Something About Iberian Ham

On the Renfe train from Molins de Rei on a Sunday morning, about 7:30, we sit across from some partiers coming home late from last night's famous Barcelona nightlife. The morning is bright and warm. The partiers are speaking Catalonian, so we really can't make out what they're saying except when their narrative bounces across something with an exact parallel in Spanish. But what's going on is clear enough: one of the boys is suffering from overindulgence, maybe--as his state of agitation implies--something to do with hard drugs, but definitely at least partly alcohol-related. But they're all in a pretty good mood. They jump out at St. Felieux station; we're whisked around the foot of the hill and through the suburbs, beige apartment buildings, past an anachronistic tower left over from medieval times sticking out of the rumpled skyline, the constant flow of graffiti along the railway's retaining walls and the low walls of nearby buildings.

At Sants, the main terminal, we transfer to the Metro after hustling down a series of tiled tunnels, serenaded along by three drunken teenagers who appear to be celebrating a recent futbol match, singing that catchy rhythmic fight song, (Olae!) but also singing and yelling other things, happy, even giddy. When we take our seats on the car, a middle-aged woman shushes them, politely, reminding them that it's early Sunday morning and not everyone is prepared for their high-volume excitement. They tone it down for a moment, but as they're passing out the door at their stop, the volume is back on high.

At the Plaza Catalunya, we hop our of the car, find our way through another maze of tunnels, finally pop out into the plaza itself, find the blue-roofed lineup of Busturistics, locate our bus, bound for the cathedral city of Girona then Figuera and the Dali museum. It's our first trip out of town after spending most of the week wandering through downtown Barcelona. The countryside north of Barcelona is pale, small towns scattered in arid hills, a river of some type, sluggish, at the core of the greensward marked by what look like aspens, planted in geometric rows.

After about an hour we arrive at Girona. A walk around Independence Plaza, stone walls, footbridges across the slow, clear, carp-infested river, the cafes mostly closed but we find one offering juice drinks, espresso and pastries. The food is delicious but there's a problem when I go to the register and try to pay our bill. I can barely manage the least transaction in Spanish, and their English isn't good here, but we work it out after the waitress summons the manager, who chastises the underling who took our order, before toting up the bill. It would have been easier if we'd sat outside on the umbrella-covered patio.

Eventually we get out and start investigating the cathedral of Sant Felieux, a dramatic stone building with, reportedly, the widest nave in christendom, 30 meters wide, the ceiling a hundred feet or more above us, lit by icons in stained glass, lined by dozens of chapels devoted to the works of a variety of saints. The cathedral is built at the foot of a hill, the attached monastery helps form a defensive wall of stone, according to the information brochure last of strategic importance during the siege of 1283.

Parts of the city are still enclosed in a stone wall, but nowadays the flat land across the river from the old city has grown into a modern city of 100,000, closer to France than it is to Spain, geographically as well as culturally.

We also visit the Arab Baths, a stone enclosure of a half-dozen ancient grottos built in the Roman style, with frigid, tepid and warm rooms, and old fixtures like the furnace and sinks still usable.

When we arrive in Figuera, around two in the afternoon, the tenor of the graffiti shifts from yearning for independence to outright hostility toward Spain, particularly toward the guardia civil. In fact one message I easily interpret is an unambiguous threat to kill those federal police. We don't see anyone on the street--it is, after all, the height of siesta time--and the warm blue northern horizon, lined by the peaks of the Pyrenees and thus France, is silent, cloud-spotted, cluttered with dust-colored villages that could be in Spain or France, it's hard to say from a distance.

The Dali museum is an ultramodern island of surrealism amid the otherwise unremarkable village of Figuera. His famous paintings, sculptures and installations are displayed in rooms and a courtyard full of happy, milling tourists from around the world. Many of the docents are French, but Spanish is still the official language, although the people of the town are likely to speak Catalonian first--perhaps exclusively. The graffiti is written only in that tongue.

It's 150 kilometers back to Barcelona, only about two hours down the highway, mostly flat. The Plaza Catalunya is our stop, and after fumbling around a bit we get directions in English from a Metro employee and find a branch of Freshco, the chain buffet lliuve restaurant. The food is top-notch, all vegetarian in deference to the tourist trade, and includes wine, a civilized touch.

Everything costs too much, but the prices are in Euros so they look deceptively low. Whenever we urge a few more colorful bills out of the ATM we lose 30% of the dollar value, but we hold out for a full week, eating every day, and visiting the top tourist attractions. There's no money left for little things to bring home, but the things I'd really want, Cuban cigars and jamon Iberique, are prohibited by customs anyway.

The smoked ham one finds in Barcelona--and one finds it everywhere, hanging by the hindquarters, hooves attached, in groceries, bars, cafes and tapas restaurants--is, to an American, spectacularly exotic and exquisite. It's moist, subtle, delicate and appears on every menu, usually served with Spanish cheese on narrow baguettes and without condiments. The bread is tender and fresh, and the ham so moist that mayonnaise would be superfluous. We realize that the American idea of such a sandwich defaults to slatherings of condiments because our bread is dry and pasty and the meat is little better than dyed tissue paper. None of the hints of clove and shadings of garlic that scent each mouthful of the real thing.

Our hotel offers coldcuts as part of the continental breakfast, along with fresh juice, chocolate croissants and more bread, this time sliced from loaves but grainy and tender. As if the grains have been wedded rather than forced to elope on some kind of blind date. Overall, Catalonian food has that quality. The clams, mussels, paella, olive oil, pan con tomates, with its dressing of spicy tomato puree, are all as good as human ingenuity and practice can make them

I'm still not sure when we arrived in Barcelona, after departing from San Francisco at six in the morning on a Monday. Four hours in Chicago O'Hare, then a transatlantic flight ending with an overflight of Santiago de Campostelo--coastline, lights, jagged lines seen through the airbus window, just at dawn. It must have been Tuesday but we flew into time, accelerated the flow of night by piercing it at 400+ mph, and there is doubt, especially when the helpful desk clerk informs us that it's Thursday. Possible language barrier.

At any rate, we hit Madrid about eight in the morning and traced our connection to Barcelona, something like four hours in the modernist Madrid airport then liftoff and the short hop across the peninsula, glimpsing the Mediterranean, then a slow, muddy river, some ponds that look like sewage treatment reservoirs, and at last the equally modernist Barcelona airport. We know we can take the Renfe train to the hotel but we take a cab instead, hoping it won't cost too much.

The cab driver takes two loops around the hill before discovering our hotel, which he either couldn't find or didn't want to find on the first time around--we discover after a while that his cab is equipped with GPS equipment that should make the trip direct-- and we end up forking over 35 Euros and checking in.

That first night we only get as far as the Sants station via Renfe, then walk down an Avenue to the Plaza Espanya. Old stone, new steel, dramatic public art, old tile broken by new construction, crowds, traffic unwilling to yield to pedestrians at the crosswalks.

We find paella and sangria. The waiter is Indian. The food here is good but it feels a bit like a clip joint. Cafe del Sol. When we stop to look at the menu on an easel, the waiter quickly comes to assist us. This happens wherever we go in Barcelona, while in Girona they are much more passive about it.

Barcelona is tourist-oriented. The waitstaff or somebody close at hand can always speak English, while out of town there is no such guarantee. They'd prefer us to speak Catalonian, which is so soft on the ear but still, having never heard it before, peculiar, hard to touch. It would take a few weeks to get the gist of it, although of course the graffiti and the bi- or trilingual information signs and tourist pamphlets offer a quick lesson on some of the more universal verbs and nouns. Per, rather than po; destino, for destinacion, many Catalonian words differing from the Spanish only by suffix, others looking more like French.

The signs of American cultural imperialism--one night we take a late cab to the hotel, and his radio is tuned to classic rock--are everywhere, unmistakable, but, here frequently used with conscious irony for purposes of propaganda. The independence movement never sleeps.

The main thing, the inescapable conclusion, is that, in the 2,000 years since Barcelona served as a Roman seaport, and including the Columbian exchange, which brought the patata and the tomate to these shores, nothing has happened here that couldn't have been done if America didn't exist, with the exception of those characteristic foods. Without them, they'd still be eating over here. The fields of corn appear to be meant for livestock, since corn never appears on the menu, and the tortilla, in Spain, is a lovely type of omelette.

But, as is clear from the airplane window, Spain's intricate, asymmetrical patchwork of wheat and rice fields, hills studded with oak trees much like the drier parts of California, roadways, dams and reservoirs, isolated hilltop villages and monasteries, is old as time itself.