Bilbao-New York-Bilbao E-Book

Kirmen Uribe

• Herausgeber: Seren
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Seitenzahl: 252

Beschreibung

The day he knew he was going to die, Liborio Uribe took his young daughter in law to the Museum of Fine Arts to show her a picture. Liborio had spent his entire life at sea, like his son José, living out unforgettable adventures which would later fade into obscurity. Years after, faced by the same painting, Liborio's grandson Kirmen, a writer and poet, uses these family stories to write a novel. Bilbao–New York–Bilbao takes place during a flight to New York and tells the story of journeys by three generations of the same family. The key to the book is Liborio's fishing boat, the Dos Amigos: who are these two friends, and what is the nature of their friendship? Through letters, diaries, emails, poems and dictionaries, Kirmen creates a mosaic of memories and stories that combine to form a homage to a world that has almost disappeared, as well as a hymn to the continuity of life. It is also a reflection on the art of writing, and lies between life and fiction. "Uribe has succeeded in realizing what is surely an ambition for many writers: a book that combines family, romances and literature, anchored deeply in a spoken culture but also in bookishness – and all without a single note of self-congratulation." – TLS "The novel is set in an absolutely modern territory, the usual place of key writers of our time such as Emmanuel Carrere, WG Sebald, Orhan Pamuk and JM Coetzee." – Sudouest "This book is as beautiful as a memory." – Le Figaró "Uribe's literary proposal is entirely fresh and innovative. A novel of our time. This writer who comes from a 'small country' begins his journey through the field of universal literature, searching for transnational communication." – Mainichi Shimbun "A splendid novel, which the reader acknowledges like a hug." – El País "Beautiful. It has the rare quality of attending to tradition without sounding like folk, and being modern without rejecting those that were so before." – ABC "This ingenious and original historiographical novel tells the story of its own writing, as Uribe explores the history of his family and the Basque Country fishing community of which they have long been a part. Framed by the author's plane journey to the States, the web of digressions is mapped by ever-lengthening and constantly entwining cultural tendrils as the family diffuses around the world, led off by his father's trawler. The intersection between truth and storytelling is a particularly potent theme, contrasting the prosaic and the poetic, the pragmatic and the romantic. It's a view from the inside of the novel, looking out upon the reader in consideration of what might prove engaging, a metafictional conceit made engaging by the genial candour of Uribe, or at least his novelistic avatar, as he explores the process of researching and honing his book. Huge credit must go to Wales-based indie Seren Books for bringing this book to English-language readers; it's extraordinary that this winner of Spain's prestigious Premio Nacional de Literatura wasn't picked up by a major publisher." – Jonathan Ruppin, Foyles Best Fiction: 2014

Leseprobe

Bilbao New York Bilbao

To My Family

Seren is the book imprint of

Poetry Wales Press Ltd, Nolton Street, Bridgend, Wales

www.serenbooks.com

facebook.com/SerenBooks

Twitter:@SerenBooks

Original Basque text © Kirmen Uribe, 2008

Translation © Elizabeth Macklin, 2014

First published in Basque asBilbao – New York – Bilbaoby Elkar Argitaletxea in 2008

The right of Kirmen Uribe to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

ISBN 978-1-78172-205-3

Mobi: 978-1-78172-206-0

Epub: 978-1-78172-207-7

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holders.

The publisher works with the financial assistance of the Welsh Books Council

Printed by Latimer Trend Ltd, Plymouth

This translation is published with the support of the Euskal Kultur Erakundea

CONTENTS

1. Bilbao

2. A Coffee at the Airport

3. Treasures in Hiding

4. 16-Millimetre Short Subjects

5. Household Matters

6. Two Friends

7. Frankfurt

8. The Fourteen-Year-Old Boy

9. Like a Flying Fish

10. Dublin

11. The Gravestones in Käsmu

12. A Bird in Through the Window

13. The Boats That Come into Port

14. Nuuk

15. St. Kilda

16. A Message on Facebook

17. In the Middle of the Atlantic

18. The Man from Stornoway

19. Montreal

20. Boston

21. Landing

22. Agirre’s Roses

23. New York City

Say the most personal thing, say it, nothing else matters. Don’t be ashamed. The generalities can be found in the newspaper.

ELIAS CANETTI

Since then I’ve wondered which are in fact those invisible relationships that define our own life, and what thread ties them all together.

W.G. SEBALD

But once they drop anchor, once the cranes begin their dipping and their swinging, it seems as if all romance were over.

VIRGINIA WOOLF

1 BILBAO

Fish and trees are alike. They’re alike because of the growth rings. Trees have these in their trunks. Cut through a tree trunk and there will be the rings. A year for each ring, and that’s how you know what the tree’s age is. Fish have them, too, but in their scales. And just as we do with trees, we know by those growth rings what the animal’s age is.

Fish are always growing. Not us, we start shrinking once we’ve reached maturity. Our growth stops and our bones begin to knit together. A person shrivels. Fish, though, grow until they die. Faster when they’re young, and as the years go on more slowly, but fish always go on growing.

Winter creates the growth rings of a fish. It’s the time when fish eat least, and that time of hunger draws a dark trace in the fish scale. In that winter season when the fish grows least. Not in summer, though. When there’s no hunger there’s no trace at all left behind in the fish scale.

The growth ring of a fish is microscopic, you can’t see it with the naked eye, but there it is. As if it were a wound. A wound that hasn’t healed up.

And, as with the growth rings of fishes, terrible events stay on in our memory, mark our life, until they become a measure of time. Happy days go fast, on the other hand – too fast – and we forget them quickly.

What winter is for fish, loss is for humans. Loss makes our time specific for us, the end of a relationship, the death of a person we love.

Each loss a dark growth ring deep down.

The day they told him he had a scant few months left to live, our grandfather didn’t want to go home. Our mother, his young daughter-in-law, accompanied him to the doctor’s office that morning. Granddad listened calmly to what the doctor was saying. He heard him out without a peep and, afterward, shook his hand and courteously said goodbye.

When they left the consulting room, Mum didn’t know what to say. After a long silence, she asked him if they’d be heading along to the bus to Ondarroa now. He said no.

“We’re not going back yet. We’ll spend the day in Bilbao. I want to show you something,” he said to her, and made an effort to smile.

Granddad took Mum to the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum. She would never forget that day, how on the very day they told him he was going to die Granddad took her to a museum. How he attempted to place beauty above death, without success. How he attempted to make that terrible day have another kind of memory for her. Our mother would always remember that gesture of his.

That was the first time she’d ever set foot in a museum.

Forty-five years later I went to the same museum myself. I wanted to find out about a certain picture, and so I went. I was on the trail of a picture by the painter Aurelio Arteta, as if following a half-erased clue, in some totally intuitive way. An inner voice kept telling me that that picture was important, that it would turn out to be an essential piece in the novel that I was writing.

The picture is a mural, painted, as it happens, in the Ondarroa country house the architect Ricardo Bastida had built to spend summers in. It was in the summer of 1922 that Arteta painted the mural, there in the living room. In the nineteen-sixties, though, a few years after Ricardo Bastida died, his family sold the house. The buyers razed it to build apartments. But the mural was saved, by good luck. Aurelio Arteta’s art work was taken down and to the museum in Bilbao. It’s been on exhibit ever since, in one of the upstairs galleries.

Jose Julian Bakedano, one of the museum’s curators, showed it to me. In its day the mural took up three walls of the Bastidas’ living room. In the museum, though, it’s hung on one wall as a triptych. In the very center is the representation of an outing to a country fair, that’s the largest of the pieces. And on the outer wings come the two other pictures. One is of a woman of the era, posed just like a Renaissance Venus. The other is of a young couple, talking with each other in the shade of a tree.

At first sight, the mural’s colours are the surprising thing about it. Arteta uses very bright colours to portray the boys and girls on their way to the fair: greens, blues, lilacs. And in a way that had never been done before.

“At the outset, a number of critics didn’t have much regard for Arteta’s work,” Bakedano told me. “Mocking him, they said he wore coloured spectacles to paint in. The years he spent studying painting in Paris were plain as day in Arteta’s work. He took a house in Montmartre and there he fell in love with the work of Toulouse-Lautrec and Cézanne. But he never wanted to make a complete break with tradition. It’s precisely because of this, I think, that his pictures put me in mind of an old tavern that’s been painted in bright colours – they’re modern but without losing their charm.”

In the mural two worlds appear, together at one and the same time. On one side are the baserritarrak, the people of the farmsteads, and on the other the townsfolk. The farm girls are in traditional dress. Their skirts come down to their ankles, scarves on heads and their necklines modest. The city girls, though, don’t look like that at all. Their dresses are lightweight, the wind moves them. Their hemlines are shorter, their knees allowed to show, and their necklines are wide open. What’s more, on their breasts they sport jewelry. Compared with the baserritarrak, the city girls look beckoning, as if they were courting the onlooker. The Art Deco effect is as clear as can be here, that nineteen-twenties optimism wells from these paintings.

“This picture represents the leap from old world to new,” Bakedano explained now, “and the contrast between farm folk and city folk intensifies the city girls’ eroticism.”

The Bastida-house mural was actually just a rehearsal. Aurelio Arteta had not yet mastered mural technique and the architect let him use his living room to try things out. The real work would come a bit later. Ricardo Bastida himself designed the headquarters the Bank of Bilbao was going to have in Madrid. In its day, that building, to be built right on the Calle de Alcalá, would be unique. Of necessity it would be a symbol of the bank and, more broadly, of the city of Bilbao. A gesture of power and modernity. The work would make the careers of both Bastida and Arteta, and win them recognition outside the Basque Country.

Bastida wanted Aurelio Arteta to be the artist for the bank’s great hall. The two of them had known one another ever since they were children, and their lives were strikingly alike, one in architecture, the other in painting. For the rotunda of the bank’s entrance hall Arteta would paint an allegory of Bilbao. The stevedores, the workers from the steel mills of the era, the baserritarrak, the fishmongers and more. It was a taxing job, more than ten murals, and moveover on an irregular surface.

Arteta took the commission but wanted to get himself well prepared beforehand. He was exacting, it was hard for him to consider a work finished. Once, years later, during his exile in Mexico, a prospective buyer attempted to look at an unfinished canvas that was hidden under a cloth, lifting the covering. When Arteta saw him at it, he took up his palette knife in a rage and slashed the man’s face. It was the one thing said to drive him wild.

A perfectionist to a fault, Arteta took great pains with every detail. He didn’t care much about signing his paintings, often enough left them with his name off, as if he couldn’t be bothered. With money matters too he was sloppy. Nevertheless, while he was painting he went at it body and soul. And, even to paint the mural in Ondarroa, he had the water brought in from Madrid, so that when it came time to start work in Madrid the water would be sure to have the same density. He chose the best materials. The sand would be ground from genuine Markina marble.

I had heard a lot of things about Arteta, and also about his character. He was a beloved painter in his lifetime. He was well regarded by conservatives, nationalists, and socialists alike, “his bashful nature may have influenced that,” Bakedano added.

I’d also heard about how he fled to Mexico during the civil war. After the aerial bombing of Guernica, Spain’s legitimate government commissioned Arteta to paint a meaningful picture for the Paris Exposition. The whole world would know then what had happened in Guernica, what kind of massacre the Nazis had committed there. It would have been his life’s great work. Arteta refused the commission, however. He explained that he was sick of the war, he would prefer to join his family in exile in Mexico. The commission later fell to Pablo Picasso. And we all know what comes after that. Doing the Guernica picture would have been a huge advance in Arteta’s career, but he turned it down. He chose life over art. He preferred being with his family to being remembered in the future.

Many people will see Arteta’s choice as an error. However could he miss out on his chance of a lifetime because of a fleeting emotional reaction. How had he placed the people he loved above his art? There will be those, too, who will never forgive him for it, in the belief that a creator’s obligation is to their creative gift above all else.

More than once I’ve wondered what I’d do if I were in Arteta’s predicament. Which way I’d choose.

You can’t tell, you have to live through the same situation to do so. But it’s the very crossroads an artist often ends up facing. Personal life or creation. Arteta obviously took the first route, and Picasso the second.

Jose Julian Bakedano went off to his office and back to work, but before he did he gave me the documentation the museum had on the Arteta mural: how their conservators effected its removal from Bastida’s house.

In any event, he gave me a piece of advice. “The person who knows the most about the mural is Carmen Bastida, the architect’s daughter, the best thing would be to call her,” and he handed me her phone number on a Post-it, saying, “Tell her you’re calling her because I said to,” and went back to his work.

I stayed behind on my own, staring at the mural, thinking. The optimism that emanated from it attracted me most of all. That energy made by the brushstrokes of Arteta’s hand. Back in that summer of 1922 Arteta and Bastida had great hopes for their work, they had no fear of the future. That strength dazzled me. Not knowing what would happen to them in just a few years’ time.

About my grandfather I don’t know too much. Liborio Uribe. By the time I was born he was dead and our father didn’t talk to us a lot about his father. He wasn’t big on the past, himself. A seaman by nature, he preferred to look to the future. About the people in our mother’s family, on the contrary, yes: we know a thousand tales from Mum’s side, stories about one relation and another. But on our dad’s side very few. Maybe because of this, that grandfather made me curious.

Among the few things our father did tell was a memory from his childhood, about the way of life in the summertimes. I’d heard him say how when he was little he’d be on the beach the whole day, at the wooden changing rooms Granddad kept for the summer people. He’d help his parents with any number of chores; taking basins of water to the summer people, helping them rinse off, getting the sand off their legs and hanging their bathing clothes on the drying poles. I imagine him entirely silent at this work, carrying water and picking up clothing and, betweentimes, paying attention to the things the summer people said to each other.

“I remember your father very well, he was a graceful boy and a worker,” Carmen Bastida said to me when I paid her a visit at her house in Bilbao. “Those were the best years of my life. Life held no worries for me then, no adversity.”

The Bastida family had three bathing cabanas on the beach. They used to set them up high on the sand, close to the cliffs. Next door was the stretch of beach for the people who engaged in therapeutic nudism, shielded by a tall length of dark cloth. The beach days come gathered together in black-and-white photographs. Showing me the photographs, Carmen tried to explain who each person was. To go by what Bastida’s daughter said, painters, musicians, architects, astronomers met up on the beach at the Bastidas’ cabanas. Most of them coming from Bilbao and Madrid. “But what I loved best was a man from the town, Liborio, the stories he used to tell us.”

Keeping the cabanas was not Granddad’s only way of making a living. He had a small boat, too, to take out fishing, by the name of Dos Amigos. The name of the boat always made me wonder: Dos Amigos – Two Friends. Why ever had he named his boat that, how had he come up with that weird name. And if Granddad himself had been one of the two friends, who had the other one been.

I wanted to unearth that other one, discover why all trace of him had been wiped out. Whether Granddad had gotten angry at his friend. Wanting to answer those questions, several years ago I started tracking down the clues. I felt that Dos Amigos had a novel somewhere inside it, a novel about the fishing world that’s in the process of disappearing. But this was the plan only at the outset. And the search for facts for the novel has taken me down several roads I hadn’t expected, I’ve met up with many surprises.

To find out fishes’ age you need to count the growth rings on the scales, and add one year. When they’re larvae, fish don’t have any scales. In the case of eels, you have to add four years. Since eels spend fours years as larvae.

They likewise need four years to cross the Atlantic. The tiny elvers make the trip from the Sargasso Sea to the Bay of Biscay in that much time.

My plane will cover the same distance in seven hours. I’ll be taking a flight to New York on this very day, from the Bilbao airport.

2 A COFFEE AT THE AIRPORT

I get to the airport from Ondarroa before I thought I would. The sky over Bilbao a double-dyed blue. Even though it’s November it’s clear the south wind is going to be warming up the countryside. Autumn is our season for the south wind. In this autumn of 2008, I turned thirty-eight. This autumn when Obama’s just beat out McCain in the presidential race. I have to get on a flight from Bilbao to Frankfurt and from there to New York.

When I go to the Lufthansa counter to check in I hear a ruckus nearby, a surprise, the Athletic Club soccer players were right there, about to get on a plane. And with them the cameras and the press. The players answer their questions with optimism. With a make-believe optimism. An optimism nobody believes in.

Optimism can even hurt you.

Once I’ve checked my bag I get away as soon as possible, to the airport cafe. Noontime light had taken over the cafe. Sunbeams streamed in through the tall plate-glass windows. You could see golden flecks in the air, golden light, in the cafe with its floor awash in paper napkins and its tables full up with dirty dishes.

A boy ordering at the bar starts talking to me.

“What it’s like to be famous,” he says. “The TV and the rest of them all show up to send off the players. They’ll never do that sort of sendoff for our dad. He’s heading out to Chile for six months, to fish. He does six months at sea and two months home.”

A fisherman, and he ships out without a boat, by airplane. It strikes me that the airport’s become the quay of an earlier era.

“Our dad was a fisherman too,” I tell him. “He worked the seas up north, on the grounds they call Rockall.”

The boy’s face stabilises.

“It could be he might know our dad, then...,” he says to me, before he takes up his glasses and makes for their table.

This is what Wikipedia has to say about Rockall island in its entry:

Rockall

Rockall is a small, rocky islet in the North Atlantic. The rock is part of an extinct volcano and is located at 57°35′48″N 13°41′19″W. It lies 301.4 kilometres west of the uninhabited islands of St. Kilda, Scotland, and 368.7 kilometres west of the crofting township of Hogha Gearraidh, on the island of North Uist. It is 424 kilometres northwest of Donegal in the Republic of Ireland. Rockall is about 25 metres wide at its base and rises to a height of 22 metres above sea level. The rock's only permanent inhabitants are periwinkles and other mollusks. Small numbers of seabirds, among them kittiwakes, guillemots and gannets, use the rock to rest on in summer. It is impossible to live there. It has no natural source of fresh water.

“It’s impossible to live here,” Maria Gabina Badiola, our great-grandmother on Dad’s side, apparently thought, about Ondarroa. That’s what I gathered especially from our father’s aunt Maritxu in Bilbao, the youngest of our grandmother Ana’s sisters.

When I took up the project of the novel for the umpteenth time, in the spring of 2005, Maritxu was the first person I interviewed. She was the only family member still living from Liborio and Ana’s generation. Our grandparents were dead on both Dad’s side and Mum’s.

When I paid her a visit I heard stories I’d never, ever heard before, ones Dad never told us. The exact names and dates get fuzzy, but I realised that our dad’s whole family history was made up of round trips, flights and returnings. And always in the background that connection to the sea, oftenest tragic, comical as a matter of course.

Maritxu lives in Bilbao, in the Begoña neighborhood. Maria Gabina Badiola, her mother, when she was widowed, gathered up her children and made for Bilbao, she wanted nothing more to do with the seafaring life. They’d brought her husband home dead from the sea, and her father had drowned as well. They’d seen from the town watchtower how the catboat San Marcos went down right there in the bay, and how it was that Maria’s father, Canuto Badiola, had drowned, along with her brother, Ignacio. They didn’t find Canuto’s body.

So close and unable to do a thing. A few years later Arteta would paint a similar scene, in the canvas called “The Northwester.”

To Bilbao they all went with their mother and turned their backs on the sea. Great-grandmother Maria and every one of the children started work at the Echevarría smeltery, “making nails and horseshoes, nails and horseshoes by the thousands.”

Maritxu told me stories I didn’t know. One about two brothers from Mutriku, for instance, who went to Argentina to work. One of the brothers was blinded in an accident and wanted to go back to the town they’d been born in. His brother helped him on the voyage home. Boarding a ship in Buenos Aires, they crossed the Atlantic and to get to their village boarded a train. They got as far as Deba. The train station was four kilometres away from their town. Leaving his blind brother at the depot, the other brother simply went off, back to Argentina. After an odyssey of thousands of kilometres, he reboarded the train to cross the ocean again. With his birthplace a mere four kilometres distant, he didn’t want to see his home. He left his brother sitting right there all alone. Some nuns finally took charge of the blind man and they brought him home.

Maritxu spoke in Ondarroan, our town’s Basque dialect, but as it had been spoken eighty years before. Periodically she’d drop into Spanish, a legacy of the years she’d lived in Bilbao.

And she also told me how the sister of those two brothers, Josefa Ramona Epelde, married the carpenter Isidro Odriozola. The carpenter must have been an elegant man, one of those men who wore gleaming-white suits. He was from Azpeitia, in the neighboring province, and came to work in the Ondarroa boatyards. But to find himself a wife he went to Mutriku. He didn’t want any Biscayan females and so he crossed the border between the two provinces, to marry in Mutriku.

When their son Jose Francisco got married, Isidro built all of their furniture out of scraps of boats. In Ondarroa people called Jose Francisco Odriozola “Tubal.” The man who would be Maritxu and Grandmother Ana’s father. He had the nickname “Tubal” because he had a boat of that name. From what Maritxu said, Great-grandfather called the vessel Tubal after a book he liked. He read from it every single night.

Tubal, according to the Bible, was a grandson of Noah, and he ended up by chance at the Tower of Babel. Esteban Garibai’s volume Los cuarenta libros del compendio historial de las chronicas y universal historia de todos los reynos de España explains that one of the 72 languages created at the Tower of Babel was Basque, and that it was in precisely that language that Tubal suddenly began to speak. Yes indeed, in Basque. He came to the Iberian Peninsula and settled in comfortably there. This took place 142 years after the Great Flood, in 2163 B.C., all the while relying on the accounts in that old volume.

Tubal Odiozola was a hard-working man. He made a deal with a businessman from Navarre named Otxagabia to build his boat. A deal of a certain era, a spoken agreement, nothing written down on paper. Otxagabia would put in the money and Tubal the labor. The boat would belong to both of them, but one would remain ashore and the other would work at sea, as captain. And that’s how he’d pay off his debt.

Tubal made good, and even made strides in politics. In Ondarroa they put him in charge of the San Pedro harbor association. He made friends in Bilbao. It was just around that very time that he met the head of the Echevarría plant.

For Maritxu those were the happiest years. At home they lacked for nothing. Tubal’s last years were hard, though, Otxagabia didn’t carry out their spoken agreement and Tubal was left without a boat. He made dozens of trips to the courthouse in Burgos in hopes of a decision in his favor. To no avail. He was obliged to work as crew during his final years. Having come down with a mouth infection, he was brought home from sea dead.

Maritxu recalls very well the last time she saw her father. From a distance he was looking out for his little girl. He signalled with his hands, laying one on top of the other in a stroking caress. Maritxu made the same gesture to me, two hands caressing. It means “Love you, love you,” my aunt explained in her diction of eighty years ago.

I hadn’t known of that hand sign, it must have been a signal lost long before.

Maritxu didn’t tell me much at all about Grandmother Ana. Maritxu’s sister was a worker, and that was what killed her, her body sickened out of pure exhaustion. “She should have stayed in Bilbao and not gone back to the village.” But Ana fell in love with a fisherman named Liborio and married in Ondarroa, leaving her mother and her brothers and sisters in Bilbao.

“Your grandmother went through a lot. During the war, too, she was alone for a year, without her husband. She took an official from Franco’s side into her home, Javier, and also a lady whose mother was a prisoner in the women’s prison at Saturraran.”

I frowned.

“Yes, I know it’s startling to have people from both sides in your home in wartime. But ideas are one thing and the heart is another.”

Ideas are one thing and the heart is another. I remember Maritxu’s words when my flight is called. I pass the table where the fisherman who’s on his way to Chile sits with his family. They’re sitting in silence. They don’t say a word to me. At the security checkpoint I put my computer bag, jacket, and belt on the conveyor and go through the little portal. It doesn’t emit a sound.

I pick up my things, and look back. People standing in line to go through security. I don’t see anyone I know. I think of Maritxu’s hand sign. The gesture her father made to her that last time. It was a signal between the two of them, a secret between the two of them. The final one.

And I feel like making the same sign to somebody from a distance; laying one hand on top of the other in a caress, saying “Love you, love you,” silently.

3 TREASURES IN HIDING

I went to New York for the first time in March of 2003, at just about the same time the ultimatum President Bush gave the Iraqis was about to expire. I went with a few musician friends, invited by Elizabeth, who had translated some of my poems, to do some performances at a few places in Manhattan. At one of them, a space called the Bowery Poetry Club, a New York writer named Phillis Levin told me the most glorious definition I’d ever heard on the subject of languages.

She’d found the Basque language fascinating, she told me. She’d heard of our language before then too, had come across texts written in Basque. On the Internet and elsewhere. More than once she’d tried to guess at what those words might mean. Hadn’t even come close. But something had caught her eye: all the x’s that appeared in the texts.

“Your language looks like a treasure map,” she said, “if you just forget all the rest of the letters and focus in on the x, it looks as if you could find out where the treasure is.”

I thought it was the most glorious thing you could say of a language you didn’t know, that it’s the map to a treasure.

A lost treasure was what the Impressionist painter Darío de Regoyos was searching for his whole life long. The revolution of Impressionism was: they didn’t want to paint the way people were teaching them to paint in the academies. Up until then people did in fact learn how to paint a horse, but they weren’t looking at real horses. All they had to do was follow cast models. Learn the technical tricks. And so, the Impressionists decided to leave the academies behind and go outdoors. To paint what they saw with their own eyes. It was to paint landscapes of their very own that the first of them came to the Cantabrian coast. The seaside light was what they wanted to capture on these canvases of theirs.