Alone in Galicia, Week 1
I took a break from talking to myself and spent a day in Santiago de Compostela.
View of Santiago de Compostela
3 May 2019
This month is supposed to be a vacation from my life: I get to focus on my writing without worrying about the bills etc (having spent the last two months grubbing for work so I could pay them in advance). It’s turning out to be a tour of the life I should have: a charming apartment with all the conveniences, in the center of town close to supermarkets, bookshops, theatres; clean air and trees; a safe neighborhood to walk around in. By tomorrow I’ll have my routine figured out.
I figured out how to operate the washer and dryer and managed not to shrink my clothes.
I plan to take a good, long walk everyday so I cased the area to choose a route. Found the used bookstore Yolanda recommended and got five books for 10 euros. They’re in Spanish (which I hope to learn, though 12 units of college Spanish and the basic Spanish course at Instituto Cervantes cannot be summoned when I need them). The bookstore/tea shop, churreria, and tapas bar are all along the route, so I’m set.
4 May 2019
There is a guitarist busking on the sidewalk across the street. His repertoire consists of Girl from Ipanema, Tears in Heaven, the theme from Charade, and inexplicably, Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas. He’s not bad, but if I hear Charade one more time I’m going to throw a coin at him from this height and distance.
A routine is emerging. I get up around 9am, do my stretches, then make breakfast. “Make” as in put on coffee, boil eggs, add milk to cereal. I do some writing and watch movies or series on the TV in the living room. At some point I take a walk, do groceries, get lunch. I read. Life is great.
Had lunch at A La Gareta on the corner. Ordered a tortilla, but the waitress said it was huge so I pointed to a “tosta” with ham and octopus. First she brought me a bowl of corkscrew pasta and I thought that was my lunch, but it was followed ten minutes later by two slices of bread heaped with jamon and pulpo.
Food in La Coruña is cheaper than in Manila (Food almost anywhere is cheaper than in Manila). I bought a quarter kilo of the local cheese, known as tetilla because it looks like a small boob, at the farmer’s market for 100 Philippine pesos. At the supermarket I bought sardines, squid, milk, kiwis, and a baguette for 380 Php. So my budget of 20 euros a day is sufficient.
Then I walked around the old city. This time I wandered into the side streets of Rua Real and managed not to get lost.
The temptation is to live on the couch and watch 30 Rock and Law and Order: SVU until the month is over. I am reading Valeria Luiselli’s Faces in the Crowd and thinking of what to do for a second novel.
The cathedral where St James is supposedly buried.
6 May 2019
Went to bed at 10pm last night without videos playing on my laptop (I cannot sleep in total silence) and slept soundly till 7am. Applying the quintuple bolt super door lock and putting the shades over the balcony doors probably helped. Yolanda assures me that La Coruña is perfectly safe, but I cannot shake my Manila-bred paranoia.
Watched Game of Thrones on the big TV while eating my cornflakes. It was not good; online fan reactions declared it a crime against humanity. True, in this age the author is truly dead and TV shows must fix all that is wrong with the world and make up for every disappointment the audience has ever experienced, resolve their issues with their parents and comfort them for having been maltreated in school. Characters can’t be fucked-up humans anymore. Then again the episode is riddled with flaws that can only be accounted for by sloppiness, laziness, and the desperate need to be done with the show. When a Starbucks paper cup appears in a medieval castle right in front of the star, it is time to pack up and go.
I wanted a big meal and decided to have lunch at the fairly posh restaurant on the corner, but first I went to the farmer’s market and bought fresh bread and a seafood tortilla. Then I dropped them off at the flat, but the tortilla looked so good, I ended up having it for lunch. Then I took my daily Vitamin D walk.
Strange: I enjoy domestic chores. I took out the vacuum cleaner and went around the flat sucking up dirt and hair. Vacuum cleaners do not seem very efficient. A broom and dustpan are preferable.
7 May 2019
Everything’s been going too swimmingly; today was the revenge of my regular life. The wi-fi isn’t working so I had to turn on data roaming (ugh). Turns out that the building is changing service providers and the signal won’t return till 8am tomorrow. So no TV for me today. Have been watching too much anyway.
Then I realized that I’d been using the wrong street address and I was expecting delivery of T-shirts my friend had ordered online. I visited the wrong address—The Chocolate Factory—and they promised to receive the package for me.
I’ve been eating properly and taking long walks, but now I am tempted to pop into the Burger King across the street.
8 May 2019
I am going to Santiago de Compostela. Yolanda is giving a talk at the university and I am tagging along. I haven’t had a conversation in a week, though I am on chat groups with my friends. My workshop group is the best thing to come out of the last year, apart from a skin care regimen and 50 pages of an unfinished novel.
Santiago is a pleasant 45-minute drive from La Coruña. Smooth, empty highways lined with green mountains and forests. The longer I stay in Galicia, the more aggravating and purgatorial life in Manila seems. Everything is just so much easier here: cleaner air, cheaper food, everything within walking distance.
Yolanda told me about Amancio Ortega, the billionaire founder of Zara/Inditex. He started out as a shop assistant selling mass-produced clothes, realized that he could manufacture smaller quantities of better quality and sell them at higher prices. The Inditex empire could bring Galician/Gallego culture to the global market (some text on T-shirts, traditional art motifs), but Zara is more interested in positioning itself as a New York-Paris-Milan fashion monger.
Two sisters who protested the inhumanity of war by living in color.
Cold, blustery day, wind ripping the umbrellas out of people’s hands. Quick tour of Santiago: the scallop shells that marked the pilgrim route, a secret garden, the cathedral where St James (“Killer of Moors”) is supposed to be buried, many many churches and souvenir shops. Met Chus (Maria Jesusa), who sells jewelry made of silver and jet.
At the university cafeteria we met a Galician novelist named Xavier Alcala. Alcala knew of Filipino history and mentioned “los ultimos de los Filipinos,” which had alluded to the last Spanish soldiers in the archipelago and is now a colloquial term for “hold-outs.” The Philippines, he noted, was barely a colony, and then it was sold to the US who wanted a foothold in Asia. Alcala wrote his first novel in 1974 and was told that no one in Spain would publish it. “Hitler and Mussolini died in 1945, but Franco lived another 30 years.” I noted that the Marcoses ruled the Philippines for 20 years, then there was the Edsa Revolution, and 30 years later his family is back in power. What Spain and all its colonies have in common: a history of strongman rule. I blame the church.
Yolanda’s talk was held in a large, ornate hall with baroque moldings, velvet chairs, murals on the ceiling. Her Gallego poetry anthology, illustrated by comic book artists, is a handsome volume, which of course I cannot read.
Late lunch at La Tita, a favorite of the student crowd—caldo gallego, a bitter vegetable soup, tortilla, fried squid. Santiago is both university town and pilgrimage site, and Thursday night is the busiest of the week. (On Friday the students go home to their families.) On one streetcorner there is a bar called Paris, where they start drinking. Then they visit every bar on the street until they get to the last one, called Dakkar. The locals call it the Paris-Dakkar race.
Walked through the park and botanical garden, which has panoramic views of the cathedral and the university. Yolanda pointed out the bench where her father was babysitting her while her mother sat her exams for a second degree in pharmacy. He was so engrossed in the newspaper that he didn’t notice his one-year-old baby wander off. After searching all over the park, he was about to call the police when he spotted her climbing a staircase. Her mother was so traumatized by the incident that she decided to ditch her two degrees and be a housewife.
In the park there are life-size statues of two local eccentrics: a pair of sisters who strolled around the gray postwar city in brightly colored outfits. They were believed to have been driven mad by family tragedy: their brothers, and the husband of one of them, were tortured and murdered. Their gaiety was a protest against the crappiness of life. I like a city that honors its eccentrics.
On a park bench sits a statue of Ramon Valle-Inclan of the 1898 generation of writers, los ultimos de los Filipinos.
The old casino has been turned into a bistro that knows how pretty it is and does not allow photography. After coffee and meeting some more older writers from the Academy, we visited El Coubeiro, a charming three-storey bookshop that just turned fifty.
Finally we stopped at the cathedral, where pilgrims have been paying tribute to the remains of St James since the 9thcentury. Y says the bones in the silver casket probably belonged to a heretic. Not that a DNA test would matter to the pilgrims, many of whom schlepped across the Pyrenees to get there, a dangerous journey that could take months or even years. It doesn’t take much to imagine how the city looked in the Middle Ages, with its narrow streets of cobblestones, gray buildings, shops catering to tourists. There were pilgrims in the cathedral square in neon-colored parkas, bearing neon-colored backpacks. Inside, the cathedral is undergoing renovation, scaffolds and plastic sheets everywhere. There is a chapel where you can have your wedding if you are very rich. Tiny passages lead down into the sepulchre, where the saint’s remains in their silver casket are visible through glass and iron bars. Behind the altar, the faithful queue to embrace the image of St James—by far the most touchy-feely saint I’ve heard of. On the way out I stopped at the gift shop to get the scallop shell Leo asked for. The shell is the symbol of the camino—pilgrims picked them up on the beach, used them for eating and drinking, and took them home as proof that they’d completed the pilgrimage and were more likely to enter heaven (or at least get time off from purgatory).