Chagall

I recently finished reading Chagall by Jackie Wullschlager, a biography of the Jewish-Russian painter. Marc Chagall has long been among my favorite painters because of the emotions his Jewish images evoke. Even though my parents were not from the shtetl (they were urbanites from Warsaw and spoke Polish rather than Yiddish at home), the shtetl represents, to me, my history and cultural background. It was the most common eastern European Jewish experience, the one I am most familiar with, and Chagall is the one who immortalized it in pictures.


Chagall came from a family of religious Hassidic Jews, and although as an adult he was not observant, he remained tied to his Jewish roots. He married, Bella, the woman he fell in love with as a young man, and adored her until she died in New York, soon after the end of World War II. She was from the same background and indeed the same town as he and during her life she served as his muse, fostering memories and connections to the old world that they had both left behind.

Chagall went to live illegally beyond the pale (the pale of settlement within which Russian Jews were required to live) when he went to St. Petersburg to study art. He and Bella left Russia after the Revolution, lived briefly in Germany and then settled in France. When Jews came into danger in France during the World War II occupation, the Chagalls managed to leave Europe and go to New York where they stayed until the War was over. Of all the places he lived, Chagall felt the most out of place in the U.S. (for cultural and artistic reasons), and the most comfortable and assimilated in France. But it seemed that he never felt totally at home anywhere and never lost his longing for Russia. In Russia he was considered suspect for not following the painting style promoted by the Party. In France he was accepted as an artist, but when French anti-Semitism flared up during the occupation, he came close to becoming a victim. He visited Israel more than once but never felt comfortable there either. It even took some doing to get him to design the windows for Hadassah as he felt that Israelis had no appreciation for art. In the end, France was where he chose to live for most of his life. That was the place where art was appreciated and where he could best be himself and an artist.

To become a painter he needed to go to Paris, but his heart was always in Russian, in Vitebsk, the town he came from. Vitebsk appears repeatedly in many of his paintings as does Bella. He painted her repeatedly during her lifetime, during the years he was with his lover Virginia, and during the years he was with his second wife Vava. He never stopped painting Bella. Vava became extremely important in his life, but Bella remained with him always.

I was very moved by Chagall’s devotion to Bella and his identification and love of his homeland. He drew on his roots all his life; without them there would have been no art. I looked him up in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia where he was said to be a Russian-French artist. They somehow managed to overlook that underlying his passports, he was Jewish, and that was the most consistent and defining element of his art. There were other Jewish artists at that time such as Jacques (Chaim) Lipchitz, Amedeo Modigliani, or Chaim Soutine, but theirs isn’t Jewish art. To a large extent, our image of what Russian stetl life looked like comes from Chagall paintings – at least mine does.

I visited Chagall’s museum in Nice, conveniently located in Cimiez, near my hotel, expecting to see a fiddler on a roof and circus images, but instead saw huge Biblical canvases. I like to buy CDs to play at home and remember my travels with and in the museum’s gift shop I found two. These two have turned out to be favorites.

On my first visit I bought Chants traditionnels de l’Ancienne Russie sung by the Choeur d’Hommes de Moscou, led by Anatoly Grindenko. It is the most wonderful collection of old Russian folk songs I have ever heard and a CD I never get tired of hearing. Being so happy with that first purchase, I made a beeline to the gift shop on my second visit two years later. I didn’t find the Romanian violinist that I had passed up the first time, but I did find Les Musiques de Chagall which I like for its variety (it includes a few cuts from the Chants traditionnels as well as Yiddish songs, Klezmer music, Tchaikovsky, Bloch,Mozart, Bach, Ravel, and Messiaen – all music that related to Chagall’s life. That led me to yet another CD of one of the groups on Les Musiques de Chagall, Tenderness and Madness Passion with Ami Flammer, Moshe Leiser, and Gérard Barreaux, that I later bought online from Amazon. This group of musicians lives in Paris and gets together to play Yiddish music and keep it alive. They are excellent.

Writing to a friend while living in France in 1929 Chagall said, “There is not a single Jew here, or even a Russian. So we feel our Jewishness even more…” I think that was an exaggeration for in fact France had both Russians and Jews. But I know how he felt.

Visitors

In the last few weeks I’ve had a very lively time with three great sets of visitors, starting with Bill and his wife Anita, who came in mid-June accompanied by friends of theirs. I’ve known Bill since 1977 when he entered the undergraduate program to study photography and I was working at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design. He and I had Los Angeles in common, and over the years we would sometimes drive down to L.A. together to visit our respective friends and families, poor six-foot tall Bill with a delicate back scrunched into my low-flying Volvo P1800.


Many years ago when Anita still lived in Germany, she was planning a trip with another couple and advertised in the local paper for a traveling companion. Dorith, recently divorced and wanting to travel was putting an ad in the same paper but missed the deadline. Later, when Dorith was reading through a copy, she found her own ad, only it had been placed by someone else. The two of them have been traveling companions and good friends ever since.

We started out with the great city market La Boqueria where the fruits and veggies are set out like works of art; then we made our way through the Barri Gotic, the old part of town where I used to live. Anita had read The Shadow of the Wind, so she was very pleased to be able to visit two locations mentioned in the book: the lovely Plaça Reial where the ethereal (and blind) Clara Barceló lived in a beautiful 19th century apartment, and the Plaça de Sant Felip Neri where the character, whose name I have forgotten, the woman who worked for Julian’s publisher used to live. The Plaça de Sant Felip Neri is a romantic, tiny square, and one of my favorite spots in the city. It sits over what was once a medieval cemetery, but more notable are the walls of the Església Sant Neri, marred by countless chips from where the bullets of firing squads struck when Franco troops executed people during the Spanish Civil War.

I had booked a table at one of my favorite Barcelona restaurants, Agut on Carrer Gignas. The German visitors were pleased. Not only did it have a good review in their guidebook, but the name that means “Oh good!” in German was an auspicious sign. Anita had the menu del dia but the rest of us ordered a la carte. I had grilled baby squid with blood sausage sauce that may sound a bit over the top, but was wonderful, the sauce being tasty but mild and not overpowering the squid.

A few days after I saw Bill I went back into Barcelona to see Sue and her mom. I also know Sue from Cal where she also studied photography and in fact, Bill and Sue vaguely know each other. When I knew Sue at Cal she was making a name for herself as a rodeo photographer. One of the pictures I have of hers is a shot of three cowboys, sitting on a bench, waiting their turn to compete while laughing and having a good time. It is a wonderful image of camaraderie that I have always kept on the wall of my dining room.

Sue’s mom is in her 70s and is in the process of taking a cruise with each one of her three daughters. The first was a river cruise down the Elbe River from Berlin to Prague; later she will sail through the Panama Canal. Her cruise with Sue started from Barcelona, going down the Spanish coast to Gibraltar and then up the other side to Rouen, stopping at Valencia, Cadiz, Lisbon, Oporto, La Coruña, Bilbao, Bordeaux, Guernsey. They came a few days early to see Barcelona and especially some of Gaudí’s buildings.

By the time we got out of their hotel it was late, so we set off walking to the old part of town for lunch at an historic artist hangout. The 4 Gats looks like it says the 4 Cats, and oddly enough it does, the Catalan word for cat being gat. This is neat because that way, even if you misread the name, you’re still right. Designed by Josep Puig i Caldafalch, a contemporary of Antoni Gaudí, it is a colorful restaurant and bar loaded with tiles on the walls and an old fashioned feel and was where all the artists (including Picasso) hung out in the early 20th century. It is very popular with tourists but I think locals like it too; it’s a good place to enjoy some nostalgia and decent food.

During lunch Mom asked if I knew where there were some Roman columns standing within an office building. She had seen it many years ago and wouldn’t mind another look. It just so happened that I did know, so after lunch we went there. The two thousand-year-old Roman columns, from what was the Temple of Augustus, now sit in an interior courtyard of a building only a few hundred years old, on a tiny, narrow street, off the beaten track. Even as you enter the building entry courtyard, you don’t see the columns; you must go to the back and turn before they come into view. We entered, we turned, we stepped into the inner sanctum, and Sue fell. She was so busy looking up and taking photos that she didn’t see the three stairs that led down to the bottom of the courtyard. There she was, head near the ground, feet up towards us. Her mom and I started towards her to help her up but Mom didn’t notice that we were standing on a ledge – there was no railing. Next thing, Mom went off the three-foot cliff onto the concrete floor below.

I didn’t know what to do first: help Sue up, get down to the level below to see to her mother, or call an ambulance. A couple of French tourists came to help us and in the end, both the women were all right. Unbelievable. These two women may have difficulty staying on their feet, but they’re tough. After resting for a while, they decided they were not up for the walk back to the hotel, so they climbed into a taxi and set off to collect their luggage and then head for the port and their cruise ship. Sue told me later that her mom took another fall at Gibraltar. She wasn’t seriously hurt there either but she bled a lot and was attended to by the very cute ship’s doctor.

The week after Sue’s visit, Shelley came. I first knew Shelley in Los Angeles when she was probably about 12 and I was 18 and her counselor in a Jewish youth organization. Now, some 45 years later, she is a lovely woman with grown children. She was here with her husband and daughter and another couple with their daughter. The two daughters had been studying in Spain.

We met on Passeig de Gracia and since it wasn’t yet time for lunch but people were hungry, we walked down to the Boqueria where they bought somewhat expensive prepared, cut up fruit and I got a strawberry and coconut juice smoothie. There are many stands now in the Boqueria that cater to tourists and sell this kind of thing, where just a few years ago, when I first moved here, there wasn’t even one. But once you work your way in past the entrance, it is still the same old wonderful market with an impressive variety of fruit, vegetables, fish and seafood, meat, and all manner of edibles all beautifully laid out.

Hunger abated, we walked a little around the Barri Gotic before heading off for lunch. We went to what was once the mikvah (ritual baths), now a back room in an upscale furniture and tchotchkes store, and then to where the main Jewish synagogue of Barcelona once was. This is the area that was the ghetto before the Jews were thrown out. There is something sad in that; you get a feeling of something lost. And the fact is that where I used to live was also in the ghetto, although it took a while before I found that out; the original ghetto ended at a street about two blocks away. But at some point the ghetto was enlarged and our apartment was within that area. My mother used to say that she thought she descended from Spanish Jews. But as far as I know, that was because she looked Spanish rather than because of any information or legend passed down through her family. Still, that area of Barcelona gives me a feeling of connecting with my past, even though it is unlikely that my past took place there.

The Barri Gotic is a wonderful part of the city that gives me the feeling when I walk the streets that I have gone back in time. The streets are very narrow – like alleyways many of them – and some of the stone buildings have settled so that they lean – precariously, you could say -- lending an air of claustrophobia to those walking below. I enjoy being in a place where history is not only in books, but in the streets. People have been living stacked up in these apartment buildings for many hundreds of years. The building where we used to live was about three hundred years old. The entry and stairway looked worn and shabby, but the apartments, with their tall ceilings and French door windows, the beamed ceilings, and the wonderful tiled floors of those apartments that had not been modernized were beautiful. Our apartment had been modernized and we no longer had the pretty old checkerboard floor (that you could see in one tiny space that had been closeted over, and the windows were now aluminum), but the twelve-foot high beamed ceiling remained.

Shelley and the group wanted the option of the best food, so we went for lunch to Agut where I once again ordered those marvelous little calamaris with the blood sausage sauce. Some of the others were a little put off, but when they tasted mine, they agreed that it was wonderful. After an excellent meal we walked back into the Barri Gotic, heading for the Plaça Sant Jaume, and it just so happened that the city hall had all its special rooms open for public viewing, as part of the city celebration of Corpus. I had to keep reassuring my guests that what looked like a museum was a real, functioning city hall. In the entry, the city giants and some of the bestiary was on view because of the holiday where they would be paraded around town as part of the celebration. Later, Shelley and I went into a couple of the medieval courtyards where the Ou com balla, or dancing egg, a Barcelona tradition for Corpus and Christmas, was on display, bouncing on top of a jet stream in ancient fountains decorated with fresh flowers.

Being with Shelley, Joanne, and the rest of her group was comforting – a bit like corresponding with Irene. They all live in Berkeley, my home town (I adopted it) and a place I will always identify with. We seemed to have a lot in common, and we didn’t just talk, we schmoozed. Lots of Yiddish words peppered our day, giving me a very pleasant sensation of familiarity.


Photo credits:
Bill, Anita Carstensen
The Boqueria, Bill Johnson
Cowboys, Sue Rosoff
4 Gats, me
Roman Columns, Sue Rosoff
Shelley and me in the mikvah, Lauren Halperin
Ou Com Balla, me
Kvetch, me!

Expat or Immigrant?

I recently participated in a short discussion with an online book group about the book and film version of Under the Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes. Everyone liked the book, but not everyone liked the film. As often happens, the film wasn’t true to the book. In fact, I would say that in this case, the film had almost nothing to do with the book except that in both an American woman buys a villa in Tuscany and proceeds to fix it up. And, truth be told, I liked the film even more than I liked the book.


In the book, Frances buys a villa in Tuscany intending to fix it and then use it for extended stays. The people she meets and the stories she tells are engaging, but she is there as a visitor, albeit an habitué. On the other hand, in the movie, Frances actually abandons the U.S. and moves to Italy. I can identify with that. It is one thing to have enough money to buy a villa somewhere pretty and fix it up beautifully so that you can go there to enjoy vacations or spend your sabbaticals; and quite another to haul yourself to a new country, leaving behind your old life to start a new one where you don’t know anyone and you don’t know the language. This Frances wasn’t a habitué; she was an expat or an immigrant.

The movie offered me much to identify with. The very appealing Polish workers who remodel Frances’s villa add to the complexity of Frances’s life because now, besides having to learn Italian, she tries to learn some Polish too. The electrician who did some work for me in Barcelona was Argentine and spoke a totally strange and unusual form of Spanish. My cleaning lady is Russian. She speaks to me in rudimentary Spanish and I speak to her in Catalan and we manage to understand each other – more or less. The guy I bought firewood from in October is Moroccan. He doesn’t speak Catalan but does speak a little English which becomes poorer when it comes time for him to do something he was paid for but hasn’t done. My next door neighbors are Swiss and speak only German. Our verbal exchanges are very, very limited. You don’t expect to find so many foreigners when you move to another country. You figure that somehow you will surmount the huge hurdle of becoming functional, hopefully fluent, in a new language, and all of a sudden you find there are many other new languages to contend with.

Adorable Pavel, one of the Poles in the movie, falls in love with the daughter of Frances’s neighbors. But the parents are opposed to the match because Pavel is a foreigner with little hope (in their opinion) of becoming a success and making their daughter happy. When Pavel asks Frances to go with him to talk to his sweetheart’s parents, they state their complaints to the match, ending up with “He has no family.” Frances replies, “Yes he does. I am his family.” I’ve seen the movie five times (I can check it out for free from my local library and most of the other choices are action films) and this part always brings tears to my eyes. I have not achieved that level of friendship.

Practially having made a study of it, the film has me thinking about what it is to be an expat, to be an immigrant, to adopt another country as your home. How far do you go to try to adapt? Generally speaking, even if you learn the language and conform to the customs, you’ll still always be a foreigner. But there are those who really do become part of their new home. Besides fitting in, cooking, shopping, dressing, behaving in the local manner, they also make real friends, not just acquaintances, and even form new families. I am very sorry to say that I have not achieved that. But then, I’m still trying.

Most of the people with whom I socialize here (in the middle of nowhere) are foreigners, like me, who came here from another country. I recently called five of them to conduct a cursory survey of their behavior in adapting to local culture, using their eating and television habits as a guide, and to see if they viewed themselves as expats, immigrants, or both.

In Spain the main meal of the day is lunch, eaten as early as 1 pm, but generally eaten at 2 and sometimes even later. Dinner is at 8 or 9 pm and usually something very light or just a snack. You only need an aerial to receive local television, although now a digital box is also required. Once you have that relatively inexpensive equipment, you can watch several free Spanish and Catalan stations. Many people here, especially foreigners, install satellites to receive TV from their home, European countries. Finally, I inquired into their self perception with regard to their status here. Did they consider themselves expatriates or immigrants and what did those two words mean to them?

First up was a man who told me they ate their main meal in the evening, at around 6 or 6:30 pm. Lunch was at 12 or 1. They did not receive local television. He considered himself an expat because he did not intend to settle here permanently but to stay until about age 70. He didn’t feel that Spain was a good place to be old.

Second was a woman who told me that they ate their main meal in the evening at 7:45; lunch was at 1:15. They sometimes watched the news and/or weather on local television, mostly they watched English TV. She couldn’t easily choose between expat and immigrant and favored “visitor” as describing her status. They were here permanently and had no plans to return to England, but the word immigrant conveyed the image of a person who was sponging off the system, so she didn’t identify with that as they are self sufficient.

One woman told me that their main meal changes from day to day, depending on how they’re feeling. Sometimes it is lunch, at about 1:30, and other times it is dinner, at 6. They receive but do not watch local television. She considers herself an expat. For her, immigrant is a person who has come to stay, while she is a resident here, but could go back, although she has no such plans at the moment.

The next, another woman and the first of my interviewees who understands and speaks Spanish told me that she used to have her main meal in the evening but recently changed that to lunch. Now her evening meal, which she has at 7 pm, is just a snack. She watches very little local television – mainly news and tennis, if it’s on. She thinks of herself as both an expat and an immigrant, although she doesn’t like the term expat because it brings to mind people who sit around and drink gin.

The fifth and last interviewee, another woman who also understands and speaks Spanish, and even writes it well, said they have their main meal in the evening at about 8:30; lunch is usually at 1. They have local as well as satellite television and watch the local for the news and weather. She is an expat. She and her husband had come to Spain as an adventure, not intending to stay. They now have their home on the market to sell and plan to move on.

I asked Manuel what the two words, expat and immigrant meant to him. He left Spain many years ago and went to live in Switzerland for a few years before moving to Panama and eventually the U.S.A. He has lived more of his life as a foreigner than as a native. He said that in Switzerland he was an immigrant because he came looking for work. In Panama he was an expat because he had been sent there to work by Nestle, his employer, putting him into the upper class. In the U.S. he was an immigrant because once again he had come looking for work. I asked him if he thought the two words had social class connotations and he said that yes, he did think so. And that’s what I find in general, that people think better of expats – they are affluent people who have a choice and a higher standing – than of immigrants who are lower or working class and usually just looking for jobs and a better life. In the film, the parents could accept Frances, who they viewed as an affluent expat, whereas they had difficulties with Pavel, a poor Polish immigrant.

I think of expat as moving away from somewhere while immigrant implies moving toward somewhere. For me, an expat is someone who is perched in a new country, possibly but not necessarily learning the new language, forsaking their home but not necessarily adopting the new one as their own. Expats are usually middle or upper middle class people who may or may not have moved to the new country permanently, but their identity and allegiance is still with the old one. Those expats who are of noble birth are emigrés.

I think of an immigrant as someone who has permanently moved to a new country, leaving the old one behind and adopting the ways of the new as much as he can. He learns the language and tries to adapt to the culture and the ways of doing things – to assimilate, but not necessarily to the extent that he abandons his own identity or history. It isn’t easy to be a good immigrant.

What does the dictionary say? In my dictionary, expatriate is defined as: 1. to banish; exile, 2. to withdraw (oneself) from residence in or allegiance to one’s native country, 3. dwelling in a foreign land; exiled. The definition for immigrant is: 1. a person who migrates to another country, usually for permanent residence, 2. an organism found in a new habitat.

Where do I fit in? I watched only Catalan television -- news, documentaries, dramas, soap operas, and of course soccer -- for the first five years I was here. Not only was it a tool for learning the language, it also gave me insider information on current affairs, culture, history, and customs. When I bought the villa I installed satellite for the British TV that my summer renters expect to have. I feel I’m an expat in that I left my home country willingly and not because I had to. But I am first and foremost an immigrant. I’m here to stay, if not in Spain then at least in Europe. Unlike everyone else I know, I came specifically to Catalunya and not to Spain and so my efforts to learn and adapt have been locally focused. I have learned the Catalan language and a lot about Catalan culture and history. I’ve invested myself in Catalunya. If I ever move to France, I’ll be probably be an expat there and not an immigrant. I will learn French as best I can (and try to dress better), but I doubt I will make the same effort to become French as I did to become Catalan.

The Key

My first few years in Spain I didn’t have a car. I never would have thought that I could live without one, much less be happy. But in fact, I didn’t miss it. Living in a city, I could take public transportation to all the places I couldn’t walk to, and on a rare occasion it was easy to get a taxi. However, when you live out in the middle of nowhere you need a car to get somewhere, and so we bought one, a Seat Ibiza.


The Seat served us well. It was a cheap small car that ran on diesel (most vehicles here do) and was economical to run and to maintain. Seat is a Spanish company and the Ibiza, bottom of their line, is probably the most popular car here. Its styling doesn’t noticeably change from year to year (like the old Volvo 122S) and its only drawback is that unlike the Volvo, you don’t get the feeling that it offers much protection on the road.

In January 2009 we bought our present car, an 11-year-old Citroen Xsara that replaced the 11-year-old Seat that Manuel killed one rainy day when he plowed through a deep puddle. The Citroen is a larger car that also runs on diesel. Unfortunately, the Xsara does not have the charm or character of my favorite 2CV, and ours is a bit of a heap. It’s a heap because it burns oil although our mechanic tells me that it doesn’t. Thing is, as many times as I’ve asked him, I still don’t understand his explanation of what is happening to the oil.

The car blows black smoke out the back when I accelerate and it constantly sends burning fumes into the passenger compartment. I have it parked in front of my house a lot of the time (Manuel and I share the car, so it is also parked in front of his house a lot of the time), but it leaves no oil spots on the concrete. And yet, we use up about two liters of oil every four weeks. If it isn’t burning oil and it isn’t leaking, where does the oil go? The mechanic says it loses oil because I don’t drive fast enough.

The other problem with the car is that we only have one key for it. When we first bought it, a year and a half ago, we asked Jeroni, our mechanic, to get us a duplicate. He said he would order one from Citroen, but during the first year of our car ownership he didn’t. Eventually we nagged enough for him to take the car serial number and get us a key – a blank that had to be taken to a Citroen dealer in order to be made to work. It wasn’t simply a matter of having it cut, something electronic was also involved. He told us there was a dealer in L’Amposta, but L’Amposta is about half an hour away and not on any of our usual routes.

Then, two months ago, Manuel lost our one and only key. He had been pulling a few weeds in his garden, throwing them over the wall onto the abandoned lot next door, and in one of his throws, he let go of the key that for some unfathomable reason he had in his weed-pulling hand. Because I have the useful aptitude for finding things, he called me. Usually it is just a matter of applying logic: when and where was the last time you saw or used it? Where would you be likely to have put it? Other times it is simply my ability to see what is sitting right in front of me.

Manuel knew where he was when he made the fateful throw, so there was only a relatively small area where the key could have landed. But that area was full of tall bushes, huge weeds, and little mountains of building debris piled onto debris. We looked and looked, but it was hopeless. Even I, the great lost objects sleuth, couldn’t find it, and I walked back home with the unhappy feeling that, because our key was not so straightforward to copy, we were in for a big problem.

Manuel said he would ask his neighbors, who have two teenage children, to help him look the next morning. Maybe all that boundless energy and youthful eyesight would yield better results. Next morning I was waiting for him to call when he suddenly showed up…. smiling. Success! And he did it all on his own. He applied logic and calculation, narrowed down the area, and took a good look in the spot where it had to be, and there it was!

This was the incident that convinced me that procrastination was no longer an acceptable policy, and that Monday we went in with our blank to ask Jeroni where the Citroen dealer was that we had to go to. But now he told us that if we waited until the next time we had the car serviced and left the key with him for the day, he would get it done. So a couple of weeks later that is what we did. Only it turned out that he couldn’t get it done, and we had to go to the dealer after all. Did we still have the code on the little piece of paper that he had given us when he gave us the blank? What the heck. Manuel said he was never given any little piece of paper, only the key. Jeroni insisted that yes, and we persisted that no, and finally we went to the Citroen dealer, the one in Tortosa, a place we are familiar with, taking along our blank with no little piece of coded paper.

At the Citroen service department we were attended by the service manager and then taken to the waiting lounge. After about twenty minutes, they came to get us. They couldn’t use the blank we had; it was the wrong one for that car. But our mechanic got it for us from Citroen. He had given them the car’s serial number. That could be, but he probably bought it from a parts supplier and not from the company and in any case, while it was the right key for the physical lock, it was the wrong key for the electronic control. “See this little blue spot? It should be black.” Surely they jest.

The service manager told us they would order the correct blank (one with a little black spot) and we could return the key we had to our mechanic and ask for our money back. They would have the new blank in two days and we should call before coming back for an appointment.

I called last Tuesday and went in on Wednesday. I didn’t even get the chance to sit down in that nice, clean waiting lounge. Their mechanic took the blank that they had ordered for us and my original key, gave them a good look, and declared that they could not make a copy with that blank. It might be the right key for the electronics, but it was the wrong shape for the mechanical and couldn’t be copied from my original, I think because the stem is too short. Did I have that other blank that didn’t work? They could copy the mechanical from that.

You have to be kidding. The service manager told us that we could send the other key back. In fact we hadn’t done anything with it (that’s not surprising, is it), but I hadn’t brought it with me either, seeing that it was useless. The manager was there, looking a bit sheepish. The whole thing seemed so ridiculous to me that I didn’t even get angry. How absurd. I’ve never had a car before that was so complicated. I’ve only ever had keys that open mechanical locks and then turned on the engine. They told me that this newfangled system was designed in order to protect me. Well hey, protect me from progress. Sometimes newer isn’t better. Basically, when you drive an old heap, you don’t spend much time worrying about your car being stolen. And what if we hadn’t found our key? Would we have had to buy a whole new engine?

I will go back next week, taking the useless blank with me, and maybe, after a year and a half, I will drive out with a spare key that works.

Peas!

On Tuesday 27 April, I put on shorts for the first time this year, intending to go out, enjoy the sun, and start on my summer tan. Giving myself a look over in the full length mirror, I noticed a good-size lump on the back of my right leg, at the back of my knee joint. When I turned a little to get a better look, I saw an even bigger one on the back of my left knee. I felt them and they were hard -- hard and ugly. You might ask, how could something grow that big without my knowing about it. All I can say is, God only knows. I never noticed the lumps all winter, maybe because I only look in the mirror after I’m dressed. The lumps don’t hurt, and the slight stiffness that I feel in my left knee I figured was just part of aging. It’s not nearly as stiff as what I feel in my lower back most mornings.


But lumps don’t count as part of aging, so I called for a doctor’s appointment and got one for the Friday of that same week. My doctor told me they were not bone cancer (my original worry), only cysts. I have had small cysts on my head several times in the last twenty years – the one I have now is the fourth. The first three I had removed; but for this fourth one, the dermatologist here prescribed two creams to apply each day and after a while it became smaller and has stayed the same now for over two years, so I just leave it alone. When it comes to my body, if it ain’t truly broke, I don’t mess with it.

However, the doctor said the ones on my knees would probably just continue to grow indefinitely so she authorized for me to go see a specialist – a surgeon – in Tortosa. I was given an appointment for the following Tuesday.

I am a great chicken when it comes to illness, pain, and almost any kind of medical procedure, with surgery being at the top of the list for what to avoid at all costs. But I did a good job of not worrying too much. Since Doctor Nadal had assured me that they weren’t bone cancer, I figured this wouldn’t be much worse than the surgeries I’ve had on the small cysts. Grow up Dvora; it isn’t enough to lose sleep over

In my village the health service has a small building where the regular GPs and pediatricians work, where you can go in case of an emergency 24 hours a day, and where the ambulance is stationed. But specialists are housed in larger clinics and the nearest one to us is in Tortosa.

Tortosa is our closest city and the capital of the comarca (like a county) of the Baix Ebre (lower Ebre). It is a small city of about 31,000 people, and sits on the Ebre River. Originally Roman, it was conquered by the Muslims in the 8th century and remained under Muslim rule for over 400 years. The castle overlooking the city (now a government-run Parador) was built by the Muslims in the 10th century on the site of an old Roman acropolis. Tortosa was later conquered by Ramon Berenguer IV, Count of Barcelona, in 1148 as part of the Second Crusade.

The cathedral was started in 1347 and took 250 years to build. They say it was completed in 1597, but in fact, I have never seen it without scaffolding and construction netting. The church of Sant Domènec, built in the 16th century, has sculptures on the facade that were all beheaded by gunshot during the Spanish Civil War. One of the most colorful buildings is the old Escorxador (slaughter house), designed in 1905 in the modernist style. It is made of brickwork and ceramics and is reminiscent of the Mudejar architectural style. The biggest battle of the Civil War – the Battle of the Ebro – took place in this area and Tortosa still shows many scars from that time. Although a comarcal capital, Tortosa has many ruins and derelict buildings in its old town, gives the overall impression of being shabby, and seems to be a somewhat forgotten and abandoned part of Catalunya.

But this wasn’t a sightseeing trip. The Tortosa surgeon said that I had Baker’s cysts, but because there were two of them – twins -- he thought I should be seen by a traumatòleg (an injury surgeon) who would probably do an eco- or sonogram, to check on any underlying problem with the joint. This was not good news as far as I was concerned, and I went down to the window to get the appointment with the traumatòleg. They gave me one for the following Monday.

Now I did start to worry about having surgery, not just on one knee, but on both and not just because of a little fat-filled cyst but something more complicated. Would they do both at the same time? How would I get around? My bathroom is on a half landing, how would I get to it? My bedroom is upstairs. Would I be able to bend over to feed the cats and clean kitty poop from their boxes? Would I be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life? I really should not be turned loose with my own thoughts when an illness or health issue looms.

That Monday, the wait for the traumatòleg was over an hour. These doctors are public health service employees and don’t have a say in how many people get scheduled in. Some people went in and out quickly and others took longer. Frankly, I was happy that she (as it turned out) was giving everyone who came the time and attention they needed. Keep in mind that none of these doctor and specialist appointments were costing me a penny. When my turn came, I explained my problem briefly (in Catalan – all my conversations with medical personnel are in Catalan), she had my record already on her computer screen, and she proceeded to examine me.

The traumatòleg confirmed that these were Baker’s cysts, and that they were probably the result of sitting a lot. She would authorize an ecogram to take a better look but she didn’t think surgery would be necessary. I was so relieved I kissed her. No surgery, no drugs, no creams. I could treat them myself. But I couldn’t quite understand what she was telling me to do twice a day for twenty minutes. Put something against the cysts? Had I heard right? I didn’t even need to go to a pharmacy. I just needed to go to a grocery store and buy two bags of frozen peas!

Goats

In the village of Rasquera, between here and Miravet, on the first weekend of May every year they hold their annual Fira Ramadera, which is a livestock fair. Marking the time when the flocks head for the Cardó and Tivissa mountains, and locally known as the goat fair, it captured my attention because where there is goat, they may also be goat cheese.


Ramat means livestock, and although Catalunya has dairy and beef industries, they are located in the north (Girona), and west (Lleida). Here, in the more arid south, you find pigs, goats, and sheep. In Catalunya (and maybe all of Spain) most of the livestock industry is relatively small scale and family run. I recently read in Temple Grandin’s book Animals Make Us Human that Europe does much better in providing decent living and slaughter conditions for its commercial animals (with the exception of chickens) than the U.S. does. And in fact, that fits with my own general impression. Although they may exist, in all the nine years that I’ve lived here I have never seen huge stockyards here like the ones in Coalinga in central California, and when there is a news story having to do with livestock, you always see a relatively small, family-run business.

Herding goats or sheep is not a big money-maker and even though there are many people who are not driven to get rich, as time goes by, fewer people are doing it, especially fewer young people. To give the vocation a boost, the Generalitat has recently instituted programs to train young people so that those herders who do not have children to take over, might find a stranger to do it when the time comes and thus the landscape will remain dotted with sheep and goats and the food supply will continue to be locally produced.

One of the more charming things about Catalunya is that there are shepherds and goatherds with small flocks, sometimes going this way and that along the roads. You might see them when you drive outside the cities, and I could even see them out the window from our apartment in Tarragona, being situated as we were near the edge of town. There are also a few small herds on the outer fringe of Barcelona, sometimes taken by their shepherds to graze in the large open space park of Collserola that borders the back of the city, as Tilden Park does in Berkeley. Pigs are a different story. They are always located outside of town, but I have felt the odor in town when the wind was blowing the wrong way.

The oldest signs of human life at Rasquera are the 6,500 – 10,000-year-old cave paintings. It was an Iberian settlement before the Romans came, and its first civic document dates from 1153 when Ramon Berenguer IV gave Rasquera to the Templars, whose castle was in Miravet. Increasing from its first recorded population of 14 souls in 1497, it rose to its height of 1542 people in 1910 and has eased back down to 955 at the latest count. It’s primary economic activity is agriculture: vineyards, olive trees, some fruit trees (it is typical of the houses in the village to have open attics for the drying of figs), and breeding and raising of goats and sheep, most notably the Cabra Blanca (white goat), a breed native to Rasquera.

In Rasquera, before leaving for their summer pasture, the animals are herded into pens at the edge of the village, and people come from all around to admire them. In addition to the gathering of the flocks and display of a few prime examples in individual pens, there was also a section at the fair for artisan products, both food and handcrafts. Of course I was mostly interested in the stands with artisan-made goat cheeses. Spain has a lot of wonderful food, but it does not produce nor offer a wide selection of cheeses. Spanish varieties are few -- usually hard cheeses -- and they import almost none. So, while I love spotting the sheep and goats when I’m out and about in Catalunya, and I love the feeling they give me of an earlier time and a more simple life, I do miss the countless wonderful cheeses from the Cheeseboard in Berkeley.

80 Years Young

It’s not every day one turns 80 and not everyone has the luck to do so in good health. But Manel did both last week.


Besides having good health, Manel also has the good fortune to have kind and generous friends who had offered to put on a party for his birthday. But the party would follow on the weekend, and I will talk about that in a minute. The first question was what to do on the actual day. I decided to invite him for a day trip to Horta de Sant Joan, one of our favorite villages in the Terra Alta, land of good strong wine and wonderful landscapes with strange rock formations, where Picasso visited and worked for some time and where they say he found inspiration for his venture into cubism.

All of that notwithstanding, what I wanted to do in Horta was to go and see Lo Parot, the 2000-year-old olive tree. If Manel thought that at 80 he was old, this tree could help him put age into perspective.

In July 2009 at the outskirts of Horta, there was a huge forest fire fueled by high winds where 1200 hectares were burned and five firefighters died when the wind changed and they became trapped. This was very big and very grave news within Catalunya, a relatively small community, and everyone grieved, including me. They had originally announced that the fire had been started inadvertently by a lightning strike, but later it was discovered that it had been intentionally set, leading to the recent arrest of two young men who had worked in fire prevention, making the whole tragedy even more grievous.

So as lovely as it is, Horta now also holds some sad associations. Nevertheless we drove up, passing some of the charred land along the way. Once an Iberic settlement, Horta fell to the Moslem invaders in the 8th century, later being taken by conquering Christians in the 12th. In 1174 it came under the jurisdiction of the Templars. I find Horta a pretty little village, relatively speaking. When you travel around Spain, you have to take into account that Spain was a very poor country for most of the 20th century, having suffered its own Civil War after which there was no rebuilding money from other countries, and having suffered over 30 years under Franco’s not very progressive thumb. Especially in small towns and villages, you are likely to see buldings in ruins or various states of disrepair, with many of the ones from the 1960s and 70scheaply built. Unfortunately, adding to the poor physical condition, you also find a lot of garbage on the ground and very few flower pots on balconies. But Horta rises above the average. So many of the old stone buildings are in good condition that you don’t notice the others, many people tend flowers on their balconies, and when you add the views that are had from many vantage points, you end up with a picturesque village.

We had two items on the agenda: the Centre Picasso D’Orta and Lo Parot. We’ve been to Horta many times but never to the Picasso center because they have no original Picasso paintings, so why go? However, recently it dawned on me that it might be a good learning experience any way, you don’t need originals for that, and you’re never too old to learn.

Picasso spent two periods in Horta: the first as a young man when he stayed with his friend Manuel Pallarès from summer 1898 to February 1899, and the second when he came with his lover Fernande Olivier and stayed from May to August of 1909. Although Horta has no original paintings, they have many facsimiles and together with text, they explain a lot about what Picasso did and what he saw in Horta. I personally enjoyed the paintings from his first stay, when his style was natural and flowing and the pictures beautiful, before he started in with geometry. All around they plaster the quote: “Tot el que sé ho he après a Horta” (All I know I have learned in Horta). But I’m suspicious. In what context did he say that? Surely it is an exaggeration, unless it refers to his learning Catalan. Nevertheless, the center was well worth the two-euro price of admission.

From Horta we drove 500 meters out of town and turned right at the sign pointing to Lo Parot, parking near a shed with a small enclosure containing a lone dog, then walking along a path, through an olive grove, until we came to the fenced off 2000-year-old tree. It is a little the worse for wear; I think Manel is in much better shape for his age. Still, it was impressive to see such an old survivor. And it isn’t the only one, there are several 2000-year-old olive trees in southern Catalunya. The California redwoods are much bigger (just about everything in California is bigger), but few are as old, and in any case, they were never cultivated, as these trees were 2000 years ago, and they don’t produce olives, do they.

Lunch was in a nearby restored masia, a rural farmhouse now turned into lodging and restaurant that was a little disappointing both for the food and the fact that out in the countryside, we had no view. But the ride back was unforgettable. We took a different road back and drove for about half an hour in second gear on the narrowest winding road I have ever driven. Luckily we only met one car and that was on a straight stretch, otherwise I have no idea how we could have passed by each other. Many of the sharp curves had mirrors up so you could see if someone was coming, although God only knows what you were supposed to do if there was.

The high point of the ride was when we were leaving the mountains. We passed a wildlife warning road sign illustrated with a deer, and Manel wondered if there really were any deer in the area. We have never seen one in Spain. And while he was saying it, I interrupted him shouting, “There’s one! Look! Look there,” pointing to the left. Just a few feet up the hill and quite close to the road was a grazing deer. Then, two minutes later, I spotted, also to the left, what looked like a wild dog coming down the hill towards the road. Manel saw it too and thought it might be a fox. But it was too big, and when I looked it up later on the internet, I found that it was clearly a jackal. What a day for wildlife. Having seen none (other than birds and rabbits and lots of abandoned dogs and cats) in the nine years that I’ve been here, I saw two wild creatures in one day.

The pièce de résistance of Manel’s 80th birthday was undoubtedly the birthday party that Carol and Lino put on for him. They had told Manel he could invite whoever he liked, and he chose to invite his family – those who live locally, which are his two sisters and their families from Barcelona. Three couldn’t come, but his two older sisters Carmen and Pepita came, Carmen’s daughter Marta came as did Pepita’s son Jose Luis, his wife Susanna, and their two children, bringing the family total to eleven. With our two hosts and two other friends, we were thirteen, but don’t tell anyone. Carol had the table set for fourteen so as to fool the forces that be. To me it felt like a Pesach seder with the extra place set for Eliahu.

Carol and Lino live in the hills (they are called mountains here) outside of El Perelló in a casa rustica (sometimes a euphemism for a ruin) overlooking the sea. They did indeed buy the ruin of a former 375-square-meter farmhouse sitting on 6 ½ hectares of land, but after two years of work, they turned it into the dream casa rustica of style and living magazines… literally. It is an exceptionally beautiful eco-friendly house that uses solar panels and wind generator, they recycle their water whose source is the rain (and a nearby Roman well when rain isn’t enough), and they use no fertilizers or pesticides on their olive or fruit trees.

Besides being imaginative, industrious, talented, and extremely generous, Carol is also a brilliant cook while Lino can also hold his own wielding the cooking knife and spoon, thus lunch was fabulous. And let me make it clear, this wasn’t a birthday party with some fingerfood, birthday cake, and cava, which also would have been great (and is what I did when I turned 60). It was a full sit-down, three course meal, served by a hired helper, preceded by appetizers and followed by the most incredible chocolate trifle I (or anyone else there) have ever seen.

We sipped our cava while nibbling on olives (of course), pickled garlic (which at least one of the Catalans was afraid to try, having never seen such a thing before), and canapés of little toasts with blended melted cheeses plus another that I didn’t try because I became instantly hooked on the cheeses and only stopped munching those when we were called to the table. We sat down to yummy steamed mussels with spicy tomatoes prepared by Lino, followed by pasta with fresh pesto, green beans, and potatoes. It wasn’t MY birthday, but pesto is my favorite and it’s been a while since I’ve had such a good one. The main dish was a lovely lamb stew, the perfect dish for what should have been a beautiful spring day, but served just as well for the cold winter one it turned out to be. The Terra Alta red wine helped keep us warm. For the grand finale, cava accompanied a magnificent chocolate trifle with cherries, brandy, and whipped cream topped off with an “80” and lit with candles, lest anyone should forget why we were all there together enjoying that incredible feast and each other’s company.

Carol and Lino plan to move to Italy where Lino is from and where they will set out on a new adventure, this one possibly involving vineyards and the making of wine. Although the market is slow at the moment, their wonderful house is up for sale, and sooner or later they will sell. When they do, we will sorely miss them. And that is one of the problems inherent in being an expat. You don’t have your old friends nearby, and then the new ones you make up and leave! Unlike olive trees, expats don’t put down roots.