Of pescaderías and parrots in the park

There are parrots in the Parque San Isidro

This is not an important fact, but it's good to know in case you worry that some kind of massive radiation leak has created a flock of electric green pigeons.

The parrots are unfortunately in shadow here.  But I had to take the picture against the path, because they're perfectly camouflaged against the grass.

The parrots were in fact a fairly small part of my day today, but it amused me to stand still and take pictures of them (that's a real pigeon in the background, looking forlorn and left out because he doesn't speak parrot), the way Europeans take pictures of squirrels in Central Park.  I have no idea how the parrots got there (I presume they've bred from escaped pets), or how long they've lived in the Parque San Isidro, but there are many of them and they are loud.

I encountered the parrots in the evening (hence the long shadows), on my way on foot to return to the bicycle rental/sale place where I tried a Brompton over the weekend.  Sadly, I can't justify the price tag on a Brompton, but their website mentioned that they sold second hand bikes that they rented when they were "renovating their fleet" and that said bikes were Dutch-style city bikes.  Since I love the upright handlebars and smooth ride of Dutch bikes, that seemed like a good option, and indeed, there were two available.  One of them is currently resting overnight in the patio with my neighbors' bikes.  (I rented it for a day, with an option to buy, which I suspect I will end up exercising.  It falls more or less into the budget for the "removal costs" that the Fulbright grant gives.  It's a good thing I haven't bought too many pots and pans since the apartment was pretty well equipped.)

My evening walk and ride back was by way of rewarding myself for being virtuous and productive in the morning, since I succeeded (finally!) in opening a bank account at Banco Sabadell (to which I say, visca els catalans), and was thus able to devote my time to going back to the Complutense for a kind of opening ceremony where my sponsor there gave a lecture about the history of the university (specifically of the building where the lecture took place, poetically known as "Edificio A" of the old Philosophy and Letters faculty, and currently simply the Philosophy building) from its inauguration in 1933 to the present.

The lecture included a number of interesting factoids, including the origin of the word complutense (I always wondered), which it turns out is the genitive of Complutum, a Roman settlement from the first century CE, largely renovated and expanded in the third century, and then renamed in the eighth century in Arabic as Alcalá de Henares (which is still its name).  The medieval university of Alcalá was moved (over some objections) to Madrid, but retained its name, hence the slightly oxymoronic "University of Alcalá of Madrid" or (in its current Latin-Castilian mixture) "Universidad Complutense de Madrid."  The other interesting factoid was that the swan on the Complutense shield (which I know from an old t-shirt I have of the Complutense) is actually a visual pun alluding to the patron of the medieval/early modern university of Alcalá de Henares, who is none other than my old friend Cardinal Ximenez de Cisneros.  (Cisne = Swan.  Cisne=Cisneros.  As Terry Pratchett says about heraldry in Feet of Clay, "That's heraldry?  Crossword clues and bad puns?")  At least that puts the hagiography of Cisneros that I wrote about in my first dissertation chapter in a new light.  (It might call for a brief revision.)  The people eulogizing him saw him as the founder of the university which had become a beacon of "libre enseñanza."  Not as the person who burned the largest university library in Europe of its time.  It's good to get your name on the right things.  It makes it so hard to tarnish your memory afterwards.  (Hellooo, Columbia University.)

Aside from the factoids, the history of the building of the Ciudad Universitaria was interesting.  It turns out it was started by Alfonso XIII in the 1920s, but completed under the Republic, which sweetly and optimistically wanted to make the new campus a symbol of the new "libre enseñanza" in Spain, which was going to be free of Church interference, and modern and secular and generally new and improved.  The professors were all about what we would now call progressive education, limiting the number of exams and eliminating textbooks (and coming up with the really brilliant idea of a field trip to see classical sites of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Italy by doing a Mediterranean cruise over a period of a semester), and co-education, and so forth.

Unfortunately, someone decided that the way to express these extremely good ideas was to break free of the (literally) dark medieval buildings of the old Universidad de Alcalá and build a whole campus, with gymnasiums and dormitories and so on, along the model (supposedly) of an American college campus, which would be self-contained and separated from the city, out in the fields and the fresh air.  (Possibly not coincidentally the old university buildings were located on the current Calle San Bernardo, in what is now a very expensive neighborhood, which makes me wonder about how benevolent the original impulse to move the university to the suburbs actually was, but allegedly the model was the US rural campus, and that's their story and they're sticking to it.)  Aside from all the reasons why American anti-urbanism and self-contained college campuses are a terrible idea, the sweetly naive designers of the Complutense were under the impression that since the American campus model was modern (since Americans are good at modernity), it made sense to have the best of modern architecture on this rural, self-contained campus....and modern at the time meant Bauhaus.

Context is everything, and Bauhaus architecture makes sense (and is at its best a breath of fresh air and at its worst at least tolerable) in the context of the overwhelmingly medieval architecture of European city centers, and a healthy dose of German kitsch on top of that, which makes clean lines and modern materials seem liberating.  But if you plunk down a series of square office blocks in the middle of a wheat field, what you get looks like an industrial park, not inspired by industry (as the original Bauhaus), but simply uninspired.  Which is pretty much the impression the modern Complutense gives.

It's striking because I assumed that the Complutense was simply badly designed, not that it was in fact designed to be what it is.  The idea of combining Bauhaus architecture with the American college town look reminds me of Terry Pratchett's Death (or DEATH) trying to make a swing for his granddaughter in the novel Soul Music, and the thinking behind it:

It was quite complicated. In so far as the thinking behind it could be inferred from the resulting construction, it had run like this:  Clearly a swing should be hung from the stoutest branch. In fact - safety being paramount - it would be better to hang it from the two stoutest branches, one to each rope.  They had turned out to be on opposite sides of the tree...So he'd removed about six feet from the middle of the tree's trunk, thus allowing the swing to, well, swing. The tree hadn't died. It was still quite healthy. However, the lack of a major section of trunk had presented a fresh problem. This had been overcome by the addition of two large props under the branches, a little further out from the ropes of the swing, keeping the whole top of the tree at about the right height off the ground.

As with Death's swing, one can't help feeling a little bit softened toward the Complutense when you see the good intentions behind it, and the slightly confused understanding of what it meant to be "modern" that animated such a series of regrettable design choices.  The links between the Protestant tradition and the US university were clearly too subtle for people who used "Christian" and "Catholic" synonymously, just as the way Bauhaus was inextricably linked to a German context was clearly something they missed.  And how sad, given such a rich and gorgeous tradition of architecture and urban planning, that the Spanish felt they had nothing of their own to contribute to a modern university.  (It's true that the gardens/parking lots around the Complutense buildings are relatively unenlivened by fountains, which the Spanish put everywhere in natural appreciation of how precious water is.  But no Andalusian gardens, or candy-stripe horseshoe arches to recall the universities that really were the glory of Europe in their day, just as there are no pseudo-gothic flourishes as a reminder of the basis of the university of Alcalá de Henares itself.  And no decorative ceramic tiles, or balconies where you could put plants, or any of the things that distinguish this beautiful city from other places.  I do get that the Catholic Church was a dead weight on Spanish education and I understand the desire to leave it behind.  But you can't be anyone but yourself.  Better a gray but indigenous pigeon than an electric green parrot that doesn't belong.)

Still, it is tragic that the building was inaugurated unfinished in 1933, and finally completed during the 1935-36 school year.  The decision was made to not move the university completely until the following semester, when everything would be all new and shiny in September 1936, and all the chairs and desks and lab equipment would be in place.  Of course, by September 1936 the fantastically expensive glass windows that were designed to let the sun shine in on the students had all been shattered by cannon fire, and the newly shelved books in the library were being used to line the windows against shells by the International Brigades who had moved in and were using it as barracks, having dug trenches between the university and the Casa de Campo.

Of course in 1933 when the building was inaugurated no one knew that it would never be used before being destroyed and then rebuilt. The blue tiled walls of the hallways, which were supposed to be modern and hygienic and easy to clean, and also bright and cheerful (they look exactly like the hallways of a public school circa 1950....P.S. 87 to the life) supposedly prompted Miguel de Unamuno to exclaim (with the charming lack of tact that was ultimately fatal to him) "parece una pescadería!"

The Complutense hallway, with historic water fountain from 1933 (behind glass).  It looks like a public school...or a pescadería

Unamuno was an old reactionary, of course, though it's impossible to not be fond of his inability to keep his mouth shut at official functions, but in this instance, he wasn't far off.  (He didn't live to see it become standard public school construction.)

Of course, what saves the Complutense is the charm of the people within the building, who are uniformly kind and cheerful, and the touches given to it by the students.  I went downstairs after the lecture to find a bathroom, and discovered both the cafeteria and bookstore (cleverly next to each other).  At the foot of the stairs, along a low table outside the cafeteria, was a row of microwaves, presumably for students who bring their own lunch and want to have a proper hot meal.  I like the idea of multiple public microwaves.

Above the microwaves were a bunch of student flyers, of the kind that students everywhere stick up at the beginning of the semester, about joining the volleyball team, the debate team, and so on.  And in the bathroom itself (on the inside of the stall actually), there was the most amazing and literate grafitti I've seen anywhere.  I noted one quote from Heinrich Heine ("we keep asking questions until they stop our mouths with a handful of earth, but what kind of answer is that?"), another from Lorca ("poetry doesn't need adepts, but lovers"), and several feminist slogans.  It was all very colorful too, in pink and purple and blue marker, as well as black.

I'm not sure why students seem to save their best self-expression for the somewhat intimate setting of a toilet stall, but perhaps the looming Bauhaus exterior freaks them out.  Good to know life bubbles under the surface though.






And so, after my happy Complutense experience, I headed home for a well deserved lunch and rest, and then out into the evening sunshine along Madrid Río to look at secondhand bikes.  And found parrots along the way.  On the whole, a good and productive day.