Some
good news from Pontevedra . . . A court has decided that the council
must return a parking fine because the sign about loading and
unloading was only in Gallego, the Galician language. A small victory
for those of us trying to master the national language. By which I
mean 'national' and not 'regional'.
Spain's
most famous, fatal and expensive bull has popped his hooves. He'll
now be stuffed and mounted, for the families of his victims to
admire, I guess. More here.
Someone
else who's effectively died in Spain recently is the King, Juan
Carlos. Click here for why he's very much out of favour. So much so,
in fact, that some are calling for abdication, for fear he'll bring
the Borbon-Borbon House down.
Finishing
Lewis's Voices
of the Sea
today, I was left wondering just how much of his riveting tale was
fact and how much fiction - as with that other great traveller in
Spain, George Borrow, of The
Bible in Spain
fame. In Lewis's case, the suspicions are endorsed by the fact that,
while he spent the summers of 1948, 1949 and 1950 in the (misnamed)
Spanish village of Farol, he didn't publish his account until
1984. Here's a comment from someone reviewing a biography of Lewis:-
Lewis's visits, we learn from the biography,
were made in a large Buick, in the holidaying company of his partner
of the the time and their children. You wouldn't guess this from
'Voices of the Old Sea'. Lewis was a secretive, contradictory man who
nursed his inconsistencies because they fitted his understanding of
how the world worked. And here's a reasonably brief synopsis of
the book:- 'Voices' conjures the elemental traditional life
of the village Lewis called Farol, on the eve of its destruction by
the tourist industry. This conquest was decades old by the time he
wrote the book. Farol's residents were adamantly attached to a
hardscrabble subsistence economy and a culture of atavistic paganism
still not yielding completely to Catholicism, much less to anything
called "Spain." Their cosmology was dualistic: one world
was Farol, the seaside, cat-infested village whose authority figures
were fishermen. Its eternal Other was Sort, an inland, dog-riddled
hamlet of cork farmers and other peasant landlubbers who wore shoes
rather than rope sandals (chief among Farol's superstitions was an
abhorrence of leather). As land and houses are bought up to build a
hotel, a kind of suspense builds slowly, even though the final
outcome seems obvious. And in fact it is shocking when suddenly the
villagers, once dismissive of the possibility of change, cheerfully
exterminate any private habit of life once the price became
irresistible, to be replaced with something palatable to visitors'
expectations of Spain. It's a sobering read for anyone historically
minded who has been to the Costa Brava, or any other part of Europe
extensively developed for tourism, and is tempted to think they have
an eye for what is "authentic" to the place. I
recommend it wholeheartedly.
As to whether it's all true or not, I leave you with a quotation from
Barros, cited by – of all people – the parish priest:- “Why
speak of truth or lies? It all depends on the colour of the glass we
look through.” Personally, I prefer the glass as Lewis painted it.
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