Catalonia Today review of No Regrets: A Life in Catalonia

At the age of fifty-two, I took my cat and flew off from the San Francisco Bay Area to a new life in Barcelona. I had gone salsa dancing, met and married a Catalan, and we were going to live in his hometown.

The adventures began before we even left, with the purchase, sight unseen, of an apartment in the Barri Gotic, and subsequent horrible discovery in a guidebook of what went on in that street. Then there was the shock of the deed arriving in the mail with a different price – a much lower price – than what we had paid.

Once there, things didn’t work out as planned and that set off an even greater adventure than I had bargained for. Things that should be normal weren’t: buying bedding, keeping drunks from peeing under our balcony, buying Chanukah candles in a country where there have been essentially no Jews since 1492.

"Autobiography is a notoriously difficult genre, whose authors often slide into rampant egocentrism or report details that may have mattered very much to them but are of no interest whatsoever to anyone else. Happily, Dvora Treisman has avoided such pitfalls and has produced an entertaining if sometimes melancholy memoir about her life in Catalonia, full of episodes which might appear trivial at first but in fact deftly push the narrative forward so that the reader is, more often then not, left wanting to find out what happens next."  From the review by Matthew Tree, in the June issue of Catalonia Today. You can find the review here.

You can purchase the book on all the Amazon sites, Barnes & Noble, Casa del Llibre, Come In Bookshop in Barcelona, and most brick and mortar bookshops in the U.S. and Britain.

The Path to Surrealism

Last Saturday my walking pal Jaume and I did our usual walk to Vilabertran, but this time it was without the dogs and with a group of people we didn’t know.  The event was sponsored by the Friends of the Dalí Museum, of which I am a member.  The purpose was to learn about the painter’s experiences in the nearby village, where one of his best friends lived.

Salvador Dalí was born and lived the early part of his life in Figueres.  His good friend Ramon Reig had a house in nearby Vilabertran and he went there often on weekends.  When there, he spent a fair amount of time painting.

On the way to Vilabertran you pass a stand of trees off to one side that seem to hide a house.  I’ve always been curious about that house which I figured was probably an old farmhouse and maybe one of those beautiful old stone constructions.  But there is no evident way to get to it.  There is one small path that cuts off in that direction, but then it is cut off by a wall.  I learned that near the house there is a spring.

As it turns out, that is the old path that Dalí would take when he went to Vilabertran.  Indeed, Jaume used to go there as a kid for picnics at the spring.  As happens here, someone who later owned the property put up walls so that people could no longer pass through.  But it turns out that the right-of-way is public, and the local governments have sued to have the path reopened.  This may even happen sometime soon.

In the village there is also a small lake, much talked about by Dalí and his sister, and much painted by the two boys.  But we couldn’t see that either.  Some other property owner has walled that off.  Peeking over the top, it seems to be a jungle, but the wall is too high to actually see inside.  We did, however, see images of the paintings done all those years ago when, evidently, there weren’t as many walls about.

We visited the church and cloister of Santa Maria, a beautiful medieval compound.  Of course Dalí must have been familiar with it, but I don’t recall any concrete reason for our visit except that it is the jewel of the village and is home to a rather impressive, large, gilded cross.

Dalí’s friend Ramon Reig, a youngster his own age, had inherited from an uncle the impressive modernist villa that still stands and that is now the Vilabertran city hall.  Reig was also a painter and when they were together, while the rest of the family chatted, ate, and drank, the two boys spent their time painting.  It was interesting, on our walk, to see images of a few of their paintings from that time, side by side.  It’s not like you would have any idea which ones were by the genius.  He had a long way to go before adopting surrealism as his way of expressing himself in art and in life.

While Dalí went on to become, well, Dalí.  Reig became an art teacher.  In fact, Reig was my friend Jaume’s art teacher when he was in school.  Jaume was thrilled to learn more about his old teacher directly from the man’s granddaughter.  And she seemed equally thrilled to chance upon someone on the tour who had known and studied with her grandfather.  And I could only marvel at how much a small town Figueres really is, where, as they always tell me, everyone knows everyone.

Walking: Vilabertran

The day that I ran into the man with a dog from the local animal shelter (called a protectora although the one in Figueres seems to abuse and kill rather than protect the animals) I was actually headed for the nearby village of Vilabertran.  I've walked there several times before but never managed to get there on a weekday when their intriguing city hall was open.  The building is set far back from the street and surrounded by a garden, pond, and wall with a gate that locks outside of business hours -- hence the problem of taking photos.  Built in the early 20th century, an example of the modernista (Catalan art nouveau) style, the Torre de'n Reig was built as a private mansion.  Salvador Dali, who was born in nearby Figueres, used to visit there.

Where asphalt turns to dirt track

  

Salvador Dali's painting "Vilabertran"
painted in 1913 when he was about 9

Torre d'en Reig, the Vilabertran
glorious city hall