Carmona

Strategic. Carmona, a rook, in Spain's chessboard history. A natural escarpment overlooking, controlling the fertile fields and navigable rivers beyond. To the south, one weak point secured by Carthaginians to Romans to Spaniards with fortified walls--sticks, stones and bones. At the far end, a crematorium still scorched by the fires of Roman dead.

Raining in Spain

June 6. Rain! Thunder rolls across rooftops, punctuated by bolts of lightning. I am not the tallest point by many meters. I linger in the cool air. It will not last the summer.

Calatrava's bridge and the Torre de los Perdigones just outside the old city perimeter offer better strikes, the tower's camera obscura able to capture but not record such a blinding hit.


I imagine hailstones falling in the warm Sevilla air, climatological perdigones (musket pellets) roundng as they drop from such great height.

Papiroflexia o Pinturas Andaluza

The Bellver Collection evokes the Andalucia of Carmen, its paintings by her native and not-so-native sons fill the walls of two galleries at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Sevilla. Romance, in the art history sense--señoritas flashing dark eyes from behind their mantillas and abanicos (fans). Zurbarán, Becquer, Murillo, Gonzalo Bilbao. . . Iterations of popular culture well into mid-century modern.



A museum guard mans the desk at the entrance, folding minute pieces of paper. Origami nazarenos. Costumbres populares. Paper folded, formed.

Pistola de Fumar

She is dressed casually but carefully, her jeans and red blouse precisely creased. Her nails and hair speak of frequent applications of color, again considered and tasteful.

Alone, she sits at the small aluminum table, an extension of the café into the Plaza San Lorenzo next to the Basilica de Jesus de Gran Poder. Stacked and shuffled in front of her on the table are three packages of unfiltered Marlboros and a lighter. She opens a pack, slides out a cigarette and places it between her lips where it remains as she lights it and puffs continously on it with deep but rapid draws, the oily dark smoke clouding the air in front of her and bathing her tanned face.

When the cigarette is one-quarter ash, she anchors it between the fingers of her left hand and begins the rhythmic sweep of hand to mouth and down to flick the ashes on the rapidly shortening cigarette.

As the cigarette sweeps downward, her lips move in a silent mantra. To the mouth, long drag and then down with a flick to punctuate the cigarette´s upward sweep. Again and again.

This meditation on and of death continues through five cigarettes with only infrequent pauses to glance at her watch and a retrieval of four more packs of cigarettes from her purse in her lap.

No surcease, no redemption with Spain´s banning of smoking in interior public spaces. Each sweep of her hand is a prayer to nicotine's balm and a kiss to its faustian bargain.

Arrivals

Arrivals come in many guises--advents of adventure, trepidations of newness, certainties of familiarity. A third summer in Sevilla parses each complexly. Words, phrases, and conversations dust off more readily; cultural timidity bows to personal urgency. Language and its acquisition are thought and action, noun and verb this summer. Bienvenidos á España!