Sunday, May 20, 2012
Santiago de Compostela to La Coruna

I took the train to La Coruna, a Belle Epoque city known for the glassed-in porches that ring the marina. La Coruna is a major port: if not as large as Marseille, certainly comparable in the scope of the maritime activities. Cargo ships, fishing boats, oil tankers, motor boats, sail boats, cruise ships can all berth in its harbor. It was here, in 1957, that I had my first taste of Europe, the night in June La Guadalupe, the Spanish Line steamship came into the harbor. I have not been back since 1986, twenty six years ago.

I walk from the train station to the port, passing Cuatro Caminos, a nearby crossroads, where my grandfather had a tavern and ran a chauffeur service with the Packard he bought in New York in the 1920s and had shipped for the purpose. At the train station I am told it is a ten-minute walk to the harbor. Dubious, I ask an older man who explains in detail (which everyone here does) how to get to the water. As I turn to leave, he extends his hand. I take it, only to have him pull me toward him to peck me gently on each cheek and with me well. Sneaky of him.

The presence of a Loewe boutique --Loewe is a luxury leather goods manufacturer based in Madrid-- on the opposite side of the street from the shiny new waterfront, attests to the city's wealth, as do the modern residential high rises with balconies everywhere along the port. Not a university town or a religious center like Santiago, La Coruna (A Coruna in the dialect) is firmly bourgeois: children to the age of ten are still (as they were whenever I visited) beautifully dressed, the girls' hair coiffed, the boys' neatly combed.

I am looking for La Plaza de Maria Pita, where the City Hall is located, and where my family and I stayed when we left the steamship, on our first visit since my mother left in 1938 and my father in 1945. It begins behind Calle Riego de Agua, off the marina in the old part of town. The plaza looks much as always, the building where my mother's cousin and her husband (a former boyfriend of my mother's) lived is still there, although the bookstore where I bought Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (the only book in English available) in the summer of 1969, is gone, replaced by a restaurant specializing in octopus.

I want to try to find the best hotel, the Finisterre, which my mother's brother and my uncle, was kicked out of for repeated drunkeness that summer, when my mother, her brother and her sister were sorting out their father's estate. I walk along the marina looking for it, but it has been leveled, replaced by a Hotel Finisterre that is part of the Hesperia chain.

The tombolas are gone. These were stands where children could try to win a doll or a basketball by buying tickets that had to be combined in a series to win: put the two halves of the matador together; collect all four Aces. Parents bought the tickets for their children, introducing them to games of chance by doing so. The kiosk Alfonso, a Belle Epoque building is still there, and the Parques de Mendez Nunez, where my sister slipped away, still has the palm trees and the fountain and the pond, although no goldfish that I could see.

What is also not there are the recruiting posters for la Falange Joven, the fascist youth organization that perdured through the Franco era. Visiting in the summer of 1964, I remember the boys and girls in uniforms of khaki shirts and shorts with blue neckerchiefs, junior Falangists. The Falange actually pre-dated Franco's successful coup d'etat, but Franco turned it to his purposes. It was started by Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the son of the military dictator Manuel Primo de Rivera who ruled Spain on behalf of King Alfonso XIII in the 1920s before the Republic was voted in. (It came into being April 14, 1931 and went into exile on April 1, 1939, when the Civil War ended.) Jose Antonio as he was known, died relatively young, executed for conspiracy against the Spanish Republic, aged 33. As a result of this, during the Civil War of 1936-1939 and the Franco dictatorship, Jose Antonio became a potent symbol around which conservative Spaniards --members of the propertied classes, the clergy and right-wing intellectuals-- rallied. For this reason, Jose Antonio's image could be seen on the Falange Youth posters that I saw near the tombolas as a child, notwithstanding that Franco and Primo de Rivera were said to dislike each other.


Despite Spain's rejection of so many things associated with Franco and the nationalist dictatorship, in La Coruna part of the avenue that runs along the marina is still named after him. It is not the only relic of the past that survived the Franco era. A few feet off the Calle Real stands El Cinema Paris. This was the movie theatre that featured the Sarita Montiel movie La Violetera, that piece of fluff that was Prohibido a Menores de 18 Anos back in the summer of 1965, when I was eleven years old, and Franco had ten years to live.