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.