I'm sitting on the dock of the bay, wasting ti -- A NIBBLE! A NIBBLE!

It's probably nothing, and may slip off the line, but today's fishing expedition had a sudden tug at the fly....

Aside from fishing metaphors, I have to say that it is difficult to convey the feel of the detective work of doing research.  I can think of two works of fiction that have done it, the German film The Nasty Girl (Das schreckliche Madchen) and Javier Cercas' novel Soldados de Salamina.  (The film version of the latter fails signally at this.)  The moment when the main character in the film finally sees an opportunity to see papers in "the poison cabinet" is more exciting than all the firebombing and emotional turmoil that comes before and after.  And the moment when the main character in the novel says grimly "in alphabetical order" when he decides to call information about every nursing home in Lyons in among the laughter and groans there's a little quickened heartbeat.  But mostly it's hard to capture what it's like to look for something for a long time, and what it's like when you (maybe) find something which (maybe) is (close to) what you're looking for.

I have to say that most of the time when I'm going through archives I'm happily interested in all kinds of stuff that I know is completely irrelevant, and simply tell myself that it's all "background information" or that I'm "getting to know" the character of the person I'm researching.  But I've been getting a little bored and discouraged (my happy teaching day yesterday was also not a day at the BNE), and today I'll be honest and admit I was bored.  I decided to walk part of the way between the university and the BNE this afternoon after lunch, and ended up miscalculating the distance of the walk and walking for longer than I planned, so I arrived at the BNE late (around 5:00 in the evening, and I wanted to get to yoga by 7:30, or 7:45 at the latest).  I was tired, and not feeling particularly inspired, but determined to get back into the routine of research, because routine is what keeps you going through tough spots.  I was a little cheered by being greeted with smiles and nods of recognition by the security people and the librarians at the BNE, who all know me by now, since I come regularly (again, routine helps).  I requested the roll of microfilm I had been working my way through, threaded it into the machine like the expert I have become, and scrolled along to the place I had left off according to my notes.



The Biblioteca Nacional's MSS MICRO 16427 is a microfilm containing manuscripts 22430/1 through 22430/14.  (I am assuming the numbers are box and folder number, but they are known as "signaturas" here.)  MSS 22430/1-13 are all filed under the general label of "cuaderno de poemas y apuntes" (notebook of poems and notes) of Rafael Alberti.  (MSS 22430/15 is the notebook of Maria Teresa Leon's that I already looked at.)  The notebooks are mostly spiral-bound, blank pages, with the legend Lanceros 1910, Argentina on them.  One of them is dated 1945, and the others have a sad paucity of dates.  Alberti used the notebooks exactly the way you would expect someone in an age before smartphones to use a fairly small composition book.  He wrote out poems in them (sometimes a few times, with edits and then in a clean version), but he also wrote drafts of essays, a couple of drafts of letters to friends, lecture notes, lots of fairly elaborate drawings, some doodles, and the occasional name, address and phone number with no context, and several to-do lists.  Some of the pages are so light as to be illegible on microfilm, and I suspect were written in pencil.  In others his handwriting is literally a scribble, although when he wanted to he could print fairly clearly.  In some notebook he started writing from both ends of the notebook and left some blank pages in the middle.  In short, the notebooks are a mess, with no rhyme or reason.  And reading them on microfilm is absolutely awful, because it's much more laborious to flip images around when he started writing upside down, or to turn the pages in sequence if he was writing from the back toward the front of the book, aside from the inevitable deterioration of already difficult to read handwriting.

Therefore, today was my third day working through this microfilm roll.  I had made it through notebooks 1-8 and was determined to get to the end of notebook 13.  The notebooks were filled with essays more than poems, some autobiographical, so I felt obligated to try to skim them to see if there were mentions of people who interest me, but the handwriting made them hard to read exactly, and when skimming in microfilm I started to get a headache.  I was a little overheated (partly because I was wearing yoga clothes under my regular street clothes), and the spinning past pages of microfilm started to make me dizzy, and then I put my head down and closed my eyes to avoid the dizziness and had not a wave but a tsunami of sleepiness wash over me.  The only thing that kept me from quitting was the horrible thought of coming back and having to go through the same roll of film yet again.

I'd used my tablet in class at the Complutense earlier in the day and hadn't had a chance to recharge it, so it's batteries were dying along with my internal batteries.  I was ready to curse Alberti for his terrible handwriting, and for writing "Como conocí a Federico" and "Como conocí a Andre Gide" and how he'd met everybody and his brother without saying one interesting thing for my research, but cursing would have taken too much energy.  I was the only one using the microfilm machines today, so I was alone in that section of the Sala Cervantes, and so tired and dizzy and discouraged.

And then there came the movie moment: the moment when you're bored and sleepy and not feeling well, and your battery is giving warnings that the tablet is about to die, and you're just going through the motions because finally this damn roll of microfilm has to end and you'll at least be able to check it off the list and move on to searching for the next source.  And then, suddenly, on page eight of notebook 13 out of 13 -- as close to the last possible moment as it can be -- into your bleary vision swims an essay title surrounded by a little doily-shaped doodle, like this:

You rub your eyes to make sure that you haven't misread the title, after so long trying to find things that are relevant.  Perhaps you've dozed off.  The room was comfortable and all the sounds were very far away, after all.  Perhaps it's not really as relevant as you think, and instead of saying "lírica afro-americana" it actually says something like "pick up dry cleaning" and you've just misread it because you've been squinting at microfilm for so long, and so much want it to be something useful.  But no.  There it is, and the letters don't disappear or re-arrange themselves after you've rubbed your eyes in disbelief, and read them again: Lo mejor de la lírica afro-americana, ofrecido por uno de sus grandes poetas.  And they're nice and clear, and it's clearly been boxed because it's a title, and several paragraphs of text follow and spill onto the next page, and it's a draft of an essay.

The first thing is that your heart starts racing and you wonder if this is really going to be something useful.  And maybe it won't be, but the title is so promising, and the extent of the prose text after it, that you feel a desire to break into hysterical laughter, or to pump your fist in the air and shout "YEESSSSSSS!!!!" (or if you're a normal European, I suppose, "GOOOOOOOL!!!!") but this is the Sala Cervantes of the Biblioteca Nacional Española and there are normas and you can't do that.

So you take a few deep breaths, and start reading the next few lines.

At this point reality and Rafael Alberti's terrible hand-writing kicks in, and of course the essay seems to be fragmentary, and there are also a few places where I swear Alberti was just writing a squiggly line instead of script as a kind of ellipses for where he was planning to stick in either a longer paragraph at a later date, or an example of an actual poem.  I had just enough self control to decide that trying to puzzle this out when I was tired, and the laptop was about to die, and  I'd been having trouble reading anyway, and  I wanted to go to yoga was a bad idea.  But tomorrow I have a plan of attack.  I think that the time has come for me to go to the "información de búsqueda" office I was referred to on my first day, and speak to an actual librarian.  I now have a sufficiently specific query (I know that this essay appears in this this notebook with the this "signatura" and I am looking for a date on said notebook and also on where the next one might be where it could be continued.)  Furthermore, I intend to stop and put money on my ID card in the "reprografía" section, so that I can print this very promising page (and a couple of others), and take it to the librarian, and after puzzling it out to the best of my ability ask a native speaker and another pair of eyes to look at it and try to puzzle it out as well.  And if the librarian has trouble, that may be my cue to beg to look at the original notebook rather than the microfilm even though it's "fondo reservado" to see if I can figure out more of the text there.

So that's the plan of attack for tomorrow.  In my quick skimming of the places where Alberti was legible I did see something about the association with "Federico" in 1936, that I'm desperately hoping is about a translation.  Please, please, please be a comment on Alberti's translations of Langston Hughes or Hughes and Alberti's joint translations of Lorca.

So that was today's adventure.  A bit of an anti-climax, and perhaps it will turn out to be nothing, or nothing useful.  But the giddy excitement of a moment is what makes this whole adventure fun.  And the lesson is to always look to the very last thing copied on a very long microfilm, and to have patience.  I will report further developments, if there are any.