Jennifer and I are up, but just barely since we both had late nights. We scarf breakfast and I happily take the gentle teasing from Isabel about my late night out (like a real Spaniard!) and the cute bartenders at O’Connells (apparently all of Cádiz considers O’Connell’s to have the cutest staff, who knew?). Isabel tells me to take a sweater and then hands us each two pieces of fruit to help hold us over til lunch. We scoot out of the building to meet a bunch of the girls at Plaza de San Antonio to walk to the embarcadero together. Today we’re off to take the ferry to Puerto de Santa Maria, the hometown of Alberti. Of course, we run into Giuseppe and Tony right in front of our building and have to admit that we have no idea where we’re going… Tony gives us vague directions accompanied by a few eye rolls before we part.
There’s no one waiting at Plaza de San Antonio. I thought this might happen. I make a few phone calls and it turns out everyone is meeting just down the street at Plaza de Mina… no problem, it’s a small city after all! We all meet up, finally, and walk past the Plaza de España (there’s one in every city!) to the Embarcadero. Some of the girls are looking pretty whooped from the night before and I’m not too sure that a ferry ride on the Atlantic is what the doctor ordered. I, myself, am really excited to take a boat ride, being a waterbaby. We board the Vaporcito, and award winning little ship that does nothing but ferry people from Cádiz to the Puerto and back all day long. We sit up top on benches and I realize, as it’s already 90 degrees at ten a.m., that the sweater I bought is totally useless. It’s a gorgeous day for sea-faring and the water is an amazing blue that stretches all around us. I can’t help but grin; I love the familiar rock of the boat and the smell of salt on the air. The ride is almost too short for me.
Puerto de Santa Maria is a small town, but a bustling one. In a weird way it reminds me of Mexico, perhaps of Puerto Vallarta. There are horse-drawn carriages waiting to collect tourists from the Vaporcito, but we’re a large group and we’re going to hoof it today. We’ve come to Santa Maria to visit the Alberti museum. Having heard the museum is actually in the building that was Alberti’s house here, where he lived after he returned to Spain late in his life, I imagine it being a very small and cluttered collection of his personal papers and sketches. I am not prepared for the treasure trove I discover the actual museum to be.
The house is grandiose inside, but modest from the outside and tucked between other buildings on an indistinct street in the town. The sala on the first floor is incredible. On one wall hangs the entire framed series of the letters of the alphabet, painted by Alberti. On the opposite wall hangs another series of his paintings called the Seasons. They’re incredible, vibrant, compelling pieces with shape and movement. The glass exhibit cases hold journals and notebooks, sketches and letters all in Alberti’s own hand.
As I peer through the glass at one of Alberti’s journals I’m struck by the melancholy thought of how sad it is to have all of these personal writings and scribbles and to know that they come to an end. Here, in this house, is an incredibly collection of evidence of a single man’s vision and creativity. The paintings bring new life and value to the poetry and having read Alberti’s poems seems to infuse the paintings with greater meaning as well. His mediums truly seem to compliment one another, and here they are, side by side, where they can sing together.
The upstairs sala has more of his free-form work as well as a series called “Los Ojos de Picasso,” a tribute to his dear friend, the famous artist. There’s also a small theater playing a short informative film on a loop, but the art in this room is some of my favorite. There is a series of paintings of figures, very simply depicted using only black paint outlines to create the images of women, or doves, or lovers embracing. The simplicity is beautiful.
We collect in a small corridor that houses a large painting of a horse and a guitar. Tony points out how musical Alberti’s painting seem to be. It does seem as though this man had an internal rhythm that can be felt in the cadence of his poetry and the movement of his art. I believe that Spain, and particularly the south, is a very magical musical place. There is dance and rhythm throughout the culture of the country. The dance in the bullfight, the stomping beat of Flamenco and the chirping castanets of Sevillanas, the crescendo of the ocean, the wailing of gypsy songs, and the random singing of every member of my host family…
This museum is the highlight of my visit to Cádiz—here Alberti comes alive for me. We have read Alberti’s autobiography, The Lost Grove. While we don’t have time to search for the actual place for which his memoirs are named, there is great benefit to visiting the places mentioned in the book. Because Alberti is such a creative persona, I’ve had a hard time tamping down my skepticism about the accuracy of the stories in The Lost Grove. But getting to see the small town where he grew up, and just the ferry ride across the bay itself was enough to validate the memoirs, real or embellished. I am beginning to understand, just from getting a little older every year, that we become the people we are not because of what happens to us or what we live through, but because of how we experience, understand and remember all of it. From this perspective, I stand to learn more about Alberti as a soul from his imaginings and memories than from the most extensively researched and fact-based biography.
What I can’t help dwelling on, as we wrap up our tour of the museum, is that Alberti, as a young man, believed that he had to choose between devoting himself to being a painter or to being a poet. I don’t think I’ll ever know why he found the two impossible to co-exist within him. In fact, most of the art must have been created later in his life. In a way, that supports my suspicion that to only pursue one medium of expression would stifle creativity, or limit it, instead of the narrowing allowing one to expedite its development. If he returned to painting, he must have been drawn to it, and I can’t believe that he was ever able to truly quash that pull.
We have to make sure we catch the one p.m. sailing time for the Vaporcito so that we can all get back to Cádiz in time for lunch. Not wanting to be late, we hustle out of the museum and truck back through the streets to the waterfront. Of course, we’re early, so we take a few minutes in a café to hydrate since it’s insanely hot today. The winds have in fact shifted over the weekend, and we are now fully suffering the hot force of the Poniente, which brings heat and humidity with it.
The ferry ride back is significantly more crowded, but a few of the girls find open benches and fall asleep. A small number of us entertain ourselves with a game. Everyone writes two lines of a sentence, you stop when you reach the end of your second line and then fold the paper so that the next person can see only the last line written. They continue the sentence and story, adding two lines of their own, then folding the paper again… and so on until you run out of space on the paper. Our story definitely didn’t make sense, but was entertaining and allowed lots of girls to play.
When Jennifer and I arrive, Isabel has lunch ready for us. She’s made spaghetti carbonara, which has chunks of ham in it, but she’s been so good to me thus far, so I don’t say anything and just eat around the ham. Of course, just when I’m almost done with my plate, Isabel notices and makes a big fuss of how she forgot that I don’t eat meat. I don’t mind at all and try to tell her not to worry, it was easy enough to eat around the bits of meat. Thank goodness she didn’t serve steak!
After lunch, to the beach! Most of the girls are there and it’s nice to be with a group of people so that I can leave my stuff while I swim in the ocean. The nice thing about the wind-shift is that the water seems cleaner, though the beach itself is still very much a giant ashtray. But in this heat, frequent dips are essential to staying cool.
We don’t stay at the beach too late, we have to report to “office hours.” Giuseppe holds his office hours for the Italian students at about seven in Plaza Mentidero (by the award-winning gelato joint) and Tony holds his office hours at a café in Plaza de Mina at about eight. Though very informal, these are semi-optional (read: in one’s best interest to show) meetings to speak in your respective language of study and to go over any of the material or work that is confusing. We are also supposed to be sharing our plans for our final projects. I shower and dress for the evening before trucking my computer down to the Plaza to use the internet and wait for office hours to commence. Only a little Spanish is spoken, perhaps because we are speaking so much of it in our homestays, perhaps because not everyone is as eager to chat as I am…
Morenita Megan and I are starving, so we head out to 100 Montaditos to get some cheap eats to go and do a little errand running. We come back to Plaza de Mina and I scarf my food while doing a little work on translating with Cortney and Carin. Rough plans are made to meet at the beach… I head back to the apartment, ditch my stuff, and then Jennifer and I walk down to the beach to see what’s going on.
The whole group (less my two translation-group members) has collected at the beach. We sit in a giant circle and spend an hour, at least, cracking up together before we migrate into town to where else? O’Connell’s.
Amy somehow is separated from the group, but ends up rolling in a little after the bulk of the group with five guys from Barcelona in tow. Now the girls in the group have to practice their Spanish—the only problem is that the Barcelona accent, and dialect, is way different!
We’re all out late again, living that “Spanish” lifestyle as only loud Americans in an Irish bar can…
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