Motherland
by Jorge Vargas
For
an entire four weeks, all I could tell people was about my excitement
to go to Spain – or perhaps simply my desire to leave the United States.
I’d traveled before, so it wasn’t the anticipation of finding a new
culture that drove me – England, Italy, and Peru, among others, are
nations which I’d visited and, in some instances, lived in. What drove
me was a desire to see a land that I already knew, despite never having
visited Spain.
After all, every Spaniard who I’d spoken to on the matter said that Spain was merely a rich version of Latin America. Some would even proudly state that Spain was the future model of a possible future for the Latin republics of America. But it wasn’t the future of Latin America that I searched for. It was the culture of Latin America which I anxiously awaited. The culture of my own home in Lima, Peru. The culture of freedom and liberalism. The culture in which alcohol isn’t a sin, and in which kissing in public is romantic not tasteless. The culture that could be described in many ways save one: Anglo-Saxon.
I went to Madrid, the Spanish capital, and remained there for a period of 125 days – the Spanish consulate officials in New York were extremely particular about that – and from Madrid I flew to New York for a short break and then to Lima, Peru’s ancient and beautiful capital. In Lima, I showed pictures to everyone and whenever there was a picture of any type of gold structure that I’d seen in Spain, the joke would arise that the gold was from the Americas – it’s likely that that’s true, of course. Spain only had one major source of gold: it’s American Empire.
But I didn’t tell the people in Peru about the other fascinating aspect of being in Spain, and I couldn’t quite put it together until I was speaking with a friend from Barbados who has a similar feeling about England – the colonial power of Barbados.
It was in early February, and I’d been in Madrid for just under a month. I had decided to go for a walk after school, so I had walked past the Palacio Real of Spain and continued heading North until I reached the Egyptian temple that Spain had brought over and reconstructed on Spanish soil I walked just past the temple, perhaps 100 meters, and the park was emptying out because the Spanish aren’t good at handling the cold temperatures of the minutes just before the sunset. I kept walking until I reached the precipice of the small cliff. Below and ahead of me I could see an endless forest – Madrid’s Casa del Campo – sparkled with the occasional apartment building and a theme park that looked ridiculously out of place in this city that felt more surreal every day.
The sun was almost set, with only half of it still visible over the horizon, and the entire western half of the city gleaming with the last of its blinding rays. I stood there for several minutes wondering about a variety of things – trying to decide if I liked my landlord or not, relationship woes, wondering why Peru had failed in making in to the World Cup – when the stillness of the moment was interrupted by the sound of feet beating lightly against the stone path that led from the temple to the precipice.
The suddenness of the slight interruption managed to startle me and forced me to spin around, an action that put me face to face with the stereotypical Spanish gentleman. He was a man well over his 60th birthday – a comment that applies to most of the denizens of the Spanish capital – and was of pale complexion, although his dark hair made it clear that he was Southern European, just as his well-trimmed moustache gave off an air of aristocracy, although his pipe and checkered brown hat certainly added to that impression. He was wearing a Spanish cape and wearing a black suit accompanied by the traditional white shirt-red tie, and whether or not he was aware of the fact that the shirt was accentuating his graying facial hair and his white eyebrow hairs was beyond me.
He took a puff of his pipe as he eyed me somewhat sternly, perhaps thinking that I had interrupted him, and then he walked right up to the precipice, and, like me, started watching the glorious sunset of that evening, although he did mind his manners by greeting me as politely as he could manage.
I glanced at him once more and then wrote him off as another typical madrileño who likely viewed me as just another Latin American who’d immigrated to the city that had been so fair in his golden day. I turned back toward the sunset and thought about that. It was the only thing that truly bothered me about Madrid: the Spanish contempt for Latin Americans, a people who shared a similar culture, the same religion, and a common language. How can the Spanish hate Latin Americans for being poor if a part of the reason for that poverty resides in Spain itself? Or could it be that Spain doesn’t accept its own history? I certainly didn’t miss the fact that when the Spanish professor at my university gave us a run-down of Spain’s history, he conveniently left out Spain’s foreign policies from the year 1535 – the founding of Buenos Aires – until the mid 1898 – the Spanish- American War.
But then the gentleman proved me wrong.
“You’re
new to the city, I would imagine?” he asked in Spanish.
Fully aware that my Peruvian accent would answer his question, I replied, “I’ve been here for nearly a month, but I would consider myself new here.”
“Of course you would,” he began, “but how do you like the city?”
“She’s beautiful,” I replied. “How did you know I was new?”
“Not many madrileños come to see this sunset anymore. Where are you from?”
Hoping to avoid a careful and detailed explanation of my life, I answered, “The Americas.”
“South America?”
“Peru,” I replied, wondering why he was so interested.
“A great country,” he replied. He tipped his hat at me and then said, “It was a pleasure, sir.” With that he walked away, past the temple, and losing himself in the foliage of the park, heading out toward the Spanish royal palace. I never saw the man again nor did I ever figure out who he was.
As I walked home that night, I began to place more special attention on of how ornate the city’s architecture was – perhaps as a way of showing gratitude for the compliment that the man has bestowed upon my own home. I began to realize that the Spaniards all managed to walk with this solemnity that I had never seen – or perhaps noticed -, I noticed how they never seemed to lose their perfect posture, how they walked at their own pace, refusing to change it for anyone or anything. In the Americas, we pride ourselves on the emphasis that we place on efficiency and progress, never realizing that there is truly something grandiose in the ornate and the silence. Never noticing that the calmness of Spain is preferable to the chaos of the cities of the Americas.
And then I walked past a government office that had a small Spanish flag hanging over its door, a flag that for the first time seemed to want me to salute. A flag that for the first time, felt as much my own as that of Peru’s. A flag that represented not just Spain but also Hispanism, Spanish Roman Catholicism, and Latin culture. I didn’t salute – mostly because doing so would have certainly earned me a few questioning glances in my direction, but also because it wasn’t my flag to salute – but the flag of Spain had suddenly made itself important to me.
That morning, waking up to the usual morning commute and grabbing my bus which left me off at a plaza dedicated to Columbus, a plaza which housed the biggest Spanish flag I’d ever seen, I noticed that I suddenly found myself wanting to speak with that traditional Spanish lisp and that I understood why that professor has selfishly left out 400 years of history – after all, every nation has some great shame. Why should we expect the Spanish to boast about their worst crime when no one else will? I still found the huge plaza for Columbus somewhat distasteful but to each one’s own.
I even started to find excuses for Spain’s racism – immigration is new to Spain, and societal factors have come together so that Latin Americans tend to turn to crime more often than Spaniards – and instead of feeling scorn toward that snobby lisp, I suddenly started viewing it as refined.
That Sunday, I went to mass once more, and that’s when 
the
bubble started bursting just a tad. If that flag represented Catholicism,
amongst other things, and these people were all below that flag and
represented by that flag, why were the cathedrals empty? Why did the
people ignore the one thing that they’d tried so hard to ingrain into
Latin America? Had the Motherland changed her mind on religion? Changed
her mind about God?
Spain calls itself a Catholic country, but on that Sunday, I began to question the meaning of that claim. Is a nation Catholic because it has a particular amount of cathedrals? Or was all of this understandable given Spain’s pro-Catholic and authoritarian former leader: General Francisco Franco? To my friends from the United States, the lack of attendance at cathedrals was no big deal, but then, most Latin Americans would agree that religion is an extremely minor thing among most American Catholics – an excuse for presents and family reunions.
But then, my newly found love affair with the Motherland made me question one of the cornerstones of my own society and of my own academic and personal formation: Religion. Spain’s history goes back to days long before Rome, and Spain as a nation has existed for hundreds of years. Spain is a nation that was once the largest empire ever, before and after, controlling large swaths of land in America – from Florida and Texas down to the tip of Patagonia in South America – along with several regions of Asia and even patches of Africa, along with large areas of Europe. Spain was the Catholic bulwark against Islam and the once-mighty Ottoman Empire. It was Spain’s constant defense of Europe that helped maintain the heart of the West intact. Wouldn’t Spain’s society, building off of this massive history, have progressed further than most others? Wouldn’t the Spanish know better on questions of religion?
It’s certainly no secret that religion is more often a source of conflict than of peace – just ask Israel.
My friend from Barbados once told me that she had a problem of loyalties. England or Barbados? Certainly, one can’t hold an allegiance to both.
Peru or Spain? That’s the question that burns within me now. Is my birthplace the true nation of my heart, or am I merely in love with a culture that is above all else, Spanish? One thing can certainly be ruled out: U.S. Puritanism is not a concept that sits well with me. I can’t call a country that doesn’t let physically-matured and sexually active women under the age of 18 buy ‘morning after’ pills my own.
The old gentleman who disappeared in the darkness on that cold Spanish night provided me with no answers, but left me wanting to be, in some sense, Spanish, although I know that such a thing would never be possible. Spaniards aren’t born in Lima, Peru – anymore.
I’ll never be completely certain of what I feel toward the motherland: Love? Gratitude? Anger? Resentment? Pride? Scorn? But I’ve realized that unless Peru starts making it to the World Cup, I’ll cheer for Spain’s national team, because it’s the national team of the country that I adopted on that February evening.
