Charlie's Letter from Mexico: Trip to Spain
This is a continuation of Letter from Mexico newsletter. After a couple of years of not issuing these newsletters I am back to writing, only instead of Xeroxing and mailing I am going to be sending these reports via a blog. The nice thing about a blog is that the reader can write comments and thus straighten out things I got wrong or that one disagrees with.
To start out I am including some articles I wrote that were not included in my book: Retirement Tales: Two Gringos Living in Mexico.
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Spain 2000—
At the Iberia Airlines check-in desk, where I had arrived early, the clerk asked my name and when she typed it in she called over to her fellow clerk, “Hey, take a look at this!” The screen was already filled with twenty-nine Montemayors who had registered before me and more were to come. Many came from
The seven and one half hour flight was uneventful. I read the Iberia flight magazine and learned that you can now learn bullfighting through computer simulation. I suppose it’s called virtual bull. I think a CD ROM disk with this program would make an ideal gift for the man who has everything.
I didn’t expect that I would care much for Madrid. I imagined it as too big, too hot, and too dirty. Like all the cities in Spain that we visited, the place was spotless. Being October, the weather was pleasant, and although the metro area of Madrid is big (population 5,000,000 people), streets were wide, accommodating traffic nicely. The transit system, which included busses that run on natural gas, and a fine subway system, serve the area well. In many parts of the city there were uniform cornice lines (the top course that crowns the top of a building wall). I was much taken with this planning measure. Some sections of the city had ten-story buildings, others eight or six, and with a uniform cornice line the city had a well-organized appearance. There were no hanging signs on buildings to compete with each other or with the handsome statuary and fountains of the city.
Our guide explained that Madrid is not an old city. Well. I suppose it depends on what the meaning of what old is. King Phillip moved the capital from Toledo to Madrid in 1561 so it’s not exactly a new town. It became the home of the bourbon kings (not to be confused with the scotch kings).
Our first guided tour was to the Royal Palace of the Spanish Kings where we saw one room after another, each more splendidly decorated than the previous. Because these parlors are still used by the current monarch, King Juan Carlos, the rugs were (unkindly) rolled back and we walked on miles of very hard in-laid marble floors. One large room in the palace was set up as a museum of armor, much of it medieval. There were suits of armor that looked like what knights wore and others like what later day conquistadors used. One set of complete body armor in the museum was striking beyond belief. While many of the suits of armor had codpieces to offer vital protection, one suit that caught my eye was notable because in the lower portions it conformed to a man in a state of arousal:a tubular protrusion of about seven inches of iron with almost two inches of girth. Whether this was meant to frighten one’s foe I can’t say. But I can imagine a combatant on seeing this knight might be thinking, “Hey, I’m not going to fight this guy! What happens to me if I lose?” Or possibly the suit was constructed this way to accommodate someone who really enjoys these battles. Does this explain how they got the term knight-errant?
This reminded me of the story about the Spanish knight, Don Julio, who decided to leave his feudal castle to join in the crusades to the holy land. Before he left he put his beautiful wife in a chastity belt. He gave the key to his trusted friend Pedro and said that if he should not return from the crusades that he could release his wife from her bondage. Thus, Don Julio departed for the Holy Land but before he had gone very far Pedro came galloping up to the knight yelling, “Don Julio, Don Julio, wait! Wait! The key doesn’t fit!”
The Prado museum is certainly one of the great art museums of the world. It never fails to amaze me when I see original paintings of old masters that were heretofore familiar to me only from books. There they were, side-by-side, “The Clothed” and “The Naked Maja.” I have a little trick I learned when I was taking a course in aerial photo interpretation. If you look at two nearly identical pictures side by side and train your eyes to focus with one eye on one picture and the other eye on the other, (you are actually focused on infinity or looking a bit wall-eyed), the two images fuse together giving it a 3-D appearance. I tried to do this with “The Majas” but there were too many people milling around to actually pull this off and I was unable to merge the pictures. I suppose I looked pretty strange transfixed staring out into space among the dozens of people viewing the paintings.
Mike Montemayor, son of Michael, one of the organizers, is a handsome young man tall with a long narrow face and dark beard. I did a double take when I saw him walk by El Greco’s “Adoration of the Shepherds” painting, distinctive because of its elongated figures. Mike looked like he had just stepped out of the painting. Goya used friends and neighbors for his models. Could he possibly have used a Montemayor ancestor for one of his models with one set of genes marching four centuries to the present in the form of Mike Montemayor? Nah, probably not!
It’s difficult to describe paintings but I can say that the full figure paintings of Rubens were not just Rubenesque but cellulitesque. The painting of “The Three Graces”¾three women traipsing in a circlewas certainly beautiful but if I met this trio of beauties on one of those small elevators that is tagged, “Maximum Load: Half Ton,” I’d take a pass and wait for the next elevator. I’m sorry, but while it is often cited that the ideal image in Ruben’s day was one of well-rounded females, has any one considered that Ruben may have been pulling our leg?
There were a lot of Goya’s paintings, including various paintings of King Carlos III. Our guide was quite emphatic in stating that these paintings were not of George Washington, although there was a notable resemblance.
We followed the museum visit with one of the best meals I have ever had. It was at a restaurant called La Rioja. With four glasses at each place setting I knew this had the makings of a great meal. They started with the best olives in the world, then Spanish sausage, white asparagus, and smoked salmon. The main course was lamb, served with both red and white wines. Because the group was large it took a while for the waiters to serve everyone, but the slow service was compensated for by the number of bottles of excellent wine they kept bringing us. The meal ended with a cream puff desert and a fine liqueur.
Toledo
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Just a few miles from Madrid is the historic city of Toledo which in several ways resembles Guanajuato. Narrow streets better suited for pedestrians than cars, a population of 100,000, many old stone buildings, and a town site with an especially steep topography, are some of the similarities. Of course, there are differences. Toledo once contained a Roman fortress; later in the 6th century the Visigoths made this their capital. By the way, what ever happened to the Visigoths? In the Middle Ages Toledo was a melting pot of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish cultures. There we saw the Synagoga de Santa Maria, which we visited. Obviously, with a name like this, the synagogue had been converted a bit although the beautiful Mudéjar arches have been restored. Toledo is famed for its swords and ironwork. (I couldn’t help but wonder if the knight who was fitted out in that armor which I described previously might not have been the original Toledo Blade.) We visited a sword factory and saw an amazing array of swords produced there, including military sabers and even one that I could barely lift that looked like something King Arthur might have sported.
The bus ride to Seville took us through the beautiful Spanish countryside where we occasionally saw old castles with crenellated walls. The landscape was unspoiled with billboards or by inappropriate development. This was true of all parts of Spain and what a difference it makes in the visual appearance of the country. Our bus stopped at Puerto Lapice, a charming village that had a country restaurant called La Venta. I thought the large interior courtyard was so intriguing that I spent the small amount of time that we had there exploring this inn. Apparently, I missed the story about La Venta but later I learned from a traveling companion that this village and inn were mentioned in the book Don Quijote de la Mancha as a place where the famous knight and his sidekick, Sancho Panza, stopped for the night. I was told that if you looked behind the inn you could see the windmills described in this classic story. I noticed above some of the houses there were straw covered platforms supported by polesstork nests. In my opinion that is about as quaint and picturesque as you can get.
Seville
We were warned to look out for the motos, (motor scooters) driven by young men and pretty girls that were all over the place, scooting and swarming with the traffic and that sometimes a driver on a moto would whiz by and snatch a hanging bag from a tourist. I didn’t see any of this behavior but then I had everything well strapped to my belt. We visited the Royal Alkazares built in the 14th century as the home of Spanish kings. The present king retains a royal apartment in this jewel box of Mudéjar patios and halls. Mudéjars were Muslims permitted to live in a Christian society, and Mudéjar style, as I understand it, is a Christian adaptation of Muslim style in architecture and ornamentation.
In Search of José Greco
When I was a boy of about thirteen I remember that the José Greco Troupe of dancers came to my hometown, Janesville, Wisconsin. It was the first and for a long time the only group of flamenco dancers that I had ever seen. They made quite an impression on me what with their rapid heal stomping and syncopated hand clapping. Also, they were all so very tall and thin and their faces bore a pained expression. To me, that was what flamenco dancers were supposed to look like. Oh yes, I have since seen some people that did flamenco dancing, but never like José Greco and his troupe.
Now that I was in Seville I was anxious to see some real flamenco dancing once again. Perhaps there was a new José Greco, perhaps a grandson that was carrying on the tradition. A number of us went to see the dancers in a small theater. Several of the female dancers were beauties. Two of the male dancers were short and looked like they hadn’t held back on eating Spanish chorizo sausage for the sake of their artwell, let’s say they didn’t look like José Greco although they did have that severe pained look on their faces. With all that rapid dancing, finger snapping, hand clapping, and foot stomping, I enjoyed the show. I usually enjoy live entertainment when people knock themselves out, but I didn’t have the feeling that I was witnessing the real thing. Later, when we visited Granada, we had a second chance to see a flamenco dance performed in una cueva, a cave. We were told that President Bill Clinton had seen a flamenco performance as a guest of King Juan Carlos when he visited Granada. That was for me. I seemed to recall an old movie with, was it Rita Heyworth or was it Ava Gardner, where they went to a cave and these terrific gypsy dancers danced on their table?
The dance we attended was held in a small theater, the ceiling of which was roughly arched, suggesting a cave. Not only was there no one who looked like Rita or Ava, there was no one who danced like José Greco. The female dancers, however, were pretty and to paraphrase my old friend Bud Tabaka back in Madison, “There are only two kinds of women who wear red shoes and fortunately all the girls in this dance troupe were Spanish dancers.” There was one especially pretty dancer who I had occasion to chat with just outside the hall cooling off during the intermission. It seemed to me that the continuous loud and rapid clapping must be hard on the dancers’ hands so I asked her how she could take it. She immediately offered me her palm and when I touched it, it felt as tough as shoe leather. She explained that unless they put a lot of cream on their hands they would blister painfully. I thought these dancers in Granada were better than the ones in Seville but no match for the José Greco Troupe. Among other things, one of the girls was secretly chewing gum and I understand that that is something a flamenco dancer is never, never supposed to do.
Córdoba
We were in the old Jewish quarter of the city and as I came around a corner I was confronted by an old gypsy woman. She held out a twig of an aromatic type, thrusting it in to one hand of mine and proceeded to tell my fortune in Spanish, all the while holding the other. Of course I remembered where the word gyp came from so I was a bit apprehensive. The old woman who had an impressive face said that I came from a good family. She then said I was very generous. She nodded her head and said that’s true, isn’t it. “Well, yes,” I thought. This fortuneteller was batting a 1000, and she added, “But you are a little bit nervous, aren’t you?” “Right on!” I thought. She told me a lot more in Spanish but I couldn’t understand what she was saying. I was feeling generous so I reached into my pocket and pulled out a 100-peseta coin, worth about fifty-four cents. She immediately said, “Coins are bad luck, put it away.” The smallest bill I had in my pocket was a 1000 peseta note worth about five dollars and forty cents and she refused that, saying she wanted 10,000 pesetas. I didn’t know how to get out of this situation. There were many people in the street, and for all I knew, I was surrounded by Gypsies. So in desperation, I asked her, “How old am I?” She looked straight into my eyes for some time with a piercing gaze and finally said, “You’re sixty two.” “Incorrecto. Incorrecto,” I yelled out. I gave her the 1000 peseta note and walked off. After all, she was mostly right.
In the mosque-cathedral of Córdoba, an enormous edifice that looks like a huge Muslim mosque with a huge Catholic cathedral built within, we saw a large stone sarcophagus with a name tag: Don Alfonso de Montemayor, circa 1390. I have since checked the book given us on the history of Montemayor, a village we were soon to visit, and the book said that Alfonso I Fernandez de Montemayor died in 1390. He was the second Montemayor immediately following Martín I de Montemayor, who started the line. So here we stood looking at the coffin of a presumptive early ancestor of ours. The sarcophagus was in a sturdy glass case so that any later day malcontents bearing a long time family grudge with this feudal lord would have trouble getting at him.
Montemayor
Probably the highlight of a totally wonderful trip to Spain was the visit to the village of Montemayor. This town of four thousand inhabitants is a few miles outside of Córdoba on the way to Granada. We got out of our comfortable busses and climbed a hill past the Montemayor Castle to an attractive plaza. Now regarding this castle, I had long thought that with a trip to Spain I might be able to reclaim the old family homestead. Starting with Martín I Alfonso de Códoba, who was the first Lord Montemayor (1327 to 1349), to the more recent José Fernandez de Velasco, who held the titles of the XXIII Lord Montemayor, all the way to XVII Count of Alcuadete and XVII Duke of Frías, I just might be the XXIV Lord Montemayor, so I was ready to advance my claim. One of the genealogists on this trip told me something that was even more interesting. When Don Diego and his partners left for New Spain, the King of Spain gave them a land grant that extended from central Mexico all the way to the Colorado River in what is now the United States. With this information in hand I now am willing to renounce my claim on the Lordship and the castle in favor of downtown Dallas.
We were ushered in to the village hall that was in a very old building that had been beautifully renovated. The woodwork was of fine craftsmanship, lots of polished brass and floors of marble. I think back to Green Bay when I was city planner there and I can hear the voice of the building committee chairman for the new city hall. “We want a functional building,nothing really fancy,” he harangued. What they got was a really ugly building. There were speeches by Colonel Montemayor presenting a plaque to the town and a beautifully bound book on Governor Galvez that Ernesto had researched and written. Galvez was the Spanish governor of Louisiana who fought the British during the American Revolution. With 4000 troops from Spanish America he tied up substantial British forces. Some historians believe that Galvez enabled Washington to prevail in the east.
The mayor responded that America is a country of great power. “It is a beautiful garden,” he said, and that he was proud that the first discoverers of America were Spanish. My notes show that one of the speakers said that it was believed, although not proved, that Don Diego was born in Montemayor although no Montemayors live here today. The mayor said that Montemayor was a simple village whose economy was based on raising wheat, olives, and grapesthat the village would like the visitors to join in eating the bread they baked here, dressed with olive oil produced here, and that later we could enjoy the wine made in Montemayor. The village has a small museum that we visited, loaded with artifacts from the time that this place was a Roman fortress named Ulía and dating back to 45 B.C. We then proceeded to the main church, San Acacia, and heard a mass said by Father Garcia, from San Antonio, and another priest that also came with us from the U.S., as well as the local priest Padre Don Pablo. Don Pablo was getting on in years but seemed to be a kind and considerate leader of his flock. Monsignieur Garcia said to the villagers of Montemayor that they could be proud of their Spanish language, their culture, their families, and their faith. He said that Don Pablo was the kind of priest they didn’t make anymore. Later, from the back of this sizable church, came the voices of a choir of perhaps fifty people, including mandolins, guitars, and violins. The music was of such beauty that it is difficult to imagine how this village of only 4,000 people could turn out such a fine choral group.
After the mass, a group of performers came to the front. The women were dressed in long ruffled Spanish dresses not unlike those worn by the flamenco dancersyou know, the kind with big polka-dots. The men were dressed in pants with the cuffs turned up to reveal their work type boots, white shirts, and embossed leather suspenders. The group sang, accompanied by various instruments, including guitars, mandolins, a military drum, and one very strange instrument that I had never seen before. This was a well-made wooden box that the player sat on, tilting the open bottom towards the audience. By beating different parts of the box with his hands he could play various notes. The singing was Spanish but the music sounded to me Moroccan. It was loud and exuberant, almost shouting. I asked two local women standing next to me what type of music this was? One of them said Córdoban and the other one said, Corinthianno, that’s not really true. That’s what Ricardo Mantalban would have called it. She said it was Andalusian.
Following this folkloric group was a concert by the choir and instrumentalists that had now come from the back of the church to the front. The music was quite beautiful and near the end of one piece one could hear the quiet trill of a set of castanetsvery moving and a bit eerie.
Our group was transported to the Montemayor winery where we sampled, heh, heh, the wines produced there. I asked one of the workmen how the economy was in Montemayor. He said it was good. “Very good, indeed!” he added. He then told me that the village industriesthe olive oil plant, the winery, and others¾were all co-operatives, and that everyone shared in the profits of the businesses in Montemayor. The village looked quite prosperous, and the people who lived there, happy.
The Montemayor castle sits on a hill with the rest of the village adjacent, perched along the gentle slopes. When we walked along a principal street in the village one lady opened up her house for us to visit. The house was ample but no mansion. It had an attractive central patio and when you walked to the back of the residence there was a balcony that looked down and across a most attractive landscape of olive trees and vineyards. No ugly urban fringe development. It went from heart of the village directly to countryside. And to think of all the hundreds of years they had to screw it up but didn’t.
From the winery we went to The Hotel Castillo de Montemayor, where we had a fabulous multi-course dinner with four entrées. I was seated next to a very trim and handsome eighty-four year-old Spaniard, El Comandante he was called, who had fought in the Spanish Civil War. I thought it best to not ask him which side he was on so instead I asked him what rank comandante was is it higher than a major for example I couldn’t understand his answer. (I have since learned that comandante means commander and thus could be any of various ranks.) The Spanish speak Spanish differently than in Mexico. To me the cadence makes it sound like they are speaking Italian. Because I don’t speak very much Spanish it was difficult for me to know if I didn’t understand what people were saying in Spain because it was Spanish Spanish or just because it was Spanish.
After the meal there was more entertainment and they gave us a very well made video of Montemayor that we could add to the handsome lapel pin and the book on the history of Montemayor that had been presented to us. I think we were all proud of this beautiful village that bore our family name, and delighted with the wonderful hospitality.
Granada
Continuing our trip through southern Spain we arrived at Granada, which is close enough to mountains that it supports a number of ski shops. Among its many splendors is the Alhambra a palace of such elaborate decoration that one has the feeling of enough, enough. We were told that unlike the Royal Palace in Madrid that had four hundred rooms but not a single bathroom, the Alhambra, much of it built in the 1300’s, had bathrooms built by those clever Moors. The Alhambra, has four hundred visitors every half hour so I suppose if they let the public use any of those bathrooms you had better be quick about it.
Costa del Sol
We stopped briefly at Mijas, a small town on a bluff overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. A few years ago this was an obscure place where a few people in the know built their vacation homes to take advantage of the spectacular view of the sea it afforded. Today, Mijas is a classy little resort that has a special parking lot that accommodates about fourteen tour busses, so it is touristy yes, but still classy. From the town you can see the beautiful coastline all the way to Marbella, which we also visited along with Malaga. I had been told that these were all places overrun by rich European tourists and I thought I would be turned off by the tackiness that goes with touristy areas. I was wrong. All these places were beautiful and I only wish that I had enough pesetas and time to have stayed longer. To think Don Diego departed from Malaga when perhaps he could have stayed in this beautiful place. One must assume that in his day the sidewalks in the central area were probably not paved in marble as they are today and there were no lovely sidewalk cafes nor a fleet of gorgeous yachts from all over Europe along the malecon.
The Basque Country
From Malaga we returned to Madrid by plane where more than half of our group returned to the U.S. and the rest of us proceeded to Bilbao, the largest city in the Basque Country. I didn’t know much about the Basques except that they say they are wonderful sheepherders in Idaho, and that the Basque language is a complete mystery to linguists who are unable to determine where the language came from. Several of the genealogists that came on this trip were particularly interested in the Basque region because Basques intermarried with Montemayors back in New Spain. It certainly appeared from our visit that the Basque people are very talented and sophisticated.
Bilbao has been one of Spain’s leading industrial cities based on iron and coal in the region. In the modern era, Bilbao was turning into a rustbelt town. The leaders of the city decided they didn’t want to see the decline of their city and worked hard and smart to turn it around. Today, Biboa has become a center for international banking and a corporate office center. Another effort was to bring tourism to the city by building the Gehry-designed Bilbao Guggenheim Museum. We toured this spectacular museum, which I believe they said cost over $100,000,000 dollars. At the time we visited they had exhibits on minimalist, post minimalist, and environmental art. Most of us were much taken with one particular environmental exhibit that consisted of a large room, the floors, walls, and ceiling of which were all a dull white. You removed your shoes to enter. Where the floors joined the walls and the walls joined each other and the ceiling they were rounded so that you could not see any joint lines. One had the sensation of being in a cloud or in a fog bank. We learned that this is referred to as the Ganzfield Effect. The ganzfield effect is a sort of mini-isolation chamber. It turns out that the mind reacts better to a blank but steadily-lit field for sensory deprivation than it does to darkness. I can’t find the word, Ganzfield, in my dictionary so we must have witnessed something on the cutting edge of the art world. There was a great deal more to amaze us as well as a lot to under-whelm us, as you might expect, in the minimalist exhibits.
In my view, Bilbao could not begin to compare with two other cities we visited in the Basque country, San Sebastian and Vitoria, the latter being the capital of the Basque country. My guide book says that San Sebastian, “gloriously situated on a neat shell-shaped bay is the most fashionable and elegant Spanish seaside resort. It has long been popular with the Spanish aristocracy.” Our guide said that gastronomically, these two cities were the best in Spain. These cities were of such singular beauty and exquisite town design that I became convinced that students of city planning should be required to visit San Sebastian and Vitoria. I wondered why American cities couldn’t have more style like I had witnessed throughout Spain, but especially in these two Basque cities.
At one of our excellent dinners I was moved to give a toast in Spanish. “Viva España!” I said, and the group responded, “Viva!” and then, “Viva Mexico!” and the group responded “Viva!” “Viva America!” and the group responded “Viva!” “Viva los Montemayors!” and the group again responded, “Viva!” Colonel Montemayor noticed that the Basque waiters were watching this with some disgust, so he piped in with, “Y viva el Pais Basco!” “VIVA!” everyone shouted and the waiters were smiling again.
One thing that surprised me about the trip to Spain, was what appeared to me a rather nice standard of living apparent among the people we saw in that country. I asked our guide why with a much higher average GDP per person in the U.S. did it appear that Spain had such a high standard of living. She said that for one thing there is not such a disparity of incomes in Spain. I have thought a lot about this and have concluded that along with that, our high average GDP includes what our country spends on the military and what we all spend on automobile transportation, much more than in Spain or other European countries. What would life in America be like if we could have less disparity of incomes and without those heavy expenditures?
For me, the trip to Spain was marvelous; I really loved it. I would return any day and next time I would take in Barcelona and Portugal.
Viva l’amor!
posted by Charlie's Letter from Mexico @ 2:07 PM
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