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  • Reflections:The Man Who Swam Out of History: Spain
  • Robert A. Rosenstone (bio)

This essay is an excerpt from a work-in-progress entitled The Man Who Swam Out of History, in which Robert A. Rosenstone reflects on his own scholarly trajectory, projects, and books as the result of an interaction between personal desires and experience and larger social forces.

~ Part 1 ~

For the man who swims out of it, History begins in Spain. This was a surprise. It was supposed to be Literature. I first went to Europe because of Hemingway. 1958. I didn't see any swimming pools on this trip, but I was not yet a swimmer. What pulled me to Spain was The Sun Also Rises. The characters in that book didn't swim. They worked in Paris. They drank after hours at small bistros on the Left Bank. They went on vacation and fished for trout in the mountain streams of Navarre. In July they went to Pamplona for the Fiesta de San Fermin. Here they watched bullfights. They sat in the café Irun, drinking too much and making smart remarks. Once in a while one of them beat up somebody or got beaten up. Pamplona was for me a holy site, the Fiesta de San Fermin an important pilgrimage. Not that I would have used those terms. I was going to emulate my literary hero. I was going to gather material for a novel I had begun to write in Paris, where I had hung around the Latin Quarter for three months.

It would have to be a short novel. I was not in Pamplona for the seven days of the festival. I was there for twenty-four hours and never saw a bullfight, the bull ring, or a bull. Hollywood had released its second version of The Sun Also Rises earlier that year and no hotel rooms were available. Cafés overflowed with American college students who engaged in lengthy discussions on the relative merits of Bermuda shorts and the new short shorts. On the first afternoon I bought a bota and drank a lot of cheap wine as I shuffled through the streets behind various marching bands. In the evening I tried to sleep with my head on the table of an outdoor café. Nausea began at midnight, diarrhea [End Page 641] a little later. The remainder of my time in Pamplona was spent squatting over a foul hole in the cement floor of the public restroom under the main plaza. When the early morning rocket announced the running of the bulls, I was dragging myself to the railroad station to catch the early train to the border. It took three days in Biarritz to recover my health.

History in the form of the Spanish Civil War came to me while touring Spain in the ten days before the fiesta. My traveling companion, Leon Frankel, had hung around the office of the UCLA Folk Song Club, next door to The Daily Bruin, where I spent three years writing editorials denouncing fraternities and sororities and railing against the iniquities of the school administration. Out of school for a year and working with the Los Angeles City planning department, Leon had just bought a new Austin-Healey Sprite in London. It carried us to the continent (on a ferry) and then down from Paris to Spain.

Our first day in the country, somewhere between Burgos and Madrid, we pass two military types in green uniforms with odd, patent leather hats, one walking on each side of the highway. Leon raises his left arm, bent at the elbow in what I can only describe as the Italian fuck you, then accelerates.

Guardia civil, he says.

Who? I ask.

National police. Used for centuries to control the population and suppress revolt. They patrol the highways in Spain.

In a small town Leon points to an unfamiliar symbol stenciled on the side of a building facing the plaza. The yoke and the arrows. The symbol of the Falange.

The what?

The Falange Espanol.

What's the Falange?

My ignorance lets Leon deliver a series of lectures on Spanish history. He has taken several political science courses from...

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