For many of my childhood years, we as a family would spend our summers in the town of Soria in northern Spain. My parents had been drawn there initially by the poetry of Antonio Machado, by the Romanesque architecture, and by the cooler temperatures. We would stay for three whole months, and to me and my brothers—because time lasts so much longer when you’re a child—it always seemed as if we were moving house to another town and taking all our possessions with us.
Compared with Madrid, where we spent the rest of the year, Soria was a tiny, immaculate place in which everything was within walking distance, and where you felt you could know every inch of it. The river Duero has its source in the Soria region, and we would go swimming and rowing there. We would play in the local park known as La Dehesa, while our elders sat on the terrace outside a café run by someone they called El Reglero. In the park stood a tree known as the Árbol de la Música, the Tree of Music, whose gigantic trunk was encircled by a spiral staircase, and on Sundays the municipal band, looking very smart in their uniforms, would climb up that staircase to perform on the wooden platform installed in the crown of the tree. Soria had three cinemas, one of which sometimes served as a theater. There were four classic walks you could take in the evening: to the Castle, to Las Eras, to El Mirón, and to San Saturio. From El Mirón you could see the river, traversed by a railroad bridge with crisscrossed girders from which an occasional luckless lover had jumped; San Saturio was a craggy hermitage, originally home to the eponymous hermit, the city’s patron saint, who, if I remember rightly, once fell from a great height and landed safe and sound on the rocks below. (I have since learned that he in fact rescued someone else who had fallen.) The hermitage was certainly dark and mysterious enough to please excitable children.
In Soria, I came to know some of the finest people I’ve ever met, especially Don Heliodoro Carpintero and his sisters, Carmen and Mercedes, who lived in a delightful house, which is really where I first began reading seriously and where I wrote my very first novel at the age of fifteen, beneath the kindly gaze of the pipe-smoking Don Helio-doro. The Liso sisters ran a fabulous cake shop, where my brothers and I spent many a happy hour learning to fold the cajillas, the square cardboard boxes in which they baked their gorgeous mantecadas, a local speciality similar in texture to muffins. Then there was the friendly, slightly eccentric pediatrician, Doña Felisa, who, along with her sister Antoñita, would happily dance around with us, and make us feel that no misfortune was so very terrible and that nothing was of any great importance. Various families, the Pastores, the Ruizes, the Sáenzes, the Páramos, Don Teógenes, and Don Oreste—an Italian musician who had ended up in Soria, who knows why, and who taught my brother Álvaro—were all lovely people who always had time to talk, and who lived their modest, provincial lives with great dignity and decorum. They were cheerful people, never glum, and very different from the stereotype of the stern Castilian, for though they were sober folk, they were also good-humored and quick to laugh: pale-eyed young Celia, for example, who lived with the Carpintero family, or the endlessly patient Señor Vicen Vila, who sold records, or the math teacher, Don Victorino, who occasionally had to put up with me whenever I flunked my exams. And I remember often playing and fighting with the other boys who became my summertime friends—friends I haven’t seen now for years—the Casalduero brothers, the Mazariegos, the Villuendas, and Ochotorena.
We spent most of September there too, long enough to attend the first soccer league matches played by the local team, Numancia. I still have photos of us standing on that dirt pitch in 1961, and, in the background, you can see the results board: Numancia 2, Logroñés 0. In my memory, that stadium with just one stand was called San Juan. I read more recently, though, that it’s called Santa Ana, but goes by the name of Los Pajaritos. I don’t know if it is the same stadium, but it’s certainly hit the headlines in the last few weeks. Ever since I was a child, I’ve been in the habit of checking the soccer results in Monday’s newspaper to see how Numancia have done in their Third Division or, now, Second Division B championship, a habit I was amused to find that I share with another writer, the Austrian Peter Handke, who, as he tells us in his “Essay on the Jukebox,” always buys a Monday edition of a Spanish newspaper regardless of where he might be.
So Numancia is rather a literary team, especially now that its successes in the Copa del Rey or Spanish Cup are being praised to the skies by every scribe. By the time these lines have been published, their elimination round against Barcelona will be over, but whatever happens in the return match held in a stadium that could hold three times the population of Soria, the team is very much part of my childhood memories of its home town: a clean, humble place, where everything appears to be in order, with its crisp, cold days and its marvelously tranquil surroundings, a place that doesn’t protest or complain about having been overlooked for centuries, a place full of courtesy, dignity, and decorum.
(Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa)
Javier Marías was perhaps Spain’s most famous contemporary novelist at the time of his death, which took place on September 11, 2022. Over the course of two decades, he contributed many wonderful essays and stories to Threepenny. Margaret Jull Costa, his translator since 1992, has also translated his latest novel, Tomás Levinson.
