This Writer's Diary
April 12th to April 19th
In the fictional medieval world of my books, travel takes a long time, limited as it is by the reach of foot or horse, or a ship sailed or rowed. My travel this week would be unthinkable. Madrid to Majorca, Majorca to Barcelona, Barcelona to London, London to Toronto, in four days.
Before we returned to Madrid after a few days in the plains and mountains, we’d driven to Salamanca in hopes of Iberian chiff-chaff, a small brownish warbler only separable from other chiff-chaffs by its song. There was a chance of penduline tit, too, a bird I’d missed previously. We’d been completely oblivious to two things: one that it was Holy Week, and the second was the significance of that in Salamanca. Not that it was a problem! Palm Sunday morning we walked in Salamanca’s beautiful river parkland, trees and shrubs just beginning to leaf out, and found both of the birds we’d come for. Later we drove out into the countryside, for me to absorb more of the sense of it, returning to the hotel late in the afternoon.
Our room overlooked a public square. In the early evening, I heard music, and went to the window to look. Below me, a parade was passing: brass bands and platforms with religious statues, church dignitaries and civic ones, barefoot men carrying heavy, full sized crosses and trailing chains from their ankles; ordinary people bearing smaller crosses or candles – one of the many religious fraternity parades that happen in Salamanca in Holy Week. But I couldn’t help seeing – without, I hope, demeaning or diminishing what these parades mean to devout Catholics – the processions from Roman history that I borrowed and briefly show or reference in three of my books: processions of statues of gods and emperors, musicians and dancers. A tradition modified, adapted, passed on through the centuries, still alive.
The rest of our travel had little to do with book research – or at least not planned book research. But ‘our’ version of Majorca – spent largely in two walks at the Finca Son Real, a nearly 400 hectare public ecological and archaeological site – had little to do with the mad partying that was happening in the resort town our hotel was in. We found the bird we’d come for – the Balearic warbler – but where the land met the sea, we also stumbled upon a tomb site from the iron age Talaiotic culture. Will this appear in a book? Somewhere, somehow….probably.
Barcelona was next – a purely urban day designed primarily to see Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia – which is all at once monumental, madly beautiful, disconcerting, and unforgettable. Even here, my writer’s brain was telling me to remember the emotions, the feelings it evoked – for I have a character, a young man who will see a great building for the first time – and be humbled and inspired not only by what it contains, but by the building itself. My memories of awe and wonder will become his.
And now I’m home, back in southern Ontario in early spring, far away from the lands I nearly parallel in my books, but with fourteen weeks of place-memory and history to deepen the worldbuilding. I know my characters better; there was time to learn more of who they are and what drives them, and I know their world better too.
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What a trip! I'm hoping to get to Spain later this year, or perhaps next year. I'm currently in Mérida, the one in Yucatàn, and hoping to see an Easter procession in the next couple of hours.