BIO AND SCENES FROM MY LIFE

An Encounter with Opus Dei

A murderous albino monk who belongs to the Catholic organization Opus Dei is the villain in Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code. I am somewhat at a loss at the author’s choice of sinister organizations because I had quite a different experience with Opus Dei.

I was alone on a train in Andalusia, the destination Granada. I was traveling light and dirty, everything except for the clothes on my back, my sleeping bag, and my wallet having been stolen in Salamanca. There were five or six of us squeezed into the compartment. One of my fellow travelers was ranting to a young man about the racial, moral, and physical inferiority of all Andalusians, especially compared to the enlightened people of Northern Spain, where he came from. The young man protested but kept his temper while the older man, beyond the reach of reason, continued his tirade filled with insults and slurs. When we arrived at the station at Granada, the young man said to his disputant with a hint of irony, “Perhaps I learned something from you.” Then he turned to me and spoke to me for the first time, “You are new here. Let me show you my city.” I believe he gave his name as Roberto.

Over the next two days, Roberto took time out of his day to show me the sights of Granada. He took great pride in his city. During this time, he explained the attention he was giving me by revealing that he was a member of Opus Dei and that showing such hospitality to a stranger was a pleasure and an obligation of his organization. “Find God in daily life” was the thrust of their doctrine.

This was the period of political reconciliation after the Franco years, and the leader of the Communist Party was allowed to return to Spain from exile. Roberto mentioned that his father could not bear to watch the exiled leader on television because he witnessed the same man ordering the execution of his father—my guide’s grandfather—by firing squad. Frequently on traveling through Spain in the 1970s, I came across people who carried these old wounds, which were the result of the atrocities committed by both sides.

Another incident also occurred in Granada, which at the time seemed a scam but, in retrospect, was worth all the money the gypsy got out of me. I was sold a ticket at five times the going rate for an evening of flamenco in one of the caves the gypsies inhabited. I asked whether this was going to be professional flamenco. The gypsy seller of the ticket promised me that it would be. Later I learned that there was a gesture gypsies make when they tell a lie to absolve them to the higher power. They bunch together the fingers of a hand, kiss the tips, then flick their fingers toward the sky.

Anyway, there was a cave, and there were gypsies—unhappy gypsies because I was their only audience, occupying a single chair out of thirty. The first dancer was five years old. Cute but somewhat shy of professional. The second, her sister, was maybe seven. The next sister, eight or nine. I applauded each performance, painfully aware that silence was the only thing worse than one person clapping. After every performance, a grandmother pressed on me castanets, which I declined to buy. I could feel the hostility in the cave grow as the older girls debated whether I was worth their effort. I wouldn’t even buy their castanets. Still, I was determined to experience authentic flamenco,

Four or five sisters later, when the girls' ages reached fourteen or fifteen, and some skill was being displayed, a group of middle-school boys suddenly invaded the cave, who, during the next performance, acted with the same reserve and decorum with which middle-school boys usually act. The grandmother came up to me and pointed to the door. My chair was needed.

Opus Dei, like any conservative religious organization with a strong sense of purpose, has its legitimate detractors. However, I have a hard time reconciling the character of an evil albino monk with the polite, kind young man who took the time to show a scruffy stranger his city.

I consider myself a tourist into the past. Like a tourist I forget much of what I hear and see. However, also like a tourist I am eager to share my best experiences. For the last thirty years, along with being addicted to novels, I have never not been reading or listening to a book on history—some popular, some scholarly. The theme of my blogs, to take a line from W.B. Yeats poem, CIRCUS ANIMALS’ DESERTION, is “Character isolated by a deed.”

Early next year (2021) I will begin to publish a series of coming-of-age historical novels starting with a boy indentured to a fur trader in 1746 Colonial America and most likely ending with a rancher in the Sierra foothills of California.

These are the bare bones of my curricula vitae. I graduated from UCLA with a bachelors in Spanish taking a circuitous route through the University of Santa Cruz and the University of Barcelona. In an alternate universe where my life has gone wrong I would devote the time of my long prison sentence to translating Don Quixote into English.

After falling in love at first sight with a young woman who inexplicably felt the same way, we married and have remained so near three decades. I have two daughters who prove the ugly rumors about millennials wrong. I’ve run my own business wholesaling Spanish language gift items. About five years into my business, I made the decision to structure my business day in such a way that I would maximize the time I spent in my car—an easy thing to do in Los Angeles—and listen to books. That is probably the reason that while I’ve avoided insolvency, I never achieved outstanding success in the business world.

I have included scenes from my life which are very much like my blogs. They will reveal more about me than the carefully edited bio above—not all complimentary. My deeds. My character. I will add more recollections as time passes.

ON THE EDGE OF THE OLD WORLD

This happened on New Year’s Day in 1977. I remember the bus letting the three of us off at night near the youth hostel. I remember the darkness so dense that I could not see the path and barely discerned the white building of the hostel in front of me. The wool blankets were rough and smelled of lanolin. I was surprised the next day, given the denseness of the night, to awake to a brilliant cold blue sky and the sight of the monasteries isolated in the distance on the bluffs.

This being New Year’s, there was no transportation to the monasteries. We were unsure that the monasteries would be open, but having nothing else to occupy our time, we decided to walk. Along the way, we passed small scrubby trees from which we heard munching sounds. Being urban kids, we had no idea that goats climbed trees to get at the leaves.

The first monastery was a convent. We were allowed to enter in far enough to give a donation. A guide hurried us through a few rooms. I can only recall that the young initiates avoided looking at us as if we were the source of the outside world’s sin and temptation. This brief glimpse into what felt like a medieval mindset was a jarring experience.  

We continued to the largest monastery. At the foot of several hundred steps that led to its entrance, a woman and her albino son sat in front of a fire boiling water for tea. Through a combination of signs and gibberish, we learned that the monastery might open to visitors at noon. Soon, one of the fathers, a spry old man, came down the hundreds of steps to talk to the mother and her albino son. They seemed to be in no hurry to end their conversation.

Being Americans, noon meant noon. When the hour struck we decided that the monastery must be open. We ascended the staircase, which tested our youthful endurance. When we arrived, winded and wondering whether this was worth our time, we were confronted by a closed door. After a short debate, we decided since nothing indicated we were not to enter, in other words, no sign that said the monastery was closed, we went in. The stone hallway where we found ourselves felt deserted. Sensing we were doing something not quite right, we walked down a hallway, passing a series of doors. The stone hallway really held no interest for us, so I tried another door, which like everything else in the monastery, was unlocked.

On rare occasions, there are sights so strange that your brain desperately tries to reinterpret what your eyes are telling it. On the shelves were bones—specifically human bones—sorted by type. Skulls on one shelf, thigh bones on another. An ossarium is definitely a thing that you should read about before experiencing. We had not, of course.

We definitely now had the sense that we were in the wrong place. We went out into the hallway, looked through a window, and saw at the foot of the steps the old priest still talking to the mother and her albino son. Again we contended with the push-and-pull feeling of whether we should leave or not. We tentatively continued toward the end of the hall, where there appeared to be a chapel. We wanted to see more than a room full of bones.

Before we got to the chapel, the old priest was beside us, cheerful and full of conversation, having climbed the steps in half our time. He decided to act as our tour guide. The only problem was he did not have much English, and we had no Greek. Still, he pointed to this mosaic and that icon and said things about them.

In the chapel, I saw on a pedestal an old hymnal with vellum pages and square blocks for the musical notation. I then conceived a wish, and the old priest read my mind. He went up to the hymnal and, for ten minutes, sang to us the ancient hymn in a resonant baritone communicating through the music the beauty of his faith. I felt I had ascended a further pinnacle on that strange cold brilliant day and glimpsed a different world. I’ve had other moving experiences in my life, but none like hearing an ancient hymn sung in a monastery on top of a mountain on New Year’s Day.