Letter from Spain #34
A long puente ... plus TBC notes & research (where fiction mirrors reality)
It’s been one of those weeks in Spain when many people only worked for two days. I’m assuming most of you know what a normal puente (bridge) is, but if not then here goes:
In the UK, for example, a bank holiday is always arranged to fall on a Monday, regardless of its official date. Such a thing is unheard of in Spain. 1st May is 1st May, and if it falls on a Tuesday or a Thursday, then it remains on that Tuesday or Thursday.
When it does, what happens here is that many people also take off the Monday or Friday - ‘bridging’ a long weekend to include the bank holiday. They block these holidays out in their diaries a year in advance. They know how to enjoy life, you see.
This week we’ve had two national holidays that fell on Wednesday 6th and Friday 8th December - the Constitution Day and the Immaculate Conception Day, respectively. This meant that most of the country took off Thursday, too.
In my first December of living in Madrid, back in 1988, nobody had warned me about any of this. That year, 6th and 8th December fell on a Tuesday and a Thursday. So, as I wrote in A Load of Bull - what happens when Spaniards happily celebrate their Constitution on a Tuesday, followed by an Immaculate Conception on a Thursday? Do they take two puentes, going to work only on the Wednesday? Cojones, do they. They do the viaducto. They take off the Monday, Wednesday and Friday, too.
Anyway, because we’ve had a double puente in Spain this week, things have been relatively quiet. The five left-wing Podemos MPs finally admitted that they find it ‘impossible’ to continue belonging to the Sumar alliance - something that was inevitable - and they have instead become part of the ‘Mixed Group’ in the Spanish Parliament, which includes three other MPs from Navarra, Galicia and the Canary Islands.
I don’t think this really affects anything as far as Pedro Sánchez being able to run his coalition government is concerned, but it’s certainly another indication of the demise of Podemos.
What else has happened?
We’ve had two ‘spies’ at Spain’s Secret Intelligence Service (CNI) arrested for allegedly passing confidential information to two US Embassy staff - who have reportedly since been kicked out of Spain. It all happend back in September-October and is only just coming to light … but no-one in authority is saying much about it, not just because it’s been a double-puente week.
Then a guy called Jaime del Burgo, who is Queen Letizia’s former brother-in-law, claimed he had an affair with her during the early years of her marriage to King Felipe VI, in a bizarre post on X (formerly Twitter), which was later deleted. You can read about it via the link below:
The Barcelona Connection - Research
Fiction mirrors reality …
I mentioned the Picasso Museum chapters in The Barcelona Connection last week.
During my research and writing the book, there were a few visits to museums by the world’s heads of state (and the ‘first wives club’) that actually took place in Madrid and Barcelona - so I felt that it was more than possible that my fictional G20 wives might visit the Picasso Museum in Barcelona (and eventually the Dalí Museum in Figueres) as part of their G20 spouse programme, while the summit is being held in the Catalan capital.
Thus begun the G20 spouse programme, perhaps with more prominence given to Spanish, Moorish and Al-Andalus art over Catalan art than the Barcelona authorities might have preferred … but it was a fair preamble to the surrealist and architectural marvels that lay ahead for the first wives’ club over the next few days in the work of Gaudí, Picasso, Miró, Dalí and Tàpies …
The first three press photos below, released by Moncloa, show NATO leaders and other heads of state visiting the Prado Museum for a dinner and concert during the summit held in Madrid in June last year. Queen Letizia, meanwhile, also played tour guide to NATO’s first wives (& husbands) club, with a trip to see Picasso’s Guernica in the Reina Sofía Museum. The last two photos are from the Spain-France Summit in January this year, held at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC) in Barcelona, which also included a get-together at the Picasso Museum.
Fiction mirrors reality with regards the ‘art attacks’ mentioned in the book, too. In November last year, just as I was going through one of the final re-writes and edits of the book, two environmental activists stuck themselves to the frames of Francisco Goya’s famous Las Majas paintings at the Prado Museum in Madrid. They also scrawled graffiti referencing the +1.5C global temperature target on the wall between the paintings.
I just had to include it as part of Beltrán Gómez de Longoria’s obsession with eco-terrorist attacks at other museums across Europe - and these were happening in ‘real life’ during the same time as writing the book. They included two protesters who threw tomato soup over Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in London, others who splashed pea soup onto a Van Gogh masterpiece in Rome, and then the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci in the Louvre and Girl with a Pearl Earring by Vermeer in The Hague were also targeted. Cake or mashed potatoes were used - in The Barcelona Connection I have the activists using gazpacho - but luckily the paintings were covered by glass and therefore undamaged.
Next week I’ll add some notes about Benjamin on the train to Figueres (and which has actually provoked a couple of questions from readers about his character) …
Previous links to my research notes are here:
Chapters 48 and 51 in Letter from Spain #33 (Picasso Museum).
Chapters 39 and 42 in Letter from Spain #31 (Hotel Arts & Port Olímpic).
Chapter 36 in Letter from Spain #29 (Hotel Arts & Port Olímpic).
Chapter 29 in Letter from Spain #28 (Nîmes to Barcelona and tollgates).
Chapters 28 and 32 in Letter from Spain #27 (Pedralbes and Jaume, the Marquès de Guíxols).
Chapter 26 in Letter from Spain #26 (pijos and Beltrán Gómez de Longoria).
Chapter 25 (again) in Letter from Spain #25 (Benjamin’s thoughts on Púbol, Figueres and Port Lligat-Cadaqués).
Chapter 25 in Letter from Spain #23 (Benjamin and Elena on the Passeig Marítim).
Chapters 22 and 24 in Letter from Spain #22 (Plaça Sant Jaume & Nîmes).
Chapter 21 in Letter from Spain #21 (the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya - MNAC).
Chapter 18 in Letter from Spain #20 (Nîmes).
Chapter 16 in Letter from Spain #19 (Marta Soler visiting the offices of La Vanguardia).
Chapter 15 in Letter from Spain #18 (Sants, Les Corts and the Plaça de la Concòrdia).
Chapter 14 in Letter from Spain #17 (introducing Inspector Vizcaya and Marta Soler).
Chapter 13 in Letter from Spain #16 (the painting - the possible study of The Hallucinogenic Toreador by Salvador Dalí).
Chapters 10 and 12 in Letter from Spain #15 (Isabel Bosch and Lieutenant Trias).
Chapters 8 and 11 in Letter from Spain #14 (Benjamin at Girona Airport and finding the Marqueses’ home in La Bisbal).
Chapter 7 in Letter from Spain#12 (Séverin and Jürgen).
Chapter 5 in Letter from Spain#11 (Elena in Girona).
Chapters 3-4 in Letter from Spain#9 (Marcos Constantinos in Hampstead, plus Benjamin at the UEA & Stansted).
Chapter 2 in Letter from Spain#8 (the home of the Marqueses de Guíxols, not far from La Bisbal d’Empordà).
Chapter 1 in Letter from Spain#7 (Benjamin waking up at the service station).
The Barcelona Connection - Reviews, News & Events
Links to reviews & articles
A review of The Barcelona Connection by Michael Eaude has been published in the October edition of Catalonia Today.
‘Short, fast-moving scenes and the deft joining of two completely different plots … the novel is not just breathlessly rapid and action-packed, but overflows with humour and satire.’
‘The excellent plotting, the local knowledge, the surreal humour, the political satire and the speed of events … it’s an admirable and very readable crime novel.’
Here’s the link for a review of The Barcelona Connection by Dominic Begg that came out in La Revista, a publication of the British-Spanish Society.
‘The Barcelona Connection is a fast-moving page-turner with a helter-skelter plot.’
‘The background to this thriller is realistic and familiar to those who know Barcelona well. It’s a world of cynical, ambitious politicians; civil servants promoted via enchufe; friction between Spanish and Catalan investigators; disruptive anti-capitalist activists; bumbling US dignitaries and security guards; the continuing influence of old supporters of Franco; the soulless 21st century, exemplified by apartment hotels seemingly without human staff-members …’
Here’s a link to a review of the book by Eve Schnitzer published by the Spain in English online newspaper.
‘Tim Parfitt very cleverly weaves together two parallel though quite different stories, set against the background of a contemporary Barcelona that is even busier than usual with major international meetings.’
‘Two plot lines interweave, with some highly ironic as well as suspenseful results … this book has a lot to offer the reader, from pure entertainment to solid information and, possibly, a fuller understanding of the complexities of Spain and Catalonia in particular.’
Here’s the link to an article I was asked to write for The Art Newspaper about my research on Salvador Dalí.
You can also click here for the latest reviews on Amazon, as well as on Goodreads and at Barnes & Noble.
The book is available on Amazon or you can also click here to choose where else to order your copy from. It can also be ordered from any bookshop simply by giving the ISBN number: 978-1-7393326-1-7.
You can also click here for the Kindle edition of A Load of Bull - An Englishman’s Adventures in Madrid.
For professional enquiries and foreign rights for The Barcelona Connection, please contact my agent Justyna Rzewuska at the Hanska Literary & Film Agency.