La Sardana

When I moved to Barcelona I learned to dance the sardana, the Catalan national dance. I found a place that holds a dance every Friday evening, with lessons for those who want them. Manuel didn’t want to go, so I started going alone and after a while I got to where I could do the sardana passably, at least to where I was usually headed in the right direction on the appropriate foot at the right time. It eventually turned out that learning the sardana became much more than just learning the steps of a dance, but more about that another day.


The sardana is danced in a circle and entering a circle has its protocols. The man to the left of a woman is assumed to be her partner (although partners are not required), so one never enters between the pair. You also don’t enter between a man and the woman on his left (I don’t know why) unless you are a couple or you have no other option. It is always OK to enter between two women. The unlimited number of women in a circle allows any woman to dance whether or not she has a partner. So, once I learned how, if I wanted to dance, I just went to a place where they were having sardanes and joined in a circle.

Next, the common etiquette is to join into a circle of people who dance at the same level of knowledge and physical ability as you. That makes it difficult for the complete beginner who doesn’t know beans about how to do the dance. But there are those kind souls who will take a newcomer aside and show them the steps, although it takes more than a few minutes to really learn the dance (simple as it may look) and if you dance badly, you spoil it for the rest of the dancers in your circle.

At first I had tried to pick up the steps by following behind someone in a circle or joining into a group of gent gran (elderly!). But even with the gent gran I was a little bit lost. For one thing, inexplicably, they would all suddenly stop the step they were doing and then start in again either with the same step or with a different one, sometimes on the left foot, and other times on the right. Figuring it out seemed like a great puzzle to which I didn’t have a clue, except that the stops coincided with stops, or breaks, in the music. But every time I went, I heard different melodies. Clearly everyone knew when to stop, when to change steps, which foot to start out on again and exactly when to finish. Had all the hundreds of dancers committed every piece of music to memory?

On the other hand, dancing with the gent gran could get a little boring.  Quite frankly, some of them schlepped. Those groups of younger people who danced better seemed a lot more interesting -- instead of shuffling they bounced, sometimes they jumped, their foot movements were more precise and pretty to look at, and even though it was the same dance, there seemed to be more variety to what they did, certainly more elegance. It was clear that I wasn’t even close to their level of dancing, but I had my aspirations, so I decided I would take lessons which eventually led me to the Friday evening dances.

There are only two basic steps to the sardana: els curts (the shorts) and els llargs (the longs). You join them together with a combination of two- three- or four-step cambis (changes). The dance goes like this. On the numbered count you lift your knee and point your toes down and then tap the ground with the tip of your shoe. The following step will be with the same foot. Say you’re starting with your left foot, which is how the dance always begins, the curts go ONE, step, step, step, TWO, step, step, step, and you’ve moved a little to the right, then you’ve moved back a little to the left. Danced well, you have placed your feet very close together and on the third step you cross one foot in front of the other. After more than three months of practice, I was still tripping over myself every now and then if I didn’t concentrate on what I’m doing. Were my feet too big? The Catalans never trip.

Llargs go ONE, step, TWO, step, THREE, step, step, step, also going back and forth and ending up pretty much where you started. If, in addition, you also bounce once on your planted foot, keeping time to the rhythm, every time you point or step, then you are dancing rather well. If you dance entirely on the balls of your feet, bouncing but never touching your heels to the ground, then you’re a good dancer.

Every circle has a leader who calls out the cambis. That person is counting every beat of the music. The person who counts only has to know in advance how many tirades (sets or layers) the sardana has. Unless otherwise announced, the cobles always play sardanes of ten tirades. The leader counts the first set of curts, and later the first set of llargs. They can tell the end of a set because of a break in the music. After that, the leader keeps right on counting because all tirades of curts will have the same number the first set had, and all the llargs will have the same as the first set of llargs, and the leader has to keep counting to know when to call out the changes and the stops. The count for a set of llargs can number up into the eighties. That’s a lot of counting.

I have attended a couple of sardana events where there was no one in the circle who could count. You can’t dance properly if no one can count -- part of the joy of the dance is ending up exactly with the music.

Sometimes a circle will also have a second leader. This is the stylist. The stylist calls out when to bounce, to bounce more, to jump, to jump higher, to stop the jump or the bounce, and so forth. Because a well-danced circle constantly bobs up and down at different levels of intensity that complement the music, and everyone who dances knows when to start, when to bounce, when to jump, and when to stop, each circle looks like a living organism.

There is a sameness about sardanes that would boggle the mind of many. People who need constant stimulation of new and fast-moving things would probably not like the dance. If you are the type of person who needs to go to a new restaurant every weekend, the sardana might not be the dance for you. There is only one set formula for the dance, no opportunity for improvisation to speak of, and even though each song is different, many of them have melody fragments so similar that if you know the repertory, you still might initially confuse one for another. They all have the same structure, and your feet always do the same two steps.

So why do Catalans love the dance so much? Well for one thing, it has a subtle beauty when done well and the whole circle moves like one unit. Also, when you look across a plaça where many circles are dancing, it looks like some sort of musical mass movement and all the people know that they are participating in something intrinsic to their culture. The music too, once you get used to the slightly whiny sound of the gralles (a unique, Catalan wind instrument), has its own unique sound and if that sound does not hurt your ears, you quickly start to have your own favorites, both for dancing and for listening. Yes, listening. They give sardana concerts where you sit in a hall and just listen. Some people – diehards -- attend these.

Going to sardanes is as much a social event as an opportunity to dance and most people come for both. And finally, people enjoy doing their national dance not only because they consider it beautiful or fun or good exercise, but because they weren’t allowed to for so many years. So it’s a little like the difference between going out to a new restaurant every weekend, as opposed to going to your grandmother’s house every week for Sunday dinner. The sardana is definitely Sunday dinner and learning to dance it became an invitation to join the family.

I have danced very seldom since leaving Barcelona, but on this last La Diada (the Catalan national day, 11 September) I went to a nearby village where I had heard there would be sardanes with a live band. It took a bit of poking around sausages, cheeses, and handmade soaps in a medieval-style fair, but I found it. I sat through the first one then joined into the second. I must have said something to this woman because after sitting out the third, she came up to me and asked if I wasn’t going to dance any more, that I danced very well. Her name was Maria and she was from Lleida, a city she said I must visit to see especially the cathedral. Wasn’t that nice? So, the people were friendly, the music was wonderful, and the whole experience reminded me of why I loved it here in Catalunya when I first came. It made me feel alive again.

Catalan Castles

On 11 September 1714 the Catalans, who had supported the Hapsburg claim to the Spanish throne, surrendered to the Bourbon victor. Oddly, this monumental defeat marks the national day of Catalunya. La Diada is celebrated with flags, wreaths commemorating the heroes of that war, speeches, Catalan poetry, and music. Last night I listened to the annual La Diada address of the President of the Generalitat (Catalan government), and later today I plan to go to dance sardanes, the Catalan national dance.


There is talk and there are posters proclaiming that Catalonia is not Spain, and if anything supports that sentiment, the sardana surely does. Compared to the iconic Spanish national dance, flamenco, it is at the opposite end of the dance spectrum. Everyone knows what flamenco music sounds like and what the dance looks like – fiery, almost violent, full of sexual innuendo and manifesting individual pride. Contrast that with the sardana, and you would assume that the two dances came not only from different countries and cultures, but possibly from different planets.

To dance the sardana is to bob up and down, doing one of only two patterns of steps, sometimes with arms down and other times with arms up, in a circle, with no partner required, no evident leader, no individualism, no fire, and definitely no sex. It is staid, some think it is boring, it is danced totally in unison, it has no variety. But when done well, a circle of dancers looks like one living, bobbing organism, and I happen to like that. It is symbolic of what you see a lot of here – community spirit.

Another excellent symbol of community spirit is the uniquely Catalan sport called castells. Castell means castle in Catalan -- you could say these are castles or human towers. The towers can reach as many as ten storeys. Each storey is made of people who have climbed up onto the shoulders of those below while accompanied by the music of gralles, a whiney-sounding flute that sounds like a sick seagull.

Castells are formed on a square base of four very formidable men, who use their arms to lock themselves into an extremely tight position that will directly support the tower. The weight of as many as nine human storeys, each of two, three, or four persons, will go up above them and will bear down directly on them. The core four are then surrounded by others – dozens of people, sometimes over a hundred -- who hold onto them and each other and provide the buttressing to help the four anchors withstand the weight and pressure from above. This construction is called a pinya, literally a pine cone or a pineapple. To fer pinya (make a pinya) means to work or band together towards some common end. Sometimes a second pinya is formed above the first. Bear in mind when you look at the photos that you do not see the base pinya in the sea of people on the ground.

Once the pinya is deemed solid (by the cap de colla, the director or head of the group) the persons who will make the tower begin to scramble up. Storey by storey they set themselves up, each layer climbing up the backs of those before them and doing it all to the traditional music played by a drum and gralles (small wooden flutes). The castle must be made as quickly as possible – the whole thing takes three or four minutes -- for the weight bearing down on those below cannot be withstood for long. The castle is finished when the top person, called an anxaneta who is usually a small child about 7 years old, holds up his or her hand to signal completion, but the whole thing is not concluded until those who went up all climb back down.

When I watch them make castells, whether in person or on television, they give me goose bumps and inevitably make me cry. It’s an incredible cooperative effort, so suspenseful to watch, and I always find it very beautiful and moving.

This is THE typical Catalan sport, unique to Catalunya, and is one of the things that sets it apartment from the rest of Spain where the equivalent sport is to torture and murder bulls. Ironically, I took these photos at a special competition that was held at the Tarragona bullring a few years ago! When I wrote on this blog some months ago about the move here to forbid bullfights, someone posted a comment saying that the Catalans are against bullfights only because they want to appear different from other Spaniards. But I beg to differ. Catalans ARE different. Their national sport, the castells, and their national dance, the sardana, contrasted with bullfighting and flamenco, typical in the rest of Spain, demonstrate that difference perfectly. In both there are no stars, no soloists. Both are cooperative efforts of people doing something together and in the making of castells, it is for the simple pleasure of creating something wonderful that lasts only a moment.

Making castells is a popular sport in Catalunya -- children and mature adults all belong to the teams.  It is not nearly as big as soccer, but important enough to be covered regularly in newspapers and on radio and TV. Many towns have a team, the bigger towns sometimes have more than one. They hold competitions throughout the season where they earn points for the difficulty of the construction and whether or not they put it up and then brought it back down without mishap. They always participate and are a highlight in the festes. Castells are one of the grand cultural manifestations of Catalunya.  There is a video on UTube about the castells, narrated in Catalan, if you don't understand Catalan you can still enjoy the images.  If you want to take a look it is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N6gYDTXk1U

Party Pooper

Although not much of a party person, I’ll go to one if invited, there being little else to do. I’m one who prefers the kind of conversation you have gathered around a table with food (and wine). I’m clumsy at making small-talk and then gracefully moving on to the next person while trying to balance a plate of food and a glass of wine, eating, drinking, and talking, all while standing.


Parties can be challenging and they can also be dangerous. At one that I attended last April, an English woman of a certain age, an acquaintance – friend of friends whom I have met many times at such events, we have never hit it off – told me, when I protested that I wasn’t happy with my hair cut, that I should have my face lifted. Not being quick on my feet, I told her I couldn’t afford it. But I mean really, what does one say to advice like that?

When I drove up to a recent party, I pulled in to park next to a couple I know who were just getting out of their car. However, they are young and apparently living life in a hurry and didn’t wait the extra minute so that we could all walk up the hill together. Not an auspicious beginning to a sociable event, but never mind, there was still hope for spending a pleasant and perhaps interesting evening.

In the emailed invitation we were asked to bring a tapa. Not having a kitchen in which to cook, I brought three store-bought pates and little toasts to spread them on. Upon entering the garden where the party was taking place, there was no sign of the host or the hostess. I may not be a big partygoer, but I have seen how it is done in the movies where guests are announced by the butler. I thought in less formal circumstances it was usual to be greeted by a host when one enters, or offered something to drink soon afterwards. But here one simply found one’s own way. I went to look for the hostess and begged for a plate, unloaded the three pates, and headed off in search of stimulating conversation.

People of many nationalities were in attendance: English (the majority), French, Swiss, Dutch, and Catalan. As far as I know, there are only four or five Americans living in this general area: me, a couple I have never met, and the couple who were hosting this party. When they first arrived here, I thought we would have a lot in common and would become friends. But once they settled in they dropped me and threw away my phone number so that now I only see them when there is some group activity.

I engaged in an initial short chat with a Catalan woman whose daughter was spending time in the U.S. As is often the case with roaming Catalans, she doesn’t plan to stay there, preferring to return to family and friends here. I made what I hope was a graceful exit and then spent most of my time chatting with two French women, one of whom I vaguely know from the arts and crafts fairs where we both sell – she, jewelry made of ceramic beads that she makes (very nice) and me, cards I make from my photos. The lady I know is French while the other turned out to be French-speaking Swiss. I didn’t realize the French-speakers were in the minority in Switzerland and that there were three official languages: Swiss-German the big majority, then French, the bigger minority, and finally Italian, a small minority, spoken by a handful.

The Swiss lady spoke French and a very broken Spanish. The French lady spoke French and decent Spanish. I don’t speak Spanish but I do speak Catalan. In spite of the Pimsleur French course I’ve been working on, I can’t manage to say anything in French when I try to use it in public (my brain goes to the Foreign Language section and only Catalan comes out), but I can at least understand some French. So I spoke Catalan, the Swiss lady spoke mostly French (from time to time she would throw in pidgin Spanish and become almost completely unintelligible), and the French lady would speak sometimes in French and sometimes in Spanish and translate for one or the other of us when needed. We all got on just fine.

It was a bunch of work but we managed to converse for quite a while in this trilingual manner. Although tiring, it was good mental exercise, and I do need all the mental exercise I can get -- I’ve already forgotten the French lady’s name, but the Swiss lady is Giselle. Like in Swan Lake, she said. I may be wrong, and didn’t want to question her about her own name, but I thought it was Odile in Swan Lake; Giselle is another famous ballet and was one of my mother’s favorites. Good I kept that to myself because eventually I was invited by Giselle for a real Swiss fondue, ladies only, but not until December when the proper cheese can be obtained. I’m hoping that I will have moved away by then, and Giselle says she is trying to sell her finca (a country property) and would like to move to Albi. But in the more likely and unfortunate event that we will both still be here, I will be very pleased to go. I love fondue. Takes me back to the 70s – to my youth when we all had those fondue pots we were given as wedding presents. Maybe by December French will actually come out when I try to speak it.

But danger lurked at this party too. I was introduced by the parking lot woman to another young English woman whose name escapes me. Hola, she said. Hello, I answered. DeVOra she said. Your name is very harsh, she told me. It sounds like devour. That isn’t very nice, is it? Nice meeting you, I said and walked away. Moving on suddenly became easier.

I hiked over to where my English friends were sitting, ate and chatted with them. Unlike me, some of the invited guests had actually prepared food, some of which was very good: a fine potato salad with tuna, seito (tiny marinated fish), several good looking omelettes (all of which I passed on, afraid of my egg allergy acting up), curries, and a dynamite bean salad. I really wanted the recipe for that bean salad, but how would I find its maker among all these people, most of whom I didn’t know? So I put the question to those at the table and struck gold. Angela (who makes lovely pearl earrings and also sells at the arts and crafts fairs) was the cook and was happy to share her recipe with me. But good luck finding the Thai red curry paste here in Spain. She buys it by the tubful on visits back to England.

Before heading for home, I went back to spend a few more minutes with my new French lady friends. The people at these parties come in many nationalities and in all types. It’s great when you can make the acquaintance of the ones with whom you click and not let language be a barrier. And for the others, well maybe chatting briefly and moving on isn’t really such a bad idea.

Summer Digs

My summer living quarters are in a small in-law apartment at Eve’s. One of the disadvantages of living in a home I can’t afford is that I must move out of it and stay elsewhere every summer while I rent it out to tourists. At least it’s possible to do that here, this being a popular seaside resort. Besides having to pack up and store all those special personal possessions that I don’t want strangers messing with, it also gives me the feeling of not having a permanent home. Except for my cats, my most treasured possessions don’t live with me. I keep them safely stored away, waiting for the day when I have a normal life, when I don’t have to share my home with strangers and can keep my treasures with me – things like my good dishes, the electric candle lamps that used to flank the family fireplace, the Lladro dancer figurine I once gave to my mother for her birthday, and photos of my parents. It might be different if I were to go somewhere for a real vacation – the South of France, perhaps? – but I can’t afford that and I have to be here to manage things, so I simply move out, take my cats with me, and go to stay nearby. I was very happy when Eve told me I could use this apartment, thus allowing Manuel, with whom I would otherwise stay, to continue to enjoy his little space on his own, without three intruders.


I feel as if I were at camp for the summer, surrounded by pine trees like up in the San Bernardino Mountains, except these are Mediterranean pines and I am a few hundred meters from the sea. I have only one room with a bathroom, but it’s a good-sized, spacious room with a kitchen counter and sink and mini refrigerator. Although I can’t cook, I brought my espresso machine and toaster with me so for breakfast I can make my morning espresso (with foamy steamed milk) and toast. For lunch I make a salad, during the day I munch a piece of fruit or down one of those yoghurts that is supposed to lower your cholesterol (I don’t believe it really does much of anything, but I like the stuff), and in the evening I snack on some bread and cheese, just like I do at home, having cut out evening meals years ago.

Except for the lack of cooking equipment, television, and internet, I don’t really miss much and in some ways feel more comfortable in this much reduced space. It is only a little smaller than the duplex I once owned on Bancroft in Berkeley where I felt like Heidi. I think I could live happily enough without a television, but I very much miss having internet access at home. I normally spend time online reading and writing email, participating in two online book groups, writing my blog, participating on expat forums, reading through Vincent Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo, looking up all kinds of information, and conducting the rental business. Now, if I am desperate to do something other than read or study French, I pop a DVD into my computer and watch a film. Staying here is good practice for figuring out what kind of space I might buy when I finally am able to sell my villa and move. A very small apartment would suit me fine, although I would probably prefer that it have a separate bedroom. When you have two cats, it is good to have a space where you can either lock them in, or lock them out, depending on the problem at hand.

The fact is, when I’m with my cats, I feel I’m at home. Minnie and Felix are so happy here that I’m not sure they will want to go back to our house in September. They now have a huge garden to explore and after the initial fear passed, have been having a fine time although they play less, probably because of the torpid weather. Contrary to the common wisdom of not letting cats out for the first two weeks at a new home (something I have never done), I let them out the day after we arrived. Frankly, I have never understood the universal description of cats as solitary, independent creatures who are more attached to places than to people. All my cats have been completely attached to me and have been very social (if somewhat shy of others), and Felix, the feral, wounded cat who lived his first year and a half on the street and who I recently adopted, is the most affectionate cat I’ve ever had.

My garden at home is mostly lawn – a very green, nicely kept lawn bordered by cypress trees around three sides of the perimeter and oleander (now in bloom) across the back wall. Near my dining room I have a small area planted with lavender, roses, gazanias, and rosemary. Basically it is a small and simple, manicured, green garden.

Here the garden is very large and very different. Brian, Eve’s husband, used to garden and clearly spent quite a lot of time at it. But he is now in a care home with advanced Alzheimer’s and the garden is regressing towards a more natural state. This is a good thing for the cats. They like adventure and my small, manicured garden doesn’t provide much of that.

I’ve only moved a few blocks and yet the atmosphere is noticeably different with new sights, sounds and smells. There are several pines around the house plus more on all the adjoining lots, creating a small neighborhood pine grove. Perhaps because of all the pines, the birds that come into the garden are different. At home I get mostly sparrows and some swallows (that skim the top of my pool for water). Here there are many wood doves and magpies. Eve also has many other types of trees, grape vines, cacti, and countless stone- bordered beds running amok. I read sitting at my front window where in the early evening, the aroma of jasmine starts to drift by, a pleasant, new experience for me, but by late evening the scent becomes overpowering. I probably really am meant for an urban life.

Among the new sounds, the most frequent is the cooing of wood doves that favor the surrounding pine grove. Then there is the chattering of magpies, and finally the cicadas. I love to stand at the back kitchen window and listen to them, that chirping somehow transports me to Marcel Pagnol’s Provence and the films My Father’s Glory and My Mother’s Castle. The annoying noise here is the public announcements, broadcast from our town hall, that come in over loudspeakers scattered throughout the neighborhood. I get them at home too, but at my house they aren’t as loud. Here, when the announcements begin, they are so overpowering you can’t hear anything else. Besides being horribly intrusive, the announcements are a waste of time and a needless source of noise pollution. Monday through Friday, we are told twice at each broadcast all the news the town hall wants us to know including that the new underground parking lot is available for yearly rentals, what special activity will go on at the weekend, and which pharmacy this week is on 24-hour call. It goes on for five or ten minutes. The town runs a radio station; why don’t they announce these things there? How about posting it all, quietly, on one or more bulletin boards? Does anyone ever actually listen?

It’s nice having a neighbor who is also a friend. No need to arrange to meet, we see each other on the way in or out and sometimes just pop by to chat. Of course Eve has television and invited me over to watch Spain play Holland at the World Cup final. We ate snacks while cheering Spain on (they played way better than Holland and we were quite loud for two mature ladies) and toasted the new champions with cava. So summer, like so many things, is full of the good and the inconvenient. But I try to follow the example of my cats and regard it as yet another adventure.

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.