Wining in Rioja

Earlier this month I found myself on the Camino de Santiago again, having lured my mother to Spain with promises of a wine tour in La Rioja. We started in lovely Laguardia, a fortified town situated on a rise that is dwarfed by the Cantabrias beyond. Staying inside the city walls takes one back to the times when the sparsely populated fiefdoms of Spain were fiercely but so often unsuccessfully defended. Laguardia is notable for its extensive series of cuevas, excavated chambers below the city that originally served as an underground defensive network but was converted into wineries when wine-making became popular several hundred years ago. The most impressive tour, by Bodegas Carlos San Pedro Pérez de Viñaspre, takes one down into the cuevas where a joven red is still made in huge tanks, in the style of several centuries past. I could write several pages on all that I learned about the fascinating process of enology, but will limit myself to saying that the wineries we saw ranged from fully modern to Bodegas Muga, in Haro, known for remaining faithful to its founder — the first in the region over a century ago to produce finer quality wines (crianzas, á la francais), as opposed to the hearty peasant jovenes which still clearly are a strong local tradition. The massive oak vats containing tens of thousands of liters of wines are a sight to behold.

Aside from wine, the tour was notable for the number of simply amazing cathedrals, abbeys and cloisters that we saw. My best move was to book a room at the Hostería housed in a modernized wing of the Monasterio de Yuso in tiny San Millán. We saw damage done by Napoleon’s troops — here, they built fires on the tiled passageways of the monastery, damage that is still visible today. Up the hill is a place that sent shivers through me — Saint Millán was supposed to have lived from the mid-fourth to mid-fifth century, and the tiny Suso monastery represents three successive periods — Visigothic, Mozarabic and Romanesque — which are all clearly visible in the architecture. While the saint was living, however, there were only a series of caves, one of which is marked as the site he used to flagellate himself. In the photo, his tomb is visible in the most ancient part, a cave which has been built out in two phases as evidenced by the two different arches. I have to say, as a Catholic, it just doesn’t get any better than this.

As I walked a side spur of the Camino de Santiago that passes by Suso, newly inspired, I contemplated the possibility of doing the entire trail by bike. But when I returned to Madrid, S. mentioned casually that she wants to do the last 200 km or so, by foot. I immediately signed on to join her. If all goes well, by the end of next month I’ll have earned the right to expiate a sin or two. Now, if I could only decide which to choose…

Siempre Seré Extranjera

With Spain, although it’s the first time I truly see myself as an immigrant, I’m launching into my third residency in a foreign country. So I’m all too familiar with the low that often hits around the six- or eight-month point, when the novelty of a new place has worn off, the faults have become all too obvious and it seems like one will never feel at ease. This has, for the third time in my life, resulted in a strong urge to go running home. In the current case, this has weirdly manifested itself as longing for Berlin, which gives me the strangest sensation of wondering if Berlin, then, had become more of a home, or at least “my place”, than the States.

This particular low point came after numerous phones calls resulting in treatment ranging from indifferent to poor to downright insulting, as well as three futile visits to government offices, in one case waiting well over an hour (at the infamous Poblados sin número, about which more in the future). All of this happened at various of the Spanish immigration offices scattered around Madrid (which seems to have half a dozen), with absolutely no result. The reason for this? I’d been set the impossible task of coming here to “pick up my packet at the foreigners’ office”. Said task was given me by the Vice Chancellor of the Spanish Consulate in Berlin. Who I finally figured out had been sitting on the informational letter (which included my foreigner’s ID number) that I needed in order to know which damn office to go to in the first place. Sitting on it, I might add, since January 13th. You can bet I will be submitting a formal complaint against that guy just as soon as I can, even if it means I have to do it personally the next time I’m in Berlin.

It was a stressful couple of weeks, as after DocumentaMadrid ended, I spent almost all of my time on paperwork, trying to figure out the residency question, then getting signed up for the Spanish social security system which is the way into the health care system (free to all citizens and residents). At some point in the future which will be announced to me, I will have to be fingerprinted, and that sort of invasion of privacy, quite frankly, heightens the desire to run fleeing back to the good old data-protection stronghold of Germany. I’ve been over it countless times in my mind but can’t think how I could extend that German visa, and even if I did, I never got free health care there. So should I look at it as fingerprinting in exchange for socialized medicine? I’m working on getting used to the idea.

As for those feelings of alienation, I know from experience that they’ll fade with time, at least to some extent. In Nicaragua I came to terms with my role as the exotic, impossibly desirable gringa. In Germany no one ever looked twice at me (other than to ask directions) as I was nearly indistinguishable from the locals. In Spain I’m neither desirably exotic nor anything like the locals; I generally feel like a great gawking pale stork. But I suppose I’ll find some way to come to terms with that too (I’ve decided limb reduction surgery is probably not covered by the Spanish health system).

I think of the song by Celia Cruz, possibly the greatest salsera the world has ever known and also (to use the unkind term) a gusana. Politics aside, she got one thing very right: the song Siento Nostalgia which juxtaposes perfectly with La Vida es un Carneval. I’m happy to report that a week or so ago, after the hassle and stress of so much bureaucratic torture was finally over, I found myself dancing to that very song with Desaparecido. A Carneval, indeed.

The Moviegoer

Like the good film addict that I am, I timed my return to Spain around DocumentaMadrid, which so impressed me last year. This year’s festival is almost over, and though I’d intended to blog it more, time’s been at a premium as I’ve been overwhelmed with such bizarre problems with my Spanish residency (which will undoubtedly become a separate post). For now I am very pleased both that my favorite documentary from the Berlinale, Defamation (Hashmatsa), was showing here and that it won the audience award in the category of feature documentary. It will be presented tomorrow afternoon during the award screenings. Last year I attended several award sessions (there are four this year) and was very pleased with the quality of the films, so this year that’s where I’ll be spending what is predicted to be the 2nd cold and rainy Sundays out of three since I arrived. But I can’t complain; the last ten days or so the weather has been beautiful.

The new discovery for me in this film festival was Andres Weiel and I saw three of his documentaries back-to-back at the Goethe Institution (which, as I understand it, has a film archive as part of its library). I will have to join in order to check out more of Weiel’s work, because two of the three documentaries that I saw very much intrigued me with a new way of asking a very old question — why and how does human society so often turn violent? I know that at least one other film, Black Box, is something I need to add to my Weiel repertoire. Watching subtitled film in one’s second and third languages is always challenging. It’s really great practice, especially for an American who was exclusively monolingual as a child, to link those foreign language pathways together. More on Veiel’s work here soon; I was mightily impressed.

The Foreigner Tax

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I’m back in Madrid and Sunny Sexy South will be back in action for at least the next six months, with a big apology for the nearly four month gap due to an extended stay in Berlin. Somehow I think Thursday’s post didn’t come out sweetly wistful as I’d intended, as I’ve been clearly hit hard with that old placelessness.  I’d intended to post a light rejoinder to off-set that post, but Madrid is still feeling like too much of a strange land.  Life has other plans: “ha, you think you’ve got everything figured out, well, I’ll show you“!

It’s nothing new for me, of course, to be hit with the foreigner tax; it’s never a surprise any more, and if at one point I might have reacted with outrage, or some sort of overly-American misguided sense of entitlement, those days are far behind me.  Unfortunately, however, I never have quite been able to shake that sort of sinking, stupid feeling which comes from knowing that I should have known better, or checked further, or asked the right question.  But that’s sort of the point of the foreigner tax — there are things one just doesn’t think of, because one didn’t grow up there and it’s not in one’s blood, like an American knowing, instinctively, that anything to do with the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) will be enough outright pain to fulfill the year’s masochism quota, or the importance of April 15th (tax day) which is imprinted in our DNA, or that, no matter WHAT, one must always address a cop as “yes sir, thank you officer”, most particularly the darker one’s skin happens to be.

In Berlin, I remember, it must have been 10 months before I figured out that I could buy a monthly transit pass for nearly 20 euros less each month if I traveled after 10 AM (and I doubt I ever traveled before noon)!!  That little foreigner tax cost me close to 200 euros, I suppose.  Here in Madrid, the turn of the calendar year, I have now learned, is associated with government-related multiple entry tickets expiring right and left.  I caught the metro ticket, due to prominent signage and my relative fluency in Spanish, thus saving myself, if I’m not mistaken, 4.20 euros.  But the city sports facility went by me completely, and I’ve just lost 8 entries to the pool.

Twenty years ago in Nicaragua was when I first learned the so-sorry (but not really) shrug. Open your hands palms facing up, keep your upper arms against your body, move your forearms at an angle to the side, and make a big exaggerated shrug with your shoulders while totally blanking out your face.  That’s the sign of government bureaucrats the world around applying the foreigner tax.  It’s quite amazing how universal the so-sorry (but not really) shrug is; it will be coming soon to the next foreign country in which you chose to reside.  As for me, I’m looking for a 30-euro under-the-table gig to recoup my losses.  I’m all for supporting public transit and sports facilities, but my new Spanish residency is without the right to work, and I can only afford to dole out so much public assistance!

Quotidian

Latin gave French, Spanish and even English this lovely word, of which I’m quite fond; quotidien makes the prosaic sound romantic. But it’s German–as so often in English–that cuts to the heart of the matter.  It’s the Alltäglichkeit, the everyday-ness, that means home to me. It’s the way you never stop listening for that special footstep on the stairs, the way your heart jumps a little, even after all those years, when you hear his key in the door. It’s cutting carrots for the salad while he rinses the lettuce, without words, by your side, within reach, but without touching, not for the first or second or hundredth time, but for the thousandth time. It’s the way the air moves when he’s breathing it across the room. It’s the careless sliding of skin against skin, or not, because there will always be another chance, a whole lifetime, really, that is home.

And once it’s gone, the only way to forget it is to keep running because each new sublet takes you further from those footsteps, to a place you think you can forget that key in the door. Then eventually that T-shirt or pillowcase that you had surreptitiously set aside loses all traces of his smell and after he’s weeks or months away, you find the pillowcase has somehow made its way into the weekly wash. It’s moving yet again, until that shirt gets left behind in some place you hardly remember and the skin you touch from time to time when the need grows too strong is so many times removed from his that you can tell yourself that you can forget even the idea of home, because you think that home is for the young, who don’t ask themselves how they could possibly live through losing such a thing again, no, love is something for those who don’t think too much and know even less, who don’t realize it’s better to just keep moving, until you forget it all, your language, the way you felt when he looked at you, the last time you made love, even your own name.

Andaluzas Kick Ass

During my most recent period of acute placelessness, I saw a movie that fits perfectly in my women-kick-ass series.  That inevitably kicks me out of the doldrums and into real-woman mode, which was an excellent prelude to going off to Berlin.  This blog has gone dormant due to so much travel; although I’ve been back in Spain for nearly a month, two visitors for the holiday season have dragged me all around the country: Andalucía, Castilla y Leon, and Castilla-La Mancha.  But though it’s been a month and a half since I saw it, I wanted to write about Sólo Quiero Caminar, which is still in movie theaters in Madrid.  The main character, played by Ariadna Gil, is someone you’d never want to meet at the wrong end of a baseball bat, and her supporting male star, Diego Luna, is the only of a series of Mexican thugs who seems to really know that some Andaluzas are, quite simply, not to be fucked with.

The trip with R. down to Andalucía, involved a lucky happenstance — stumbling across the Museo del Baile Flamenco in Sevilla.  They present shows every Friday and Saturday nights and we were lucky enough to catch Inma Rivero, the female singer, who turned out to be the real star. Bursting with real-woman qualities, she dominated the show; not only could she sing — and man can that woman sing — but she exploded onto the dance floor as well.  Spain as a society, I’m finding, is still sadly uncomfortable with aggressive, dominant women.  But flamenco is one place where real women can be just as tough as they want to be, kicking some serious ass, right up there on stage, right in front of everyone.  Inma Rivero, I’ll be watching for you.  Hope to see you in Madrid.  Or maybe I’ll have to head back to Sevilla to get another real-woman fix.  Olé.

Dodgy

All I have to say is Sock-and-Awe.  That and greetings from Sunny Sevilla where it’s hard to say which is better: the friendliness of the people or how tasty the food is.  Life can be very, very sweet at times.

Christmas in Madrid

I adore group energy of nearly any sort — I feed on it, and choral music is one of my favorite forms.  I’ll expand this to a full post soon, but for now I just want everyone to know that there’s a series of Christmas concerts happening in Madrid.  The brochure, which is titled “Música en nuestras Iglesias”, doesn’t list a website, I’m afraid, so I’d suggest trying esmadrid.com which has a whole Christmas activities page.  My first Christmas visitor arrived yesterday and as the first concert was a nice walk up to the top of Calle Embajadores, to Iglesia San Millán y San Cayetano, on the way to the San Ginés Chocolatería, we checked it out.  The Coral Cristóbal de Morales has some lovely voices in it though there were some challenges with their rhythms, and the church acoustics were passable.  Tonight, actually in the Parroquia de San Ginés itself, I’ve got my eye on the Grupo Vocal Juan de Mena.

Imprinting

Probably it was R. who taught me that it’s really all about touch. It’s odd that the incredibly sexy but incredibly problematic M., as much as he is determined to flee from it, sometimes gets it right. It’s also strange that, coming from such an undemonstrative family, I seem to have, if not mastered it, at least grasped the concept.  I’ve found it has been as simple as lightly touching D.’s arm to stress a thought, or reaching my hand out as L.’s rises to meet it.

It’s a stepping into arms opened wide, a mutual launching into the void, a falling together, it’s a descent to the most fundamental part of what we are, it negates thought, supplants reason, it obviates the past and the present and the future, it’s a surrendering of skin from which there is no possible escape, and those of us fated to have had it once, will spend the rest of our lives seeking it again, there is no quest more important, no drive more visceral, no need more fundamental. It is destiny, it is written in the ancient scripts and every star in the galaxy. There is no place that is or ever could be more like home — it is, in an instant, about every then and now and forever more.

NOTE: SSS will likely be on vacation for most of the next three weeks or so as I’m away, working in Berlin.

Esperar

At the beginning of what has become a life-long love affair with Spanish, I remember struggling with the word esperar.  It seemed so imprecise to an American English speaker.  How could a word mean, collectively, to wait, to expect, and to hope?  During my second year living in Nicaragua, I began to appreciate the creative implications of this word’s ambiguity.  Think of the range of meanings in this simple statement: “te estaré esperando“!  [Not surprisingly, Babel Fish can't deal with this and spits out "I will be hoping to you."]

When I think about the idea of home, I think about esperar.  Going to both Berlin and Italy last month had elements of home.  In Berlin, there were so many people, both friends and colleagues, to get together with.  Though there was too little time, I will be back there for three weeks starting Sunday, and am now trying to work out how many Thanksgiving parties I will be cooking pumpkin pie for.

Then, as I was schlepping my suitcase down the boardwalk in the precious little Cinque Terre town of Monterosso, following the instructions to the hotel where we were to meet, what should I hear but my mother calling my name?  She’d planted herself in a restaurant that faced the ocean, and, having miscalculated the time I’d need to arrive from Milano, had been scanning faces for hours.  What a strange sensation it was to hear her voice, I can tell you.

I’ve started surveying other people in various states of displacement.  M., when I asked, said home is where her parents are, even though they’ve eschewed her hometown in greater New York for god-knows-where in Florida.  Desparecido said it’s somewhere that one is a gusto.  For me, I know that home has very little to do with place, but is, rather, someone waiting/hoping/expecting me.  And this explains why I am, quite simply, a wreck when I live alone.  But despite my struggles with placeless-ness, I am lucky in one important way: I have many homes all across the world, with people dear to me, esperándome.