Benito's Barbecue, Franco's Old House, and the Beginning of the End

The period of despedidas, or "good-byes," has officially begun. My good friend Colin, with whom I traveled to Salamanca, left a couple of weeks ago to work in the Chicago area for Teach for America. Kathleen left about a week ago to begin a law-related job in Texas. (The next sentence is no longer true since I edited and published this post the following day.) It is 1:30 AM here in Madrid, and though I work tomorrow, I have been up all afternoon and evening helping Ali do her last packing, recycling, and cleaning. She and I just said our last good-bye, as she flies out tomorrow morning to begin working on the Obama campaign in Colorado. The end is truly here, and the formal farewells are driving that point home to me.

Though beautiful and interesting, the storks can cause
problems and be a nuisance due to the noise they create,
the food (animal guts and insects) that they drop, and the
weight of their large nests on the old church roofs

To take the fullest advantage possible, I have led a busy social and traveling life as of late. First of all, I went to visit Benito, his wife Nichol, and their two adorable children, Paula and Martín, in their new house in Soto del Rey, a nice, quiet town in the north of the Comunidad de Madrid. As always, Benito and his family treated me like royalty. Benito's wife is an incredible cook, and we ate a dense, moist cake that was to die for; fresh bread; a nice salad; and a paella so enormous in proportion and so spectacular esthetically that it was truly a shame to eat it. It was one of the best paellas I've ever had, and given how much pride Spaniards take in their paella, that is really saying something. Benito gave me a tour of the town, and he showed me the town's church that is covered in storks' nests. Many towns in Madrid house these enormous nests and their odd, partly elegant and partly awkward builders.

The "German Brewery" that Hemingway frequented, in Plaza
Santa Ana, which also houses statues of Federico García Lorca
and Calderón de la Barca, two of Spain's all-time best
playwrights. It's a very literary plaza, indeed.

My French-Canadian friend from New Brunswick, Mathieu, and I also have been able to hang out a couple of times before his cousin arrives and then he returns to his home in eastern Canada. Since I have long wanted to go into the brewery that was among Ernest Hemingway's main haunts when he would travel to Madrid, Mathieu entertained my desire and we went inside and had a great time. He and I were also able to go into the Prado Museum together, and though we were slightly distracted away from the artwork since we wanted to catch up and therefore tried to do both art appreciation and friendship building at the same time, I nevertheless saw a room or two that I had missed in my multiple visits there before and was impressed, once again, at how stupendous of an art museum it is. I will miss it dearly next year. It's not everyday that you get to live within walking distance of some of Europe's finest art from the Middle Ages onward.

A haunting painting in the Prado Museum of an auto de fe, a Spanish Inquisition trial
held right here in Madrid's central Plaza Mayor

The Palacio Real de El Pardo and the manicured gardens
outside of it

Having had my interest piqued last week at the enormous monastery and cross built by Franco at the Valley of the Fallen, I decided to pursue the Franco topic a little bit further, much to the half-jocular, half-serious dismay of one of my teachers. (I assured her I wasn't a neo-Franco fascist, and I think she believed me.) I went to the royal residence where Franco lived during his dictatorship from the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 to his death by natural causes in 1975, a relatively lavish but slightly isolated palace called Palacio Real de El Pardo. El Pardo was originally built by the Habsburg monarchs in the late 1500s to be used as a palace for hunting, given its strategic location in a sylvan area of the Comunidad de Madrid. The sumptuously wealthy monarchs ruled from other castles of theirs elsewhere but used this palace for their excursions into the woods to pursue game and try their skills at marksmanship and archery. The palace was beautiful, and a sizable portion of it is oftentimes not available to the public because it is currently used as a reception place for foreign heads of state, many of which have left autographed photos and comments in an interesting guest registry book. Some of the rooms evinced a clash of cultures and centuries, I thought, like a room built by the Bourbons in the 1700s that nevertheless had a modern plasma-screen television, for example, or another amenity straight from the 21st century. The most interesting part of the entire tour, however, was the Franco suite which, curiously, has been left just the way that he used it during his lifetime. Equipped with a personal theater in addition to the other predictable luxuries (bathroom, kitchen, and such), the strangest thing about the suite to me was that Franco and his wife slept in separate beds even though it was well-known that he was entirely faithful to her (not a common trait among Spanish aristocrats, many of whom fathered hordes of bastard children). Also strange was the fact that he kept the dried, skeletal hand of Saint Teresa in an elaborate box beside his bed, just like superstitious Felipe II did during his reign, as well. Catholic relics are fascinating. A rotten hand by your bed? Regardless, it was a great tour.

I always enjoy different forms of media and art, and though I sometimes intentionally follow a trend in my consumption of art, I oftentimes just let myself flow with whatever I find or whatever turns up. However, by coincidence, I had a week in which most of my media was somewhat intense and racy. To begin with, after having an enjoyable evening with Kelly, David, and Félix, David lent me three films by Almodóvar. Almodóvar is one of Spain's best film directors. He started producing his edgy films in the 80s, after the fall of the Franco dictatorship, as part of a movement called the movida

madrileña, a time when Madrid indulged in the excesses of drugs, sex, and partying that were prohibited under the former conservative regime. Almodóvar is a product of this time, and it appears constantly in his films in motifs that become almost predictable. I watched both La mala educación (a pun on Bad Education and Bad Manners) and  La ley del deseo (The Law of Desire). In La ley del deseo, Antonio Banderas is a jealous gay lover who goes to drastic lengths to be with the artsy, promiscuous film director with whom he's in love. In La mala educación, Gael García Bernal (who starred as Che Guevarra in Motorcycle Diaries) is a cross-dressing prostitute who avenges the death of his transsexual junky sister who was raped by a priest when she was a little boy. The movies are actually quite brilliant and much more complex than my reductionist synopses give them credit for, but they are intense, slightly kitschy, and turn many Spaniards off because of how excessive they often are in their portrayal of drugs and sex. I also went to see Shame with Ruth, the mother of the family to whom I give a private English class each week. We chose Shame on a whim, and it recounts the sad tale of a man addicted to sex. He is incapable of expressing intimacy and instead prefers prostitutes. He is so consumed by his need for pornography and orgasm that he neglects his weak, needy sister, is less efficient at his job, and gets beat up for saying lewd things to unavailable women flanked by their boyfriends. It was a sad movie and had a shocking, gruesome end that was hard to watch. Lastly, I went with James, the Brit with whom I work, and his Canadian girlfriend, Melissa, to a show called El agujero ("The Hole"). It was part comedy, part musical, part acrobatics, part cabaret. It was actually a brilliant production even though I had never seen anything like it and really only agreed to go as a gesture of politeness to James for having invited me. Having my feminist fenders up, I was surprised that the most body objectification and nudity in the show was male. It was interesting, to say the least.

In one hour I catch a bus down south to go to Sevilla, the heartland of flamenco, and then on Sunday, right after I return, I've purchased myself a ticket to see a bull fight. I'll be embracing some Spanish stereotypes and seeing what I get out of the experience! And a month from today, I'll be flying home. Can you believe it?

Ávila and Its Environs, El Valle de los Caídos, and Little Miracles

Ana and her family used to rent an apartment in a small town called Burgohondo in the province of Ávila, one of the regions of Castilla-León, which is one of the autonomous communities of Spain that I have visited the most and that I find the most stunning. A long time ago, Ana and I made tentative plans to go visit Ávila one day, and when we realized how little time we have left together, we decided that last weekend was our ideal time to go. We drove up to the city of Ávila first, which was a rather brief drive from Madrid, and I was instantly struck by the perfectly intact wall that surrounds the entire old part of the city. Many people talk about how incredible the wall around Toledo is, but Ávila's is, in my opinion, by far the best that I have seen. I don't have any great photo that shows how truly stunning the wall is when seen from afar, but this photo at least captures enough of it that its length, continuity, and immaculate state of preservation can be extrapolated from the photo.

Ávila is famous for being the place where Santa Teresa received her visions of Jesus and where San Juan de la Cruz (Saint John of the Cross) also received his heavenly raptures that he later converted into poetic verse. I remember reading in high school a Freudian interpretation of one of Teresa's dreams in which she is pierced by a spear held by Jesus, and the interpretation obviously connected the spear with the phallus, the piercing with penetration, and talked about Teresa's celibate life as a nun. I don't know much more about either individual, but my interest is piqued and I will do more research about them in the future.

Next, Ana and I went to dip our toes into the river that runs through Burgohondo. We only spent a short amount of time there, but it was a pleasant repose in a peaceful, fluvial environment.

 

We then headed for a place called Valle de las Iruelas, a serene, sylvan place right on a reservoir known as El Burguillo, and there Ana, Vega and I spent the night in a small cabin that we rented for the evening. The cabin had a fireplace, so we lit the fire despite the heat and made a nice, simple dinner that we all enjoyed. When dinner was finished and Vega was fast asleep, Ana and I had our book club and discussed El amor en los tiempos del cólera (Love in the Time of Cholera), our book club selection of the month. We had a fruitful discussion about this novel written by Gabriel García Márquez in which a man named Florentino Ariza falls in love with Fermina Daza and knows that she is the love of his life. Though she marries another man and he spends years of his life making love to other women, the two end up together when they are older and the novel is, in that sense, one with a somewhat traditional happy ending. It was an interesting read, and it fueled my desire to continue to deepen my understanding of Hispanic and Spanish literature. I still prefer Gabriel García Márquez's short stories, but it was great to read one of his most popular and acclaimed novels.

Ana, Vega, and I spent our time hiking around the forest and the lakeside of the reservoir. It was a warm, completely tranquil environment, and it was a wonderful place to relax and enjoy good conversation. We returned to Madrid on Sunday afternoon, refreshed and ready for another week at school.

 

As Ana said, this is a great photo of me
with my youngest student

My next adventure in Spain was one that I have been interested in having for quite awhile. Before I tell you about it, let me give you a brief chronology. I work in the northern part of the Comunidad de Madrid, the autonomous community that houses the capital of Spain. Since I live in the center of the capital, I catch a bus every morning to go out to work, and I always noticed from the bus an enormous stone cross up on the mountainside near where I work. I always figured that it was a Christian monastery or something of the sort, but after asking about it, I quickly learned the truth of its construction and what it symbolizes. I have done more research and learned much more about the monument, and I finally got the chance to visit it this weekend. Below I will explain in more detail.

The enormous cross on the mountainside is a monastery of sorts, but I was only half-right in my guess. The cross sits a little ways up the mountain from a monastery, and the entire zone, with all of the buildings and such, is known as El Valle de los Caídos, "The Valley of the Fallen." It is essentially an enormous cross, a Christian symbol representing the death of Jesus and the expiation of humankind's sins, as well as a monastery for religious services, an abbey where monks live, and enormous esplanades of austere granite. It sits alone on the mountainside and is next to nothing but pristine landscapes. From its elevated position, it has some of the most beautiful views of the Comunidad de Madrid, and all of it is in virgen, beautiful forest teeming with wildlife and towering pines and holm oaks. And all of it was built under Francisco Franco, Spain's dictator from 1939 to 1975, by the slave labor of the Republicans, the people who lost the Civil War to Franco's Nationalists.

When I told people that I was going to visit the Valley of the Fallen, I got by far the most acerbic comments, or the most sarcastic comebacks, or the most troubled of faces that I have ever received in Spain. Multiple Spaniards told me simply not to go there. One called it "dead ugly" and recommended that I go see El Escorial instead, a granite castle built by Felipe II that I have visited 3 times since I find it so compelling. One of my friends, Félix, got properly upset and told me that going there supported the monument by giving it my money, my time, and my attention. It was unbelievable how much negativity the monument gets, and I understand why. I tried to put myself into the mind and heart of a Spaniard, and I am sure that I would feel the same. Many of these people saw their families entirely split in the Civil War. Brothers deceived, tricked, and killed brothers. People had their mother taken out of the house by the opposite side, saw her get raped, then shot, and then thrown into a ditch on the side of the road. Many people are still unaccounted for because they are in roadside graves like this. Even Federico García Lorca, easily Spain's best playwright of the last century of one of their best of all time, was shot by the Nationalists for being gay and liberal and has been yet to be dug up and properly interred. This is a very fresh wound for Spain, as the dictatorship and its regime of terror only ended in 1975.


I went to the Valley with the technology teacher at my school, Laura, as well as two other English teaching assistants and my friend Ana. The monument is absolutely stunning in proportions and in its twisted beauty. It is a spartan place, made mostly of monotone stone, everything in large proportions, stately, towering.

Laura also had very strong opinions. As we were driving there, she told me that she refused to enter the monastery where Franco is buried, saying "que se pudra sin mi visita," meaning "let him rot without me visiting him." It was an experience charged with emotion. Once I was actually up there, I was stunned at how impressively large and domineering the architecture is. The monastery where Franco is buried felt like the Chamber of Secrets from Harry Potter or something. There were enormous statues of angels who looked like they were made of bronze-turned-emerald-patina, muscular men with wings holding scythes and swords. The monastery was one enormous room with high, rocky ceilings left craggy and unpolished and a long, echoing corridor that led to the alter behind which Franco is buried. A simple bouquet of spring-flowers adorned his grave, a stone tablet inlaid in the ground that simple said "Francisco Franco." I was unfortunately unable to take photos or else I would have captured the magnificent cupola, with its mosaic depicting the lives of Catholic saints in intricate details with small glass tiles, the enormous central nave with its stern stone walls and the occasional biblical tapestry adorning them, and the other sights of the haunting place. Instead, you all just have to trust my interpretation or make a visit there yourself. If anyone is interested, I also recommend Ghosts of Spain: Travels through a Country's Hidden Past by Giles Tremlett for more information on the Valley of the Fallen, the Spanish Civil War, or anything of the sort. I haven't finished the book yet, but it's been a riveting read so far.

Part of what is so disturbing about the Valley of the Fallen is that it is currently used by neo-Nazis, pro-Franco franquistas, and Spanish fascists as a site to pay homage to the deceased former dictator and his ideology. Unlike Holocaust museums in Dachau or Auschwitz that exist as a reminder of the horrors of the ethnic cleansing and mass slaughter that happened there and a call for these things never to be repeated, the Valley of the Fallen still has Franco's fascist coat of arms/symbol on its buildings. The official placard says that it is a memorial to those who died in the Civil War, but given that the dictator built it by the forced, torturous labor of the other side (many of the workers starved and died from cold exposure), one can see why it's more polemical and less peachy than that. It was a very intense visit, and one well worth it to me, though I hope that all of my Spanish friends know that I am neither passively supporting Franco nor trying to dig into Spain's painful past by my actions. I just felt it would be a shame not to visit this place given how close it is to where I work.

The rest of my life has been good. My friends have already begun to return to the US. Colin went back to start working for Teach for America. Ali goes in less than two weeks to work for the Obama campaign in Colorado. It's amazing how quickly we're all moving on with our post-Spain lives! I've got a few more weeks, and I'm going to keep juicing them for all they're worth!

Art Expositions in Madrid and Savoring Salamanca

The weeks are quickly winding down until my day of departure from Spain, and as such, I have tried to enjoy things with an even greater appreciation and an even richer consciousness of the wonder around me. Fortunately, I can report that I think I have absorbed this whole year to the maximum, so despite my efforts to "live more richly" the past few weeks, not much has changed, which is a good thing. I've been living richly since I first set foot into this beautiful country!

Last weekend, I took a free tour of the Teatro Real (Royal Theater) where many famous operas are performed. It was an ornate building right off of the Plaza Oriente in Madrid, which is the large and picturesque plaza right next to the Palacio Real, one of the main palaces in the Madrid region built by the Bourbon kings of the 18th century. It's manicured gardens and sculptures are always an ideal place to take a stroll, and from the elevated vantage point afforded by the balcony off of the Teatro Real, I got this great photo.

An interesting Chagall piece in which a
rooster is mounted and hugged by
a rider

I spent the rest of the afternoon with Ana visiting an art exposition centered on Chagall. Chagall was born in Russia but lived much of his life as an exile in France. His Jewish ancestry and Russian heritage were key themes of his work, which used bold, intense colors in very symbolic ways. Ana and I had a great time walking through the gallery with our audio guides and comparing opinions and interpretations.

When Ana and I were finished with the art exposition, we went to my favorite movie theater in the city called the Cine Doré and watched a documentary that was a biographical look at the life of Arthur Rimbaud, a French symbolist poet about whom I had read a little. Rimbaud was a temperamental, prodigious boy who fell in love with Paul Verlaine, another French poet, but had a short-lived, passionately violently relationship with him that eventually ended. Rimbaud refused to write poetry or talk about literary subjects after ending his relationship with Verlaine, and he essentially spent the rest of his life doing endeavors that, unfortunately, the documentary made seem unbelievably tedious and boring. (Ana reports that my head kept bobbing from falling asleep at this point, so she asked me if she should let me sleep or try to keep me awake so I wouldn't miss the documentary, to which I apparently replied that I should be allowed to sleep. I don't remember any of it. :) )

Nolde's paintings had such thick
brush strokes and layers of paint that
they were quite three dimensional.
They were gorgeous.

This weekend has also been full of new adventures. Friday was Museum Day here in Madrid, meaning all museums had free entrance, so I took advantage and went into the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, the only one of the three best art museums in Madrid that doesn't give teachers free access. The Thyssen is a rather incredible museum based on the private collections of the Baron Bornemisza and his wife. Because it is a private collection, it spans a large range of art history and art from many cultural traditions. The first rooms were medieval Italian art, and the museum takes you all the way up to extremely modern North American art throughout your visit. My favorite rooms were the ones that had North American landscapes (I had John Denver in my head the whole time, and oh how I pined to be back in, well...the pines (he he) and the peaks of the Rocky Mountains). I also enjoyed the Van Gogh, the Monet (what a master of impressionism!), the Gauguin, and a new artist I had never heard of before named Emile Nolde, a German expressionist. All in all, it was a great visit to another astounding museum.

The seniors cheer on their fellow classmates as they perform

On Friday evening was graduation for "seniors" at my school. Though I don't teach any of the students of that age, they invited me to their graduation ceremony and to the dinner afterwards, and I happily accepted. The graduation ceremony was both comical and poignant during alternating moments. The school choir sang a few songs, including "Hallelujah," a song that had caused an author controversy conversation when Mom and Dad were here in Barcelona but which we finally resolved by searching on Wikipedia and seeing that it was originally written by Leonard Cohen but that it was later covered by many singers, including John Cale, the version you can listen to here. After the graduation ceremony, we all ate a delicious dinner including many typical courses of a Spanish meal, such as "croquetas," as well as risotto and "cochinillo," which is an infant, tender pig (can you tell I still feel former vegetarian guilt for eating such a young and intelligent animal?). It was a great night, and it was wonderful to see all of these students about to depart on the next steps of their lives' journeys.

I was also invited by Ruth and Eugenio, the married couple to whom I teach a private class (in addition to teaching a class to their daughter, Adriana) to see a play called La loba (The Female Wolf) about an avaricious white woman of the Reconstructionist South in the USA whose cupidity and lust for wealth leads her to betray and disregard all of those around her, including her husband and her own daughters, people that she treats with frigidity unless they can be used as pawns for her devious ends. When the tragic but wonderful play ended, Eugenio, Ruth, and I went out for Mexican food and had a nice talk before walking back in the balmy nocturnal weather to our respective neighborhoods in Madrid.

Though you can't really make out the particulars
of his visage or form, here's the best photo
of Colin I got all day.

The highlight of my weekend, however, was yesterday, a day I spent with my friend Colin in Salamanca. Let me give you a brief background on both Colin and Salamanca. Colin and I met in Valladolid during the mid-year Fulbright conference since we randomly sat next to each other on the bus that commuted us from our hotel to the university where our sessions were held. On that bus ride, Colin told me about the novel he wrote during NaNoWriMo (National November Writing Month) and about the Parisian marathon he was training for in April, and I instantly knew he was a person worth knowing. We've kept in touch since then, and he has known for awhile that he was terminating his Fulbright contract early to go back to the States and do Teach For America in Chicago. Knowing I wanted to see Salamanca and aware that he only had a couple of weeks left in Spain, I invited him to come along with me, and he accepted, much to my delight. Salamanca is a city that I have long wanted to see because it is renowned not only for being elegant but also for being the home of the oldest university in Spain, la Universidad de Salamanca, founded in 1218, and also where Miguel de Unamuno taught, one of my favorite Spanish authors. Suffice it to say that I went to Salamanca with high expectations.

Most buildings in the historic center of the city had
intricate spire roofs that were truly awe-inspiring

Fortunately for me, all of my desires were met and exceeded. To prepare for Salamanca, I had purchased and begun to read Unamuno's Del sentimiento trágico de la vida, his best-known philosophical work in which he struggles to reconcile the rational, scientific view of things that says that all we humans are is another animal on a planet of atoms and compounds with his heart's longing to have an immortal soul and a transcendental purpose and meaning in life. It's been a powerful work so far, and I've only read a portion of it. Unamuno is one of the most important authors I have ever read because of his novella San Manuel Bueno, mártir, a brief but puissant story of a Catholic priest who actively foments faith in his flock of congregants but who nevertheless is utterly bereft of belief in an afterlife himself. I recommend it to any who are interested since it so profoundly affected me my senior year of high school. Anyway, walking around this most beautiful of cities with Colin was incredible. To give you an idea of the astounding architecture of Salamanca, look at the following photos.

Colin and I are both walkers, so we just trekked all around the city and were pretty impressed by all that we saw. Many buildings had really nice enclosed courtyards and cloisters that reminded me a little bit of Westminster Abbey (not necessarily because the styles are all that similar but just because it was the closest thing in my frame of reference).

While taking this photo, a Spanish gentleman of about
fifty years asked us to take a photo of him and his family.
Upon recognizing us as foreigners, he asked if we needed
any help or suggestions, so we asked him questions
about what museums were open, where he recommended
we eat, and the like. He was one of the nicest strangers
I have ever met and is a testament to the goodness of
the Spanish people.

Colin and I had a delicious lunch right outside of the Plaza Mayor, a beautiful structure designed by the Churriguera brothers during the peak of Spanish Baroque architecture. Though my loyalty will likely always lie with Madrid, this town plaza might rival Madrid's Plaza Mayor for most beautiful.

Shockingly intricate facades often recounted
biblical stories and accounts of martyrdom,
and they stupefied Colin and me and made
us wonder about the hours of manual
labor necessary to design them.

Perhaps most stunning of the entire city, however, was the Catedral Vieja and Catedral Nueva, (the New and Old Cathedrals), both essentially occupying the same space. (Colin and I were never fully able to tell why the same building bore two different names, though one part of it was definitely built after the other.) The facades on the cathedral were some of the most intricate that I have ever seen (like the one above), and the whole thing had a majestic, lofty, yet slightly stern air about it that felt very Spanish indeed.

As with all of my trips this year, the quality of the company and conversation was once again one of the main delights of my travels. Colin is a thrilling conversationalist, and he and I talked about everything from injuries sustained while running to social justice in the American education system to whether or not humans have free will. Colin is an avid reader and just a warm-hearted, bright guy, and it was a pleasure to share this journey with him and solidify our budding friendship.

Iglesia de San Esteban, another example of Salamanca's
grandiose architecture that almost looks too perfect to be real

All in all, it's been a great couple of weeks. I only have a few more to go, and I will continue to update with the last of my adventures during this brief epoch of mine spent in Spain.