Sunday, May 13, 2012
Irun to Santiago de Compostela

Morning comes, and with it the urgency of making the 8:45 a.m. train to Santiago. I have gone through my things, deciding that I will leave behind two French magazines and the summary of the trial of Marie-Antoinette, having finished it on yesterday's train. I hope to be able to give the reading matter to someone who will apprecate it. There is a young woman, Ines, who works the bar at the Undaribia. Lively, petite, with a haircut tailored specifically to the lines of heart-shaped face, a kind of mullet with bangs that taper to a peak at the point between her eyes. She is perky and energetic: even if she doesn't read French, she probably knows someone who does. I take the elevator to the lobby with my items in tow. I also need a strong coffee, which I would like to enjoy while I complete packing..

I take the elevator to the lobby, settle my bill and carry over the bag of books. Sure enough, Inez reads French. When I mention the book about Marie-Antoinette, she mentions that she was just in Pairs and that she will enjoy the story of the trial particularly. I order a coffee, which she says I can take to the room and leave there. Missions accomplished, I return to finish packing, have my coffee and circulate back to the lobby ready to go.

At 7:45 a.m. promptly, the taxi arrives. Packed, I sit in the back and observe in connection with the taxi's punctuality, how Spain has changed.

"For the better, or the worse?" responds the taxi driver.

"The problem with a question like that, is that you will get a straight answer from me," I offer, testing the waters.

"Well--"

"Spain was a country where the older generation sacrificed for the younger. In the hotel there is a large group of senior citizens on a subsidized holiday. The Spanish government works with the tourism industry to make available these sort of trips at a low price. Wonderful for those retired, but now when the government wants everyone to pull in their belts-- everyone has lost the sense of sacrificing for future generations --the same is true in the America. Here in the Basque country however, at least the area seems prosperous, the Basques having, perhaps a better sense of the cost of things than the average Spaniard."

The taxi driver allows me this arrogant observation, responding,

"True, the economy here has been good. But even here we feel the effects of unemployment. Three years ago it was at -0-, when it is said that the normal level is 2%. Now we are at 8%, and the national average is 21%."

"--And among those 18-25, 45%."

We need not continue this melancholy conversation, because I have arrived at the train station. Here, unlike the Gare Montparnasse, there are station personnel behind the ticket counter windows, and railroad workers milling about, smoking cigarettes, every one of them, and talking.

There is a train to Madrid's Chamartin station leaving ahead of the Santiago train on Track 6. I have to wait a half an hour, so settle myself outside where I can watch the passengers boarding the Madrid train. Two frisky young woman are being seen off by two young men, standing on the other side of the divider between those leaving and those staying. The young women kiss and laugh with their boyfriends until a minute or two before the train leaves, then rush off It is 8:25 when the train doors close and a minute later the train pulls away, with the Santiago train pulling in right after.

There is a ticket inspection inside the station, so I return and queue briefly, have my ticket stamped and make my way to the second class Car #3. A group of French men and woman, perhaps walking part of the Chemin de Saint Jacques, come forward with their knapsacks and enter the car after me. They are senior citizens, two couples, with a pair of seats behind each other. Seeing that the car is empty, they quickly appropriate the set of four seats directly in front of me. They set to chattering right away, one of them observing that she studied Spanish for two years at the lycee, but that she knows nothing of the language. Watching the green landscape pass by may be more interesting than overhearing. France is an old country with a fine intellectual tradition that continues to the present day, but not every Frenchman embodies that history.

As the train moves off, a conductor passes through the car distributing earphones for the movies that can be watched from the overhead screens, boxes a good six feet away from the seats. The film, The Lincoln Lawyer, with Matthew MacConnaughey, is of some years back. The train is old and rickety, as is the conductor, a man with a long and untrimmed beard and a uniform that has seen years of use. From the window, the green hills roll by.

***
Today it is a year that my husband died, suddenly, at home, in bed, a pulmonary embolism robbing him of breath and life in four minutes. All of it taking place before my eyes. Whatever I do for the rest of my life, the grief of the loss will never leave me.

He had the softest, most beautiful skin, unmarred by adolescent ravages or scars. The nape of his neck was hairless and sensitive to the touch, as were his ears, especially the lobes. While he had become portly in middle-age, his legs remained long and graceful, leading up to small buttocks that belied the belly on the other side . His shoulders were narrow and his chest covered with the same blond down that covered his legs. His hands were fine, with long, tapering fingers and small nails, and virtually hairless. His face was round, almost moon-faced, with a deep dimple in his chin, a small mouth and mustache just covering the upper lip. His hair was white blond as a child, then a light honey color, then a slightly darker brown, which the sun would lighten in the summer. He never went grey, never lost his hair. Wrinkles never changed his looks. He wore glasses, which heightened the impression of intelligence his broad forehead, with its widows peak, gave. There was almost always a freshness about him.


When he walked into a room, people smiled to see him. The reason was that he was accepting of each individual as he was, and he very, very rarely had anything negative to say about anyone --which is not to say that he made no judgments, just that he reserved them to himself. He was not given to violent reactions, but careful ones. His sense of humor brightened any company, although he was the most serious of men in his deliberations. Untalkative, he could listen to a group of colleagues or friends belabor a topic, then offer a pithy, witty comment. On account of his calm silence, strangers were often perplexed by encounters with him at the beginning, then would realize he had been following all along.

He was American, and although he loved traveling in Europe, presented with the chance to meet Princess Margaret at a reception in London, moved away from her purview, so that he would not be obliged to bow: he didn't think Americans should show signs of deference to royalty, our country having rejected monarchy and abolished all aristocratic privileges.

He was not midway past his fifty-sixth year when he died. The mourning was substantial: parents, sisters, in-laws, cousins, classmates, friends, colleagues, shopkeepers, employees, felt the loss. Many said they did not know him well, but felt a great pleasure in his company. There is something about the sudden death of a person who has not lived out the full account of the years we thought would be allotted him, that freezes forever the image of the person, never allowing them to decline. We are familiar with the phenomenon when we think of the famous, died young: Princess Diana will always be the beautiful thirty-seven year old (?) whose coltish legs dangled over the platform of the yacht on which she spent her last Mediterranean holiday in August in the year of her death. Similarly, Bill will always be the impeccably dressed professional on work time, the ordinary man smoothly indifferent to his appearance when left to himself, each image masking the totality of the whole.

O, Weep for Lycidas, for he is dead

wrote John Keats in the elegy, composed in memory of a friend drowned. If only it were possible to drown the grief.

***

We pass Vittoria, then Medina del Ebro, Burgos Rosa de Lima. The landscape reverts to flatland. We are traversing the meseta, the tableland of northern Spain. The treeless fields, the uncultivated land, bisected in places by roads, must be brutal to hike across in summer. Yet last year, according to the Pilgrim's Office in Santiago de Compostela, almost a quarter of a million people walked, bicycled or rode on horseback through all or part of it.

The signs of Spain's housing boom are everywhere: recently built developments, each in its own style, found both n the towns and the suburbs. These are not architectural jewels, just places to live. The banks lent to build, the buyers borrowed to buy. While Spain's banks have been largel solvent, this week the government announced that it would step in to take over [ ] a major bank in difficulties. There have been protests against the austerity cuts the new, conservative government of Manuel Rajoy, must implement to stem the tide of the country's financial collapse, but no violence.

***

It is 1:15 p.m.: I have been on the train five and a half hours, with almost another seven to go. We are arriving in Palencia, a city I was in twenty-two years ago in 1985. My sister had made friends with a wealthy family from there, working as a translator. They were visiting New York City to obtain special treatment for their eight year old son, who had been in a coma for four years. The boy had been playing by the family swimming pool, when, unobserved, he fell into the water. He had been in a vegetative state since then. In New York, the family learned new techniques for physical stimulation of his muscles, in the hope of his return to consciousness one day. Some griefs are greater than others.


When I visited Palencia for a day as a guest of this family I remember that they took me to Bar Lennon, a popular local watering hole. Inside the small lounge, over the bar was a bust of John Lennon, sculpted in black stone by a local artist. Like the Zappafest [] in Bad Doberan, it is the celebration of a cultural figure outside his native context. Yet a Bar Lennon in Madrid would not seem half as strange as the one in Palencia, because Palencia, like Bad Doberan, is a provincial town, out of the mainstream of the cosmopolitan, where one would think the local would have priority over the foreign.

The strangest example of this paradox in my experience, was a visit to a restaurant high in the Mexican sierra, where a cousin took me when I visited, also in 1985. The cousin was driving my husband and I from Puebla, near Mexico City, to Veracruz. He kept insisting that we would have a wonderful seafood lunch at this place in the mountains, halfway to Veracruz. Dubious, we kept our own counsel. However, the restaurant in the mountains did indeed feature seafood, and it was excellent, although we were the sole diners. The only jarring note was that we sat across from a massive painting done by a local artist, of Adolf Hitler, standing at the head of a table around which were gathered his officers.

***

2:10 p.m.: We have reached Leon. This is where many pilgrimages start, 281 kilometers to the east of Santiago. The most well supplied route to Santiago, the Camino Frances, has five major stops from here: Rabanal del Camino, Villafranca, Triacastela, Palas do Rei, and finally, Santiago. Many pilgrim groups include a priest who says Mass daily. There are also historic churches to see. Near the refugios, the low-priced hostels where pilgrims with a credencial can stay, there are also restaurants offering a "pilgrim's menu", a simple and cheap meal, catering to pilgrims, who --whether they are making the walk for religious, cultural or other reasons-- are usually budget travelers.

The train picks up speed after we leave Leon. It is easy to see why many pilgrimages start here, the countryside is prettier than in the first part of the Camino, there are more houses in the traditional Spanish style --roofs tiled with terracotta--- and it is not so far. The sky, which was blanketed in clouds and fog from Irun, is now wide-open and blue. An occasional bank of hills breaks up the landscape.

In Irun, I heard Basque spoken everywhere. It sounds a bit like Greek, with its clicking consonants. Here, the first strains of Gallego, the Galician dialect, are heard. Gallego is a lilting language, related to Portuguese, but softer. In the Franco era, none of the dialects of the regions of Spain --of which there are five (Basque, Catalan, Galician, Malloquin, Valencian)-- could be spoken, let alone published in. This was one way Franco tried to impose national unity. With his death in 1975, all the restrictions fell, and the regions were given a large degree of autonomy, partially funded by the national government. So all the dialects became subjects of study in the elementary schools, and newspapers in the local languages sprang up, expanding the scope of the speech. Modern speakers of Galician, as a result, speak an academically sanctioned version of the language; whereas my cousins in Spain all learned the language from their parents, such as it was. As a result of the country's economic crisis, the degree to which the national government will continue to fund such regionalist programs is in doubt: indeed, the local governments have overspent their budgets to a large degree, and there will have to be cuts there, too.

A simple example of this free-spending is what happened when I called the civil registry from my home in Manhattan to obtain a copy of my father's birth certificate. In the past, I would have had to travel to the local registry to obtain a certified copy of the form, which is necessary to establish my right to a Spanish passport, among other purposes. In contrast to my parents' day, the registry bureaucrat I spoke to quickly found my father's entry in the computer records. He would mail it to me, he said. The cost? Nothing. --But I live in the United States-- What is your address?

A new wealth tax has been enacted to try to find the money to balance Spain's budget. Those from Spanish families resident abroad with a little home in their ancestor's village will be surprised to know that many of them are now subject to a tax on their world-wide assets, such is the need for funds of the government, which can no longer be generous.

Galicia, perhaps more than any other region in Spain, is the gateway to the Americas. First of all, it is the westernmost point in the country, with Finisterre being the most western point in the western most region. Galicia overhangs Portugal, so no other region in Spain can compete for the title. On account of the rocky earth (granite three inches below the soil), and a land-distribution system, minifundio, that broke up family holdings into smaller and smaller pieces between family members,, farming was never a source of prosperity. Ocean fishing was more lucrative, although at greater risk of life. Which explains why of all Spanish regions, outmigration from Galicia has been historically highest. So many Gallegos moved to Argentina at the turn of the century that the word became a synonym for anyone of Spanish descent. Cubans, too, claim many Galician ancestors as do other South Americans and Spanish-speaking Caribbeans. New York, too, once laid a claim to an entirely Galician neighborhood, centered around West 14th Street in Manhattan. It's remnants are still located on that main street.

Foolowing Franco's death and up until the recent financial crisis however, Galicia was a prosperous region, a breakthrough for one of Spain's poorest areas. Galicians had a reputation for being taciturn and tight with a dollar, the natural consequence of a hard-scrabble life. They too, however, have become reconciled to consumer society: one of spain's most profitable lines of clothing, Zara, is a Galician concern, successfully implementing just-in-time inventory controls and other management techniques to maximize its profits. No longer do women wear black forever when a close family member dies (it can be an inexpensive choice), they drink and smoke just as men do, and they dye their hair, all things that were not done in most of Spain before 1975, when the destape --the uncorking of Spain's post-dictatorship culture-- began.

To give an example of how restricted life was during the Franco era, when I was eleven years old, my parents spent the summer in Galicia, visiting relatives. A popular actress, Sarita Montiel, had just released a film, La Violetera, a kind of Spanish May Fair Lady. It was breaking all records at the theatres --poster paint signs on the marquees of cinemas featured paintings of Sarita's head and the title, underneath was written Prohibido A Menores De 18 Anos. This romantic film, with absolutely no sexual content, could not be seen in movie theatres by anyone under eighteen. Anyone who has ever seen a Pedro Almodovar film, will appreciate how mores in the country have changed. Notwithstanding, the rate of domestic violence in Spain remains the highest in Western Europe, as the shiner visible under the makeup of the telephone salesperson I met in Irun would suggest. Spain is still a macho country, although women work outside the home in large numbers, and exceptional women hold Cabinet positions in the administrations of both the leading parties.

***
The train ride to Santiago is, if not my longest --the two-day trip from Bad Doberan to Hamburg to Tirolo di Merano may have earned that distinction-- my last train ride in Europe this journey, a milestone reached. I write as I travel to Santiago to pass the time, and to record the moment, knowing now tha,t as memorable to me as many of the moments during the last eight weeks have been, their aura dissipates as soon as a new scene presents itself, whether by plan or the involuntary interference of others. The Kuglerhof was long ago, sunny Nice is a blur. Now in Spain, no one I meet will give a hoot about French politics the way the French do or find them as interesting as their own.

The pleasure I took in being in France during the elections can only be re-enjoyed with anyone from France with the same passion for the country's politics that I have. Out of the country, that pleasure evaporates into thin air, as I realized when I decided to throw away all the newspaper clippings analyzing the effects of the Presidential election on the upcoming legislatives. No one but me would care to know.

Now I am in Spain, where a different set of assumptions about the world prevails. It would be unfair to say that the Spanish are incurious, but they are not especially given to theories, as the French are, but to unvarnished life, with all its messy roughness. The authenticity of Jiusepe Ribera's clubfooted Beggar Boy, for instance, a quintessential Spanish painting, is immediately apprehensible: Meeting the world that pities him with a mischievous smile, like Lazarillo de Tormes, the the boy-hero of the picaresque tale of a blind beggar's helper, the Beggar Boy is a force of nature poverty cannot humble.

Perhaps it is in the nature of the earth of each country that each country develops its view of the world. Simon Schama wrote a book about the effect of landscape on the German sensibility, Landscape and Memory, in which he argued that the German Romantic ideal of life has had certain constants throughout the country's history, even down to the Nazi era, and that they have something to do with the German cult of nature. Similarly, the yielding and abundant landscape of France seems more fertile soil for its Cartesian attitudes, while Spain's more difficult one demands unflinching concentration on survival in the here and now, and pleasure when you can get it.

***

The land is becoming hilly and very green again. It is 4:20 p.m., only three hours and forty minutes to go. The sun is shining brightly and we are passing a large river that cuts across a custer of hills. Farmer's houses start to prevail over housing developments, whitewashed houses with slate roof tiles, houses built of granite slabs. Galicia --which I knew only through my parents, who never ventured beyond La Coruna, the department which contains Santiago de Compostela-- has a green lushness broken up by placid creeks and rivers, is much more naturally beautiful than I ever realized. As I think this, a young man is kayaking on a large river, surely enjoying being the only person on the water.

***

It is still light out at 8:00 p.m., the time the train gets into Santiago. I leave the train and find a taxi which takes me directly to my hotel, the Altair. Teresa, the receptionist on duty, quickly makes me feel comfortable and in response to my question, tells me that the Cathedral is open until 9:00 p.m.

Just then a bearded man in his sixties, wearing an orange parka and caryying a knapsack walks into the hotel. Interrupting my effort to give Teresa my passport, he looks at my recycled shopping bag and asks me whether I am getting rid of my parka, which I took off on account of the heat outside.

"Don't even think of it", I say, struck by the combination of religious fervor and cupidity. When he hears that I am keen to get to the Cathedral he tells me that there is a special liturgy being said this evening in honor of the apparition of Mary at Fatima in Portugal, so the church will remain open longer.

I speed off to be sure that I get to the cathedral in time. Old Santiago is a town whose streets are aved with enormous blocks of granite. Santiago is in a cool and damp coerner of the world, and this far west the light is still out, although it is nearly nine o'clock. After seeing that the Cathedral's main gate is locked, I go around to the Praza das Praterias and up the wide steps and into the Cathedral.

It is as I remembered it, a symphony of gilding everywhere around the altar, two languid angels, giant-sized, framing the altar, their pink limbs covered only by the sashes of gold the carver draped across their upper thighs. (Angels of course, have no reproductive organs --they don't need them.) At the back of the high altar is the bust of Saint James and below, in the crypt, his remains. Pilgrims mount the staircase behind the high altar and traditionally srap their arms around the fiigure, "giving the Saint a hug", as it is known. They have been doing this for over a thousand years.

The saint is not available for hugging at this late hour, so I will have to return to do that in the morning. However, the crypt below is pen. I descend the few steps and --there is the odd man who wanted my anorak. He is perched on the kneeler. I go inside and pay my respects to the Apostle (whose remains are in a large silver box in the crypt) by kneeling beside him. However, a couple comes in for a moment, and one of them tries to take a picture. The odd man springs into action, denouncing their lack of respect. It is a little too much for me, so I slip up the crypt stairs.

Meanwhile, the procession in honor of Fatima is moving through the church. The processors, mostly elderly women are following a figure of Mary placed on a flower arrangement designed to make it seem the statue is resting on a mound of flowers. The figure of Mary is carried on the shoulders of four young women in t-shirts, the first timee I have seen that. The Marian liturgy for the day is recited, and after about thirty minutes, the ceremony if over, the priest and acolyte exiting through the side door.

After this, there is a general distribution of the flowers from the flower arrangement. This generates a certain excitement among the processors as well as from a number of Johnny-come-latelies. One woman, who had not processed, actually opens a gate at the back of the Communion rail in front of the altar and cuts across the space to get flowers ahead of those who had processed. I hear her say to some with her


"Come on, let's get some flowers--"

There is a man standing on the inside of the Communion rail working with the woman on its outside distributing flowers. He stops her cold, refusing to let her have any flower or piece of greenery until the very end, when everyone who participated in the procession is allowed a souvenir. Their conversation takes up a few minutes, and finally, defeated, she walks off, deflated. Meanwhile, flowers are being given out to those near the statue who processed --and the woman handing out stems knows them by name.

It is all a little like the beggar's banquet scene in Vidriana, Luis Bunuel's tale of a pious and wealthy young woman who naively admits the town riff raff to dine, only to discover, to her shock, that her gentle gesture is taken as an easy opportunity for rapacity by the assorted dwarfs, blind men, mutes and cripples who pillage her table of its silver and gold plate.

Piety carried to absurd extremes was always a problem in Spain: piadosas, pious women, would carry wood boxes holding images of saints up the stairs of the Cathedral on their knees in expiation of their perceived sins. These were just as capable of upbraiding a young mother whose children were in sleeveless pinafores for lack of modesty (as happend to my mother once), or a young woman whose head was not covered when she entered the church. The man who wanted my parka, the women processing, eager for flowers, the woman who wanted the flowers without showing her devotion --are their natural heirs, living in the same medieval world of hell and death.