Making Memories/Spain/January 31st, 2009

Jo and Louise at the Necropolis in Carmona.

Forty years ago, I traveled to Spain in my 19th year, roaming around with two friends in a turquoise VW, camping in a pup tent, sleeping on empty beaches and under white-netted olive trees. We almost never ate out, subsisting on bread and cheese and wine. Those were the days of Frommer’s Europe on Five Dollars a Day, and a hundred dollars got me through almost a month. At that time, Spain was under Franco, and we were visited every night by soldiers in three-cornered hats and floor-length capes, poking their machine guns into our tent to inquire about who we were and why we were there. We were broke, and so was Spain. Tourists were an oddity.

I hardly recognized the Spain of my youth. Franco has been dead since 1975, and Spain is now a healthy democracy. To my eyes, it looks as if Spain has a standard of living very close to other E.U. countries. The cities we visited---Cadiz, where we docked, Seville, and Cordoba---were clean, prosperous looking, and bustling with activity. With wide avenues, sporting elegant shops, modern cities have grown up outside of the Centros Historicos. The noise of the traffic was deafening. (The use of the horn is a mode of expression in Spain. Unlike the staccato beeps of New York that just say---MOVE IT---the horns of Spain whine in sentences, sometimes whole paragraphs.) Tourists are no longer an oddity. Spain knew that we were coming, and indeed had created an entire industry devoted to our comfort and exploitation.

Here is the sad fact: We can’t afford to travel in Spain. Thank goodness the major items such as hotel, and car rental, were not only reasonable, but cheap by U.S. standards, but the costs of staying hydrated, fed and caffeinated were astronomical, and admission to any tourist sight was usually eight Euros. (And it really galls me to pay to enter a church; it ought to be free.) We collapsed at a sidewalk café in Cadiz for lunch, ordered one small 8 inch plate of Manchego cheese, a miniature loaf of bread, and a Coke that we split--- the bill was almost thirty dollars! Our best, and least expensive meals, were in rest stops along A-4, the four-lane highway we took between Cadiz and Seville. There we had fresh, hot tapas for under eight dollars, a garbanzo bean stew, hot potatoes in a gooey white sauce, and café con leche that would grow hair on your chest. Pizzas too were a bargain, and delicious with goat cheese and fresh verduras. Another favorite was something called Chocolate con Churros, a deep-fried dough dipped in a chocolate glop so thick that you couldn’t drink it. But the bottom line: my hundred dollars a month of yore had turned into a hundred dollars a day, and that was just to maintain metabolism.

Manchego Cheese.

Chocolate con churros.

But sticker shock aside, we had two great days in Seville and Cordoba, with a day in the countryside between them. Jo and I traveled with another faculty member on Semester at Sea, Jodi Cohen, who teaches Communications at Ithaca College in upstate New York. Jodi did all the driving, and I was supposed to be the navigator, but Jo ended up taking over the map. Once we got into the tangled knots of narrow, one-way medieval streets in both Seville and Cordoba, I not only made NO contribution, with my dyslexia, I was a liability. (At least I was partly responsible for Jo’s presence in the world. Among the three of us, Jo was hands-down the most competent.) Jodi managed the stick shift with skill, and more importantly, with good humor. True, her shoulders were hunched up around her ears when we were hopelessly lost during rush hour in Seville, but she never lost her temper or her equanimity.

In Seville, it was a great pleasure to watch Jo experience her first European cathedral, complete with stained glass, soaring Gothic arches, the biggest altarpiece in the world, a gilded extravaganza with over 1,000 carved figures, and inside the southern door, the tomb of Christopher Columbus. (Whose bones may, or may not, be buried there. The Dominican Republic claims that Columbus’s remains are in Santo Domingo. The fact is he’s been shuffled around and sifted so many times post-mortem, what’s left of Columbus may be in two places at once. That poetry might have pleased him.) We also climbed up to the top of La Giralda which used to be the minaret of the mosque that once stood on the site. Seville lay at our feet in all directions, looking peaceful and pink, and full of trees laden with oranges.

Cathedral at Seville.

Our second day we got off A-4, and wended our way to Cordoba on back roads. We spent mostof the morning in Carmona where I bought a mink blanket, Jodi bought a bra, Jo bought a jacket made in China, and we went to a Roman Necropolis. Carmona has an active archeological site where they are unearthing a vast Roman city of the dead, as well as an amphitheater. We spent an hour or so poking around the ruins---we were the only living visitors there. When we first arrived, a young woman at the reception desk asked if we wanted to see a film about the excavation. She then led us upstairs to a large room with a screen and a set of long benches, and after setting up the film and darkening the room, she closed the doors and disappeared. Jodi and I decided that we were going to do some stretches. We were creaky from being in the car, so while we watched the film, Jodi did yoga on the benches, and I loosened up in the corner with tai chi and some animal poses from Chi Gung. (I did both the Rhinoceros Looking at the Moon, and the Phoenix.) Jo sat stationary in her chair and made cracks about what it’s like to travel with two insane, post-menopausal women. When the film was over, we went downstairs, and Jodi asked at the reception desk for a book about the Necropolis for her class. “For your yoga class?” the young woman asked. That was when it dawned on us: we’d had an audience for our exercise, probably via a security camera. For all we knew, the entire museum staff had been having a good laugh watching us at the closed-circuit TV. An hour or so later, as we were leaving, a guard waved at me from the top of the hill. I couldn’t see his face, only his profile, but when he raised his other hand in the air and turned slowly to the right and then to the left, I knew: For sure, we’d been seen. It was definitely a Spaniard doing Rhinoceros Looking at the Moon.

Jo and Jodi among the Roman dead.

We got to Cordoba too late for anything but getting lost and eating dinner, but this morning we got up early and went to see La Mezquita, that masterpiece of Islamic architecture, with its rows and rows of terra-cotta red and white arches that seem to go on and on into a dark infinity. When I’d been to the mosque with my friends in the spring of 1969, we were the only visitors. I remember sitting alone on the cold floor for quite awhile in the dusky light with my back against a pillar. Today, after forking over 16 Euros, the mosque was full of cultural pilgrims, with guides spewing information in many languages around clumps of intense tourists, and people staggering in and out of the shadows with audio guides clasped to their ears. No one could, or would, have sat alone on the floor. It was still wonderful to be there, but now no one can experience the mosque at Cordoba privately. All must be experienced publicly, mediated through the trappings of touristry.


View from our hotel in Cordoba.

La Mezquita.

Will Jo go back to the necropolis in Carmona in forty years, and remember how she and her mother and another crazy lady roamed through a Roman city of the dead all alone?

We’re on our way to Morocco. The institutional food and bad coffee notwithstanding, we’re both glad to be back on the ship. It was so much fun to see our shipmates at dinner, everyone showered and full of stories, running on adrenaline---a sort of manic post-trip energy. I’m so looking forward to sleeping in my little cell, under my new mink blanket.

I wonder if Fez will have changed as much as Spain? Will it measure up to my memories?


LH

A cat from Cadiz.