announcer dubbing in the words. Then I turned the television off & put on my coat & took an orange from the bowl in the kitchen & walked to the bus station, to go to school.

I remember very clearly walking to school the morning after the election, while the sun rose behind the buildings & the Sierra Máginas & the garbage men gathered in ranks on the corner of the Gran Eje & Avenida de Barcelona, & thinking to myself how inevitable & relieved I felt, how unambiguously proud. By then it was probably an hour after midnight on the East Coast, midnight in Chicago.

And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces, to those who are huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of the world . . .

By the time I got to school, many of the teachers had heard. I got pats on the back & thumbs up in the teachers’ lounge. The woman working in the caféteria said my morning coffee was on the house. Kids ran through the halls yelling, “O-ba-ma!” One man came up, shook my hand, said very carefully in English, “Congratulations.” One or two expressed blunt surprise that he had made it alive. I listened to the acceptance speech streaming over the internet & actually cried at one point – kind of welled up. The sheer, profound relief that I could possess a basic expectation of competent governance, intelligent decision-making, eloquent speeches – that whatever else happened, things wouldn’t run aground, there wouldn’t be rampant criminality, abuse, circumvention, arrogant power. This relief, more than anything else, had me shaking, my thousands of miles away.

ii.

It goes without saying that remembering this kind of emotion, even less than three weeks later, feels distant. You want to be analytic about it. But there it is: factually. And it’s a fact, too, that Spain, like Europe generally, rejoiced, congratulated, or at the least took for granted Obama’s inevitable victory over an opponent whose name few could remember or cared about. Long after I was nervously rewatching debates & a thousand various opinions in prose my teachers were pretty well convinced that he’d win the election.

All well & good. But at the same time, & amidst all of this jubilation, it’s hard sometimes to reconcile the happiness here with Spanish racial attitudes, which are complicated in that they live completely outside the framework we’re accustomed to operating in back in the States.

Spanish lacks synonyms – negro/a, (black), stands in for a race, and also exists, as in that great body of 19th c British literature, in a thousand colloquial expressions as catchall term for bad, unlucky, suspicious. A joke, told to me before the election: Sí gana Obama, será un día negro en America; sí gana McCain, será un día negro para el mundo.

Literally, “If Obama wins, it’ll be a black day for America; if McCain wins, it’s a black day for the world.”

The word alone is a little weird to say out loud for an American English speaker. What’s worse is the way that it’s routinely conflated with bad, unpleasant, suspicious,  - a kind of rhetoric racism that simply isn’t recognized in Spain. Where, for instance, any Asian person is chino/a - no differentiation - as in the old woman who visited the school café the other day & was introduced to me and said, “Paraces un poco chino, ¿no? En los ojos.” Clearer: Your eyes make you look kinda chino.

Or an old Catholic teacher at my school: The center of town is like Chinatown! There’s more chinos than españoles – I don’t know why they all had to come out all the way here.

Cheap or shoddy goods are chino. Bad weather, mala suerte, misfortune – negro, negro, negro. There is surely something about the way the headline returns el presidente negro directly to Africa that speaks to this conflation – but then again, isn’t it pretty straight news? After all, his victory was a big deal in Kenya too. 

iii.

All of this is complicated further by pure nativism; Spain’s relationship to northern Africa is roughly the same as the States’ to Mexico – frontiers, borders that are the focus of hysteria over an impermeable national identity, worries over language & culture, thinly disguised racial terror. To the extent that Spain as a nation has a cultural identity, it is in part Spanish, & in part a vision, like many European nations, of an Occidental culture synonymous with civilization, which I always can’t help but thinking of the arrival of Conrad’s narrator to the “city that always makes me think of a whited sepulchre.”

My compañero de piso & his friends from the pueblo watch, for example, news reports about Africa with a kind of distant, undifferentiated fascination. “Things,” I might say in Spanish, “are pretty bad in the Congo right now. I read an article in the Times about it. Especially for women, there’s an epidemic of rapes that’s only beginning to be addressed.” And my roommate will respond, yeah, things are bad in Africa, you’re right.

In local city schools here in Jaén, North African students are mostly ignored, left in the back of the classroom, & actively discouraged from participating, doubly so if they’re not yet fully integrated into Spanish. They are looked at as problem kids from the moment they enter – this according to auxiliares who work in those schools.

I can’t speak for my kids, because out of the approx. 70 children I teach directly I can count on the fingers of one hand those who were born outside of Bédmar or Garcíez, the smaller pueblo whose kids are bussed here (the high school is less than a decade old), or perhaps the provincial capital. I have one kid not born in Spain – a 13 yr. old from Lithuania.

Andalucía is homogeneous; your identity as a Spaniard is one that’s apparent – an ocular proof. Language, too. And if you’re Spaniard – people remark sometimes, approvingly, that I look moreno, that my accent is castillano – you’re fine.

It seems to me that Obama, as in the States, as with many exceptional racial figures, is perceived by the world in a different light than, say, the North African street vendors who spread their wares in blankets on the Plaza de la Constitución without permits & have to gather them up or be rousted when the police come. There’s a double consciousness at work here, too. But I don’t know. I’m not sure I have the vocabulary or the insight to say.

iv.

None of these declarative statements sit well with me; I want to equivocate. The teacher who drives me to school every morning was talking to me about an auxiliar from Britain at her last school, a black woman who’d left late in the semester because she’d been terribly homesick. She was great, she told me, with the kids. A good teacher. But so homesick. Her family came to visit twice in two months. She cried all the time. But she was very good while she was here. She had a beautiful singing voice – of course, claro. La voz negra, ¿sabes? Como todos.

To which, well – what do you say to that? Like the other things you’re given, you nod silently, you make a little sound in the back of your throat, you take it, another piece of information, you swallow it, & you continue living in the culture, you eat what everyone eats, you try to hold your fork the same way, you imitate the pronunciation & memorize folk sayings & after you pour the olive oil on the tostada in the morning & spread the tomato you take the knife & break the golden top of the bread to let the oil soak in so that it doesn’t spill over your hands, like everyone else.

Judgment you reserve for a little later. This, at any rate, is what I’ve seen, to the extent that I’m able to see.

 

_

Other longer stuff:

Teaching - Féria - Hometown tourism – Cultural differences

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.