I recently went on an excursion through Spain with a
popular tour company. When I’d read the brochure, I’d liked the fact that this
tour concentrated on just one Country. But it still turned out to be a little
too much too quickly. Instead of “If this is Tuesday, it must be Belgium” – it
was “If this is Tuesday, it must be Cordoba.”
Nevertheless, I’m glad I went. I learned a lot along the
course of this almost military regimen of up-and-out at dawn and on to another
city. But it isn’t the grand sights that I’ll probably best remember. It’s not
the cathedrals, the palaces, the Prado, the Alhambra. It will probably be the
little things that will stay with me - the caught conversations - the flow of a
gypsy woman’s long chiffon skirt - the anguished look on the face of the aging
flamenco dancer that exceeded even the proud pathos the dance calls for - the glimpse
of a Valencia orange falling to the street and being kicked aside by a
passerby.
The part of the planned itinerary that I enjoyed the most
was our visit to an olive orchard where the yield was pressed into olive oil.
Even though it was mid-November, the bougainvilleas were still in full bloom up
the sides of several of the operation’s stucco buildings. As we walked through
the orchard, one member of our group snapped an olive off a tree, chewed on it,
and pronounced it awfully bitter. It seems a lot of processing has to take
place to produce olives that are good to eat. As far as making olive oil, the
workers have a narrow window of opportunity to pick the olives, when the
drupaceous fruits are at their oiliest. When these are first pressed, virgin
olive oil is the result. Subsequent pressings of the lees produce olive oil of
lower grades.
The owner of the operation took us through the rooms of
pressing equipment. He told us what to look for when buying olive oil back
home. We should always get opaque glass containers, not the cheap transparent
plastic containers that most grocery stores sell. We should store the olive oil
in a cool place, so it wouldn’t turn rancid.
Then an unexpected treat. The owner said that in Spain,
people put olive oil on EVERYTHING. He served each of us a dish of chocolate
fudge nut ice cream with olive oil drizzled on top. The olive oil he used had
been infused with orange essence. So maybe that was cheating a little, but
either way - delicious!
Later, we took an off-schedule side trip to the home of a
cave-dweller toward the north of Spain. Centuries before, caves had been carved
out of the clay mountains in the region. Now the residences are by law passed
down within families. It takes special dispensation to buy one of these
dwellings.
We climbed a metal staircase and entered an
earthy-smelling low vault of a room with white-washed walls. The friendly young
family living in this cave had made a modest tourist attraction of their home,
without in any way subverting their lives. We were conducted through the
various rooms, including the children’s bedrooms, all branching off from that
main vaulted dining room. Electricity was run in from the town’s main street
and operated everything in the house. There was no need for heating or cooling.
We were told the cave stayed at a nearly constant 69 degrees F. because clay is
a wonderful insulator.
There was a second story to this cave residence. The
family had made a museum out of those rooms, stocking them with artifacts
showing how life was in their town in the 1800’s. But the main impression I
walked away from this tour with was the overall sweet contentment of the
family. They were independent illustrations of that sampler injunction to “Grow
where you’re planted.” They were where their ancestors had been, but they had
no sense of being stuck in place. They had added their own twist to the
traditional lifestyle by allowing select tours through their home. And now they
had it all – the old and the new – the inviting and the insular.
Having grown up in my family printing business, that
select contentment with tradition is one of the aspects of European life that
most touches me. I found that here again in Spain. Again when we went to
Toledo, there were people carrying on the tradition of engraving the “best
steel in the world” produced in the region. Our guide told us that no one has
been able to pin down exactly what makes Toledo knives so keen, guaranteed for
life. Many suspect it might be something secret in the waters of the Tagus
River that lends itself to the annealing of the metal.
With all the exotic sights to absorb, it was however
sometimes the conversations of my fellow travelers that informed me the most.
It’s odd how different tour companies attract different clienteles. I’ve
actually been on some tours where I was the most technologically advanced,
where I could flummox other tour members by referring to “Googling.” However on
this trip, I was the cave-dweller, in the old pejorative sense of the word. All
my cohorts were on the cutting edge of technology, the Toledo steel cutting
edge – the very sharpest of all. They had ultra-Smart phones, Internet access,
a conjurer’s powers at their fingertips. Meanwhile, without even a cell phone
with international access, I was pathetically incommunicado.
One couple demonstrated to me how, sitting there in
Barcelona, they could control the thermostat in their master bedroom back in
Tennessee by pressing a button on their phone. Everyone else was immediately
emailing any interesting photos they’d snapped – to all their friends at home.
One woman showed me how her SmartPhone had neatly labeled the location of every
picture she took on it. There was the precise (and correct) label “West Wall of
Alhambra Main Garden, Granada, Spain.” How did her phone know? “GPS,” the woman
shrugged, as if her phone’s intelligence was a trifle. “I sometimes turn it
off,” she elaborated. “I don’t like to be that closely tracked all the time.”
By contrast, my photos are in their usual merry mish-mash
– with me often being in the dark even about what city they were taken in. Never
mind exactly what wall is shown.
During some of our free time, one couple took the
opportunity to tour a manufacturing plant that specialized in 3-D printing.
They told me how they had seen a fully functional handgun “printed” right
before their eyes. This was sort of old hat to them. They had known about this up-and-coming
revolution in manufacturing for some time. When I got home and looked up likely
investment opportunities, I indeed saw that that ship had already sailed. All
the stocks that would give an investor some stake in 3-D printing action had
already tripled in the course of the year.
But it isn’t generally so much what my fellow travelers
could teach me about the technology of the world that has stuck with me. It’s the
glimpses I got through the different windows they had onto the world and the snatches
of their perceptions about life in general.
One man carried an elaborate ensemble of camera equipment
with him, which led me to ask his advice on some aspects of picture-taking. Like
most people asked to give their opinion when their superior knowledge is
recognized, the man blossomed into his own 3-D Technicolor at my request. It
turned out he was a professional photographer.
But he said he’d given up doing weddings. He couldn’t stand the
“Bridzillas.” No, now he devoted himself exclusively to his true love –
candidly photographing beautiful young women caught in the natural course of
being themselves. He said he took his camera everywhere he went and approached
likely subjects at every turn. After a few street shots, he’d hand them his
card and invite them back to his studio to do nude sessions. He said as often
as not, the women accepted his invitation.
Well, that suggestion of lechery the man revealed was a
little concerning. I sensed the “nude sessions” probably went beyond innocent
fun, perhaps all the way into some serious purveyance of pornography. How nude
were these nude women? The long-suffering expression on the face of the man’s wife
also hinted at an expected tendency for there to be “something going on” in
that studio - something more than mere picture-taking.
After hearing this man expound on street photography
techniques, I made a point of watching him in action as we traveled across
Spain. Sure enough. He approached one lovely after another, the younger the
better. Most of the women seemed flattered and were glad to lend themselves to
his camera’s eye. Of course here in Spain there could be no after-hour sessions
back at his studio. And since he was an older, unthreatening man, it could all
be just innocent appreciation of beauty-in-passing.
The man approached one rather unlikely looking subject as
she stood framed by architect Calatrava’s dramatic bridge/museum construct in
Seville. I didn’t think this young woman would have been the man’s type. She
sported spiky orange and pink hair and otherwise effected a rather Goth look.
But the photographer did indeed solicit her to pose with Calatrava’s dramatic
oceanic sweep as backdrop, and the girl was indeed amenable to being
photographed. Although the photographer spoke almost no Spanish, and the girl
spoke almost no English, they collaborated through what seems to be the almost
universal medium of a desire to leave some record of oneself on this planet.
After this brief memorializing of the girl’s presence in
front of the great whale-harp-arch of a building complex, the two parted ways
forever and the man came over in gleeful satisfaction to show me the results of
his shoot. As we peered together down at his camera viewfinder turned screen,
he sighed in a sort of transport of appreciation, “Look, doesn’t she have
beautiful green eyes?” I would never have noticed.
Perhaps this man’s activities weren’t always the most
admirable, but he probably did more good than harm in the world. And truly, I
envied him. His sexual impulse gave him ready access to a delight that would
undoubtedly persist in him and sustain him. I once thought my own different
sort of infatuation with the opposite sex would similarly be an eternal flame
that would light my way out into the world. It impelled me to a hopeful
outreach. Every bus I boarded, every corner I turned, held the possibility of
that certain smile, that certain secret connection. But after decades of
everyone else on all those busses being buried in their newspapers, then in
their iPhones, with nary an answering eagerness or entente, that impulse died
in me. Or maybe it wasn’t the lack of response. Maybe it was all just a matter
of hormones. Whatever the cause, after having been warmed and lifted for so
long by that prospect of my personal spark catching - the flame went out. It
went out suddenly and no doubt permanently. Now I go through the motions of
enthusiasm. But I sensed that photographer’s buoyancy, however questionable
some of the explorations it might lead him to, was real and would carry him
through to the end. And I wished I was him.
Actually, all the other group members seemed genuinely
enthusiastic about taking in the sights. Although the day’s scheduled tour
might have been grueling, most of our group members wanted to extend themselves
to tour further on their own in the evenings. This unflagging determination
resulted in the most memorable moment of the whole trip for me.
We had toured the Prado, where I learned a lot about El
Greco, Velasquez, and Goya. I was especially surprised by the grotesque abstractions of
the latter’s “black years.” But then after dinner, many people wanted to go on
to the Queen Sofia Museum to see Picasso’s “Guernica” mural first-hand. But I’d
been up for thirty-six hours by then, including all the hassle of the plane
trip to Madrid. I declined the group sortie to Sofia. “Oh, but you’ll be dead
for millions and millions of years,” reminded my fellow traveler. “You might
never get here again. You have to do it all now.”
Somehow, the vastness of the void of death had never been
brought home to me with such stark finality before. I felt myself standing on
the precipice of that ultimate descent into blackness. Perhaps that was the
same precipice that Goya had been standing on when he produced his macabre distortions. Perhaps that was the same precipice the anguished flamenco dancer had been standing on as she
stomped out the last proud defiance that would collapse the earth out from
under her.
Still, my laziness won out in the end, as it usually
does. I skipped the Sofia and trudged back to the Hotel, where I fell into a
profound sleep that lasted unbroken until our breakfast call the next morning.
And so I added most of one more day to those unfathomable millions. I stretched
my time of unconsciousness to eternity-plus-one.
