My Spain
In my last blog post (oh so long ago, lo siento,) I wrote of waiting for spring. I wrote of waiting for the hope of a new temporada, an unthawing of what I felt was at first a cold welcome from a closed off people into a country I had pictured as awash in the golden glow of sun and sangria.
I was mourning the loss of the hot sun of Africa when I disembarked into a wintry Spain. So used to the openness and easy hospitality of the Batswana, I wasn’t prepared for the amount of work it would take to break through the distant and insular demeanor of my classmates. Perhaps I shouldn’t blame them—every semester brings new swarms of exchange students here, so what was I for them but a stranger passing through? And so I waited for Spain to change, while remaining blind as to how Spain was changing me, working upon me like a tide upon a cliff—so gradually as to be unobservable, until time has elapsed enough that erosion has visibly smoothed its rocky surface.
How could I have forgotten the words of my favorite poet, Rainer Maria Rilke? Life is not a “reckoning and counting, but a ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything.”
I did not trust at first that summer, metaphorically speaking, would come. I did not have patience with the language here, the people, the at times incomprehensible customs, the way of life. Looking back, I wanted to be a Madrileño without first understanding how, and without first earning it. I yearned for summer without acknowledging the need for a spring. I yearned to speak the language without wanting to struggle with it, without wrestling with it, without fighting with it. Every day in class I wanted to throw my desk through a window and scream every time a word evaded the tip of my tongue and I was rendered speechless by my own inadequacy. I had to learn the patience (with pain, to which I am grateful) that Rilke speaks of. Learn to taste the words and spit them out like a Rioja on a wine tour.
Where am I now?
Sitting at my small desk in front of an open window I can smell the roasting peppers and onions from Yolanda’s kitchen (my eccentric old neighbor who seems to permanently have her faded grey grandma panties out on the line) wafting in on the cool night air that always seems to carry with it the faintest tint of hibiscus. I hear the crackling static of the radio from the apartment above me, the wavering chants and hauntingly solemn tones of the Spanish mass sung to radio waves and the silence of our empty courtyard. And strangely enough, I feel at home.
I cannot place my finger on the moment when it changed: when I finally felt home. No longer trapped in the cellar of a language unspoken in this country of rolling vowels and trilling consonants and a musical virtuosity that in comparison makes me hear my native tongue as light as lead and slow as molasses. When did I first walk the streets with the unconscious assuredness of a local? When did I no longer dread the opening words of a conversation but greet them eagerly?
I am a person in search of wild things, and I thought I had left them behind in Africa. But I was too quick to judge and dismiss the wildness of Spain, blinded by my homesickness for Botswana. It is a different wildness, and I did not recognize it at first for what it was. But the wildness here exists in the frenzy of fiesta, the crush of the crowds at Carnaval, the sprawled graffiti on the silent unprotesting walls of Madrid. It is in the nighttime abandon every Madrileño embraces as if it was his last night on earth and he must make up for lost time. It is in the passion of the flamenco, the wail of the guitar, the roar of the motorbike racing past lumbering blue buses. It is in the uncontrollable excitement of a rumbling football stadium after a goal by Real Madrid.
There’s a wildness too in the austerity of cloud-capped glaciers on the road between Granada and Madrid, where rock and granite are fragments of a broken world. As we sped by in our bus, the untamed landscape of rocky and arid hills flashed by us, illuminated by the hard rays of the sun that casts shadows into hiding until their bravery slowly gathered as the sun turned her eye to the west.
It’s found in the glimpse of old castles speeding past the windows of my bus, those haughty outcroppings of stubborn pride serving as an unflinching memorial to centuries of kings and conquistadors. History hangs heavy in a land where aspirations of world domination are carved into stone and erected as monuments to dead kings in marble tombs. History is seeped into the soaring cathedrals, into the cobblestones of Toledo, into the intricate mosaics of the Alhambra and the mosque of Córdoba.
And oh, the Alhambra! As Kate O’Brian, the fearless female explorer once said, ‘Not to admire Moorish architecture is to be incapable of appreciation. Its sad, solemn beauty and exquisite taste made me think of minor keys, and how truly Madame de Stael had called architecture “frozen music.”’ The Alhambra, for me, was just that. A fugue caught for eternity in its moment of climax. And how perfect is the word fugue to describe it, this edifice erected to the glory of the Moors and appropriated by the Christians of the Reconquista. Fugue, a polyphonic composition based upon one, two, or more themes, which are enunciated by several voices or parts in turn, and gradually built up into a complex form having distinct divisions of development and a marked climax at the end. The Alhambra, with her Moorish style, the forced overlay of Christian symbolism upon it, the voices of Europe and North Africa and Islam and conquest all commingled into one powerful composition.
And in writing this, I realize this frozen music can be used to describe more than just the architecture of such wonders as the Alhambra. Spain is a fugue of powerful voices. There is Moorish Spain, Hemingway’s Spain, Velazquez’s Spain, Gothic Spain, Franco’s Spain, King Felipe II’s Spain, Frederico Garcia Lorca’s Spain. The echoes of conquest and battles sound a drumbeat beneath it all: the resolute enjoyment of life and the exuberance of her people are the lyrical flute. A pervasive melancholy of unresolved tragedy from the reign of Franco is a sonorous cello, a counterweight to the flamboyance of a radical youth. Spain, a fugue of millions of voices all clamoring to be heard and in their wild cacophony form something great.
I opened my eyes and ears, and this is the Spain I have discovered. My Spain. My Spain, and yet where is she going? What a time to study abroad—a time of elections and indignados, of manifestaciones and movimientos. The spirit of revolution, perhaps sparked by the courage of the Arab world, has suffused this country with a new brand of resistance (or perhaps not so old at all—the veins of anti-fascism always seem to course through the hearts of these protests.) I walked through the protests in Sol, I saw the tents and signs of Barcelona, Valencia, Zaragoza. This protest is not just for Spain though—the May 15th Movement is a global movement that saw countries like Greece, Germany, France, UK, Iceland, Tunis, Egypt, and Syria staging their own protests and taking to the streets. I asked my friend from Somosaguas just what exactly the May 15th “revolution” is about. He said, quite seriously, “Everything.” He said that the world is in crisis, that it is in a social, political,environmental, and financial crisis. The May 15th movement then, is a roar of rage against all that is occurring, a frustrated cry of those who feel powerless and helpless against “the system.” To them, the banks are the villains, the government the enemy, the rich the bad guys who must be taken down. The world is black and white, us v. them, if you’re not down with the revolution get up and go. The revolution is a reaction to the unresponsiveness of their representatives, their losses and struggles as a result of the financial collapse, the dismal prospects for a better job, a better life, a better future than their parents’ generation. They feel they have no political recourse, that their vote is a drop in the ocean. The poor and unemployed, many of them of my generation, feel as though they are paying for the errors of their politicians, the evasions of the rich, and the entire global system that rewards the entrepreneurs and those who understand and manipulate the capitalistsystem to their advantage. And so they resist in the only way they know how, in the only way they can—staging giant protests with the hopes that their actions will create a strong enough ripple to make it to the halls of power.
As I look to my departure back to the United States in just a few days, I wonder what it is that I will miss most about this Spain of mine. Because it has become mine now, and I have grown to love it as I have grown to understand it. This wild, complicated, spirited, beautiful country has become home over the course of six months, and I know that wherever my travels take me, I will always find myself drawn back to this land of brilliant sunshine and snow-capped majesty, of tempestuous song and turbulent sword, of castle and Kapital. Hasta luego a mi vida en España, pero nunca adios.