Scenes from Andalusía, Spain, November 1981

Scene 1. We're on the road from Seville to Córdoba. It's siesta time; I'm driving, and my Dad is taking a nap on the back seat. At this time of day, the roads in Spain are completely deserted. Suddenly, I see a car in the rearview mirror - it appeared out of nowhere. I slow down, letting the car pass. Two men inside are smiling and gesturing to me.  After few minutes they slow down, letting me pass. We play like this for some time, back and forth. They gesture to me to pull over. I'm not going to comply, and frankly, I'm tired of their company. But they are not going to give up: they start honking. They become really loud which finally wakes my Dad. 'What the heck', he says and sits up. Young Spaniards, clearly surprised, leave the scene pretty fast.

Scene 2.  One of the goals of this trip was to visit La Mancha and to see the famous windmills which Don Quixote took for giants. The windmills are white and built on bare sunlit hills. I take pictures of them, then we head to El Toboso, the hometown (more of a village, really) of the famed Dulcinea. There is a church, and in front of it a marketplace with stalls offering used clothes. The town includes La Casa de Dulcinea and the Cervantes Museum.  Dulcinea's house displays typical farm tools, cheese-making apparatus, seventeenth-century furniture, large vats where wine would have been stored, and has a large oil press in the courtyard. In the Cervantes Museum one can see copies of his masterpiece in a huge range of languages. It holds over 400 copies of "Don Quixote" from all over the world, signed by the leaders from the time they were collected, such as Franco and Mussolini. Hitler sent a signed copy of "Songs of the Nibelungen". The museum seems proud of those artifacts; to me, they are ominous.

Scene 3. We get to Madrid during the celebrations of the sixth anniversary of Franco's death. On the weekend following November 20^th, Madrid goes crazy: the streets are full of people dressed in dark blue shirts and black pants (men, women, even kids), extending their hands in a Nazi salute. There are hundreds of posters with swastikas, numerous stands where young neo-fascists are selling “Mein Kamp”', and fascist paraphernalia. Young people are driving erratically, waving flags, shouting, honking, saluting. The streets don't seem safe to us, especially after some neo-fascists snatched my camera from me and almost beat me up because I'm taking pictures. We find an asylum in a coffee bar where people turn out to be normally dressed - what a relief! They all look very sad. When we tell the barista what has just happened to us, he says we'd better hide in a nearby movie theater for the rest of the day.

Scene 4. When the unbelievable celebrations are finally over (on Monday morning one cannot see even a trace of what was going on in this city over the weekend), we're going to see the famous 'Guernica'. The monumental painting arrived in Madrid only two months earlier, in time to celebrate the centenary of Picasso's birth on October 24. There are huge long lines outside the museum.  The police are checking our purses and backpacks thoroughly.  The masterpiece is displayed behind bomb- and bullet-proof glass. In the front of the huge glass case there are commandos with machine guns in hand, facing the public. I find their presence disturbing, but on the other hand, they add specific drama to the painting.