In these Times: Roses in Spain

A sign blocked my path as I was out walking this morning.  

Ask about “miguelitos de la rueda” it informed in loud letters. 

So, I opened the little grocery store, went to the register and asked the matronly woman with graying hair about them. 

I am out.  We won’t have any more until Friday.

Hum.  I had to ask what they were.

A donut sized bit of puff pastry filled with chocolate or cream,  They are from Madrid.

To my ears, that all sounded pretty ordinary but I can’t opine until I actually try them. Still, this reminded me of another sign I saw on my walk today. It simply said, the best cookies in Alicante. 

This one was in the door of a little cookie and coffee shop on a much frequented small street a block from the major Alfonso el Sabio Avenue. I know the people who own it and run it are from the US, the midwest, and used to celebrate that fact in their signage.  The man is large and bearded and often wears a full man-dress. 

To my tastes, their cookies are only so so, but without even remembering that, I thought “how would you guys even know yours’s are the best. Have  you tried all of them or did some one do a comparative taste and quality test.

Then I remembered how in the midwest it seems every small town claims to have the biggest or the best something or other as a draw to get people off the freeway. PR speak, the claims are their’s to make and no one should call them out to check on it, unless maybe its a neighboring town and they can make an event of it at, maybe, the state fair. 

Thinking about naming, advertising, and claiming, I remembered reading earlier about Spain's ultra party, the very right wing, authoritarian and nationalist VOX led by the apparently sleazy Santiago Abascal. He's from the Basque region, the industrial and Port city of Bilbao, specifically,  which claims the majestic Guggenheim. 

Abascal grew up during the time of guerrilla violence for Basque independence and in a city where I heard lots of basque spoken. 

In Utah, there are Basques, many who came to herd sheep and who stayed.  Last year at Salt lake’s Living Traditions festival I asked the delightful woman who was selling churros--pieces of extruded and fried dough--if many people still spoke Basque now that they have been in the Great Basin for a couple or three generations.  She insisted they do and that young people take classes in the language. 

A Spanish nationalist, whose history I only know from reading to or three newspaper articles and--gasp--Wikipedia, Abascal challenged Basque nationalism as a young man in the University. He argued instead that in Spain there should be only one language, Spanish (what many people here in Valencia call Castillian).

When asked about death threats he had received and whether he was afraid to continue arguing against the Basque guerrillas ETA and the Basque language as an official language of the Basque region, he boasted he was not afraid. 

Abascal, in both his corruption and presence seems like a macho in the Tumpian PR tradition. His image is of defiance. 

I further read that his party VOX is deliberately, as a strategy, attacking journalists. Activists have received recommendations from the party to look for when media journalists are in the middle of filming or broadcasting a live broadcast. They should seek the right moment, interrupt, and knock the microphone out of the journalists' hands, as Spaniards are growing accustomed to seeing. 

The strategic point, evidently, is to challenge the idea of press neutrality while breaking even constitutional protections of a free press. They claim you can only know the truth from within their party and their party's media and channels. 

Note, I actually wrote the meta point but remembered that Zuckerberg has claimed this useful word as the name of his business, one that supersedes his Facebook and Instagram. Sigh, he has made this term private and indeed protected by law. Even in legitimate external usage, such as I was going to write, where the term means that which is above, Zuckerberg’s oligarchic power can be felt. 

He is in the news this days for removing fact checking from Face book, allowing people to say what they wish. He along with Musk of Once-Twitter, now X, are indirectly claiming truth is related to power and not to facts. 

This is the marketing of we are number one, or America f… yeah! Even facts become suspect in this powerful and possibly proprietary speech. 

The residue of arguments like these--in the dictatorial antecedents of VOX, the Franco regime’s tactics as dictator and even during the Spanish civil war--are marked in the streets and soil of Alicante. Monuments to martyrs murdered by the fascists are found, such as in the middle of the Dr. Gadea Avenue or to the side of the Seneca Plaza, and so on. You can also visit bomb shelters set up to protect the population from Facist air raids. 

I can only imagine the fights advocates had to get these recognitions on buildings, in parks, and in streets. Even today, fifty years afterwards, there is still resistance to recognition of the Republic and its martyrs. 

I guess the poetry of Shakespeare from another time, retelling a story of the Italian Renaissance would be false.

 A rose, by any other name, would not smell as sweet. 

The name, it seems, should make the rose and not the petals, the thorns, or the perfume. 

Let me end by actually citing from Mr Shakespeare Juliet’s challenge to hereditary authority--such as Mr Abascal likes or even the Great Man Randian authority preferred by Messrs Musk and Zukerberg .

What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet. 

So Romeo would, were he not Romeo called, retain that dear perfection…without that title...

As Cretaceous Raptors Escape

The day was wan when I walked out of my building an hour or so after dawn as if exhausted after a long cold night. The cold knifed through my jacket and flicked my ears like a bully in school.  

Across the street, a man often sleeps on cardboard. At dawn he lifts it up and spreads it out to make a privacy barrier for his ablutions and to change clothes. Different people occupied that nook today, a woman in a wheelchair who I could not see well, and a bearded, blond young man, standing with his head resting against the blue tile wall. 

A modestly chi chi neighborhood, mine is a dowager whose wealth may dissipate if not careful. Yet a block and a half toward the sea, a group of women recently opened an elegantly appointed  bakery coffee house. It fills most mornings. The croissants are like those in France and they serve specialty coffee as well as much else. Their Spanish-style breakfast toasts are well crafted with a touch of flair. 

The other day, while out walking—it was warm then, I dropped in to get a brownie take-out. This chocolate madness now appears everywhere it seems, though seldom do they please this gringo’s palate. The woman who was helping me, also blond with a smile that could melt ice at a hundred paces, recommended I try a particular one of the three they offered. I made them, she coyishly said. 

I asked how she got into baking. She said she was from Huelva in Andalucia and had studied cooking and baking there, Spanish and classical. She has worked throughout Spain and now joined in this venture. I took it with me into the plaza in front of the Church with a noisy bell tower, where I sat among many other people and pigeons. 

Well, the pigeons were often flying, the people not to my knowledge. What a hit of dark chocolate—the brownie almost sent me into the air. It was melt in your mouth soft under a light crust.  

I have wondered about the homeless I see on the streets here. On the nearby, elegant avenue Federico Soto, in front of a the flagship Corte Ingles department store and right next to Alicante’s miracle-mile of shopping,  where the Avenue’s benches in white marble make a corner walled on two sides, a grizzled, bearded man lives, his library stacked high and wide. Plastic sheets are carefully folded, as are his bedding and his clothes.

When I first arrived, I stayed with friends in a neighborhood I had visited before, one that may be the poorest and roughest in the city. Homelessness there seemed harsher to me as well as partially fueled by the easy availability of whatever drugs the young men across the street on the hill were selling, People were careful to keep control of their space, in fear of the homeless, the addicts, and others who might just move in and take over--so they said.

I have met a woman from Poland, who attends one of my book groups, and is a social worker with the homeless, though I have not yet had a real conversation with her on the issue. 

Like the US, Spain has a housing crisis and I suspect the homelessness is a partial result of the issue, though I do not really know. I just see the homeless. They are different from the beggars who also populate Spanish streets, especially in relatively well off neighborhoods. 

While there are needy, such as the man from Cádiz who found himself here with not enough money to return home, they are joined by those whose ordinary work is begging. The latter are masters of separating passersby from their cash. 

These include a whole group of Albanian woman. One older Albanian woman with her young dog occupies a niche by the Santander Bank. Bible and crucifix in hand she is the veritable image of suffering older, Catholic woman. Nonetheless, early one morning, I saw her arrive at her place of work athletically riding a personal electric scooter. She seemed a wave rider on the surf of Santander.

I do not begrudge people doing the time-honored task of begging by working our fantasies and fears, except when I feel scammed. This is a venerable profession and plays a social role. 

However I am not writing about the ethics, morality, or sociology of begging. Instead this all, even if tangentially, fits into the housing crisis here. It is simply often hard to know what's what. 

The building I lived in while visiting here, in the hard scrabble neighborhood, was built in the fifties by the right wing dictatorial government as worker housing. It is in a neighborhood of four or five story complexes of multiple apartments. A plaque on mine attested to that history. Somehow the building was privatized. The owner of my flat lives in the US and contracts with a management company to handle the apartment’s affairs. 

This is all relevant because I read in today’s El País that, according to the Socialist Government Spain had a large supply of publicly built housing that “somehow’ had become private property. 

Much public discussion has been about AirBnB removing private housing from the rental market to let them short term at far higher rates that a normal rent would provide. 

Much ink, passionate rhetoric, and demonstrations have focused on this. Sometimes they have taken an anti-tourist and even anti-foreigner flair. Yet the Government, while recognizing this, has spoken about the lack of public housing and publicly funded construction as a control of the rental market. Of course the opposition argues for a more robust vendor’s market with financial assistance to buyers to qualify for mortgages. As is often the case, the two sides speak past each other.  

Earlier this year, Barcelona imposed rent controls as a means of addressing this problem. Yesterday Blackrock, as well as a whole flock cretaceous raptors that soar over the globe, announced it was withdrawing from the Barcelona market. Its peers quickly followed. They say the controls mean they can no longer make the profits they had anticipated. 

With some chagrin, I have to acknowledge that as a relatively well off retired professor, I am part of the group of foreigners coming into the local housing market and providing upward pressure. To be honest, I do not have a good answer to that concern, though I am  trying to integrate into my building community (as they call it) and learn as much as I can. I shall have to write another time about the difficult complexities of “expat”  as a category that encloses me, as opposed to “immigrant” another category that is very troubled in today's world.

The sun is well up and the day is warming up from its earlier 5 degrees centigrade. I'm going back outside, 

Alicante Merengue

 In the evening of July 1, I arrived in Alicante’s airport on a flight from Paris, and before that from Los Angeles, and Salt Lake. It is so hard these days to find direct flights almost anywhere. We hop like toads from lilypad to lilypad in the vast ocean of this world. 

With my backpack and carryon, I walked through the baggage claim looking for the police. Because I had first arrived in Paris, I needed to have my arrival formally registered by Spanish police. Finding them involved questioning a lot of people, walking in different directions, knocking on strange doors, and so on. When I finally found the right door, the person, who answered denied any knowledge of what I needed. 

After a transatlantic and transcontinental flight I was barely able to stand up from exhaustion. Expressing myself in English would have been hard but in Spanish I faced the difficulty that my Spanish was not theirs’ and that Spain has its own bureaucratic vocabulary, and others as well, that simply are not shared. It almost reminded me of arriving in Brazil and fighting with its Portuguese.

In any case, I got myself registered and worked through the bureaucracy of immigration (thanks to a company of lawyers I hired) and now am an official resident of this Iberian land and its Mediterranean Coast. Like Romans, Berbers, Jews, Goths, and Roma before me, and now Arabs, Slavs, Latinos, and increasingly, Americans I am here to reside. In my case, officially and with permission.

The newness of it all has mostly worn off, now that six months have passed. It feels normal and it just feels like my life. 

Nonetheless, I am a questioning sort. I want to know why things are the way they are and the wrinkles of their history, Tourist narratives of history or reality simply do not satisfy me. I love to pull back the rug of ordinariness, to see what is beneath it. 

For example, everywhere I have read that though the Valencian language is official in Alicante, it is a Spanish speaking city. 

Yes, those arguments are right. Alicante has had enormous in-migration from people from elsewhere in Spanish speaking Spain, for example, nearby Murcia, Andalucía, and La Mancha. Lots to say about those places, because they each have their own assemblage of Romance descendants, including different varieties of Spanish.  

My ear is now getting attuned and I am learning to distinguish a Manchego from a Murciano. But in terms of Spanish speakers, where it gets harder, is to distinguish them from Valencian Spanish speakers and those who are from Valenciano-speaking communities but speak in Castellá, as they call Spanish. 

Historically, there are numbers of paired towns where one is Valenciano and the other is Castellano, there also are forms of speech from solid Valencian speaking communities and of Spanish speaking ones, often called Churros, that drop down in the mountains, valleys, and coasts from the area of the regions capital, the city of Valencia. 

To this you must add different variants of Valenciano. 

Foreigners—ex pats, Latinos, Arabs, and Ukranian refugees—have come in and brought their own linguistic lives. 

Already, I can outline a long paper on this topic, building on what I have read and on my conversations with local people. Even though retired, I can’t stop exploring, learning, and organizing knowledge. 

All that aside, I have wondered about the use of Valenciano in the city of Alicante. I was told the long-time dictator Franco’s repression killed it, that immigrants overwhelmed it, and, that if people speak it, they only do so in the privacy of their own homes and with trusted networks. 

Being from a bilingual city, El Paso, this did not satisfy me because I could almost feel the language here and so, delicately, began to look.  I am beginning to find it in many places, even in my own apartment building where it showed up in our chat.

The language is one thing. I also started hearing what I thought might be an accent, a variety of Spanish that is interlingual and maybe an old form, not unlike the marriages between Spanish and English that fill the South Western US. 

When people said “hasta luego” when taking leave and how they said it, seemed to me an index. 

One issue is that many just say “adiós” which is hard on my ears, with its sense of a permanent good-bye. When conjoined with other features of the speech, it seemed it was people from the Castellano speaking places that had replaced “hasta luego” with “Adiós”. 

I also noticed a distinctive feature of many of the “hasta luegos. The dipthong ue in luego was simplified to an “O” which was given a long duration and intriguing tone. “The statement became “ha’ta looogo”. (I may write about the s another time, I should). 

So I looked and it seems Valencian does not have this ue dipthong and so this may indeed be a distinguishing feature. 

Furthermore the timbre of voice and the precise sound ot the oooo may mark people as being from Valencian speaking worlds, or as being Valencian -speakers themselves. 

Am I right? I think so but this is imply a preliminary hypothesis for testing. Such things keep my mind active and fascinated with this place as I build my new life. 

I am about to say hasta luego to you all, my way with the dipthong, but first I want to say something else. It is easy to simply accept the appearance of the present without asking about its historical depth and changes.

  

On a major street nearby, in which there are newish Argentine, Italian, Greek, and so on cafes and bars, there is one that just looks like an old Spanish bar, like you would find throughout Spain,Today, while having breakfast, I asked about the meaning and history of its name Merengue. That could be meringue like in the pies. It could be a Dominican music and slang for fans of Real Madrid. I wondered, especially since the cafe's logo was of a fish like is used on the tiled walks of Alicante city but merengue does not refer to anything pescatarian according to the Royal Academy dictionary I find myself using a lot. 

The head waiter and maybe manager lit up when I asked.  (Of course, months have gone by of building a relationship.) He said, it was from the grandfather of the current owner. They are from a small town nearby and the grandfather was well known for selling meringues on a cart through town, shouting out “merengue, merengue” to announce his wares. 

The name honors him, a local sweet, the city, and possibly Valenciano. The answer made me think of the social and economic capital that comes together in individuals and families here that is behind the businesses. 

Alicante is rich and complex, far from just a place with a castle and a cute beach. 

Hasta luego y'all. 

Nina and the Third Grade

She had just come from Mexico and I sat at a small desk behind her. She was not at all like the girls from Las Vegas, New Mexico where I lived before we moved to El Paso. Even her name seemed exotic. 

Nina had long, dark brown hair. It draped her shoulders like a shawl and she did not slouch.  She sat upright and was more possessed than the rest of the kids. 

Postlude in Two, Maybe a Dessert

David Knowlton

To cook is to immerse yourself in sound.There are the sounds of peeling, slicing, mincing, and chopping; those of bubbling, frying, and baking; blenders and mixers; microwaves and clocks.Those sounds open paths that help us grasp much beyond food.  

Do you know the sound of breaking open a crab’s legs to pull the hidden flesh out?  It is a crack like no other.  

Have you ever broken open a bone, heard it splinter, in order to suck the marrow out from inside?