Re Previous blog: A friend has criticized me for not making a sufficiently sharp demarcation between the early and late 1960’s. She is quite right. There was a big change with the first part of the decade being tentative and the last part much more strident.

The most touching response I received about the blog was from a friend in Nepal who explained how important the music of Dylan and others had been to his generation in that still largely isolated country.

And now a trip to Girona

In 1286 the French struck down through the Pyrenees to attack Girona on their way south. The city was a regular battle site for any army headed south. In this case it was King Peter the Great of Catalonia and Aragon against King Philip of France backed by Pope Martin IV, who had excommunicated King Peter. The Sicilian Vespers are part of this story, the Sicilians having massacred their French conquerors and elected Peter as their King. Entering the fortifications of Girona unopposed the soldiers were plundering, raping, and looting when they went into the church of Sant Felix, which contained the shrine of Sant Narcis, opened his tomb and were about to sacrilegiously hack his body to pieces when out of his belly erupted a snarling cyclone of flies.

“As big as acorns” they crawled up the nostrils of horses stinging them to death, 4,000 of them, and stung to death the soldiers as well. Partly black, partly green with traces of red, they were so poisonous they killed instantly.

This is why one can buy fly earrings in Girona, which I did on my first visit. I have a frog ring and when I saw the flies I thought it would be a display of good guardianship to buy him a pair of flies. They were delicately wrought of gilded silver filigree. But I lost one. In the female emotional structure the loss of an earring creates a vacuum with the insistent gravitational pull of a Black Hole.

However my present trip was in March, a year after I had written my first Quarantine Blog; we were still Covid bound but allowed to travel around Catalonia or whatever province in Spain we belonged to. I decided to go back to Girona because, a town on a mountain, it has just the right number of things to investigate. Another motivation was to replace the fly earrings.

I had not been on much public transport in that year of Covid quarantine—the metro three or four times, buses which I found easier to accept than the metro, once on an airplane to San Sebastian. I took a taxi to Sants and after a café con leche boarded the Renfe but could not find my seat. It turned out to be upstairs. I was adamantly unwilling to haul my bag up that twisty stair and then, in an hour or so, down again with the train moving. I went out to the platform leaving my bag with a young man who was standing in the entry to the car who wanted to know if I spoke French. He too was going to Girona.

I explained to the woman conductor on the platform that I was 84 and not about to drag maletas up and down narrow stairs. At this point the young man offered his seat to me. I thanked him fervently and the conductress seated me.

It is only about an hour to Girona. The train had no distancing whatsoever and I was sure the return trip would be the same. On arrival, I found a taxi and we drove up the mountain to the Hotel Historic in its lane to the right hand side of the cathedral. I like this hotel because it is next door to the cathedral but also because it is an old stone house with thick walls and tall windows that look out to the stone paved lane below them. It combines a medieval air with very hot water in superb bathrooms and a breakfast under stone arches with endless coffee.

I was too early to be checked in so I left my bag and walked to the church that was closed up tight as a can of peas. I went next door to the cathedral museum, which is entirely religious art. I knew I had been there before, yet I remembered nothing I was looking at until I came to a stone sarcophagus with a knight carved into it. Him I recalled and with him that I had been in gritty mood when I had been to the museum before. Apparently gritty moods destroy memory.

The knight’s name was Cruiiles, a very standard looking fellow in grey stone. In Barcelona my upstairs neighbor’s last name is Cruelles. I wondered if the later was a modern version of the former. Since returning I have asked her but she has never enquired into her family history.

This time I enjoyed the museum. There are column capitals from the 12^th, 13^th and 14^th century with palm fronds and other vegetal decorations but also the occasional human, or almost, human face. The imagination of carvers of those centuries can be a little macabre presenting visages which wander between animal, human and sinister combinations but there was nothing as interesting as the face on a capital in the MNAC 8museo National de Arte Cataluña) in Barcelona which is either eating or vomiting a ram, a whole ram with horns. There is no Christian symbolism apparent here. No one knows who this ram-eater-vomiter is or what his meaning is.

There were endless paintings of very graphic sadomasochistic martyrdoms in which the martyr’s face is always in Swedish deadpan. He or she might be staring into a bowl of porridge while being flayed alive, dismembered or gouged with various instruments for for all the emotional content on his features. The Madonnas and their bizarrely limbed infants often have faces pulled about by unknown forces, but they were better than the carved wooden Madonnas who are early Catholic Cigar Store Indians.

I felt the painters and carvers had never really looked at women or children. Their men, however, are clearly individual with specific faces. One altarpiece had some real men who you would recognize in the street while the Madonna looked as though she had suffered a mild stroke.

Upstairs in an exhibit of old stained glass they show how the glass was cut and the variations of hues among the span of colors.

Their shop, tiny, had no fly earrings. I asked about the museum shop—closed for renovation. They suggested I ask about earrings at the tourist office down on Rambla Libertad.

I ambled down, now hungry, asking my way when I got lost, and found a café on La Rambla by the river with its low bridges where I had an excellent melon with ham followed by a fideu, also exceptionally good with shrimp, mussels and something unidentifiable which may have been pretending to be scallops.

I found the tourist office where a young woman in oversized glasses told me, as soon as I asked about fly earrings, the name and location of a shop I would pass on my way home.

I walked up hill, passed it, retraced my steps. It’s in the Call, the Jewish Quarter, and indeed, the dark burly man had fly earrings but not the same as those in the museum. These were larger, clunkier and in silver but I could have them gilded. The Cathedral shop won’t open until next June. As a friend of mine says, “We will go to any length to replace an earring.”

The next morning, Saturday, I did not make it to mass at the cathedral, which was at 8 because breakfast was not served until 8:30. As I exited the hotel I looked up and saw between the buildings dark smoke billowing up to close the sky channel of the street. There was a fire in a building across and down the lane. Standing near me was the owner of the hotel, also looking up. He introduced me to a grandmotherly woman standing on the other side of me. It was her house that was burning. She didn’t seem that distressed but within seconds her two grand daughters arrived, barefooted, in furry acid green and screeching pink zip up sleeping suits their faces swollen and wet with tears of fright. There were firemen. Since there was nothing I could do but commiserate, I did and then walked over to the cathedral now closed after mass.

It is always pleasant hanging out around it when the sun is out, looking down the steps or inspecting the carvings over the side entrance which, despite their often being inexplicable as the ram vomiting man—two serpent monsters, one with a rather malevolent woman’s head—I prefer to the rococo baroque front façade which I find Hallmark in its sentiments. There are serpent monsters with human heads that to my bemused amazement convey clearly that they have a low IQ. How do you manage to carve dim wittedness into stone?

The cathedral and the steps were part of the scenery of THE GAME OF THRONES, which I have not seen. The steps are of the variety that one has no difficulty imagining a body or bodies rolling down.

I was meeting two friends who have a masia not far outside of Girona. They arrived with their dog, Kramer, who is the calmest and possibly the most emotionally stable of the three. We had a coffee at a cafe with tables in front of the steps. This is, for me, what friends are for. I had intended last time to have a coffee here but had not done it. Being alone, there are things one doesn’t do which come quite without hesitation in company. J and I went into the baths together.

I have now seen a lot of Roman and Arab baths, these are 12^th century Arab, in various parts of Spain but this is one of the nicest because it isn’t your usual—cold, tepid, hot carved in good strong well squared stones. There is as you enter a “reception area” of graceful elegance with a small pool at its center covered by a cupola on tall, slender columns. There are seats around the edge of the barrel-vaulted space: a serenity gently enfolds you. After this the rooms are much as usual but it is a ruin and you climb up stairs out of ceilingless rooms to look out over the ruin of the baths to the valley and up the green hill to where there are more ruins secreted in the whisper of trees. It is beautiful.

We walked down to toward the river, which I had not done before, stopping at a Romanesque church. Cataluña is rich in Romanesque ruins. The collection of frescoes rescued from abandoned country churches at the MNAC (Museo National de Arte Cataluña) in Barcelona is world famous. The church has been turned into a museum for temporary exhibits and had one on food on its walls. It is intimate with charming proportions; a chubby stone edifice wearing tiles roofs like Chinese farmers’ straw hats.

We walked along the river and came to the restaurant J and R had chosen among an animated row of eateries now full of people. I had delicious goat chops and Kramer was delighted to finish them off for me. We talked about everything from architecture, to real estate, to Russia and had a thoroughly enjoyable time. R, it was the first time I had met him although I have known J for many years, has perfectly greying hair, piercing dark eyes and an intellect to match.

We walked beside the river past the bright red hierro bridge, coming to a quarter of town I had not seen before with the usual international cloned shops. Here I left them, crossed a low stone bridge and started up hill to the hotel.

The next day, Palm Sunday, I went over to the cathedral for mass. There was a well-dressed, small crowd, given the size of the cathedral, with lots of children grasping the complicatedly braided and twined palm leaves that are de rigueur on this day in Spain. The priests looked elegant in elaborate vestments. Women wore hats and shushed children. Men, I was pleased to see, attended with their families. In Italy you can barely squirm your way through the crowd of men blocking the exit of any church.

There was a small but enthusiastic chorus accompanied by the organ which when musically on its own swelled its sound into the available space like a frog expanding its throat.

I had wanted to return to the church because of the memory I had from my first visit.  Entering its dim expanse—the nave is the second widest after St. Peters at 75 feet—I had seen floating before me an ethereal cloud of light which, after deciding that it was not a spiritual apparition, I identified as a silver baldacchino. It´s shape is not unlike the large white sheets or canvases that are strung up on roofs in the hottest months of summer in Spain. It shimmered, a spirit from the 13^th century. It’s underside and outer curve dance with a multitude of figures, 137 saints and angels in rows, which you cannot make out without binoculars but the angles and curves of elbows, noses, knees and fingers refract frolicking light. It was created between 1292 and 1326.

On the high altar is another piece of what I think of as religious jewelry, a retable. It is silver, embossed plates, sometimes gilded, over a wooden core studded with cabochons, filigree and superb enamel of local manufacture. It crests into three towers that enclose figures in high relief of Saint Felix, Saint Narcis and the Virgin. It was begun in 1320 by the goldsmith Bartomeu and completed in 1358 by Ramón Andreu and Pedro Berneç. Again, to see the figures with any clarity you need binoculars. These colors, gold, silver and enamel with a rainbow of hues make me think of the Pala d’Oro in Saint Marks, Venice, which it postdates by 200 years. The altar is alabaster and was consecrated in 1038.

Having had time with the silver cloud while enveloped in the organ’s sound I crept out as quietly as possible so as not to disturb the celebrants. I asked the hotel owner about the people who had the fire. He rents apartments as well as hotel rooms and had given them one of his apartments for a few days. I gave him a contribution for the family remembering the sorrowing green and pink furries, ordered a cab and found the right station.  There are two. The train back to Barcelona was full, with no distancing just as I had thought. My not-quite-satisfactory silver fly earrings were in my purse.

And now, at last, the Andrew Sisters.

I desperately wanted to fit in with my classmates in middle and high school. Realizing my musical preferences, opera and classical, were making me “different”, causing me to be mocked, I suppressed any reference to the music I loved and listened, studiously, as though I were conjugating French verbs, to pop music, which was largely, but not exclusively, the Andrews Sisters. Every Saturday, or was it Sunday, evening I would tune my radio to the program many of my schoolmates were listening to, the Billboard count down of the most popular songs in the country. This was not particularly painful but it was boring.

In the 1940’s and the 50’s the Andrew Sisters were the prime pop group with hit after hit. To quote a friend, admittedly a New Yorker, “They were awful–mushy, cheap, and certainly not eye candy.” Until he mentioned it I hadn’t thought about the “eye candy” angle. It’s quite true. They were a curly coiffed, rigidly hair-sprayed, homely group. What they sang while “mushy and cheap” was also bland, banal and vapid. But their primary interesting characteristic was intense cheeriness. All their songs are happy sort of jump about ditties, full of bounce. That cheeriness is, for me, one of the salient traits of the 1950’s and I suspect what causes people to have such nostalgia for that period. We had come out of the Second World War triumphant and all was right with the world. The music insists, all is well; everything is fine, fine, fine. We are all happy, happy, happy.

The truth of the 1950’s was quite different from that—desperate single mothers unable to find work, lynchings in the south, acute poverty both urban and rural all over the country. The personal truth of the lives of the Andrew Sisters also contradicted this artificial happiness.

From Minneapolis, Minnesota they started singing very young for fun becoming commercial singers after their father’s restaurant business collapsed. They supported their parents for the rest of their lives. They were famous for their close harmony singing and performed all varieties of music from boogie-woogie to Country to Calypso. (You can find everything I mention on YouTube.) However, if you listen to the music they, and, their arranger, Vic Schoen, had an odd leveling effect on these styles making them sound similar.

If you listen to “Rum and Coca Cola” and then Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat Song”, it becomes clear that although the beat has been retained it has been iron out so that it is not as pronounced. And, remember Belafonte was himself a popularizer. The “real” calypso was even more unique in style.

Of course, popular music, is just that, popular; to achieve mass appeal it can’t be heavily individual. What the Sisters did to “Rum and Coca Cola” was also done to classical music when it was adapted to popular song. I will only give two examples, “Full Moon and Empty Arms,” a Frank Sinatra hit, takes its melody from the third movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto; “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again,” sung by Eric Carmen, comes from Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony, the third movement.

But the lyrics of “Rum and Coca Cola” are another problem. Here are some, not all, of the words the Sisters sang:

Rum and Coca-Cola

If you ever go down Trinidad
They make you feel so very glad
Calypso sing and make up rhyme
Guarantee you one real good fine time

Drinkin’ rum and Coca-Cola
Go down Point Koomahnah
Both mother and daughter
Workin’ for the Yankee dollar
Oh, beat it man, beat it

Since Yankee come to Trinidad
They got the young girls all goin’ mad
Young girls say they treat ’em nice
Make Trinidad like paradise

Drinkin’ rum and Coca-Cola
Go down Point Koomahnah
Both mother and daughter
Workin’ for the Yankee dollar
Oh, you vex me, you vex me

From Chicachicaree to Mona’s Isle
Native girls all dance and smile
Help soldier celebrate his leave
Make every day like New Year’s Eve

Drinkin’ rum and Coca-Cola
Go down Point Koomahnah
Both mother and daughter
Workin’ for the Yankee dollar.

The fact that this song was about women prostituting themselves to American soldiers went right by the 1950’s listeners as well as the Sisters. “We neverthought of the lyrics. The lyric was there; it was cute, but we didn’t think of what it meant….” Maxene said in an interview. She points out that content went right over people’s heads, both singers and listeners. They paid no attention.

That perhaps sums up the 1950’s for me. It was an era when people didn’t think. They were oblivious particularly to the effect they were having on other people, and their lives

The Sisters’ first hit is an even odder instance of not thinking. In 1937, a year after I was born, they recorded “Bei Mir Bistu Shein” a Yiddish song from a Yiddish musical comedy titled I WOULD IF I COULD. However, Jack Kapp of Decca Records didn’t want them to sing it in Yiddish but in American vernacular English. Somewhere along the way the title was translated into German, becoming “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön.” Not only did a Jewish song have its title translated into German but a Nazi pop band a few years later recorded it with “state-approved anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevik” lyrics. It doesn’t appear to have occurred to anyone in the American recording industry that taking a Yiddish song and translating its title into German was a bad idea. Of course it was just the beginning of the war.

The song sold seven million records and was on the Billboard Charts in first place for seven weeks. The title was incomprehensible to most Americans and according to LIFE MAGAZINE people went into stores asking for “Buy a Beer Mr. Shane” or  “My Mere Bits of Shame. ¨ I have had experience with this problem of consumer approximation of a title, having worked in a Doubleday Bookstore when BONJOUR TRISTESSE hit the bestseller list. My favorite interpretation of the title was “Bangor Treaties.

Other hits of theirs which may be familiar are “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”, “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree”, and “Beer Barrel Polka.” A thought in passing. It is an oddity of popular music, for which I have no explanation, that it is always played at the same volume. It never gets louder or softer. It is always at a constant volume.

Another characteristic of popular music is sentimentality. Out of this period I remember “The Tennessee Waltz” as a prime example of saccharine drench. But if you have never heard Spike Jones’ satire of it, you have missed a good thing, again YouTube. At the time I didn’t know about Spike.

However the monsters of celebrity and money slowly gobbled up the Sisters. When their parents died, one after the other in 1948 and’49, they started arguing over money, solos and billing. Finally they split up and became estranged from each other, there were suicide attempts, and they never really reunited, although each had a separately successful career. It is an American story of ego arrogance and greed destroying relationships.

Now I have to add a caveat emptor here. Paul Taylor made a thoroughly delightful series of ballets out of these songs, performed to a recording of the Andrew Sisters singing. It captures the naiveté of that time period with its utter lack of sensitivity to anyone outside of the mainstream. You can see these on YouTube.

There was other music around, folk, jazz, but I grew up in the narrow channel of classical and knew nothing of these other forms until I was in college. When I brought home a record of Ertha Kitt my family greeted it with firm disapproval. I didn’t get to Dexter Gordon until much later. But they were just as opposed to Dave Brubeck. I knew of Burl Ives but had not heard him and even The Weavers were totally unknown to me.

Obviously, in my family there was a hieratic snob value attached to music, which I had not been aware of and the same was true, in a different way, of my classmates’ musical choices. If you liked a certain kind of music you belonged. Surely, using music in this way, or any other art form, to place people up or down in the hierarchy or to decide they are “acceptable” is a sad and grievous twisting of what art is.

I started this blog about the Andrew Sisters and other music of the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s, with the best of intentions, but as you will see it veered into the intensely personal. I have decided to send it out anyway.

At my son’s request I am writing this blog about my ideas concerning popular music in the ‘40’s, ‘50’s,‘60’s and into the ‘70’s. I have been hesitant for several reasons: 1) I have no expertise in the area of popular music so what I am writing is sheer personal opinion. 2) It brings up emotional turmoil because, although I adored school, I had a hard time with my classmates partly due to the different musical content of our lives. And I am going to have to start with the trauma of those years, which is inseparable from my sense, feeling, reaction to the music of the time.

I grew up in the 40’s and 50’s in the then prosperous, but not yet deluxe, suburb of Chappaqua about 36 miles outside of New York City. It had an excellent school system and taxes to match. In the late 1940’s and all of the 1950’s conformity was rigid in these communities, of course, more so among children. We dressed alike and all our tastes were supposed to be exactly the same.

I remember a boy in grade school wore a pair of knickerbockers one day, probably inherited from an older brother, since these had been popular ten years before but were no longer worn. He was teased. They were a signal of familial poverty. Knickerbockers, which still exist, are baggy trousers that end at the knee and are worn with knee-high socks. I have always wanted a pair in emerald velvet.

The smallest difference was mocked. Later in middle to high school I had a girl friend who also didn’t fit.

Her clothes were fashionable, rather than the prescribed skirts, sweaters and saddle shoes that were de rigueur. She came to school one day in a circular quilted skirt that was much ridiculed.  She would have been fine in New York City where diversity was/is largely accepted but the suburbs are/were more confining. She also had very long hair, which she wore down her back. This was pulled and tangled so much that she was often in tears. Her family finally removed her and placed her in a private school. Having your child come home weeping every day is not pleasant. I wanted desperately to follow her to that private school, but my family did not have the money, so I learned to tough it out. I didn’t tell my parents what happened to me in school until I was grown.

I don’t know what I was like at that age. I may have been superior or arrogant in my attitudes and offended my schoolmates. Besides liking opera another of my social solecisms was that my mother made me wear long, tan, cotton stockings which were held up by a sort of halter over my shoulders with garters attached. She thought I was too frail to weather the winter barelegged. A girl in my class, who was also a neighbor of mine, I have no idea why, and I suspect she doesn’t know either, talked some boys into throwing me into a ditch to pull up my skirts and see what held up the stockings. The instigator of my humiliation was totally irresistible because she had breasts, which a fair number of us did not yet have.

I am missing pieces of this incident. Did I try to fight them off? I cannot remember. What I do remember was that climbing out of that ditch, leaf mold on cheek and knees, in an agony of humiliation and defeat, I wanted immediately to erase the incident from my mind. I never wanted to remember it. This is a natural but not a useful reaction.

What I had been taught, however, was an important lesson, that while I thought I was autonomous, free to do what I wanted, I was completely at the mercy of any group that wanted to use their physical strength against me. I had never had to think about this.

It meant that the other effect of this incident was I became immediately and permanently on the side of all underdogs in my vicinity and, slowly, underdogs anywhere. Whoever was baited, blamed, ridiculed was my companion. This incident made me aware that I was living in a society that was lying to me. I was not free. I was not equal.

It lead me to teach in Harlem at City College, interview ex government prisoners in Burma, a writer under house arrest in Indonesia, causing me to acquire a police tail, and to confront the Minister of North American Affairs in Ho Chi Min City, Vietnam about writers in prison there. The later was not a very good idea. It is also, possibly, the reason I reacted so violently to the situation I found when I came to Spain in 1960 and saw the fear on peoples’ faces and the Guardia Civil in their patent leather hats posted along the roads.

What my neighbor and schoolmate did to me changed me. It changed her as well.

Practically no one gets through life without his or her soupçon of trauma and one shouldn’t. Trauma is a necessary lesson about life. My schoolmate/neighbor, who many years later apologized to me (more later on that), had her own horrifying trauma around that time.

Her father brought his Russian father to the U.S. This would have been the time of Stalin. It must have been a complex operation both expensive and difficult. I am sure this was done with the best of intentions. He, the grandfather, was a little man in his late sixties or seventies. I used to see him alone, neatly dressed, on our road walking. He was the only Russian I knew, my only Russian reference, until I was in college, when my memory of him gave me an aperçu into Dostoyevsky’s characters, isolated in their suffering. He was also the first person I recognized as being, even though I didn’t really know him, detritus, cast up on the beach of history. I have known many in that despairing isolation over my lifetime.

He was utterly alone, no English, no tendrils of relation to the alien culture he found himself in. He had his son, but I imagine his grandchildren viewed him as something incomprehensibly alien suddenly dumped in their lives. He was cruelly isolated at the end of his life.

One day he went missing. The police were called, I believe, and his family and others on the road searched for him. It was my tormentor, his granddaughter, who saw the top of his bald head shining above the water in the pond beside their house. Like Virginia Woolf he had drowned himself by walking into the pond.

We all get our spoonful of trauma.

Years and years later my schoolmate apologized but went well beyond saying she was sorry. When she contacted me she told me she had carried the guilt of what she had done for years gnawing at her. The boys involved, now old men, never apologized. I can’t remember who they were; trauma wiped them from my memory.

 My former neighbor in apologizing explained, “I told my children and my grandchildren, ‘Don’t ever do anything like this or you will suffer terrible guilt all of your life.’”

I had no difficulty forgiving after such a confession.

That’s my introduction to the Andrew Sisters.

So after over a thousand words I have not gotten to the Andrew Sisters. I promise to be more on topic with the next blog.

Here we are in the New Year that looks much like the old year. In that old year I started a rabbit I would like to pursue, Mary Magdalene.

I grew up with her as the exemplum of female remorse in the Church, the bad girl who having reformed was either in eternal tears or a haggard saint. I am thinking in the later case of the statue of her, the Penitent Magdalen, by Donatello formerly in the Baptistery of the Duomo in Florence carved from white poplar wood. She looks like a famine victim, haggard, hollow eyed, emaciated. Her teeth are snaggled and she is clothed in her own hair. I thought the first time I saw her she was wearing animal skins. There is something odd about her being clothed in her own hair. It is not penitential dress but erotic garb for a woman to wear only her own hair, even when a bit matted, although the mattedness may signal eroticism gone rotten. I have no conclusion to draw. I am simply puzzled by this malingering carnality.

About fifteen years ago I discovered that the Magdalene I knew was a victim of a conflation creation.  In 591 Pope Gregory I in his Easter sermons melded her with two other women, Mary of Bethany (Luke 10:39) and the unnamed woman in the New Testament (Luke 7:36-50) who washed Christ’s feet and was considered a sinful woman. Being a sinful woman was not interpreted as being gluttonous, prideful, greedy, envious, wrathful, or slothful but as being a prostitute. The Church early in its career narrowed the focus on sin to sex. This is how Mary Magdalene became a legendary prostitute, through papal misrepresentation.

There was as well a second set of legends, of which I was ignorant, in which Mary was Christ’s wife and bore him children. This was a mythology, however, that never took root.

In 1969 the merging of Magdalene with Mary of Bethany and the sinful woman was retracted in the General Roman Calendar by Pope Paul VI. But you can’t revirginify your reputation from papal slander that easily after fourteen hundred years. She is still considered a reformed prostitute by most of the Christian world.

The little we have of written records of Magdalene in the canonical gospels, those accepted by the Catholic Church, tell us she traveled with Christ, gave him financial support, was in contact with the apostles, was witness to the crucifixion, to his burial and was alone or with others a witness to his empty tomb. The accounts of the last event vary widely depending on the gospel being read, but she is always the first to discover the tomb is empty.

In the gospels of Luke and Mark it is also recorded that she was exorcized of seven demons which may mean she underwent seven exorcisms or simply, because of secondary meanings of the number seven in Hebrew at the time, that she was in the power of these demons. Demons were in that era considered the source of mental illnesses. However, this exorcism and demons don’t appear in the gospels until the second century AD. They may be a second century invention.

That she gave Christ financial support means she was wealthy. At that time it was not unusual for well-heeled Jewish women to financially support synagogues. This also suggests they probably had more voice in the community than one might imagine.

Reading outside the cannon, however, things become more complex. The Gnostic Gospels include reference to Mary Magdalene and there is a Gospel of Mary that tells of Christ’s teaching from her perspective.

Gnosticism was a complex web of beliefs that preferred enlightenment through individual insight and understanding over fixed dogma. It considered the material world to be corrupt because it was created by a flawed entity, God. Adam and Eve did not bring evil into the world; it came from the Creator of the world who arranged that all living entities eat each other and are, therefore, in fear of each other.

Two forces exist, one for good, the Godhead and the other evil, the Creator God who is responsible for setting up the system of suffering which exists on earth. Christ is one of a handful of Messengers of the Light sent from the Godhead, which is an It not a He or She, to assist humans in their search for Gnosis, knowledge.

Despite their belief in Christ the Gnostics were declared heretics by the Church as it grew into the stunningly powerful corporation it has become. It may be the most successful in human history. What other corporation could have survived tearing itself in two. Could Microsoft have survived a CEO in Silicon Valley and another of equal reputation and following in Los Angeles? Years of exponential, blatant corruption did take its toll in the Protestant splintering but it is still a very healthy corporation today.

Although the Gnostics produced large numbers of written texts the Church destroyed them with such thoroughness that until the last two centuries all that was known about Gnosticism came from quotations of Gnostic texts in the writings of Christian prelates trying to refute Gnostic heresy. In the nineteenth century scholars attempted to collect these shreds of quotations in order to form an idea of the sect’s beliefs. In 1945 a farmer discovered the Nag Hammad library in an Egyptian town of that name. It consists of thirteen leather-bound papyrus volumes that had been buried in a sealed jar. The books include both Christian and Gnostic texts.

Among those books is the Gospel of Philip, a volume that meanders from subject to subject in a fashion quite confusing to the modern reader. Here is the section that mentions Mary Magdalene.

Two caveats before presenting you with this. One, Wisdom for the Gnostics was feminine, named Sophia, an emanation of the Godhead. Second, Christians and Gnostics greeted each other with a kiss on the mouth, the “kiss of peace”, and there was nothing sexual about it.

     “As for the Wisdom who is called “the barren,” she is the mother of the angels. And the companion of the Savior is Mary Magdalene. But Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her on the mouth. The rest of the disciples were offended by it and expressed disapproval. They said to him, ‘Why do you love her more than all of us?’ The Savior answered and said to them, ‘Why do I not love you like her? When a blind man and one who sees are both together in darkness, they are no different from one another. When the light comes, then he who sees will see the light, and he who is blind will remain in darkness.’”

That is a fairly breath-taking put down of the disciples. It is apparent that Magdalene is being compared to Sophia or Wisdom. To segue to Buddhism for a moment, the Drölma, also known as the Green Tara, who could be considered an emanation of the Buddha, represents Wisdom, which Buddhists consider feminine and passive.

But Peter did object to Mary. There was a power struggle that existed and is apparent in the Gnostic gospels. I would say he won. The early Church, even in the time of Paul who had a copious and complex correspondence with women in positions of power among converts, had many women in its structure but it became more an more patriarchal over time and women were pushed off to the side.

A last tidbit is a legend in which, after the discovery of the empty tomb of the resurrected Christ by the three Mary’s—Magdalene, Mary Salome and Mary of Ciopas—the three sailed from Alexandria with some say Joseph of Arimathea, others Santiago, arriving at a fortress on the French coast known as Notre-Dame-de-Ratis, Our-Lady-of-the-Boat. The name was changed over time to Notre-Dame-de-la-Mer and then in 1838 to Les-Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. Here she was, so the legend goes, buried. Oddly the Gypsies also have a female saint here and come to celebrate her once a year.

The possibility of Mary, Christ’s mother, Magdalene and the third Mary packing up after seeing the empty tomb to cross the Mediterranean and become missionaries of Christianity seems most unlikely but it does give a different perspective to see these women as independent travelers over sea and land.

Rather than the Pope’s prostitute, out of this patchwork, swatches of possible lives, the Magdalena I envision is a well dressed Jewish matron, her wealth apparent in the quality of the fabric of her well cut dress rather than in its stylishness, wandering the shore and hills of Provence, talking to fisherman and farmers of the new faith. She has dark, expressive eyes and an authoritative manner that even men used to being in command find difficult to confront. There are lines of suffering and sadness about her mouth, but the dark eyes dance with humor and spiritual joy.

It’s worth noting what happens to an individual once she or he has gotten into the maw of an institution or corporation with a particular agenda. The winners write history, of course, but the amount of denigration meted out, the manipulation and excising that goes on is worth being cognizant of.

Her latest incarnation is in a song by the British singer FKA twigs in her album entitled  “Magdalene.”

Mary Magdalene

FKA twigs

A woman’s work
A woman’s prerogative
A woman’s time to embrace
She must put herself first
A woman’s touch, a sacred geometry
I know where you start, where you end
How to please, how to curse

Yes, I learnt you needed me
Yes, I’m here to open you
Yes, I know that your heart is blue
(So cold)

I fear before the fire
True as Mary Magdalene
Creature of desire
Come just a little bit closer to me
Step just a little bit closer to me
I can lift you higher
I do it like Mary Magdalene
I want you to say it
Come just a little bit closer ’til we collide

A woman’s hands
So dark and provocative
A nurturing breath that could stroke
Your divine confidence
A woman’s war
Unoccupied history
True nature won’t search to destroy
If it doesn’t make sense

Yes, I learnt you needed me
Yes, I’m here to open you
Yes, I know that your heart is blue
(So cold)

I fear before the fire
True as Mary Magdalene
Creature of desire
Come just a little bit closer to me
Step just a little bit closer to me
I can lift you higher
I do it like Mary Magdalene
I want you to say it
Come just a little bit closer ’til we collide

Ooh, you didn’t hear me now
Ooh, you didn’t hear me when I told you
Ooh, you didn’t hear me now

Mary Magdalene
Creature of desire
Come just a little bit, just a little bit 
Mary Magdalene
Creature of desire
Come just a little bit closer ’til we collide

Ooh, you didn’t hear me now
Ooh, you didn’t hear me when I told you
Ooh, you didn’t hear me now

(I should explain. The date on a blog indicates when I started writing it, not necessarily when I was in the place written about.)

At breakfast I asked if I could have my eggs scrambled. The waitress had a moment of indecision but then she went for, “No.”

I walked to the museum wending my way through the now familiar streets of the old town, stumbling across the antique store I had not been able to find the other day. It’s all bits and pieces, old Lladro figures, jewelry, pictures, silver.  He had a footed silver box and I was tempted to add it to my collection but I have reached the stage of life where possessions are more apt to be a burden than a joy.

However, I saw a pair of Japanese house sandals at another shop and decided they were what I needed for the tile floors of Spanish hotels. Also they pack flat and though not warm keep your feet off the floor.

At the San Telmo Museum I walked through the Sert paintings again. Since then I have learned, from a friend who reads my blogs. about Sert’s other murals in the Vic cathedral and his first wife, Misia Sert, a pianist (1872—1950). She studied with Fauré. She was apparently a favorite portrait subject having been painted by Renoir, Bonnard and Lautrec. Her fashionable Paris salon was a resort for Ravel, Debussy, Picasso, Mallarmé, and Cocteau. He says there is a plaque on Sant Pere Més Alt in Barcelona commemorating Sert’s birthplace.

I went on into the hall with remnants of stone tools and arrows that flows into the lethalness of swords and armor and then the human homicidal tendencies are channeled into 18^th century hats and headdresses that may still have been seen on occasion at the beginning of the 20^th century. These are fun.

Some are real hats but many are concoctions made by winding white strips of linen around, I presume, a form to make a curved horn, a steeple straight up or a series of dumplings getting smaller as they rise and ending in a little curved horn. One mannequin looks as though she has a large muffin on her head beneath which folds of drapery enclose her from chin to chest. The face, male or female, is not covered but neck, hair and ears are. I spent time gazing, in part, because these heads reminded me of the girls who lean out of the walls of the stage at the Palau de la Musica with their harps, tambourines, flutes, and horns in all kinds of hats and hair adornments.

I took the elevator upstairs where, utterly alone with the paintings, I at last got to concentrate on this eclectic gathering of faces. There are some early paintings of the Evangelists. These are not gaunt old men in straitened circumstances hanging out with their symbols—the lion, the angel the bull and the eagle—but well fed, middle aged, scribes with thick, crisply curled beards in sumptuous brocade robes of deep, stained glass colors all of whom have, I noticed, large ears. They look as though in another part of their comfortable houses housekeepers are keeping things in order and seeing lunch is on the table promptly.

Around the corner is a startling Mary Magdalene by Tintoretto. I wrote in my notebook, “hilarious”, yes, but perhaps equivocal is a better word, although she did make me laugh. Your average Renaissance Mary Magdalene is a good-looking woman even when half drowned in tears of remorse. She may or may not be sexy—see Titian, El Greco, Caravaggio, Crivelli—but she is always pretty. This young woman, I would say she is a teenager– physically a woman but not there yet emotionally or mentally– is not particularly good looking, being a bit chubby about the face, but she is definitely of the flesh. She is ripe, about to drop off the tree. In modern terms she is, a la Madonna, a material girl. She is all gussied up in the way teenagers love. She’s been to the hairdresser and he’s given her, ringlets across her brow and beside her ears like spiral bands through which she has threaded pearl drops on a pearl chain. She is wearing a pearl necklace and her bodice is cinched with gold chains studded with amethysts. There are more adornments on the chest before her and I suspect a mirror that we can’t see that she is looking into with bland complacency. She is over the top and loving it. There’s no cleavage and no leg; she maybe spiritually and mentally immature but she is in season.

Behind her shoulders are big rose silk, opulent poofs, lined with gold brocade, like wings, suggesting that they are her current conception of wings. She’s a materialistic butterfly, not a numinous lofting spirit. She is unlike any other Mary Magdalene I have ever seen

Next door to her are three El Greco’s. I may have noted down “hilarious” in my book because of the contrast between Mary and these pale, attenuated saints, their eyes cast up to heaven, all of whom have hands like Glenn Gould. This is the first time that I made a connection between El Greco and Modigliani. The saints and Mary are polar opposites. They are almost transparent with spiritual transcendence; she is solid as a block of oak.

Across from this sanctified gathering is a portrait by de la Cruz of Phillip III, handsome, but with a thoroughly unpleasant glint in his eye, which is odd because I don’t think of him as one of the nasty kings, just another self indulgent royal who let his friends eat his country.

In the next room is an exquisite little Madonna and Child by Rubens. It has a strip before it which sounds an alarm if you lean too close which I did several times, although there was no one on the floor to hear or reprimand. It is an intimate picture whose characters are warmly lovable in the most cheerful bourgeois way. The Madonna is plump cheeked with a curvaceous mouth, baby all smiles in his chubbiness. Everyone is well dressed, comfortable and perhaps most important, happily content. They radiate well-being, wholesomeness and immense charm.

The floor below leaps into the modern era. A painting by Antonio Ortiz Echaqüe, Two Women of Tafilalet, shows a pair of women draped, twin pillars in different shades of blue with no flesh showing except their eyes, in the case of the younger, one eye. They are not veiled in the Saudi sense, but have drawn their shrouding mantles of blue across their faces as though in protest against the painter’s intrusion. They are mysterious and, of course, Islamic. Tafilalet is the largest Saharan oasis in southeastern Morocco and has a number of fortified villages. It was on a caravan route from the Niger River to Tangier. That is all I have been able to learn with nothing about the painter to be found through the usual Google channels, but the women have a statuesque, imposing quality that I found appealing.

More modern and western is a canvas by Juan Luis Goenaga of fish and divers with tanks strapped to their backs under the sea. It’s not your usual subject matter, which makes it fun. Quite different is Mari Puri Herrero’s Sobresalta a las Campistas. Herrero is a mistress of the edgy, disturbing image.

In the foreground of a greenly lush countryside are two men in dark suits, one with a bowler hat. They are as out of place as a pair of large pythons in Trafalgar Square. In the distance, hurrying away, are two women. I have no idea what this is about but it is worryingly sinister.

The museum then continues chronicling life and history in the Basque country. There are little videos on sheep and shepherds, on making cloth from spindle to loom, on labor movements, on women’s rights with exhibitions accompanying all. It is overwhelming and wonderful.

I had lunch at a place my friends E and V had suggested which had filling pinchos.  They were large and delicious. I managed to rediscover a chocolate shop I had seen to buy a bar with chili, very little chili, and an orange slice dipped in dark chocolate which I ate at a café on the esplanade with a café con leche. It is satisfying to consume coffee and chocolate with the perfect curve of the bay before you.

The next day I was leaving, therefore the morning was spent packing but at lunch time I went back to my first restaurant, Casa Vergara, and reordered my first lunch—oysters, ham croquets, grilled shrimp. It was just as good as the first time. I thought about paying again to revisit the Santiago pilgrim, but it was time to go back to the hotel, order a taxi and head to the airport.

Bon Nadal
Feliz Navidad
Merry Christmas

The next day being Monday, the museum was closed, as was the buffet in the café, in its case, due to a lack of guests. However I could have whatever I wanted and as much as I wanted from the menu –coffee, croissant, eggs with ham, yogurt and muesli.

I have a friend in Barcelona who is exceptionally discerning on the subjects of restaurants and tenors, indeed, on anything about opera. He had suggested a restaurant, Rekondo, specifying that it was exceptional, a bit expensive and not to be missed. If P says a restaurant is exceptional, it’s a Michelin two to three star. I found it on my paper map and decided I could walk there.

Leaving the hotel I took off in the direction opposite to that I had been heading for the last three days, this time toward Igeldo, the promontory on the opposing horn of the crescent bay. On a whim I turned inland and found myself climbing stairs, if my phone is tallying truthfully, fourteen flights.

As I started up I noted a man doing his morning exercise by running up several flights and then walking down; cheaper than a gym, it certainly looked effective judging by the sweaty patch between his shoulder blades. The views out to the Concha, the bay, were fine but as interesting were the views of houses, their terraces. One looked up at them, down at them, out at them from all levels. Some were primly tidy with flowering plants and chairs drawn up to umbrellaed tables. Others were a bit blousy, straggling geraniums gone to seed or overwhelmed by blooming weeds with faded canvas chairs, or rusty tables on loose tiles. 19^th century grace and 20^th century modernity jostled each other up the hill.

At the top and along the way were a few 19^th century villas muffled in undergrowth. They are probably too costly to renovate. Things became quieter, no cars; often I was alone with birds and trees looking down at that perfect bay. I took a street that turned down toward the Miramar Palace once the summer home of Queen Maria Christina, much loved here because she supported the town. Now a convention center, it has lots of turrets and roofs which make it interesting from a distance but it becomes less attractive as one gets closer and its resemblance to a 19^th century suburban villa on growth serum becomes more evident.

It is surrounded by a park that pitches abruptly down the hill. As I left the bulk of the Miramar Palace I passed a clutch of men gathered about a group of cameras on tripods. On a bench in their midst, and I thought associated with them, was a white haired man in a blue plaid flannel shirt and a blue quilted vest. I am not sure why I noticed him; perhaps there was something authoritative about him.

I was able to follow my map to Igeldo Passealekua, the road on which the restaurant was located, through first an attractive small shopping center and then streets of recent bourgeois two story homes with carefully but not imaginatively planted front yards. It had that comfortable, solid look the middle class is so good at creating. But once past these I started up hill again through much less orderly surroundings, fewer houses and those often unkempt. Views of the bay were over scrubby trees and unpretentious buildings. There was a marginal feeling to this land, unkempt edge of city land.

I began to wonder how far away this restaurant was. There were, however, hotels that I passed, that were a comfort, and then there was a big sign, Rekondo, and a parking lot full of cars, next to a wide terrace looking down to the ocean shaded by a big tree.

I walked in and there was the white haired man I had seen among the cameras. I thought he must be another solitary dinner. I explained to the woman who greeted me that since I was alone I had made no reservation and hoped that was all right. She seated me and gave me a large menu with a selection of Basque and other dishes. Slowly I realized the man in the vest was the owner and that I was sitting in the wrong direction, looking into the restaurant rather than out to the terrace.

I decided to skip the first course. One of the main courses was venison, which I have not had in many years. It is not something that one sees on a Barcelona menu.

It was served with pears poached in a luscious brown sauce of great depth of flavor with fruit high lights. I have come to think of brown sauces or gravies as ambushes. They look innocuous but can be pools of grave disaster tasting of half cooked flour and burned vegetables. This was ambrosial. As I ate slowly, becoming enveloped by that luminous sense of bien être a superb meal gives you, the restaurant filled.

To my right was a room filling with a couple with a baby in an ultra modern pram, a pair of athletic looking middle aged business men and an older couple but behind me on the terrace there were young people, quite a large crowd of them chatting, going to the bar to order drinks in a celebratory mood. Directly behind me were two women in their fifties or sixties whom I could only glimpse. One was plain, a bit stodgy but the other had flair and was wearing a navy blue, soft, silk suit piped and cuffed in brilliant pink. I was disappointed to have my back to her.

As is true of most people my age I don’t usually have dessert but I realized that in this circumstance it would be depravity to be abstemious with such a kitchen available. I ordered a mille-feuille of thin, brittle layers redolent of almonds with vanilla cream between them and a papaya sorbet to one side, heaven with a café con leche.

P is never wrong.

This quality of food is rare these days anywhere in the world. Shanghai Tang’s restaurant in Hong Kong and the Thai restaurant in the Oriental in Bangkok are up to this standard, although neither are purveyors of Western cuisine.

When I was 24, pregnant and traveling through France with my husband who only ate steak and French fries because he was in a foreign country, it was possible to, from time to time, I am thinking specifically of a restaurant called Trencavel in Carcassonne, have a meal like this every couple of days as one drove across France. In that restaurant, this is a memory now 60 years old, they recognized I liked food and, ignoring my husband, went into conference with me before each meal. I had never been treated like this and I reveled in the attention. I ordered one evening a trout with mussels and tiny shrimp. Madame, bent over me solicitously and advised, “But after that you must have something simple, a little chicken perhaps.”

The trout was celestial, the chicken not far down the hierarchical scale. The memory of that trout has stayed with me all these years as one of the high points of my gastronomic life. The venison and mille-feuille have been entered in the same file in my memory.

A further digression. Trencavel is the name of the viscounts of Carcassonne, Béziers, Albi and Razès. Raymond-Roger Trencavel died after the capture of Carcassonne in 1209 by Simon de Montfort. The restaurant was named for the family. A French friend filled in the historical background.

My inner person beaming I walked down hill to the bay and then along the shore turning in at the cathedral, which is 19^th century but has a reputation for beauty. However, despite signs stating that it was open from 8 to 8, it was not. Thinking I knew what I was doing I wandered off and became lost and entangled in rail lines and children coming home from school. I finally stopped at a gas station to ask my way.

It is always a good idea to get lost. In this case I saw a more plebeian section of town, more family oriented than where I was staying. Parents with dogs were picking up children bringing home satchels of books or paintings to be acclaimed by mothers. The streets were choked with young life being directed across streets by crossing guards. I stopped by one, mid street, and asked my way again. But I did get home.

I made a mental note to thank P for his recommendation. Tomorrow I was planning a return to the museum.

Watching the view of the bay appear out of night into a grey and rose morning was calming. I started with the good buffet and the huge café con leche and then walked down stairs to the beach from the esplanade to make footprints on the sand. There were people in the water, astonishing considering the temperature; I was wearing a jacket. They were in regular bathing suits, although some were in wet suits but I could tell by the way the wet suits shifted about that their feet were uncomfortably cold. Many of the women in swimsuits were topless. I would have worn a wool sweater into the water over my topped bathing suit. A tough crowd these northerners.

There were lots of dogs, some in, some out, of the water. A small, Jack Russell type, in a red and white overcoat was wildly enthusiastic and tried to induce his fellows to express similar exuberance, but they were much more blasé about the sand and sea experience.

I went back up to the esplanade and walked over to the museum, passing a shop with the kind of hair fasteners that are difficult to find in Barcelona since the little store in the Boulevard Rosa Mall on Pasig de Gracia closed. The two women who ran it wore every kind of hair ornament transforming themselves into exotically crested birds behind their counter’s plethora of combs, barrettes, ponytail clasps, feathers and rhinestone clips. I miss them. The little shop I was peering into wasn’t open yet.

At the San Telmo Museum I wandered through an exhibit of etchings, engravings, paintings and drawings of Monte Urgull starting in the 16^th century and ending in the 19^th with the beginning of photography, showing from the shore Santa Clara and Urgull. The views portrayed were amazingly consistent. It didn’t seem that any artist had thought to move more that three feet in either direction or go out in a boat to sketch. This wasn’t what I had come to see but I continued to count on serendipity, which didn’t happen.

I then went upstairs to an exhibit of photos by Fernando Postigo Silva, a photo journalist, recording social and political agitation in the Basque area from 1977 to 2001—strikes, riots, demonstrations and terrorist attacks. This was educational because I know practically nothing about the Basque protests but there were many, many photographs, all relatively small and since I did not recognize most of the names it quickly became a blur. There were a lot of politicians, police and funerals. It was an amazing record.

But by now I had spent over two hours wandering, looking, but not seeing what I had come to see. I looked at the map they had given me at reception. I saw the section I wanted but could not figure out where it was. I went to reception and asked.

Since there were very few people in the museum they kindly led the elderly foreigner to the door, which was just outside the exhibit of views of Mont Urgull. I had seen it but since it seemed to lead outside I had ignored it.

My guide brought me into a cloister off of which was a church filled with dimly lit, enormous paintings, of enormous, striving figures. A bell went off in my head muffled by the passage of many years. Sensing my enthusiasm for what I saw, my guide said they were by Sert, the name rang no bell I am ashamed to say, and that there was a guide in English she would get for me.

I stood in the church with three other people gazing up at gigantic canvases on which huge men, sometimes women, performed all kinds of physical labor. The bell got louder. My guide brought me a pamphlet in English and French. I read the first paragraph of information but it didn’t help.

The huge laboring men over my head slowly focused into familiarity. I thought, “These are like the figures in the murals at Rockefeller Center. “ I did, however, associate the figures with Diego Rivera. But the penny didn’t drop until I came home to the hotel and Googled, “murals Rockefeller Center.” 

The murals are by José Maria Sert (1874-1945) who replaced Diego Rivera as the painter in the downstairs lobby of Rockefeller Center after Rockefeller fired Rivera objecting to the portrait of Lenin Rivera had incorporated into his mural and refused to paint out. I was reunited with a forgotten acquaintance from New York City. Since Sert was pro Franco he and Rockefeller must have gotten along well. Interestingly it was John Rockefeller Jr.’s wife, Abby, who suggested Rivera.

The canvases are full of physical power, the figures arranged rhythmically without much interest in individuals. The work is monochromatic making it more concentrated in it power. If he had worked with a variety of colors it would have been distracting. These are monumental, dynamic and visceral canvases but there is certainly irony in the fact that Sert, not a supporter of the workingman, produced paintings full of epic figures of laborers—ironworkers, fisherman, shipbuilders.  Humans are strange. But it is a stirring experience to be in the cavern of that church surrounded by massive paintings of men straining at all kinds of physical labor. Sert’s nephew, Josep Lluis Sert, is a famous contemporary architect.

By the way, should you go bring opera glasses. It will enable you to see details otherwise lost to height and dimness.

Now over three hours into my museum experience I was beginning to flag but I walked up a staircase that displayed rubbings of old gravestones before taking the elevator to the top floor and finding the painting collection. I decided to have a walk through and come back the next day. As I said to the ladies at the front desk as I left, they have at least two museums.

I cast a brief glance at a portrait of King Philip III, a Mary Magdalena by Tintoretto, three El Greco’s and around the corner a little Ruben’s Madonna and child. On the floor below were modern paintings and below that a floor of medieval armor and swords preceded by Neolithic stone bits. Then there were all sorts of byways with displays of everything from head ornaments for men and women to agricultural implements. By this time I was sagging badly.

I left the museum and fumbled my way to the Maria Christina, a 19^th century dowager duchess of a hotel. I wandered its high ceilinged corridors for an appealing restaurant when, to my astonishment, I saw a decorous—everything in the Maria Christina is decorous—sign declaring Saigon Café.

One of my few complaints about Spain is that it is impossible to find good SE Asia food here. This is because the Spanish are, generally, as horrified by spicy food as many English. Any restaurant in the Maria Christina was going to be good, so I felt I could bet on the quality of the meal. Around me were groups of friends and families slurping up glass noodles with aplomb and looking eagerly under the bamboo latticework of steaming basket lids at pale, plump pillows of dim sum.

The menu was eclectic including Thai, Vietnamese and Chinese dishes. I ordered from my chubby waiter, whose nationality I couldn’t decide on, Tom Yum Gung, a spicy, superb Thai soup with shrimp and mushrooms and duck curry, which was the Vietnamese rather than the Thai edition of the dish. That is not a criticism. Rather than the watery, bland perversion of Tom Yum Gung I am served in Barcelona, I received a bowl of steaming soup glowing with droplets of red oil, that with its full-bodied spicy broth loosened my sinuses. The duck dish was so large I could not finish it. I apologized to my plump waiter and told him that I was, at this point going to switch countries and have a café con leche. My remark made him giggle which made me decide he must be Thai.

Thai men giggle. It is not a chortle. It is a giggle. This can drive a foreigner to teeter on the lip of insanity, or homicide under certain circumstances—i.e. trying to find out about a parcel in a Thai post office. It usually erupts out of embarrassment, in that case the embarrassment of having to speak English. But I like the giggle because it is to me a signal that Thai men are allowed freedoms Western men are prohibited.

When I first traveled in the East I was amazed at how men were interested in fabrics, not just male suit fabric. I went to have two out fits made by a Nepali tailor in Kathmandu. There is a lot of unemployment in that town and one of the places to hang out is a tailor’s. The men gathered around, admired my fabrics—two pieces of silk—and wanted to know what I planned to have made. They gave full endorsement to the proposed designs. I was amazed, since I come from a culture where men do not have the freedom to enjoy that kind of beauty and creativity.

Men are told in most cultures that they have the freedom to do whatever they want. No they don’t. I, of course, know primarily about American culture which keeps men, particularly those less educated, with less money in their trouser pocket and less knowledge of the world in a narrow trench where they are allowed hard work, violence, guns, alcohol in quantity but not tenderness, or to admire beauty in anything much beyond a nude  mammal calendar picture, or to explore different kinds of music or dance, certainly not poetry. Prisoners of the limitations of their class, chained to a denial of all but a few emotions, shackled by fear of not being “real men” they are told all the time how free they are. I am probably exaggerating, but not a great deal.  As one moves up the economic scale there is a little more freedom but it is never large.

I taught a poetry class once in a high school in a small town in Nebraska. (This was during my personal diaspora when I taught all over the US driving back and forth across the country 10 times in six years.) In this particular class there was a giant of a young man, tall, strongly built who when he heard he was going to have to try to write a poem started to gibber all kinds of sneering comments about poetry and people who wrote it. He was in fact having a hysterical fit of fear at the thought of even attempting such a task. His regular teacher with resignation written all over her face took him off to the library. I thought probably he should have been taken to the gym where he understood things.

There was one young man, intelligent and quiet, also a giant, who wrote a good poem. I praised him in front of the class for his performance and realized half way through my first adulatory sentence that I should not be doing this. He was not happy at being praised. Indeed, he looked grim. I realized I had enabled people to tease him for the next week.

Being asked to write poetry creates a threat to your manhood in the middle of America. Manhood is easily destroyed in red states.

The next day was Sunday and the museum was closed so I walked down the beach, and joining with another woman headed in the same direction, climbed a stair, whose metal grill steps were embedded with mussels, to find the gate to the esplanade was tied shut. Again there were people swimming and a small fleet of sunfish whose white sails were pretty as cast off petals against the blue green sea.

My intent was to walk around Mount Urgull. It hadn’t occurred to me that this was the promenade of choice among the citizens of San Sebastián on a Sunday. There are expansive ocean views on one hand and precipitous rock on the other. One comes out near the Maria Christina Hotel. I had a moment of temptation to have another SE Asian lunch but friends had given me the names of a few restaurants in the old town so I decided I would find one.

I turned back toward the old town and after working with the paper map, which has the advantage of not suddenly changing direction, and Google maps, which flips this way and that causing my dyslexic brain much distress, I found the restaurant E and K had suggested, Janito Kojua. I had a good fish soup but it was not as deep flavored as I had hoped, and rice with little clams, which was excellent. The restaurant itself has a warm ambience, reflected in its rather motherly staff and is calm.  My waitress when she saw I had left a third of my rice oozed the sad but resigned disapproval of a mother who has done her best for a picky child.

I walked more after lunch totting up 9 kilometers. Then I went home to the hotel and had a long talk with my grandson in NYC, always a happy event.

I have just returned from five days in San Sebastián. I had never been, there are many places I have never been in Spain, and it seemed a good place to go. I needed out, badly. I have been irritable, something and discontent, feeling my psyche was made of some form of Jell-O that was being constantly agitated. Yes, the Covid numbers were high, but that would mean fewer people would be traveling, also the numbers in the Basque country were lower than in Barcelona. I am adept at rationalizing.

I organized a baby sitter for Galata while I was gone, a young woman, delightfully tall and slender, who viewed G with slightly less alarm than G viewed her. When A arrived G sniffed A’s proffered fingers but was having none of that touchy-feely stuff from an unknown human. In the five days A managed to stroke her once.

I was happy to be leaving from Terminal 1 since I find Terminal 2 scruffy and mildly depressing.  My cab driver was kindly solicitous of the aged and went to get me a cart. Checking in took one back in time, about 50 years. There was one person ahead of me and no one behind. The woman at the counter urged me to check my carry-on containing my computer. I equate traveling with a computer to traveling with an 18^th century Dresden shepherdess. Who would put such an object into the hairy knuckled hands of a baggage handler who will immediately hurl it with his massive strength into the back of the airplane’s maw? I was lucky. I was one of the few passengers who retained their carry-on into the plane. Considering how few people there were on the plane I don’t understand why they were divesting people of carry-on luggage. Were they keeping handbags at a safe distance from each other in overhead bins? As I found on the plane they had not taken such care with the passengers.

I had far too much time to waste but the airport, a subject of dire discussions with friends, was empty and there were large spaces between people in the restaurant cum coffee shop. I bought a bottle of water, a yogurt bar, disinterring my slightly squashed spinach and egg tart, bought at my local bakery because of fear of food in the airport restaurant, from my purse.

I listened on my phone to some excellent music a friend had sent me and read in my latest Times Literary Supplement about how Virginia Woolf named her friends after animals. Of one she wrote, “Weasel has a lovely pink snout, & she shall dip it in a jug of cream if she is good.” I think Woolf is one of our all time geniuses and no girl should grow to womanhood without reading “A Room of One’s Own” but I find this Bloomsbury literary game playing revolting. It is so cutesy-poo and adorable I want to throw up all over it.  I am embarrassed, not because it lacks high seriousness but because it is so artificial, condescending and denigrating to those so named while with its cuteness trying to obfuscate the put down that is being delivered.

I was careful to be among the last on the line to board. The bus to the plane was a little nervous making but until we started the doors were open and the ride was short. Getting on the plane was not a mad crush but they had me in a row with a couple so we were three across.  Why would you do that? The plane wasn’t half full. The row behind had one man in it, so I sat there.

I managed after some confusion outside the airport to locate the beginning of the taxi line and stepped into an elegant, spotless car. It is about a half an hour to town but there are hills or mountains with conical peaks to look at and everything is green. The approach to San Sebastián is lined with 1950’s apartment houses of the grimmer sort along the river. Once in town the architecture improves with a number of erratic and purposeless but charming towers and cupolas.

The Hotel Niva is small and on the esplanade above the beach with a spreading view of the bay’s crescent. I had messed up my reservation, having made it for the 16^th rather than the 15^th, so they couldn’t at first find it. But it was fine.

There was an old fashioned elevator with inlaid wood and etched glass that silently lifted me to the sixth floor. The room had a white balustraded, narrow terrace with that same view which so totally entranced me that I left my small case outside the door and didn’t know it until the maid knocked on the door.

I unpacked and arranged myself before going downstairs to order too much for dinner. There was an elder and a younger waiter. The elder was having an expansive social time with his regular customers and found me a mild nuisance. But the younger wanted to know where I was from. It was fun to tell him Barcelona and then admit my New York origins.

I woke the next morning at 6:30 but lolled about, watching the bay appear out of the night, not getting to breakfast until 8:30. There was an enticing buffet with scrambled eggs, various types of ham, croissants, salmon, cheese, breads and more. I had a super sized café con leche to go with my heaped plate.

I walked along the esplanade above the beach toward Monte Urgull. The scene is esthetically quite perfect, a crescent bay with promontories at each end and Isla Santa Clara asymmetrically placed between them. Everyone wore masks properly. Only some bicyclists were maskless. There were lots of dogs. My favorite pair was a medium sized, placid mutt whose companion was a hyper, intense white poodle, obviously an incessant, enthusiastic chatterer. “Isn’t it wonderful to be out in the fresh morning, the sea smell sharp, the pavement wet under paw from rain? Isn’t it wonderful?  Don’t you love it?  So exciting? “ And on and on.  Enough to enervate any mutt.

I was walking randomly so it was serendipitous to stumble upon Santa Maria del Coro. It is so much more fun to stumble than to search out. The façade is Rococo with a San Sebastian full of holes above a sweet-faced Madonna. Everything is well balanced and symmetrical. Like the bay it is harmonious. I came into the church, which is 18^th century baroque with classical elements, and paid to see the museum. Although baroque it is not of that glutinous, gilded variety that makes one feel one has had an encounter with a gilded octopus. The movement between classical and baroque gives the viewer a rest between complexities.

I either left my hat while buying the ticket or dropped it on my way to the museum.  I knew it would be at the entrance when I returned. San Sebastián feels like that sort of place.

The museum is small, simply arranged, ranging over seven centuries and contained, for me, three things of interest. The first was a surprise, a 13^th century, small sculpture of a Compostela Pilgrim with his staff, hat, beard, bread and bare toes protruding from under the swaying folds of his robe. He was worth the airfare. He leans toward you slightly on his staff, perhaps, a foot and a half high balanced on his plinth from which he has been broken. You want to give him a hug and a little money for tomorrow’s bread.

The second is an El Greco of Saint Anthony with that painter’s typical writhing movement in the figures of the Saint and his companions who seem to be airborne against a dark and violent sky with which their serene faces contrast.

The third is a contemporary, bronze sculpture, hanging on the wall, by Jorge Oteiza of a woman standing bent forward slightly over an unidentified body, head turned to look up at something or someone. The title is “Piety”, yet there is nothing pious in the woman’s stance to me. I may be mistaken but for me her posture, the angle of her head, both, proclaim belligerence, defiance, resistance to the forces behind the death at her feet. Rage and rebellion radiate from her figure.

There is one further sculpture of note, a Descent from the Cross by Alonso Villabrille, 17^th to 18^th century, that is a group of figures once part of the Easter procession. Two men on ladders are lowering Christ from the cross down to a mourning, but not weeping, woman. It is dramatic, intense but compassionately human. The sense of movement among the men contrasts with the woman’s stillness.

When I went to leave I found the woman I had bought my ticket from had my hat.  She wanted to know if I was from Germany. This is unusual. I am sometimes thought to be British and sometimes French but rarely German. I told her I was an American from New York City and had lived in Barcelona for ten years. This is typical of the kind of interchange I had in San Sebastián, friendly, warm but limited. I had the feeling that Covid has made people apprehensive enough so that they curtail rather than extend themselves socially.

I went on to the Aquarium, half aquarium, half museum. I never had that much interest in aquariums until I found my grandson E is addicted to them. The museum half had models of various kinds of ships, exhibits of objects used at home and on ship board with a running history of the town as a port, a haven for privateers and a fishing center. This concludes near the skeleton of a tight whale strung up through two stories of the building.

Then you enter the aquarium. I am only good for so long because I get bored with fish but they had one of those tunnels through which you walk surrounded above, below, to right and left, by shifting silver fish shapes and the occasional dark shadow of a shark with its white belly and undershot jaw drifting over head. The last section was tropical fish, colorful, but by that time I was finned out.

I received a refund because my audio guide didn’t work.  I looked into the gift shop and almost bought E a plush octopus.

It was about 2:30ish and time for lunch. I went back to the old town in the neighborhood of the Iglesia Santa Maria looking at restaurants and their menus, although I thought I would go to the first one I had seen, Casa Vergara.

As I wandered I passed a young woman in a state of exasperation with her squirming daughter who was working her way with petulant noises out of her grasp rucking up her pretty pink top and beginning to ruck up her pretty pink face into a full fledged squall.

I have in old age developed a turn I do with preverbal children in this state. I stopped, looking Miss Pink in her tearing eye and said firmly, but in my adult to adult, not my teacher voice, “You’ve got it quite wrong. It really isn’t that bad at all. Actually, if you give it another look I think you will find, to the contrary, that things are very good indeed. You are in an excellent situation.”

As usually happens, this incomprehensible flow of verbiage, coming from a stranger, transfixed the girl and she stopped preparing the melodrama she had been intent on. This often gives the mother a chance to take preventative action. What I hadn’t expected was that the man sitting opposite the mother, probably the grandfather, said to the child in English, “You should listen to this woman.  She’s right.” I passed on vastly amused at us elderly persons.

I had lunch at the Casa Vergara—three briny, pellucid oysters, followed by three exquisitely sweet shrimp, two ham croquets and then goat cheese with quince jam. The cheese should have been sharper but otherwise it was a perfect lunch.

I then aimlessly ambled about the old town looking in shop windows, reading menus, and watching people. The shops are small and individual. One dress shop specialized in 1950 dresses with wide skirts, puffy sleeves and chunky Mary Jane strapped shoes to go with them. Children’s clothing stores displayed nostalgia inducing smocked dresses. Stores with costume jewelry, imitation tortoise shell hair clips, pins, and ornaments sold bargain perfume. An antique store with attractive, small silver boxes from the last century, or even before, one with little feet was particularly tempting. Slowly I wended home through square after square and then back to the esplanade. I had no interest in dinner, watching streaks of sunset was enough.