Merluza and the Life of Brian - the BNE cafeteria

Research continues.  No breakthroughs.  But amusements.

I spent the better part of three hours transcribing María Teresa León's speech on the "Escuela Hispano-Americana" today, from its very light pencil in her very hurried handwriting.  (She wrote nicely for short stories she was planning to type.  These were more notes for a lecture, and were pretty scribbly.)  I did google it to make sure it wasn't completely wasted effort, and I think at least I've preserved the gist, although my paleography training came in handy in a few places, where I just left ... to signify words or letters I couldn't make out.

Unfortunately, it makes no direct reference to my authors, but it's interesting as a European's view of the Americas (or more specifically as a Spaniard's view of Argentina) in 1940.  It's an odd (but not at all unfamiliar to me) mix of arrogance and pleading.  The school, as far as I can tell from the speech, was designed to have European (Spanish exile) instructors for local children, and although the outline she scribbled for herself at the beginning is supposed to include an "elogio a America" it's mostly about how much the teachers have to offer, since they can explain not only books but also the lived experience of anti-fascist struggle.  What the children (and their families) have to offer is of course a living to the teachers.  All in all it's an odd sample of someone begging and hating to beg.  I also don't think I'm imagining it that the writing gets clearer in the sections where she's talking about the ways Europe has let her down and fallen apart than in the rather vague generalities about the promise of America.  When she writes "Cuando les dijimos del éxodo de Milagros y del martirio de Guernica nos apartaron con su desden enfadadas. Los franceses no quisieran oirnos." the words are nice and clear.  But most of the other sentences have words I can't make out.  It could be my faulty knowledge of Spanish or of her handwriting, but I like to imagine that she was pressing the pencil very hard when she got angry, and so her anger made her words last longer.

I took a break after two hours of puzzling out Maria Teresa's notebook to go have lunch in the BNE cafeteria, which (as was to be expected) was jumping at 3:00.  It functions in a somewhat similar way to the cafeteria at the Complutense (useful given the overlap of customers), in that you go to the cashier first (it's a live person at the BNE, not a machine), and say whether you are ordering a menu or half menu or individual coffee or whatever, and then pay and are given a receipt.  Then you take your menu receipt to the line where you get a tray and silverware, and move along the line and take the first course and dessert, and then are served the second hot course by the servers behind the counter.

I gladly grabbed an ensalada mixta which was nicely furnished with hardboiled egg and tuna for my first course.  Several types of alleged hamburgers featured in the second course, but made wise by experience I don't eat hamburgers here, so I went for the merluza in white sauce with rice, which was undistinguished but perfectly pleasant, and something that I probably wouldn't make at home.  (Side note: Careful label reading at the Mercadona and elsewhere has taught me why the hamburgers here are weird tasting.  The chopped meat that you buy in supermarkets -- that is, unless you go to a butcher and have it ground before your eyes, a la A Tree Grows in Brooklyn -- is only 82% meat.  The other ingredients include coloring and flavors, and also what is described as "fiber."  In other words, it's cut with sawdust.  That explains a lot.)

Anyway, while I was chomping at my merluza I became aware of a discussion several tables away between a half dozen people (three men and three women), all middle-aged and all wearing lanyards with plastic IDs on them, which marked them as staff of the BNE, not researchers.  (They were clearly co-workers.)  I didn't hear everything, but the dispute was mostly between two men, one of whom I could hear better because he was facing me, and the other of whom was harder to hear because he had his back to me, but who was gesturing much more eloquently with his hands.

The argument apparently centered on the institutional support of the Catholic church in Catalonia for the Catalan referendum.  (Several people at the pool and elsewhere have mentioned to me or in my hearing that they were shocked and disgusted that votes were cast and counted in a church, "with the priest singing Mass to the parishioners there."  Spaniards are understandably twitchy about church-state separation because of bad experiences in the past, and as one lady in the locker room at the pool said, "so will they multiply the votes like the miracle of the loaves and the fishes?")  The man with his back to me was defending the Catalan priests who supported independence, arguing that they did so out of support for "su pueblo" and that this showed a praiseworthy spirit of being close to the people rather than the church hierarchy.  The man facing me was saying that he couldn't see how the Church could support any nationalist movement "because if an institution says that it supports universal brotherhood and all of us equal before God how can you be in favor of a nationalist movement?"  He added, with the air of one sure of his religious education.  "¿Qué vas a decir? ¿Que la Biblia dice 'lo de César a César, sí, pero lo de Judea aparte?' "  (Roughly: "So what are you going to say?  That the Bible says 'render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, ok, but render Judea's taxes separately?'")  

My immediate thought was that he had probably seen the El Intermedio episode in which the CUP and the ERC were compared to the Judean Popular Front and the Popular Front of Judea in the Life of Brian.  My second thought was that the English creators of Life of Brian, who are comfortably Roman in outlook, think that scene is a joke.  The Spanish seem to think that it is a lightly disguised documentary.  (Indeed, the Catalaniste attitude toward what is now fashionably called the "regime of 1978" can be summed up as "yes, but aside from the roads, the AVE, TV3, underwriting our debt, funding our health system, and so on, what has Madrid done for us lately?")  My third thought was that the news here just ran a piece on the lamentations/celebrations of the hundredth anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, and that "sí, pero lo de Judea aparte" would probably get a good deal of political support in certain quarters, so when you think you're making a joke you might actually be articulating a policy.

The argument wasn't settled when I had finished my dessert, and they were lingering over natillas and avoiding going back to work, and I doubt it reached any resolution, but I stand by that the entertainment value of the BNE cafeteria is well worth the price.

When I headed back upstairs to the Sala Cervantes I finished the transcription, and then spent an hour with the dreaded microfilm, in this case looking at more of Rafael Alberti's notebooks.  These were little memo pads with graph paper squares on them, which he used the way everyone uses little pads....he wrote in half of them, he skipped pages, he jotted things down sideways and upside down, and he started from both ends.  They're a pain to get through on microfilm.  That said, these are more genuinely notes, not drafts of poems or translations.  There are three more on the microfilm, which I intend to look at tomorrow.  Sadly, most of them seem much later than the time I'm interested in, which is kind of a pain not only from the point of view of relevance but because it takes me longer to figure out their relevance, because some time in the 1970s the couple moved to Rome, and since Rafael (I figure he and Maria Teresa and I are now on first name terms since I've been rummaging through their stuff - que nos tuteamos, vamos) used his notebooks to draft letters, some of the letters (and occasional speeches) are in Italian.  And it takes me a while to figure out whether he's just abbreviating, or I'm misreading his handwriting, or whether he's actually switched languages.  Sigh.

Tomorrow's goal is to finish that microfilm and move on to the next.  This is the slogging part of research.  I just have to keep hoping for Life of Brian references to keep life amusing.