It’s a beautiful mild and sunny Saturday. Serge and Pierrette came for lunch, bringing an unlabeled bottle of red wine from her home in Gruissan. It had the taste of simple friendship and hospitality that I associate with Narbonne, which is next door to Gruissan. When I first found out where she is from I called her Nausicaa, and her Occitan home was for me the generous land of the Phaeacians which shelters Odysseus on his homeward journey. This association goes back to a simple encounter, meaningful only to me, during my three-day journey hitchhiking from Paris to Barcelona in July 1968 in order to study Spanish at the Intituto Eurolingua language school. To steal a march on the other hitchhikers, I traveled in a suit and tie with my things in a suitcase, so that I looked like a stranded bourgeois. It worked. After two days I was trudging, suitcase in hand, through the poorer outskirts of Narbonne. By then, my white shirt was bedraggled and dirty and I was sweating in the heat and dust. Two old men at an outdoor café motioned me over to their table in the shade of a tree. They poured me a glass of red wine and asked me what I was doing there. One was a veteran who had fought for the Spanish Republic. He spoke Spanish and told me about himself and his friend. I explained where I was coming from and heading. They didn’t have any ulterior motive to invite me to their table under the chestnut tree. It was pure hospitality. They could see that I was tired and thirsty and a stranger. I never forgot the gratuitous kindness of these two old guys. They weren’t rich, more on the plebeian side. I’ll always remember their friendly and bemused manner.
In Barcelona, I was quartered by the school in an apartment in las Ramblas that belonged to an older Spanish lady. Luckily, another student was quartered in the same apartment, a student half-French, half German-Jewish, who two months earlier had taken part in the French May-June events. He had been expelled from the Sorbonne or from France altogether, I can’t remember which. He knew a lot and thought politically at a sophisticated level. Speaking German and sometimes Spanish, we spent a month talking politics and history while playing the pin ball machines in the back alley dives. Franco’s Guardia Civil still patrolled the streets. More than anyone else, I owe my political education to him. On August 21, we listened to the radio news in the old Spanish lady’s apartment as the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and crushed Alexander Dubcek’s “Socialism with a human face.” I had spent Easter week in Prague with a West German student group. For us students, Czechoslovakia opened up a freer spectrum of political options than the Cold War polarization allowed. The envisioned freedom of 1968 was suddenly narrower.
Is there a poet or alchemist who can distill and balance all the sweetness and bitterness I have in me?
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks(
Normal Thoughts 