Gerry Dawes in 2021 standing at La Puerta (El Arco) de la Macarena, the gate through which he first entered Sevilla in 1968, quite by accident, the same entry point used by numerous Spanish Kings on their first visit to Sevilla.
Sevilla: Arrival in Spain
Soldiers on a Train
Chapter 2
(This content may not be copied or re-transmitted without the written consent of author Gerry Dawes.)
Before
I was stationed in Spain in the US Navy, my knowledge of Spain and wine, which
subsequently became a career for me in New York City, was nonexistent. Spain
and my Spanish wine expertise would follow later, but my fledgling wine
knowledge began its journey in California when I was stationed in Monterey in
the mid-1960s. (I don’t count plying girlfriends back in Illinois with the
occasional bottle of pink “Champagne.”) On week- ends at the mystical white
beach at Carmel with my buddies—all of us students at the Defense Language
Institute at the Presidio of Monterey—I shared jugs of cheap California wines,
along with bread and cheese from the Mediterranean Market in Carmel village.
One night under a decaying old Monterey wharf, I helped two Navy buddies polish
off a gallon jug of Mountain Red—with miserable results.
Occasionally
on a payday weekend, I would splurge on abalone and a bottle of Almaden Emerald
Riesling or some such at a restaurant on Monterey’s then-not-so-touristy
Fisherman’s Wharf or have spaghetti and a wicker-wrapped, aptly named fiasco of
Chianti on Cannery Row, which at that time still had vestiges and whiffs of
John Steinbeck’s era. And one June weekend in 1967, I watched and listened in
wine-soaked reverie at the Monterey Pop Festival as Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix,
Canned Heat, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, Otis Redding and others became
international stars right before our mesmerized eyes and ears and passed into
legend.
Before
I entered the Navy, at Southern Illinois University, I had sporadically pursued
a Journalism major until 1965 when the Lyndon Johnson-led US government—opting
first, of course, for those “who had not worked continuously towards a
degree”—decided they needed even more carrion candidates for Vietnam. I
volunteered for the Navy as soon as I felt the hot breath of my local draft
board breathing down my neck. To avoid the possibility of two years of infantry
duty and possible (certain in my mind) death, I enlisted for four years in the
Navy, astutely calculating that aircraft carriers didn’t normally invade
Vietnamese rice paddies.
Ironically,
I damn near died from a bout with spinal meningitis that I contracted during
basic training at Great Lakes Naval Station, where recruits were allowed some
four hours sleep a night, which greatly contributed to a meningitis epidemic
among recruits during that epoch. (In the middle of the night, we took turns
guarding a laundry room, just in case, we surmised, the Viet Cong somehow
managed to penetrate the heartland in the dead of a Lake Michigan winter to
stage a surprise laundry raid.)
After
a four-month stay in the hospital and after schmoozing the Great Lakes Naval
Station personnel bureau with boxes of donuts, they put me on the telephone
with Navy bureaucrats in Washington, whom I pestered until they gave me an
assignment to the Defense Language Institute at Monterey, where I miraculously
graduated as a poor-to-mediocre linguist. I left Monterey barely conversant in
Russian, much of which was military terminology, but I did learn to sing a
transliterated version of “Dixie.”
After
graduation, we were transferred for several months to the Defense Department’s
Top Secret Security School in San Angelo, Texas, a training assignment made
memorable by a monumentally ignorant Boatswain’s Mate Chief Petty Officer, who
lined up our mostly col- lege-educated crew of linguists and threatened to
charge us with mutiny for failing to show up for a useless meeting after an
all-night class. He punctuated his blustering by proclaiming the “ignorance in
boatswain’s mates went out with the sailing ships,” which caused the in-
credulous officers watching this absurd, worthy-of-a-M*A*S*H episode
performance to stifle guffaws. The mutiny squelched, we survived to graduate,
but the Chief was not done spreading his wisdom.
On
graduation day, he graphically told the men in our unit, several of whom were
married, how to avoid contracting venereal disease after having sex with women
they might meet in bars. My classmates, fearing imprisonment for mutiny or
insubordination, strained mightily, as in near hernia-inducing strain, to keep
from laughing in the chief’s face. Some of the officers attending our
graduation rushed from the room to keep from doing the same.
One
day in class, when field assignments were being announced, my unit commander
blurt- ed, “Dawes, you lucky bastard. You are going to Rota, Spain.” As it
turned out, life’s lottery handed me a winning ticket. As soon as class was
over, I went straight to the base library and checked out the few books I could
find on Spain.
On
January 2, 1968, not long after daylight, our military plane, near the end of
an overnight flight from McGwire Air Force Base in New Jersey, banked near El
Puerto de Santa María and I got my first glimpse of Spain. Below, I saw
whitewashed buildings amid palm trees set in a sea of stubby vines—now bare of
leaves in mid-winter—surrounded by stark white soil. As I would learn later,
the Navy base at Rota was near the sherry vineyards between Jerez de la
Frontera and Sanlúcar de Barrameda. As the plane circled before landing, I also
could not help noticing circular enclosures which I would learn were bullrings,
including the big one at El Puerto de Santa María and a couple of smaller ones
which I would one day find first-hand are used to test young fighting cows for
bravery. Spain was already beginning to fascinate me and I had not even touched
the ground.
The plane landed in Spain, but on the US Navy base, an American
enclave where I would stay for the next week, eager to discover my first
foreign country. New arrivals were not allowed off the base until they had
attended the don’t-drink-the-water, don’t-eat-the-food, don’t-get-in-
fights-with-the-natives, don’t-molest-the-señoritas lecture, which was held
once a week. For our group, the indoctrination lecture was not held for nearly
a week. All I saw of Spain during my first week in Rota were the glimpses I got
on the daily bus rides to my work assignment at a large white security
building, surrounded by a huge antennae field—derisively known to the enlisted
men as the “hum locker,” because of the constant humming sound made by the
anten- nas. It was where Navy linguists in French, Arabic, and Russian
clandestinely eavesdropped on radio conversations from around the Mediterranean.
Tom Sims, a tall, shy, sardonic, totally eccentric French
linguist, with whom Gerry Dawes first came to Sevilla.
From
the perimeter road, across the strands of barbed wire that encircled the base,
I saw men plodding along on burros past scrappy-looking farms with cottages,
some of which still had thatched roofs and in whose sparse environs grew cactus
and palm trees. I saw little of the greenery that I knew from my native
Midwest; this part of Spain was more like parts of Cali- fornia, perhaps even
more barren. Still, those few glimpses seemed exotic and were tantalizing.
Finally, along with other new arrivals, we were given the indoctrination
lecture and allowed off the base. I went to downtown Rota with a fellow sailor
for my first meal in Spain: spaghetti with meat sauce, served in an “American”
bar, where Spanish and foreign girls, very few of whom were prostitutes, tried
to keep lonesome young men engaged in conversation, thus
keeping
the wheels hot on the trucks that delivered San Miguel beer to the bars of
Rota.
The latest American rock music blared from a jukebox,
continually reminding my compa- triots of the girls they had left behind,
perpetuating their homesickness and underlining their determination to get out
of “Mother Nav” and away from Spain. Some of my fellow Navy men contemptuously
referred to the local Spaniards as “Moes,” a name used by sailors who had been
transferred from previous assignments in Kenitra, Morocco, where they called
the Moroccans “Moes,” then used it in Rota as a moniker for Spaniards in
general.
I knew men who spent two years at Rota and never got more than a
few kilometers from the base. Once I lured one of them as far away as Cádiz,
that wonderful, ancient, exotic seaport city across the bay from Rota, to see
the sights but he became so uncomfortable after a couple of hours that he
demanded we return to Rota to drink in the American bars.
I too joined the daily post-shift migration to the bars of Rota,
drinking my share of drinks, playing my share of pool, telling my share of
jokes, and trying, like hundreds of other enlist- ed men and officers, to woo
the too-many-times-wooed, often hardened, young women who served drinks. But
gnawing away at my insides was the thought that Spain was my chance to see
Europe, maybe my only chance before returning to small-town Illinois where,
with the help of the GI Bill, I would resume the pursuit of my teacher’s degree
at Southern Illinois University.
In addition to hanging out in the bars, I continued reading
about Spain and like many others before and since, became enamored of Ernest
Hemingway’s books, especially the ones set in Spain: For Whom the Bell Tolls
and The Sun Also Rises, especially the latter, which drew on the
author’s experiences with the Paris-based “Lost Generation.”
During my first months in the Navy at Rota, I met Tom Sims, a
tall, shy, sardonic, totally ec- centric French linguist, whose father was a
prominent geologist and whose sister Charlotte was crowned Miss Minnesota in
1967. One of the quirkiest of many quirky people I have known in my life, Sims
became my friend and, eventually, my housemate in an off-base apartment.
Sims arrived in Rota several months before I did and had been to
Sevilla once. How Sims managed to get there and back, I still wonder, since his
skills as a navigator, or anything else involving the use of logic applied to
everyday problems, seemed non-existent. Sims, whose whole life revolved around
reading good literature while listening to classical music, is a man to whom I
would never loan even a screwdriver without a serious interrogation, nor would
I turn him loose in any kitchen unless I wanted it to become a toxic waste
site. His idea of cooking in those days consisted of dumping a box of Kraft
Macaroni & Cheese—bought from the Rota Navy Exchange—into a pan of water,
turning the fire on under it and reading until he smelled it burning. Sims also
seemed to revel in a peculiar habit that made him, say, order steak in some of
the best seafood restaurants in Spain such as those in Sanlúcar de Barrameda,
and then choose fish in landlocked Ecija, a Córdoba province town which gets so
hot it is known as la sartén de España, the frying pan of Spain.
In early spring of 1968, Sims and I took the train from El
Puerto de Santa María to Sevilla. When we arrived at what even a novice like me
knew had to be the main train station in Sevilla, then the Estación de San
Bernardo, Sims claimed that there was another station where we were supposed to
get off. After a 15-minute stop, the train began to move. I kept questioning Sims
about this “other” station, since I was convinced that we were on our way to
Madrid. As the train was rambling out of the suburbs of Sevilla, it slowed down
for a track-switching maneuver and I insisted that we jump off before it picked
up speed again.
We got off the train while it was moving and ended up in San
Jerónimo, then a suburban village near Sevilla’s San Fernando cemetery, where
later I would learn that Joselito and Belmonte, the two great hero matadors of
Sevilla, were interred. It was market day in San Jerónimo, so we strolled along
the street listening to the foreign sounds of peddlers hawking the cheap
produce of a working-class barrio. When we asked using sign language how we
could get to Sevilla, a woman at a vegetable stand pointed to a bus stop across
the street. The bus was just arriving and we rode four kilometers to Sevilla,
where we got off at a stop across the street from one of the old Moorish gates
to the city.
El Arco de la Macarena, one of the remaining ancient gates left
in Se- villa and one of the most important because it leads to La Basilica de
la Macarena. But since it is off the main routes leading into Sevilla, it is
unlikely that any foreigner would enter Sevilla this way for the first time.
This was my very first photograph of Sevilla. Note the traffic jam of bicycles,
motorbikes, small trucks and cars and a donkey pulling a cart.
The gate was the Arco de la Macarena, the ancient archway
through which one of the most iconic Virgin figures of Andalucía, La Virgen de
la Macarena, a jewel-bedecked, richly robed Madonna statue of legendary beauty,
is carried out each Holy Thursday to the hosannas of thousands of Sevillanos.
The Macarena gate is flanked by the ruins of Sevilla’s old Roman walls and is
one of the city’s most revered spots, but it was not a place directly linked to
any main roads, so it was next to impossible for a foreigner to enter the city
this way. I have long thought, given this auspicious entrance into Sevilla,
that my fate was somehow inextricably intertwined with this marvelous
Andalucian city from that first moment. My future wife and I eventually lived
in Sevilla for nearly four years; the best man at our wedding was a Sevillano,
and it was Sevilla that, 25 years later— through a pivotal rekindled friendship
and the discovery of a prodigiously talented young bullfighter/media star,
Francisco Rivera Ordoñez—would draw me ever more deeply back into Spain.
On
that wondrous spring day in 1968, Sims and I wandered through the back streets
for hours, emerging from Sevilla’s narrow urban canyons on calle Francos to
find the La Giralda tower soaring above us. Once the minaret of the main mosque
when the Moors ruled Sevilla seven centuries earlier, La Giralda was later
capped with a Renaissance structure and became the bell tower of the Cathedral
and Sevilla’s symbol, its Eiffel Tower. The statue of Faith, called El
Giraldillo, crowning the top of the structure, has a metal protrusion that
allows it to swivel in the wind so that it acts as a weathervane. The
shield-like protrusion resembles a mu- leta, the small red cloth that a
bullfighter uses during la faena, the main act of a corrida— there is
even a pass called the giraldilla.
Sims
and I had finally arrived at the center of the city, but our meanderings were
worth it. From our impromptu entrance through the Macarena arch that is sacred
to Sevillanos and our serendipitous exploration of the labyrinthine streets of
the working-class quarters of Sevilla with their strange sights, smells, and
sounds, I got a taste of the city’s true alma, its soul, one that I have
never lost. In subsequent months, now enchanted with this beautiful and exotic
city, I returned again and again. My Navy linguist’s unit worked in shifts that
were similar to what nurses work in hospitals. The schedule was crucial to
being able to really immerse myself in Spanish culture. Our work cycle began
with two evening shifts from 5 p.m. to midnight, then two day shifts, followed
by two midnight shifts.
On
the last morning of each cycle the shift ended at 8 a.m., then we had the rest
of that day free, the following two days and until 5 p.m. the last day when the
cycle began again. During each nine-day cycle I had 81 hours off in a row, the
equivalent of a four-day weekend, which allowed me to go to Sevilla and play
civilian, or in my case, Sevillano. Not insignificant in my nascent love affair
with Sevilla was the fact that there was a continual flow of young American,
Canadian and English-speaking European women backpacking or touring around
Spain and on their obligatory stop to see the quintessential Andalucian city of
Carmen. This made Sevilla an infinitely more attractive place for me to
spend free time than in Rota, with its very highly competitive, seldom fruitful
bar scene with its jaundiced women.
Early
on during my hitch in Rota, on a train from El Puerto de Santa María to
Sevilla, I met an American backpacker whose name I no longer remember. He was
carrying the indispensable guidebook, Spain on $5 a Day, which
recommended a cheap pensión in the old Jewish Quarter, the Barrio de Santa
Cruz. It cost about a dollar a day, he said, and asked me if I would like to
share a room with him to save money. We found the Pensión Santa Cruz in the
narrow back streets of the Barrio and it became my home away from Rota. The
Juan Alonso family who owned it became my Spanish mamá and papá and
their son Juan, mi hermano, my Spanish brother, who subsequently came to
America sponsored by my friend Edwin Mullens and was the best man at our
wedding in Michigan. I was hooked on Sevilla.
Because of the military’s infinite wisdom and logic-defying
precision, I, a Russian linguist, was assigned for two years to the Rota Naval
Base in Spain, from which periodically I was sent out riding (facing backwards)
in the plane captain’s seat of antiquated 1950s-vintage, unarmed airplanes,
including the great swept-wing “whale,” the A-3 Skywarrior, a converted
fighter-bomber. Staging from Rota to aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean and
to land bases in Greece and West Germany, we flew on electronic eavesdropping
missions off the coasts of Egypt, Libya, East Germany, Poland, and the Soviet
Union. It was my job to listen on a radio receiver and tape Russian military
conversations. While flying off the coasts of the Soviet Union bloc countries,
the first time I heard a MIG on our tail pretending to lock on with a missile
that would have turned us to toast in a few seconds, I momentarily longed even
for a Vietnamese rice paddy. Nevertheless, during my
two-year tour of duty in Rota, between
A
street scene on calle San Luís in La Macarena quarter during my first hour in
Sevilla.
flying
missions, I had time to begin discovering Spain and I began to develop an
afición, a passion, for the country that has continued to grow for more than 50
years. I was happy, deliriously happy, to be in Europe and not in Vietman.
By
August of 1968, a year after that momentous Monterey Pop Festival, after a
weekend in Sevilla I found myself in a steamy second-class train car rattling
south through Andalucía toward El Puerto de Santa María. I was with a group of
Spanish Army conscripts, whom I had met on the train and who would become my
friends over the course of that summer as we traveled back-and-forth between
our respective military assignments in Cádiz province and weekend R&R in
their beautiful, mystical Sevilla, the quintessential city of southern Spain, a
place that was rapidly becoming my adopted hometown.
On
that wondrous spring day in 1968, Tom Sims and I meandered through the back
streets of Sevilla for two hours, emerging from the city’s narrow urban canyons
at the end of calle Francos to find the La Giralda tower soaring above us. Once
the minaret of the main mosque when the Moors ruled Sevilla seven centuries
earlier, La Giralda was later capped with a Renaissance structure and became
the belltower of the Cathedral and Sevilla’s symbol, its Eiffel Tower.
On
that slow rocking train in southern Spain, Roberto, one of my new Spanish
soldier friends—most of whom came from La Alameda de Hércules, a Sevilla working
class barrio— taught me how to cut a V-shaped wedge out of either side of a
cork pulled from the label-less bottles of ice-cold coarse red vino corriente
that I purchased when the train stopped at the sta- tion in heat-baked Utrera,
south of Sevilla. Roberto would shove the cork back in the bottle and pass the
wine around for all to share bota-style, each in turn tilting up the bottle and
allowing the wine to flow in a stream into the drinker’s mouth without allowing
the bottle to touch his lips. During the summer of 1968, I nearly mastered the
art of hitting my mouth with a stream of red wine while standing in the
passageway at the end of the swaying train car, through whose open doors gushed
blasts of Spanish summer air, considerably increasing the degree of difficulty.
Wine-stained
shirts, the accompanying foul-mouthed invectives and the cost of a few bottles
of wine were a small price to pay for the conviviality of these fun-loving
Spanish soldiers. In addition to learning a modicum of unorthodox wine-drinking
etiquette from Roberto and his friends, I picked up some Spanish by osmosis and
was treated to impromptu flamenco sing- ing accompanied by the staccato rhythms
of my friends clapping palmas (which they also taught me). I was also given a
share of Roberto’s mother’s superb tor- tillas españolas, Spain’s classic
potato omelettes that are sliced into wedges and eaten cold—a traveler’s staple
in Spain.
Each
week, when we arrived in Sevilla, Roberto and his friends told me which train
they would be taking back to their base in San Fernando, so I could meet up
with them for the trip back south. No matter what shape we were in after
drinking multiple bottles of wine on the two-hour train ride, my new amigos
always made sure I got off at El Puerto de Santa María, the great sherry town
on the bay of Cádiz, where I would catch the shiny little local train to nearby
Rota. There were big abrazos (embraces), waves, and good wishes from my new-
found friends as I disembarked, then they were back to clapping and singing
flamenco as their train creaked to life and rolled on to San Fernando, two
stops down the line.
The
sharp metallic chilled wine, which tasted far better with the good tortilla,
Spanish olives, and rough country bread, was never more than poor to mediocre,
but it was the camaraderie and conviviality of Roberto and his Sevillano
friends sharing their food, songs, jokes and sto- ries with me that made those
train trips so memorable and the ordinary wine and food a feast. On those
wonderful “wild and weary” train rides through tawny summertime Spain, I also
learned an indispensable rule about drinking vino—the most important thing
about any bottle of wine is the people surrounding it—and in the process I
developed a passion for Spain, Span- iards and Spanish wine and food that has
endured to this day.
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