Dawn

Dawn

Sunday, May 12, 2013

Sometimes you feel gypsies get a raw deal in Spain and you wonder why the Spanish dislike them so much, as in “I'm not a racist but I hate gypsies”. I mean, you do see them every night scavenging in the bins but this is surely something to pity, rather than criticise. And then, one day, you're driving down the hill when a car speeds straight out of the road from the local gypsy encampment, drives right in front of you, forces you to brake and then accelerates off at 50-60kph in a 30kph area, even though the driver knows there's a sharp bend 50 metres ahead where he'll have to slam on the brakes. And then you think: “Ah, yes”. As good a demonstration as you'll get of pure macho aggression. Rather negated in this case by the fact the driver had to stop for a car on the roundabout and then continue with this slow-moving car ahead of him and me behind, until we all reached the next roundabout, at the bridge. Where I briefly contemplated making a Tehran manoeuvre around both of them, to reach the bridge first. Which urge I suppressed, suggesting I may be approaching maturity at last.

All of which reminds me there was an episode involving a gypsy woman down in town yesterday. This was the old crone who used to demand money from me and then curse me when I refused. She doesn't bother with me these days but she did opportune the woman at the next table to me, who coughed up some money pretty quickly. Possibly sensing an easy touch, the crone then pushed her benefactor to have a palm-reading. When she was refused the air grew blue and the poor woman dismissed her with the words: “How evil you are!”. When the would-be palmist had gone, the woman turned to me and complained that “If you show them what you've got in your purse, they want the lot!”. Yes, I said, I know. And departed with a smile.

I believe the name Adolf has disappeared from the German nomenclature scene. And probably from that of most other countries too. But its Hispanic equivalent – Adolfo – certainly hasn't. In fact, one can even find Adolf still in use, as in the case of Adolf Todó I Rivera, a Catalan. Odd.

Gerald Brennan, of The Spanish Labyrinth fame, once gave some pertinent advice for we foreigners living here in Spain. “You must never forget”, he said, “that Spain is a nation of 35 million kings.” The problem with this is that it overstates Spain's homogeneity. As anyone who's lived here for more than 5 minute knows, Spain is not and has never been a single nation, but a 'Nation of nations'. Or at least 'nationalities'.

To be honest, I read that comment of Brennan's in an article in El País by an Englishman, John Healey. This was translated into Spanish and Google and I have put it back into English. It's a nice read and you can find it at the end of this post.

Mots Justes

have to live in the here and now. I can't remember what yesterday brought and I've no idea what tomorrow will bring,

Finally . . . Shops continue to close on a daily basis here in Pontevedra but there were two key closures recently. Firstly, that of the best-located, most successful estate agent/realtor. Secondly, that of one of the numerous health food shops that sprouted like weeds at the height of the (phoney) boom. I've little doubt that, if I were to traipse around the entire city, I'd find several more. Down in the wonderful old quarter, there are now streets where every one of the shops has closed and where the buildings have begun to deteriorate. This one – from both the bottom and the top - is to be found between the market and Veggie Square and it makes one wonder how much further this dereliction has to go and how many years it will be before the buildings are restored.




But to be more positive, here's a building that was a total windowless wreck when I first came to Pontevedra, and which I used to tell visitors could be gloriously restored. And so it has been. Though I doubt that many of the flats, if any, have been occupied.


To be even more positive, here's the Poio hillside on which I live, in the second row of houses from the top. The highest level, of course, comprises the townhouses which took six (noisy and dusty) years to build and which have been empty now for two. Because four of them, and the access road, are built on stolen land and so, as you'd expect, are illegal. By the way, the bridge in the foreground is new. Work on it was suspended for 9 months when someone discovered there was no construction licence for it. So, two astonishing things: 1. No one thought to get this, and 2. Once the need was identified, it took 9 months to get it. Even though it was a local government project.



John Healey's article: The fallen pine-tree is no longer in Malaga.

It all started with an Iberia flight from New York to Malaga in the spring of 1969. Malaga Airport was at that time a single building and a much smaller structure, whitewashed, covered with red tiles and decorated with a profusion of geraniums. The runway ended at a two-lane road and, across the road, without any obstacles to hinder the view, there was nothing but golf, the beach and the Mediterranean. In other directions you could see crop fields, a village in the distance and, beyond, a chain of old mountains, of low height, on which stood out a small fallen pine-tree, resting on a rock. Since then, for 30 years, each time on landing or taking off from Malaga, I always insisted on looking for that fallen pine-tree amidst all the dramatic changes that were being experienced by the airport and throughout the region.

The house in which I lived for the first four months I was in Spain was in this region. It was a farm called Buena Vista, near a narrow road where many villages stood in ruins. The house had in front of it a round well, sober and unadorned, and a garden guarded by cypress and lemon trees. Within the enormous wooden gate was another smaller door, and in the back yard, where we ate, there was a pink oleander. Curious mixed-nationality couples lived with children, dogs and cats. The owner of the house was a renegade American, from New York and Connecticut, a wine connoisseur, a history lover and brilliant conversationalist in English, Spanish and French. A separate building housed a dilapidated library with hundreds of Penguin books placed on roughly-assembled shelves and a beautiful edition of the works of William H. Prescott.

Among people who frequently went to the house I was a handsome Australian who had come to Spain wearing tweed jackets and neckerchief, with the intention of impersonating an English lord. In the time that I knew him, wore bracelets, tight shirts and long hair. He was usually stoned, was very clever, and everyone fondly called him Sir Donald. Another constant presence was that of Gerald Brenan, the famous Spanish scholar who in his youth had taken Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey by mule to the village where he then lived in the mountains south of Granada, and who at that time resided across the street. I had just turned 19. I left my beard grow. I read with relish. Before I went to live in France, I walked up the mountain to find the fallen pine. I sat next to it, tired and happy, surrounded by rosemary and thyme, gazing at Malaga and the sea.

Since then I have lived all over the country, in Madrid, in provincial capitals, in coastal towns and in a small mountain village. My daughter was born in Granada. The night of her birth, I met an elegant dwarf, a member of a travelling circus who was staying at my hotel, in the lobby, drinking cognac, dressed in a suit with a waistcoat. He immediately took charge of the situation. He ran into the street and stopped the little traffic that was for me to make an illegal turn. My daughter was born in a beautiful eighteenth-century hospital run by nuns, with walls coloured ochre and yellow and a courtyard filled with orange trees. A few years later it was torn down and replaced by with a horrific building of green and beige flats.

After so many years of feeling frustrated at how Spain is ignored by the US press, for which Europe always means France and Italy, now suddenly, it's in the news almost every day, for undesirable reasons. A huge number of Spaniards are out of work. Many families, unable to keep paying mortgages granted through trickery when credit was cheap, are being forced to leave their homes. The education system is as dysfunctional as ever and on top is now suffering a terrible shortage of funds. The health system, once enviable, is sinking. The problems which have always faced the country's political system have been exacerbated by the economic crisis. The Spanish do not know where to turn.

Despite this, my most recent stay in Spain has been, as usual, a delight. Although every night there are people who rummage in the garbage bags I carefully close and throw in the bin, when the morning comes, the streets are generally clean. The Spanish, both those born here and those who came from afar, remain an overwhelmingly honest, kind and expressive. They work hard, some of them very much so, but without the puritanical self-righteousness so pervasive in the United States. Some essential services continue to function, more or less. The ship works.

There are things that survive, like the smell of acacias in the late summer nights in Madrid. In the ups and downs experienced by all countries over time, there are certain constant characteristics, though, as you get old, except where they have lived through truly horrible circumstances, you tend to idealise the past. In the case of Spain, few foreigners have expressed this sentiment as well as Ernest Hemingway in the wonderful last chapter of his not-so-wonderful book Death in the Afternoon. Don't forget these words were written in 1932: "... Pamplona has changed, of course, but not as much as we've aged. I have found that if you take a drink, everything is as it was always. I know things change and I do not care . . . Let them change. We'll all be dead before things change very much and if a flood doesn't happen when we are gone, it will still be raining in the north in summer and the hawks will continue to nest in Santiago cathedral and in La Granja ... We will never return from Toledo in the middle of the night, washing the dust out with Fundador, nor will we ever experience again what happened that July night in Madrid . . . ".

During the past 43 years I have seen "disappear" in Spain too many beautiful things which will never return. The fallen pine-tree is no longer. Malaga and the Costa del Sol, ruined by greed and by urban projects fed on steroids, are unrecognisable. But there are other things that survive and make me return: the smell of acacia trees in the late summer nights of Madrid, swallows their rapid flight at dawn and dusk, jasmine climbing on a shaded patio in the hills that dominate La Herradura, swimming in a crystal cove near Tamariu when everyone is eating, walking our dog on the vast empty beach of Corrubedo after the last stragglers have left, the smell of oak and olive wood burning in the fireplace during a winter night in the Alpujarras, travelling from one province to another in which we stopped almost every village to ask at some quiet bar a for a café con leche. The children I knew years ago, who now have children.

To Gerald Brenan I owe two things. The first is that, thanks to him, I read Joyce's Ulysses in its first edition, published in Paris in 1922 by Sylvia Beach. And the second, a comment he made almost in passing during a dinner, a night I have never forgotten. "You must remember," he said, his eyes barely visible behind his thick glasses, while cigarette ash fell on the shirt, "that Spain is a nation of 35 million kings".

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