A Walk into Shadows

Last evening, while leaving a sadly closing bookstore I love, I had an intriguing conversation. IN my stroll to my path home, I walked a ways with a colleague from my writer’s group. He is a film-maker and is seeking stories from Alicante.

As we walked in the now dark streets—amazing how quickly the sun sets now and how late it rises—I was struck by the lugubriousness of the street. 

Even in broad day, there is a strange quality to these streets, or maybe it is just in the eye of this beholder. I do not know about the latter and so will just give you my observations. 

Alicante was heavily bombed during the Spanish Civil War by Italian bombers (although I believe Germans were also involved) in alliance with the fascists who carried out a coup against the elected Republican government. 

People talk about the market bombing—I wrote a poem about it, I was so. moved when I found out—when at the height of shopping for lunch, the bombers dropped their load on the public market and killed some 300 people in one fell swoop. 

When I think of that, the images that come to mind are immediately those of warred-out cities in the Middle East, including horribly Gaza. But I also think of the core of Berlin and the places they have left unreconstructed as memorials, such as the missing dome of the Reichstag, the congress building.  

Yet I did not hear about how the market bombing was just one of hundreds of explosions in this city as part of the war effort. 

I noticed the shed-looking, small metal buildings with gates to stairwells. These go down to bomb shelters; people can take tours into them. I did not realize that there were many more entrances and bomb shelters; a network in this central part of the city. I read somewhere that at the time, they could accommodate most of the residents of the city.

However, during the long Franco dictatorship whose victory over the republicans ended the war, the shelters languished and decayed. Many have still not been restored. Though I do not know, I imagine others disappeared in the construction of the web of parking lots under parts of the city’s center.  

I imagined these underground spaces, dank and filled with cobwebs and probably rats, maybe even bats. They seemed eerie to me, witnesses to a past preferably forgotten and hidden.  

It seemed likely that over the decades youths and maybe unsheltered people had entered them for their own ends: residence or spaces beyond control for parties or to just be for a bit. That reminded me of graffiti-ridden decaying buildings in other cities, like the bombed out spaces the anarchists took in Berlin to make cooperative living spaces and government-free spaces. 

This made me recall the bat is an important symbol to Valencians. Called the Rat Penat, it is an official heraldic symbol of Valencia. 

Legends tell of how bats, which the Arabs used to control the inevitable mosquitos in the very swampy land of Valencia’s capital city and hinterlands of the same name, turned against them and enabled Christians to become victorious. As a result, the bat is seen as a protector and vanquisher.

I assume as a symbol it can switch and also speak as a denizen of the night. 

to the dangers of official power.

Alicante has a castle above it, on whose slopes the Arabic city was built. Of course there are stories, such as of the king who had a beautiful marriageable daughter. He set up a contest among two suitors to see who could build a canal to bring water to this ultra-dray place. One of them won, but also lost as the princess died leaving the space of epic in which to construct adventures. 

However, the city bravely expanded away from its walls and down the coast into the domain of fisherfolk. I do not know these tales but I am sure the people had many about the sea. Some probably remain today. 

Houses were not built, unlike today, to maximize views of azure waters and the expansive sea.  People constructed with uninterrupted back walls to the sea for protection. Only in the nineteenth century with the fall of Tangiers did this change. The result is a small warren of narrow and odd angled streets. 

From the sea, before this, came pirates to steal cargo and crops, murder and rape, as well as enslave Alicantinos. Many Spaniards, not just Alicantinos were captured, enchained, and taken to the Maghreb in north Africa.  

I am sure there are (or were) amazing stories about the pirates, the pirate wars, and family members captive among the Arabs

Today the pirate wars are a key part of the celebration of Moros y Cristianos, Moors and Christians, a feast and drama that is central to festivities throughout the region. Sword fights with the pirate king occupy a key place in the re-portrayals.

In fact, the cinema’s of the city have just opened Amenabar’s new film—the Captive— just opened in this city. It relates how the great writer and icon of Spain, Cervantes, as a young man was enslaved in Algiers. This work marks a change in Spain’s portrayal of self and its understanding of masculinity, just as Cervantes’ Don Quixote does if read and examined. 

With the destruction of the Alicante’s walls, one of which ran along the coast, the city built a  modern fin-de-siècle town, simply called El Centro today. From a hundred and fifty to maybe forty years old, these constructions are either decaying or being restored. One see abandoned buildings, or gaps where buildings were with their tiles still pasted against the neighboring building’s wall. 

Each of those has stories and is source material for stories, along with the prison camps and the mass killing of Republican captives not quite a century ago. 

One can only imagine the despair of Republicans gathered in Alicante’s port for transport out of Spain as the war came to a bitter end. Surrounded by fascists, Italian and Spanish, weapons raised, they were never rescued and their bodies now occupy mass graves around the city. 

This is a city of stories, many unheard and untold though they leave traces for those who wish to read them. 

 

My colleague and I parted company, he to seek stories and tread on in the domain of film, and I towards home and the shadows of my anthropological mind.

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 two 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...