Our last tapas supper in Spain after a week’s holiday included delectable artichokes garnished with shavings of parmesan, and slices of octopus on veal sweetbreads. And a reminder Spaniards’ reverence for literature.
We ate in the bar at Casa Alberto, which at nearly two centuries is the oldest tavern in Madrid. A tile plaque over our tiny table informed us that the building housing the tavern was even older, and that it was where Miguel de Cervantes finished “Journey to Parnassus” in 1614.
“Don Quixote” author Cervantes depicts in “Journey to Parnassus” a poetry slam in which Greek gods are the judges. The plaque in the crowded Madrid bar took my mind back to Barcelona, the capital of Spain’s Catalonia region, where we’d begun our holiday.
April 23, celebrated internationally as World Book Day, is said to fall on the anniversary of Cervantes’s death. It is also the day of St. George, of dragon fame. George is the patron saint of Catalonia, where he is known as Jordi. An American friend who lives in Spain told us over tapas at a Barcelona bar that the convergence of commemorations makes St. Jordi’s a big day in Barcelona. Book stalls fill the streets. Some call it the Catalonian St. Valentine’s day – sweethearts gift one another books instead of chocolates on St. Jordi’s Day.
We were in Barcelona in December, too late for a day I know I would have enjoyed. But we visited plenty of beautiful book shops in the city. I imagined their wares shifted to street stalls where lovers would browse in the spring.
We also visited Memòria Barcelona, a think tank and museum dedicated to telling the story of resistance to Franco’s dictatorship. We saw an exhibit there on the role anarchists played in the fight for democracy. As we left, we found a table piled with books for the taking. I can never pass up a free book, even in Catalan. I got a collection of work by a Barcelona playwright named Carles Batlle, and a study of Franco’s iconography. I’m trusting that my grasp of Spanish will allow me to read them in Catalan.
From Barcelona we took a train to Zaragoza, a Spanish city founded by Cesar Augusto in 14 BC. Zaragoza is the way the locals pronounce the Roman ruler’s name.
As in Barcelona, we benefitted from local knowledge in Zaragoza. Friends who have retired there took us on a very personal walking tour that included a stop at Casa Gavin, a garden shop that is more than a century old. The current owner, who took over from the family that started Gavin, has interests beyond seeds. He’s also stocked the shop’s beautifully carved antique shelves with books. I bought one in which the poetry of Pablo Neruda was illustrated by Isidro Ferrer, who teaches art in Zaragoza.
The shopkeeper, pleased with my choice, began pulling pieces from his Ferrer collection from his shelves to show us. Among them was a clever sculpture made of a suitcase handle attached to a concrete brick, poetically evoking immigrants from places such as Neruda’s Chile who have helped build Spain.
Another train ride took us from Zaragoza to Madrid for the last days of our holiday. In addition to dining on artichokes and octopus at Alberto’s, we fed our minds at Madrid’s Librería Mujeres, founded in 1983. Librería Mujeres, as beautiful as any of the bookshops we saw in Barcelona, is one of the world’s oldest feminist bookstores. There, I bought a book in which Loly Ghirardi, a textile artist known as Senorita Lylo, explores the power of techniques such as embroidery that are often dismissed as women’s craft. Ghirardi, an Argentine who lives in Barcelona, writes in Spanish, not Catalan, so I should be able to make my way through her richly illustrated book.
Now that I’m back in my actual home, my literary souvenirs are helping me look back on how at home I felt in Spain, a country that loves words in many languages.