The Barcelona of Nothing but Ghosts, and a Bloggy Confession

Dear Lenore went to Barcelona last week for a wedding and visited a place so dear to me that I wrote it into Nothing but Ghosts. What a gift, then, that she has returned with photographs from her trip, and with memories that she shares with her lucky readers today. She's included, in her post, a Barcelona excerpt from Ghosts.

Another key Ghosts scene takes place here, at Ciutadella Park. A place I wish I would find myself strolling through again, and soon. Wings, anyone? Fantasies?

On another topic now, I fear I must make amends: Poor Sierra has been left wondering (due to my previous two posts) whether I have porcelain-faced doppelgangers in my own backyard. Alas, I do not. I fear my blog makes me seem far more eccentric (by which I mean interesting) than I actually am. In fact, I live in a small, quiet, and (to a fault) immaculate house with a manicured front and back yard, and a (shall I say it?) surround of celebrated gardens (the kind that people slow their cars down for). All bath tubs (that would be one) are of the indoor variety. I own no shower cap. I do not have A. Jolie lips. I wear my trench coats over clothes, not naked skin. But this is true: When I look up, I look for the stars.

All of which would be explanation enough as to why I shifted from memoir to history to fiction. The older I get, the more I like to make things up.

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Nothing but Ghosts, An Excerpt on Launch Week

...I finally found them down where a wedding was going on, or had already happened, my mother sitting on a bench, my dad beside her, both of them watching this bride and her groom at the edge of a pond where the water was so still I could have sworn it was a mirror. I saw my mom pull a flower straight out of a tree. I saw her stand, take the flower to the bride, and bow her head. I saw her go back to the bench and sit down with my dad and ask him, "Would you marry me again, Jimmy? Would you?"

"In a heartbeat," he said, "and you know it."

"I wouldn't take any of it back," Mom said, and maybe I don't know how you put regret inside a painting, maybe I can't figure out Miss Martine, maybe I can't really save my dad from sadness, but maybe so much time goes by that you start to understand how beauty and sadness can both live in one place.

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Behind the Camera's Tunneling Distance

Once on an overnight train from Barcelona to Venice, this boy became my friend. Outside my compartment he sat, cat like, waiting for me to compliment him on the fearless red of his shoes. He liked to stand at the windows, looking out. I liked that, too. He performed acrobatics on the old blue rug. I was his audience.

He wanted his portrait taken. I took several.

I escape mirrors, as you know. I refute photographs of myself (just ask Tirsa). I am out with my camera, most every day, tunneling a distance. I wonder now, looking back on this boy, how it might feel to look a camera in the eye and to say, undaunted, See me.

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Regrets

I don't think I was ever the girl I might have been; I could have used a more sustained carefree.

Today I heard myself again: Serious, when others were laughing. Pushing for absolute when almost was all that moment needed.

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Learning as I Teach

It was a movie weekend—"Slumdog Millionaire" at ten on Friday night, "Frost/Nixon" at 4:15 Sunday, "Mongol," courtesy of Netflix, in between, late Saturday afternoon. And then the Oscars, a tradition strong as Christmas here—a semi-glamorous meal delivered picnic style while the "barely mint" dresses float by. The Oscars always make me cry. Call me a sentimental fool (you won't be the first), but I like seeing dreams fulfilled. I like the idea that it's possible.

In between, I was walking about my humble abode feeling knocked-down grateful for all the book recommendations that came my way via Looking for Book Love, for all the passion that is out there, still, for stories that cling to the page. While I considered the titles that came in, I read essays on writing and craft—re-read them, I should say, in preparation for Tuesday, when I'll spend a chunk of the day in a coffee shop with aspiring young writers. Sven Birkerts, Natalia Ginzburg, Mary Oliver, Jack Gilbert, Gerald Stern, Stanley Kunitz, Forrest Gander, and of course Pablo Neruda will keep me and the girls company throughout a day that will also be spent collecting and sorting the details we hunt down with our cameras.

We'll yield to six exercises, which I've named the following way. I plan to write right alongside the girls, for I am not the sort of writer who believes she definitively knows. I'm the sort who keeps trying to find out. Who learns as she teaches, and as she goes.

The class in brief (should you wish to write along...):

Leveraging Involuntary Memory
The Perceiving I
The Hunt for Character
The Fair Release of Story
The Act of Autobiography
Vulnerable Fictions

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Nothing but Ghosts: The Real vs The Imagined

This past Friday I had the pleasure of speaking with someone who had just read Nothing but Ghosts. She was asking what was true and what was fiction, what had been seen and what only imagined. I thought about Barcelona, where some of the story takes place. I thought about the following passage. I walked these streets. I saw these things. I could not sleep. All of which I yielded to my characters, who are more essentially complex than I will ever be.

In Barcelona she couldn’t sleep. We would walk from the old city to the new city all the way to this place they call Sagrada Familia, which is a church that looks like a painted sandcastle that they’ve been building for years but cannot finish, don’t ask me why; even the tour guide couldn’t explain it. We would stand in lines and we would walk through the church, around the construction, up into the towers, over and down, and then we’d walk all the way back to our hotel to rest, stopping at theaters or shops as we walked. She wanted to be by the sea at dusk—by the boats that bobbed on the back of the Mediterranean, and at midnight she wanted tapas, she wanted dancing, she wanted, but I only get it now, life. In the morning she’d be out of the room before Dad and I had awakened, just taking a walk she would say, or buying oranges on the Rambla, or hunting down some pastries for our breakfast.

One afternoon I was up in the room when Mom pushed through the door. “You have to see this,” she said, and she led me by the hand down the hall to the elevator and out onto the streets, then up toward the square, where these musicians who had gathered before some government hall were banging and playing and calling. They had burnt-bottom pots in their hands, big wooden ladles, teakettles, and also real instruments like brass trombones, harmonicas, accordions, and flutes. It was all just noise, not song, and some people were shouting over it, and I asked my mother what was going on, and she said, “I don’t know, and I’m not sure it matters.” She had so much light in her eyes, and what I kept thinking was, So this is Barcelona. So this is my mother loving Europe.

The sun was hot, but she stayed pale.

The days were long, but she wanted them longer.

There were mimes in Barcelona, I remember. They’d paint their faces white and their mouths grossly huge, then stand in the sun and stare at the crowds and not ever break their silence. “Imagine not speaking like that, for hours and hours,” Mom would say. The thought of it making her shudder, but I didn’t understand why.

“Mom?” I call out now, because I hate the silence of this house. “Mom?” Her door is shut and I lean hard against it, and then I walk away, deliver myself to the shower.

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