Spanish adventures

I first went to Spain 50 years ago. In Easter 1963 my father drove a car and caravan with 4 kids aged 6 to 13 right across France (then, with no motorways, a 3-day journey) to Tarragona, south of Barcelona, where we camped for 10 days. We spent our time clambering over the old Roman amphitheatre (no doubt fenced off and 5 euros entry nowadays), me roaming the Cathedral (I had just started my life-long interest in Church architecture). It was also my first serious confrontation with popular Catholicism: I remember the Good Friday procession: the men struggling down the narrow, stepped streets with a heavy statue of the Virgin, another pretty convincing group dressed as devils (or maybe they were penitents), and even more frightening, right at the end, a goose-stepping contingent of Guardia Civil: this was still Fascist Spain.

I got interested enough to learn Spanish reasonably well (off two BBC gramophone records) and pass my Ordinary Level state examination with top grade. I can still just about speak it and occasionally translate professionally from it.

Were we back there last week, based with translator friends north of Barcelona. We visited two excellent museums, the National Art Museum in Barcelona, with its wonderful collection of Romanesque frescoes, peeled off the walls in churches in the far north of Spain (the bit the remained Christian after the Moorish invasion) and the Diocesan Museum in Vic, with its marvellous collection of altar frontals and altarpieces. My wife will no doubt provide descriptions in extenso in the coming weeks. I confess to spending some of the time on the museum floor: ever since starting carpentry classes, and more especially since starting to translate a major work on late medieval picture frames, every time I see an altar frontal, altarpiece, chest or cupboard, I am trying to work out how it was put together. And the best way to do so is from the bottom upwards.

I admit struggling for a deeper feel for Spain. The Spain I first got to know – and which attracted me at age 14,- was proud, quixotic and Catholic, and not yet invaded by sun-seeking package holiday tourists.  I don’t know how much this really represented the Spanish ‘soul’ as it felt itself, and not as a certain propaganda wanted to portray it. Spain certainly had then its less pretty side: people living in near-hovels and shoe-less beggar boys begging for centavos, whom I caught up with ten years later as the first generation of Gastarbeiter in Germany. And then there was the enormous cloak of silence in Spain itself on the Spanish Civil War, compounded by the pro-Republican bias of the post World War II foreign literary establishment (Orwell’s ‘Homage to Catalonia’, and Hemingway’s ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’). Fifty years on, though, I am not sure the ‘soul’ is really any better, not least because the Christianity which is, historically, one of its core components, is itself split, with a conservative, ‘Fascist-light’ Christianity, typified by Opus Dei, facing off against a left-of-centre trend in part of the Catalan priesthood.  Nor am I sure that the ‘European spirit’ that the EU would have us embrace, is any help to the country: institutionalized shallow conformity.