Saturday, June 2, 2012
Killiney in the morning
Grainne and Paddy say I ought to go to either the north or the south side of Dublin Bay today, as it will be a sunny day. Grainne will come to "collect" me at four o'clock, but I have time to make the trip and back in time to dress for this evening's barbeque.
The Dart, an elevated rail line, runs frequently and will get me to either the north side or the south of Dublin Bay within a half hour. There is a stop near the hotel at Lansdowne Street. Of the places I might quickly visit are Howth, on the north side, but the road out nothing to write home about. Killiney, a stop on the lines out to Greystones and Bray, on the south side of Dublin, is the place where Dublin's wealthy live, Bono of U2, for instance, has his residence in Killiney.
Ireland has for many years attracted the wealthy and famous by a tax policy that encouraged their residence. John Huston, the film director, lived for many years in Ireland, attracted by the horse racing. If you have credentials as an artist, and a substantial income, Ireland welcomes you, not taxing you on your creative product. To Killiney I will go to see what wealth looks like there.
***
I walk down Lansdowne Road towards the Aviva Stadium and find the DART station easily. Buying a card is a matter of paying 5 Euros for a hard plastic card and buying a minimum of 5 Euros worth of transit, for 10 Euros in all. The turnstiles on the South Dublin bound trains are all marked "X" for inaccessible, and only other one is open, so I go through, thinking the conductor will frank my card while I ride.
We pass Sandymount, then Sydney Parade, where cricketers play on the green. At Booterstown the sea stretches out, as flat as a plate. One of the posters on the train platform shows a photo of a young woman's head, followed by the caption, I tried to bury the heartache of my abortion, but it kept coming back.
At Blackrock, an enormous suburban park on the other side of the tracks from the seaside harbors a pair of swans sitting peacefully on the laws. After Seapoint, with its attached townhouses, you can see sailboats on the water in the distance, their sails white as table napkins.
At Salthill and Monkstown stop, the townhouses become grander. Lovely dogs gambol on the green. The Yacht Harbor, East Pier, starts there, and extends to the grounds of the white neo-classic building at Dun Laoghaire, at which point the sea wall rises and we enter a tunnel. The ticket control makes its way through the car and I hand my card to the conductor. He inserts it into his hand-held device, looks at the screen and tells me that I have -0- Euros on the card. We go back and forth about what the facts of the matter are, and finally agree that as we are both getting off at Killiney, he will check the card history, and we will see what the truth is.
At Dalkey, the sea disappears briefly, then re-emerges, seen from a height, the open sea spreading out before the eye. The next stop is Killiney, where there are some motorboats in the water, and behind them on the heights, mansions.
At the train station all is revealed to myself and the conductor: As I could not activate the card at Lansdowne Park station, it appeared as though I had no Euros on the card. Simply paying my fare is not possible, because the return will cost 4.30 Euros instead of the 2.50 the sensor would have charged me at Lansdowne had it been working.
"I'll let you off this time: just put your card through when you come back. I could find you 100 Euros for not paying, you know."
I make appropriate gestures of abasement, and I can exit the station.
At the train station a young man tells me that there is no center in Killainey, and that the only pub is up a steep hill he points out in the distance.
"Bonos' house is up at the top of the hill, to the right of the steeple", he points out. "--But you won't see him" he adds, trying to temper my disappointment. He explains that I can reach the pub by following a climbing road to the left of the train station, and I set out.
I take in the beach as I do so -it stretches out until it becomes low-lying cliffs, which stretch out to just before almost the end of the point, where there is a building that looks like a hotel. Beyond is only a squat stone building and land's end.
I walk up the hill road, beside beautifully landscaped houses with gates and stone walls and privet atop them. Pines and other trees add further cover --this is the Dublin Riviera: flowered shrubbery, palms and pines and pools on the grounds of houses named Undercliff, Undercliff Cottage, Maraviglia, Vico Cottage, and Curlews lining the way, which is called Vico Road. A sign announces a fine of one hundred and fifty Euros for not cleaning up after your dog.
I reach the Dalkey town line, where the hill slopes and the point comes into closer view. The presence of cars, parked all along the bottom of the slope, and a sign in the distance, herald more public access, although how to reach the pub at the hilltop is not apparent to me.
I ask a woman mounting the stairs from White Rock beach about the pub, but she refers me to the ice cream seller's truck. However, the woman manning the stand is Polish and doesn't know anything about where things are found in Killiney and Dalkey.
A young couple, their three children scarfing ice cream, tell me to go straight and, where the road forks, take the right, ten minutes' longer walk, but with a view of Dalkey Island.
"It's misty today. It's too bad", she says, but I find it lovely without qualification, sea and forest combined with great houses.
The grand houses continue: St. German's on my left, The Coach House and Strawberry Hill on my right. Cyclists in professional kit pedal by. The houses are becoming more modest and closer together: the hill slopes again by those called San Elmo and Ventnor, and the hotel and point come into sharper focus.
At Hawk Cliff, a determined runner, all in black, drives himself to mount the rise I am gently descending. A private house for sale at #2 is having a viewing from noon to 2 p.m. I tread the pebbled path and admire the property, a horizontal ranch house with picture windows looking out to sea. Indeed, the axis of the house-- the seating, the bedroom layout --all centers on the sea edge. Despite the sign, though, no one is there to guide prospective buyers and the curious --although a radio, broadcasting two speakers having quiet conversation, suggests someone just stepped away. I walk back out as quickly as I walked through the gate, as two cars, drawn by the sign, roll in.
I reach a fork in the road, and stop two genial elderly men for directions. Seeing me writing notes, one asks
"You're not writing something down in connection with the referendum, are you? That was over yesterday--"
Confirming his surmise, I ask for directions, which they give, but not before asking where I am from. This leads to their questioning me about who will win the presidential election in the United States in November. I later read in The Irish Times that South Dublin returned the highest percentage of voters in favor of the austerity treaty. Those with enough can always see their way to pulling their belts in.
I take the Sorrento Road towards the DART at Dalkey Village center. The houses are now on a much smaller scale, attached in pairs with a common hedge between them. I continue along the Sorrento Road towards a squat church roof I see a quarter of a mile away. Sorrento Road is now Sorrento Gardens, and the houses are all attached and small, two storied, and further down, singly. Hobbit Cottage, the name of one, sums up the road, which runs into a shopping high street. I am in Dalkey village center.
A few minutes later, sitting at the counter of the local juice bar, I read more about the referendum. Although the measure passed 60%-40%, only half of those eligible voted. Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein leader, whom I saw walking the grounds of Dublin Castle across the way from the Chester Beatty Library yesterday, and who was against the treaty, was quoted as saying,
"This is one battle in what is going to be a very, very long struggle" he says, adapting the old rallying cry of the IRA to the economic dilemma of Ireland.
***
The fairness of the Irish fascinates me. I have been told that in Australia, where immigration from Ireland has always been high, the grandchildren of original settlers, being so exposed to the sun, include fewer redheads, as the gene is being naturally selected out. In time, redheads will be fewer and fewer. This is not yet the case in Ireland, though, where the full range --from hazel-eyed, strawberry blonde, to green-eyed, pink-cheeked carrot tops, to brown-eyed gilded copper, are on display.
Then there are the light ash-brown-haired with the palest hazel eyes; or grey-eyed with dark ash brown. The black-haired, with full heads of hair, often silver prematurely, at the other end of the palette. With their exotic colorings, fine skins and largely regular features, the Irish were born to be painted.
Saturday, June 2, 2012
Friday, June 1, 2012
Friday, June 1, 2012
A Happy Turn
Memorial Day Weekend, the beginning of the American summer season, passed, without my thinking about it. Here in Dublin it is cloudy and moist, although no rain. Even so, I have my hotel umbrella, and although I had to discard three tops and my wool socks to please the check-in people in Santiago, I still have the green country jacket I bought at the Emmaus sale in Besancon.
The hotel, which is called the Roxford Lodge, is a townhouse converted to a businessman's hotel. My room is, again, tiny,but the hotel takes the prize for the most electric outlets with the least apparent risk of fire. Instead of an electrical strip, the plugs have been set into the electrical wiring, and there is one for everything. The desk (with ingeniously includes a mirror), has a printer/fax machine, a wireless internet hookup. A hair dryer is set into the wall above the printer (dry your hair while sending a fax?) while in the round window above is set a tray carved to fit its curves, on an electric kettle, a cup and saucer and the fixings for tea, including non-perishable milk.
The sauna stands next to the bed, a wooden box I first mistook for a closet. It makes for a fine clothes dryer --"Yes", I washed out my socks and underwear last night.) It has a radio and CD player and antenna sticking out of the top. Above the end of the bed is the television, and on a shelf below, the controls, along with complimentary DVDs: The Bourne Ultimatum, Die Hard 4.0, Dances With Wolves, Juno, among others. There is also a DVD about feng shui.
My room has a total of five windows, including the roundel, with its stained glass. I am in a basement apartment, looking out on the parking lot. Immediately outside my window, next to the sauna, is a bubbling brook, something bought in a garden shop and placed next to a brick archway garnished with shrubbery that comes up mid-window. It is a small space, but ingeniously designed, a garret in a basement.
I make myself some tea with the electric kettle, putting one of the remaining the tea bags without theine I brought with me right in the water to get the most tea out of one bag. After it has steeped, I pour myself a cup and help myself to the milk. The tea is awful: when I am in Dublin center (a twenty minute walk away), I will have some Irish tea from a freshly made pot.
Paddy is coming to pick me up at 8:00 p.m., and Grainne is coming in from her overnight trip to London around the same time, so we will have dinner together. Tomorrow there is a party for me, I am not sure when. It will be good to see these friendly faces again. It has been sixteen years since Bill and I made a flying visit to Dublin from London for the day, a day which started when we caught the first flight out and ended on the last flight in, a pub crawl of a day. I worked with Grainne at Greentrees, coffee shop in Rockefeller Center my last year in law school, 1985. She returned to Ireland, then moved to London, taking a job with a Turkish carpet seller named Alton, a man of phenomenal disorganization. Grainne and Paddy were living in an apartment in Bayswater, where I camped out after the Bar. I went on to Dublin and spent three weeks with her family in Ranelagh, getting to know her sister, Niamh, her mother Clare, and her father, Augustine Martin, the Yeats scholar and member of the Board of the Abbey Theatre. The next year Niamh came over and I helped her get settled and find a job --she was at my wedding. My memories of the Martins and Paddy --who is a Bolger-- are very happy ones.
***
Those memories notwithstanding, Dublin overwhelms me with the scope of its transformation in sixteen years, let alone thirty. Gone are the old bookstores on Grafton Street that served Trinity College; the Georgian revival has led to the houses off Merrion Square (one of which, #1, was where Oscar Wilde spent his childhood) becoming offices for corporations and law firms, as in London. Grafton Street is pedestiranized and full of chain stores of the sort found in every city with a claim to being "international".
I walk along the inside perimeter of the park on the opposite side of Merrion Street: it is a pleasure to do so, its cool green path coming to an end by a statue of Oscar Wilde with many of his most famous quotes. Finally, Dublin recognized his genius.
Coming into Nassau Street my eye is caught by Read's, the largest bookstore in Dublin. The postcards on sale outside are hilarious: the caption under a photo of dilapidated cottage says, "One more payment and its mine" --The Irish may be down, but they are not out, if a sense of humor is any guide. In fact, yesterday the country voted 60% in favor of an amendment to the treaty with the European Union which provides that the deficit shall not exceed 3%. Until the property bubble made millionaires and just as quickly paupers of many, the Irish always held living within your means as a virtue, the return of which may be heralded in yesterday's vote.
This incipient frugality notwithstanding, prices of things are as dear as New York, if not more. New paperback books in Read's are, even with the 25% discount, expensive. The culture of shopping has firmly entrenched itself in Ireland, judging from the number of people out looking at the shop windows early in the morning. I am not enthused about staying on another week, a feeling that a visit to the tourist office at the end of Grafton Street does little to disperse.
John, a charming agent for a family-run tour bus company tries to get me to buy a 3-day package of bus rides to the West Country, even offering me the student discount. He was a trader in Hong Kong, lost "millions" in the property market, and set up this business to keep afloat. He is smart as a whip, and I enjoy talking with him, but after the Castro Mil, I do not want to be on a long-distance bus again, ever.
I try to reach Aer Lingus on my cell phone, which I have been able to buy an Irish SIM card for. However, the airline is having problems with the computer that books reservations, and will be down for a good part of the day. I try several times before calling American Express, which has the same problem. However, the travel agent is able to tell me that I could leave Dublin any day between June 5 and June 9, although it will cost me at least $450 extra. I am reminded of a criminal law professor, Abraham Abramovsky, who once paid a taxi driver to take him from Albany to New York on a Friday evening, even though he had to be back in Albany the next Monday. "It was worth every penny", he said, in reference to the unsatisfying prospect of a weekend in Albany. Not that Dublin compares remotely, but I know the Martins have busy schedules, and limited time to spend with me. If I cannot find some activity to justify staying through to June 11, I might as well save on the hotel and come home early.
The answer to my quandary comes in my visit to the National Library of Ireland on Kildare Street. It has an incomparable Yeats collection and a new exhibit about the poet. At the entrance to the exhibit is an announcement that next Thursday there will be an all day seminar on James Joyce, focusing, as Bloomsday is nearly upon us, on "Ulysses".
While I read Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I have not tackled that work, and this might be the best possible circumstance to consider doing so. And at 30 Euros for the seven and a half hour day, the price cannot be bettered. I go to the office of the library in charge of registrations and put my name on the list, deferring payment until Tuesday, to give me time to think about the prospect,. While doing so I learn that the Dublin Literary Festival is on from June 4 through June 10. Combining the two would give my week the snap, crackle, pop that would justify the expense --particularly as a writer I have long admired, Mario Vargas Llosa, is speaking the day before I depart. If I can get a ticket, I will pay for the Joyce seminar.
I have to go to the festival office in Temple Bar, an area popular with young tourists. Taking in the tatoo parlors and the bars cheek by jowk, Temple Bar reminds me of Soho in London: a bit rough, but with its own energy. At the Theatre Festival office I am able to purchase a Vargas Llosa ticket --and a good one, in the eighth row --and my decision is made. I am also able to get a ticket for a session on James Connolly, an influential leader of the movement for Ireland's independence, and I am on the wait list for a talk by Alain de Botton on Religion for Atheists. I thought I would overlook my reservations about Edmund White because he would be interviewed by Colm Toibin, whose novel "The Master", about the late years of Henry James, I admire. However, White has had a stroke and will not be travelling, so the talk about his book "Jack White And His Friends" has been cancelled. Richard Sennett, Alice Leahy and Gavin Titley, too, were to have appeared together to discuss "Living Together --The Lost Art Of Cooperation", but one of them has taken sick as well, so the event will not materialize. I am uninterested in the W.G. Sebald celebration and screening of an accompanying film, Patience; likewise, Bosnia Twenty Years On --which would bring me up to date on a conflict I watched closely as it unfolded.
There is a seminar on Thursday evening on cultural connections between England and Ireland --always a sharp topic, especially in Ireland-- but after a day with James Joyce, the best thing might be a pint.
Tickets purchased, I discover that the Irish Film Institue is around the corner. They are showing "The Turin Horse", a Hungarian film in black and white about the day on which Nietzsche, seeing a horse cruelly beaten, descended into madness. On a lighter note, there is a new comedy from Ken Loach, The Angel's Share about two Glaswegians obsessed with single-malts. I will have more than enough to provoke my thinking over the course of the week here without having to fall into the stereotypical tourist round.
My last jaunt, at 5 p.m., before preparing to meet Paddy at eight p.m. in front of the Schoolhouse Hotel, is a walk to Saint Patrick's Church, where Jonathan Swift was Dean. The choir is rehearsing for choral evensong at 5:30 p.m. and the gift shop is closing. There are no photos of Jonathan Swift's two death masks, which are in a case in the Cathedral in the back of the pews; or any other likeness. I buy a card to memorialize my visit, read the biographical panels associated with the Dean --who, appalled at the treatment of the mentally ill in Dublin, founded the first hospital for the treatment of the mentally ill --the hospital where he was treated when he suffered the stroke that incapicitated him at seventy-five and under whose effects he languished until his death three years later.
Disappointed initially that he never was able to reach higher office in England, he came to defend, from his position in the Deanery of Dublin, the rights of the Irish, successfully defending their currency from devaluation and using his biting mockery to call attention, in A Modest Proposal, to the plight of its poor.
***
I was going to visit the homes for dogs in Dublin, and see about finding a puppy to bring home: the Irish have beautiful horses and dogs. However, while I am changing to go out to meet Paddy and Grainne, an amber and orange tabby comes to pay me a visit througb the open windows. I find her at he feet of my desk chair and put some milk in a saucer for her, which she laps up. She is very friendly and I regret having to call Desmond, the young man at reception who brought me tea to the room earlier, to ask what to do. The cat, it turns out, is one of three attached to the Roxford Lodge. Whenever anyone leaves a window open, they will come in. If I pick my new friend up and place her over the window she will find her footing outside. Indeed, she lands squarely on the window sill outside, not to say she likes it. She looks at me wide-eyed with reproach --I should have valued her magical capacity for inserting herself more.
***
Paddy picks me up in front of the Old Schoohouse Hotel. He has just dropped his youngest boy, Finn, off at a discotheque for young teenagers, from which he will be picked up at eleven. Paddy and I drive past Aviva stadium, and a new arts complex around which commercial real estate stands empty, as well as around the new docklands of Dublin, which imitate Canary Wharf in London, all luxury apartments by the river Liffey. We visit several other areas, some downmarket, which were targeted by speculators and inflated in value during the Celtic Tiger years, and now are worth much less than their mortgages. In another area, one of older houses, Paddy points out a house purchased for an astronomical sum, renovated for another, now unsaleable.
We arrive in Tenerure, where Paddy and Grainne live with their three boys: Tighe, Killian and Finn, about an hour before Grainne is due in from her flight from London. Paddy is a substitute teacher and a tutor in Dublin's schools, a job he took after spending many years commuting between London as a mechanical engineering consultant for the City's largest financial services firms. Grainne worked for a computer training consultancy, but was downsized three years ago, at which point she started her own training firm, which has been very successful. She travels several days a week, and is about to make her first training in Singapore, which will open up to her possibilities all over Asia. She has, coupled with great energy, the capacity to sleep on planes and a genuine love for her work. Paddy holds the fort down, taking care of the house and the boys, as well as nurturing their black Labrador and a dun colored Labrador puppy, both of whom have the run of the house.
It is as if we last saw each other yesterday: Grainne and Paddy remember every little detail of our times together, and I many others. They are leaving for ten days in Cadaques, returning two days after I leave, Paddy's first vacation in two years: why don't I house sit for them?
Their offer is like manna from heaven: it is not that I cannot tough it out at the Roxford Lodge, but it would be very nice to live in a house for a few days. Clare, mother of Grainne and Niamh, lives nearby, and Niamh, too is not far. I can see them, and still have time to go into Dublin. Of course, there are books everywhere, and a garden, and a refrigerator and a stove. I will have to take the bus into Dublin, but staying in Terenure, I will also get a flavor of Dubliners' lives, I would never have within the cozy confines of the Roxford Lodge. I gladly accept, and plan to settle in Sunday afternoon, after Grainne and Paddy are well on their way to Cadaques.
A Happy Turn
Memorial Day Weekend, the beginning of the American summer season, passed, without my thinking about it. Here in Dublin it is cloudy and moist, although no rain. Even so, I have my hotel umbrella, and although I had to discard three tops and my wool socks to please the check-in people in Santiago, I still have the green country jacket I bought at the Emmaus sale in Besancon.
The hotel, which is called the Roxford Lodge, is a townhouse converted to a businessman's hotel. My room is, again, tiny,but the hotel takes the prize for the most electric outlets with the least apparent risk of fire. Instead of an electrical strip, the plugs have been set into the electrical wiring, and there is one for everything. The desk (with ingeniously includes a mirror), has a printer/fax machine, a wireless internet hookup. A hair dryer is set into the wall above the printer (dry your hair while sending a fax?) while in the round window above is set a tray carved to fit its curves, on an electric kettle, a cup and saucer and the fixings for tea, including non-perishable milk.
The sauna stands next to the bed, a wooden box I first mistook for a closet. It makes for a fine clothes dryer --"Yes", I washed out my socks and underwear last night.) It has a radio and CD player and antenna sticking out of the top. Above the end of the bed is the television, and on a shelf below, the controls, along with complimentary DVDs: The Bourne Ultimatum, Die Hard 4.0, Dances With Wolves, Juno, among others. There is also a DVD about feng shui.
My room has a total of five windows, including the roundel, with its stained glass. I am in a basement apartment, looking out on the parking lot. Immediately outside my window, next to the sauna, is a bubbling brook, something bought in a garden shop and placed next to a brick archway garnished with shrubbery that comes up mid-window. It is a small space, but ingeniously designed, a garret in a basement.
I make myself some tea with the electric kettle, putting one of the remaining the tea bags without theine I brought with me right in the water to get the most tea out of one bag. After it has steeped, I pour myself a cup and help myself to the milk. The tea is awful: when I am in Dublin center (a twenty minute walk away), I will have some Irish tea from a freshly made pot.
Paddy is coming to pick me up at 8:00 p.m., and Grainne is coming in from her overnight trip to London around the same time, so we will have dinner together. Tomorrow there is a party for me, I am not sure when. It will be good to see these friendly faces again. It has been sixteen years since Bill and I made a flying visit to Dublin from London for the day, a day which started when we caught the first flight out and ended on the last flight in, a pub crawl of a day. I worked with Grainne at Greentrees, coffee shop in Rockefeller Center my last year in law school, 1985. She returned to Ireland, then moved to London, taking a job with a Turkish carpet seller named Alton, a man of phenomenal disorganization. Grainne and Paddy were living in an apartment in Bayswater, where I camped out after the Bar. I went on to Dublin and spent three weeks with her family in Ranelagh, getting to know her sister, Niamh, her mother Clare, and her father, Augustine Martin, the Yeats scholar and member of the Board of the Abbey Theatre. The next year Niamh came over and I helped her get settled and find a job --she was at my wedding. My memories of the Martins and Paddy --who is a Bolger-- are very happy ones.
***
Those memories notwithstanding, Dublin overwhelms me with the scope of its transformation in sixteen years, let alone thirty. Gone are the old bookstores on Grafton Street that served Trinity College; the Georgian revival has led to the houses off Merrion Square (one of which, #1, was where Oscar Wilde spent his childhood) becoming offices for corporations and law firms, as in London. Grafton Street is pedestiranized and full of chain stores of the sort found in every city with a claim to being "international".
I walk along the inside perimeter of the park on the opposite side of Merrion Street: it is a pleasure to do so, its cool green path coming to an end by a statue of Oscar Wilde with many of his most famous quotes. Finally, Dublin recognized his genius.
Coming into Nassau Street my eye is caught by Read's, the largest bookstore in Dublin. The postcards on sale outside are hilarious: the caption under a photo of dilapidated cottage says, "One more payment and its mine" --The Irish may be down, but they are not out, if a sense of humor is any guide. In fact, yesterday the country voted 60% in favor of an amendment to the treaty with the European Union which provides that the deficit shall not exceed 3%. Until the property bubble made millionaires and just as quickly paupers of many, the Irish always held living within your means as a virtue, the return of which may be heralded in yesterday's vote.
This incipient frugality notwithstanding, prices of things are as dear as New York, if not more. New paperback books in Read's are, even with the 25% discount, expensive. The culture of shopping has firmly entrenched itself in Ireland, judging from the number of people out looking at the shop windows early in the morning. I am not enthused about staying on another week, a feeling that a visit to the tourist office at the end of Grafton Street does little to disperse.
John, a charming agent for a family-run tour bus company tries to get me to buy a 3-day package of bus rides to the West Country, even offering me the student discount. He was a trader in Hong Kong, lost "millions" in the property market, and set up this business to keep afloat. He is smart as a whip, and I enjoy talking with him, but after the Castro Mil, I do not want to be on a long-distance bus again, ever.
I try to reach Aer Lingus on my cell phone, which I have been able to buy an Irish SIM card for. However, the airline is having problems with the computer that books reservations, and will be down for a good part of the day. I try several times before calling American Express, which has the same problem. However, the travel agent is able to tell me that I could leave Dublin any day between June 5 and June 9, although it will cost me at least $450 extra. I am reminded of a criminal law professor, Abraham Abramovsky, who once paid a taxi driver to take him from Albany to New York on a Friday evening, even though he had to be back in Albany the next Monday. "It was worth every penny", he said, in reference to the unsatisfying prospect of a weekend in Albany. Not that Dublin compares remotely, but I know the Martins have busy schedules, and limited time to spend with me. If I cannot find some activity to justify staying through to June 11, I might as well save on the hotel and come home early.
The answer to my quandary comes in my visit to the National Library of Ireland on Kildare Street. It has an incomparable Yeats collection and a new exhibit about the poet. At the entrance to the exhibit is an announcement that next Thursday there will be an all day seminar on James Joyce, focusing, as Bloomsday is nearly upon us, on "Ulysses".
While I read Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I have not tackled that work, and this might be the best possible circumstance to consider doing so. And at 30 Euros for the seven and a half hour day, the price cannot be bettered. I go to the office of the library in charge of registrations and put my name on the list, deferring payment until Tuesday, to give me time to think about the prospect,. While doing so I learn that the Dublin Literary Festival is on from June 4 through June 10. Combining the two would give my week the snap, crackle, pop that would justify the expense --particularly as a writer I have long admired, Mario Vargas Llosa, is speaking the day before I depart. If I can get a ticket, I will pay for the Joyce seminar.
I have to go to the festival office in Temple Bar, an area popular with young tourists. Taking in the tatoo parlors and the bars cheek by jowk, Temple Bar reminds me of Soho in London: a bit rough, but with its own energy. At the Theatre Festival office I am able to purchase a Vargas Llosa ticket --and a good one, in the eighth row --and my decision is made. I am also able to get a ticket for a session on James Connolly, an influential leader of the movement for Ireland's independence, and I am on the wait list for a talk by Alain de Botton on Religion for Atheists. I thought I would overlook my reservations about Edmund White because he would be interviewed by Colm Toibin, whose novel "The Master", about the late years of Henry James, I admire. However, White has had a stroke and will not be travelling, so the talk about his book "Jack White And His Friends" has been cancelled. Richard Sennett, Alice Leahy and Gavin Titley, too, were to have appeared together to discuss "Living Together --The Lost Art Of Cooperation", but one of them has taken sick as well, so the event will not materialize. I am uninterested in the W.G. Sebald celebration and screening of an accompanying film, Patience; likewise, Bosnia Twenty Years On --which would bring me up to date on a conflict I watched closely as it unfolded.
There is a seminar on Thursday evening on cultural connections between England and Ireland --always a sharp topic, especially in Ireland-- but after a day with James Joyce, the best thing might be a pint.
Tickets purchased, I discover that the Irish Film Institue is around the corner. They are showing "The Turin Horse", a Hungarian film in black and white about the day on which Nietzsche, seeing a horse cruelly beaten, descended into madness. On a lighter note, there is a new comedy from Ken Loach, The Angel's Share about two Glaswegians obsessed with single-malts. I will have more than enough to provoke my thinking over the course of the week here without having to fall into the stereotypical tourist round.
My last jaunt, at 5 p.m., before preparing to meet Paddy at eight p.m. in front of the Schoolhouse Hotel, is a walk to Saint Patrick's Church, where Jonathan Swift was Dean. The choir is rehearsing for choral evensong at 5:30 p.m. and the gift shop is closing. There are no photos of Jonathan Swift's two death masks, which are in a case in the Cathedral in the back of the pews; or any other likeness. I buy a card to memorialize my visit, read the biographical panels associated with the Dean --who, appalled at the treatment of the mentally ill in Dublin, founded the first hospital for the treatment of the mentally ill --the hospital where he was treated when he suffered the stroke that incapicitated him at seventy-five and under whose effects he languished until his death three years later.
Disappointed initially that he never was able to reach higher office in England, he came to defend, from his position in the Deanery of Dublin, the rights of the Irish, successfully defending their currency from devaluation and using his biting mockery to call attention, in A Modest Proposal, to the plight of its poor.
***
I was going to visit the homes for dogs in Dublin, and see about finding a puppy to bring home: the Irish have beautiful horses and dogs. However, while I am changing to go out to meet Paddy and Grainne, an amber and orange tabby comes to pay me a visit througb the open windows. I find her at he feet of my desk chair and put some milk in a saucer for her, which she laps up. She is very friendly and I regret having to call Desmond, the young man at reception who brought me tea to the room earlier, to ask what to do. The cat, it turns out, is one of three attached to the Roxford Lodge. Whenever anyone leaves a window open, they will come in. If I pick my new friend up and place her over the window she will find her footing outside. Indeed, she lands squarely on the window sill outside, not to say she likes it. She looks at me wide-eyed with reproach --I should have valued her magical capacity for inserting herself more.
***
Paddy picks me up in front of the Old Schoohouse Hotel. He has just dropped his youngest boy, Finn, off at a discotheque for young teenagers, from which he will be picked up at eleven. Paddy and I drive past Aviva stadium, and a new arts complex around which commercial real estate stands empty, as well as around the new docklands of Dublin, which imitate Canary Wharf in London, all luxury apartments by the river Liffey. We visit several other areas, some downmarket, which were targeted by speculators and inflated in value during the Celtic Tiger years, and now are worth much less than their mortgages. In another area, one of older houses, Paddy points out a house purchased for an astronomical sum, renovated for another, now unsaleable.
We arrive in Tenerure, where Paddy and Grainne live with their three boys: Tighe, Killian and Finn, about an hour before Grainne is due in from her flight from London. Paddy is a substitute teacher and a tutor in Dublin's schools, a job he took after spending many years commuting between London as a mechanical engineering consultant for the City's largest financial services firms. Grainne worked for a computer training consultancy, but was downsized three years ago, at which point she started her own training firm, which has been very successful. She travels several days a week, and is about to make her first training in Singapore, which will open up to her possibilities all over Asia. She has, coupled with great energy, the capacity to sleep on planes and a genuine love for her work. Paddy holds the fort down, taking care of the house and the boys, as well as nurturing their black Labrador and a dun colored Labrador puppy, both of whom have the run of the house.
It is as if we last saw each other yesterday: Grainne and Paddy remember every little detail of our times together, and I many others. They are leaving for ten days in Cadaques, returning two days after I leave, Paddy's first vacation in two years: why don't I house sit for them?
Their offer is like manna from heaven: it is not that I cannot tough it out at the Roxford Lodge, but it would be very nice to live in a house for a few days. Clare, mother of Grainne and Niamh, lives nearby, and Niamh, too is not far. I can see them, and still have time to go into Dublin. Of course, there are books everywhere, and a garden, and a refrigerator and a stove. I will have to take the bus into Dublin, but staying in Terenure, I will also get a flavor of Dubliners' lives, I would never have within the cozy confines of the Roxford Lodge. I gladly accept, and plan to settle in Sunday afternoon, after Grainne and Paddy are well on their way to Cadaques.
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Thursday, May 31, 2012
The Heights of Santiago
I do make it to the Cathederal in time to hear lauds, and participate in the Mass that follows. It is in honor of the feast of the Visitation, when Mary, newly pregnant, went to see her cousin Elizabeth who, despite being childless and past child-bearing age, had conceived a child who would be John the Baptist.
Eight priests sing lauds and another four men --the sacristan, the homilist, the celebrant and a man in white robes assist at Mass. it is my last opportunity to give Santiago a hug, so I queue on the line. In front of me are a group of French tourists, taking photos and filming with a videocamera despite the sign stating that to do so is not permitted.
I have come to think that the compulsive taking of photographs is a sign of the anxiety of modern man. We want something we want something to hold onto to preserve whatever specialness we thought an event held, but by the time we get home and print the photos around they are insufficient to the purpose, and we are let down. I see in my own journey, coming to a close, a similar dilemma. Have I been transformed by the trip or have I merely been in motion?
At the end of the Mass I walk over to Archbishop Gelmirez' palace for my last contact with the Cathedral, the tour of its banquet hall, interior walkways and rooftops. The rooftops are called cubiertas, and they are stepped, because the Cathedral was a defensive redoubt against invasion by the Moors, the Visigoths and the Vikings, all of whom waged campaigns in Gaicia. The purpose of building a stepped roof was to permit the Cathederal to be defended more effecively than if soldiers could only defend from the ramparts. From the cubiertas all the rest of the Cathederal can be seen, including the two towers shaped like ziggurats. All of Santiago, too can be seen, as well as the countryside beyond.
The tour guide is extremely knowledgeable and adds a few facts to my knowledge about the Cathederal. The very large fob attached to the rope at the end of the reel from which the botafumeiro swings is called an alcachofa, the Spanish word for artichoke; the swinging of the botafumeiro on days other than the most holy days, is arranged by the making of a donation to the Cathedral of three hundred Euros. Also, with regard to the Cathedral bells, on Good Friday, the bells did not ring. Instead, the Cathedral decided to install a large carraca in one of the towers --a wooden rattle, whose grinding sound was deemed more appropriate to the solemnity of the Crucifixion than bells.
The tour over, I have a quick lunch and start to walk to the hotel with forty minutes before a taxi arrives to take me to the airport. However, two middle-aged women, pilgrims from Brazil doing the Camino Portugues starting from Oporto, ask me for directions to the Seminario Menor next to the Dominican convent of the sisters of Belvis, from whom I bought the cookies. They are a very long way from thre, and I have time and know how to get there directly, so I guide them there. The younger one of the two is sick with a bad sore throat and is having difficulty moving. The older one follow me, but at one point, just two streets before they would have arrived at the point where they could descend rua da Trompa and reach their destination, they fall back, and I lose them.
It is a moment worthy of the magical realism of South America: one minute I am taking two women pilgrims to a Dominican convent in an old part of Santiago, the next they have vanished. --Of I have gone too fast for them, which turns out to be the case. They have lost me, and I them: I find them getting directions from a woman who is passing by on her way to do an errand. I take the sick woman by the hand and gently walk her the two blocks left. I point out the convent and the Seminario Menor in the distance and tell them to follow the slope of the road: at its end is their destination. They give me weak smiles and go on. Soon they will be relieved of their distress.
I go to the hotel, take the taxi and get to the airport twenty-five minutes before check-in is to start. However, most of the passengers for the four-twenty-five flight are already on line. They have been waiting for the Spanish Aer Lingus personnel, who only start working at 2:30 p.m. When they come to me, they take my suitcase, but tell me my knapsack is too bulky, and I am obliged to discard clothes I wore on the Camino. Ultimately, though I get on the plane with my knapsack and my bag of books, no worse the triage.
The flight to Dublin is smooth, and I have a lively conversation with Sinead, a teacher of anatomy at the Medical School. Arriving in Dublin, I have the sense that I have already started my re-entry to the world I left behind, with its fast pace and attendant tensions. I go to the bus stop for the Air Coach, which I have been told to take, and there I see the airport chapel where I attended Mass the Sunday I flew in from New York and waited to change planes for Rome when I began my journey three months ago in March; where I asked to use the lavatory so I could freshen up a bit before the last leg of my journey to Rome, where Manuel Otero Mari picked me up, and I started my trek.
But I must move on to Dublin. There is a bus to take me to Ballsbridge, and I check into my hotel quickly. My room features a built in sauna for one person and a whirlpool bath. The American Embassy is a few blocks down from my hotel on Northumberland Street, as are many professional offices. I might be in Washington, D.C. from the look of the park across the street and the low-height modern offices.
The hotel recommends a bistro called Roly's, across the street from the embassy for dinner. And again, I feel as though I have already started my re-entry: the restaurant has two cookbooks to its name, it is throbbing with customers and the food is much, much more complicated than anything I have eaten for a long time, at least since the lunch I ate at Bofinger my last day in Paris. I have a leek soup, a lamb pie and an apple strudel, all good, but all enriched by the addition of butter or cream. The apple tart I order comes with vanilla sauce and ice cream and is more pastry and sugar than apple. In Santiago I had green apples from the fruit bowl the Altair set aside for guests to snack on. I am wondering where the nearest grocery store in Dublin 4 is, a neighborhood where houses are listed at prices of well over a million dollars.
I know I want to see the Yeats exhibition at the National Library, and visit Saint Patrick's Cathedral, where Jonathan Swift was the Dean; and I want to see my friends Grainne and Patrick and Niamh and Paul, but I am already feeling as though I want to cut short my stay in Dublin. The dinner at Roly's whose cookbooks emphasize the reasonableness of their prices, has cost me sixty-five dollars. Twelve days of this and I will blow my trip budget.
The Heights of Santiago
I do make it to the Cathederal in time to hear lauds, and participate in the Mass that follows. It is in honor of the feast of the Visitation, when Mary, newly pregnant, went to see her cousin Elizabeth who, despite being childless and past child-bearing age, had conceived a child who would be John the Baptist.
Eight priests sing lauds and another four men --the sacristan, the homilist, the celebrant and a man in white robes assist at Mass. it is my last opportunity to give Santiago a hug, so I queue on the line. In front of me are a group of French tourists, taking photos and filming with a videocamera despite the sign stating that to do so is not permitted.
I have come to think that the compulsive taking of photographs is a sign of the anxiety of modern man. We want something we want something to hold onto to preserve whatever specialness we thought an event held, but by the time we get home and print the photos around they are insufficient to the purpose, and we are let down. I see in my own journey, coming to a close, a similar dilemma. Have I been transformed by the trip or have I merely been in motion?
At the end of the Mass I walk over to Archbishop Gelmirez' palace for my last contact with the Cathedral, the tour of its banquet hall, interior walkways and rooftops. The rooftops are called cubiertas, and they are stepped, because the Cathedral was a defensive redoubt against invasion by the Moors, the Visigoths and the Vikings, all of whom waged campaigns in Gaicia. The purpose of building a stepped roof was to permit the Cathederal to be defended more effecively than if soldiers could only defend from the ramparts. From the cubiertas all the rest of the Cathederal can be seen, including the two towers shaped like ziggurats. All of Santiago, too can be seen, as well as the countryside beyond.
The tour guide is extremely knowledgeable and adds a few facts to my knowledge about the Cathederal. The very large fob attached to the rope at the end of the reel from which the botafumeiro swings is called an alcachofa, the Spanish word for artichoke; the swinging of the botafumeiro on days other than the most holy days, is arranged by the making of a donation to the Cathedral of three hundred Euros. Also, with regard to the Cathedral bells, on Good Friday, the bells did not ring. Instead, the Cathedral decided to install a large carraca in one of the towers --a wooden rattle, whose grinding sound was deemed more appropriate to the solemnity of the Crucifixion than bells.
The tour over, I have a quick lunch and start to walk to the hotel with forty minutes before a taxi arrives to take me to the airport. However, two middle-aged women, pilgrims from Brazil doing the Camino Portugues starting from Oporto, ask me for directions to the Seminario Menor next to the Dominican convent of the sisters of Belvis, from whom I bought the cookies. They are a very long way from thre, and I have time and know how to get there directly, so I guide them there. The younger one of the two is sick with a bad sore throat and is having difficulty moving. The older one follow me, but at one point, just two streets before they would have arrived at the point where they could descend rua da Trompa and reach their destination, they fall back, and I lose them.
It is a moment worthy of the magical realism of South America: one minute I am taking two women pilgrims to a Dominican convent in an old part of Santiago, the next they have vanished. --Of I have gone too fast for them, which turns out to be the case. They have lost me, and I them: I find them getting directions from a woman who is passing by on her way to do an errand. I take the sick woman by the hand and gently walk her the two blocks left. I point out the convent and the Seminario Menor in the distance and tell them to follow the slope of the road: at its end is their destination. They give me weak smiles and go on. Soon they will be relieved of their distress.
I go to the hotel, take the taxi and get to the airport twenty-five minutes before check-in is to start. However, most of the passengers for the four-twenty-five flight are already on line. They have been waiting for the Spanish Aer Lingus personnel, who only start working at 2:30 p.m. When they come to me, they take my suitcase, but tell me my knapsack is too bulky, and I am obliged to discard clothes I wore on the Camino. Ultimately, though I get on the plane with my knapsack and my bag of books, no worse the triage.
The flight to Dublin is smooth, and I have a lively conversation with Sinead, a teacher of anatomy at the Medical School. Arriving in Dublin, I have the sense that I have already started my re-entry to the world I left behind, with its fast pace and attendant tensions. I go to the bus stop for the Air Coach, which I have been told to take, and there I see the airport chapel where I attended Mass the Sunday I flew in from New York and waited to change planes for Rome when I began my journey three months ago in March; where I asked to use the lavatory so I could freshen up a bit before the last leg of my journey to Rome, where Manuel Otero Mari picked me up, and I started my trek.
But I must move on to Dublin. There is a bus to take me to Ballsbridge, and I check into my hotel quickly. My room features a built in sauna for one person and a whirlpool bath. The American Embassy is a few blocks down from my hotel on Northumberland Street, as are many professional offices. I might be in Washington, D.C. from the look of the park across the street and the low-height modern offices.
The hotel recommends a bistro called Roly's, across the street from the embassy for dinner. And again, I feel as though I have already started my re-entry: the restaurant has two cookbooks to its name, it is throbbing with customers and the food is much, much more complicated than anything I have eaten for a long time, at least since the lunch I ate at Bofinger my last day in Paris. I have a leek soup, a lamb pie and an apple strudel, all good, but all enriched by the addition of butter or cream. The apple tart I order comes with vanilla sauce and ice cream and is more pastry and sugar than apple. In Santiago I had green apples from the fruit bowl the Altair set aside for guests to snack on. I am wondering where the nearest grocery store in Dublin 4 is, a neighborhood where houses are listed at prices of well over a million dollars.
I know I want to see the Yeats exhibition at the National Library, and visit Saint Patrick's Cathedral, where Jonathan Swift was the Dean; and I want to see my friends Grainne and Patrick and Niamh and Paul, but I am already feeling as though I want to cut short my stay in Dublin. The dinner at Roly's whose cookbooks emphasize the reasonableness of their prices, has cost me sixty-five dollars. Twelve days of this and I will blow my trip budget.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
May 30 2012
The Museum, the road rally and the sun
The sun breaks out in the afternoon, and with it come the tour groups: lots of pilgrims from Ireland, just in from Tipperary, groups accompanied by a priest or priests. At this time of the year Irish pilgrims come en masse, and flights back and forth fill up months in advance. I am certain to be flying to Dublin with a planeload of pilgrims, priests and nuns.
I pass the time in the room taking care of details of tomorrow's departure, then walk over to the Cathedral Museum at the side of the main facade. As I have been on a pilgrimage, I pay 3 Euros, instead of 5. The museum has been modernized since I was here last: it now features camera-driven glass doors that open automatically, leading to an area displaying archaeological finds, as well as damaged sections of the Romanesque parts of the Cathedral, preserved. The signal piece is the Choir of the Romanesque church, which has been painstakingly rebuilt using reconstituted pieces of the missing segments. This labor of the workshop of Maestro Mateo, who was charged with completing the works begun earlier and bringing the Cathedral to completion and dedication on April 21, 1211, includes heads of holy figures, each individualized, carved above the Choir seats. The Compostelan Romanesque is known for its playfulness: saints smile, animals have funny expressions. The woman who had to kiss her lover's head twice a day after his beheading, is part of the winding decoration of what was once one of the Cathederal's supporting columns.
The Museum is part of the Cathedral, so it is possible to visit the Cathedral cloister. Not home to any religious order, it is simply an interior courtyard to the side of which lie the changing rooms for the priests. The Treasury reveals the Cathedral's treasures: bejeweled monstrances, carvings in ivory, bas reliefs known as cornucopias:
religious scenes elaborately hammered in silver and adorned with silver flowers and leaves.
The library holds, along with its many rare books, the original of the botafumeiro. On the topmost floor there is an exterior gallery that looks out on the square and offers a wonderful view Santiago's roofs and the countryside beyond. Although, in another example of the challenge to the spiritual world posed by the material, half of the Praza del Obradoiro is full of classic cars --a Rolls Royce, a Stutz Bearcat, and others. A road rally from Gijon to Bayonne is taking place, and stopping in Santiago: the only square large enough to park all the participants' cars for the night is the Cathedral's.
The tapestry rooms are on the other side of the exterior gallery. The tapestries, Flemish and Spanish, were the 1811 gift of Don Pedro de Acuna (tilde) y Malvar, Canon of the Cathedral. The tapestries from Flanders feature mythological scenes of heroic proportions. but perhaps more significant artistically are a number of panels for which Goya drew the cartoons. These were woven at the Royal Workshop and the Workshop of Santa Barbara. Shown with Goya's written descriptions of the subject of his cartoons --which can be seen at the Prado in Madrid-- they remind us that Goya's eye rejected nothing, that it was catholic in its reach, capturing daily life around him unflinchingly. One panel depicts a gypsy woman walking with her inamorato, who takes umbrage at the proffer of a flower from a seated man. Another takes in guileless boys playing at soldier. Another depicts rough and ready men, armed with pistols, protecting a cache of tobacco from bandits. Goya looks life straight in the face and finds it beautiful in all its messy glory. That is why he is the most Spanish of all painters, the closest to the life of his times as it was lived at all levels of society.
My tour of the museum over, I ask the guard if there is not another section to see. If I make a reservation, I can use my museum ticket to obtain a discount to see Archbishop Gelmirez' palace attached to the Cathedral. To do so I have pass the central stairs of the Praza de Obradoiro next to it, mount the stairs to the Palace door. The young woman at the entrance tells me that I can come tomorrow at a few minutes of eleven a.m. and be admitted. The end of the visit includes a trip to the topmost parts of the towers of the Cathedral, which should be something to see.
If I can I will get to the Cathedral in time to hear lauds, the mid-morning chant, which is sung, and then go over to the Gelmirez palace. That should give me enough time to wrap up packing and leave for the airport by 2:00 p.m., in more than enough time to complete the check-in for the 4:20 p.m. flight to Dublin. The visit will be my farewell to Santiago.
The Museum, the road rally and the sun
The sun breaks out in the afternoon, and with it come the tour groups: lots of pilgrims from Ireland, just in from Tipperary, groups accompanied by a priest or priests. At this time of the year Irish pilgrims come en masse, and flights back and forth fill up months in advance. I am certain to be flying to Dublin with a planeload of pilgrims, priests and nuns.
I pass the time in the room taking care of details of tomorrow's departure, then walk over to the Cathedral Museum at the side of the main facade. As I have been on a pilgrimage, I pay 3 Euros, instead of 5. The museum has been modernized since I was here last: it now features camera-driven glass doors that open automatically, leading to an area displaying archaeological finds, as well as damaged sections of the Romanesque parts of the Cathedral, preserved. The signal piece is the Choir of the Romanesque church, which has been painstakingly rebuilt using reconstituted pieces of the missing segments. This labor of the workshop of Maestro Mateo, who was charged with completing the works begun earlier and bringing the Cathedral to completion and dedication on April 21, 1211, includes heads of holy figures, each individualized, carved above the Choir seats. The Compostelan Romanesque is known for its playfulness: saints smile, animals have funny expressions. The woman who had to kiss her lover's head twice a day after his beheading, is part of the winding decoration of what was once one of the Cathederal's supporting columns.
The Museum is part of the Cathedral, so it is possible to visit the Cathedral cloister. Not home to any religious order, it is simply an interior courtyard to the side of which lie the changing rooms for the priests. The Treasury reveals the Cathedral's treasures: bejeweled monstrances, carvings in ivory, bas reliefs known as cornucopias:
religious scenes elaborately hammered in silver and adorned with silver flowers and leaves.
The library holds, along with its many rare books, the original of the botafumeiro. On the topmost floor there is an exterior gallery that looks out on the square and offers a wonderful view Santiago's roofs and the countryside beyond. Although, in another example of the challenge to the spiritual world posed by the material, half of the Praza del Obradoiro is full of classic cars --a Rolls Royce, a Stutz Bearcat, and others. A road rally from Gijon to Bayonne is taking place, and stopping in Santiago: the only square large enough to park all the participants' cars for the night is the Cathedral's.
The tapestry rooms are on the other side of the exterior gallery. The tapestries, Flemish and Spanish, were the 1811 gift of Don Pedro de Acuna (tilde) y Malvar, Canon of the Cathedral. The tapestries from Flanders feature mythological scenes of heroic proportions. but perhaps more significant artistically are a number of panels for which Goya drew the cartoons. These were woven at the Royal Workshop and the Workshop of Santa Barbara. Shown with Goya's written descriptions of the subject of his cartoons --which can be seen at the Prado in Madrid-- they remind us that Goya's eye rejected nothing, that it was catholic in its reach, capturing daily life around him unflinchingly. One panel depicts a gypsy woman walking with her inamorato, who takes umbrage at the proffer of a flower from a seated man. Another takes in guileless boys playing at soldier. Another depicts rough and ready men, armed with pistols, protecting a cache of tobacco from bandits. Goya looks life straight in the face and finds it beautiful in all its messy glory. That is why he is the most Spanish of all painters, the closest to the life of his times as it was lived at all levels of society.
My tour of the museum over, I ask the guard if there is not another section to see. If I make a reservation, I can use my museum ticket to obtain a discount to see Archbishop Gelmirez' palace attached to the Cathedral. To do so I have pass the central stairs of the Praza de Obradoiro next to it, mount the stairs to the Palace door. The young woman at the entrance tells me that I can come tomorrow at a few minutes of eleven a.m. and be admitted. The end of the visit includes a trip to the topmost parts of the towers of the Cathedral, which should be something to see.
If I can I will get to the Cathedral in time to hear lauds, the mid-morning chant, which is sung, and then go over to the Gelmirez palace. That should give me enough time to wrap up packing and leave for the airport by 2:00 p.m., in more than enough time to complete the check-in for the 4:20 p.m. flight to Dublin. The visit will be my farewell to Santiago.
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Weighing the luggage
I take up the offer of the pharmacist from whom I bought a nail clipper yesterday and take my large backpack and my rolling suitcase there to be weighed.The pharmacist, a short-haired, clean-faced woman in her sixties is not at all put out. Indeed, she makes me get on the scale with the backpack to assure that the weight is as accurate as possible. The backpack is slightly under the limit, and the suitcase slightly over. If I get to the airport first thing, I can hopefully sort out any problem there: in my experience, arriving early for check in finds the personnel in a more forgiving frame of mind than later, when time pressure brings out the worst in everyone.
I return to the hotel with the bags and grab a coffee at Girasol down the street. While I wait for it to be prepared, I eye the back page of El Correo de Galicia. It seems that the adult son of Cayetana, Duchess of Alba, the most titled aristocrat in Europe, was visiting Santiago yesterday. He enjoyed tapas outdoors at a restaurant, Abastos 2.0, next to the Mercado de Abastos. Curious what sort of place a Duke might eat in, I head there.
Surprisingly, it is down another street from Praza de Certvantes, which I have crossed tens of times this trip. In Santiago, you are always going around in circles, but also always stumbling on sections of the city you never knew existed. I find the market, which is at its busiest now, in the late morning. Abastos 2.0 is an unpretentious spot, a glassed in rectangle of stone with a small, narrow kitchen on one side, and tables on the other, along with outdoor tables. Judging from the backpackers enjoying late-morning tapas and beer, its popularity is not limited to aristocrats.
I return to the hotel to write a note of appreciation to Alberto Conde, whose columns in La Voz de Galicia I enjoyed so while here. I found the offices of the newspaper, but the receptionist had no idea who he was. It is said that Spaniards are reluctant to acknowledge the gifts of those among them, preferring to find fault than to celebrate, so I hope to offer a countervailing gesture. Fortunately, the clipping has the newspaper's e-mail, so I am able to compose my homage and forward it in care of the editorial offices.
As to the point about the mindset of Spaniards, I would add my perception that self-importance is the national vice. At numerous points, I have found myself in conversation in Spanish with one or another person who took it upon themselves to declare a thing this way or that. At the police station I had to obtain a ticket for the queue from a woman sitting next to the machine. When I told her what I needed, she told me that unless I had a death certificate no one would give me anything, and that she wanted to make sure that I understood that before I sat down and waited. In fact, when I spoke with Jose Manuel de la Casa Vadillo, the supervisor of the D.N.I. section, I got all that I needed in the way of information to solve my problem.
This morning, when I was at the pharmacist's, a woman was waiting for a prescription to be filled. She overheard the pharmacist and I talking after the luggage was weighed, making the conversion from kilos into pounds. She threw herself in to the discussion.
"But you are fine --you only have 22 kilos, and you say the limit is 44--"
She had not recognized that a kilo is 2.3. pounds, and that I was slightly over the limit. The pharmacist explained her error to her, at which point the woman retracted her opinion and took the opposite point of view.
Another example: The priest who celebrated Mass in the Capilla de la Communion of the Cathedral yesterday morning came in a few minutes before the hour. He began preparing the altar table for the celebration. Seeing me sitting in the empty chapel, he asked me why I was not standing. I could not entirely hear what he was saying, so I stood up to hear him better and said "What? What?" --at which point he recognized that I was not from Santiago, smiled and said nothing more --although by then I was standing. The priest is apparently used to having Mass goers get to their feet when he enters a chapel, and took my recumbent posture for disrespect.
After Mass, in another part of the Cathedral, a homeless man was sitting against one of the pillars. The security guard came over, said a few words, and returned to where the man was sitting. Bellowing, the guard said,
"The doctor says 'Do you need medical assistance?'" --I walked away so as not to be in the way. Leaving the Cathedral a few minutes later, I saw emergency personnel impatiently ordering the man --by now on a stretcher-- to blow air into a plastic bag. "Blow! You have to blow!"
And a final example: I entered the crypt of Saint James the Apostle to pay my respects earlier in the week during a point when there were few people in the area. I came to say a prayer and knelt before the grill, but not before spying a middle aged man in casual dress standing behind me. He was about to take a picture in contravention of the request that the area --like that behind the altar where the Saint's bust lies-- lie beyond the reach of cellphones, videocameras and other photographic devices.
Feeling self-important myself perhaps, I told the man photographs of the crypt were not allowed. Whereupon, he let loose with a torrent of argument:
"Where does it say that? What do you know? Who are you to tell me I cannot photograph here-- Stick to your prayer and leave me alone." I said my prayer and left the crypt, leaving the man, posing his photograph.
If, as I thought after a month there, every man is a king in France, in Spain, he is an emperor.
Weighing the luggage
I take up the offer of the pharmacist from whom I bought a nail clipper yesterday and take my large backpack and my rolling suitcase there to be weighed.The pharmacist, a short-haired, clean-faced woman in her sixties is not at all put out. Indeed, she makes me get on the scale with the backpack to assure that the weight is as accurate as possible. The backpack is slightly under the limit, and the suitcase slightly over. If I get to the airport first thing, I can hopefully sort out any problem there: in my experience, arriving early for check in finds the personnel in a more forgiving frame of mind than later, when time pressure brings out the worst in everyone.
I return to the hotel with the bags and grab a coffee at Girasol down the street. While I wait for it to be prepared, I eye the back page of El Correo de Galicia. It seems that the adult son of Cayetana, Duchess of Alba, the most titled aristocrat in Europe, was visiting Santiago yesterday. He enjoyed tapas outdoors at a restaurant, Abastos 2.0, next to the Mercado de Abastos. Curious what sort of place a Duke might eat in, I head there.
Surprisingly, it is down another street from Praza de Certvantes, which I have crossed tens of times this trip. In Santiago, you are always going around in circles, but also always stumbling on sections of the city you never knew existed. I find the market, which is at its busiest now, in the late morning. Abastos 2.0 is an unpretentious spot, a glassed in rectangle of stone with a small, narrow kitchen on one side, and tables on the other, along with outdoor tables. Judging from the backpackers enjoying late-morning tapas and beer, its popularity is not limited to aristocrats.
I return to the hotel to write a note of appreciation to Alberto Conde, whose columns in La Voz de Galicia I enjoyed so while here. I found the offices of the newspaper, but the receptionist had no idea who he was. It is said that Spaniards are reluctant to acknowledge the gifts of those among them, preferring to find fault than to celebrate, so I hope to offer a countervailing gesture. Fortunately, the clipping has the newspaper's e-mail, so I am able to compose my homage and forward it in care of the editorial offices.
As to the point about the mindset of Spaniards, I would add my perception that self-importance is the national vice. At numerous points, I have found myself in conversation in Spanish with one or another person who took it upon themselves to declare a thing this way or that. At the police station I had to obtain a ticket for the queue from a woman sitting next to the machine. When I told her what I needed, she told me that unless I had a death certificate no one would give me anything, and that she wanted to make sure that I understood that before I sat down and waited. In fact, when I spoke with Jose Manuel de la Casa Vadillo, the supervisor of the D.N.I. section, I got all that I needed in the way of information to solve my problem.
This morning, when I was at the pharmacist's, a woman was waiting for a prescription to be filled. She overheard the pharmacist and I talking after the luggage was weighed, making the conversion from kilos into pounds. She threw herself in to the discussion.
"But you are fine --you only have 22 kilos, and you say the limit is 44--"
She had not recognized that a kilo is 2.3. pounds, and that I was slightly over the limit. The pharmacist explained her error to her, at which point the woman retracted her opinion and took the opposite point of view.
Another example: The priest who celebrated Mass in the Capilla de la Communion of the Cathedral yesterday morning came in a few minutes before the hour. He began preparing the altar table for the celebration. Seeing me sitting in the empty chapel, he asked me why I was not standing. I could not entirely hear what he was saying, so I stood up to hear him better and said "What? What?" --at which point he recognized that I was not from Santiago, smiled and said nothing more --although by then I was standing. The priest is apparently used to having Mass goers get to their feet when he enters a chapel, and took my recumbent posture for disrespect.
After Mass, in another part of the Cathedral, a homeless man was sitting against one of the pillars. The security guard came over, said a few words, and returned to where the man was sitting. Bellowing, the guard said,
"The doctor says 'Do you need medical assistance?'" --I walked away so as not to be in the way. Leaving the Cathedral a few minutes later, I saw emergency personnel impatiently ordering the man --by now on a stretcher-- to blow air into a plastic bag. "Blow! You have to blow!"
And a final example: I entered the crypt of Saint James the Apostle to pay my respects earlier in the week during a point when there were few people in the area. I came to say a prayer and knelt before the grill, but not before spying a middle aged man in casual dress standing behind me. He was about to take a picture in contravention of the request that the area --like that behind the altar where the Saint's bust lies-- lie beyond the reach of cellphones, videocameras and other photographic devices.
Feeling self-important myself perhaps, I told the man photographs of the crypt were not allowed. Whereupon, he let loose with a torrent of argument:
"Where does it say that? What do you know? Who are you to tell me I cannot photograph here-- Stick to your prayer and leave me alone." I said my prayer and left the crypt, leaving the man, posing his photograph.
If, as I thought after a month there, every man is a king in France, in Spain, he is an emperor.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Evening in Santiago
I have never known Santiago de Compostela, the town: I have been here at least five times, not counting these last three visits in two weeks: 1957, 1965, 1969, 1985 and 1996. Yet all I remember of the visits is the area around the Cathedral. Yet Santiago, being the seat of a medieval Cathedral, and a place of pilgrimage, had many religious orders associated with it, each with their own building and community, some of which are still active. Among these are the cloistered Dominican sisters of Belvis, the Convent of las Mercedarias the Convento La Salle, and the Order of Saint Clare. As to orders for men, the Jesuits still teach at the Colexio San Francisco Javier, diocesan priests at the Seminario Menor, a school for boys, and distinct from El Seminario Mayor, which trains priests. All these institutions have their own buildings, most of them built in Baroque style in the 17th and 18th centuries, like much of Santiago, including the Cathedral.
Santiago also has many chapels, each with its own personality. The Capilla de las Animas, next to the Arquivo Universitario Historico, the university archives, is particularly striking: it features a polychrome plaque in the architrave of the exterior: nine long-haired men --they resemble the Apostles at the Last Supper, with the fifth being the tallest, the others in descending height making up four on each side of him. Their throats and shoulders and the top of their chests are exposed, and their hands are clasped together in a prayerful gesture. Yet their bodies are being consumed by flames as tall as wheat sheaves, a field of fire.
These are not apostles filled with the Holy Ghost, nor are they souls in Hell. They are souls in Purgatory, and, like Hell, it is hot there. The modern mind no longer contemplates Purgatory in the sense the builders of the chapel did, if we believe at all, we live with the dichotomy of Heaven and Hell, and nothing in between. The medieval mind, however, recognized gradations between the seventh circle of Hell, and the "seventh heaven" as we speak of it today. Santiago is full of reminders of this kind, that indicate that human beings looked at existence on earth very differently from the way we do. On the Cathedral facade on Praza das Praterias, for another instance, is a sculpted scene in relief of a woman kissing the lips of a head severed from its body. Legend has that it was the head of her lover, whom her husband --who killed him-- obliged her to kiss twice a day. Not a mere folk tale, the founders of the Cathedral --for the Praterias facade is one of only two that retain their original Romanesque form intact-- saw some edifying value in illustrating this grisly story, raising it to parable status by commissioning the sculptures.
There are lighter sides to Santiago as well: it is a University town, of one of the oldest universities in the world, founded in 1495, around the time Ferdinand and Isabella sent Columbus to discover a new route to the Indies, and built the Hostal. It is also a center of Galician folk culture, featuring Galician musicians playing hammered dulcimers and especially bagpipes in the high-ceilinged passageway that leads to the Plaza del Obradoiro. The sound of a piper playing a cheerful jig (and there is a different one every hour of the day), can be heard from a distance, the music floating through the air and adding a light note to the natural solemnity of the Cathedral. When I hear the piper's strains, I want to dance --and have.
A classical guitarist playing in another corner, offers an alternative musical form. And the mimes dressed like Santiago as a pilgrim, with varying degrees of success --one actually has the soulful eyes and rustic manner associated with the Apostle in his pilgrim garb, and attracts many who want their picture taken with him-- all make for a peaceful experience in the vicinity of the Cathedral. Not that this is always the case, as my entry into Santiago the day of the bicycle race demonstrated, but generally, the Plaza is a place of peace and celebration for those who made the trip to this remote place in Europe.
I go there this evening, after having gone so far as to tour Santiago's modern shopping district --not too much different from those anywhere else, and therefore, just as well avoided. There will not be too many more opportunities to visit the Saint, and I want to know more about the chapel behind the altar, la Capilla de la Confession, where the German pilgrims heard Mass this morning. There is a seven-thirty Mass, the last of the day, so I head over to the Cathedral.
There is a large group of Italian pilgrims visiting with their priest. The church is full, but I squeeze into the one remaining seat in the front pew, next to a couple who will take the collection, on one side, and two Brazilian visitors on the other. The highlight of the Mass (apart from the sacrament, of course), is the swinging of the censer, the botafumeiro.
The botafumeiro, about fifty inches tall, and made of silver, takes eight men to raise. The sacristan places the incense on the already hot coals, which catch and start to smoke as the men, pulling together, start raising the censer with one abrupt pull, followed by a pause, and another, each pull widening the ambit and height of the censer's swing. Starting out small, the eight men widen the censer's arc until it swings out almost the full length of the transept, over the heads of the faithful seated in the transept pews, until, at the climax of the spectacle, it just misses the ceiling, before the decline in centrifugal force brings it slowly down to earth in a few more swings. One of the eight grabs the censer by one of the chains attached to its parts, the remaining force swinging him around once, at which point the censer is once more at rest. Another man removes the ashes of the incense, and another pulls on the rope to lift the botafumeiro back to its stationery position above the altar table.
The botafumeiro is not raised predictably: some holy days it is, others not. The censer was raised this evening as a courtesy to the pilgrims who came from Italy with their pastor. Its raising is a bit of a circus act --and the presiding priest noted that whenever it occurs, word gets around in advance, and the Cathedral fills up, particularly during the last half of the Mass. Think of the perfume rising as a sign of the Holy Spirit he said, and I am reminded of Indian temples and similar references to incense as the material manifestation of the spirit. In fact, when I look at the altar piece of the Cathedral of Santiago, I see an elaborateness of gold decoration comparable only to the many-layered elaborations of Hindu temples and the churrigueresque, the Mexican Baroque (which reaches its apogee in the Viceregal Chapel in the Monastery of Tepozotlan). The multiple layers of gold decoration on all of these are like encrustations --it is almost impossible to tell where one motif ends and another begins, they are so piled on top of one another. Of the three gilded elaborations, Santiago has the largest and most fully realized angels, though.
And, although Saint Peter's in Rome may be more architecturally significant, and more externally representative of Roman Catholicism, Santiago represents something else, something perhaps more compelling. Santiago represents the life of the spirit, and its promise. Because everyone who goes on a pilgrimage to Santiago hopes that, at the end, whatever the rigors of the journey, at its end, our inner restlessness will be becalmed, if only temporarily. This is not the same thing as a vacation from the workaday, it is the hope that our souls will find peace and our incompleteness completion.
Evening in Santiago
I have never known Santiago de Compostela, the town: I have been here at least five times, not counting these last three visits in two weeks: 1957, 1965, 1969, 1985 and 1996. Yet all I remember of the visits is the area around the Cathedral. Yet Santiago, being the seat of a medieval Cathedral, and a place of pilgrimage, had many religious orders associated with it, each with their own building and community, some of which are still active. Among these are the cloistered Dominican sisters of Belvis, the Convent of las Mercedarias the Convento La Salle, and the Order of Saint Clare. As to orders for men, the Jesuits still teach at the Colexio San Francisco Javier, diocesan priests at the Seminario Menor, a school for boys, and distinct from El Seminario Mayor, which trains priests. All these institutions have their own buildings, most of them built in Baroque style in the 17th and 18th centuries, like much of Santiago, including the Cathedral.
Santiago also has many chapels, each with its own personality. The Capilla de las Animas, next to the Arquivo Universitario Historico, the university archives, is particularly striking: it features a polychrome plaque in the architrave of the exterior: nine long-haired men --they resemble the Apostles at the Last Supper, with the fifth being the tallest, the others in descending height making up four on each side of him. Their throats and shoulders and the top of their chests are exposed, and their hands are clasped together in a prayerful gesture. Yet their bodies are being consumed by flames as tall as wheat sheaves, a field of fire.
These are not apostles filled with the Holy Ghost, nor are they souls in Hell. They are souls in Purgatory, and, like Hell, it is hot there. The modern mind no longer contemplates Purgatory in the sense the builders of the chapel did, if we believe at all, we live with the dichotomy of Heaven and Hell, and nothing in between. The medieval mind, however, recognized gradations between the seventh circle of Hell, and the "seventh heaven" as we speak of it today. Santiago is full of reminders of this kind, that indicate that human beings looked at existence on earth very differently from the way we do. On the Cathedral facade on Praza das Praterias, for another instance, is a sculpted scene in relief of a woman kissing the lips of a head severed from its body. Legend has that it was the head of her lover, whom her husband --who killed him-- obliged her to kiss twice a day. Not a mere folk tale, the founders of the Cathedral --for the Praterias facade is one of only two that retain their original Romanesque form intact-- saw some edifying value in illustrating this grisly story, raising it to parable status by commissioning the sculptures.
There are lighter sides to Santiago as well: it is a University town, of one of the oldest universities in the world, founded in 1495, around the time Ferdinand and Isabella sent Columbus to discover a new route to the Indies, and built the Hostal. It is also a center of Galician folk culture, featuring Galician musicians playing hammered dulcimers and especially bagpipes in the high-ceilinged passageway that leads to the Plaza del Obradoiro. The sound of a piper playing a cheerful jig (and there is a different one every hour of the day), can be heard from a distance, the music floating through the air and adding a light note to the natural solemnity of the Cathedral. When I hear the piper's strains, I want to dance --and have.
A classical guitarist playing in another corner, offers an alternative musical form. And the mimes dressed like Santiago as a pilgrim, with varying degrees of success --one actually has the soulful eyes and rustic manner associated with the Apostle in his pilgrim garb, and attracts many who want their picture taken with him-- all make for a peaceful experience in the vicinity of the Cathedral. Not that this is always the case, as my entry into Santiago the day of the bicycle race demonstrated, but generally, the Plaza is a place of peace and celebration for those who made the trip to this remote place in Europe.
I go there this evening, after having gone so far as to tour Santiago's modern shopping district --not too much different from those anywhere else, and therefore, just as well avoided. There will not be too many more opportunities to visit the Saint, and I want to know more about the chapel behind the altar, la Capilla de la Confession, where the German pilgrims heard Mass this morning. There is a seven-thirty Mass, the last of the day, so I head over to the Cathedral.
There is a large group of Italian pilgrims visiting with their priest. The church is full, but I squeeze into the one remaining seat in the front pew, next to a couple who will take the collection, on one side, and two Brazilian visitors on the other. The highlight of the Mass (apart from the sacrament, of course), is the swinging of the censer, the botafumeiro.
The botafumeiro, about fifty inches tall, and made of silver, takes eight men to raise. The sacristan places the incense on the already hot coals, which catch and start to smoke as the men, pulling together, start raising the censer with one abrupt pull, followed by a pause, and another, each pull widening the ambit and height of the censer's swing. Starting out small, the eight men widen the censer's arc until it swings out almost the full length of the transept, over the heads of the faithful seated in the transept pews, until, at the climax of the spectacle, it just misses the ceiling, before the decline in centrifugal force brings it slowly down to earth in a few more swings. One of the eight grabs the censer by one of the chains attached to its parts, the remaining force swinging him around once, at which point the censer is once more at rest. Another man removes the ashes of the incense, and another pulls on the rope to lift the botafumeiro back to its stationery position above the altar table.
The botafumeiro is not raised predictably: some holy days it is, others not. The censer was raised this evening as a courtesy to the pilgrims who came from Italy with their pastor. Its raising is a bit of a circus act --and the presiding priest noted that whenever it occurs, word gets around in advance, and the Cathedral fills up, particularly during the last half of the Mass. Think of the perfume rising as a sign of the Holy Spirit he said, and I am reminded of Indian temples and similar references to incense as the material manifestation of the spirit. In fact, when I look at the altar piece of the Cathedral of Santiago, I see an elaborateness of gold decoration comparable only to the many-layered elaborations of Hindu temples and the churrigueresque, the Mexican Baroque (which reaches its apogee in the Viceregal Chapel in the Monastery of Tepozotlan). The multiple layers of gold decoration on all of these are like encrustations --it is almost impossible to tell where one motif ends and another begins, they are so piled on top of one another. Of the three gilded elaborations, Santiago has the largest and most fully realized angels, though.
And, although Saint Peter's in Rome may be more architecturally significant, and more externally representative of Roman Catholicism, Santiago represents something else, something perhaps more compelling. Santiago represents the life of the spirit, and its promise. Because everyone who goes on a pilgrimage to Santiago hopes that, at the end, whatever the rigors of the journey, at its end, our inner restlessness will be becalmed, if only temporarily. This is not the same thing as a vacation from the workaday, it is the hope that our souls will find peace and our incompleteness completion.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
The Police Station
I awake thinking that I must take advantage of being in Santiago again to really take in the historic buildings in addition to the Cathedral, and that it wouldn't hurt to go to Mass there again, after the pro forma celebration in Esteiro Sunday. Then I remember that I am supposed to go to the police station as early as possible to see about obtaining some substitute for my father's Carnet.
Remembering what the priest said the day before about the active life and the contemplative life, I decide to go to the Cathedral first. It is 8:30 a.m. and there is a Mass for German pilgrims going on in a chapel inside and behind the main altar. It is inaccessible except by previous arrangement with the diocese. The door is gilded bronze with panels in bas relief depicting events in the life of Christ. I would love to be able to go inside and get a closer look, as the Mass has ended, but the chapel is closed. I catch the eye of a woman, a German pilgrim collecting liturgy books and indicate that I would like to go inside, but she waves her finger at me in the negative. Ah, well
I walk towards the main altar's pews and sit in the forwardmost pew to study the altar: Santiago the Moorslayer emerges on horseback from the top of the altarpiece, below he appears again in his guise as pilgrim. At the front of the church he is seen in glory, and his figure appears again on the Cathedral facades. I attend Mass --which is said by another old school priest --bald and formal-- in the Communion Chapel to the side of the main altar. The chapel altarpiece is relatively plain, bathed in gold. When communion is given, it is at the altar rail, although the priest only administers it two by two. Once done, I leave the Cathedral and walk over to the police station.
Here, all my conceit and my impatience are revealed in their fullness. I take a number and set about to wait. My number is A312. The "A" distinguishes me from those with a "G" next to the number, which indicates that they have made an appointment on line or by telephone before coming by. After 30 minutes I am called to the desk of a tall young man with an angular face and glasses.
I explain that my father left Spain in 1945 and that he has no Carnet, that he never returned to Spain. Then he would not have one, because the Carnet only came into existence in 1951, says the young man. Perhaps there was another document that was used instead, a different form --but you have to order that from the Registro Civil in Madrid. To do that you have to speak to our supervisor --and he points to an empty office to the side of the open plan desks where he and his colleagues are working.
"He will be here in a momentino", he says, using the Galician diminutive for a little while.
That little while is more like an hour, during which I roil with agitation. I think that the man --Jose Manuel, they tell me his name is-- has returned several times: first come two men --one of whom looks more Irish than Spanish-- who look more like detectives than bureaucrats, but enter his office and start touching everything. Then in comes a serious-looking man carrying a computer keyboard. I start talking to him about my problem, but he tells me that I am not who he is looking for, and he goes behind the office with the other men. After another ten minutes Jose Antonio-- for that is actually his name, comes into his office, a fair-skinned, light-haired, blue-eyed, well-dressed, poised, intelligent servant of the Spanish state. He immediately puts me at ease, asking me to sit down to explain my situation.
The problem is that there is no Carnet, although he can request one, which will result in a declaration from Madrid that it does not exist. However, that will not prove that the Antonio Bouzas Bouzas in whose name the Muros and Esteiro parcels appear, is my father. In any event, to make that request, Jose Antonio will need:
My father's death certificate;
My father's birth certificate;
My birth certificate;
My marriage certificate--
All so that I can establish my right to ask that the public record in Madrid be checked. If I do that, Jose Antonio will mail me what he receives in response to his request, the declaration of nullity of the existence of the Carnet.
That, however, will not prove the ownership of the parcels by Antonio Bouzas Bouzas, my father.
Well, Jose Antonio says, once we have the document from Madrid, I can speak with the Catastro, and verify for them that there is no other Antonio Bouzas Bouzas listed in the records who came from the Muros and Outes townships, which should satisfy the Catastro.
He gives me his e-mail address, phone number and full name: Jose Antonio de la Casa Vadilla, a name to conjure with. I tell him I will send him an e-mail from my hotel this afternoon, and that I look forward to working with him.
--I just hope that there is no Antonio Bouzas Bouzas other than my father between Muros and Outes.
The Police Station
I awake thinking that I must take advantage of being in Santiago again to really take in the historic buildings in addition to the Cathedral, and that it wouldn't hurt to go to Mass there again, after the pro forma celebration in Esteiro Sunday. Then I remember that I am supposed to go to the police station as early as possible to see about obtaining some substitute for my father's Carnet.
Remembering what the priest said the day before about the active life and the contemplative life, I decide to go to the Cathedral first. It is 8:30 a.m. and there is a Mass for German pilgrims going on in a chapel inside and behind the main altar. It is inaccessible except by previous arrangement with the diocese. The door is gilded bronze with panels in bas relief depicting events in the life of Christ. I would love to be able to go inside and get a closer look, as the Mass has ended, but the chapel is closed. I catch the eye of a woman, a German pilgrim collecting liturgy books and indicate that I would like to go inside, but she waves her finger at me in the negative. Ah, well
I walk towards the main altar's pews and sit in the forwardmost pew to study the altar: Santiago the Moorslayer emerges on horseback from the top of the altarpiece, below he appears again in his guise as pilgrim. At the front of the church he is seen in glory, and his figure appears again on the Cathedral facades. I attend Mass --which is said by another old school priest --bald and formal-- in the Communion Chapel to the side of the main altar. The chapel altarpiece is relatively plain, bathed in gold. When communion is given, it is at the altar rail, although the priest only administers it two by two. Once done, I leave the Cathedral and walk over to the police station.
Here, all my conceit and my impatience are revealed in their fullness. I take a number and set about to wait. My number is A312. The "A" distinguishes me from those with a "G" next to the number, which indicates that they have made an appointment on line or by telephone before coming by. After 30 minutes I am called to the desk of a tall young man with an angular face and glasses.
I explain that my father left Spain in 1945 and that he has no Carnet, that he never returned to Spain. Then he would not have one, because the Carnet only came into existence in 1951, says the young man. Perhaps there was another document that was used instead, a different form --but you have to order that from the Registro Civil in Madrid. To do that you have to speak to our supervisor --and he points to an empty office to the side of the open plan desks where he and his colleagues are working.
"He will be here in a momentino", he says, using the Galician diminutive for a little while.
That little while is more like an hour, during which I roil with agitation. I think that the man --Jose Manuel, they tell me his name is-- has returned several times: first come two men --one of whom looks more Irish than Spanish-- who look more like detectives than bureaucrats, but enter his office and start touching everything. Then in comes a serious-looking man carrying a computer keyboard. I start talking to him about my problem, but he tells me that I am not who he is looking for, and he goes behind the office with the other men. After another ten minutes Jose Antonio-- for that is actually his name, comes into his office, a fair-skinned, light-haired, blue-eyed, well-dressed, poised, intelligent servant of the Spanish state. He immediately puts me at ease, asking me to sit down to explain my situation.
The problem is that there is no Carnet, although he can request one, which will result in a declaration from Madrid that it does not exist. However, that will not prove that the Antonio Bouzas Bouzas in whose name the Muros and Esteiro parcels appear, is my father. In any event, to make that request, Jose Antonio will need:
My father's death certificate;
My father's birth certificate;
My birth certificate;
My marriage certificate--
All so that I can establish my right to ask that the public record in Madrid be checked. If I do that, Jose Antonio will mail me what he receives in response to his request, the declaration of nullity of the existence of the Carnet.
That, however, will not prove the ownership of the parcels by Antonio Bouzas Bouzas, my father.
Well, Jose Antonio says, once we have the document from Madrid, I can speak with the Catastro, and verify for them that there is no other Antonio Bouzas Bouzas listed in the records who came from the Muros and Outes townships, which should satisfy the Catastro.
He gives me his e-mail address, phone number and full name: Jose Antonio de la Casa Vadilla, a name to conjure with. I tell him I will send him an e-mail from my hotel this afternoon, and that I look forward to working with him.
--I just hope that there is no Antonio Bouzas Bouzas other than my father between Muros and Outes.
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