Rustlings

Dark has fallen like a velvet cape, heavy and black. Already blood and gore walk the streets.  

Not the hospital stuff, nor the politicians, people of all ages in costumes. Maybe a third of people promenading on the pedestrian street, or pushing on the sidewalks to get home from work or the store, are costumed. But the spirit of Halloween is here. 

I was surprised while reading about Spanish celebrations to note that the Celtic north east celebrates Samhain, the Celtic Holiday that became Halloween in the US. They always have. Besides their own customs, they are borrowing now from the transnational Halloween phenomenon.

Tomorrow is Todos Santos, All Saints Day and a national holiday. When I asked, earlier this evening, a server and graduate student with abundant dark, curly hair if he planned to celebrate tomorrow with his family. 

“Of course. Todos Santos is very important in Spain.”

There you have it. The day Protestants lost due to the Reformation, while retaining Halloween—the night before,  was reinforced here and has not gone away. If anything, it is reported to be gaining strength even against the media power of Halloween.

From what I have read, since I am a foreign guest in the country and not yet part of such intimate networks as family to be part of that celebration, families will go to the cemetery, clean and decorate graves. They will share stories of their dead, and will take dishes of symbolically important food to share with the departed. 

I was told there are tours tourists can take to the main cemetery tomorrow to see people’s  ritual work on their graves and their gathering together. 

Following Spain’s Celtic customs in Samhain, people here in Alicante, they say, will roast and eat chestnuts as well as sweet potatoes called boniato. They will also share sweet wine, from what I have read.

Towards evening, as people dress to walk in the streets, see and be seen, food trucks will appear, If I remember right from last year. Chestnuts will scent the air with their roasting. People will also look for Saints’ Bones which are made from marzipan and sugar syrup.

Many if not most Alicantinos will attend mass, even if they are not religious per se. 

Almost everything will be closed tomorrow, as the country turns inward to its personal and family life. 

Still, given the importance of flowers and food to this feast, the flower markets and the food markets will be open tomorrow morning until about 2 pm, about lunch time when people should be home. Then in the evening the time for promenading, turning outward again, street vendors will work their trade. 

Tonight, halloween, there will be festivities, noise and fierce darkness that the city’s lights will attempt to pierce. 

Maybe, though I doubt it, I will hear a “trick or treat.” That custom seems not to have been transplanted outside of the American expat community, 

Kinds of People, Silvia Plath and Ted Hughes in Benidorm

Post siesta, while sleep still blurs my eyes and fogs my brain, I find myself sort of reading about a famous American and her famous partner in Benidorm before it was Benidorm. I wake up.   

The article is by a Spanish journalist in a digital magazine. In other words, it is very of the moment. 

While that moment right now is one where I want some caffeine though the light is fading. Soon the skies will darken. We lost Summer Time and kicked the clocks one hour back yesterday morning. Still, a whole bunch of day, if not light, remains. 

In this moment I see more and more American couples on the streets, in the cafes, and the grocery store of Alicante. 

They look like retirees and look like they have come to stay. Here, instead of in some retirement development in Florida or Costa Rica. 

They, along with the digital nomads and the nightly renters of rooms online are controversial for maybe worsening Spain’s housing crisis. 

I am one of those American retirees who is staying, though I came before the Trumpets blew, so to speak.I speak Spanish and I am making my life in Spain now. 

Thus, as a personal part of the moment, a small group of writers and I meet in a local Hookah bar-cafe every other Thursday to talk about poetry and share our writing in English, although I would also enjoy it in Spanish. Sometimes, I wonder what it means to be Anglophone poets and writers in this Spain, today.  

A short tram ride from Alicante and not far from its urban sprawl, Benidorm’s glitter and high rises shine bright in the mediterranean sun. As a result, it is hard to know its past beyond official facts and return to the time in the fifties when it, even then exaggeratedly, is described as a sleepy fishing village. So different from the beer-and-drugs-party town of prawn-red, overweight Europeans near the beach it has become. 

By the sixties it was becoming  become the Benidorm we know—the so called New York of the Mediterranean although perhaps the Las Vegas sin-city of Spain’s Mediterranean is more appropriate with its Manhattanesque skyline. 

I think it sad when a skyline becomes the ruling image of a place, though I guess “fishing village” is probably just as reductive and absurd in a very of this moment marketing way.

Benidorm became Benidorm once officials created the possibility and tour operators began putting packages together;  they started bringing in groups who would only stay for a short time as their schedule required them to depart for the next exciting spot in the new dizzying world of Elvis, the Twist, and the hyperreal., all the while dropping lots of money. 

The American, a poet, Silvia Plath and her new husband, a Yorkshire poet, Ted Hughes, came on their honeymoon to this place transforming as backdrop for their intensifying romance. Their visit has been the subject of a library of texts mostly as part of interest in Plath.

The two saw it as a romantic site of Mediterranean and Spanish charm, perhaps influenced by Hughes’ study of Garcia Lorca and his poems even though Benidorm was on the cusp of becoming a place that dwarfs itself regularly with people who come to stay for a few days away enjoying of sun, fun, and drink. 

The poets stayed for a bit more than a month. The article notes that locals as a result did not have a word to describe this couple other than as veraneantes, someone who comes to summer there. 

I do not know, but it is possible they may have seen themselves more in the Romantic tradition of poets abroad, such as the writers who came to Spain to support the ill-fated Spanish Republic, or who moved to Paris’ left bank. In honesty, I am just starting into the literature on Plath and Hughes in Spain but there are things I can already say by looking at the two as part of a world in change.   

One still finds groups of romantic, literary souls traveling through European, Latin American, and Asian cities. They settle for a while while populating coffee houses and open mics. Some of them openly describe themselves as writers and as nomads, sometimes as digital nomads. They emphasize impermanence as a hallmark in their self identity.

The locals here in Spain did not know of that twentieth century literary fashion. They just knew the onset of outsiders was composed of people who wanted to spend some summer away time. 

This fishing village had already been receiving travelers from Madrid who were probably coming to the beach escape stifling summers. At the same people started coming from other places to do the same thing. They were seasonal visitors who wanted to spend a part of their summer in the waves. 

Plath and Hughes they stayed for more than a month, a relatively long time. They rented a local house where they lived. They shopped at the local market and drank in local establishments. In any case, they left some traces in some people in Benidorm. 

In these, they distinguished themselves from the veraneantes who stayed in hotels and ate in restaurants near the beach rather than cooking for themselves or taking advantage of local bars, especially those a bit away from the beach. 

Whether they meant to or not, Plath and Hughs were distinctive as briefly resident foreign poets. They stayed, got to get pissed off and argue with their first landlady, the amazing widow who also wrote poetry, bargained in the market, and became local color people gossiped about and some remembered. 

To be fair, people might well have forgotten them if they had not become famous and if books and magazine articles with their names and pictures had not started to appear in local news stands. 

As tourism has grown, tourist has become a meaningful label. Travel and going there, wherever there is, has become a big deal and people pay fortunes to go places and visit things on the check-off-able list of what you must see.

Tourists are transitory, they come and go over a relatively short time. As some come, others leave. As a result, they feel to locals and analysts as a solid reality in places, like Benidorm, and to a lesser extent the city of Alicante, where there are always tourists, just different ones; sometimes more of them and sometimes less. 

Tourists, digital nomads, Non Lucrative Visa holders, immigrants, we are all woven into the new fabric of Spain and this at a time of a nascent political movement of reaction. The question of the real Spaniard and of real Spanish culture is now in the air as are still fringe proposals to begin massive deportations of those who cannot display those credentials of the real. 

I’m excited to read more about Hughes and Plath’s time here and to ask what it means to write poetry and essays while living in the land of Matadors and communist widows who return from exile to take in people like Plath and Hughes. These people rent them rooms, become openings for foreigners to know Spain. and for them to know more about the outside world. 

Here are a few words by Silvia Plath about Alicante. 

Alicante Lullaby by Silvia Plath

In Alicante they bowl the barrels

Bumblingly over the nubs of the cobbles

Past the yellow-paella eateries,

Below the ramshackle back-alley balconies,

While the cocks and hens

In the roofgardens

Scuttle repose with crowns and cackles…

Stranger in Someone Else’s Home

 

Moving to a new place, whether in your own country or to a different country, usually bring joys, tensions, and downright shocks.  You navigate a way among them and create yourself afresh, although seldom from whole cloth.

As you know, I live now in Spain, on its White Coast, and have for a year and a third. I also just signed up for an additional two years with approval from the Spanish government.

I speak Spanish and have since my parents introduced me into a Spanish American town in New Mexico. Yes, we spoke English. mostly—I mean, I came from coastal South Georgia and in my English had that coast’s lilt. If you say my first name in English with two syllables and a glide between them, you have won some love from me. 

My Dad did speak Spanish from having lived in Argentina for three years as a Mormon missionary, though his grammar was far from the best and his accent always hurt my ear. But he had an amazing vocabulary, because he was always reading books in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.  

The latter because he had removed my first generation American mother from Utah and moved her to different worlds: first to Nashville and the different culture of Tennessee and then to São Paulo, Brazil where they both learned Paulista Portuguese. 

My Childhood was in Spanish speaking New Mexico and then on the edge of Chihuahua. 

I have lived in Bolivia, Peru, and Argentina as well as spent time in Mexico, Colombia, and, to a much lesser extent, in Chile. Mostly, I just lived in the old U.S. of A. in various English and Spanish speaking niches, 

Now I’m in Spain, in a dialect region whose sounds seemed to escape my ear. Although I could speak, I often did not understand what was said back and people often paused when I spoke to them, seeming not to understand me either. The sociolinguistics of this are complex—though I shall not go there; nonetheless, the experience set me back.  

I still threw myself into the society, although as I looked around for groups to participate in, I first found expat groups in English. When I applied for my NLV (retirement) visa initially, I was told: “you will love Alicante because the ex-pat community is so strong”. I took pause because I had never participated in the community of Americans or Europeans abroad. Now I do. 

Things have changed, not just for me, but for Spain. It is part of the European community meaning that even within it, English is the common lingua franca. Normally, I avoid English and speak Spanish, but I have become part of that group of anglophone expats and have met many Spaniards from here and elsewhere through it who speak English and wish to do so fluently. I have also met many Europeans, French, Germans, Italians, Romanians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Poles, Russians, Czechs, and especially Ukrainians who use English. At the same time I have made friends with people from this city and province as well as the country through Spanish, even in the Anglo-phone groups. 

People often try to guess my accent in Spanish—in English, it is obvious, Anglo American.  A couple of days ago, a clerk in the Mercadona Supermarket, told me about my speech. He is a slightly rotund man with an engaging personality and a scruff-beard. He said, “you sound Mexican but you are not Mexican”. 

Elsewhere, people pick up the massive influence of South America in my voice and grammar, but here in Spain they seem to clearly get my origins from when I open my mouth. 

Though I spend time with expats and have friends, most of the time I speak Spanish here, though I do read and write too much in English. Sometimes it feels schizophrenic. But that is my new reality. I’m an English-educated bilingual, retired, adjunct professor. I just have to deal with it.

The American expat places on social media are filled with people complaining about things like the siesta, the lack of American products, a different style of life and different floor plan of homes, etc.  

While I want to snicker at their complaints, I remember when I moved to St. Louis, Missouri, I was troubled legitimately by such things. I could not find decent tortillas anywhere, nor could I find chile peppers.  The day I discovered in South St. Louis a Puerto Rican store that carried Mexican products I quickly transitioned to heaven. After that, every week I made a visit there. 

May other things in the Midwest would surprise me and not infrequently bite a chuck out of my posterior.  

Nor do I feel here the nostalgia that seems to inflict immigrants, including ex-pats who I insist are immigrants though generally the two categories are separated. 

Nostalgia can be an important, a cultural form. In Argentina it is the stuff of Tango and in Brazil it even has its own word, saudades—though it is not quite the same as the English nostalgia. Saudades just floats off the tongue even if it often comes with a feeling of loss and pain, as well as joy for having memory and having had the reality it speaks to.

What I have found myself missing, now in my second year, is fall colors. 

Not halloween, pumpkins, costumes, and phony webs everywhere, but trees in gold and red. I also miss the sidewalks covered with leaves. It is so fun to slide your feet through them. 

That takes me back to childhood in New Mexico.  (I suspect in coastal South Georgia we did not have much fall color either.)  

Nor do I go to the grocery store anymore and get frustrated with what I cannot find to make my food. That was the first few weeks, until I pulled myself up by the ears and turned myself around to look positively at what they have and to cook with that.  

Ok, Ok, I still miss the ease of finding Mexican products. It has been almos 400 days since last I had cotija cheese, for example. I have learned to find some stuff, work with what I have, make things I want—such as flour tortillas, for example.  I should write an ode to chorizo con papas, o chorizo with eggs.  I hare figured out how to make a reasonable version with Spanish products. did find some decent though dry, corn tortillas that have started appearing in the upscale El Corte Inglés near my home, or in a little Mexican store a little further away where I can find chile peppers now. 

I have pretty much given up on finding Mexican food I will like in restaurants here or even less in the streets, though the taquería in the central market is not bad. 

There just is not a very large Mexican population here. Sigh. 

Still I have become a sailor, well attuned to local currents and winds, while still piloting a vessel formed by almost seventy years elsewhere. 

What is the result, god only knows, because I do not. I am just enjoying the sailing.  

  

The Growth of the Follón

Mornings begin when I open my cel and begin to read the news, mostly these days from El País in Spanish. In English, the New York Times, and the Guardian. 

While the technology has changed, from newsprint to laptop to cel, the habit has stayed the same. Indeed it is one I inherited from my father. He would sit at the breakfast table with the morning paper open in front of him.

To be honest, I do miss going looking for the big fat Sunday Times and spending a good part of the day and then the week reading it. 

Criticisms of the news are also par for the course. One learns to read multiple sources and look for patterns and what is more or less trustworthy and verifiable. 

Of course, all this is a small part of my reading, but a key one. 

Spain has a rich tradition of journalism and for years I have read El País, although not daily, unlike now. I have loved they way it supports writers such as Vargas Llosa whose conservatism came increasingly to trouble me.  

Now, of course, V. LL. would seem quaint in the face of the bombastic and mendacious ultra right propaganda that increasingly dominates air waves as well as print media.

That is not yet the case in Spain where there is still a strong culture of print journalism. 

Yet, you could wonder how would I really know since I only watch TV when in a café where it is on. I miss out on this important site where opinion is manufactured and played out. I also miss out because I do not watch the right influencers nor spend much time on news Tik Tok or Instagram. 

Evidently, according to El País, I am really missing an important phenomenon in which the ultra right interests are strongly invested.

I read a few articles about a handsome youth and right wing trouble maker, Vito Quiles, native of near-by Elche, Italian Father and Spanish mother. 

He could just be one of the seemingly infinite number of attractive faces, bodies, and provocative personalities that trouble the waves around us and appear whenever we turn on out machines. 

However, Quiles is becoming more and more celebrated by Spanish media as a provocative voice of the Ultras with all the hormonal passion of an undereducated  young man. 

Though more handsome, he is reminiscent of the recently martyred man of the eternally boyish name, Charlie Kirk. In fact, El Pais mentioned them both in an article where it claimed Quiles, despite trying to upend college campuses, does not have the talent of St. Kirk.

But he is the young male face of the ultra right which is increasingly gaining force among college age males. 

Like Kirk, it appears he is dependent on the sponsorship of older, wealthy men. El País also noted that the Ultra leader, Santiago Abascal, through his foundation,  spends an ungodly amount of money supporting right wing media. He hopes, following the model of the US, that right wing media will open the door for the growth and support Abascal and his party Vox's inflammatory arguments.   

In this is something key, a vicious circle of citation in which external facts play little to no role. Instead the currency is support for its politicians and ability to agitate the public. The keystone of this edifice is a web site, “La Gaceta de la Iberosfera”, which trolls for voices and ideas that would support Santiago Abascal, the head of VOX in his and other partisan's arguments. 

Abascal then cites the Gaceta in his speeches and arguments which then quotes him. El País notes that much information on the recent focus on immigration, particularly from Africa—north and Sub Saharan, is false and never corrected. 

I respect journalists who, despite having a stance, actually go into the world and gather information. I suppose phone calls or emails are a legitimate substitute at a time of limited resources and enormous pressures on their day. But the do not replace in my mind getting out into the streets to see and to interview.

This does not include helicopter journalism. dropping from the air for a few camera shots and sound bites before being beamed up again to go somewhere else. It should mean spending time weighing and living the story they propose to report. 

Sigh, helicopters and emails are for more popular, especially if they give verisimilitude to what the journalist already thinks or what his or her employers already know. 

I love to see journalism that respects the task of the reporter to gather and verify information, especially when it runs counter to established ideas. And, I love thinkers with the depth of Vargas Llosa, even if I came to dislike his liberalism no matter how well he established it and argued for it.

His bias came to seem to me not unlike the passion the character Fonchito felt for his step mother in one of Vargas Llosa’s novels, Elogio de la Madrastra, in Praise of the Step mother. 

In reading authors like Vargas Llosa or like the many writers for El Pais, The New York Times, and the Guardian, you learn the back-feelings of thinkers and actors of your day. 

And through the reading, you can also learn much about the day’s events and challenges. 

You also learn language. While reading about Vito Quiles in El País I learned a new and useful word, follonero, he who makes follones. A follón is a mess and follower is, for me, the translation of the English trouble maker.

Somehow follonero seems to me less serious than the English troublemaker, kind of like Quiles with his youthful looks and actions.

It makes the Ultras seem playful, while in the US they seem deadly serious and painful, a plane dropping shit on the public. In both cases, they stink.