On fleeing and homecoming

There's no easy last entry for this blog...

I'm glad to be home, and glad that Spain has shown its best side in the last weeks.  But for my blog-reading peeps who can, stay in the streets.

So, my Fulbright grant is officially over.  I'll be back and forth to Spain over the summer, but I've made a quick trip home (the first since last September, and the first time I've left Spain this year).  I kept reassuring all my friends and neighbors in Carabanchel, "it's just for a couple of weeks.  I'll be back soon" and it's true...but I can feel the beginning of being uprooted, and I'm sad, because I've been mostly very generously welcomed...in Carabanchel, in Madrid, and in Spain.  (I know perfectly well from other Fulbrighters that the welcome extended so generously might be more ambivalent and unpleasant if I weren't white.  This hurts me because I love Spain and want it to be better, but I can still acknowledge the grace with which I have been received and made at home in my immigrant neighborhood, even as other people remind me that the glory of New York is that you can become a New Yorker, and the problem with Europe is that you and your children remain forever foreigners.)

I'm also being generously welcomed home in New York (it turns out I have friends), and I must say that from the moment of landing at JFK I felt the same relief and happiness about being home as always, and the same recognition that New York really is unlike any other place I've been, not only because of my personal associations, but because yes, the cross-section of people you get on a subway car here is more diverse than the (very beautiful) metro in Madrid, even in my neighborhood.  And yes, you can speak English if you want to, but it's really optional.  (I met up with Spanish friends in New York on my first day back, and kept being surprised when the children playing around us in the park spoke such good English.  My instinct is to speak Spanish with children and English with adults now, and I kind of had to reverse it.)

At one of my farewell dinners during my last week in Madrid a concerned Spaniard (considering visiting New York) asked me whether speaking Spanish was "stigmatized" in the city, and I could hardly help laughing as I assured her that it most emphatically was not.  And yet...this is a painful time to come home.

Madrid to Carabanchel - a novel tour

 My Fulbright year officially ended on June 14, and the blog is sadly winding to an end, but here's a little story of one of my final activities....

Faithful blog readers will recall my long winter's silence when I was trying to finish a novel as well as working on my thesis. A few of you have read or heard more about this project, so I thought it would be nice, as one of the final entries, to do a little tour of how important places in the novel look in the present day. So this will be an entry of photos, not so much about my daily life as about the places I wrote about (more or less), although I give fair warning that the neighborhood has changed so much in the last fifty years (and even the last twenty-five) that almost nothing remains of 1876, when the novel is set, and when Carbanchel was a country village outside a much smaller Madrid, that still stayed more or less inside its gates.

Always the last place you look...

To quote Edwidge Danticat's Krik?Krak! “Something is always in the last place you look, because once you find it, you stop looking.”

I had a lovely day finding nothing in the archives yesterday, going first to the university's facultad de filología, as recommended by the friendly archivists as the university's archivo histórico. The facultad de filología is located in the old tabacalera building, a lovely seventeenth century pile of sun-paled stone, set around a series of courtyards. It's a pretty standard stop on the tourist itinerary, and indeed a sign in English, French, and Spanish advises visitors that free audio guides are available just past the entrance. I ignored the audio guides and headed straight for the conserjería, where I got directions to the “secretaria” of the facultad de filología, and then headed through the courtyards decorated with neo-classical statues and fountains, and old signs from the tobacco factory (“Inspección de Talleres” read an archaic sign above a more modern one for restrooms), and where gracious stone arches were discreetly fitted with glass doors to set off important things like the student cafeteria.

Students in the main building of the Universidad de Sevilla

Then I turned off the last courtyard and headed down a hallway where marble gave way to tile and then eventually to linoleum to find a little window (ironically dedicated to Erasmus students) where I offered my somewhat involved explanation of what I was looking for to a young woman who was probably the equivalent of a work study student, and who was clearly used to answering questions about registration and exams. She looked amiable but puzzled and then asked me to wait a minute.

Morons of the Frontier: a morning in the hemeroteca

Sadly, yesterday's triumph was not repeated today.  But perhaps it's one day on, one day off...and there's still tomorrow.

I must say that the archivists of Seville are - individually and as a group - the most kind and helpful I have met.  Yesterday's nice people in the municipal historical archive suggested that if I was researching a journalist I might want to consider the hemeroteca, the collection of local periodicals one floor down, to see if she had written any articles.  It had never occurred to me that Peterson might have published while she was in Sevilla, but as most of her (few) published works are articles, that struck me as logical.  So this morning I presented myself at the hemeroteca after a quick stop in the provincial historical archive to check for her "certificado de buena conducta" which was fruitless ("was she arrested?" asked the friendly man in the white coat brightly.  "Because we have all the prison records from then."  He seemed distinctly less sure of her presence in the archives when I said she hadn't had brushes with the law.)  I looked quickly at the little exhibits in the provincial archive, about the flag of California (for not completely clear reasons) and the letters of nineteenth century novelist Juan de Valera, and also took their little flyer about "international archive day" which has the heading (in "Andaluz"):  ¿Pero qué eh Ud?  ¿Archivista?  Bueno, hay gente pa' to'o.  ("What're you?  An archivist?  Well, it takes all kinds.")  In a sweet attempt to democratize an archive which basically runs to prison records and state control, they also have a little poster saying that everyone has old photos and letters and so on, and that if you contribute them to the provincial archive they will be digitized so we can keep records of "our Sevilla" as it was for all, and another little form to take which you can fill out to make donations of photos or other personal papers.

Anyway, back to going around the corner and up the stairs to the hemeroteca.

In her own hand...a small victory in the archives

 

It took ten months, but I've finally located a primary source document written by one of my authors.

Greetings from Sevilla, where I arrived yesterday afternoon, after planning to visit multiple archives here since September.  Sevilla was the first port of call (in one case literally) for most of the authors I'm studying, and they tended to refer to it using terms like "the heart of Spain."  This is the Andalusian city par excellence, known for its flamenco, for its bougainvillea strewn terraces and balconies, its accent "muy cerrado" and its "color especial."  This is the city that ruled the "West Indies" and saw the expansion (and explosion) of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and got rich from the gold of the New World (and also poor since the Spanish imported so much they accidentally devalued the currency of half of Europe, because they didn't understand about absolute value vs. commodity fetish, but whatever).  This is the "Spanish" city which boasts the Roman ruins of Baetica, the (much restored and renovated) Moorish alcázar and the ramped Giralda, the minaret-cum-belltower with its spinning statue ("giraldilla" or little spinner), thought such an architectural wonder that allegedly the medieval conqueror of the city threatened to slaughter every single civilian Sevillano if the city's defenders tried to destroy it before surrendering.  (To their credit, they put the lives of their citizens above their religious principles, and allowed it to be defaced as a church tower.  It must have been tough on them though.)  In any case, Sevilla is the "heart of Spain," and every single one of my authors thought it was iconic.

I've never really liked it.

Partly that's because my heart has always belonged to Madrid, the much maligned mongrel of the high desert.  Partly that's because the first time I visited Sevilla, almost exactly twenty years ago, the city was unpleasantly split between super luxury tourism of the Bruges-Disney variety and really unpleasant poverty.  And partly just because I'm perverse, and hate falling for all the stereotypes about Spain.  But the archives beckoned, and I have to admit, after twenty four hours here, that it's really a very beautiful city, and that there has also clearly been some attempt at intelligent investment and development (and the presence of some normal stores like supermarkets and pharmacies and hardware stores as well as souvenir stores selling overpriced cachivaches).  And bright and early this morning I set out to visit the Municipal Historical Archive, on the trail of Dorothy Peterson that had led nowhere in Málaga in February.

Hugs and Handshakes all around

It's June, which means the school year is ending, and it's graduation season...and there are lots of award and end of year ceremonies that are similar.  Also the odd swearing-in.

On Friday, 1 June, I had not one but two semi-formal social commitments.  First of all, I was invited to attend the awards ceremony for the most outstanding Erasmus students at the Complutense, on the somewhat shaky grounds that I have been one of the substitutes for the English-language adviser this term, and one of the award winners was from University College London (though the young lady in question is actually French, and being an extremely good student had no need to talk to me for the entire semester anyway).  That was in the morning.  Second, in the evening, I was invited to an optional "end of year gathering" for Fulbrighters before the program officially ends in just two weeks time.

Given that the Fulbright and Erasmus programs have some common features (and some interesting differences), the two ceremonies had some interesting parallels and divergences.  All in all, both were nice affairs, which succumb to the human temptation to make formal milestones to mark endings of things, and indulge in a little benign self-congratulation.  Both involved hugs, promises to stay in touch, excellent tapas, and beer and wine for those participants who enjoy those things (and fanta and coke for me).  But given that they both happened to take place on the same day (and in fact almost literally at the same hour) as the PP government of Spain fell and the PSOE replaced them, and as the shaky Italian coalition took power with all the grace and finesse of what a car insurance ad here calls "a teenager who parallel parks by ear" the overwhelming presence of diplomats from no fewer than six different countries led to some amusing reflections.  The most important one of course being that most of the invited diplomats wisely took advantage of their prior engagement to deliver anodyne congratulations to a bunch of sweet young people to be unavailable for comment while governments dissolved and re-formed.  Like Macavity or Corporal Nobby Nobbs, they were distinctly not there when it came to dramatic events in Moncloa or in Rome, but in this hyper-connected age of checking smartphones, few of them were able to completely keep their concern about what the more tactful among them referred to as "challenging events in the world" from out of their remarks.