Waiting for the three kings: fiery epiphanies in Girona ...Somehow it’s been five weeks since I wrote in this blog. Bad form, but December was insane and I suspect the coming months will be much the same with the front door beginning to revolve. But it’s also a function of most of the “new” things about living in France being behind us. That might sound like we’re bored, but we’re not. We’re more deeply ensconced, daily life has a shape to it that’s begun to feel familiar. At the same time, the distance between us and what at times feels like “the old life” increases, which provokes all kinds of existential anxieties such as ones that begin with the question “who are we, anyway?”
I’m sometimes amazed (still amazed) that a place I'd never heard of two years ago is now so important to me. Narbonne? Even though it is a major city of this region, I probably would have lived the rest of my life without once hearing its name, and yet now I follow its politics, I listen carefully to its civic plans, I marvel at its modernity even though it is one of the oldest cities in Europe. How could a place like this have ever passed below my notice for forty years and how many other dozens of cities are there like this in the world that I am poorer for not knowing? Narbonne, for now, will have to represent them all and I realize that as I walk its streets and do my daily work in it, that my sense of home has changed permanently. This is a Torontonian of forty years speaking. Among all the people you know, I might be the most rooted one of all, the one least likely to feel settled outside of his hometown. And yet, here I am, wondering how I’m ever going to go home. (For all you grandmothers of certain children out there, just let me say that’s rhetorical. We’ll come home. Promise.)
Five months ago, this place was a dream realized. Now it’s a house, a school, a workplace, a collection of businesses where we shop and go out to eat, where people know who we are (even if they don’t know our names: a strange formality that obtains here ... people don’t ask your name and don’t offer theirs), as well a sense of place that can’t be faked. There is now no longer anything casual about our presence here. We have put down roots; thin roots, but roots just the same. We’ll tear these roots up next Christmas (we plan to stay on a little longer now) and then what will the world look like, feel like? Gazing on photos of our friends’ kids the other night we realized that the adults will be more or less the same (more grey, more paunch-slash-droop perhaps) but the kids are going to be completely different, as will ours to those who haven’t seen them in this time. On a hike yesterday with Anne and the boys, we were talking about how provisional one’s identity can seem. (Anne and I were talking about this. The boys were discussing the size and utility of their walking sticks.) The busy components of daily life—the streets you drive, the people you see every day at school, the parties you hold, the parties you go to, your favourite restaurants, the people you speak to on the phone every couple of days, the guy who grinds your coffee, the friends you worry about, the friends who worry about you—all of this has a bracing necessity to it, gives you a sense of being enveloped in purpose. So when you leave it, you should feel bereft, right? And we have at times, we have missed people so deeply, and been lonesome for them, and sometimes even wondered if the space we took up in their lives is closing over like a gash in the bark of a tree, but we’ve also discovered that the urge to make order out of one’s days is pretty deep, and you import your talent for ritual and repetition to a new place easily. A lot of people already know this; I didn’t because all of my traditions have taken place against the same backdrop. It shocks me to feel at home somewhere else.
This doesn’t mean you should stop obsessively missing us or staring at our pictures or checking this blog hourly. Although we’re wondering now if people have given up on it, hence that little survey to the left. Will you answer it, please? Apparently we get 200 visitors a week, but maybe it’s just you checking back 200 times. In which case, we’ll call you from now on, okay?
DETOX
One of the side effects of Getting French has been exposing our bodies to an even-greater-than-normal supply of mind-blowing food. Read: wine, white flour, butter, saturated fat, delicious dairy (the siren call of cheese), caffeine, and sweets. So as of January 8 Anne and I are “detoxing” for about three weeks, which means none of the above is entering our bodies, although after four days of sizzling headaches, I went back on coffee. But with soy milk and honey, so shut up in the cheap seats, okay? One week in and I’m down about six pounds, Anne looks impossibly hot, and both of us would drown a sack of puppies for a steaming baguette with ripe camembert on it. There’s a reason we humans like fat and sugar: it’s gooooooo-ooood. I think when this is over I won’t touch chicken for a month. And as for the gluten-free, wheat-free, yeast-free “bread” we’ve been eating, I’m going to track down the bloodless freak who invented it and I’m going to colonically irrigate him with 35% cream. But in the meantime, our livers are thanking us for this even if our souls are not, and even better, I’m growing my own sprouts which I know is deeply gay, but they’re really nice in salads. (I mean “gay” here not in the sense of being homosexual, but in the sense of growing your own sprouts.)
“WINTER” IN NARBONNE
Now with Christmas and New Year’s in the past, we enter the heart of winter here, which is not what you would call it. Yesterday I was pruning fruit trees and pulling out the too-numerous green stalks of the artichokes I don’t think we’ll be wanting to eat in the summer. This weekend in go the winter peas and a couple other things: the planting season is just around the corner. Every week of the year here, something is in bloom. Right now it’s the big white flowers that look like inverted frosted bowls, as well as the little purple numbers opening on the short, spikey stalks we saw in the mountains yesterday. The continuing fecundity of this part of the world sometimes strikes me as comic. As if there’s so much blooming to be done that all the plants drew straws and the unlucky ones have to open in January. Nothing is truly asleep here. The grass outside my window is green; the trees in the yard have already budded and some people are still harvesting last fall’s chard. One of the undiscovered things about life here is about to happen: a garden! It’s been so many years since I had a proper garden. Really since before Anne and I met. I haven’t had more than tomatoes and beans since I lived on Manning Avenue in the late eighties.
We had a pretty marvellous Christmas and New Year’s, although it was strange at times to be just the four of us when this season is usually so full of people for us. We got our dose of warm Christmassy people goodness on the 26th and 27th, when we went out to Mas Blanc to spend a couple of days with the Huggans. Bob “Invincible” and Isabel “Cardshark” Huggan made us feel right at home as they usually do, and this time there was the added bonus of Abbey, their daughter, and her boyfriend Saulis, who had come for the holidays. Ah, when I think back to those days of munching chocolate right after our healthful salads, I could cry. Alack, our camera was out of juice by the time we got to Mas Blanc, so I have only the photographic stylings of Isabel “Quick-study” Huggan to prove it ever happened.
A "friendly" "game" of "cards"
Max, Ben, and their new friend MatthiasAfter New Year’s, we headed south to Barcelona to spend a few days in that city. I’d never been there and was amazed by it. First by its beauty and sensuality, second by the incredible rudeness of the people. Anne and I have been warned numerous times by various cognoscenti that city “X”, be it Paris, London, New York, Kitchener, you name it, was full of the rudest people on earth. And we’ve never had the pleasure of meeting those people in the places in which they were alleged to congregate. But that’s because they were staffing the markets, stores, and restaurants of Barcelona. I’ve rarely experienced a disconnect as great as the one between the cultural qualities of a city and its people. I know these are dangerous generalizations, and granted the weather was crummy, and Christmas had just ended and Epiphany was right around the corner (a bigger day than Christmas in Spain) and so on and so forth, but rilly, people. Why so grumpy? Lady who made me a disgusting nearly white “cappucino” with almost no espresso in it after ignoring me for five minutes in her empty shop and then charged me an extra euro when I asked for the coffee to go: is your world really that twisted? Did merdeing me really make you feel better? I do hope so, because you put so much effort into it. Surely a lip waxing and taking all of the curlers out of your hair would make you happier. Dude at the fruit stall who insisted on picking my mango for me and put the rottenest one he had in a paper bag for me knowing I wouldn’t look at it until I got somewhere where I could peel it: hey dude, that wasn’t cool and what’s more, I think I can smell cheap brandy on you too. And Madame? Yes, you who snootily informed us that you couldn’t measure our child’s feet in order to try on a pair of shoes in your shoestore because you didn’t have such a device owing to the fact that you are a “specialty” store? I'm not going to even bother to think up something clever for you: just fuck off.
And as for the waiter who sternly warned me not to take a picture of the interior of his restaurant, here’s my reply:
Nice painting, huh? The artist is Javier Mariscal and he’s pretty hot. That thing above, about 10 feet long by three feet high, done on plain white paper in pastel and watercolour would sell for about 20,000 Euros. But you can look at it for free and Mr. Mariscal can have the promo for free. Click on his name and see more of his work. He’s pretty amazing.
But despite the coldness of the people in Barcelona, we loved the city and will give it a second chance when the weather is nicer. And maybe we won’t stay on the Rambla, which I suspect gave us as accurate a vision of the city as staying at Queen and Yonge would give the visitor to Toronto. We did see some absolutely brilliant things, including Casa Batllo, one of the buildings designed and built by Antonio Gaudi.
(A view of the inner, sun-filled atrium/stairwell is to the left.) Gaudi, whose work when seen in pictures has always struck me as fey, is, in real life, startlingly erotic, fresh, and his materials have a wonderful warmth and depth to them. Like Dali, who has always struck me as the first party guest you’d get tired of, I’d always thought of Gaudi as a one-trick pony (I still want to punch Dali in the nose) but the scale of his work, as here and in Parc Gruell and the Casa Mila, gives a weight to his ideas that Dali’s two-dimensions never granted him. Also, the sheer brute work involved in Gaudi’s accomplishments means the things with his name on them are limited, whereas Dali created more than 5000 works of painting, sculpure, and drawing, and almost all of them have a pair of spindly legs in them somewhere.
The Redhill-Simards atop Gaudi's Casa BattloThe old part of Barcelona, called “Barcino” by the Romans is really lovely too, if also a tourist trap. One of the best things we saw there was the excavated remains of the city, uncovered under one of the palaces and stretching for a couple of city blocks underground. You go down about ten metres to it and walk in the Roman streets, look through the Roman doorways at laundries, fish-preparation plants, and even a winery. None of it is faked up or overly interpreted for you: it’s set out plainly, cleaned but not restored, and it’s one of the most stirring archeological sites I’ve ever been in. The kids got a little bored, but Anne and I walked through it with our mouths open. One of the little details that will always stay with me was seeing old Roman milestones being recycled as building materials. Incredible layers.
A fish-preparing plant in Barcino, circa 100 AD
Shops along a Roman streetGREETING THE THREE KINGS. CAREFULLY.
After Barcelona, we went up to Girona to meet some of our Goodness/Bondat friends. Pere, Anna-Karina, Jordi (right, with the gorgeous Joffre)
and his wife and kids had invited us to take in their Epiphany parade, which is the arrival of the three kings and is the biggest moment in the social calendar of Catalan children. Girona was the perfect size for this intimate, ancient and joyful ceremony, and it seemed like every last one of its 70,000 inhabitants was out in the streets. The parade begins with the convergence of three separate bands of merrymakers in a park near the old Roman wall, where they meet and announce the arrival of the three kings, who then parade at great length through the streets. This kids hold lanterns and guide their way.
Candy is thrown, marching bands play, clowns rouse the crowds into endless choruses of the same song (one that Maxime had learned by the end of the evening, realizing, in his eminently practical way, that if he sang it, candy would fly through the air in his direction). This was one of those perfect moments that’s hard to foresee coming: being among new friends, welcomed into the family for a very personal ritual, and delighting in the freshness of something that is an old tradition. I felt as if we could have been on the streets of Girona circa 1400. Apart from one small detail. I was filming each of the kings coming down the street toward us when this happened:We were all standing about ten feet away when it happened. At first, I thought the fire was a cute little furnace burning in the front of the carriage; a rustic touch. But then people were rushing at the king to get him off the carriage and we were all enveloped in a caustic smoke made of burning rubber and extinguisher foam. It was even a little scary. Later, when we joined the rest of Jordi’s extended family further along the parade route, the kings passed again.
Yep, he did the rest of it on foot. The show must go on. As a rather amusing sidebar, you can see Pere in that clip, at bottom right, talking to a bearded man who, as it turns out, is the editor of one of the major newspapers in Catalonia, El Punt (in which I was interviewed for Goodness back at the end of November). What are they discussing? The fact that I have the Great Fire of Girona on tape. After the parade, I was bundled off to the newspaper’s offices, where the footage was downloaded. It was there that I was told the second king had been played by the president of one of Catalonia’s biggest banks. (I guess these honours go to upstanding citizens.) So the fire at the parade was news in more ways than one. The next morning’s newspaper featured a sort of fumetti made of nine images taken from my film. My fame in Catalonia expands.
One more cool thing about the parade was that there were a couple of people in it whose job it was to go up to new two-year-olds and collect their pacifiers. Evidently, the arrival of the three kings is also used to help young children kick the habit. They're told a couple of months before the parade that the sucker-collectors will be there and the kids will trade their pacifiers for lots of presents from the three kings. A rather brilliant strategy. Here's one suce-beringed collector with his bounty.
Suckahs!Well, that's it for now. Here, it’s life back to “normal." The kids in school, me back at my desk, Anne back at hers, and rice crackers with homemade chicken salad on them for lunch. We’ll try not to write again until we can drink. Until then, we miss you all and send love from our “home” to your “home”.
Memories of those laid-back Barcelonians
