JOHN VC

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This is a venture that began in art and ended in beauty, rolling from the Kingdom of the Basques over the Pyrenees to the occitanian backwoods of the Dordogne with a stop to sample the miracles (see HORDES AT LOURDES), following which we hang a right and descend, via precipitous chasms, into Provence (see LAVENDER LAND) on footpath-like roads that are inherited unchanged from the days of ox carts. All this with nary a scratch or mishap until the final day when we brushed a wall negotiating a corkscrew ramp in a parking garage at Aix-en-Provence. A peaceful holiday with little in the way of character development, but it was new country to me. Poor me, so many years wasted.

The Basque country, wrapped around the west end of the Pyrenees, is much wetter and greener than you might suppose. Southern Europe seems to consist of different parts of California, and here we are somewhere around the equivalent of Mendocino, on a mountainous coast with lush canyons leading inland from little coves and river mouths. A coastal road, the Basque equivalent of US 1, hangs desperately from the sea cliffs and dodges in and out of mossy forest nooks to get from one cove and its fishing village to the next. We came south to see the new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, but we took everyone’s advice and stayed an hour away at the coastal resort of San Sebastian, an amazing Victorian confection of a city on a neck of land between two bays. It has a double decker merry-go-round in front of the multi-turreted city hall, at the end of a mile long promenade on the sea wall, and streets full of buildings that look like wedding cakes. This was a sort of 1800’s La Jolla, where the artisto-trash went to negotiate further inbreeding when not soothing their neurasthenia. The proper Basque word for San Sebastian is Donostia, as we learned from the road signs. Better yet, other signs insisted that the chief Basque city is not Bilbao, but Bilbo. Cool.

If you’re thinking of heading to Basque country for the eats, stay home. We only had two decent meals during the 3 days spent in this otherwise delightful area. One was found by clever Enid, who asked the lady in the butcher shop where SHE would eat. The other gourmet feast was lunch in the Guggenheim Museum cafeteria — where the elderly lady at the next table turned out to be one of Ben’s high school teachers on her honeymoon! Otherwise, elbow to elbow with loud chain smoking Basques at bars laden with greasy tapas, or restaurants with carbon copy menus of chuleta, merluz, langosto and pulpo, like an evil incantantion that followed us wherever we went. Seeing the Guggenheim, however, was certainly worth the gustatory deprivation — absolutely staggering visually, inside and out, with its skin of titanium scales and its piled-up, eye-stretching curves. At present they have not a great deal to put in it except modern Spanish art, which is not saying much, and some pretty chunky scrap iron by Frank Stella. In a book we saw the unrecognizable doodles that Frank Gehry submitted as his concept for this astonishing sculpture-building. He must have been a hell of a talker.

On the way back from Bilbo we took a half-hour detour to Gernika/Guernica, where Basque Kings were crowned beneath a great oak that still stands. The air attack by the Fascists on the defenseless population, during the 1933-35 Civil War, was the subject of Picasso’s greatest painting — and the turning point in his career, from serious artist to serious celebrity. A little surprised to find a peaceful, beautiful little red-roofed town tucked into green hills above a deep bay. No sign of the horror 65 years ago — but nobody will ever forget that this was the world’s first intentional bombing of a civilian target. By making aerial massacres militarily respectable, Gernika led on to Coventry, Dresden and Hiroshima. We sat in a hilltop park, Alicia made a daisy chain, the church bells tolled over the tree tops.