Food, Customs, Art, and Architecture: Madrid, Segovia, Toledo

In all the world’s great cities, you can find any kind of food you want. Madrid, of course, is no exception. To explore the culture of Madrid is, in part, to explore Madrid’s cosmopolitan cuisine—delicious sushi, pizza, pasta, a cold lemon Fanta. Beneath and beyond the international, though, is the comida of the country, the smells and flavors of its cultures. What have I tasted so far? Paella de mariscos, paella arroz negro, tapas, sangria, Spanish wines (at prices like beer in Mexico), gazpacho, and, thanks to the nudging of seasoned Madrid residents, Peter Thompson and Dale Fuchs, a rather surprising Roquefort sandwich (for .70) and an “exotica” treat--mango/passion fruit/pineapple filled with vanilla ice cream on a stick. And: I visited the Museo del Jamon (the "ham museum.")

Although, I don’t eat ham, I have to say the experience of hams hanging everywhere around the room in this Spanish deli is as transcendentally medieval as the meat markets of Latin America, but more, well, European. Okay, a cross between a New York City deli and a south Mexican carnicería, only, this is a specialty shop—ham, ham, and more ham. I did enjoy a sandwich vegetal (tomato, lettuce, hardboiled egg—an interesting Spanish vegetable—on a croissant) with a copa de vino blanco and a saucer of olives (you know, I never was an olive eater before I came to Spain. These olives are to write home about.) And then there was Segovia’s fascination with suckling pig, where I had the freshest, coolest gazpacho. Now, the paella is fascinating, and especially the arroz negro—rice black with the ink of the cuttlefish.

What excites, though, are the fruit and vegetables. Okay, the golden plums from the tree of the nuns is an exceptional story. The fruit trees around the university area, as well, are a discovery (apricots, tiny red and yellow plums coming into season.) It’s the fruit and vegetables in the market in Segovia, though, that enlightened me as to why so many artists focus their still lifes (bodegones) on food. Oranges, cherries, nectarines, eggplants, apples, onions, braids of garlic—the smells, textures, and colors in the midday light in the market: sublime.

So, too, the art of Madrid’s Prado. This week I made two trips to the Prado, one on Sunday to see the incredible Bosch paintings, another on Friday afternoon, after the “treasure hunt” in Puerto del Sol (where I discovered the cheap sandwich at Café de Fuerpas), to see not only the work of Ribera, but the paintings by Dürer, el Greco, Velasquez, Ruben, Pantini, and many others, including the incomparable Goya.

If you look at a portrait by Goya of a the lady in black lace, you will see that she holds a fan. What could be more quintessentially Spanish woman? There are fan shops everywhere in Madrid; they are sold on the street corner, on park benches and in high-end department stores. No, they are not just for tourists. At mass on Sunday, ladies pulled out their fans and pushed perfumed air across the church. In the Prado, a young girl had her fan tucked in the back of her belt, like a workman’s tool. Handpainted fans—from children’s cartoons and tourist icons to elegant florals and landscapes—belong to the feminine culture of Spain.

A little over an hour from Madrid, Spanish culture resonates throughout Segovia, one of Spain’s deep pockets of history. Here is not only a standing Roman aqueduct, old and beautiful Romanesque churches, a stunning cathedral, but also a castle like an illustration in a book of fairy tales. And a half hour from Madrid by high-speed train, the medieval city of Toledo presents Spain’s Moorish, Christian and Jewish architecture and, everywhere you look it seems, another masterpiece by El Greco. It’s hot in Toledo, by the way. When we arrived at the train station for our return journey, about 5:30p, the thermometer read 42* C. (Do the math.)

Culture tip: Don’t wait for the subway train doors to open (from the inside or the outside.) Push the green button, and mira! You are in or out. If you want to use your U.S. credit card, know your pin number, or, apparently, carry American Express (at least at the train station.) If you do have your credit card, don’t stand in line in the first ticket vending room waiting for your little paper number to come up—down by the platforms there are automated vending machines where you can purchase and print your tickets. You know this, but just a reminder: Don’t try to shop between 2 and 4 in the afternoon. There is lunch, behind closed doors (no one needs to know what you choose to eat) and siesta. Dinner won’t come again until 9 or after, so do make sure you stop and enjoy the leisurely lunch. Oh, and ASK for your check. Probably, you should ask a half an hour before you want it. The word is tipping, as in the US and elsewhere, is not a custom here. Apparently, the waiters are not anxious to bring the bill, either.

El diario

Sunday, July 8, 2007 El Prado
Finally, a day to sleep in for a little while, nine at least. The plan for the day was to go to the Prado for a first glimpse, and specifically to find the gallery with the extraordinary paintings of Hieronymous Bosch and other 15th century Flemish painters. The triptych “Garden of Delight” dominates one wall in this room, with El Bosco’s round table painting of the Seven Deadly Sins in the middle and the “Hay Wain” opposite the “Garden.” It’s a stunning experience to see the original of a painting you know very well from a reproductions in books, postcards, album covers, but especially stunning to see these paintings, so weird and effusive in the medieval tradition of the grotesque and the allegorical. Bosch’s figures are the visual equivalent of Dante’s contra passo, highly symbolic, human behaviors and their interior correspondences matched and externalized, like a visualized aura.

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I am in a poetry workshop in the morning and a “Form and Idea” seminar in the afternoon, and each evening there is an event. On Monday, we watched Luis Bunuel’s 1961 film, Viridiana “a parable for the Spanish Civil War,” which was banned in Spain until 1977 for its criticism of the Franco regime and of the Catholic Church (criticism that seemed very subtle to me.) On Tuesday and Wednesday, different members of the program read from their work. These days are very full, with little time unscheduled, so a moment like the one when we discovered the golden plums on the nuns’ tree—which our friend climbed up on the fence to pilfer for us (an Augustine moment for which she later went and apologized) is priceless. I am still struggling with the Madrid schedule and find myself up very late at night, trying to write and read and even stay connected to home. As much as I am enjoying myself, I do miss my family and friends and garden, and I wish I had more time to write.

Thursday Segovia
I rose early, early on Thursday morning to get across town to climb on the charter bus that would take us to Segovia, a charming city. Here it was I finally felt like I was in Spain, much more so than in Madrid. The aqueduct, of course, stuns. The patterns on the walls, which our guide said were different for each family, enchant. Here is a magnificent cathedral and several smaller Romanesque churches, including a tiny 13th c. church on the outskirts that reportedly was used by the Knights Templar.

Friday lecture on Spanish civil war, treasure hunt and Prado

Friday began with Professor Peter Thompson’s lecture on the Spanish Civil War and its roots in class conflict. I am accustomed to think of Spanish history in terms of its medieval religious and “racial” encounters and exchanges, its relationship to the Americas, and its emerging nationalism at a time when most of the nations of Europe were beginning to consolidate a sense of nation. I was far less familiar with the class divisions—church, landowners, and army in conflict with the poor, from the time of the feudal serf and peasant through the 19th century and on into the 20th century. I had read Raymond Carr’s A History of Spain, which is a good survey, but each chapter is discrete, focused on a period. Peter’s talk made connections as he traced this trajectory to a time in Spanish history that looms in the near past, so near it is almost the present, and is distinct in some ways from the modern history of the rest of Europe or of the western world.

After the lecture, Anny, Brenda and I sat off on the treasure hunt that Dale Fuchs and Peter Thompson had devised for us. Mostly in the Puerto del Sol, it took us into the Casa de Libros (where I bought a slender volume of Gloria Fuertes’s poems to read and translate), to find a bullfightt poster, ogle at the hams, eat the nondescript sandwich that turned out to be delicious and the exotic ice cream bar, to find the autograph of the Nestlé girl, to discover who is in the box at a church on the plaza that is closed (although a blind man sells lottery tickets in a box-booth just outside the church.) We finished that fun with a second trip to the Prado, where we spent several hours, beyond Ribera’s haunting San Sebastian and St. Paul the hermit and the Flemish still lifes on our quest. I, particularly, spent my time in the Goya galleries, especially visiting with the black paintings. They cut cold to the soul, especially in contrast to the court paintings, the religious work that came before. The connection is there, the style, something in the faces or the dress—but the spirit, mood and tone. . .the vision. . .has changed.

The special Panini exhibit was also fascinating, again a reminder that the art of the modernists and surrealists did not spring full grown from the painters’ mind. This connections, the continuity were especially driven home for me by the exhibit I saw in March at the Guggenheim, “El Greco to Picasso..” Here were paintings arranged not by chronology or artist, but by theme or topic—a weeping woman, a grotesque, a child, a still life. Now, I am seeing many of these same paintings again, here in Spain, but back into their usual museum context, and I feel my experience of them has been changed and complicated—enlightened. The book I recently read, From El Greco to Goya: Painting in Spain 1561-1828, refocused on each of the major artists, as does seeing the work, especially that of El Greco, in a variety of contexts in Spain, but now I am also seeing a transcendent art history, that cuts across the time line diachronically.

Saturday Toledo
In Toledo on Saturday, we certainly saw many paintings by El Greco, whose colors and shapes are unmistakable. Beyond the art and even the arroz negro paella, Toledo is a city to experience architecture, particularly in the blend and juxtaposition of Spain’s three religion-centered cultures. The streets are narrow and winding; the castle sits away from the center of the town—Toledo, even in the scorching heat—seems shaded by the medieval past and modern history, layered and concentric.