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| On the hotel balcony in Cadaqués. You can see it's early: Stanley's hair isn't even dry yet! |
On May 19,
2016, we had a schedule to maintain and got up early to marvel at Cadaqués in
the daylight, in spite of thick cloud cover. Even eating the hotel breakfast
was a feast for the eyes because the area had huge windows on all sides.
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| Cloudy day over the love mansion. Photo by Jessica Knauss |
It was a short
drive to Portlligat to the Dalí House-Museum, although we didn’t recognize it
when we saw it. I’d always seen pictures of it in the sun; under the clouds,
you had to look for the eggs on the roof. Although it’s a timed tour, with
eight visitors at a time, the guide didn’t give a tour per se, but recited the
rules in Spanish, French, and English and opened himself to questions. The
other people on the tour, including an American and a French couple, were
inquisitive and their curiosity made the experience personal.
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| Photo by Jessica Knauss |
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| Jessica in the Dalí library. Photo by Stanley Coombs |
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| In Dalí's studio. Photo by Jessica Knauss |
I’d seen a lot
of Dalí’s extraordinary art in museums in most of the countries I’d visited and
was thrilled to be in a place that exuded his special brand of creativity. But when we moved past
the library, through an anteroom with views onto the port, to the bedroom,
Stanley asked a question that brought everything gloriously together for him:
“Who slept in the other bed?”
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| Gala and Dalí slept in the same room. Photo by Stanley Coombs |
In spite of
Dalí’s untraditional sexual practices, Gala made her mark throughout the house.
Who was Gala? The love of Dalí’s life. The devotion between them was legendary
and artistically fruitful. As soon as he could detect the love story, my
husband sought out the special meanings of each room, which Gala
and Dalí had built to their designs. All together we spent an hour and half
there, wondering and wandering, but it was timeless, a romantic idyll, like all
the moments we spent together.
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| Photo by Jessica Knauss |
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| Photo by Stanley Coombs |
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| That smile was reserved for moments of true love. |
I’d heard about
this house and read about it and seen travel shows about it, and I never
honestly thought I would get to go there. Its location on the edge of the world
felt out of reach to a lonely traveler. Obviously, I needed true love to
get there.
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| Darkening skies. Photo by Jessica Knauss |
The weather
worsened—gale winds threatened to push the car off the road—and made it
impossible for us to see the rock formations at the coast at Cap de Creus. As I
mentioned, Cadaqués and Portlligat are on the edge of the world, so we had to
drive back the way we’d come, through the twisting mountain roads. We were
starving by the time we made it to Girona for lunch, but I had enough energy to
appreciate it as it whizzed by our car windows while we searched for a place to
eat. We finally parked in a garage and walked down Gran Avinguda Jaume I into a
place called Viena, which, it turns out, has the best sandwich in the world
according to the New York Times—a jamón on scratchy, crusty bread. We
didn’t get that one; Stanley already had a pulverized hard palate from the hard
bread we’d been eating. We ordered hamburgers with bacon and egg and pepper
sauce, with some fries and the most satisfying drink in the world according to
my love, Fanta taronja (Catalan for
orange). The buns were as hard as any baguette! It’s not easy to eat a
hamburger in solid steel casing. But I thought it was really good, anyway. I
was relieved to find they’re a Catalan company and in Catalan tradition, they
had a lot of lovely pastries for breakfast. And Girona became another place I
thought I would like to live.
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| "Enjoy the good things in life" "The best sandwich in the world—The New York Times" Slogans are even better in Catalan (says this linguist) |
The hugeness of
Barcelona struck us both. Our hotel was in the middle of a
commercial-industrial area in Cornellà de Llobregat,
but we took a walk and saw a Manolo poster for a concert he’d already given.
Had we heard anything from him yet? "Not yet," we said, with love and hope in our hearts.
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| Portents of things to come... Photo by Stanley Coombs |
It’s more
tiring than you think it will be when you haven’t been somewhere before. I’d
been in Barcelona long before, but it was a package tour—no thinking required. Next time: I try to
navigate Barcelona on my own for the first time!
Catch up with the rest of the posts in this series here.
Catch up with the rest of the posts in this series here.
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