Will travel

Though I failed to get in to the house muesem (see previous post), I was able to visit the Centrol Cultural Federico Garcia Lorca, which is currently showing an exhibit of Lorca’s papers and other artifacts related to the writer’s life in Granada. The Centro is a cool modern structure right in the historic center of the city. It has a theater, gallery, and various community spaces and puts on a variety of programming throughout the year. The current exhibit was two big rooms with cases full of his original drafts of poems and plays in addition to photographs, drawings, etc. I’m not sure why it’s so moving to see actual paper with someone’s actual handwriting on it, but it is, and I think this is especially true for drafts of poems. On these, it was possible to see the edits and changes he was making while writing.

A loose translation:

“I want to go down the well,

I want to climb the walls of Granada,

To watch the past heart

Through the dark press of the waters.”

(I’m not sure how to translate “punzón” in this context, and “corazón pasado” is odd as well, but you get the idea).

One final Lorca image—this street sign, which is quite a name for a street.

Lorca famously wrote and spoke about the concept of duende, which has been enormously influential to 20th and 21st century poetics. I first read about it, and first read his essays and poems, as a sophomore at IU, and I’ve revisited his work ever since. The following year in a modern drama course in London, I read his strange, haunted plays. It was illuminating to see and hear and taste the hyper-local images and tropes in his work—knowing that he pulled his water from a well, heard and saw similar doves, horses, balconies, plazas, orange trees, olive trees, apples. Heartbreaking to think of the work he could have done had he not been executed by Nationalist forces at only 38 years old during the Spanish Civil War. His body and the bodies of thousands of others have never been recovered.

It was a real privilege to contemplate his work in the place he lived much of his life.

This is the house where the great Spanish poet/playwright/writer Federico Garcia Lorca spent summers and wrote for the last 10 or so years of his life. It was his family’s summer home on what used to be the outskirts of Granada. Apparently it is preserved largely how it was when the family lived there, including Lorca’s writing desk and the piano he used to play around on.

Before I realized the house was there, the kids and I walked down to the adjacent park, which is full of gardens and playgrounds. Another day, Saoirse and I tried to squeeze in a visit before Spanish classes but ran out of time after not finding a taxi and taking a few too many wrong turns. A third time, I ran and taxied my way there after the kids’ Spanish class, arriving 4 minutes after the final group tour was scheduled to leave (you can only go through the house with a guide at set times). I teared up, I begged, I pleaded, I threw myself at the mercy of the guy working the front desk, but to no avail. He refused to let me in despite my pleas and explanations. He kept repeating “Hay un horario y hay que respectarlo.” There is a schedule, and it must be respected.” After leaving, dejected, I noticed that he quickly locked up the house and left. I believe he lied to me that there was a group in the house (when I asked if I could just join late, my loss) because I was the only person there and he preferred to go home. I actually went back to the door and told him I didn’t appreciate how rude he had been. He wasn’t buying it or budging. After he left, I sat in the neglected orchard outside the house and wrote, thinking at least maybe I had gotten a poem out of the experience! On the way there, the taxi driver went on and on to me about his epileptic dog. He was devastated by the dog’s episodes and was comforting his even more devastated wife on the phone during the drive. He told me that before getting this dog, he had never understood how people could be so obsessed with their animals, but now, he wasn’t sure how his family could even cope with the impending loss. Something in the juxtaposition of this moment, a distracted, emotionally fraught drive over through a maddeningly difficult city to navigate and a militant adherence to the rule of law at the Lorca house, began to vibrate with that tension that lets me know a poem might be emerging. Lorca was executed by Nationalist fascists during the Spanish Civil War, by people who had no space for his art or his politics or his sexuality. I couldn’t help but wonder if he wasn’t rolling in his undiscovered, unmarked grave at the militant way his memorial was being run, by people repeating robotically that hay un horario y hay que respectarlo. So, in the end, I spent two weeks in Granada and never saw the inside of Lorca’s house. Maybe I never will. I’m still working on that poem. I was able to visit the Centro Cultural Garcia Lorca and see handwritten manuscript pages, which was very moving, and which I will write about next post :).

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During our second week in Granada, after my parents headed home, a language school about five minutes from our house agreed to do 90 minutes of classes/day for the three kids. They had a lovely teacher named Lola, and I had just enough time to dash down the mountain and do or see one thing before picking them up again! I think the older kids could have handled more, but that was about the max for Mac.

They learned quite a lot for a week!

Mac was extremely taken with flamenco dancing. We went to a dinner and show in our neighborhodd one night, and he was mesmerized. He danced all the way home, and then in the courtyard.

I was also taken with flamenco. The music and self-possession of the dancers was amazing. The women especially were there to demand attention, to take up space, to approach anguish and stomp it out. They weren’t particularly young or thin or stereotypically beautiful—they were fully embodied, which made much more of an impression. Mac was particularly drawn to their hand movements, the snapping, clapping, flicking of fingertips. I’ve tried and tried to upload a video of him dancing, but I’ll have to figure out videos another time.

Another new experience for Mac has been the discovery of Fanta naranja. Until this trip, I don’t think he had every had more than the odd rejected sip of soda, as no one in our family really drinks it. Lots of hot days out walking with stops at cafes has led me to relax my rules, and all of the kids have developed a taste.

Speaking of stereotypically-Spanish things that are in fact widespread, we did enjoyed churros and chocolate on several occasions. Probably for the best that we didn’t discover the “churrería” around the corner from our house until the last day. This was 1.70 Euro worth of churro! They were fried in a giant steel drum of hot oil. Dipped in a cup of chocolate, or cafe con leche for me? Mmmm.

Something I finally got the appeal of, once the heat came on, was sangria. I’ve had it before, of course, but I’ve never felt like it was the one thing I really wanted at any given time. But one day I had been out walking all morning, and we sat down to lunch. I saw a table next to us with icy glasses of sangria, so I ordered one, and it was the best thing I’d had in the longest time. Sweet and bitter and poured over fruit and ice. Delicious, and something I will figure out once we get home!

We are staying in a little whitewashed house in the Albaycin (spelled a million different ways) neighborhood of Granada. A UNESCO world heritage site, the Albaycin is a jumble of ancient cobblestone streets dating back to Moorish rule during medieval times. There were settlements here even before that, but most physical structures date from this time. The house is a traditional “carmen,” or freestanding, walled-in house with an interior garden/patio, and it is just lovely. House pics in next post.

Typical neighborhood views.

We had another great airbnb experience—a hike in the mountains along a river and across suspension bridges outside Granada. My parents decided that they’d like to do something really active before flying back, and this was our (rather gorgeous) solution. Trip was from 5-9pm, so the light was amazing.

On the way back into town, our guide Sonya and I had a wide-ranging conversation about global politics and more. She is a lawyer who finished school but didn’t find work in her field in a place she wanted/found it feasible to live, so she was establishing an airbnb business with partners and worked part-time at various other things. We discussed the economic and political situations in Spain and the US and shared our fears and frustrations, agreeing that so much needed to change in big systemic ways. One of the things I love most about traveling is having conversations like this. Person to person, hope is much easier to come by. I noticed so many common themes that keep coming up in conversations I have at home as well, which makes me think maybe a sea change is on the horizon after all… I can hope anyway.

Our other guide was trained as an archeologist and had worked to search for and uncover some of the 150,000 disappeared from Spain’s Civil War. He said the country is only behind Cambodia in numbers of disappeared citizens. I told him Sebastian was interested in history, and he encouraged him to read Marx. Seb smiled at that. I’m sure he will read Marx someday, as he continues to explore his own opinions on history and politics. On the way home, we discussed our countries’ short memories—the atrocities we don’t talk about, and so risk repeating.

Mac would like to add that from school he misses Mrs. Read, Mrs. Warden, free play, and recess.

The other evening while waiting yet again to be able to eat dinner (no dinner restaurants open till 8pm), we sat in a placeta around the corner from the house, having a cool drink, and I asked the kids some questions.

-What is something you’ll remember about the trip so far?

Sebastian: Xirimiri, (pronounced Shee-ree-mee-ree), the Basque word for a light, soft rain.

Saoirse: the hike in the mountains (the Sierra Nevadas, just outside Granada).

Mac: “that place when we went to a place where we can eat something.” (I think he was hungry!). He later wanted to change his response to the hike as well.

-What is the most beautiful thing you’ve seen so far?

Seb: La Mezquita in Córdoba.

Saoirse: the view from the mountians

Me: the Alhambra and its gardens, followed by basically every crowded streets of Paris

Mac: “this water fountain”

-What is something unpleasant about the trip so far?

Seb: WiFi going out when I was on the verge of solving the rubic cube

Saoirse: falling on the hike (she just slipped and scraped her leg but is fine)

Mac: “Nothing. Everything I like-ed.”

-What is something you miss from home?

Seb: Internet (do you sense a theme?)

Saoirse: people I know

Mac: my lion and my snake

Me: yoga/classes at the Hot Room and coffee. Yes of course there is coffee here, but I miss my big brewed American pot of it. I also miss my husband and partner in travel crimes, but we will see him again soon :).