The climb up the tower featured on the tower’s interior walls many old photographs from the past hundred or so years in San Sebastián, as well as some placards that gave a history of the city and its environs.
One of the placards mentioned that Franco had summered in the city from the end of the civil war until his death in the autumn of 1975. It had never, ever occurred to me that summering would be a thing a fascist dictator would do. Wasn’t he too busy, you know, executing people and stuff?
This one goes out to Ricardo, obviously.
When I told my friend Ricardo that my proposed itinerary for my trip included San Sebastián, he told me that San Sebastián was one of his favorite places in all of Europe.
He mentioned a selfie he had taken there, and directed me to where he’d taken it from. It’s atop a hill on the west side of town, he said, and added,
On top of the hill is a small amusement park, and in the amusement park is the tower I was on top of. When I was in San Sebastián in both 2012 and 2015 there was an old lady who ran the admission stand to the tower and she had a small dog named Miru. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re still there. Pay whatever the admission fee is and then march up the stairs to the top and you’ll be where I was.
The hill is called Monte Igueldo, and it’s prominent from pretty much everywhere in the city, and so I and a friend walked there one afternoon. The theme park is mostly closed right now–it’s not yet the high season–but the tower was there, and it was open, so I told the friend that I pretty much had to climb the tower. When we got there, sure enough, the old woman was working the concession. I asked her, “¿Dónde está su perrito?” (“Where is your little dog?”) She opened the door to the admission booth to reveal him on his bed. She said he was tired from running around. I told her that my friend had told me about the tower and her and her dog, and that was what had brought me there. She said, “When you come back down the tower, you can hold him and we’ll take a picture and you can send it to your friend.” I smiled and thanked her and climbed the tower.
The views were every bit as good as Ricardo had promised. I particularly enjoyed the vantage to the west, where I could see a bit of the rugged shoreline and a spot where the ocean waves churned against the rocks, and the foam from that churning turned the water white and turquoise against the deeper blue of the water further out. Even from where I stood, I could feel the energy of that spot. My friend had told me on the walk over about a big change in her life, a break-up after many years of relationship, and she sat on a bench atop the tower and faced that roiling surf for a long time. I let her be. I know what witnessing and internalizing the energy of the world can do for you when your heart is looking for answers.
After a while, we came back down the tower, and I got to meet Miru, and he was a sweet and very cute little guy, and the señora did in fact insist that we take a picture, and then I insisted that she be in the photo with me, and here you go, La Señora del Torre y Su Perrito Miru, and now you too can witness the magic of a world that is both very, very big, and very, very small.
PS. You can find Ricardo’s piece about his 2015 visit to San Sebastián here.
It’s like estuary (Bilbao) versus ocean (San Sebastián). Bilbao has the more interesting architecture and city layout, plus it has the iconic Guggenheim Museum. It’s the larger of the two. San Sebastián has the ocean and the beach and its famous surfing. It’s smaller, and it feels that way.
From what I can tell, for most people, the ocean wins out. No one that I can recall has ever told me how great Bilbao is. But many friends, old and new, from inside Spain and out, have told me of either their love for San Sebastián or that it was a place they were told they simply needed to visit.
And for me? I don’t know. The ocean is amazing. But I’m a mountain boy, and Bilbao is nestled on both sides by mountains.
It was my first night in San Sebastián, and we were out trying our best to ignore the rain and do a pintxos tour. Pintxos are the Basque version of tapas, small plates like tapas but less for sharing, though every bit as social an experience as tapas are in the rest of Spain.
They were showing the second leg of the Roma-Liverpool Champions League semi-final on the TV in the bar we were in. Liverpool had just scored their first goal, and so were up 2-6 on aggregate, and all the guys behind the bar reacted with excitement, and I declared right then that Liverpool were going through to the final. I asked the guys who worked at the bar–obviously soccer fans, every one of them, and social fellows as well–whom they would root for in the final, Real Madrid or Liverpool. I was curious if they would root for Real Madrid, as “uno de nuestros” (“one of ours”), or if they’d root for Liverpool, because fuck Real Madrid.
Most of them answered unequivocally: Liverpool.
I asked who they rooted for, mostly because I couldn’t remember who the local team was. One of the guys pointed to the clock on the wall. It had the coat of arms of Real Sociedad on it. Ah, yes, now I remembered.
A few minutes later he explained to me basically everything I needed to know about San Sebastián. “The two worst teams,” he said, “are Real Madrid and Athletic Bilbao.” Which is to say : the team most closely associated with Franco and the dictatorship, and Sociedad’s local rivals.
Bilbao was clearly far, far worse than Real Madrid.
So much for Basque unity.
They aren’t kidding. Bring an umbrella.
The first Monday I was in Barcelona was Sant Jordi’s Day, and as I walked around among the throngs of people–for it is a very busy day in Barcelona–at one point I came across a little stage sponsored by some company or another, where I watched a duo–a singer, who also played ukulele, and a percussionist with shakers and tambourines and whatnot–perform what seemed to be essentially children’s songs. Hard to tell for sure, as they were speaking and singing only in Catalán, which to my ear falls somewhere between Italian and French in its closeness to Spanish.
At one point, the singer took a few minutes to explain something about music and European audiences. As best I could understand it–again, he was speaking Catalán–he was saying that, perhaps because of the same sort of musical traditions that we hear now in classical music, Europeans tend to hear and feel the solid pulse of a 4/4 rhythm on the downbeats, that is, the ones and threes, whereas in places like America that have assimilated aspects of African music, listeners feel the backbeats, the twos and fours. Which is to say that Europeans, when listening to a pop/rock/R&B/hip-hop song, will often clap on the ones and threes, which to anyone versed in pop/rock music will seem incredibly square.
He finished by explaining that the next song was supposed to have something of the funky feel of a rock song, and he asked people to clap along on the twos and fours.
And when he started playing the song, sure enough, the crowd split about evenly between people who clapped on the twos and fours and those who clapped on the ones and threes. Not funky, Barcelona.
(If what I said above about rhythm didn’t make sense, let me explain a bit more thoroughly. Almost all pop/rock/etc. songs are in 4/4 time, meaning there are four beats to a bar, a bar being the basic unit out of which the song is built.
Put on a song you like and count along with the beat like this: “One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.” This should feel pretty natural. Almost everyone automatically starts counting on the one–it also just feels natural.
Once you have the rhythm of the song in your body, keep counting, and clap along with the music the way you would at a concert. Most Americans will naturally clap on the twos and fours.)
I’m sure I’m hardly the only American who is accustomed to treating coins as basically a nuisance. I generally put them in my pocket, then later drop them in the origami box I keep them in at home, a pocket in one of my workbags, or the cupholder in my car. There they’ll stay until they’ve piled up sufficiently that it’s worth taking them to the bank to turn them into, you know, real money.
But here in the Eurozone, the smallest bill is a five, and I find my habit butting up against that reality. I can’t just throw them in my bag and forget about them. All those 1- and 2-euro coins add up pretty quickly.
If I am here to deepen my understanding of flow, and I sit down to write because I am in the moment feeling called to write, and then the moment deepens and I continue to write rather than let the call of “I am here in Barcelona, why am I spending time writing!?” distract me, then am I not doing exactly what I called myself here to do? There is a part of me saying I am missing it. And another part saying, in a calm voice: No. This is exactly right. If you are going to choose against the flow of the moment, you are choosing a temporary self (the one that’s in Barcelona) rather than your true self. And you are here in exploration of your true self. So write what needs to be written. There will be plenty of time to meet Barcelona. Flow lives in the space of faith. So trust, because flow can be trusted.
Each of the last three of mornings, as I’ve been getting ready to leave the Airbnb, I’ve heard strains of classical guitar music coming through the walls. At first, I thought it was recorded music, but by the second morning, I listened closely enough to realize that it was someone practicing. And boy did that bring up some emotions.
When last I was in Spain, 24 years ago, I still had aspirations to pursue classical guitar as my vocation. I practiced three hours every evening during my stay in Madrid, and I never once felt like I was somehow missing out on being there. Practicing like that was just something I did. I was pretty dedicated.
I burned out not long after my return to the States. Back then, I didn’t know why I burned out, but I do now: My practice was always rooted, if you can call it that, in the future. It was like, “Someday, when I get good at this, I’ll finally enjoy it.” Almost never did I come out of my head and truly experience my practice in the moment.
If your motivation is external to you, you’re asking for that motivation to collapse if you ever sense, as I came to, that in reality there’d be no real satisfaction upon attaining the destination you imagined. (Or, perhaps more accurately, that there is no such thing as a destination at all).
But in hearing that phantom guitarist play these last few mornings, I was struck by something that I lost when I burned out, and haven’t really ever much grasped over the intervening two-and-a-half decades: the classical guitar is a beautiful instrument. And I’m kinda feeling that maybe I miss it in my life.
Last night, my Airbnb host took me for a walk up to the top of Turó de la Rovira. It’s one of the tallest hills in Barcelona, and offers three-hundred-sixty-degree views of the city. And damn, what a beautiful city. Looking south, I could see all of the main part of Barcelona spread out before me (La Sagrada Familia being the most obvious landmark) and then, beyond that, the sea.
Being atop a tall hill and then looking south over a city toward the sea put me in mind of being at the Griffith Park Observatory in Los Angeles–and perhaps in part because the similarity ended right there. Los Angeles’ endless automobile-oriented grid looks exactly nothing like the myriad angles of Barcelona’s intersecting streets and the organic topography of Mediterranean architecture that rises above them.
I tried, but I could never love Los Angeles. But I bet I could love Barcelona.