Gibralter

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After my jog along the dark restless sea, as vivid stars fled the seeping flame of the sun, I drove to the hinterland, where fuzzy umber and sage hills shook free from housing developments. There is no indication for Gibralter at the lower tip of the continent, since it was granted to England forever by a 1704 treaty and has irritated the Spanish ever since. Spain was finally forced, as a condition for entering the European Union, to resume diplomatic relations. On the Spanish side of the border is La Linea, where we parked on the advice of a French expat, as long lines of cars waited endlessly to cross the little line. We crossed the border right away on foot, through a passport control into Britain, over an airport runway, toward the foot of the 400 meter Rock of Gibralter. It is like the approach to Mont St. Michel, but here you are in a shabby left-behind sort of modernity, with the forlorn quality of an expat, and swamped with rampant, tasteless construction. At the walls of the Casement, a military looking concrete and rock defended shopping mall, are cartoonish reminders of the British Empire. Main St. is a string of charmless shopping. The prices, say the guidebook, are not even good, though it's duty free.

As we passed Trafalgar Cemetery where its eponymous dead lie, macaques shook the olives from above, and a cheeky female swung down the vines to sit next to us, till a guide, irate as if he were her own father, threatened to throw things at her. We went up the Rock by cable car, while macaques scampered below. At the station a few giant elders greeted us and posed against the horizon. An Indian man on the terrace reached into his backpack, and a little macaque bounded past him, snatching a bag of chips right out of the backpack. Everywhere they posed, essentially begging. A family below took turns hugging their tiny sparse-haired baby with his jutting ears, and rather forcefully grooming each other. They ran the show and they knew it, lining up on walls, peeing on rooftops, planting themselves in our way.

We walked through the natural preserve of the rock among eucalyptus and pine past a feeding point for the apes, where Germans fondled them. The maca hugged their babies and picked fights with each other. We came to St. Michael's cave--we had eaten some ghastly food at the cable car station, told that there was no other to be had, but here was St. Michael's Pub! St. Michael's cave is a fantasy of swirling stalactites and stalgmites, now used for concerts, once made into a hospital, where much of archeological interest including Neanderthal skulls have been found (by forced labor! The Captain lost his job.) Some soldiers have disappeared in these caves, or perhaps deserted.

Then we walked the road past another ape sanctuary and up and down past private homes in the exotic forest, to an entrance to the siege tunnels, dug over centuries, their large ventilator windows now fitted with cannons. 80 km of tunnels house barracks, hospitals, military offices--Eisenhower planned the invasion of North Africa from here. What we thought were caves, seen from the ground, are embrasures and military positions used in at least 10 sieges.

A little further was a reconstruction, with manniquins, of life under the 18th c. Great Siege. Poor Georgie the Drummer is being flogged, as he had been many thousands of times over 14 years. The vegetarian Captain Eliot was ordering people to grow vegetables amidst much starvation.

At the edge of the Rock's portals, a 13th c. Moorish castle stands, with tunnels beneath and gardens around its base, with the king's bathing rooms, and a prayer room with a vaulted ceiling, dedicated to a commander who had drowned trying to take the castle back, his body strung up by the Arabs as an example. Later his own son recovered the castle and his father's body, and buried him decently.

Unfortunately, the photos I took have been lost.My camera was subsequently stolen in Barcelona. I tried downloading photos from Wikicommons and ended up with an infected computer! Which photo did the dirty work, I don't know, but I suspect it was a demonic monkey from Gibralter!  So, disk fully erased and restored with the loss of a month's work. I ask you, dear reader, to be content with my words and your own imagination!   

Hinterlands of Eastern Andalusia

Costa del Sol, the sunny coast, is a corner of fabled Andalusia where the devil of overdevelopment purchased Spain's soul during Franco's years of lead.  Our hotel stood like a souless ocean liner at the edge of the ocean, in sight of the magical Mediterranean, and not of it.

Santiago of Marbella

We searched carefully among resort towns and their strip malls for the genuine land and its stories.  Take Marbella, where they say the beautiful people are to be found. At first glance, even the hospital is a kitsch Greek Temple. But we finally found the old city. The Placa de Naranjos was where Ferdinand and Isabella planted a church to Santiago. Now it is a warm pulsing square, radiating the narrow stone streets the Arabs had left behind when they were forced to flee in 1495. Roseate stone carvings of heraldry and a stone fountain of headless 16th c cherubs surrounded us as we had grilled fish and fritata under the periodic sun and the eponymous citrus trees. Then we walked in chilling shade to the Church of the Incarnation, bulky with its chapels to gaunt Christs of soulful mournful eyes and Virgins who are always dressed for the 15th c like Madame Alexander dolls. The stone streets hid churches of early centuries, an extraordinary British guitarist who dominated the echoing stone, and from a window two godlike boxer canines with impassive gazes from sorrowful eyes.

Boxers of Marbella

The next day I drove out through our own city, busy Benalmadena with its Arabic gardens and brightly muraled sports center, to the interior. Spikey toy-like housing developments slowly give way to mountainous land, poor, sometimes burnt, sustaining but a few sheep. Even the nature preserves are rocky and scrubby. The highway slices through chunky slate and rust colored rock or light boulders dusted with red, till near the white village of Ronda the stony hills are gray and lunar It is a beautiful mountain drive up and down the curving cliffsides. Ronda is terraced with the same undistinctive housing developments spreading through the more fertile valley, then a commercial center bustling with character for all its banality. But the old Ronda is an Arab city of fortified double walls, labyrinthine stone streets between closely spaced whitewashed houses, the occasional 15th c facade in roseate stone with heraldic carvings. The Arabs yielded it in 1485 like much of Costa del Sol.

Arab baths of Ronda

The old city starts at the Punta Nueva, a monumental bridge over the plunging gorge that dramatically enters the old city by the Santo Domingo convent, also Inquisition headquarters. Along the street is the castle of a Moorish king said to drink from the skulls of his enemies. We descended the stony footpaths of the city that rises and falls precipitously to the Arab Baths. In the 13th c a poor donkey drove the pump that kept lifting water from beneath into these three stone rooms (hot, warm, cold), with their fluted columns and star shaped openings to the sky.

When the Christians conquered in 1485 they built over mosques to create Santa Maria Major and other churches. Santa Maria sits under her square tower decorated with roccoco spires that the publisher Hearst copied for his own castle. The church was begun as a momumental gothic construction, but was so resented by Seville that it was cut back in size. Each chapel is lavishly outfitted mostly with dressed Virgins for most of these churches are dedicated to the Incarnacion. The main altar under a huge baroque Baldaquin carved of Canadian red cedar is a modern day immaculate conception, the piercing of her heart by the ruggedly handsome angel. The painted statues of Spanish churches can seem like store manequins, but the carving and silverwork is of the highest order.

Iglesia del Carmen, Antequerra

On another day we embarked, in the pouring, blinding, rain, toward Verja, a former fishing village where coves and caves and stone palisades form a charming relationship with the sea. A cave nearby has yielded paintings and other findings as old as 43,000 years, and painting from 20,000 BC or so. From Verja's Balcon de l'Europe, a grand esplanade, one can see Morocco--but not that day. The town has been touristified so we drove on (as the rain recommenced) to Frigilliana, another white washed town that wound tightly upward. It had been an Arab stronghold during 16th c rebellion of the Arabs that led to a total expulsion. Azuleros, inlaid ceramics along the winding stone streets, told in old Spanish of the Moors' happiness, health and hard work, the fertile soil, and then their valour and suffering at the hands of the Spanish. The views were of large, enveloping clouds moving around us, over winding orchards and neatly terraced lands of the broad valley, and the village's bright wisteria, jasmine and hibiscus. The main commercial offering was restaurants with mirador, panoramic views of the beautiful white winding village.

Another outing took us to Antequerra, whose rock abutments contain ancient dolmens, while the high Renaissance city overlooks Roman ruins. In the driving rain we popped into a pub, lavishly and meticulously British with heraldry, an old fire truck, dart boards and on TV some hefty Spanish jokers, like their American counterparts, starting a business with clueless faces and glamorous wives. As it started to clear we struck out, though the monumental Renaissance churches and convents and museum were all still closed for siesta. A dark little man rushed with keys jingling to open the Iglesia del Carmen. Baroque and roccoco, with dark sinister paintings, it was built in the late 16th c with chapels painted like lavish wallpaper. The high ceiling (1614) was mudejar style, wood beams of interlaced stars and Moorish detail. The high altar was the intricately carved mountainous style, like a giant Buddhist scenario, with its painted statues perched in nooks and tree branches, of the Cathedral at Ronda. The chapels housed gaunt suffering Christs, even in the fluffy roccoco tabernacles, and dressed Virgins with their elegant sorrow.

Canadian Red Cedar carved chapel

When we emerged a glaring sun lit up the valley of orchards and veinyard and pueblos blancos, and a double rainbow arched halfway above the craggy rock mountain where dolmen mark a much earlier time. We stood on the Plaza with the Renaissance Cathedral San Sebastian, inaugurated 1550, and looked down on Roman baths. It is not hard to appreciate the advantages of settling here those many thousands of years ago. San Sebastian is spare in a Florentine manner, domes perfectly spaced, unlike any church we had seen in the region. There was a huge Tarascon, which is a beautiful woman holding a mirror with multiple serpents composing her lower body--a common sight in holy processions.

Unfortunately, most of the photos I took have been lost. I offer a few photos taken with my iPhone.  My camera was subsequently stolen in Barcelona. I tried downloading photos from Wikicommons and ended up with an infected computer! Which photo did the dirty work, I don't know, but I suspect it was a demonic monkey from Gibralter!  So, disk fully erased and restored with the loss of a month's work. I ask you, dear reader, to be content with my words and your own imagination!  

Malaga

Sunrise over the ocean, matchless brilliance over rippling blue waters. Birds twitter in high pines and palms, sun's piercing glare on the mighty waters. But we only sojourn on the Costa del Sol, we are interested in an older Andalucia.

Malaga is Andalucia's second largest city and its white sprawl, among purple mountains, has a somewhat industrial feel. Yet the old city, like all the Mediterranean settlements we visit, has seen the succession of Phoenicians, Carthaginians and Romans, Wisigoths then Arabs, the Byzantium of the East and then Western powers--they have all owned this spot. It is still marked with delicate minarets and beaux arts mansions, while an ungraceful ocean liner sits in the harbor.

Roman theatre beneath Arab fortress

The Alcazaba is an Arab fortress standing where the Phoenicians founded Malaka in late 8th c. BC, giving my own name an ancient Phoenician spelling. This high butte had been the refuge of inhabitants under successive invasions. The Arabs, who had arrived in 711, created in the 11th c, this Alhambra-like fortress, a spiraling labyrinth of gardens and secret rooms, fountains and niches of bright colored stones and bricks on the spur of land over the water. It now overlooks the Cathedral whose mighty cupola of roseate splendour dominates the city below. With its delicate slits for armory and the Wisigoth keyhold shaped doors and delicately rendered stone lace and fluted columns it is a palace of mysterius (since all explanation was in Catalan) uses and varied origins. Descending the brick pathways between doubly reinforced batiments among bright red roses and jardin exotique, between roman columns with small Corinthian tops like mismatched heads of Roman statuary, we looked down on a Roman theatre unearthed in the year of my birth, 1951.

The old city center is graceful during the passagiata, the evening hours of strolling the stone streets. At a bar a group of Spanish men break into song, joined by other men walking down the street. A little table sits on the plaza for tarot readings. We went into the Cathedral during Mass. Inside it is like a mighty city of an elaborate stone fabric covering every surface with monumental hubris that rises high into a confection of a dome. As a priest intoned prayers, we left to circle the outside which seems to be various monumental cathedrals clustered together, so elaborate is each aspect. An old man played violin in the dusk, his daughter accompanying him. Later we took the audioguide tour of the Cathedral. A few beggars crouched outside while we paid our 5 euros and then listened to sometimes numbing detail on the artistry of the Cathedral. The massive interior has stone carved domes 40 meters high, creating a lacy ceiling, enormous altars and a gleaming high altar all filled with pomp and pious, didactic symbolism. The many chapels hold mostly dressed Madonnas and gaunt statues of Christ. The last is called the Chapel of the Fallen, for the thousand bodies from the Spanish Civil War that lie beneath.

Ancient Phoenician for Mallaka

But the grandeur became ponderous and we escaped thru the gardens, some left over from the Arabs, and at length found our way to the high fortress, Gibralfaro. Extensively reconstructed in its angular labyrinthine walls, steps ascending and descending to plazas of artfully laid brick and black and white mosaics, it is less alluring than the lower Alcazar's gardens and fountains. Placards told of the plethora of gardens the Spaniards had encountered in 1492 (and the pain for the Arabs on leaving Al Andalus behind, forever). Jasmine, figs, citrus trees, date palms and other palms for weaving baskets, oleander and medicinal plants, cypresses, olives, and vineyards tumbled over the walls and between the walls (beneath which sinful Arabs reclined), astounding the Spaniards. An Exhibition hall showed the costumes and arms of 15th-19th c Spanish soldiers who had inherited this beautiful site from the fleeing Arabs. A French family moved near us, a silent girl, thin and hesitant, who smiled with a sweet dreaminess when she sat alone, but moved hesitantly with her parents who only light acknowledged her or touched her. Perhaps she was autistic. The staff of the Gibralfaro were handicapped, and startled us with their sweet, fragile innocence.

On our return we discovered in the far reaches of Benalmaden a Tibetan Stupa, gleaming white, topped with gold, truly a spaceship to heaven. It reverberated with a lofty feeling, its interior painted in pastel murals, a strange inspired presence near a kitsch Thai butterfly zoo. The vibration was extraordinary. (My iPhone battery was suddenly drained.) The Buddha-being was slender with an intense seriousness.

As we pulled up behind the hotel, by the rough Mediterranean, a group of young people stood in the dark wind drinking from paper cups. The woman had a scarf covering her hair--they were Arabs, enjoying their clandestine drinks.

Impressions of a Month in Léran (Aug-Sept 2012)

Having finally arrived by night train in the southwest of France, we feel its allure. Hotel Baures still delicately upright with a few paneled windows, landscaped with palms and grasses. We wait among a few curious passengers in this luxuriantly still, empty arena--the train station of Pamiers at dawn---where one beggar, tall and pretty and scraggly roams the little gare with her long legs. The train ride was relatively painless--well air conditioned with silken little sleeping bags, three stout gruff French women shared our compartiment couchette and abruptly helped J lift our heavy bags--this time heavy with books to read at our leisure. Now, sleep deprived, we wait in a wind that lists palm leaves under a sky with thumb prints of silver.

Patrick, Jacques' nephew, arrives with his son Quentin and kindly drives us home, through farmland and the distant Pyrenees mountains, the tame but mighty trees, the meadows and hillocks of the Ariege. We drive through quiet villages with their landscaped roundabouts, between stuccoed walls of houses that still shoulder the road with mistrust after hundreds of years, to the dry labyrinthine village of Léran with its melodramatic crucifix staring down near the humble Protestant Cemetery, its forever shuttered shops that now include the one boulangerie, where the same well-groomed lady missing her front teeth sits with her cat.

In the morning, under pearly skies, a chorus of mourning doves, near and far, join the baying of a rooster and the gurgle of the pond. A car rolls past outside the garden wall. The morning air is filled with chirping and a lingering cool, then the molten sun flashes suddenly among thick trees. Flow is the defining word here, a flow of thick French I often cannot penetrate, flow of eating heavy meals, of people and cats. Flow of cousins and siblings, ebbing, waxing, cousins with their expressive eyes and pursed lips and exaggerated reactions to life's banalities. In the thatchy garden the family cats find great drama, darting up trees, stalking tiny lizards--and my tai chi practice faces new challenges on dry molehills.

Protestant cemetery

The fact the boulangerie is closed has caused great consternation. And the other great issue of the day is the Protestant cemetery, with its customarily unmarked graves, which is now being challenged. If no one can claim the graves, they will revert to common use, for they seem neglected. The cousins file in to the garden and then the mayor of previous years, and each remembers the ancestors.

Léran is a disappearing world, where the family has gathered since 1947, though the house was built in 1747. Now a summer home, it is in a village where traces of medieval origins can be seen in the circling streets that were once on ramparts. Summer in the Ariege is hot. Now the heavy air is dispersing, the golden haze of a remote, lost world is floating into obscurity. Yesterday I escaped to the lake in the dissipating golden heat, for a little freedom on the road, the bicycle humming past fields and heading up into the cool forest, past the darling smelly horse stable. As cars thinned, as families departed, I roped my velo to a thin tree near the campsite of le Comptoir Déambulatoire (a kind of traveling theatre) next to a huge patient dog with one large blue eye. I plunged into the cloudy water, a turquoise plate among grassy hills surrounded by the ghostly Pyrenees behind forested buttes, pushing away thoughts of the monsters unseen beneath me, my tortoise progress toward the yellow buoy. It is an artificial lake and filled with clay which refracts the sun in the most delightful shades of blue.

The garden is loveliest in the morning, little cyclamen peek, tender red violet, among the dried grasses under shaggy overgrown green and crumbling stone wall. The Loups see the garden as pieces of memory and fragments of tasks. Everything has been sensibly pruned back, and the sun gleams with a less toxic intensity. And it seems that this year the frogs are all gone.

During my jog an old man appears over the hill.  He tells me, this was once all vineyard.  I know, I say, my mother-in-law walked here every day, le Chemin des Vignes.  Oh? he asks.  Yes, he went to school with Jacques and after working in Toulouse he came back here to live.  He says he'll visit, but he won't.  Long years have separated these schoolmates.

The summer is passing. Thunder and lightening at 5 am, now close, now blazing afar, and now the sun blazes promising heat. Magnolia leaves shelter from the infinite blaze and mist. The cooing has resumed loud as a choir since this morning's rain. The poplars are monumental, the fruitiers exuberant. But the rain will continue, cold and steady, large drops slapping down.

We took our evening walk out along the farm that faces the chateau. The little ass could not be seen but the lavendar, just out of reach, was sublime. Just outside of the village the land is broad, of warm golds and browns. Cropped hay filled the old stone barn with its comforting smells. Otherwise the cavernous stone building was filled with old appliances, the courtyard had a trailer in it.

And then, as autumn approaches, the drama is in the skies. Incessant tossing winds move fleets of clouds, pearly incandescent, or gray-lined, across a cerulean sky. The in between moments of sun baked us in ecstasy--the drama was waiting for these overwhelming sunbaths, all awash in clean, intoxicating air, as we read. The olive and gold of the magnolia against the exquisite blue burns the senses. Long locks of gigantic poplars sway. Snowy doves visit now the cats are gone, they swoop just across the window to greet me from the boughs of the magnolia. They skim near, wings whistling, taking off with the cries of a human baby. The adorable honking ass is now my close friend. I'll bring a carrot in case I see him today--preening, then ears back, trotting silently up to accost me at the fence. A man walks his goat who trots placidly behind him.

Intermittent guunshot. The molten orb rises in lacy leaves. It is still cold. It is a misty autumn sun, the air thick, a few birds. I have a recording of Léran a few years ago, much thicker with morning birds. Last year there were herons and frogs. So quickly does even this tranquility lose its life. Morning traffic. But still unlike so much of the world. The sun is radial over the high woolly trees. The magnolia leaves splay in bright green splendour in the prodigal sun, though it is now a cooler, more distant sun. Cyclamen have sprouted everywhere, tender violet, tiny survivors. Our room is golden with the sun. Perhaps it is the season, perhaps that's why there is less wildlife.

Final tingly swim in the thick cold turquoise lake. We stretched on the beach with our books till several groups arrived and the heat began to press upon us. It is an escape from the hard, bleak character of Léran.

I am beginning to love the beautiful red fish of the garden pond and their mermaid tails. They're beginning to know me--as I meditate and my gaze falls over them they nibble at the water surface, their flame-like bodies hanging, they seem to look straight at me. And Piccolo the ass also looks at me coyly through bites of his apples.

I crouch on the hoary tree roots that make a table and chair, waiting for the sun. The cyclamen stand in the sun like beautiful little aliens landed on this crotchety lawn. One little crown, its high petals like pope's hats, has fallen next to me, still so fresh, the tender veins. Calling and crying out and piercing cooing, so much commotion and the twittering nearby. Wafts of cool hit my face like waves of sublimated water. On Sunday rifle report sounds early, hunting dogs yelp somewhere behind trees. I came out to do tai chi at nearly midnight--what stars I am missing in my blindness! Soon

these green green mornings will come to an end, but so will the dismal stone streets of hollowed out buildings, the poor people. So will the garden, both prison and comfort.

The sun bruises the sky with a magenta glow where it rises and the wind lifts a chill over the green shaggy garden. At 2am again I went outside to the hard brilliant glittering glass stars above as the wind blew clouds onward. Now the molten sun winks at me, through the dancing foliage. We are leaving on the cusp of autumn. Picollo trumpets.

The garden has been stripped bare and beautiful and we climb into a cab (he only makes a living because he transports for medical emergencies) to the bus stop at Aigues Vives and sit on the curb in the deep sun till the bus comes, then we climb on with all the schoolkids - first announcement of the denser world out there. We ride for 2 hr past lush green trees over parched fields, the mountains rolling blue to our left, into the burnished violet sun that perches on the horizon, large and brash, before sinking and leaving us in peace.

Fireplace grill, kitchen in Léran

Toulouse is dense, noisy, relatively polluted--our kind of place--with belle epoch blocks of graceful brick and stone--endless frothing architecture. We sit at the Quick with our luggage and watch the happy, excited world meet girlfriends and boyfriends, tiny spikey kids and plump blacks laughing with a smokey affection and drunks bantering half in Arabic and nice clean cut kids waiting with luggage and open faces. We board the train, this time a simple hauling of luggage, not a hot sweaty unbelievably crowded night on dirty asphalt like the night we left Paris. The last two to arrive in our cabin are long haired middle aged pals who seemed to appropriate all our bunks as they comfort each other telling their life's stories. The one sleeping beneath me snores, insistently, especially as the train stops mysteriously at 1:30am. I put on headphones and as the engine rumbles up again I sway and dream as we hurtled onward.