(1991)
Old Friends
It’s odd how, over time, one loses touch with certain friends, especially groups of friends. With individuals it’s easier to trace the process that led to that rift, an argument perhaps or an insurmountable difference of opinion; with others it was more a slow drift of disillusion, when the person to whom you felt very close for a time evolved in such a way that he or she became a stranger or, worse, someone you despised or found boring (or else we were the ones who ‘deteriorated’ and were more or less rejected). This must have happened with a lot of people of my generation (politicians and journalists for the most part), who were very idealistic and combative at university, but ended up at the opposite end of the spectrum: ‘reinterpreting’ the Civil War, tacitly rehabilitating Francoism or doing property deals with what they termed ‘pragmatism’, but which was really just cynicism pure and simple. One sometimes learns, with horror and desolation, that a friend of many years – once you stop viewing them as kindly as you used to – now, quite implausibly, represents everything you most hate. Or else you hear him defending the ideas, attitudes and people he loathed fifteen or even ten years ago. I don’t mean that people shouldn’t change and adapt and modify and come to see things differently, but there are limits that ‘converts’ fail to respect, a long path that needs to be travelled: what I find unacceptable are sudden transformations, as if by magic: now I’m here and now I’m over there, without anyone seeing how I arrived at that new position.
Far more difficult to understand are the cases where, if I can put it like this, nothing happened: there were no betrayals, no disenchantments or quarrels, not even a sense of weariness. When one of those old friends who you haven’t seen for ages dies, time somehow concertinas, and what seemed remote only a few days before the sad news broke suddenly becomes intensely clear. This happened when Michi Panero died, some years ago now, and I just couldn’t understand why we hadn’t seen each other for such a long time, when, at the age of nineteen or twenty (he was six days older than me, we were born in the same month of the same year), we saw each other every day: after morning classes and after lunch, I would go over to his tiny apartment in Calle de Hermosilla (a great privilege at that age), and we would decide what to do, taking it for granted that whatever we did we would do together. I felt the same when I saw the obituary of Gustavo Pérez de Ayala; it was in his mother’s apartment in Calle de Padilla that I undertook one of my first paid commissions, correcting and polishing the translation of a book so bad that it naturally enjoyed enormous success, Love Story. I am ashamed to confess that he and I were responsible for the Spanish version of that ridiculous saying, which, for a time, became the motto of all lovers: ‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry.’ I would head over there every evening, and one of those daily friendships was born, one that lasted quite a long time (although when you’re young, everything seems to last a long time). When and why did we stop seeing each other, Michi and I, Gustavo and I? I simply don’t know.
Later, when I was in my thirties, for a period of years (well, it seemed like years) I used to go out for supper very late (almost never before midnight) to a restaurant called El Café then and possibly La Mordida now, if it still exists. A few of us would simply drop by without ever arranging to do so or announcing our intention: there were bound to be two or three of us present, if not seven or eight, plus a few less assiduous members, who knew where to find us. Among the regulars were: Antonio Gasset, whom I now only see occasionally on my TV screen; and Tano Díaz Yanes, whom I still have lunch with once a month or so – but just the two of us now, and much earlier in the day; the scriptwriter and novelist Eduardo Calvo, who never failed to turn up, has been in Algeria for several years now, running an Instituto Cervantes no one ever visits; Edmundo Gil, that most inveterate of bachelors, has married and has a child, and has left his job as a notary in order to produce films; Toni Oliver, who was the wealthiest among us (he ran a chain of cinemas, at least I think he did; we didn’t ask each other many questions), suffered various setbacks caused by unreliable business partners and now, apparently, writes lyrics for the singer Sabina; the doctor, Charlie, who didn’t seem at all like a doctor, is presumably still practising; and as for Julio, the owner of the restaurant, he’s still going great guns and has expanded his business. I still often talk to Julia, but I have no idea what happened to Paloma, Isabel, Maru and Natalia. Altogether, I know little about most of them. And yet there was a long period in our lives when we used to have supper together almost every night, and could count on each other’s company, and we used to laugh all the time about a hundred thousand things. How is it that none of that exists any more? When did we stop going or who was the first to disappear? That restaurant, if it does still exist, probably still echoes with our endless laughter, like that of the living ghosts we are to each other now.
(2006)
I’m Going to Have Fun
I’ve written before about Doña Carmen García del Diestro or, rather, Señorita Cuqui, my literature teacher at the Colegio Estudio in Madrid. She is now in her nineties and has asked me to write a few lines for the talk she’s going to give at the end-of-term meeting held by the current teaching staff. I decided instead to write a letter and I reproduce it here as a homage not just to her, but to a whole generation of teachers, and because some of what I say could well apply to other professions too.
‘This is an age in which teachers, constrained as they are by rules, regulations and other such pedantries, enjoy less and less freedom. This means they are allowed to use their imaginations less and less too, and instead have imitation and uniformity thrust upon them. Some will be glad of this. In every profession there are and always have been lazy, routine-bound people, who like to be told what to do, not just on a daily basis, but throughout their lives, people who want security not adventure, repetition not risk; comforting rules and restrictions that leave no room for the subversive enthusiasm with which they would sometimes have set about their work in the past.
‘Perhaps I’m wrong to use the past tense there – I hope so. Their numbers are shrinking, but there still are people who do set about their daily work and even their entire lives with imagination and enthusiasm, preferring not to have everything neatly mapped out before them; people who welcome surprises – even if those surprises are not very pleasant – rather than feeling that their life has been programmed for all eternity. I feel that such enthusiasm – which, inevitably, often flags – and such imagination – you only need a modest pinch of the stuff – are particularly important in education. The times we live in certainly do not help, offering teachers little encouragement or reward, whether political, economic or social. Nevertheless, a teacher’s first rule should be: I’M GOING TO HAVE FUN. That was certainly my motto during the few years when, as an accidental impostor, I taught in Oxford, Massachusetts and Madrid. And one thing I learned was that if I was having fun, then so were the students. They were intrigued, curious, obliged to think, hoping that, at the end of the class – as at the end of a story – there would be some revelation, some deduction, some not insignificant conclusion, the answer to an enigma or, which comes to the same thing, some fresh snippet of knowledge. It didn’t matter if, when the bell went, none of those things had happened, what mattered was their hope and confidence in the process by which some problem or piece of knowledge was transmitted. A fleeting glimpse of a mirage.
‘That, I think, is the main thing: teaching others to think, to feel interested and curious, and this can be achieved even in the most arid and least practical of subjects, like mathematics or Latin. But I think, too, that it can only be achieved if the person provoking the thinking, the interest and the curiosity is also enjoying him or herself – even if that enjoyment is short-lived and lasts only as long as the class does.
‘You, of course, and many other teachers, especially the teachers at the Colegio Estudio, were the people who convinced me of the truth of what I’m saying now. You were brilliant
at all those things, and I’m keenly aware that, for many of you, being a schoolteacher meant abandoning theoretically loftier ambitions, meant resignation and renunciation during a dictatorship that was determined to destroy the hopes and dreams of many Spaniards. I doubt that you had all long nurtured a vocation to be a teacher. Probably many of you hadn’t. And some of you would have gone to your classes as if it were a penance. And yet most of you, and especially you, Señorita Cuqui, rose above any setbacks, sorrows or disappointments with your vehement desire to have fun. And you were imaginative and happy, ironic and, for the most part, cheerful, ready to take risks and to be surprised – fortunately for us, especially for me. And I know that if there were no teachers (sitting behind a desk or standing at a blackboard), teachers like the ones I watched and listened to for all those years, the world would be a much sadder, more stupid and less attractive place than the one I was lucky enough to discover. And regardless of how teachers may be viewed nowadays, their main task is still not so much passing on knowledge as shaping their students, which is why their role continues to be such a vital one. And so, for the good of everyone, I trust that there will never be any shortage of teachers who follow both your example and your motto: I’M GOING TO HAVE FUN. Have a very happy and fun meeting.’
(1999)
THE MOST CONCEITED OF CITIES
* * *
Chamberí
I was born at No. 16 Calle de Covarrubias in Madrid, which means that despite my reputation as a foreignizer, a traitor to the country and ‘a goddamn Anglosaxonist’ (as one furious now quasi-academic once called me) – a reputation that has dogged me ever since I published my first novel – I come from the most genuinely madrileño area of Spain’s capital city, namely, Chamberí. I grew up and was educated there and in the surrounding area, and when I moved apartments a few years ago, I didn’t stray very far.
There are certain streets in Chamberí that I always associate with my childhood, streets that still exist and have preserved their old names, none of them particularly resonant now, or else the names have simply grown inconsequential because forgotten: Miguel Ángel, Génova, Sagasta, Zurbano, Luchana, Zurbarán, Almagro, Fortuny, Bárbara de Braganza, Santa Engracia. And Covarrubias. The streets may still exist, but, in large measure, they have also been destroyed. That area, which is now home to so many banks, was once full of small eighteenth-century palaces and mansions with high doors and imperial marble staircases. I certainly didn’t live in one of those, but they were the backdrop to the walk I went on most frequently with my brothers, hand in hand with my mother and with Leo, our highly imaginative maid, who had us believe that she was the girlfriend of the football player Gento (a popular idol at the time) and told us apocryphal stories about Laurel and Hardy. Or else with two worthy ladies of Cuban origin and accent, my grandmother and her sister, Aunt María, who would accompany us, complaining and excited, to one of the nearby cinemas. Almost none of these remain. They all had monarchical names: the Príncipe Alfonso, the María Cristina, and the Carlos III, which still survives. Another cinema, the Colón, lasted into my adolescence, its name dating from after the Civil War, when it replaced that of the Royalty, which was clearly too ‘goddamn Anglosaxonist’ for Francoism.
Younger taxi-drivers are greatly surprised when I ask them to take the ‘bulevar’ route, when there has been nothing in Madrid for decades now that you could even jokingly refer to as a boulevard. But that is how we people born in Chamberí in the 1950s knew the four streets of Génova, Sagasta, Carranza and Alberto Aguilera, which are now an indescribable flood of cars driven by hardened criminals. When I was a child, the street was a polite and respectful place, occupied by spruce, gleaming automobiles, which their owners would drive almost apologetically, and by enormous black taxis with tip-up seats – traspontines or transportines as we children called them – that we fought over the privilege of sitting in. It was, of course, also a city of trams, trolleybuses (trolleybuses!) and double deckers, exactly like the London ones, except that they were blue and had the entrance on the right, despite having been made in Britain, where the door is on the left. Racing up the spiral stairs to the top floor was like a daily adventure, and helped us to identify more closely with the characters created by Richmal Crompton or Enid Blyton, childhood heroes who never disappointed. Nor was it unusual to see carts drawn by mules or donkeys and piled high with boxes and battered furniture or a rolled-up carpet on end; these were driven by traperos – junkmen – who for some reason (whether it was mere chance or out of a desire to be ornamental I’ll never know) were always accompanied by some extremely beautiful, pale-eyed, gipsyish girl, sitting with her back to the driver and therefore facing the trams or taxis patiently following behind. That’s why it still always thrills me to see a female face looking out of the back of some passing vehicle, although nowadays those faces tend to lack all mystery, they’re mostly gum-chewing fifteen-year-olds with frozen smiles, who always go around in a gaggle and are never alone, not like the solitary female passengers of those carts.
Madrid, or, if you prefer, Chamberí, was to the eyes of a child a city dominated by cake shops and grocery stores, places of abundance and even good taste. Of the latter, the nearest, which still exists, had one of the loveliest names I have ever seen on a sign: Viena Capellanes. From another, Mantequerías Lyón, a boy came every day to the house to deliver our order, because it was inconceivable then that you would buy food to be eaten on any day other than the one on which it was bought. In the midst of all this industrious refinement, it was not infrequent to catch a very strong whiff of cow as you walked down the street. As a small child, I found it easy enough to crouch down and peer through a barred window to find a few of those illustrious mammals crowded together in a cellar. In order, I suppose, not to besmirch the city’s reputation as the capital of Spain, those dairies were called lecherías not vaquerías (naming the product, ‘leche’, rather than the source, ‘vaca’), despite the astonishing and very obvious presence of those beasts just two steps away from the trolleybuses. And so, incredible though it may seem, what with the mules and donkeys of the junkmen, the cows and horses with their riders that could also be seen sometimes trotting along certain streets (Ferraz, Génova, Cea Bermúdez), we children of the 1950s rubbed shoulders on a daily basis with creatures typical of nineteenth-century cities. My memory of that Madrid is of an unhurried, orderly city (perhaps excessively orderly, for I’ve never seen more policemen on the streets anywhere), and perhaps because I was a child and was more aware of other children, I remember its human landscape as being dominated by two things: by girls in blue or grey uniforms or wearing a red jersey and wrinkled socks, with books and files clasped to their incipient bosoms, as they shuffled along through the helter-skelter rush of children; and by the elegance that was expected of any woman living in that typically Madrid barrio, so much so that piropos (the flattering comments addressed by men to women in the street) were almost obligatory, although always decorous. I still remember something a man said to my mother one Sunday when I was walking back with her after mass: ‘You’re the loveliest thing I’ve ever seen, in miniature.’ My mother burst out laughing, and was, I remember, wearing one of those decorative combs Spanish women often used to wear in their hair.
(1990)
The Most Conceited of Cities
One of the innumerable ways of differentiating large cities would be to divide them into the boastful and the conceited, in the certain knowledge that there isn’t a city in the world that doesn’t fit one of those two categories. It might seem, at first sight, that the categories are too alike, inhabit the same semantic area, that the frontier between them is too blurred and, therefore, pointless. For me, though, there is a big difference, which has to do, above all, with character, because ultimately, it is character – far more than the look of a place or the customs of its inhabitants – that leaves its mark on you as a visitor and stays with you when you leave.
Boastful cities tend to be insecure, childlik
e and chatty (even vociferous), unenigmatic and exhausting, impatient places eager for praise and in a hurry to captivate. If you don’t watch out, they’ll take you on walkabout or plunge you into the hustle and bustle and thus not allow you, as a visitor, to go poking around on your own account and at your own pace; they’ll try by every means possible (however disrespectful or loutish) to impose their own wishes on anyone who dares to tread their streets. In other words, they try to draw you in, to subdue and overwhelm you. Boastful cities like Paris or Rome or Madrid are completely changed by the presence of foreigners, not so much because they rely on them (if that were the case, they wouldn’t be so boastful), but because they simply cannot leave them in peace to do their own thing. It could be said that the only reason they pay them any attention at all is in order to intoxicate, stun, befuddle and even corrupt them as much as possible. Their boastfulness definitely has a totalitarian streak: they don’t allow for difference or even distance, for impartiality or the cool spectator’s eye. They are all-pervading and require wholehearted commitment, they demand it, and yet they are the ones doing the committing.
Barcelona, on the other hand, is the most conceited city I know. Even more so than San Sebastián or London, even more than New York or Venice. This category of city shares with the other category a belief in its utter uniqueness – either for some specific reason or as a whole. Nevertheless, the attitude and character of conceited cities isn’t just different, it’s diametrically opposed. They are far surer of themselves and, therefore, lazier. They are also more enigmatic, more reserved and more elusive. True, they couldn’t live without praise, but they prefer envy. They like to hold back, to appear unassailable, knowing that there will always be people wishing to assail them. They never do anything for the visitor, they don’t even bother or pester you, and, unlike boastful cities, they put up with you as a thing apart and resist any show of commitment or adherence. They are conscious of bestowing a great honour on visitors and expect this to be duly repaid not just with compliments, but with amazement and unconditional surrender.
Between Eternities: And Other Writings Page 5
