Sermons in Stones

I recovered enough to make my way to the Museu Nacional do Azulejo, and I am making  my way around  it very slowly. Joy was right; I wouldn’t want to have missed this.

I like the strabismus-eyed angels:

And these 17th-century trompe-l’oeil diamond patterns. They look like they truly jut out from the wall:

But it is an illusion created by skillful painting:

There’s beautiful contemporary tile art here, also, such as this piece in the entry hall:

I really like the exhibit of combinations of two Portuguese art forms, azulejo and fado, made (with the collaboration of many people) by a French artist named Bastien Tomasini who goes by O Gringo. We just went to a fado performance over dinner last night, so I could hear the songs of longing in my head. This is also perfectly flat, although it looks like the hands have depth.

Now I am back in the museum café, having been delighted to discover that they serve small (20 cl) bottles of Schweppes ginger ale. There is so little ginger in ginger ale that I’m sure its effect as an anti-nausea remedy is 95% placebo, but placebos can be powerful, especially the ones that take you back to your childhood bedroom, sipping from a Dixie cup of ginger ale your mom has given you to soothe your stomach.

It’s our last day in Europe. I was waiting for a bus to take me to the National Tile Museum, when I began to feel increasingly sick to my stomach. I headed back to the apartment and got there just in time.

While my body was hunched miserably, my mind ran the inventory, as they do in this situation: what did I eat this morning? Nothing but oatmeal and mint tea! What could be wrong there? And it came to me: I made the oatmeal with the last of the almond milk. The almond milk that’s been in the half-fridge whose door doesn’t shut properly so that nothing gets very cold. The door that we discovered open a couple of inches when we got home last night, to an apartment that was in the mid 80s at least. Yeah.

I hope it was that, anyway, and not some bug that’s going to be with me for the next 36 hours, because I’m going to spend a lot of those in taxis and planes and I really, really do not want to be traveling while sick.

I’m recuperating and hoping I’ll be able to go to the museum a little later. In the meantime, I’ve sprinkled this post with some of the tiles from the buildings in the neighborhood.

The bus yesterday showed us the temperature and time all the way from Sevilla, Spain, to Faro, Portugal. This ain’t Fahrenheit, folks.

The bus was air-conditioned, but shortly after the temperature hit 42°C (107.6°F), we made a pit stop and could experience it for ourselves. Whoof.

It was a 15 1/2 hour day of travel from Córdoba to Lisbon, even though it’s less than 5 1/2 hours to drive it. Minor mishaps dogged us. Faro rolls up the sidewalks on Sundays, so food options were few during the 3+ hours we were waiting there. We wouldn’t have been waiting there at all except that a travel site we like and trust unaccountably advised us that it was a haul between the Faro bus and train stations (it is not; it’s a five-minute walk), so we didn’t book the first available train, and we couldn’t exchange our tickets. The Faro train station has removed all its electrical outlets, and the ones in our carriage to Lisbon didn’t work, so I was out of juice: no books, audio course, blogging, or drawing from the photos I’d taken for the purpose. It was uncommonly difficult to get a taxi outside the Lisbon train station, so after walking to a hotel and waiting for the taxi they called, we rolled up to our apartment at 12:30 am Córdoba time, tired and without access to all the information the owner had sent me.

However, the day had many compensations. I knit a lot. I had made two false starts on the current knitting project, and probably only made this third one stick because I wasn’t distracted by my audio course. The sight of Portugal going past the train windows was made all the sweeter by the knowledge that it may be a long time until our next train ride (not counting BART). And even in the impatience to just get into the apartment and sleep, we could see that the neighborhood was beautiful. This morning, we walked one tile-lined block to a delicious, cozy breakfast cafe.

The day’s explorations confirm that Lisbon is beautiful. It’s still hot. But as Joy and I walked past the ornate government building that turned out to be the seat of Parliament, she nodded up at the building and said “You think we’re hot . . .” Two men in uniform, a la Beefeaters, though with slightly less punishing hats, were ceremonially guarding the door and marching with their rifles. I wonder what crime one commits to land that gig in August.

In related news, I have been drinking various interesting fruit drinks all summer, and have resolved to make virgin mojitos at home now and then.

Desde aquí, se puede ver el vuelo de las palomas desde arriba. Un perspectivo muy raro y bonito, lo cual desafortunadamente mis videos no expresraran.

Sin embargo, los mosaicos romanos son bellísimos.

Y los jardines son llenos de fuentes.

On the one hand, going to Córdoba in August wasn’t the most strategic choice, even before our visit coincided with a heat wave.

On the other hand, this light. This light.

Drawn yesterday during lunch at the Mercado Victoria.

…when I’m as old as this man, to enjoy life as he does. You can just feel the sun on your own skin.

Right now I am working toward this life goal by spending hours in a museum, drawing and writing and marveling at art; and, at this exact moment, by making the most of the Area de Descanso. Yes, the Prado does have a nap room of sorts: a long, narrow, sun-filled corridor lined on one side with long couches. Ahhhhh.

When we started taking public transit again on the downslope of the pandemic, I swore I would always wear a mask on transit. Close quarters, lots of people coming and going, usually inadequate ventilation–and look, I hadn’t gotten a cold the whole time I was masked for COVID, and I liked it. However, this summer I have forgotten a lot, or in the case of the Paris Metro, put my mask on and then taken it off because it was so, so hot. So . . . I have a cold. Meh.

And of course, since we’re in Madrid for only four days, I hate to miss anything, and yet, I also want to enjoy myself, and forcing myself to go out and do stuff when I’m sick is just not fun. Today is a case in point. The plan was to go to Reina Sofia, the modern offshoot of the Prado, but I slept until 11 a.m. and still couldn’t imagine going anywhere, especially since we had reservations for dinner and flamenco tonight and it would take all the energy I have. So I stayed in the apartment, grateful for the time to rest and recover, trying not to feel like I “should” be seeing this city while I had the chance.

In general, when a tourist, I don’t like to put myself under the pressure of must do this, must do that. Even under ideal circumstances, you can’t get to everything you’d like to see without running yourself ragged. Add a minor illness and it’s goodnight, Irene. But there are two things I really want to see in Madrid. One is the Prado, and tomorrow we have nothing else planned but that. The other is Guernica. That seed may have been planted early. Growing up, I lived near New Haven, and my family went into New York fairly often for art, great restaurants, and so on. The Museum of Modern Art had a huge retrospective of Picasso when I was about 12, probably specifically because they were going to have to return Guernica to Spain. The bombing of the city was ordered by Franco’s forces, and Picasso’s impassioned response was commissioned by the Republic. Picasso did not want a Spain ruled by Franco to have his masterpiece, and he gave it into MoMA’s keeping under the conditions that once Franco was dead, it would return to Spain permanently. So when my family and I went to MoMA to see the exhibit, my dad said, “You have to see Guernica while it’s still here.” And I did. That was 43 years ago, so I want to see it in person again.

Fortunately, we have some time Wednesday before we take the train to Córdoba, and I’m going to go to Reina Sofía then. There is a sculpture courtyard and some other pieces I’d like to see there, but if all I manage is Guernica, I will be content with that.

In Paris, something that wasn’t quite a “must-do,” but up there for me, was the basilica at St.-Denis. If you, like me, have taken art history classes, you have probably learned about St.-Denis and how it took all the elements of Gothic architecture and put them together. In other words, if there is a “first Gothic church,” that’s the one, so if you love Gothic architecture, which I do, it’s on the short list. And it was a short Metro ride from our apartment. I went there on my own, with a sense of religious and artistic pilgrimage.

I was listening to Gilead, with its narrator–a humble, troubled Christian pastor–exploring ideas of blessing, grace, and mystery. I thought having that in my ears as I sat in the church would be lovely. And I was also reading a lot on a Facebook group called “god has the worst fan base,” whose posts (reposts from some of God’s most insufferable fans) reminded me of just how many really destructive beliefs are out there. So when I gazed upon the basilica’s famous tympanum (the half-circle over the front door), which portrays the Last Judgment, instead of shrugging it off as a bit of medieval theology, I was thinking of all those people who really, truly believe that we are all going to be judged, and mostly found deserving of hell. I’m sorry they drowned out the much kinder, wiser Christianity of the fictional pastor John Ames and his creator, Marilynne Robinson, but they did.

I snapped a photo of one small portion of the carving, a tableau of demons and damned, and have been drawing it ever since.

I left feeling shaken. I don’t usually fret much about the theology embodied in the churches I visit. They are aesthetic objects, and I enjoy them for their beautiful elements and shake my head over their less beautiful ones. But I couldn’t look at the tympanum of St.-Denis without thinking about all the people who have passed under it during the past nine centuries. Generation after generation of people living in constant terror of the pit of eternal torment that was about to open up under their feet. People whose loved ones died of plague or infection, rapidly and unshriven, and who were told by their religion that those beloveds were in hell. And how many still live under that weight today. I can still appreciate the art–I even like the demons, who are a lot more expressive and interesting than the placid humans in their clutches–but it’s haunting.

Anyway, I finally finished the drawing yesterday, so there it is. I left off working on the demon that you can see just barely outlined on the bottom, because I had miscalculated and not given it enough room. I think I’ll draw it separately, when I recover from this cold.

Also yesterday, we went to another one of those things that many people say one must do in Spain: churros and chocolate. Of course, something can’t really be obligatory unless you want it to be. And when it comes to dipping churros in rich, thickened but not too sweet liquid chocolate, we did want it to be.

We have just returned from our evening at Corral de Moreria. The problem with dinner theater, cabaret, and all such combination events is often that only one element is really excellent. You’ve got great music and the food is meh, or vice versa. But Joy read that at this place, the food, music and dancing are all extraordinary, and she was not steered wrong. Everything was wonderful, and I was glad I had made it my only activity of the day.

Now it’s back to horizontal mode, listening to a podcast, hoping to sleep so that my poor, cough-sore diaphragm can get some rest, and so that I can enjoy a nice, slow day at the Prado tomorrow. I wonder if they have benches where I can just curl up for a little nap if I need it . . . ?

Por fin, estamos en un país donde hablo el idioma. At last we are in a country in which I speak the language!

Only a fool would complain about traveling in Italy, Slovenia, Austria, Switzerland, and France, and I’m not complaining. But oh, what a relief to understand what people are saying and know that I can make myself understood! The woman who let us into the apartment rattled away en español, and I followed almost everything she said. I could ask for what I wanted in the little joint where we got lunch, though after reminding myself for three weeks to say “Merci,” not the “Gracias” that comes automatically to my lips, I’m having to un-remind myself.

We arrived in Barcelona five hours ago, and we will be here for less than 48 hours. All the trains from Arles to Madrid pass through Barcelona with a stopover of several hours, so we decided we couldn’t come to this marvelous city and just sit in the train station. Certainly not when Munchkin has never seen the city of Gaudí. She knows his architecture enough to know she wants to see it in person.

So we have tickets for a visit to Sagrada Familia tomorrow afternoon. (Park Guell would be even better, if it weren’t going to be 85°F.) Right now, Joy and Munchkin are visiting a couple of other Gaudí buildings. Tomorrow morning, we might visit the beach, or explore the Gothic Quarter, and tomorrow evening, we’re having dinner with a friend. Enough to have a taste of this city without trying to cram in more than can be enjoyably seen in two days.

Photo by David Salamanca on Unsplash