October 27, 2009
Yesterday I read a very moving travel memoir, The Tomb in Seville, written by Norman Lewis when he was ninety-three about a trip he made to Spain when he was in his twenties, in the fall of 1934. Spain was on the brink of civil war and Lewis was on a quest, together with his communist brother-in-law, to search out a family tomb in the Cathedral of Seville. Their adventure is recounted through the eyes of Lewis as a young man, robust with humor, mettle, and sympathy, and with an easy fascination for everything he encountered.
Spain in 1934 was a country with one foot in the twentieth century, evidenced by some industrialization and pollution, and another foot back more than a few centuries into the past. People literally still lived in caves in many of the towns Lewis visited throughout the province of Zaragoza, and further south in the province of Andalucia. A side trip through Portugal brought Lewis to a town that had just witnessed a witch burning and everywhere he went he saw abject poverty accepted as the norm of peasant life. Lewis doesn't judge Spain harshly for her backwardness; he does, however, become entranced by her old-fashioned charms of civility, sociability, the cafe life and the evening paseo, and even the piropos, sexually-explicit complements offered on the street to attractive women. He recounts charming tales, like that about a city park marked off-limits to men in the early afternoon to allow an army of several hundred wet nurses privacy when offering milk to their charges on pleasant tree-shaded benches, and sad stories, like the friendships he makes with two Spanish communists, both of whom disappear, one unexplained and one arrested, and the brutal death of a bull fighter.
Lewis's book was so immediate and personal that I felt as if I were along for the tour with him, holding my hands high above my head to avoid being shot on the streets of Madrid, sharing bread and sausage with fellow travelers on a slow-moving train, or walking through the ancient forests north of Zaragoza. While passing under the huge trees, Lewis remembers thinking that "[f]aced with these towering oaks that had grown from seeds no longer than fingernails to dominate their environment for centuries -- or even a millennium -- one was encouraged to speculate over the possible duration of life itself": a sobering yet optimistic thought, especially given the carnage and massive killings that waited just ahead in Spain's civil war.
When Lewis and his brother-in-law finally reach Seville, it is to find that the family tomb, contracted for only a quarter of a century, has been dismantled and tossed in with other old tombs, in order to make room for more recent, and more distinguished, dead. No matter, comforts Lewis's father-in-law, "Was it not pride in its most absurd form to be able to claim that one's grandfather's tomb was a few metres from the sarcophagus of Pedro the Cruel?" The conclusion reached by Lewis is that it is more important to acknowledge he has fallen in love with Spain, and will hold on forever -- or at least, as his book proves, for another seventy years -- to her beauty, her grace, and her timelessness. For anyone who has ever traveled to Spain, or is planning a trip, or might consider a trip, The Tomb in Seville is a must-read that offers not only an awestruck portrait of Spain, but also presents a very unique moment in time for a country and a very special moment in life for a man.
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