“Good Ol’ Spain”
The lady was French though she’d either been born in Spain or came as a little girl. Her father was a diplomat. He didn’t request Spanish citizenship for her so though she stayed in Madrid she always remained a French citizen I believe. I don’t know what happened to her father but she and her brothers remained in Spain. During the Spanish Civil War she was a teenager and became a Socialist. She was denounced and arrested and spent the whole war in prison. Almost every night … Read More
Tag: Spain
“Carol” (A portrait from the past)
I met her in Paris where she worked as a maid. She was a peasant from around Burgos (northern Spain). Her mother died early and her father and stepmother treated her inhumanly. When she was five years old they sent her to a convent. There she wasn’t handled with silk gloves either; Spain was simply a hard country where the strongest survived. Five year old Carol scrubbed the convent’s floors and washed clothes from morning to night. She stood on a chair raised up on blocks … Read More
“Esteban” (A portrait from the past)
Esteban is a Spaniard of Catalan mother and Andalusian father. He grew up in a small Catalan city. He came from Barcelona to Paris with dreams of journalistic glory as an envoy of a literary magazine. He had the great sensitivity of a writer but for success he lacked two basic qualities: education and money. In Barcelona, the magazine published his rubric a la Dear Abby which he surely handled well because he knew how to dig into life situations and his religious morality concorded with that … Read More
ALMANZOR’S REVENGE?
A vacation souvenir topic:
Almanzor’s revenge? Of course not! But this comparison came to mind as an analogy to ‘Montezuma’s revenge’ which afflicts tourists in Mexico. A strange incident which occurred in the mountains of Alpuharas, Spain, might look like a manifestation of Almanzor’s burst of bad humour. But if Montezuma has his good reasons for revenge, Almanzor could have nothing against me — on the contrary — as the rest of the story will explain. In my view, what happenned, was a sort of communication, a magic message that … Read More