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.

The filología (modern languages) wing off the pretty courtyard.  Secretaría at the end of the hall.

Then she went and got a grown up, and I explained what I was looking for to him, adding that the university archive people had sent me to the department thinking that perhaps they had their own records. He invited me to come around the corner from the window to actually walk into the secretaria office (step one! Foot in the door, literally!) and then presented me to an older gentleman saying that if anyone could help me it would be his “compañero.” I explained what I was looking for a third time, and the third person said that the department didn't keep records from the sixties, because they hadn't been the facultad de filología in those days, they had been filosofía y letras, and their records had either been transferred to the university archive in the library or destroyed after the departmental reorganization in the seventies. But if the person I was looking for had taught English (he guessed correctly after hearing her name) then there were two English departments now, language and literature, and if I wanted I could go upstairs to the English language department and talk to their secretary, and perhaps there would be older professors who might remember the person I was looking for.

Studying under the skylights by the department of lengua inglesa

Accordingly, I thanked him and went up the marble staircase to a lovely open are under a courtyard closed in by colored glass which allowed for stained glass lights on the study carrels where various students were perched with their books, preparing for exams. It is really amazing how much friendlier a space the university of Seville is than the Complutense. In terms of cities to live, I'd pick Madrid over Seville, easily. But in terms of physical environments to work, the university of Seville is in a different league from the Complutense. 

Student activities: strikes, demonstrations, and Italian classes

And – to paraphrase Yeats – how but in custom and in ceremony are naive and righteous indignation born? The Complutense has mostly apolitical graffiti over things, varied by the occasional political grafitti, but generally looking simply scruffy. The facultad of the University of Seville is immaculate in its historical building filled with tourists, but there are posters everywhere proclaiming demonstrations in favor of public education, against exploitation of adjunct professors, and all sorts of other good causes, none of them spray painted (that would be vandalism in such a lovely setting) but with flyers and banners and so on. (Of course, it could also be the six thousand American exchange students I learned inhabit the university here, who bring a tradition of activism fueled less by long simmering rage and more by naive shock that all may not be for the best and in the best of all possible worlds which I recognize more easily because it's more familiar.)

Some stuff on the grad students minds

 

And some evidence of caring about something immediately beyond themselves.  (Namely their recent baby selves, which is almost as important.)

Once again I headed away from the formal and elegant study spaces into the narrower corridors, until I found the inevitable, linoleum-tiled, low-ceilinged, windowless hallway with an industrial copy machine saying “Introduce Code to Make a Copy” on the screen that exists in every English department everywhere, and a bunch of doors with name tags and little postcards about conferences taped to the doors with slightly peeling tape. Feeling right at home, I identified the door labeled secretaria, where someone had scotch-taped a strip of paper with a computer printed note on it which said:

Debido al volumen de tareas en estos momentos, la secretaria atenderá a peticiones entre 11:00 y 13:00.

It was at that point just before noon, so I was technically in the middle of office hours, but the door was very definitely closed, and I could hear a voice on the other end in what seemed like a rather involved phone conversation (it was hard to tell through the door and with only one side of the conversation, but I think it was about scheduling). I settled down to wait.

After 20 minutes I calculated the likelihood that the person behind the door would (a)be off the phone before 1:00 PM, and (b) not immediately have something else to do and (c)therefore be willing to listen to a person who was not a student or faculty member who was making an odd and unusual request for which the easiest response would be “no.” The odds of all three of these things happening (plus of course the possibility of the department actually having anything) seemed to me to be a limit approaching zero, so I conceded defeat and left without speaking to the secretary of the English language department, which is an outgrowth of the facultad de filología which was once filosofía y letras. I admit defeat.

As it was still only 12:15, I put phase two of my plan into action, and headed back to the Archivo de Indias, where after duly putting my bag through a metal detector and being asked if I was there “para investigar” by the alert security guard (who must get tired of directing lost tourists to the museum across the way all day), I headed up the stairs to the first floor where I met with a reference librarian and explained (for a change) that I was not so much interested in the collection (though it doubtless is interesting), but rather in whether they kept any records of people who had visited the collection, as I was specifically researching someone who had spent time working there almost one hundred years ago, in the early 1920s. “Uff, one hundred years ago, no I don't think so,” he said instantly. “¿Es famoso, o qué?” I explained that yes, Arthur Schomburg was “famoso” in certain circles, namely those in African American studies, as he was one of the first to research the roots of the trans-Atlantic slave trade seriously. “Vamos, un pionero, entiendo,” the librarian said sympathetically, before going on to explain (with apologies) that their records for this century are digitized, but that the preceding century had been periodically “recycled” (i.e. shredded) “because otherwise we wouldn't have space for any other documents.” As I know very well no one gets into a Spanish archive without providing passport of DNI, and filling out a little information sheet, and in the municipal archives you have to fill out your name and contact details and the date along with every request for a folder that you make, so I could easily see his point. I'm glad to know that all of the time spent filling out call slips and information sheets will not make this blog useless to future generations, since I suspect (computerized or no in theory) that most of the information they collect on researchers goes straight into a circular file. (I could have tested it by checking their computerized records for some of my fellow Fulbrighters who I know have been working there, but that would have been weird and creepy, so I didn't.)

In any case, the Archivo de las Indias has nothing on Arthur Schomburg's pioneering research stay there. I'm saddened, but not surprised. In a way, I feel as if this validates my project a little, since it's quite natural and easy to focus on preserving the oldest and what seem like rarest documents if you have them, so I completely understand archivists in Seville working on preserving their collections from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But the twentieth century is the black hole into which collections which are not old enough to be “interesting” and not young enough to be digital fall. So perhaps it's worthwhile to try to work on remembering it while still possible.

Having gotten that out of the way, I headed quickly past the Cathedral and down the Calle Sierpes to meet up with the Calle Almirante Apodaca (you can look on Google maps if you're interested), past the shoe store selling very reasonably priced alpargatas that I heroically did not buy (though the weather is finally getting warm enough that they might be conceivably useful) to the municipal archive again, where the nice people at the hemeroteca had suggested that I meet with Rafael el Bibliotecario. My first meeting was in fact with a blond woman in a white coat, who recognized me from my preceding adventures there, and asked kindly how she could help me this time. I had a plan of attack worked out, and asked for the índices callejeros for the alternate years Dorothy Peterson had spent in Seville, hoping to find another certificate of empadronamiento, to perhaps confirm what year she left Spain, and find further evidence of her apartments in Spain besides her letters to repeat my Monday triumph.

Then I hit another snag. They only have the índices from 1960 and 1965, because between that time they only did rectificaciones, and 1970 is probably too late. I must have looked somewhat sad and flummoxed, because the archivist said “here, let me give you a list of all the topics we have information on in alphabetical order, and you can look at that and decide what collections would be useful” and handed me another slim, leather bound volume. Offering thanks which really did not convey the depth of my gratitude, I took the book and settled down to read all the file headings preserved in Seville's municipal archives from Abastecimiento de agua to Zócalos. Sadly, extranjeros (the only heading which struck me as useful) only had information from 1859 to 1874. Even more sadly, I found a ton of information (or at least useful topic headings) for something which a fellow Fulbrighter is researching. She hasn't been to Sevilla, and is leaving Spain at the end of this week, and was deeply frustrated when I sent her a series of texts while she was working at the BNE. (Her interest is epidemics and public health ordinances in the nineteenth century, and she was so jealous she threatened to block me as a WhatsApp contact if I didn't stop telling her about all the folders full of documents about “animales dañinos,” “cólera,” “difteria,” “fiebre amarilla,” and “perros vagabundos y rabiosos Véase hidrofobia y matanza de perros.”) However, while it was nice to find something of use to someone else, there was alas almost nothing of the twentieth century of use to me. (This makes me suspect that it might be back at the Archivo General de Administración in Alcalá de Henares. Virtues and annoyances of centralization.)

After apologetically handing back the volume and saying there was nothing there of use, and thanking the archivist again, and doing the same thing with a slim little book which was “an overview of the municipal archives” which she then offered me, she trotted off to get Rafael the librarian, her professional pride evidently hurt by not being able to offer any folders. (Or else I just looked very pathetic and discouraged.)

Rafael greeted me with the friendly but anxious smile of someone who is thinking “I don't think we've been introduced, and I can't place you, but I know I've seen you wandering around the building before, so maybe I'm supposed to know who you are and what you want.” After I explained my Peterson quest (yet again), he relaxed into a real smile, and seated himself in front of his computer and promptly went to work googling. I had to explain about Dorothy Peterson the Swedish-American movie actor from the same time period, who screws up all google searches, and direct him toward the correct Dorothy Peterson, and then I offered what I had found already, and chatted a little bit, explaining that I had been to the university archives and they had directed me to the facultad de filología, but that I wasn't really sure how involved Peterson had been with the university, etc. etc. Rafael was busily tapping through various university library catalogs, in both Seville and nation-wide, which I technically have access to, but know a lot less well (and the keyword things are always a bit weird given a foreign language and sub-ideal software and user interface). He didn't find anything (which didn't surprise me), but he did sit back and say finally. “Well, the head of the English department at the university a usuario of the archives here, and very pleasant. You could get in touch with him. And there's also the CentroNorteamericano de Sevilla in the Calle Harinas. Do you know where that is? It's right by the Cathedral, in the zona monumental. Anyway, the Centro Norteamericano has been around since the 1960s, I think, and it was a kind of social center for Americans in Sevilla, as well as offering English language classes. So this woman might well have been involved there. They might have a library and archives. And even if not, it was founded by una señora...I can't remember her name now, pero una señora muy mayor, who lives in an apartment above the Centro. (It's in an old building in the city center. Very pretty.) So if you go to the Centro and ask them, and maybe ask to speak to the director, she might be able to help you.”

While saying all of this he was googling away, and found the Centro Norteamericano's website with no difficulty, although he was disappointed that the “¿Quiénes Somos?” and “Contacto” pages did not list the director/founder's name, but only those of the current teaching staff. He was pleased to see that the Center listed its activities as “since 1958,” since I had explained that Peterson came to Sevilla in 1959, which is certainly a nice coincidence.

By that point it was nearly two, and I was hungry and didn't feel like going through newspapers on a wild goose chase, so I thanked both Rafael and his colleague again profusely, and said I would follow their leads, and then left to find a place to have lunch.

After lunch, and a nice nap at the hotel (necessary with all this getting up early, and possibly the fact that I checked out a crappy fantasy novel from the NYPL online and read it until too late the night before), I pulled myself together and headed back to the university historical archive, to look at the very last file I had noted as being possibly of interest in their charming card catalogues.

I was greeted by name and in English and practically with hugs by the red-headed librarian, who exclaimed at how late I was (it was after eight), and said she had despaired of seeing me that day, and presented me to her colleague who had met me on Monday. They both asked with mock sternness if I had “hecho mis deberes” and gone to check out the facultad de filología. I explained that I had, but had hit a dead end, but had only one more file I wanted to look at and that I promised I wouldn't keep them late until 9:00 (when they officially close). After assuring me that it was no trouble they promptly provided the two folders in the one gigantic file, a list of appointments of “colaboradores” (I think the rough equivalent would be adjuncts) for the 1972-73 school year for the facultad de filosofía y letras.

It would have been exactly the information I was looking for, had it been for the 1966-67 school year instead. (Of course that one's not in the files.) On the upside, I got to read the contracts of employment for various language teachers (including English teachers), and I now have a good idea of a value in pesetas of what Peterson meant when she wrote that the university was “the worst paid job she'd ever had.”

Sadly, no Peterson. But the university archive librarians hugged me and kissed me on both cheeks when I left, and wished me luck, and I promised to send them a copy of my thesis if it's ever published as a book. I'm thinking the acknowledgements list is going to be long now, and that I should have asked people's names because there are so many people who have been so kind.

I collapsed yesterday evening with the sense that I had checked a lot of things off the list, and done my best. Thursday, my last day in Sevilla, I decided would be devoted to a day of tourism, rather than trying fruitlessly to track down the English department of the facultad de filología formerly known as filosofía y letras. To satisfy my conscience, I decided to take my good camera (not my phone) and take pictures of the three addresses that Dorothy Peterson lived at in Sevilla, to have them to accompany my notes based on her empadronamiento, and to stop in at the “Centro Norteamericano,” which I suspected (correctly) to be like the International Institute in Madrid, a once odd project of fanatical American ladies, but now simply a private language school offering English to Spaniards and Spanish to Americans.

Accordingly, I packed up and checked out in a reasonably leisurely fashion, stopped for coffee and a pastry at a handy cafe, and then wandered happily through the sunshine (it was so nice to be able to wear shorts finally, although I'm afraid I'll be back to jeans in Madrid, if the forecast is accurate). I followed the address notes I had taken, and google maps on my phone, and snapped pictures and felt like a tourist and was happy. I found the Centro Norteamericano, closer to the river than I'd been all this trip in Sevilla, two gracious old houses with tiled courtyard and fountain knocked into one. I made my way around the group of middle aged American ladies who were being taken on some kind of tour by a Spanish guide, and headed over to where a cheerful young woman at recepción welcomed me and asked how she could help. I think she thought that my hesitant ¿Cómo explicar? was a lack of trust in my language abilities, not a way of marshaling the series of facts for the rather bizarre request I've made so often lately. In any case, she relaxed considerably when I explained myself in Spanish, and then said apologetically. “El caso es que no tenemos archivo, ni nada.” I nodded, already expecting the answer, and then – with the genuine desire to be helpful which has marked nearly everyone I've talked to in Sevilla – she added. “But if you leave your name and phone number, and the name of the woman you're researching I can give it to the director. She's been here a long time and she might know something.” Pleased that I would be able to take Rafael the Librarian's advice (since I felt guilty about not doing my deberes thoroughly enough for the ladies at the university archive), I very carefully printed my full name and phone number on a post it, along with my email, although I suspected that given the probable age of the director, a phone number was requested for a reason. Then I carefully wrote a note explaining that I was researching Dorothy Peterson's stay in Spain between 1959 and 1968. Then I thanked the girl at recepción again, and chatted a little, explaining that I was doing a thesis about various writers, but that she was the most forgotten because she had published least, perhaps because she had faced some sexism and that I was hoping to do a revindicación of her work because I felt she was unjustly overlooked. (Spaniards love discussing the injustices of sexism. It is an invariable sympathetic opening, especially with young women. In this instance I think it happens to also be true.) Then she wished me luck and promised to pass along the post it note, and then I left.

Entry way of the Centro Norteamericano de Sevilla, Calle de Harinas 16

I plugged the next address into my phone, and realized that it took me across the river, to the “Barrio Remedios,” which Dorothy Peterson described as brand new and “very cosmopolitan” in 1960, not least because it had “the only Chinese restaurant in Seville.” (My feeling about having to live near a Chinese restaurant even when you're being an expatriate is that it proves that you can take the girl out of New York, but you can't take New York out of the girl. Sometimes you just need comfort take-out.) When I was searching for Dorothy Peterson's empadronamiento for this neighborhood I didn't find it (she moved right at the end of the year, around the time the census was taken), but I did find that the block she lived on was full of other Americans (at least ten families, which would have been unusual at the time, I think, though now the city is absolutely stuffed to the gills with my compatriots, partly the six thousand American students Rafael the Librarian mentioned, and all their loving families who visit them, and partly doubtless overflow from the still active bases in Rota and Morón de la Frontera.). Observing the address (it's on the Calle Asunción), it's not hard to see why it was an expatriate community in 1960. For one thing, the buildings were all new, which meant new plumbing and hot water and so on. For another, while it's really right across the river and only about a half hour walk from the absolute city center, that would have been considered quite a distance outside of town when the city was less built up, and I suspect that only Americans had the horrible suburban impulse. Spaniards who had a choice would have preferred to live in the city center, and Spaniards who didn't have a choice would have been too poor for what was obviously planned as an upscale suburb. The streets are wide and straight, and laid out in as strict a grid as the curve of the river allows. (And now, bless them, the very wide straight shopping street of the Calle Asunción has a wide two way bicycle lane and is otherwise completely pedestrian. If anyone has ever doubted or wondered what a truly pedestrian avenue in New York City would look like, not just closed for a street fair but permanently closed to traffic, look at the Calle Asunción, with its wide bicycle lanes, nice benches at intervals, and people up and down the rest of its width and going shopping. Traffic moves on the through streets, and there are the retractable bollards so that I suspect trucks get through with deliveries for the stores at night, but during the day it's absolutely lovely.) In other words, the Barrio Remedios is about as far from the narrow, twisty, picturesque city center of Sevilla conceptually as it's possible to get. I loved it. (Sevilla is stunningly beautiful. But it's also so quaint it makes my teeth hurt. If Bruges is gingerbread houses, Sevilla is marzipan houses. I need a city with some substance that's not just empty calories.)

The Calle Asunción: a wide, straight, street originally (optimistically) built for cars, and now bikes only.  The dream is real.

After wandering along the Calle Asunción, and feeling generally cheerful about life, as one generally does on a prosperous bourgeois shopping street, filled with people on a warm, sunny day, I headed south to my final address, which brought me across the river again and (had I bothered to check it earlier) to within a stone's throw of the university's beautiful new library and historical archive. I was just approaching the Puente de Remedios to re-cross the river when, to my surprise, my phone rang. Not buzzed, for a received email, or bonged for a received text message: rang. Someone was calling me. A quick glance showed an unknown but local number.

Torn between hope and fear of a sales call I picked it up and said “¿sí?” and an English speaking voice on the other end said “Rebecca?” After going back and forth a bit until we settled on English as a language and I found a quiet corner away from the traffic noise of the bridge where I could hear properly, a woman's voice said. “My name is Barbara. I'm calling because I got a message that you were interested in researching Dorothy Peterson. Dorothy Peterson was a friend of mine. I'm going to a concert this evening actually with someone who knew her quite a bit better than I did, because she was part of a women's club with Dorothy that I didn't belong to. I can ask her what she remembers too, because you know age does bad things to the brain.”

For faithful blog readers who have read Javier Cercas's novel Soldados de Salamina, this was the moment when the narrator hears a voice over the phone that says: “Miralles al aparato.” For Hobbit-geeks, this is Durin's Day.  This was the supreme Moment of Coolness.

I managed to not fall over, and to profusely express my appreciation, and explain a little about my project. I also was tremendously sad about leaving Sevilla this evening, as I totally would have met the ladies and invited them to a drink or coffee either before or after their concert to ask for information. But alas, I was leaving Sevilla, and I was unprepared to conduct an interview on the spur of the moment over the phone. I offered to return to Sevilla next week (damn the expense, it's worth it), but I think probably we'll end up speaking by phone, either next week or when Barbara returns to the US for the summer, and when I have a nice list of questions typed up and ready to go. I don't know what (if anything) I'll find of interest. But in keeping with the theme of people really going above and beyond to help out in Sevilla, Barbara said, “Oh, I knew someone who was close to her in Sevilla and then lived in Massachusetts near her when she was living there before she died. She lives in Alabama now. I'll try to get in touch with her.”

I was still in a public place when I hung up the phone after our brief conversation, so I did not jump up and down and squeal (though I honestly told Barbara that she'd made my day). But I will do an electronic jumping up and down and squealing now. OMG. OMG. OMG. BEST. FULBRIGHT RESEARCH EXPERIENCE. EVER. I know I shouldn't get my hopes up. It's not a lost manuscript (even of an article). In terms of literary criticism, it may not even be that interesting. But I feel as if Dorothy Peterson has suddenly become real in a way that my other authors haven't quite. And I do hope that I get to talk at more length with Barbara (and perhaps her friends who also knew Dorothy Peterson) and learn a bit more about her life in Spain, and perhaps even more importantly the ways she taught Spanish to Americans, which made her a conduit for Spanish culture in the US.

I really need to learn to be less excited about very basic detective work. But (as a faithful blog reader who I texted a small squeal to pointed out), at least this is a kind of detective work that hurts no one. And I think an interview plus an empadronamiento amply justifies both my trip to Sevilla and my Fulbright in general. And it's true, you always do find something in the last place you look. Even if you were about to stop looking anyway.

All in all, it's been a good day.

From my farewell walk in the Parque María Luisa before taking the train back to Madrid: Roses and palm trees, and neo-mudéjar palaces.  Sevilla always gilds the lily.  But the sunshine and bright flowers and pretty building matched my mood.