Nicholas Tresilian Blog

COCIDO ERGO SUM

2012-02-11T02:17:00.000-08:00

There is Cocido. And then there is Cocido Madrileňo. Your ordinary Andalusian Cocido is a starter rather than a main course: a greyish soup of hambone stock and chickpeas, in which if you are lucky you will find floating a sliver of the bacon-fat the Spanish call tocino, a mouthful of chicken on the bone and maybe a little chunk of slightly indeterminate flesh. Cocido as a starter is nourishing and egalitarian. One of those peasant dishes where a lot of carbohydrate is eked out with not much visible protein – though the beans themselves are 25% protein and the marrowbone stock supplies a useful DNA underlay. Cocido Madrileno, on the other hand, is a main course, a meal even – a traditional lunchtime dish in Spain’s bustling capital city. I ate it first at a celebrated Madrid taberna, La Bola, where it is the mast-head dish. Lunch is the main meal in Spain, which explains the need for siesta afterwards, observed as faithfully in winter as in summer. (It is said that so long as a husband sits at the head of his own family table for Sunday lunch, with whom he lunches or siestas on the other days of the week may be considered his own affair – cocido in the Madrid style is excellent stamina food for long-distance lovers.)

La Bola has its own way of serving up cocido, bringing it to table in individual clay tankards – pucheros - tall, pint-sized pot-bellied, brown jars in which the meat, beans, vegetables, chick-peas and stock are cooked for six hours (or so it is claimed) on trays in a slow oven. The pucheros come with a handle, so that first the stock – the caldo - can be poured into a bowl and drunk as a soup, usually with the addition of some boiled rice or the light-weight pasta the Spanish call fideos. Then a fresh plate is presented and the main body of the cocido decanted onto it, with all its rich and varied aromas. Whereupon the Madrileňo businessman takes a strong sip of the red Rioja wine poured and set before him, and steps off alone on his fortifying food-safari.

Cocido served up in individual pucheros is for upmarket restaurants with a point to make. Until the gas or electric cooker came – less than 30 years ago in most Spanish households - home-made cocido – cocido casero – was universally prepared in a cauldron hung over the open fire, just as Velazquez or Goya might have painted it centuries earlier. Into the simmering mess of chick peas went whatever the house-hold had to spare: salt meat, fresh meat and sausage (preferably smoked), meatbones, tocino, salt fat and pig’s trotters to add richness to the stock and maybe a boiling fowl for its flavour (always preferred to a roasting chicken). In the last hour potatoes were dropped in to soak up the stock and add bulk; a cabbage added colour, texture – and a bit of redeeming roughage too.

When Joshua fought the battle of Jericho and the walls came tumbling down, modern archaeology reveals that many of the surprised inhabitants would have been tucking into a chick-pea supper at the time. Chick peas were playing a central role in the Mediterranean diet long before tomatoes or pasta arrived. You can boil them, roast them, grind them into flour, coat them in honey and eat them as sweets, and while they are still green, eat them raw. You can mould them into falafel or ferment them to produce an alcoholic drink much like sake. Cooked and ground with tahini, olive oil, lemon juice, salt and garlic they become hummous. Their likeness to little male testicles may have prompted their adoption by the Ashkenazi as a festive dish for the birth of a baby son. India is the world’s great producer of the legume the French call poix chiche, the Spanish garbanzos and the poly-lingual Indians chana or harbharaa or kadale kardu. Chick peas are delicious when bought cooked and bottled. But the only way to preserve the true sense of risk when cooking them, is to buy them dried, soak them in water overnight, and disbelieve anyone who says they can be fully cooked in under three to six hours.

In Spain the supermarkets sell cocido preparado – the preparation pack for a cocido – the basic ingredients of raw meat, sausage, fat and bone, pre-selected and shrink-wrapped for the busy housewife. True members of the cocido aficion – the authentic dedicatees of the soup that is also a stew that is also a soup – will visit their local butcher and negotiate cheap cuts. The results will taste much the same either way. A nation which in earlier centuries lost not just one but a total of six fully-equipped armadas, with all their cannon and cooking-pots, in the vain attempt to hang onto empire, is not nowadays going to play foodie games with a national dish.

Followers of contemporary art recognize the difference between works of art inviting detached contemplation – typically paintings and sculptures – and works of art such as installations and contextual works, in which the individual becomes perceptually immersed. From cooking to final consumption cocido is an immersive process. Furthermore – to borrow another phrase from the art critic’s lexicon – it is ‘context-sensitive’. That is to say, the character of the cocido both influences and is influenced by the surroundings in which it is consumed. To prove the point, my friend Joanna and I cooked a gargantuan cocido madrileňo, tied the lid firmly to the pot, drove 60 miles through the Subbetica hills south of cordoba to where our friends Matthew and Miranda have a gorgeous house high up amongst olive groves. There, on a January day under glittering Andalusian sunlight, we untied the string, lifted off the lid, and lo! – our workaday urban soup-cum-stew had been transformed, by the magic of fresh air and friendship, into a rustic feast.

© Nicholas Tresilian, 2012

Birds

2011-08-25T13:39:00.000-07:00

Swimming in the home pool one lazy July afternoon, I found myself overlooked from the covered terrace at the end of the pool by a couple of swallows. One was perched on the rim of a hanging plate, the other was gripping a wall-sculpture. I swam several lengths, coming within less than a few feet of these calm little birds each time I reached the deep end, apparently not causing them more than mild interest. Then as I relaxed between lengths at the far end of the pool the swallow from the hanging plate dropped in a perfect dive to within a yard of me, scooped up a sip of water in its beak and shot away over my shoulder for all the world like a Spitfire which had just rocketed a panzer tank.

Birds are an important part of life in Las Pinedas. Each summer swallows and house-martins nest and breed exuberantly. One year a pair of swallows flew in through my office door, fluttered round a few times like potential buyers inspecting a new property, and apparently satisfied, the next day set about building their nest on one of the cross beams – that is to say the hen (it must have been the hen) set about doing the building, while the cock (it was certainly the cock) sat on a nearby beam, berating me with a stream of threatening chatter as I meekly typed away at my computer. Eventually my breeding pair produced a family of three young . All that summer I had to keep my office door open as the family flew busily in and out. The next year, with swallow-like regularity, self-evidently the same hen arrived on the grille outside my office door, but now with a new and more uncertain mate, who seemed alarmed by my presence in the office. Nonetheless the pair roosted together on the usual beam and flew out in the usual way in the daytime. That second evening however the hen reappeared alone, sat on the grille for a while, then flew off with a definite air of decision, and presently returned with the defaulting male. They roosted one more night together. The third night the hen sat on the grille alone, finally flew out into the gloaming and never came back.

This summer there was a happier story. In Casa Uno a pair of swallows managed to construct their nest on the sloping brass top of one of the Moroccan lamps hanging over the covered eating area. The weight of the nest tilted the lamp at a crazy angle, but it fledged two full families of four baby swallows apiece, who spent the summer days on the wing, cleaning the Las Pinedas air of flying insects ,and in the evenings flew screaming with delight around the courtyard, before settling down to sleep in two groups of four on the branches of a big potted dama de noche plant beside the pool. Guests seeking the fifth bathroom in the night have courteously lifted over their heads the branches laden with sleeping swallows.

There are more caged birds in Las Pinedas than one might wish. A particular friend is a solitary love-bird, who spends the summer in a shaded corner of a neighbour’s garden, out of sight of the street. But he recognizes my footfall as I walk by in the road and gives me a welcoming ‘TWEET’! Love-birds can’t do much more than tweet. Our particular game is to work up to a climactic double-tweet…a wolf-whistle. We exchange one or two single tweets, then sometimes he goes first, sometimes I go first… for the double. I know he is warming up for a double when I hear a muted CHEEP, the sound of a love-bird clearing its beak, as one might say, for musical action. As every construction worker knows there are two possible inflections for a wolf-whistle: the upward inflection PHEW-WEE?, as in ‘Hey lady, love my abs of steel!’, and the downward inflection WEE-PHEW! As in ‘Phew wotta scorcher!’. My bird-friend and I have become practiced at both of these musical tropes. What the scrawny cats sitting on the garden wall make of it is difficult to say.

It is at Paqui’s Self-Service store next to the Bar Gtan Parada that the bird-life of Las Pinedas is most abundant and contradictory. Some years ago Paqui rescued a hen which was getting rough treatment in the chicken-pen at the back of the bar, and brought it into her house. All birds need a territory they can call their own. Paqui’s hen took up residence on the back arm of the sofa in the living room immediately off the shop. Each morning the hen pecks vigorously at the sofa cover, eating imaginary seeds and wood-lice, clucking possessively and ruffling her by now rather shabby old feathers. Later in the day she waddles into the shop, idly wandering the aisles like Marie-Antoinette taking the air in the Tuileries gardens, and though she is less than a foot high and has to look up her beak rather than down it to express her disdain for we shoppers, somehow manages to leave the indelible impression that from shop-floor level she is looking down on us.

Paqui’s shop also gives shelter to the most intimate of all my bird-friends in Las Pinedas. A love-bird again, coloured green and red, in a cage with a wired dome, like a miniature crystal palace. By now it knows me well – sees through all my various seasonal disguises – hails me straight away with a cheery TWEET!...leaving me in no doubt that I am being summoned to the presence. This is a bird that likes big music. Our relationship really began on the day I stooped to its cage and whistled the first twenty or so bars of the opening movement of Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata – engraved in my memory by the man in the next-door set of rooms to mine at Cambridge, who only knew these twenty or so bars, but played them incessantly all one year and fixed them indelibly in my mind. Alas there was no way that Paqui’s love-bird could whistle Beethoven back to me. Instead he responded with callisthenics. First he rocked from side to side on his perch. Then he leapt onto the side of his cage and with beak and claw moved – like a crazy crotchet – up, down and across the upright wires, producing his own randomised Stockhausen score. Finally he worked his way up into the dome, did the splits to grip the two lateral base-wires and bring his body to the horizontal, and in that extended quasi-flying position focused his eyes on mine in a sustained and intensive stare – the bright and brotherly eye-to-eye acknowledgment of one significant artist to another. Latterly we have moved on from Beethoven to the Last Post, which two years of National Service in the 1950s had also indelibly printed on my mind. While Paqui weighs my tomatoes, slices the ham and tots up the bill, her bird and I celebrate the going down of the sun on innumerable imperial yesterdays. Of course he knows nothing about Gibraltar…where greatly to the irritation of successive Spanish governments, the Last Post is still blown nightly by a solitary British Army trumpeter.

My house is across the road from a Franco-era water tower, a gaunt concrete exclamation mark, identical to a thousand water towers all over Spain, relicts of Franco’s unsuccessful experiment in autarchy – economic self-sufficiency for Spain, without reliance on overseas trade (there are grain silos in every town from the same period). Nowadays the tower is rusty with concrete cancer and eventually it will have to come down…or risk falling down under its own immense weight. It has long been emptied of water, which nowadays is supplied by modern high-pressure mains. But for the migratory birds of Las Pinedas – and especially the house-martins – it is a vital landmark for their annual return to their traditional breeding-grounds on the houses and barns of Las Pinedas. The first sign that summer is drawing to a close is the house-martins’ assault on the water tower. For several days they mob it, flying hectically around it, clinging to it with clawed feet, falling away to scream and perform aerial acrobatics, flying back to cling to it again. It is as if they are in some way ‘marking’ it…embedding it in their own memories and the memories of their fledglings…fixing it as an attractor…a special point of return amongst all the other possible points of return in Spain…return to the the village that they know is theirs….though we humans foolishly sometimes think it is ours.

As the house-martins and swallows leave for Africa, small flocks of bee-eaters arrive, dropping thick autumnal trills as they swoop and swerve over the rooftops: a long curved bill, a flash of brilliant yellow at the throat, kingfisher blue body, wings that open on the turn to reveal sharply defined triangles of brightest white – the loveliest birds in Southern Spain.

Birds seem altogether more intelligent than we give them credit for. S0-odd miles from Las Pinedas is the lake of Fuente de Piedra, summer home for a colony of some 10,000 flamingos. Every evening at dusk the breeding pairs, male and female parents of the young birds, rise in a dense pink cloud from the water to fly down the Guadalquivir river to the estuarine marshes nowadays within the great biosphere reserve of the Parque Nacional de Donyana – a distance of some 100 miles each way, to browse the salt-marshes there throughout the night, returning to Fuente de Piedra at down the following morning, to regurgitate the contents of their stomachs and feed their young. And the young meanwhile? They spend the night in Fuente de Piedras. But far from leaving the young to their own devices, somehow the flamingo community has evolved a system whereby a number of older birds are designated to stay behind at the lake, to maintain tribal order and teach the young birds how to feed themselves. Perhaps these elders are self-selected, simply too old to undertake the nightly odyssey to Donyana and back, A physicist would see the principle of least action at work here, a philosopher would recognise the cut of Occam’s razor –for both disciplines, the simplest way always works best. Somehow, without any knowledge of physics or philosophy, the flamingos seem to have worked this out.

ENDS

Cats (B)

2011-07-20T06:59:00.001-07:00

When we first arrived in Las Pinedas my beloved late wife Fay and I spent much time trying to imagine explanations for the two 10-litre containers of bottled water which to this day still stand on the front step of our immediate next-door neighbour’s house. We have could think of no credible explanations. The two bottles stood there, defying the mind. What were they there for? Finally Fay determined to ask our neighbour Maria-Carmen during that moment of truth every morning, when the ladies go out in their kaftans and dressing-gowns to buy bread from the gossipy bread-lady who seems to arrive a little later every morning, such is her appetite for conversation as she drives the fresh bread around. After Fay had ordered a large integral (a baguette made of whole-wheat flour) and my neighbour with more mouths to feed had bought the necessary five loaves and seven dulces (sweet powdery cakes), the question was finally put. The answer? The big bottles were put there to deter the local cats from peeing on the front step. This is a big issue in Southern Spain, where in the great heats of high summer the villagers like to sit out on their own front steps at night, enjoying the cooler evening air before trooping off to bed sometime after mid-night. Of course in those circumstances you wouldn’t want a cat to have got there before you. But what part do the water bottles play in cat-prevention? Aha! You see it is widely believed in this part of Spain that cats are frightened by their own reflections. (This belief .may have its origins in the superstitious connection of cats with witches – who certainly did some strange things with mirrors!). So along comes the cat, bent on a crafty micturation, eyeing up your door-step beadily to that end, when to its horror it catches sight of another, identical cat stalking towards it from inside a 10-litre water-bottle! Obviously it hurries off and pees on someone else’s less well-protected door-step. As President Bush once said: ‘Mission accomplished!’.

LA CARLOTA – SEX CAPITAL OF EUROPE!

2011-07-20T06:50:00.000-07:00

Cruising down the E5-A4 autovia from Cordoba and passing La Carlota on your left, you are unlikely to notice the modest rooftop sign ‘CLUB’ unless you are passing by night, when ‘CLUB’ is lit up in a modestly immodest glow of red neon. Driving up the E5-A4 from Seville and passing La Carlota on your right whether by night or day, your eye cannot fail to be attracted by the brazen display of ‘S’CANDALO’ with its three floors of discreetly shuttered windows, the thatched Hawaiian fun-lounge in its garden, and opening directly into the garden, a large lorry park, brightly lit and with security camera surveillance, where a row of immense trucks is usually to be seen, in waiting for their drivers’ obligatory period of rest to end and the drivers themselves to return manfully refreshed to their cabs and resume their pleasantly interrupted journey. S’CANDALO is certainly the more colourful of the two bordellos, one at each end of town, which constitute La Carlota’s main claim to cultural fame. Recently S’CANDALO acquired a 4WD Toyota Landcruiser, with the number soixante-neuf prominently displayed in white upon a pink heart, and a snorkel of the kind used by military vehicles for fording rivers – suggesting the possibility of new revenue-streams from under-water sex. The S’CANDALO group is nothing if not entrepreneurial. One recent summer they put up a large hoarding beside the autovia approaching Malaga (where they also have an operation). The slogan, purloined from L’Oreal, read: S’CANDALO, porque tu le merece!’ – ‘because you are worth it!’. Despite strict EU rules against motorway advertising it was not taken down for quite a while.

S’CANDALO’s status in La Carlota was much enhanced when the fuel giant BP, in a joint venture with El Corte Ingles (Spain’s ultra-respectable equivalent to the UK’s John Lewis), opened a large garage plus lorry-washing facility immediately beside the brothel. The lorry-park, too, is part of the BP garage complex. The act of the driver washing his lorry before abandoning it in the lorry park conveys a faintly confessional nuance, albeit that the sin for which absolution would most probably be required is more likely to come after the lorry-washing than before.

The apostrophe in the name S’CANDALO, incidentally, is a concession to the local demotic. Speakers of authentic Andaluz do not pronounce the letter ‘s’. Mas o menos (‘more or less’) becomes Ma o Meno. Nicholas becomes Nicholä. And S’CANDALO becomes ‘CANDALO, pronounced with a slight click of the throat on the initial letter ‘c’.

The more downbeat CLUB by contrast stands between a builders’ merchants and a transformer park. But the car-park always has cars in it. The cars are lined up under the sun-shelters sideways-on so that their numbers cannot be read if their owners’ loved ones happen to be driving by. What CLUB lacks in bzazz, it nowadays makes up in metaphysical aspiration. A shining new Tanatorio – the much more imposing Spanish word for crematorium – literally a deathatorium – has opened up immediately across the old main road from CLUB. Now it is possible to ‘die’ metaphorically many times in CLUB before dying finally one more time on the way, as it were, to the Tanatorium.

Overshadowing all these wonders, however, is La Carlota’s Luna Club, with its modest strapline ‘solo parejas’ – only partners – identified simply by small doorway into a large warehouse on La Carlota’s main industrial estate. The Luna Cub was recently described on television as Europe’s biggest wife-swapping club – though one wonders how the producers could be certain.

Everyone in England knows that wife-swapping happens mainly in Essex, that the invariably male drivers of cars throw their keys in a bowl, that the ladies pull the keys out of the bowl and go off to spend the night with the owner of the car, waking up the next morning in Chelmsford, Chingford, Clacton or – less believably – in Frinton-on-Sea. But now imagine pulling the car-keys out of the bowl in La Carlota and waking up the next morning in Frankfurt, Lake Balaton or Lodz (which rather disarmingly if you happen to wake up there, is pronounced Woodzh). Obviously this could not work in geographical terms. The rather depressing reality revealed by the TV programme is that the punters enter two by two like the animals in the ark – one is reminded that Noah also decreed ‘solo parejas’ - pay their money at the door and each receive a mask. After that I guess a kind of low-light speed-dating goes on until everyone is exchanging body-fluids with someone they have probably never met before, but who also, beneath the mask might be their husband or wife revitalised by disassociation…and on that basis the evening can be pronounced a success.

That said, I confess the night-life of La Carlota is a total mystery to me. At the far end of the Poligono – the curious Spanish word for a business park – are three immense and shiny discotheques. By 9pm, which is the latest I have ever been through the area on my way back from late evening lengths in the municipal swimming pool – they haven’t even turned their outside lights on. There is a second Spain which only starts to function when the rest of Europe has gone to bed. The Spanish love the madrugada, the small hours of the night. The air is cool. It is a good time to enjoy. It is a good time to be naughty. Late-night naughtiness is the ultimate Spanish Vice. It has certainly contributed to the Spanish financial crisis, along with an overhang of more that 1 million unoccupied and unwanted dwellings, most of them flats bought off-plan with a view to easy profit. Punitively expensive employment laws, which boost the black economy and destroy government revenues, are another aspect of the Spanish economy. It is difficult to believe that Spain will not be colonised by China in the next generation or so. The Chinese are unsmiling, they have no duende and do no bull-fighting, but they are prepared to work so much harder than the Spaniards. Chinese shops have arrived on the Spanish high streets already

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1/. Dying, as in the joyful ‘I die! I die!’ was a much-used Restoration Comedy metaphor for sexual climax. I once tried to explain this to my Spanish teacher, without total success.

Big Jaws

2008-12-14T08:40:00.000-08:00

It was the day of the Romeria, the annual pilgrimage of the festival of San Isidro, the patron saint of farmers, which begins in our local market town of La Carlota and ends some five kilometres away on the Monte: the plantation of holm oaks a short way beyond Las Pinedas, which has been a site of pilgrimage and picnics since anyone can remember. Even the addition of concrete barbecue sites recently erected by the local council the Monte still faintly retains the atmosphere of some primitive sacred grove. San Isidro himself travels to the Monte on a farm-cart towed by a tractor, hand upraised in benediction, preceded by the flashing lights of a police car and a bare half-dozen decorated floats populated by grinning children, followed by a long procession of local worthies in slow-moving cars, many towing trailers laden with chairs, tables and paella pans for the all-day picnic to come. As for San Isidro himself, he will spend the day on his cart, parked immediately outside the beer tent, looking a little more woozy from the fumes as the day goes on.
We had seen the procession snaking its way down the shallow valley which separates Las Pinedas from its upstart neighbour La Chica Carlota a kilometre away and the site of much recent new building, mostly on its Southern slopes and mercifully invisible to us - new Spanish domestic building is, alas, usually best left unseen. In course of time the procession arrived in Las Pinedas to make its leisurely way along the street re-named after the murdered poet Frederico Garcia Lorca when democracy returned to Spain after Franco's death. Hastening to see the procession pass in Calle Lorca, I left my own front door open in the paralle street re-named another great poet of Republican Spain, Antonio Machado (he sought refuge in France during the Civil War, but died - one suspects of a broken heart - soon after the war ended). As the police car with its flashing blue lights cleared the streets of possible anti-clerical demonstrators and other noxious vagabonds, I noticed a door open on the far side of the street to let out a dog. It was quite a small, sturdy-looking dog with disproportionately heavy jaws, as though a Yorkshire terrier and been mated with a Husky. It pushed purposefully between the legs of the small crowd gathered to watch the procession and disappeared behind us in the direction of Calle Antonio Machado.
The procession duly trundled by, and as the last slowly-moving cars were nursing their over-heated engines along Calle Lorca and out to the Monte, the dog in question re-appeared, trotting firmly along with the air of one who has successfully accomplished some important private mission. It poked its head between our legs, spotted a gap in the traffic, trotted across the road and disappeared into its owner's house.
A couple of days later, going into the still-room off our kitchen for a bottle of wine, I found to my amazement that the cardboard case in which the wine came had been torn open with great force by some unknown third party and then largely demolished, the ripped panels visibly bearing the tooth-marks of a large mouth used with considerable violence. For a moment it seemed as though the age of the super-rat had finally arrived in Las Pinedas. Yet the mouth which had done this work of destruction was self-evidently far from rat-like: more rounded (rather than coming to a point under a ratty nose) and furnished with the massive molars needed to dispatch a regular diet of butcher's meat. Surveying the damage - which thankfully was only to the cardboard, our intruder had left the bottles inside unharmed - my wife Fay and I were completely non-plussed as to what or who might have caused it.
It was some days later before I finally remembered the little brown dog with the massive jaws and the front door which I had casually left open on the morning of the 'Romeria de San Isidro'.
NT/May 2008.

Wifi & The Watertower

2008-12-14T02:59:00.000-08:00

It's raining cats and blogs in Britain, our daughter Arabella tells us on the phone. It's lovely limpid late autumn sunshine here. Our ambitious young lady mayor, Rafi, has pledged that every village in her mayoralty will have broadband by the end of 2007.
A shiny new aerial + radio communications dish has already sprouted as though by magic on top of the rust-stained concrete water-tower which overlooks our end of Las Pinedas village. The pines of Las Pinedas having long gone to build a succession of hapless armadas for the never-to-be accomplished invasion of Britain, the water tower is the one surviving tall growth for miles around. Mains water is nowadays piped in under pressure to our houses so there is no longer any need for the tower to be filled to produce a head to drive water to our taps.. It is a matter for quiet relief that there are not now some 30,000 litres of water poised up there in the cone-and-shallow-cylinder tank like a liquid sword of Damocles, ready to be released over our heads by the first earth-tremor strong enough to snap one of the rusty reinforcing rods visibly exposed to the elements in the surface of the concrete. The tower speaks grimly of the distant days of General Franco's doomed autarky - his attempt after the Civil war to make Spain economically self-sufficient, independent from the outside world for goods and services - meagre design, poor materials, a fatalistic approach to security - even empty of waterr the gaunt structure the height of three houses is yearly getting weaker and will eventually have to come down or (since this is Spain) will maybe simply fall down, crushing the cars and dwelling at is feet.
Meanwhile, for all its ugly enormity, it has somehow weathered into the landscape. Every autumn flocks of departing house-martins spend a day flying obsessively around it and clutching themselves to its surfaces - claws locked into cracks in the vertical concrete - as though fixing it in the collective memory for the return migration next year. What will they make of the space-age construction now glinting in the sunlight up there when they arrive next spring? For that matter what are we to make of it? - Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Or is it WiFi? I unhook my computer from a landline and carry it out into the garden, turning on the wireless facility which I last used in my office in Bath. The screen stays blank. If it really is WiFi up there (they call it 'wiffy' in Spain) all I can think is that someone has not yet quite got round to switching it on. But then, even in modern hi-tech Spain, mañana is always another day.

NT: 07/12/2007

BRUJA

2008-12-08T11:28:00.000-08:00

Michele is a Spanish speaking Scot who lives in our local market town of La Carlota with her partner Rob, himself Spanish born and half Scottish with a degree in Spanish and Linguistics from Edinburgh University, who in his middle years has abandoned the bookish life of a successful interpreter and translator to sell second hand John Deere tractors from an inhospitable stretch of hard-standing just off the main Seville to Cordoba motorway. To provide income meanwhile, Michele gives Yoga classes and does Ayurvedic massage – the latter being particularly good for ricked backs, as I can testify, and even better as a non-specific cure for the generalised pressures of modern life.. Over a period of seven years she had built up a thriving business in Algeciras and she is now hoping to repeat the success in La Carlota.

As a promotional gesture Michele recently offered a free massage to a number of La Carlota’s leading ladies. They took the free offer, were duly appreciative, but failed to come back for further paid treatments. In course of time Michele discovered that they were all of them regular clients of the local white witch – the Bruja – who gives her healing services free. It turns out, she is Michele’s principal commercial competitor. Furthermore she operates from a small shop in the very next street, barely 25 metres away from Michele’s apartment.

There, hanging out over the pavement, is a discreet but unmistakeable shop-sign bearing the single word 'EMBRUJA' in colourful cursive script. For an appropriate sum of money the Bruja will bless a bottle of water for a cure, cast a spell to change the course of love, read a palm or turn over the cards or cast up a horoscope to foretell the future, and so forth. Her waiting room is the street outside her shop. Most evenings there is a small crowd at the door - young people mainly. By that time of day the leading ladies have taken their aches and pains home and are in the kitchen scolding their husbands and children and stirring the cazuela in the time-honoured way.

In short, the Bruja, offering pagan services shrewdly tailored to the needs of her mainly Christian clients, has established herself as a formidable competitor to a newcomer like Michele, operating in the related marketplace of holistic healing, based on the ancient wisdom of a distant Far East. There may however be light at the end of Michele’s tunnel. Her two latest paying clients were two of the sisters of the Bruja herself.

08/04/2008

CATS (A)

2008-12-08T11:08:00.000-08:00

Our predecessors in our own house, just down the road from Casa Uno, were thoroughly rational people in all but one respect: her inordinate love of cats. This led her to feed two dozen stray cats every afternoon at from her front door, involving a not inconsiderable outlay of cat-food pellets per day, and creating multiple foraging opportunities later in the night for the rats which naturally roam a farming village. But she was an enchanting person, much respected and indeed much loved in the village, and her little eccentricity where cats were concerned – a deep eccentricity in Spanish eyes for whom cats are only valued as utilities in the keeping down of rodents – was tolerated cheerfully enough. When our predecessors finally left the house to us and returned to England, it was with a parting bequest of 25 Euros and a big bag of cat-pellets, to be handed to a neighbour two houses up the next street, to continue the good work. We in our turn took possession of the house and then returned to England to sort out the furniture to be brought here. When we came back to Las Pinedas a couple of weeks later, a curious absence of cats was detectable. Our immediate neighbour, a French-speaking Algerian and possessor of a shot-gun, shouldered an imaginary gun in explanation. As for the 25 Euros and the big bag of cat-pellets, in this parsimonious society one can be sure they were not wasted.

08/12/2008

Light, Silence and Darkness

2008-11-26T03:51:00.000-08:00

Towering over the mud-coloured reaches of the Guadalquivir river stands Cordoba’s Mezquita, the greatest mosque in Moorish Spain and today the only surviving mosque of the Moorish period – all the rest were long ago replaced by churches, usually on the same foundations. Majestically expanded in successive phases of construction between the 8th and 10th centuries, the Mezquita is approached across a vast pebbled courtyard of symmetrically-spaced orange trees, watered by stone channels, still containing fountains to refresh the air and the great circular basin of Al-Mansur where the Faithful performed their ablutions before entering the mosque. Inside, in a forest of stone columns surmounted by double red arches, 8000 Moorish warriors at a time could prostrate themselves before the Mihrab, the golden niche indicating the geographical direction of Mecca.

The Mezquita owes its existence today to the massive whimsy of the Catholic Church in the 16th century. The then Bishop of Cordoba, Don Alonso Manrique, possibly mindful of the extreme beauty of the architectural space, or perhaps recognizing its convenience as a mass gathering place for Christians in wet weather, decided not to destroy the mosque absolutely as had been Christian practice after the Reconquista everywhere else in Spain, but to build a Baroque cathedral in the middle of the mosque, open all around to the mosque itself. It is at one and the same time both a dreadful act of architectural vandalism a miracle of architectural integration. `You have destroyed something unique!’ protested Carlos V, monarch of the day. But the fact is, Bishop Alonso had also created something unique – a marriage of Christian and Muslim architecture unparalleled elsewhere in the world – a symbol also of a mutual religious tolerance already long dead in Spain of the Holy Inquisition, which had once been at the heart of Moorish culture in Cordoba itself.

All this comes to a point in the Mihrab at the Eastern end of the Mezquita. An octagonal niche of extreme simplicity within, lit from hidden windows above, surrounded by texts from the Koran in exquisitely inlaid mosaics, it had been a gift to the then Caliph of Cordoba from the then Emperor of Byzantium - titular head of the Christian Orthodox church in the old Roman Empire of the East – who supplied not only the lavish materials for the mosaics but the skilled craftsmen to execute them to Muslim designs. On a first view the Mihrab, in its extreme austerity and lack of monumental symbolism, pales beside the colourful exuberance and sculptural complexity of the Christian altarpiece some 8 rows of columns away in the Cathedral. On a second or third view the eye may begin to calibrate to what is actually there in the Mihrab, indeed to all that is there, given the utter simplicity of the interior space beyond the gilded mosaics. What is there, of course, is light – light captured in the tower above and made visible in the space below – a compellingly powerful metaphor for the wisdom which the Faithful have always sought in the Divine. By comparison the gilded altarpiece of the Christian cathedral, with its central figure of the risen Christ and attendant angels, its internal domes and supporting arches and columns, can seem like the lady in Hamlet, to protest too much.

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High in the hills above Cordoba is Las Ermitas, a group of 13 hermitages inhabited for many centuries by a community of solitary monks who shared the chapel, vegetable gardens and burial ground as communal facilities. The community died out more than 50 years ago, but the chapel still survives, approached along a drive of dark cypresses, behind which self-seeded vegetables and flowers from the monastic days still run an unregulated riot amongst the woodland shrubs. Sombre messages of the memento mori variety dot the path, a skull here, a text there reminding mere mortals of their mere mortality as they draw nearer the chapel of La Magdalena

The chapel is T-shaped, with that curious Spanish feature of a second nave and choir, used by the monks as a chapter-house, at right angles to and behind the altar of the first, as though some habit of North/South solar orientation left over from pagan days was still being discreetly preserved behind the dawn-to-dusk East/West orientation of the more recent Christian church. (The Holy Week ceremonies in Cordoba and Seville, with their swaying floats, groaning and long lines of hooded penitents, convey a similar impression of paganism glossed over but still giving a darker-than-usual emotion to Christian ritual). In a glass case in a small vestry off the main chapel there are gold monstrances containing chips of dusty bone alongside other talismanic items of an ancient Christian faith – gifts from visiting pilgrims, at an extreme of variance from the poverty the monks themselves sought out in their tiny two-room cabins, a couple of which are still open to view: the one room with a fireplace and vessels for the preparation of food; the other, with bed, table and stool for sleeping, prayer, study and pious self-flagellation with vicious scourges still displayed.

The chapel too is brilliant with the gold leaf, richly-coloured wall-tiles and statuary twisted in ecstatic prayer from centuries of generous donations. All leap into the light for a few lovely minutes when a Euro coin is dropped into the magic box at the entrance to the nave, for tourists and their listless children to wander round, take their snaps and be off into the gardens again in, following the path down to the mirador, where an Episcopal chair in marble looks out over limitless views of the Guadalquivir valley, beneath a tall column surmounted by a statue of St Raphael patron saint of Cordoba, its base decorated with the emblematic fasces – bundles of lictors’ punishment canes – of the former Falange party.

The real meaning of the chapel of the Ermita is only revealed when the tourists have gone, the lights have clicked off and virtual darkness falls, barely penetrated by sunlight struggling through the few heavily decorated church windows. High on its hill-top, protected by its lofty elevation and by its hedge of cypresses from the hum and buzz of human life on the plains far below, what the Ermita then offers is the gift of silence – the silence through which the divine Signal, with or without teasing bursts of divine Noise , may trickle down through the ether to the ear of the attentive and well-scourged hermit, to be received and rejoiced in as the divine Word, manna in the wilderness for the mortal soul.

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Divine light and divine silence – threatened metaphors in a world where natural light and natural silence are increasingly hard to attain – marginal light and marginal silence, still beckoning the occasional attentive eye or ear, biding their time, no doubt, for when the energy runs out or the human species runs down, and light and silence will come into their own again.

And meanwhile, in a tall side-chapel off the nave of Cordoba cathedral which encroaches darkly on the space of the Mosque itself, permanently locked but permanently open to view through elaborate iron gates, set before an opulently gilded altar there stands a huge black basalt tomb. The tomb bears an expensive spray of artificial lilies and the simple legend `Jose-Antonio’.

Jose-Antonio Primo de Rivera was the son of the first dictator of Spain under king Alfonso XIII. Founder of the Falange party – the `Phalanx’ – modelled on Italian Fascist lines, the dashing young Jose-Antonio planned to use it to impose an authoritarian socialist regime on Spain, with an all-powerful central government taking decisions for and on behalf of the common people – a replica of his own father’s unfulfilled plans. In 1936 already deemed a threat to the ephemeral political stability of the Republican government of the day, he was imprisoned, and after the invasion of Spain by the Nationalist forces of Generals Mola and Franco he was executed by firing squad in Alicante gaol at the age of 27. Franco then took charge of the Falange, an arm of civilian power which he played off with great skill against the rival powers of Church and Army, by developing a death-cult of the young Primo de Rivera himself and by allowing his strikingly beautiful widow to be nationally prominent in the performance of good works. The tomb of `Jose-Antonio’ remains the nowadays unspoken fons et origo of the cult.

Light, silence and pitchy darkness – the trinity of magical/occult powers which still subtly infiltrate the inner life of 21st century Cordoba, as the people and the traffic hum and buzz by outside.

NT: 04/09/2008