Viva Espana

But I have written too prosaically about Spain, about bullfighting and fiestas. I have given no sense of what it felt like to lie on the Spanish beaches and to have stayed alive all night eating bread and olives and cheese and drinking Spanish wine in ancient Roman courtyards under the stars and moon. Spain was hot that summer. Sunny landscapes, dry, warm air bathing tired driving eyes. Rolling hills of brown and gold broken by green olive trees and cork trees and stony outcroppings and crumbling castles standing unguarded, unmarked.


One afternoon we stopped at one to eat lunch, relax, and explore. I rested in the shadow of a stone wall atop a hill. A steady breeze blew through old stone windows and the chinks in the stone. My shirt dried until I was chilled. I do not believe in anything beyond death, but I would swear that day I saw and heard spirits. White, regularly shaped puffy clouds in an azure sky. Surely it was only this and the sound of the wind creeping around corners.

Stopping one day to swim in a giant public pool. Sleeping through the noon heat in a room with fifteen foot ceilings in Seville. Walking by the river, eating ice cream. Cafés and tapas bars with plates of food—octopus, squid, sliced hams and olives and cheeses—where you helped yourself and were charged by the toothpicks you accumulated.

Spain newly liberated, Franco now gone, the people beginning to celebrate a new-found freedom. Everywhere the old and new. Cathedrals and Mosques.


Barcelona, the most wonderful city in the world, an onion of concentric circles that leads you back in time to the city's center, old Roman streets winding blindly, opening into wonderful courtyards, unexpected restaurants, children playing. Sitting on the steps of an old church in the blue shadows listening to a young student play a haunting flute. Wine shops, ham shops, the Picasso Museum. Gaudi’s hideous spires. Singing in a hidden bar late one night—“Viva Espana”—feeling the dangerous trouble that was about to explode before it happened. A flash of knife, fists and feet, rushing a woman through the door and into the street, gone before the policia arrived. Entering a flamenco bar in some lost neighborhood. Then the Ramblas where you walk away the night.


Grenada and Alhambra, the rich gardens. Climbing Spain’s highest peak and seeing Morocco across the Straight. Valencia for Paella, eating up the countryside, driving blind. Eating sardines from the can in small villages, drinking local wines beside the car. Always bread and olives and cheese.


All before Pamplona. There are stories to be told, of course, but not this morning.