Notes from Spain

Barcelona in Rain

Isis, our guide from arrival to departure eight days later, walks us briskly through Barcelona’s alley-narrow streets, pedestrian ways now, the rain pelting, then misting, sometimes falling in rivulets from balconies overheard onto cobblestones. She shrugs: her father liked the name of that Egyptian goddess. Umbrellas sideswipe each other in passing. Wind blows back our hoods. I should have emptied my purse of everything I didn’t need, should have kept the charge cards in different places.

At the plaza containing Barcelona’s cathedral, the rain stops. Elders perform the Sardana, a traditional circle dance, symbol of Catalan pride, banned by Franco. Their faces are so serious, Ethan, one of our students, says, “I don’t think they’re getting any joy from it.” The Sardana, Isis tells us, is dying out. Should have made sure the bag was in front of me, my hand on it every moment.

Our Catalan guide for the Gaudi tour asks, “how do you tell the tourists? They’re the ones smiling.” And grins at us. Separatist flags fly from balconies here. People have scars from the Civil War, he says, grievances among themselves from those times and so don’t smile at each other on the street. Should have made sure it was completely zipped, should’ve left my driver’s license home. Isis shows me how easily someone could open it.

The six ninth grade girls assigned to me report promptly at appointed times. Hillary fixes a problem with my phone. Mattie solves a painting I’m trying to figure out: “It’s about forgetting, about Alzheimer’s.” Happy and engaged, they are a joy to be with, around me every moment after the art museum, after the last time I had my wallet out. Chattering, weaving through crowds, debating the best way back to the rest of the group, I’m happy too. I forget about the bag, and it swings around to my hip, I’m sure. I felt nothing, saw nothing. Nor did the girls. I should’ve listened to Donna, robbed here two years ago. My six girls were stricken when I discovered the loss, immediately offered me loans.

The long, hard night after the theft, I didn’t sleep, kept closing the barn door over and over again—should’ve, should’ve, should’ve—but that horse was long gone.

Montserrat in Fog

It’s an hour to the serrated mountain from Barcelona. We’re relieved to be on the bus, out of the rain. Montserrat has a famous black Madonna carved from wood darkened over centuries. For the last several hundred years, she and her infant have been black as ebony and a source of pilgrimage. Enclosed now in a glass case, only her hand holding the universe extends out for the devout to touch since they cannot touch her. We stand in a reverent line to see her.

The mountain swells in great boulders behind and above the buildings snugged into its cleft, as if it might crush them at any moment. Benedictines have nested here like eagles for eight centuries. Fog swirls slowly around the cliffs, calming me.

Madrid and Guernica

In Madrid we walk from our hotel to the Plaza Mayor, to Puerta del Sol, to the Reina Sofia, to the Prado, to the restaurant where dinner’s at eight. Isis says you know a city through the soles of your feet. As we pass, our thirty-two teenagers loud as teenagers are, Madrileños sitting at cafes glance at us. Within the babble of American youth, I never hear the sound of this city. Still, I’m delighted by its wide avenues, spacious plazas, string quartets on the street, bookstores, endless cafes, the glass Mercado of stalls selling cod and salmon tapas for a euro apiece, the Prado, Goya’s black paintings.

It’s not raining yet when we leave for the Reina Sofia, but a cold drizzle falls blocks before we get there. We stop at Starbucks, the old mendicant woman outside barefoot in the chilled morning. Our kids can’t stand it, buy their lattes and dump all their Euro change into her hands.

At the Reina Sofia, my mission is to see Picasso’s Guernica—we have just an hour and my feet are already tired. Lines of preschoolers enter the museum, teachers front and back. We with teenagers synchronize meeting time and place and disperse. From the glass elevator on my way to the 1900 – 1945 floor, I see bobbing bright umbrellas below: the rain has become a downpour.

I scan rooms in search of Guernica, a centerpiece of the collection focused on the Spanish Civil War, that lost cause célèbre and prelude to WWII. Period photos document rubble-filled Madrid streets, dead horses in harness sprawled on a Barcelona plaza, 1936. Film runs in some rooms. I catch a scene of Luis Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or, rush through a roomful of Dalí, resisting temptation.

I don’t need to read the wall plaque to know what’s on the next screen. Los Olvidados brings a prickle of gooseflesh. I showed it to my students long ago, gratified by their enthralled reaction. In the adjoining rectangular white room, Guernica has a wall to itself, a low wire barricade six feet before it. All along that boundary, a line of three-year-olds—angelic as only small children can be—sits on the floor, a teacher at either end making hushing gestures. Adult visitors stand behind them. The children whisper and squirm a bit, don’t know what they’re looking at. From their innocence I raise my eyes to the shattering painting, its wall-filling size, its grays and whites and blacks, its tortured creatures. And find myself crying.