Down among (yesterday's) grassroots

The Archivo Histórico Provincial de Málaga does not have things of immediate interest to my research...but it does have things of interest.

I had a productive Thursday, spending the morning in the Provincial Historical Archive again and combing through personnel files of the cuerpos de seguridad which were useless to my research but quite amusing. I discovered Nobby Nobbs levels of police corruption in one handwritten transcription of the deposition of various complainants and one guardia de vigilancia charged with buying lottery tickets on credit from them and not paying for the tickets throughout 1930-1931. He'd run up a tab of 50 pesetas to one lottery vendor and 45 to another before they finally got up the courage to complain. (Since El ONCE in Spain is traditionally run as a charity for the blind, and the ticket vendors were and are traditionally blind or visually impaired, this falls into the category of taking money from a blind man's cup, almost literally. One of the ticket sellers who complained added specifically in his deposition that his only previous contact with the police had been about precisely the theft of coins from his cup and that at that time he had been “attended to courteously and promptly” – suggesting that dealing with the shakedown guy who didn't pay for tickets was an unpleasant surprise.) As I know from reading several files, the annual salary for a guardia de vigilancia was 3500 pesetas, and for a blind ticket seller presumably considerably less. So 50 pesetas could be a week's income from the ticket seller, or at least a few days worth. (Say the equivalent of about 150-200 euros.) Abusing authority that way seems sleazy, if not actively criminal. The internal investigator apparently agreed, since the deposition ends by saying that the accused was forced to pay the amount he owed in the presence of witnesses.

I also found the correspondence with the Ayuntamiento from 1930-1940, an eventful period in Málaga's history, which (not too surprisingly) has almost all the big events absent. What remains are some oddly moving carbon copies of letters about things that (as a scriptwriter from the era memorably put it) don't amount to a hill of beans in the crazy world of the time, but were still very important to the people involved (including the request for the fifty peseta retirement bonus of the retired veterinarian who was a former slaughterhouse inspector, citing regulation number and paragraph that entitled him to it, and a letter from 1939 confirming that someone who had requested a pension was in fact a widow, whose husband had in fact been killed by “los rojos” even though she couldn't provide a death certificate).

Anyway, all of this was interesting, but not actively helpful for my research, so when the archive closed in the afternoon I headed over to the station to get a bus ticket to Torre del Mar, a district of the neighboring municipality of Vélez Málaga. (I also found a letter from around 1940 on the creepy stationery of the F.E.T./J.O.N.S. saying that as Torre del Mar was now a district “with some 3500 inhabitants, and more arriving” the F.E.T. was humbly requesting that they be granted their own municipal council, and a special council representative within Vélez Málaga to better represent their interests. For those readers who don't know, the F.E.T. is the Falange Española Tradicional, and they merged with the JONS, or Juventudes Obrero Nacional Socialistas to become FET-JONS around 1940, and have remained and continued to present electoral lists in that form ever since. When I say their stationery is creepy, I mean I'm not even sure the logo is legal in Italy at the moment. It is mildly depressing to note that the Spanish Fascist party at the height of its power was apparently less allergic to town hall meetings with constituents than current US congressmen who voted to repeal DACA.) In any case, according to George Hutchinson's biography of Nella Larsen, Dorothy Peterson and Nella Larsen lived in the “Villa Mercedes” in “Málaga” from September to December of 1931. The only Villa Mercedes that google knows about that is not from a much later time period is a neo-Moorish fantasy in Torre del Mar (about 35 km down the coast from Málaga capital). I went to take a picture, and see if I could ferret anything out.

The Villa Mercedes in Torre del Mar - with a weird wooden sidewalk decoration in front of it.

Side view of the Villa Mercedes

Even more than Málaga capital, Torre del Mar recalls the unfortunate fate of Catherine Deneuve. You can still see the remainns of what must have once been incredible beauty, but between putting on all the weight (it's a lot more than 3500 inhabitants now) and some really breathtakingly stupid decisions, the remains almost emphasize how much its in the past tense. The town stretches along a long barrier beach coast, and the beach itself is still pretty, and the Mediterranean is still sparkling blue. The mountains that rise up dark and jagged against a blue sky everywhere the coastline curves are still stunningly dramatic, and would be beautiful even without the contrast with the sea. There are still a few little white washed houses, and the odd thing like the Villa Mercedes, a rich man's idiosyncratic labor of love which was sensibly put about three blocks back from the beach, doubtless looking over red tiled single storey roofs to the blue of the sea when it was built.

 

Looking down the street toward the ocean from the Villa Mercedes today

Sadly, the Villa Mercedes is now separated from the beach by a tacky “centro commercial” selling beach souvenirs and similar, and by two rows of six or seven story condominiums, both of which have what they call “gintonerias” on the ground floor. In February, when most of the souvenir stores and ice cream places (and bars) that line the beach are closed up tightly or being renovated, and only a few cafes and heladerías along the beach have a sprinkling of casual clients, the place still has a nice low-key beach vibe, though at 18 C (about 64 F) it's too cool to swim. (That doesn't prevent the various wrinkly and sunburned Northern Europeans from wandering around in t-shirts and shorts.) I have the bad feeling that in summer it sinks under the weight of its own tackiness. (All the signs are in English and German, even more so than Málaga. I think Spaniards sneak out and try to enjoy the relative calm in February, as I actually did overhear a few local voices at the heladería, notably a woman with either her son or grandson, a boy of about five, who had a serious conversation about football with the waiter, before having an equally serious conversation about ice cream flavors. Ice cream in a jacket and long pants is a small price to pay for the ability to chat with the waiter and not have to fight your way through tourists.) I didn't go down to the water (the sand was quite wide), but the sand looked nice, and a sign along the promenade proudly informs visitors in Spanish and English that the beach is the recipient of the “bandera azul” for clean waters, although due to an unfortunate typo English visitors may read that Torre del Mar has a “blue flan” beach, which does not actually sound very salubrious.

Torre del Mar's "blue flan" beach, with hazy mountains in the distance

Still, I was able to have a sense of what Torre del Mar might have looked like for Larsen and Peterson, already a tourist destination but far less developed, and with quite incredible natural beauty. I understand why Peterson wrote that she was “less unhappy than [she] had been in a long time” when she was there. The beach is nice and wide and I imagine taking long walks there must have been conducive to writing her novel. (Wish she'd left a carbon copy of it in the attic of the Villa Mercedes and that someone had turned said copy in to the municipal archives, but if wishes were dynamite the horrible condos along the beach in Torre del Mar would be demolished and the Villa Mercedes would have its beach view back.)

I stopped for ice cream after taking pictures of the Villa Mercedes because it was siesta, and the tourist office was closed until 5:00 PM. After sampling the “artesanal” coconut and Ferrero-Rocher (aka chocolate hazelnut) flavors, I headed over the tourist office, who provided me with exactly the information on the web about the Villa Mercedes, and added that it was in private hands, and therefore not a site that could be visited, and that if I wanted information about the history I should ask the owners. Still, I got a little handout and a map of Torre del Mar with other points of cultural interest (their somewhat optimistic slogan is “Torre del Mar, Todo el año” which suggests how overrun they are in summer). Then I looked at the paintings by a local artist on display in the little tourist office, and then I headed back to the bus station and took the bus back to Málaga ciudad, where I collapsed, sunburned but happy, for a few hours before dinner (which involved other adventures detailed in the next entry).