A Month in Spain
February, 2005
Letters Þrst sent as e-mail dispatches to a group of friends, for whose patience and interest I am truly grateful.
The red-eye out of San Francisco was bumpy and uncomfortable; I think American Airlines is reneging on their well-publicized more humane seat conÞguration, and God knows the food isn’t even as good as it once was, let alone really what you might call basically good. But we landed safe and sound at Miami only half an hour late, and found our Thrifty Rental car without having to resort to anything as demeaning as helpful public information. Which seems as yet unconsidered in Chad County.
But from there things looked up. A friend had suggested spending part of a twelvehour layover having brunch at the Delano Motel, in Miami Beach; the hotel itself has been rescued by Philippe Starck (famous for his weird retro chair designs) from shabby gentility and transformed into a witty postmodern wannabe Thirties Deco palace, and the kitchen is said to be looked over by Claude Troisgros, whose brother Michel staged a while Chez Panisse and now runs the family temple in Roanne.
We sat under the ceiling looking out toward the pool and, beyond that if we could only have seen it through the wandering semi-nude readers of the New York Times, the cerulean green Atlantic; and we took our ease and a couple of Mimosas, and consulted our menus and the oddly clad fellow diners, and had an enjoyable couple of hours.
I usually dress up for travel; it’s one of my few concessions to fashion. I looked like a retired college instructor from a private liberal-arts college, which is in fact one of my roles: Harris tweed sport jacket, Italian silk tie, conservative blue button-down shirt, black trousers and shoes. I dressed so mostly because I would be unable to change before checking in at my Madrid hotel, where I wanted to look substantial, since I’d be running up a substantial debt. But it was not the prevailing dress in Miami Beach.
Didn’t matter. The main thing about this town, at present, is that you can be anyone and look like anything and Þt quite into the scene. We parked on a side street and walked the Lincoln Avenue Mall, which runs from the imaginatively named A 1 A, Florida’s beachfront highway on which all the posh hotels are sited, west toward the sound separating Miami Beach from the city of Miami. I can’t tell you anything about Miami; I’ve only driven through it. (Well, I can tell you one thing: it’s perfectly flat.) But I do have a few things to say about Miami Beach, or more speciÞcally the Lincoln Avenue Mall.
The Þrst thing that strikes you is that you’ve walked into a time warp. I doubt a building has gone up along this mall since the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. The best buildings are streamline moderne; the worst aspire to it. Where there used apparently to be a street — Lincoln Avenue, in fact; in its day an Auto Row, to judge by the remaining Cadillac Building — there is now a pedestrian mall, unfortunately interrupted at the end of each block by a stoplight permitting two lanes of trafÞc in each direction.
Along the mall is a curious assortment of chain boutiques, souvenir shops, those odd emporia of computers and cell phones and CD machines that seem to spring up in tourist centers, second-hand clothing shops, gelateria, restaurants serving pizzas and the like, a white gospel church, and one decent bookshop, and the home of the New World Symphony, directed by Michael Tilson Thomas.
The mall is furnished with fountains, cafe seating, a number of vendors of juices freshly prepared from fruits clearly brought in from sustainable local airports, and tall palms, one thicket of which was peppered with noisy green parrots. I wouldn’t eat under those trees, and fortunately wasn’t asked to.
We killed a bit of time, bought a Spanish-language phrasebook, and ambled over to the Delano for our Mimosa and a leisurely consultation of the menu. For forty-eight dollars each it proposed, beyond that drink, as much as we wanted from a rather elaborate buffet: cereals and pastrys, omelets and sausages, braised duck, or steamed salmon, or roast veal; waffles and pancakes and the like, and a long salad and hors d’oeuvre station. I had a few oysters on the half shell, wanting to go light since the previous day I’d been laid low by a pre-flight flu; and a nice salad of flageolets, and another of eggplant and zucchini and peppers; Lindsey had the same minus the oysters but with seaweed. I followed with duck conÞt, braised with a Chinese-influenced selection of vegetables, with a slice of roast veal just to see what it was like, and Lindsey had truffled eggs Benedict.
I’d been entertaining myself watching people. A short young man in whites walked in with a much taller blonde in a skin-tight red dress; the top of his head came about to her Adam’s-apple. Another elegant young lady applied mascara to herself a table or two away. A number of older diners ignored their spouses by sharing with them the Sunday Times, but at our next table six young beauties giggled over their iPods and cell phones. An intense young man in a bright red tee shirt seemed to have an eye on every detail, and when he noticed me observing him he was right at our table: May I be of some help to you, sir?
I explained that we were by way of being in the restaurant business from time to time, and I always enjoyed watching a good manager. He beamed at that: perhaps he’d been concerned I was sent in disguise, as Zeus or Wotan used to be on occasion, to be sure things were running the way they were meant to. We chatted for a while, and he talked freely about the joys and perplexities of attempting a Þne dining operation in a locale to humid to bake bread, to laid back to provide attentive or even particularly competent help, and too rich to house a clientele that didn’t already know everything about how such places should run other than the fact that they really knew rather little, and that that came from unreliable sources in the media.
Well: the food wasn’t bad. It wasn’t up to Troisgros in Roanne, but it was better than I’d expected. We had dessert — a rice pudding for me, a humid Key Lime Tart for Lindsey — and went back out onto the time warp on the mall, convinced more than ever that a part of the upper East Side of Manhattan was passing itself off as the Santa Monica of the 1950s.
I write this in a nice little hotel room on the Calle Clavel, just off the Grand Via, where one guide-book warns us street robbery is more prevalent than elsewhere in Madrid. It’s been quite a Þrst day in this promising European capital, until now innocent of visits from Lindsey and me. Our friends Hans and Anneke flew in from Amsterdam to spend the week with us, and we celebrated by going out to dinner at two o’clock, at a neighborhood restaurant du quartier, as the Parisians used to say, which Thérèse discovered a trip or two ago, and which has since appeared in Frommer’s.
La Fuencisla is a small yellow room, square, with about eight or nine tables, opening off behind a bar on Calle San Mateo, near the Tribunal Metro Station — an easy walk, even in a light rain, from our hotel. I stepped in authoritatively and eyed the room: only two or three tables busy. The waiter asked how many we were and promised we’d be seated immediately. Then he asked my name.
I thought at Þrst this was uncommonly sociable of him, and was on the point of asking his in return when I realized he assumed we’d reserved. We hadn’t; it had never occurred to me. It’s Monday; it’s past two; just give us a table. But there seemed to be some consternation, and he consulted with an enigmatic presence who until then had been silently reading a newspaper at one of the tables.
This fellow suggested that we be admitted even without a reservation, and nodded to a service table until then stacked with cutlery and folded napkins. We took our seats and looked at the menus.
The waiter had heard me speak English to Hans and Anneke (and Lindsey, of course), and proudly pointed to the English translations in the menu he handed me. But it seemed to correspond inexactly with what the others were looking at, which suggested Þxed-price daily specials. But today is Monday, and what the hell is cocido? It became clear that none of us spoke any Spanish at all, that we hadn’t done our homework, and that no one here was about to speak Spanish to us. (The same had happened earlier at the airport, except at the tourist information desk and the Thrifty ofÞce).
Much mime and bad guessing and second-guessing began to restrict the possibilities until Lindsey asked, with some point, if we hadn’t bought a phrasebook for precisely that sort of information. And in fact the Harper Collins Language Survival Guide, in spite of its British bias and a few typos, is worth having, and particularly for its food pages. There it was: “Cocido: stew made with various meats, vegetables, and chickpeas.” We all four had it, of course, preceded by a bowl of perfect chicken-noodle broth and accompanied by a dry dry Rioja 2000, and followed by the inevitable flans and an exceptional espresso featuring Segafreddo coffee. Cost per couple, Þfty-Þve Euros.
After a nap we took a taxi through the rainy trafÞc-jam hour to the Queen SoÞa Museum, a truly great regional museum of twentieth-century painting and sculpture, particularly strong of course with Spanish names: Saura, Tapies, Picasso, Gris, Gonzales, Miro, Dali. This is where Picasso’s Guernica has found its apparently Þnal resting place, and the sight of it brought tears to my eyes — it’s hard to look at this just now with an American passport in your hip pocket; any number of residences in Iraq must have looked like this in the last couple of years. And the bitterness of this realization was enhanced by the series of documentary photographs taken by Robert Capa during the Spanish Civil War, when “liberals” were Þghting and dying in a futile attempt to preserve their country from the arrogance of an authoritarian, nationalist, bible-thumping and backward-looking “leader” who played on his country’s fear of Modernism, internationalism, liberalism, and social justice for all.
But I digress, and it’s time to fold six feet of fatigue into a bathtub designed for one of Goya’s dwarfs. We’ll see how that works out.
Hostal San Lorenzo, Madrid, Feb. 8—
It’s come to this: we’re standing at a glitz counter on the fourth floor of the Corte Ingles, speaking English among ourselves and French to a Spanish woman about buying tickets to a Dutch orchestra concert tonight here in Madrid.
This because none of us, neither Hans nor Anneke nor Lindsey nor I, can manage in Spanish. The language is fairly accessible via print, when the print’s large enough and close enough to make out. But when it is spoken it is exceedingly difÞcult to deal with. For one thing, it doesn’t sound like it looks. What we call Saragossa, and the Spaniards spell “Zaragoza,” sounds something like “tharrahath,” the “h” a heavy breath. And so it goes.
Well, the Concertgebouworkest concert was sold out weeks ago, so we’ll do something else. There’s no shortage. We slept like innocents, unholy ones, and woke up at 8:30 refreshed, and spent two hours planning our day, Þnally settling on a walk, not a long one, to the Prado. The museum clearly needs a week. I could cheerfully spend an hour examining Jan Breughel’s Þve little paintings dedicated to the senses, and there are many more signiÞcant things than that. The Van Dyck portraits are amazing. The Rembrandts. The Rubenses, many of which lack the fat nude females for which he’s best known, and for which I scarcely forgive him.
Eyes grow glassy in a place like this, but you sure can learn a lot about painting. For one thing, you can watch it being done; there were four or Þve people working away at their easels, copying details or entire canvases; some nearing the end of their futile occupation, others just beginning their canvases, sketching out the broad lines of the composition in grisaille (more often in brown or sepia washes) to be covered later with their dutiful and attentive but somehow less masterly homage.
One copy was particularly useful, for it had been made centuries ago, of Rubens’s Adoration of the Magi, before he enlarged and changed the original painting. More lessons here: how he became more dramatic and more insightful by slightly adjusting the postures and gestures; how he learned to direct the viewer’s eye along the lines of his composition. And how the copyist was unable to capture the master’s dramatic lighting, and how he utterly gave up trying to paint the kneeling King’s ornately embroidered coat, and so would I have, had I even got anywhere near that far.
After literally rinsing out my eyes I found the paintings had trained them — or perhaps it was the exercise of looking Þrst at the grand compositions, then the tiny print on the labels, when we wanted to Þgure out what the hell exactly was going on in these mute but richly Þlled reports from several centuries ago. How people dressed, how they looked, what they ate, how they danced, how they gardened, how they furnished their homes, whether they were nobles or clerics or peasants — all that is more and more fascinating. And above all how they differ from us, principally technologically; and how they are the same, above all emotionally. I couldn’t help thinking of Capa’s photos of the Spanish Civil War when I looked at Rubens’s panoramas of lustful Greek centaurs and the like. Joy and misery, and the few serene moments that lend meaning to the violence they convey, hardly ever change.
There’s a particularly ugly painting hidden away in a small room where the elevators discharge, an enormous painting of Salome’s dinner party, at the moment she shows her father the grisly head of St. John the Baptist. Painted in the early 17th century, it’s as disgusting a portrayal of anti-Semitism as I’ve seen: every face but the Baptist’s is shows as ugly or deformed or supercilious or depraved. You could imagine it having been painted in Germany in the 1930s.
Lunch in the museum cafe, not bad; then a walk to the Corte Ingles for that language lesson in Babel. And, Þnally, a telephone chip, so I now have a working phone, may it serve me well, and home to rest for an hour. And then for the evening business: we walked down to the Puerta del Sol, a beautiful plaza whose ensemble of buildings, elegantly matched, form the oval facade to a large busy intersection; and then down through the Plaza Mayor to the Teatro Albeniz, imagine tildes and accents, to buy tickets to tonight’s show. And then retrace the steps to our second typical restaurant du quartier, this one recommended by, of all people, Rick Steves.
The Casa Labra Taberna (12, calle Tetuan, behind the Corte Ingles and down the street from Juan Gris’s birthplace) is where in 1879 the Spanish Socialist Party was founded, and it looks like a worker’s hangout, and I think it is. Busy bar on the street, restaurant on the side, casual sit-down tapas joint behind the bar in what looks like a onetime checkroom, with high railroadcar hatracks running all round the room. Here we had delicious salt-cod tapas, and tuna on a toothpick, and mixed salads, and Þnally Fino. When I asked for a Fino the previous night the waiter informed me that in Spain the word was spelled with a “V,” v-i-n-o, vino. No, Fino, I said, vino de Xeres, Sherry wine, not vino. No, he insisted, is vino with “V”, and brought me a red wine.
But here in the worker’s bar, only a few hundred meters further south but far enough, there is both vino and Fino, and I had the Fino, and then just to make sure a Manzanilla, and they were the right stuff.
I wanted it because after all we were going to a flamenco-type show. Carmen, Carmela, it was called, a drama-in-dance conceived and choreographed by Antonio Canales, who played Don Jose, with two singers, a guitarist and a percussionist behind the scenes, and a prerecorded tape of many guitars, a flute, and a chorus to present the key items of Bizet’s score, and two really good singers; and another male dancer, Diego Llori, as Escamillo; and Lola Greco, apparently the daughter of Jose Greco, in the title role.
Canales changed the story a bit, to get rid of Micaela who I never like anyway, and the third act, which I always sleep through; and to end with a brutal and abrupt surprise. Much of the evening struck me as contrived and jimmied together. But much was valuable: Bizet’s score revealed again its nervous intensity; Merimee’s plot led Love to its inevitably cruel end with clarity and grace; the singers — Herminia Borja and Jose Valencia — stepped forward to participate in the action honestly, intensively, sympathetically. I was reminded of all sorts of things: my despair when I was jilted by a girlfriend, Þfty years ago; the desperate lovers kissing on benches in the Atocha railroad station down the street, the illfated young husbands and wives in Capa’s Civil War photos, Romeo and Juliet and all the rest.
And then home, after a nightcap, and to get the mail, and so to bed.
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Hostal San Lorenzo, Madrid—
What is it with Boccherini? We listened to six of his string trios tonight — there didn’t seem anything else to do so early as 7:30 in the evening — and while the music was clear and melodious and by turns spirited and affecting, Þfteen minutes later we agreed, sipping our tea and mocha and frappuccino at a nearby Starbuck’s, that it was pretty lightweight stuff. And in fact I couldn’t recall a single theme, not even the ones that he’d returned to over and over again in a couple of rondo-Þnales.
They were played beautifully, by three young Russians who have taken jobs in one corner or another of the present Spain. The violinist, Yulia Iglinova, is in the Royal Philharmonic of Galicia; the violist, Yulia Malkova, is a soloist in the Madrid Symphony; Anton Gakkel was in the Tenerife Symphony Orchestra for three seasons, and is now, with Iglinova, in the national radio orchestra.
It was a free concert, and it was packed. In fact we couldn’t get seats in the 300-seat hall; we sat in an overflow 114-seat hall and watched a bigger-than-life-size instant television relay, with impeccable sound, seated in posh, soft, capacious armchairs.
It was the Þrst of Þve concerts surveying some, by no means all, of the string chamber music of Luigi Boccherini, who died at 62 exactly two hundred years ago, after helping Haydn and Mozart deÞne the idea of the string quartet and quintet. Though he was born in Lucca, much of Boccherini’s career unfolded here in Spain; he died here in Madrid, and was only returned to Lucca in 1927, though I’m sure it hardly mattered to him.
The series is beautifully produced by the Fundacion Juan March, otherwise apparently mostly a home to contemporary currents of the arts — there was a handsome video installation scattered across a number of monitors in one of the lobbies, and a series of works on paper from Picasso forward upstairs. There is a Þne forty-page program, with an intelligent general introduction to Boccherini and terser but still informative comments on each of the Þve programs.
In his introduction Ramon Barce discusses the vicissitudes that naturally accompanied Boccherini’s dependency on the Spanish court for his income. He worked at Þrst for the younger brother of Carlos III, don Luis de Borbon, who loved music and painting and the fair sex and hunting and was therefore too immoral to take place, even by fatherhood, among the Holy Catholic Monarchs of Spain. And by methods too Baroque to go into in an e-mail he was aced out of any possibility of ascending to the throne and even exiled from court.
Now according to Barce the music of Boccherini reflects some of this turmoil. He says:
“Boccherini’s music... takes its place easily within the style and the ethos of the Rococo, where it joins the work of Haydn, Mozart, and the Mannheim School, with an Italian taste for openness, simplicity, delicacy and luminosity. You could think of his music as “celestial,” compared with the more complex and severe music of Haydn. ... A light sentimentality is quite present in his slow movements and at times in passages that are deliberately descriptive or evocative, with allusions to the hunt, or the Infanta’s aviary, or the pastoral and bucolic world, material common within the late Rococo.”
Bingo: the Rococo. Earlier Lindsey was speculating about her lack of enthusiasm for Goya, as he is represented in the Prado. We saw there the famous two Majas, the nude one and the clothed, each of whom wears her head slightly awry; and the series of court portraits — Carlos IV looks like a straw man; Maria Teresa has no room for a brain behind her slightly vacuous expression; even the innumerable dogs and horses seem to lack character.
He could paint accurately and expressively; the wonderful CruciÞxion proves that. And even though the more celebrated late political satires are not to be seen in the Prado — no surprise; this is essentially a Royalist collection — Goya’s sympathy for the proletariat is obvious in the Summer and Winter canvases of his cycle on the four seasons.
But we agreed, Lindsey and I, that most of the Goyas here are clearly Rococo: light, quick, entertaining, decorative, and little more. Velasquez managed to please his royal patrons without an airbrush; Goya didn’t seem to mind. He stands a little too close for my taste to Watteau and Fragonard on the majestic march of painting from Cranach and Giotto to Guston and beyond.
We spent the morning in the Prado, mostly looking at Goya and Bosch and Breughel. Clearly one must book a Madrid hotel for a week to study the Prado. I am far from a connoisseur or even an student of painting, and I can easily walk through a museum in Þfteen minutes, especially if it’s getting close to dinnertime. But I am an enthusiast of painting, and the painting here is meticulously, passionately, intriguingly seductive. You want to spend every minute looking at these paintings, and then every minute thinking about them, and then every minute talking or writing about them. Everything in the world is here, every aspect of human desire and hope and history, individual or social, violent or peaceful.
The Þrst thing that strikes you is that almost none of these paintings looks like the famous and ubiquitous reproductions. This is partly a matter of size and space and lighting, of course; but color and texture enter into this discussion, and it all adds up to substance, imagine that in italics, beyond or behind appearance. We normally think of looking at or seeing paintings, with our eyes, as we see them in photographs or prints or projected transparencies or, these days, on the Internet. Here in the Prado you do that of course, but these paintings, the best of them, which is to say a good half or more of them, get under your skin, Þll your lungs, take over your mind.
In a few hours we’d had enough, the four of us, and we walked out the museum into a beautiful day, chilly but beautifully sunny, time for a walk in the park. We headed up for the Buen Retiro — what a marvelous name for a park! — and ambled the packed-clay paths among the planes and pines. It’s winter; parks aren’t at their best, perhaps. But there’s cool clean air, the traceries of the bare limbs (trees, of course, not majas), and the cunning architecture of the park, which spreads formal geometry across unpredictably varied topology.
Suddenly we came upon the huge crystal palace, no longer a Victorian greenhouse like the one in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park but a space for exhibitions of contemporary art. Here we found a number of works by a Mexican sculptor named Gabriel Orozco, who closely observed visitors who, like Hans, took up a cue to drive a billiard-ball into the red target ball that swung like a Foucault pendulum from an invisible line attached to the roof far overhead, or a paddle to play ping-pong with Anneke on a cross-shaped table for four with a lily-planted water hazard at the intersection.
Outside there was a larger pond, and then quite a good-sized one, with rowboats; but we were hungry, and walked back into the city to Las Truchas, which had been recommended for its Þsh. Here we had the local garlic soup, thickened with bread and paprika and a poached egg, bracing and Þlling; and then a platter of whiting and anchovies and squid and daurade, lightly battered and fried, perfect with a pitcher or two of local light-bodied but flavorful white wine, and completed with a huge baked apple.
And then a rest, and the Boccherini. I’d have liked to go on after that to a flamenco show, but was outvoted; we’ll get to that tomorrow. We’ll get to the Titians and Tintorettos later, too; if not tomorrow, then next month, at the end of this tour. You can’t do everything, is perhaps what Goya and Boccherini were lamenting; not in this imperfect world. You can try, but Mister Bosch showed us pretty vividly today, in his Garden of Delights, what that can lead to.
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Hostal San Lorenzo, Madrid—
I’m sure there are many Madrids, and we’ve only given them three days, which has brought us two museums, Þve or six restaurants, a hotel, and two concerts, most of which you’ve heard about. Madrid is a huge and sprawling city, probably as big, geographically, as Los Angeles: but except for a late-night taxi and one tour-bus ride today, taken mainly to sit down for an hour or so, we’ve walked everywhere.
So we can only talk about a small part of town, centering on the famous Plaza Puerta del Sol, more or less the geographical center of the old city, halfway between the Royal Palace to the west and the Prado Museum to the east. Madrid has its Paris-type boulevards, but they do not radiate outward from nerve points. Four lead like the spokes of a flattened X out of the Puerta del Sol, but none lead north and south. The streets are otherwise narrow and rather helter-skelter, for the city lies aslant, with no predictability to the grades.
Nor are there any concentric circles remembering ancient city walls, for Madrid isn’t particularly ancient. The Royal Palace lies at the western foot of its gentle slope, its champs-de-mars leading down to the river Manzanares, and the position would not be easily defended: this was clearly the palace of a royal family that feared very little attack. Spain seems to me in many ways similar to the United States, and this is one of the ways: its history seems one of consolidation in relative isolation, from Roman times to the discovery of the New World; and then one of administering a far-flung empire again from this secure relatively isolated position on its own continent.
The empire was deÞnitively lost only a couple of centuries ago, and the aftermath is still unfolding — witness yesterday’s car-bomb reminder, apparently aimed by a faction of Basque separatists at the King’s participation in an important art fair with an international guest list. Spain is a constitutional monarchy with a relatively weak center administering to a number of semi-autonomous regions, many of them the relics of former independencies with distinctive national cultures of their own: Barcelona-dominated Catalunya, speaking its own language; distant Galicia; to the south Andalucia whose own sub-regions respond, no doubt with occasional local grudges of their own, to Seville.
To complicate things further, the Spanish monarchy overlapped for many years with others. It tried to own and run the Low Countries for a century or two, and the Dutch “G” retains the harsh aspiration of the Spanish “G” and “J.” It was allied to the Kingdom of Naples, and was therefore close to the discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum, whose decorations were immediately taken up by a court already fond of chinoiserie and various American motifs. There were of course various connections between the Spanish monarchy and the French. We Americans too easily think of distinct European nations as having hard and fast boundaries and clearly deÞned languages, as we are beginning to think of our own regions as being either Red or Blue: but these matters are never descriptions of steady states; they always refer to dynamic processes flowing easily or turbulently within a very complex fluid — except that there’s nothing you can usefully think of as a source, and nothing that we know of that will be a vast Þnal paciÞc ocean.
Anyhow we traipse up and down the very center of this slanted city, usually on narrow streets, protected by bollards from the little cars and taxis — there are no big vehicles here — and looking out for green-uniformed men and, occasionally, women, pushing motorized sidewalk-washers with rolling cylindrical brushes and snorkelly flexible snouts. (They clean the pavements at the expense of fouling the air.) The streets are amazingly crowded, and everything you’ve heard about the Madrid timetable is absolutely true: lunch begins no earlier than two and may continue past Þve, and dinner is unthinkable until nine.
The Madrid we know is a shopping town. There are sales everywhere just now; it’s the season. I would advise touring shoppers to spend January in Rome; that’s the month the government decrees the shops all have their sales. Then move to Madrid for February. You have small boutiques and enormous department stores. The Corte Inglés isn’t content with every floor of an enormous building; it spills out into hardly less enormous annexes across this street and that; and you can get anything you can think of there.
If for some reason you want to reject the “values” of your parents’ generation, and stay away from this Nordstrom-Magnin-May Co.-Macy’s perfection, then for the other part of the Madrileño’s life — entertainment — there is the local Fnac, which peddles everything electronic, from MP3 players to home theaters, as well as everything media-related, from books and magazines to DVDs and tickets to movies, theater, and concerts. And don’t forget the cameras and telephones.
So the streets are jammed during shopping hours, then fall silent during the “siesta” which is not a siesta at all but eating-time. I suppose this is the result of the weather: it must be beastly hot in the summer, when you hide from the sun for hours; how could you change your pattern for the few months of bitter cold weather in winter? So we go about in our chic black surcoats and scarves and gloves at night, shopping until nine o’clock, then nibbling tapas and sipping our wine until midnight, when the shows begin. The youngsters, I’m told, roll up the day at Þve in the morning. There are two days to every day.
Still, you wonder, what does Madrid really look like? It looks like architecture. Perhaps because it’s courting the 2012 Olympics, it is cleaning itself up with a vengeance. The relatively few plazas do not serve as chaotic parking-lots, as piazzas and places do so often in Italy and France: they’ve been hollowed out underneath, and steep, narrow ramps lead to multi-level parking structures neatly out of sight. There are sidewalks only on the few wide boulevards, and these sidewalks are often very wide indeed; but they are not lined with trees except along the magnifcent Paseo del Prado which deÞnes the western boundary of the central city.
What there is, to fascinate the tourist eye, is the architecture. The Gran Via, the Calle Mayor and the Calle de Atocha are lined with immense and delightful buildings, from the late 19th and early 20th centuries I’d say, all of an even height. (There are tall buildings only in the suburbs, with one unfortunate exception — probably the one that suggested the imposition of a limit, as the Tour Montparnasse did in central Paris — out at the Plaza de Colon.)
These buildings are uniquely harmonious, contributing a playful sort of dignity, or a sober sort of eccentricity to what would otherwise be too masonry-dominated a city. The facades are full of relief and detail, but the styles are fully achieved and arrived, with an integrated character entirely their own: these buildings need no fake Corinthian capitals or sly Chippendale architraves. Postmodernist historicism seems banned from the center, and while there’s plenty of elegant wit there’s no heavy joking, no one-laugh architectural effect. You can walk these streets and look at these facades for hours without getting bored or tired.
This morning we went to the Royal Palace, where we spent two or three hours walking through the rooms home to the Spanish monarchs for the last quarter-millenium. The ceilings are painted by Goya and Velasquez, among others. The immense building is designed inside and out to the Italian taste, by Italian architects, only toward the end suffering some redecoration along French lines, Empire or Directoire or, in the end, in a previous king’s billiard room, in a sort of romantic Gothic kitsch, the ceiling mural having been panelled over to make the place look like a secular choir in dark carved woods.
There was a lot of taste here, a whole lot. You can be sure this was a decadent period in Spanish history: the royal family didn’t have to do too much beyond hunt and dance and listen to music and, of course, eat and drink. There was an extensive bureaucracy to run things, to the extent they could be run, and anyway the old empire was being sold off or traded away or lost to skirmishes for independence, rather as if a formerly wealthy man were Þnally to let his servants have the damn country house anyway, he’d rather stay home in the city and play cards with his cronies. I may be simplifying things a bit.
All this taste may have led to a few medical crises, judging by the extensive pharmacy we toured in one corner of the palace, with rooms Þlled with beautiful porcelain jars and glass bottles containing spices and simples of every sort, along with more than a few pure chemical elements and compounds. I suppose the exploitation of Latin America and, to an extent, southeast Asia brought many of these botanicals to Madrid. They did not apparently do enough for the weakening inbred Habsburg line; fortunately, the present Borbón family seems both more stalwart and more sensible in its enthusiasms.
A rest atop the tour bus refreshed us for dinner, which we took at three o’clock or so in a restaurant near the Plaza Mayor. (This perpetual disjunction between spelled and sounded Spanish almost made me type what you always hear: “plothamy yore”.) This was, for Lindsey and me, an unwise but irresistable combination: olives, bread with tomato and olive oil, creamy salt-cod bacalao, creamily tuna-Þlled red peppers, and roast suckling pig, washed down with sangria, then a Þne 1999 Rioja.
Afterward, inevitably, a nap; and then out again this evening to see what was happening in the tourist district down by the lovely early twentieth-century cast-iron San Miguel market. We settled for something simple: anchovies in vinegar and oil and a plate of Manchego cheese, both always dependably flavorful and clean and interesting, with a glass or two of Fino. And then a taxi home.
Tomorrow we leave Madrid. We rent a car, pack our bags, and struggle out through the city trafÞc, about which I refuse to worry further at the moment, and head for Avila, which manages to contain the bodies of both Torquemada and St. Teresa. That must be energizing. We’ll see how it goes down.
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Hotel Torre del Clavero, Salamanca, Feb. 13 —
Out of Madrid along the Gran Via, through the Plaza de Espana where (as I understand it) the skyscraper is that took Þre this morning, and through disorganized sprawls of suburbs, then into the Sierra. Spain is transversed by a number of these Sierras, or ranges. The word is related to the word for “saw,” and refers to the many similar-sized peaks, set more or less in line, like the teeth of a saw; it’s a familiar geographical feature and therefore word to Spaniards, and so was naturally applied to similar ranges in Mexico.
More to the point, the word also contributes Serrano ham, ham from pigs from the mountains. Well, the word doesn’t contribute the ham, the many delicatessens and department stores and bars and cafes and, of course, restaurants contribute the ham. There is a chain of stores called the Mesón de jamon, I think, unless it’s actually the Museo de jamon, I don’t recall at the moment. It’s been a long and hard day.
The hams hang high and low in the Museo, unless it’s the Mesón (itself a transliteration into Spanish of the French “maison,” but enough etymology for today). How much do they weigh, Anneke wondered, so I asked a shopgirl: Oh, about four, four and half kilos, she said. Some of these hams go for as little as nine Euros the kilo; others range up toward forty. The ham is of course absolutely delicious — salted and air-dried. The best comes from the bars in Seville, I think, where it hangs for days directly over the bar, proÞting from the blue cigarette smoke.
There was snow on the peaks, and before long we saw it alongside the road, in the shadows to the north of the rocks and trees. The country began to remind me of that north of Flagstaff, high desert with pines; and then we dropped down to the plain to the north, and before long left the toll highway for a national highway to Ávila.
What a city! The capital of its province, with perhaps 40,000 inhabitants, it is said to be the highest city of any size in Europe, and to have the best-preserved walls. It’s entirely encircled by these walls, sturdy high ones composed of the warm beige sandstone of the region with occasional inÞlling of rubble and smaller river-run stone — perhaps there were times when the walls had to go up more quickly.
The walls are punctuated by tall cylindrical towers, castellated at the tops, exactly as you expect watchtowers to look; and the city is entered by way of four or Þve gates. Or it is if you’re a local. We are not, so we parked in an underground garage a block or two from our hotel, and carried and wheeled our luggage along the sidewalk, then over a road paved with river-run stone — noisy wheeling, that — and through the main gate and around the corner to our hotel, itself just around a corner from the cathedral.
Ávila’s main industry seems to be Saint Teresa, who was born here, but ran away as soon as she could — unsuccessfully; she was nabbed a few kilometers out of town and brought back. I’m conflicted about St. Teresa; I’ve always been attracted to a concept of her that came to me from Virgil Thomson’s setting of Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts; but that concept has little to do with either reality or history, as far as I can tell.
We toured her museum yesterday morning, after a sound night’s sleep in a very quiet city. The museum is in the basement of her convent, the convent she established with the help of her friend St. John of the Cross — they founded the Carmelite order, famous for its bare feet, though Anneke pointed out that one of the relics in the museum bookshop, along with St. Teresa’s ring Þnger (complete with ring), was the sole from one of her sandals. (She did not have terribly small feet.)
I was fascinated by the excellent facsimiles, in this museum, of Teresa’s writings. Her handwriting was fast and fluid but very graceful and amazingly clear; once used to the long “S” and a couple of other eccentricities — of the Spanish of her time, not of hers — you could read these manuscripts pretty easily.
And she wrote a lot, and apparently read even more — in Latin and Castilian, the bookshop attendant told me proudly, and in books of all sorts. But however much she read and wrote, she is responsible for much more: a quarter of the museum seemed devoted to various editions of various translations of her work and commentaries on it, along with similar literature on a number of saints who trained for their profession under her influence. Some of these are quite recent, and one, born Edith Stein but known now as another St. Teresa, died in 1942 in Auschwitz.
I relate more easily to books than to ancient Þngers. Generalissimo Francisco Franco kept Teresa’s Þnger, presumably with the ring and in the present crystal reliquary, on his bedside table: I would not be able to do that, not even if I were Generalissimo. Some of St. John’s bones are on view, too, and that somehow seemed indecent; I don’t think they were meant to be so publicly laid bare; it doesn’t Þt the virginal concept I retain of this particular saint. But, as she so famously wrote, todos pasan, all things pass.
I have the impression Ávila is a conservative town, politically. A prominent escutcheon on one of the walls mentions Franco’s contributions to the town: his name is writ big, the very Þrst word, though it’s true the remainder of the Þrst line is chiseled bare. Or, rather, covered over with a layer of cement: perhaps the city fathers are hedging their bets, and remain ready to restore Franco’s title when necessary.
Conservative or not, it’s a pleasant city. Our hotel was new last year, installed in what was already an inn centuries ago — the columns in the dining room retain iron rings to which horses were formerly tied. From the wall I looked down on another building only a few yards away, a building almost identical to our hotel Las Cancelas: I wouldn’t be surprised to see it turned into competition in a year or two.
On arriving in town, a little past noon, we walked the walls — thankfully not more than a tenth of them, all that are open to tourism. This was a chore: the steps up are narrow, high, and uneven, and the pavement at the top is also uneven. But the views are marvelous, more so when you admire the architecture inside the walls than when you look beyond to the extramural outskirts, or even to the bleak plains at the north foot of the Sierra.
Ávila is all made of the same warm beige stone; only the Bank of Spain chose to Þnd something more symbolic of its power, I suppose, a whitish granite of some kind; and its false classicism is as inappropriate as its color. Otherwise the architecture is rather humble, the few new or newish buildings carefully suiting their neighbors. But the cathedral is a surprise, made of blocks of stone mottled liver-and-white, giving the building a headcheesy quality with I Þnd oddly pleasant, particularly as it articulates some quite splendid Gothic vaulting.
We slept one night in Ávila, taking our dinner at a place said to be both high in quality and local in flavor. It was okay. I could have given Ávila a day or two more, but I would have gone on to explore another restaurant, I think. But dinner was pleasant, and the walk home, at midnight, kicking a frozen softball-sized ice ball along, passing it back and forth among the four of us, was hilarious.
* * *
We left Ávila about noon, after spending the morning at St. Teresa’s and then having yet another boisson, as I always call them, in a very pleasant bar-cafe on the Plaza Santa Teresa (what else?) outside the wall, on a huge “Plaza di Italia,” so called I supposed because of the arched portico along one side, though the other is walled by two particularly unfortunate new buildings.
The road to Salamanca was fast when we weren’t behind trucks, one lane in each direction, with enough curves and dips to rule out passing when you particularly wanted to. And we did. There were only two or three towns along the route, and they were not interesting. The countryside was mostly open, and when we later learned the area is famous for its beans it became clear why nothing was going on: the Þelds are fallow where the country is cultivated; other stretches were dotted with heavy oaks and no doubt populated by pigs — let’s hope they somehow get to the Sierra before they become ham.
I could spend a week in Salamanca. We’ve been here before, but only overnight; on this trip we’ve spent two nights and seen a fair amount — my God, I’m tired — but have a lot left unseen. Last night we went out to a concert by the regional orchestra, a multi-European affair, strings from Russia and northern countries, to judge by surnames, and winds from Spain; conductor from Colombia. We heard the Mozart Wind Symphonie Concertante and the Tchaikovsky Serenade for Strings, both played for the Þrst time by this thirteen-year-old orchestra, and played very well indeed, in a hall seating 1200 with splendid acoustics — a big wooden box of a room with a small balcony, rather the shape of Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, the sound utterly transparent and alive.
If Ávila’s business is the church, Salamanca’s is the university. Its university is the oldest in Spain and one of the oldest anywhere. Salamanca’s spoken Spanish has the reputation of being the best, like the French in Tours, or the Italian in Firenze, or English in Healdsburg. And Salamanca draws students from all over the world, and the students draw non-students, and the non-students draw bars and cafes and bookstores and the like.
The shopping is hip and elegant, and the cafe life is wonderful. I have made a hobby of squares and piazzas and places and pleins, and Salamanca’s Plaza Mayor is hands down the most handsome I have seen, exactly the right dimensions, perfectly consistent, quite detailed without being busy, and marvelously lit by a caressing sun through the day and subtly placed artiÞcial lights by night. There is no trafÞc in this square other than pedestrians, and the pedestrians are anything but pedestrian. Today, Sunday, we admired elegant and conservative people of our own age at noon; then after dark when we returned we enjoyed a mixed population of younger generations, children included.
Today we also explored the cathedrals — Salamanca has two of them, side by side — and the University, and a museum devoted to Art Nouveau objects; and of course we had dinner, and boissons now and then, and heard music in the street, and so on. But I have gone on long enough. Tomorrow we drive to Segovia for the night, and the next evening we drop Hans and Anneke off at the airport and move on to the third stage of this little tour of Spain.
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Hotel Infanta Isabel, Segovia, Feb. 14 —
On the drive from Salamanca to the Madrid airport we stopped off again in Avila, for three reasons:
• to look for a book we may have left there in our hotel, but no, lo siento, senor, no es aqui, it wasn’t there.
• to ask the whereabouts of Barca de Avila, which a friend recommends as a particularly nice country village, but no, lo siento, senor, no es la via al aeropuerto, it isn’t on the road to the airport; we’ll have to Þnd it some other time.
• to have for God’s sake something to eat. Our breakfast was the one we had yesterday, in our hotel, at the breakfast buffet, where among all the offerings we take a cup of coffee with hot milk, a glass of orange juice, a clementine, and a piece of toast. I, minding my greater need of caloric input, being so much bigger and stronger, have in addition a croissant stuffed with chocolate. Chocolate is insidious stuff; one grows to depend on it. No matter: it’s good for you.
But such a breakfast only goes so far, and afterward we had a strenuous morning investigating the absolutely marvelous San Esteban church and monastery; whose cloister is one of the most affecting I’ve seen; whose monumental staircase contains in its railing an eccentric and quite moving statue of St. Mary recumbent, lying at about a thirty-degree angle upward (the angle of the staircase), resting on her elbows and looking ahead dreamily as if she were conceived by Edward Burne-Jones in the late stages of the 19th century instead of four hundred years earlier; and whose nave is perhaps the most perfect such we’ve seen, quite high in proportion to its length and width, magniÞcently daylit through its high square lantern-dome, and completed with an elaborate reredo composed of a thousand pieces of wood, intricately carved, then magniÞcently gilded — the sort of thing that would be far too much if it were not in an interior so otherwise modestly chaste.
I would say that regardless of the two cathedrals, regardless of the breathtaking library in the University, regardless even of the Plaza Mayor, which I think is the most nearly perfect outdoor living-room in my experience: if you can see only one thing in Salamanca, let it be San Esteban.
Anyway. We then had our coffee with Hans and Anneke, and went back to the hotel to pack and check out, Þrst securing a hotel in Toledo for Wednesday and Thursday. And then to their hotel to pick them up, and then back along the now-familiar highway to Ávila.
I was mistaken if I suggested a few days ago that this highway was bordered simply by fallow bean-Þelds. They are wheat-Þelds; it’s perfectly obvious from the occasional grain elevators scattered about. For maybe forty miles the two-lane road winds through rolling wheatÞeld country, before rising into the sparse oaklands and scattered farms; and then pines begin to appear, and the snow is more evident; and before long we were again at the Four Posts where St. Teresa was apprehended by whatever relative it was she was running away from, and then Ávila.
The tortilla in the bar Santa Teresa, in the Plaza Santa Teresa, is delicious — it manages to be both Þrm and soft, yielding and structured; the eggs are almost deeply browned on the outside, but still moist and delectable on the inside,with tiny cubes of potato and shreds of uniquely sweet onion to deepen the plot.
All they need is salt. The others were rather jammed into the corner banquette we’d chosen two or three days ago on a similar visit, so I approached the bar, waited to be waited upon by the nice pert young man, and, when he asked Dica, which means literally “talk to me,” I answered:
Mag ik de zout?
This is not Spanish. It’s pure Dutch, a construction I learned a long time ago. Mag ik de zout means, literally, “May I the salt”; the Þnal word, “hebben” or “have,” being understood.
This happened simply because we’d been having fun talking among ourselves, Hans Anneke Lindsey and I, and of course we were talking in English, but it’s always a little in the air that their native language is Dutch, then say “when” for “if” and occasionally pronounce “yellow” as “jello” and things like that, and when I talk to them I’m always thinking, part of me, a teeny part of me, in what little Dutch I know. So out it came, or, as the Dutch would say, outcome it did, and the waiter looked at me and, what else, waited, until I explained myself.
Then at the airport when I asked the Eurocar clerk if he spoke English he said Of course, and spoke it better than do I, but with a familiar accent; and when I asked where he’d learned it, why, in Netherlands, he said. Oh, I asked, sprekt U nederland? And then we both wisely gave it up, though it was clear he was better than I in Dutch and Spanish and at least as good in English.
I am sorry to report that the approach to the Madrid airport is inscrutable, enigmatic, recondite, concealed, withheld. The signs high above the highway each offer a number of numbers: A1, A6, M40, M11, and so on, all in sizes ranging from barely adequate to invisible, and all interspersed with various irrelevant destinations, some hundreds of kilometers away, along with meaningless abbreviations of other apparently meaningful phrases and various icons and graphic assistances.
When the sign pointing out aeropuerto does Þnally appear it is not overhead where all the other damn signs have been but hunkering down alongside the shoulder as if while hitchhiking it had noticed a familiar car approaching and it were desperately trying not to be observed. I can’t imagine who decides to order, or fabricate, or choose, or place such signs. They are an offense to right-thinking drivers, let alone those of us wondering whether this lane or that goes to short-term or long-term, or private car or tourbus or rental, or domestic or international, or whether that tractor really wants to cross the road, or the guy in the Mercedes in the rear-view mirror cares whether he totals both his car and yours in his idiot compulsion to negotiate this maze.
Well. We Þnally found the rental-car place and parked, and I found a push-trolley and we loaded Hans and Anneke’s luggage; and then we trekked to the terminal. This did not involve any sidewalks or ramps, oh no it did not, it required our crossing four lanes of maniacal trafÞc without pedestrian crossing or stoplight or even a warning sign. And before that even we had to leave the parking lot, which involved getting under or around one of those wooden gate-arms that may swing up to let you through, or may not. In our case it did not, and we managed our way around, and were better off than the hapless group that was coming the other way, and saw the gate miraculously rise, and hustled through, only to gather in alarmed sympathy when it came crashing down the last minute on one poor fellow’s head, knocking him to the ground. They all looked like so many disciples and hangers-on at the foot of the cross in one of those paintings at the Prado, and we looked on in reverential and shocked and useless sympathy while they gathered the poor man up and dusted him off and continued their miserable flight out into the rentalcar parkinglot.
* * *
But I am writing about eating tonight. We dropped Hans and Anneke off in the terminal, having pushed the cart from one end to the other and back before Þnding the right place — the Madrid airport being the most customer-unfriendly I have ever found, either in its highway approaches, or its parking lot, or even within its passenger accommodation facilities, there, I’m already using that kind of offputting language. And then we negotiated our change of car, from the spiffy Audio 400 that Eurocar gave us, with a free upgrade, a car that easily did 140 km/hour, to a Hertz KIA, of all things, that will only do 120 with great effort and then on an even grade and with the beneÞt of luxury cars breathing down its neck.
And we drove here to Segovia. I had thought, judging by the two guidebooks we have with us, that this would be rather a simple town: but it is not. Finding our way to the hotel, right on the Plaza Mayor, took us through a number of roundabouts and tight corners and two conversations with bystanders. We pulled up in front of the Hotel Infanta Isabel and checked in, and after we looked at our room we stretched our stay to two evenings and canceled the reservation I made for tomorrow at a desperate halfway point between Madrid and Toledo; we don’t have to do that. This hotel is spacious and quiet and pretty and we intend to rest for a day.
And then a walk down the main (pedestrian) street to a restaurant highly recommended. We’d phoned en route, desperately hoping to get a table this Valentine’s Day, when restaurants are crowded, and were thankful to get one at the unfashionable (indeed unheard-of) hour of eight o’clock; and we got there a little early to make sure, and nursed a Fino until twenty after or so, and then took our table in an empty dining room and presided there alone, the two of us and our courtly but friendly waiter, until we were done, or nearly. We had a mixed salad and Castilian soup, in which I’ve been specializing — broth, garlic, bread, paprika, and egg. And then we had suckling pig.
And, wonder of wonders, the table had a salt-cellar on it, and for the Þrst time in Spain so far the food of course needed no salting.
And with it a bottle of delicious Alizar (tempranillo) 2002, with a very quick violet nose and quite a bit of tannin but very friendly indeed; and then a baked Alaska for Lindsey and some soft floral sheep’s-milk cheese for me, and so to bed, after writing this.
There have been things left out, notably storks. But they will have to wait.
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Hotel Infanta Isabel, Segovia, Feb. 15 —
Storks, yes. Hans and Anneke were excited and delighted when we checked into our hotel Friday night — nearly a week ago! — to discover stork nests on the roof of the Ávila cathedral, visible out the high window of their room. We hurried in to take a look. I remembered how pleased and surprised a fellow was on a street in a small town in Holland, two or three years ago: he was walking toward me, a big smile on his face, and when he drew near he said Ooeivaar! and I looked it up as soon as I got into my room, and found out he had seen a stork; and I immediately went downstairs to relay the news to our host, and he rushed outside himself to have a look.
Storks are good luck, they say. I was pleased to Þnd one grazing, I suppose, on a small lawn in a desultory town on the German side of our walk across Holland, later that week. But I’ve never seen more than one in the wild. Here in Ávila the sky was lousy with them, as Lindsey’s father would have said. There were nests on every bell tower in town, often three or four of them, many in iron bowl-shaped cages installed there for the purpose.
They migrate between Africa and Scandinavia, I read, and make their stop here in the Spanish mountains for their breeding season. As we walked the Ávila wall we watched them wheel about in the sky, apparently enjoying themselves, perhaps in a sort of courtship dance — I don’t know; they weren’t talking. They weren’t even squawking. They do have a call of sorts, which they make by clacking their bills together quickly several times, sounding like a stick dragged quickly along a picket fence. It’s a pleasant sound, really, particularly since it’s generally so far away.
At the end of our effortful stroll along the city walls we descended into a small park, where two stork couples had built nests in the top of a tree — perhaps they couldn’t afford the more desirable perches on bell towers. Why were bell towers preferred, I wondered; perhaps there’s something about the vibrations that they like, Lindsey suggested. Another stork enigma.
Since it’s early in the season a number of them were still a-building, and we often saw a stork flying overhead with a stick or a piece of rope in its bill — never, as far as I could see, a diaper-slung baby. At other times we saw them simply perching, often on one leg, sometimes with their wings held out stiffly as if to dry. I wondered what they must have thought of the many magpies hanging about, who looked like stork midgets, wearing the same elegant black and white; but the storks seemed to take no notice of them at all.
Ávila was lousy with storks; Salamanca was lousy with storks; but we see relatively few of them here in Segovia. It may be that it’s simply too damned cold. Salamanca isn’t that much higher than Ávila, if at all; I could look it up but I’m too lazy; but it’s in an exposed location, perched on a rock island in the midst of rolling plain, and to the east and south are those mountains, some rising to seven thousand feet or so, and they are covered with snow down to their feet. I’ve asked a number of locals if this weather is normal, and they all assure me that it is: es frio, Segovia.
This may be why the stern Alcázar, which is the Spanish word for castle and not for movie theater, was used most recently in its checkered history as a military school. It had been built for a royal residence, back when Segovia was capital of Castilla. (Isabella the Catholic, better known to us Americans as Isabella the wife of Ferdinand and therefore co-sponsor of Columbus, was given her crown here, not far from our hotel, the Infanta Isabella.)
(Another parenthesis, if you don’t mind: alcázar seems not a Spanish word at all, but an Arabic one taken up by the speakers of Castillian — which is what the language we call Spanish is called hereabouts.)
When the capital was moved elsewhere there seemed nothing better to do with this gloomy fortress of a castle than turn it into a prison, and so it remained for a couple of centuries. Perhaps the prisoners all Þnally froze to death: in any case it was turned into a military school for the artillery, and the museum here offers lots of swords, daggers, crossbows, blunderbusses, mortars, and other instruments of mayhem, along with stone cannonballs. And, more to my interest, models and detailed drawings of apparatus needed for measuring the size and shape of these things, and the force of samples of gunpowder.
For among other things the place was a laboratory for the production and improvement of military chemicals, particularly gunpowder. And then, inevitably, the whole place took Þre, and burned for three days and nights, giving the locals only time enough to escape with their lives and the holy vessels and books.
(You could write a disquisition on the Siamese-twin relationship of chemistry and war, but I won’t; I’ll just hesitate long enough to point out that peacetime chemicals seem to concentrate on agriculture and are proving as mischievous as the wartime ones.)
The Alcázar was rebuilt, and the inside looks pretty convincing. Rick Steves says the whole thing has a Disneyesque air to it, but I disagree: this Alcázar is nothing like Miami Beach. Or even San Marino. The residential rooms have been put back to what they may have been during the early days, and the ceilings in these rooms are entrancing. Ditto the friezes and the sculpture.
But oh my God this castle is c o l d . We could stand it no longer, and rushed back to our hotel, stopping along the way for chocolate and churros, those deep-fried strips of extruded pastry that serve for doughnuts in this country.
Later the sun came out, though tiny flakes of snow continued to drift, and we tried another tour on foot. Like every other city we’ve visited on this trip Segovia is fascinating for its architecture, much of which is as early as the 15th century — magniÞcent houses with truncated towers, reminiscent of the old residential architecture in Verona, for example, except that almost every important facade is decorated with obsessive repeated textures (as is the Casa de las Conchas in Salamanca, and Salvador Dali’s house in Figueras).
Usually these are simply sgrafÞto designs, though they are mostly done in the negative, the Þgure raised above the ground. Sometimes, though, they stand out in a much heavier relief. The champion is on a house that serves now as an art school, its facade studded with pyramidal forms. The guidebook refers to this as symbolic of a woman’s veil, but I’m not so sure. I think they may have been meant to deflect cannonballs. I was pleased, though, to notice a woman’s jacket on sale in one of the many nearby boutiques, a quilted jacket whose puffs were very similar to those pyramids.
We walked down the hill to look at Segovia’s famous Roman aqueduct, and were pleased to Þnd a Þne enlarged copy of the famous she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, given Segovia by the city of Rome to celebrate the double millennium of the aqueduct. Does our country ever think of giving little presents like this, I wonder; have we for example given the French anything to commemorate the help they gave us in our quest for independence from England? Don’t know. Have to look into this.
We climbed up the other side to have a look at the aqueduct from the top. It’s an amazing structure, still able to function, I read, though it hasn’t really been used for a century or so. But the wind was blowing, the sun had drifted away, and we were getting hungry. We took refuge at a bar where we could thrust our Þngertips under a sort of steam-table containing basins of tapas, and I asked what they were and was told in incomprehensible Spanish, excuse me, Castilian, so I pointed at this and at that and particularly the little roast potatoes and the meatballs, and Lindsey had a glass of good white wine (chilled! Imagine that!) and I had a tinto, because there was no sherry in this bar, we are not yet in the south.
And so we thawed out a bit and stove off hunger with a good-sized plate of tapas. The bill was three Euros twenty. When I expressed surprise the bargirl was concerned; she apparently thought I was complaining about being cheated. She pointed out the wine list prices. Yes, I said, but what about the tapas? Oh, they come gratis with the wine, she said. So we complimented her on her nation’s values, which put food at the service of wine, and home we went to contemplate a last Segovia dinner.
Segovia, like all of Leon y Castile, relies on pigs. Roast suckling pig is on every menu; ham is ubiquitous; even the wonderful sopa de Castilia, garlic soup with bread and a poached egg, tastes of lard. So we thought we’d go to a Sephardic restaurant we’d noticed, though Lindsey did point out that the menu included cochinella, roast suckling pig.
And I started with the Castillian soup, because this one was different: it had quail eggs in it rather than the usual chicken egg. And it was good, though I thought a bit more tripey than I’ve had elsewhere.
Afterward, though, we went ethnic. Lindsey had couscous, made with chick peas and rice as well as the couscous, and a Þne assortment of vegetables, and dressed with Þne green olive oil flavored with parsley. And I had Markla hlua, chunks of beef braised with orange sections, tiny white Þgs, raisins, and spices, served with rice with a little saffron. It was not my usual fare, but it was very tasty indeed — I could have been in Venice.
Dessert? Six dates, pitted and Þlled to overflowing with almond paste moistened with cream and liqueur, and in the middle a scoop of tangerine ice cream, really a gelato, drizzled with raspberry sauce. I ate it up, every bit of it.
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Hotel Pintor el Greco, Toledo, Feb. 17 —
Storks have given way to partridges, and snows to cobblestones. We saw our Þrst partridge at a gas station ten kilometers out of Toledo, where we’d stopped so I could get out of my jacket — infernally hot here, I thought, not having opened the car door since leaving frozen Segovia. And what’s that, I asked Lindsey, a partridge? It’s some chickeny kind of bird...
She peered at it through the binoculars and conÞrmed that it was. Partridges had been on our minds. We have to eat partridge before we leave this country, she said the other day, and I thought to myself Yes: man can not live by suckling pig alone. But we did not expect to see partridges walking around calmly like this.
As we got back on the autovia we noticed an enormous partridge farm. Ah, so: this is an escapee. The history of Toledo is a history of sieges and escapes, and this lonely partridge, soon no doubt to be recaptured and prepared for his end (and Lindsey’s sustenance), is a trivial but touching testament to this history.
Our hotel, for example, is near the calle del Transito, and near the two surviving synagogues. I step outside and stroll across the street to the bluff from which, according to James Michener, a mob of Christian Toledans, inflamed by an anti-Semitic sermon, threw all the Jews they could Þnd, having dragged them out of synagogue and slit their throats.
I asked about this in the gift shop on the corner. Oh no, señor, there were no Jews murdered in those years, they all either converted or went away. There’s something in a book about that, but it isn’t true.
Well, is it true, I continued, that during the Civil War, back in the 1930s, there were many executions here? Yes, señor, that is true, there were many many people murdered here.
That was in 1936, when the country was torn between liberals and leftists who wanted a democratic republic, of all things, and conservative and theocratic Loyalists or Nationalists, as they were known, who wanted to continue with the disengaged sort of autocracy that had been Spain’s method for the previous century or two.
Toledo, the religious seat of the entire country, was a conservative city. A group of Republicans were brought in from Madrid to change the town’s political opinion, and they rounded up as many conservatives as they could easily Þnd, brought them to this same bluff, and shot them, afterward tossing a number of the bodies down on the same rocks.
As you know, the Loyalists ultimately lost. When Franco Þnally took Þrm control the situation was reversed, and Toledo took its revenge; anyone whose jacket’s right shoulder showed signs of wear was assumed to have been a rifleman for the Loyalists; all such were rounded up, taken to the same place, and given the same treatment. Thousands of rightists murdered by leftists, thousands of leftists murdered by rightists.
When I was a boy, sixty years ago, Spain was an enigma. It was vaguely allied with Germany and Italy, though ofÞcially neutral; and it remained isolated from Europe and the United States until Þfty years ago, as isolated as Albania, or more recently Libya. Things began to change when the US traded food aid for military bases in the early 1950s; but didn’t really change until Franco Þnally died in 1975. When we Þrst visited Barcelona, for example, in 1976, Catalan was still barely spoken, and the police all carried submachine guns.
Today Toledo looks like any other touristy European city. The museums are full of Japanese tourists and grammar-school students, who troop around with clipboards and dutifully write essays about this El Greco or that. The shops are full of ceramics and needlepoint and swords and leather goods, some of which may be manufactured within a few score miles, for all I know. Menus are in four languages. It is often necessary to speak Spanish, which I do very badly indeed, but that was true in Salamanca and Segovia and even Madrid — Spanish must be a very satisfying language; it seems that few who grow up speaking it as their native language bother to learn any other.
The name “Toledo” has always stood for one of only two things to me: scales, or an El Greco painting. Scales, because so many seemed to have been manufactured, when I was a boy and began noticing such things, in Toledo, Ohio: and perhaps to commemorate that fact there is indeed a Calle Toledo Ohio in this city.
The painting, of course, is the famous “Storm Over Toledo,” which has always led me to believe, foolishly, that Toledo stands on a cone-shaped mountain, occupying most of it, rising above an otherwise bare plain.
Might as well assume all the Apostles had unnaturally long faces and Þngers. Toledo does rise above its surroundings, but the hill isn’t that simple: we’re constantly walking uphill and down. I think the Cathedral, which is big and made of stone, may have been forming a big dimple in the middle of town, the way the Antarctica ice sheet has depressed that continent unnaturally. (Is the stone under the ice unnaturally dense, I wonder; and, if so, will it rebound when the ice melts?) The streets around the cathedral take implausible angles, often reverse angles, in their urge to lead either up or down, never flat — contour lines had not been invented when this town was laid out, presumably by the Visigoths.
They are also, at least in our quarter, quite narrow — often too narrow for cars, which is a blessing, as you don’t like the things sneaking up on you from behind. And the pavements are invariably cobblestone. All this leads to another effect Michener mentions: the town can be infernally loud. You’ll hear someone walking down the street outside your hotel with a drum, for example. Why should this be? Why would anyone walk around town in this day and age mindlessly beating a drum? And it’s not even particularly good drumming; it has no real beat; there are no flams or paradiddles, just mindless thumping.
The schoolchildren are quiet enough when they’re scribbling at their clipboards — sweet and intent, in fact; it’s a pleasure to see whole pages being Þlled with their impressions of the paintings in front of them. But once out on the street, which provides a wonderful acoustical enhancement, their shouts are competitive, demanding attention. Now and then they don’t notice your ear is scarcely a foot away, and they’ll shout right into it, leaving it ringing for minutes afterward.
It’s an aspect of a curious detachment I’ve noticed between a number of people here in Toledo and the people around them — perhaps because they’ve been doomed to live among a vast number of tourists, though I don’t recall noticing this detachment in Venice. (Of course there may be no native Venetians at all; the workers there may all be commuters from the mainland, for all I know.)
Shopkeepers and baristas, for example, when giving you your change, or a cup of coffee, or whatever knickknack it is you’ve bought, rarely set it on your side the counter. They put it down as if it’s intended for their own use, and you reach across the counter, one elbow raised to keep the damn shoulder-bag from slipping to the floor, the book you’ve had tucked into your armpit thereby loosed to fall in its own turn, you can’t lift the cup and saucer because someone else is crowding in, you can’t simply slide it toward you because the counter has a cunningly infernal change of level built into it causing an invisible step to interrupt your action, the coffee slips over the lip of the cup, the spoon falls to the floor...
* * *
I mentioned Michener. Lindsey’s been reading his Iberia, a combined travel-history he published back in the late 1960s, and she handed it to me to read the section on Toledo. What a fascinating book! I’d never read him; I always thought of him vaguely as some kind of political reporter, something like the John Gunther whose “Inside...” series were so prominent among the Book-Of-The-Month© Club selections that turned up now and then on my parents’ bookshelves, and which I never read, perhaps because it seemed as if they were something I were supposed to read; or perhaps it was the obligatory © that turned me off.
But Michener, it turns out, is the author I always seem to try to be, combining personal experience with a little real knowledge: except that his experience is so much more interesting than mine, being completely beyond my ever sharing (if only because it took place in a time never to be recaptured, and ever so much more fragrant than my own); and his knowledge so much more extensive.
He tosses off a parenthetical paragraph early on, for example, in which he daydreams about an ideal college education, which would require the student to spend his Þrst and fourth year “studying one brief segment of history.
“...he would immerse himself in the world culture operating at that period in time, and to do so he would study the art forms, the music, the contemporary understanding of geography, the philosophy, the religious convictions, the economics, the travel, the architecture, the writing and the daily life of the peasant. And he would be obliged to explore in depth the half-dozen nations or principalities which best illustrate the signiÞcant meanings of the age being studied.”
Michener chooses A.D. 70 and the fall of Jerusalem, 1832 and “the passage of reform in Great Britain,” some date when Greece and Rome were in confrontation, and another in the Middle Ages “before dissolution of old patterns had begun” as the four periods most fruitful for such study, and they seem pretty good choices to me.
Suppose our present Administration were well grounded, for example, in the period during which Christianity deÞnitively defeated Hellenism; or that of Alfonso the Wise; or even — Michener’s own choice — the 1530s, when Francis I, Henry VIII, Carlos V, Martin Luther, Suleiman I, Ivan IV, and Akbar were presiding over France, England, Spain, the Reformation, Turkey, Russia, and India, and the world as we knew it until, say, ten or twenty years ago was being built. (He leaves out China and Japan, which seems a pity.)
Lindsey bought the Herald Tribune the other day, and in it we learned that Arthur Miller thought, among other things, that the mass of humanity had no real awareness or understanding of the forces that manipulated their destinies. I doubt that was true in the 1530s, when even the peasants understood both the stakes and the methods involved in the international struggles to impose new patterns on the chaos that had followed the dissolution of the old ones.
It’s happening all over again, but it’s odd to think of Tony Blair as a Henry VIII, or Jacques Chirac as a Francis I. Mr. Putin may have ambitions to be an Ivan, terrible or otherwise; and for all I know George Bush may think of himself as a Habsburg. That would explain his determination to bankrupt the country with wars and corruption.
Oh well. We had a nice day today; we saw the synagogues, poor things, they started out as mosques, converted to synagogues, then to Christianity, each time apparently losing a little of their beauty along with their principles. One of them was ultimately a barracks for Napoleon’s troops, and you know how that ends: target practice on the cornices, peeing in the corners.
We investigated the El Greco Museum, full of fascinating paintings; and the Santo Tomé Church, where his Burial of the Count of Orgaz still hangs where he installed it, a marvelous painting. We munched Manchego and a little more ham in our room, and then strolled the town some more: the Museo Santa Cruz, always being reshuffled apparently; the Þne cloister at San Juan de los Reyes, whose handsome church is sober and beautiful enough to have hosted the tombs of Ferdinand and Isabella, if only political considerations hadn’t taken them instead to Granada. And in a half hour we go out to dinner; and tomorrow we drive to Córdoba, for so many years the real intellectual engine of Iberia, and the site of a splendid garden. And then my mood will improve, and Life will assert itself over death and politics; there will be bacalao and sherry and the good Andalusian life; and we’ll spend the weekend with a beautiful granddaughter.
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Calle Duende, Seville, Feb. 21 —
A long hiatus in these dispatches, and today I’m afraid two of them. You may not feel the need to catch up, but I do.
Castile and La Mancha have given way to Andalusia, but the weather is still cold, cold. It’s odd to be so close to Africa while still enjoying the Norwegian air. There are orange trees everywhere, with sour but pretty fruit hanging on every branch, but the air bites.
In fact you enter Andalusia, coming from Toledo, through a fairly high notch in a range of low mountains that deÞne the country pretty deÞnitively. Spain is a nation, but it is not a country; it’s a collection of countries. The reports in yesterday’s newspapers, for example, on the results of Sunday’s nationwide referendum of the European Union and its new constitution, gave the results by province in a way that seemed more meaningful than our division of our own nation into blue states and red states. Galicia, Catalonia, and Andalusia, not to mention the Basque country, have distinct individual cultures that extend, somehow, to political “values.”
But while Andalusia is mountainous it is Southern. We spent a night in Córdoba, in a pleasant hotel not far from the principal tourist attractions, the Mezquita and Alcazar, and the night life in the streets seemed easier, more open, more leisurely, than it does in the north. And the Mezquita is clearly an Arabic building, an enormous mosque deceptively concealed behind a plain stone wall, perhaps twenty feet high, that completely surrounds the equivalent of four city blocks.
Inside you come Þrst to the entry garden, a wonderfully symmetrical grove of orange trees designed to calm and ground the urban mind; and then you enter the mosque itself, another grove but this time of evenly spaced stone columns sustaining a seemingly endless succession of perfectly drawn arches, evenly striped red and white. It is rather dark and quite quiet, even when crowded with visitors. It goes on forever, the arches and columns drawing you into a meditative stroll with no particular goal in mind.
I suppose the devout Muslim would have had as his goal the intricate prayer room. A more secular person, me for example, prefers to stroll, admiring the calming effect of the regular rhythms of columns, arches, and interior spaces; and to note the propriety of conversation here, quiet conversation between twos or threes of persons marveling at this place.
During our visit, though, Mass was being celebrated; for in the time of Charles V the Christians celebrated their rout of the tolerant Muslims by tearing the ceiling and roof off a small section of the Mezquita, near the center, and building there a Gothic cathedral. This was set about, Sunday, with signs asking us to respect the spirituality of this odd intrusion, and we did, but we noted the ironic effect of ranks of clerics in their medieval-inspired costumes, speaking of tolerance and humility in a flamboyantly decorated and rather proud cathedral, surrounded by the quiet decorum of the egoless mosque whose architecture, having only a very subtle goal, substitutes calm and meditation for architectural striving and drama. It’s a perfect expression of medieval order giving way to the beginning of modernity, and Charles V was right, I think, to shake his head sadly when he saw the then-new cathedral, murmuring “We’ve ruined it.”
The Alcazar garden put me back in spirits, as it has before. It’s the outdoors version of the indoors Mezquita, with rows of neatly clipped topiaries, principally enormous cypress columns and mushroom-shaped orange trees, and long narrow pools, and regularly distributed beds. Winter is not perhaps the best time to visit, but the bones show well and the cypress are newly shaved, and the lower light throws deÞning shadows highlighting this ingeniously arranged series of garden rooms.
Then we drove to Antequera, for no particular reason except that we’d never been there, seventy-Þve miles or so across plains, then rolling Þelds, into one of the subcountries into which Andalusia’s numerous ranges of hills and mountains assign its agriculturally productive regions. The map sprinkled this area with symbols I took to stand for pine trees, in low mountain forest of some kind, but they turned out to mean olive trees: we were in the heart of olive country.
Antequera lies at the northern foot of the Sierra Nevada, Andalusia’s highest range, and has been populated for millennia. There are three “dolmens” on view, for example, one of them really not a dolmen at all but a marvelously constructed, perfectly dome-shaped burial chamber under a mound of earth. These are oriented so as to exit northward and aligned toward a curious and imposing natural feature, a small rock mountain whose proÞle suggests a human head lying on its back, slowly settling into the flat plain around it. It’s impossible not to attach signiÞcance to this feature, and among that signiÞcance is the sudden realization that Surrealism is based in nature, that Yves Tanguy and Salvador Dali painted versions of landscapes that only slightly heighten bizarre interpretations that are in fact innate in certain geographies.
Next morning, on to Ronda, a town I wanted to visit for its bridge, a stone affair only a hundred feet long at the most but spanning a gorge at least a hundred yards deep. It was truly frightening to look down into this abyss, but looking across was very pleasant indeed, especially from our table at lunch, a long one in an interesting restaurant successfully bringing traditional foods into a modernized presentation — much more successfully than was done by Charles V’s architects.
And then on to Seville, the delayed goal of this trip, and a night in Eve’s apartment, and next day, yesterday, our transfer to our own. And with that I’ll close, lest in describing our present situation I end on too negative a note.
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Calle Duende, Seville, Feb. 22 —
I’m sure our landlady is a very nice woman. I found her attractive, in fact, immediately, in our telephone conversation yesterday, when we arranged a time to get the keys and the instructions concerning our new pied-a-terre in Seville. Her Spanish was measured and forgiving, pitched in a low, melodious voice; and she quickly responded to my own halting and clumsy speech: We can speak Engleesh, if you prefair; I speak Engleesh, but slowly, and in the Engleesh style.
Fine, I said, may we meet at two o’clock? Yes, undair the clock of the ceety hall, my hair ees blonded.
When we got there, Þve or ten minutes late, we found a young woman with stylishly unkempt blonded hair; with her, a terrier on a leash, who was getting acquainted with another terrier on another leash, held Þrm by another stylish young woman.
We paraded then down the calle J. Guichot and up the calle Jimios, me wondering all along where our calle Duende might be as it wasn’t to be found on any map, and then we came to an abrupt halt in a pile of sand, scaffolding ahead of us, cement mixer to one side, wheelbarrows and hard hats and jackets scattered about.
Our landlady said something to herself in a language I didn’t quite catch, and then observed that this was very strange, as everything had been perfectly normal just two or three days ago.
Astonishing, I thought, that so much destruction and so little reconstruction could have taken place in just a few hours of work, for yesterday was Monday, and I was reasonably sure these sturdy, sullen workers had not been laboring over the weekend.
We picked our way past a building that has been completely gutted, whose wall on the calle Duende side has been newly erected, those children’s-toy hollow bricks stacked up within the bearing girders. Some, to give the workers credit, had already been stucco’d; part of the stucco had dried and already been painted. But there is clearly a lot of work left to do, and the job’s clearly been under way for weeks.
We stepped across hoses and extension cords and steel cables and dodged workers and wheelbarrows and scaffolding and continued down the passageway, for the calle Duende is nothing more, it is not a street, it’s a mere passageway and a dead-end one at that, with the door to our building at the very end. On our way we looked apprehensively up at wheelbarrows of freshly mixed stucco being hauled aloft by those steel cables.
Once we climbed the single flight of marble stairs to our apartment things began to look better. Sitting room, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom; television, stereo setup, twenty-Þve biographies in Spanish ranging from Alexander the Great to Salvador Dalí. Air conditioner: we will hardly want that. The apartment is freezing, but will soon warm up, we’re told. Washing machine, microwave, twoburner range, toaster, electric whipper thing.
We gave the stylish young woman our money and she left, taking her terrier with her. Then we discovered there was no hot water. I found a switch, Þnally, that apparently would turn on the water heater. Then we discovered that the toilet had an alarming desire to fall over on its side, like a spavined horse.
Well, “Duende,” of course, is what all flamenco artists have to have if they are to portray their sense of the tragic with any authenticity. We might have seen this coming.
It’s all right. We intend to use the place only for sleeping and resting our tired feet. Seville, like every other town that seems to call us on this continent, is paved with cobblestones for the most part, at least the most part we’re interested in. The streets are narrow indeed, fewer than half wide enough for even a small car to negotiate. On those streets that do have automobile trafÞc there may be a sidewalk, but it’s likely to be too narrow to walk on comfortably; two abreast is impossible, and if someone comes your way one of you must step into the street, avoiding those steel bollards that only come up to mid-calf height.
We are near the Plaza Nuevo, a Þne rectangular plaza behind the Ayuntamiento or City Hall, very near the fashionable shopping streets Tetuán and Sierpes, and not far from the Cathedral and Alcázar. We’ve spent our Þrst twenty-four hours walking, eating, drinking, sleeping, walking. I like eating in Seville: we generally avoid restaurants, taking breakfast in a bar, lunch at a sidewalk tapas joint when we can Þnd one in the sun, then tapas again later if we feel like it.
Yesterday, for example, we went with Eve for tapas at Los Coloniales, where we must have shared nearly a dozen plates of things — potatoes, peppers, pork, quail eggs, fried zucchini, spinach croquettes, ham, several small glasses of sherry and so on, for about thirty dollars. Breakfast is our usual: coffee with hot milk, toast with butter or jam. In the neighborhood bars this costs about Þve dollars for the two of us, and I have a second coffee.
We were last here in November, a year or two ago. February is a different season. There are plenty of oranges on the trees, as noted a day or two ago, but the deciduous trees are bare, the banana trees severely frostbitten, the roses mere sticks. In a month things will be different; in two it will be glorious. I would not recommend Seville between November and March, but we’re here for museums and bars and the Cathedral, and the promise this weekend of rainstorms doesn’t particularly bother us.
Today we were advised to visit the Casa de Pilatos, which some eccentric built in the early 16th century on the supposed plans of Pontius Pilate’s house in Jerusalem. It is home to one of Spain’s noblest nobles, and their are no nobles nobler than the Spanish; and the rooms and gardens that were opened to the public — upstairs by guided tour only — revealed a Þne sense of spatial taste, with a series of rooms looking in on one another and out onto one or another garden, all set about with that geometrical sense of order, clarity, and calm that seems so Spanish, yet so unlike the violence, surprise, and immediacy that form an equal component of the Spanish temperament.
(Maria Rosa Menocal’s fascinating, occasionally maddening account of Spanish history from Muslim times to the Inquisition, Ornament of the World, takes as its given the idea that no man or nation is worth much that can’t hold two opposing concepts simultaneously. This idea comes to one’s mind repeatedly here in Spain, and counters nicely an article in yesterday’s Herald Tribune, describing the great care the European Union has taken to allow only six heads of state to speak to President Bush during his visit here, and each of them to discuss one topic only.)
We were advised to visit Pilate’s House today, because Tuesday is the day it’s open free of charge. But of course this is true only for citizens of Europe. We often Þnd this to be the case: an American passport (but for that matter also one from China or Norway or Zimbabwe) rules you out of this cultural largesse. And, of course, since the house was free to so many, it was very crowded, primarily with Spaniards.
So I stood on the edge of the crowd as it moved from room to room, looking out over a sea of dark-haired heads — little blonding here! — all at about the same height from the floor, say Þve feet six, looking rather like a flock of dark sheep, with an occasional Dutchman or German or American sticking up like a skyscraper. They say Spaniards of a certain age are all short because they were starved during their childhood, during the terrible Civil War era: but I notice that even the youngsters crowding the bars, or walking quickly by twos and threes, jabbering into their cell phones, are considerably shorter than those I’m accustomed to.
Admirable as the Casa de Pilatos is, not to mention the Þne paintings, tapestries, and furnishings in its rooms, it was the gardens, and the way they related to the building itself, that impressed us the most. A number of ground-floor rooms have large open unglazed windows looking out onto courtyards and gardens, and as you stroll these rooms and gardens things keep changing conÞguration, just as life keeps changing as you make your way along. Fountains, doves, the voices of children, murmured conversations in corners reveal the astounding silence that contains them: you can’t believe you’re just off a narrow cobblestone street winding between hard-surfaced stucco threestorey buildings.
* * *
I called this dispatch “Internet Apartment,” but that doesn’t mean we have any internet connection here. Our Þrst day, in fact, was partly devoted to Þnding a way of connecting. One after another promising lead failed to pan out: Oh no, the boss doesn’t let people connect their laptops. Sorry, the computer’s down today. Oh no, I’m afraid that place has gone out of business. No, the cafe’s closed on Mondays, and only open otherwise from four in the afternoon until eleven.
Finally I went down to the place I used a couple of years ago, whose only disadvantage is that it’s a bit of a distance away, though a pleasant enough walk, and close to a couple of bars I like, Modesto and El Toboso. So here we are back in touch again. Tomorrow, with any luck, I’ll let you know about Seville’s Museo de Bellas Artes, which I’ve wanted to see for years. In the meantime, I think I’ll see if that water has heated up yet.
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Calle Duende, Seville, Feb. 23 —
Perhaps because I grew up in the country, where I was allowed to ramble a bit on my own, and it was useful to know at any moment what direction home lay, I’m never really content unless I know which way is north. And I’ve always thought of myself as having a pretty good sense of direction, so when it fails I get unhappy. Downright anxious at times, Lindsey would say. And the fact is the Þne instrument is losing its edge, and increasingly I Þnd myself disoriented, especially in the city where the direction of shadows isn’t always handy, or at noon, or in latitudes more extreme than I’m used to, or in foggy weather.
Seville is particularly cruel, because many of the maps, and all the maps we Þnd ourselves using much of the time, are wrongly oriented. Well, not really: in fact they’re properly oriented, for they put east at the top, as was the convention for many centuries. But the convention changed long ago, and I’m used to north being at the top, and the result is that on our Þrst visit here a couple of years ago I got used to the idea of a sideways Seville, the old city on the wrong side of the river, the river flowing in the wrong direction, everything all bollocksed up.
So I’ve written E A S T prominently in the top margins of the maps, and as we walk through town I try to remember to tell myself what direction we’re headed. It doesn’t help that there are almost no parallel streets in this part of town, or that the river forms a sort of diagonal, or that few streets continue in a straight line any longer than necessary.
This contrasts with certain elements of the Spanish temperament. One of you wrote recently that you like the Spaniards for being “tough, not in a bad way, but they are very direct which I... found refreshing after Paris, certainly.”
Well, yes. Yesterday I got lost for the Þrst time: I was on an important mission, to buy tickets to a flamenco concert, and I was so intent on getting to the box ofÞce quickly that I took one wrong turn after another, and Þnally had to resort to stepping into a shop: Habla ingles? No. Um, well, okay, (switching to bad Spanish) do you know Ximenez de Enciso street?
She was gorgeous, elegantly coifed, expensively dressed, and her two friends were equal to her, and they all looked at me with a certain amount of disdain. Then she answered, her monosyllable beautifully modulated, rising patiently: sí...
Silence: and then I had to ask: donde está; where is it? She floated toward the front door of the shop, stood in the doorway, and indicated a street with her chin: Take that street, the next right, and continue straight on.
I thanked her and shambled my way out of the shop, feeling myself grow smaller and smaller as I walked away from them.
* * *
I’ve been reading, among other things, a fascinating little book by Eugenio d’Ors, Three Hours in the Prado Museum, written nearly ninety years ago and never out of print in this country. The premise is of course both stupid and brilliant — you have to be able to keep two conflicting ideas in mind simultaneously. The book is written as an engaging conversation with an ideal newcomer to the Prado, “young, intelligent; with an instinctive good taste and not confused by too much art doctrine.”
D’Ors chats enthusiastically about the pictures in the Prado, taking as his point of departure an idea he attributes to the sculptor Adolf Hildebrand, who, when studying “the problem of form” in art, decided that form always embraced two values: one architectural, the other functional — terms for which d’Ors substitutes spatial or expressive. Another kind of orientation. And d’Ors decides that painting occupies the central position among the arts, because it is uniquely balanced midway between the two values: architecture clearly crowds the spatial extreme; music the expressive.
D’Ors then strolls the Prado, Þnding Mantegna excelling at the spatial end, El Greco and Goya at the expressive, Velasquez brilliantly balancing the center. It’s a nice kind of thread to string through these galleries, offering a third, objective reference point to triangulate the usual direct picture-to-viewer statement. It’s only one way to do this, of course, but it’s clear and coherent and often gives d’Ors a chance to make a brilliant observation, as when a painting of Claude Lorrain’s recalls to him Baudelaire’s memorable lines:
Tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté,I tried carrying d’Ors along with me today in Seville’s Museum of Fine Arts, a rambling old structure climbing stairs and turning corners around three or four courtyards, with a decommissioned church in the middle to house an absorbing series of religious paintings by Murillo. The museum is heavy on the Seville school, whose stars are Murillo and Zurbaran, but it begins with a marvelous collection of 15th-century paintings and sculpture, on religious themes of course, whose depictions amount to almost photorealist portraiture.
luxe, calme, et volupté...
(Nothing here but order, beauty, light, calm, voluptuousness...)
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Calle Duende, Seville, Feb. 24 —
Don’t you think life has more purpose, a greater sense of validity, when each day has some little goal to be met, some challenge to be overcome? I think so too. I’ve already noted some of the challenges of our apartment — in case you’ve forgotten, here’s the letter I just wrote to the rental agency:
I would like to tell you how we Þnd conditions in our apartment on the calle Duende.I went out a couple of hours ago to Þnd the rubble piled up higher than usual, and more cement dust than usual swirling around the passageway and into the open kitchen door of the little restaurant across the Duende. I also found two cops, one looking a little mystiÞed, the other a little upset. I asked him if he spoke English, and when he said he didn’t I told him that I’d rented an apartado here, that esto es todo muy mal, very bad for one’s health. He agreed, with a serious look on his face, and stepped into the building that’s being renovated to have a talk with someone.
The apartment itself is very nice but there are a few problems. The toilet is not attached to the bathroom floor and it is often in danger of falling over on its side. This is very uncomfortable.
The electricity goes out if we are trying to use both the toaster and the microwave. This makes breakfast difÞcult.
There is not enough hot water to make a bath, so we have to heat water in a pan on the stove in the kitchen.
If these things were taken care of the apartment would be very nice.
BUT.
The building next door is under complete renovation. All day long we hear the noise of the workers, tractors, air hammers, and the like. Also the air is full of cement dust. We must keep the windows closed all the time.
When we walk down the Duende to arrive or leave the apartment we must step through piles of broken tiles and concrete. We must also be careful to avoid being hit by falling wet stucco as it is being put on overhead.
The situation is so bad that we have decided to go away for the weekend, from Saturday until late Monday.
Yours,
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Calle Duende, Seville, Feb. 25 —
Across the river, then, Þnally, this morning, to take a walk recommended by one of the guidebooks in the Seville quarter known as the Triana. Seville, the old city, grew up as an inland seaport on the broad Guadalquivir river, and though the river silted up so badly centuries ago that all port activities had to be moved downstream — to Seville’s regret, for gold and silver were still coming in from the Americas in those days — the river still makes an imposing presence here.
In the last century, for example, there were two world’s fairs held here, an ill-fated one in 1929 that saw some splendid national pavilions built, now being used as government ofÞces, and a more successful one in 1992, whose pavilions are being used as private corporate head-quarters for the most part, though some have been transformed into various tourist venues.
But it was not this Magic Isle, as the ’92 fairgrounds is called, but to the older Triana that we wanted to explore. Here is Seville’s oldest still-consecrated church, Santa Ana; and here is the center of Seville’s still-thriving ceramics industry, responsible for the tiles you see in almost every doorway, and the plain or fanciful Þnials gleaming in their luster glazes on the corners of so many rooftops.
After crossing the river, which is so wide and slow-moving as to be almost an endless lake, we strolled its banks for a half-mile or so, walking on tamped granite clay, enjoying the fresh air, playing a few minutes with a blackbird who cheerfully improved upon whatever I whistled to him. On the river there were a number of racing shells, most of them for solo oarsmen and -women, and an occasional tourboat churned by, its upper deck crowded with visitors whose heads all turned in unison this way and that as a voice, unheard by us, pointed out one sight or another.
We browsed the ceramics shops, of course, and found much we liked. But nicely glazed fountains are hard to carry on the airplane, and it seems more logical, if we’re going to buy such things, to buy them in Mexico. I contented myself with an interesting piece of tile I found in a dumpster. This wasn’t hard: Triana, like Seville the other side the river, is undergoing an incredible amount of renovation.
I asked a woman in a ceramics shop why. She was glazing a border tile, and I asked how many more she had to do: Muchos, muchos, she said, handing the one she’d just Þnished to her husband, who tossed it rather casually I thought onto a stack while she reached for the next. It’s a job for a building being reconstructed, she went on. Times are good; lots of people want apartments or homes or shops in Seville, and everything that’s built or rebuilt or restored is done in the traditional manner.
The activity, as I’ve mentioned earlier, is intense. You walk past 18th-century facades of threestorey buildings and suddenly realize that’s all they are, facades, braced from the front or behind, waiting for an entirely new building to take place behind them. And large plot or small, there’s likely to be amazingly deep excavation going on behind. We looked down into a hole bigger than the cathedral yesterday — I’m skipping: it was in Jerez de la Frontera, not Seville — where there will be an underground parking lot of immense proportions.
The underground parking is everywhere, under many of the plazas. This is Þne: you no longer see jumbles of autos parked in plazas, as you so often do in France and Italy — unless in the last year or two the same kind of thing is going on in those countries. Perhaps it’s a European Union mandate; or perhaps it’s subsidized by Komatsu, who seems to make all the enormous earth-moving apparatus we see everywhere.
Metros, too. They’re building one in Seville, beginning apparently with the stations; one’s going in right outside the venerable Alfonso Hotel at the Puerta de Jerez. I don’t know how they can do this without running into classical antiquity, and indeed there’s a huge dig across the avenue from the Plaza Encarnacion where what must originally have been commercial development has been transformed into archaeology.
I read the other day that the mayor of Venice, of all places, wants a subway of his own, at least to unite the airport with the old city. Because of the danger of subterranean vibration to the ancient city, built as it is on pilings in mud, the proposal is to put the Venice terminal a little offshore; perhaps people would get there by boat — in which case why not simply continue taking the boat to the airport, as is done now? The mayor says the subway will reverse Venice’s alarming loss of population, down from 250,000 to sixty thousand since World War II: but wouldn’t a subway simply enhance continued commuting, by workers, from the mainland? But this is Venetian business, and I’m in Spain.
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Speaking of rebuilding and the like, Lindsey wants me to assure you that in fact our apartment is not a dump. The toilet is loose; the hot water is scarce; the circuit-breaker blows readily: but these are minor matters. How much time do you really spend with the toilet, after all, or with hot water, compared to the amount of time you sit on a comfortable couch in a nicely decorated room, reading Michener or d’Ors? Not very much.
During the day the place is nicely lit, indirectly, by the sun. I make the breakfast we like very easily in our little kitchenette. The bed isn’t all that bad, and the apartment is beautifully situated, two minutes from the Plaza Nueva and the Ayuntamiento, Þve from the Cathedral. So don’t get the idea we’re in a dump. I guess this means: don’t take my complaints too seriously.
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And speaking of the Cathedral, it was very interesting to contrast Santa Ana with the Cathedral today. I think of all the cathedrals I’ve seen this one in Seville is by far my favorite. (Of course I may be wrong here, because I don’t really recall St. Stephen’s in Vienna well enough. That has to be revisited.) Seville’s cathedral is, Þrst of all, huge: someone famously reported that you could lose Notre Dame in it. The legend is that when it was built, six hundred years ago, the planners said “let’s build a cathedral so huge everyone will say we’re completely insane.” The ceiling, at the transept