I figured I'd go ahead and blog now, since I doubt anything that's going to happen tonight will top the adventure I had today. Today may have been the most exciting, yet still frustrating, Ash Wednesday I've ever had. At one point, I was pretty sure I was on my way to join Christ in the wilderness...literally.
Few things ever go right on the first try. Using the bus system in a foreign country, no exception. The good news is that, at 4:30 this afternoon (two hours earlier than I had planned), I disembarked from a bus at the Pamplona bus station, made it back to the AGN for an hour of work, and am now safely back at my hotel. The bad news is I never got to Barásoain. By the end of my outgoing trip, I was 100 kilometers from Barásoain.
I had it all figured out. I got up early so I could walk to the bus station and buy the tickets before starting work this morning-- GoogleMaps assured me it was a mere 8-minute walk. Well I took a wrong turn down the Paseo Sarasate, which was nice, but not where I was trying to get. I finally got my bearings straight and got to the bus station. It took fifteen minutes or so to get someone to give me a straight answer as to where to buy the tickets. I finally got to the counter I needed to be at and bought the ticket, and all was well. Got turned around again trying to get back to the casco antiguo (the old quarter, where my hotel and both archives are). Finally got that figured out. By the time I made it back to the Maisonnave, it was about twenty minutes before the ADP would open. I had hoped to be back in time to go to the AGN at 9 and work there for an hour and change before going to the ADP, since I'd be missing out on most of my afternoon time there.
Worked at the ADP from 10:30 to 12:30-- with the problems this morning, I wanted to make sure I had enough time to make the 1:30 bus. I swung back by the hotel to make sure I had everything (I was extremely glad later that I had gone back to get my sunglasses) and set out.
This time I found the bus station, no problem. The ticket said "Bus: 1," "Asiento: 2," and "Linea: Pamplona-Zaragoza Pueblos." Well there were numbers beside various bus loading spaces at the station, so I went and sat on the bench by spot "1," thinking "That's where Bus 1 will load." Wrong-o. I almost did the same thing at the Renfe train station in Madrid, but I remembered that the gates for the trains aren't even chosen until about 20 minutes before the train leaves. Buses work the same way, it seems. 1:30 came and went and no bus pulled into spot 1. This was another problem of being American. I've never known a bus to be on time. In Spain, it turns out, they're always on time.
When 1:40 came around, everyone at my bench got up and moved over to spot "7." I looked up at the screen (first time I had noticed this little thing that could have saved me 160 kilometers of travel today) and it listed the various outgoing buses. Sure enough, #7 said "Bus 1, Zaragoza-Pamplona-San Sebastian." I was like, "Whew, good thing I followed the crowd." My bus # was 1, just like this bus, and it was a line with stops in Zaragoza and Pamplona, just like mine. The bus driver was talking loudly and laughing with another couple of bus drivers, and people were just walking onto the bus without feeling any apparent need to show their tickets, so I did the same. The bus was almost completely full, but my seat, seat #2, was open, and after I sat down, no one came forward with that ticket to let me know that was their seat. Another unmistakable sign that this was the right bus, right?
The bus pulled out. I was going to Barásoain. It was actually happening.
Then things just started to seem wrong one after another. For starters, as we were leaving the city, I noticed that the sun was behind us and slightly to my left. In Spain, as we approach the spring equinox, if you're traveling south, the sun should be slightly ahead of you and in the afternoon it should be slightly to the right (moving toward setting in the west). Strange, I thought. Maybe we have to leave the city in a northerly fashion before turning south to Barásoain, I "reasoned." Over the next twenty minutes (which should have been the entire length of my bus ride), the mountains were getting bigger and bigger, and numbers on signs saying "Francia" were getting smaller and smaller.
I was on the wrong bus, and not only was I on the wrong bus, I was heading in the exact opposite direction from where I needed to go.
When we finally reached our destination, I explained the problem to the bus driver. He said he saw my bus (the one heading south) pulling out of the Pamplona station as he was pulling in-- he asked if I had gotten to the station late. I assured him that I was there at 1:15, and that I waited at the bench under the #1 that entire time (I beckoned to my ticket). He took me in front of the bus to show me the linea on the front. It was bus #1, he said, and the number on the ticket refers only to the bus, not to the loading zones (which appear on the screens in the station a few minutes before the bus arrives). But the linea was Zaragoza-Pamplona-San Sebastián. The linea on my ticket was Pamplona-Zaragoza Pueblos.
I had done it-- I had been the quintessential dumb American who just kind of went with the flow, assuming I was doing everything right rather than risking sounding dumb by asking the same person five times if this was the right place to be. I had no idea where I was, other than that I was in the Basque Country, and I thought I was in the area known as Guipúzcoa.
The bus driver beckoned down the main street, and told me I could buy another ticket at the ALSA office either to go back to Pamplona or they might have a bus today for Barásoain. When I finally found the ALSA office, the lady there was very understanding, and was kind enough to answer my helpless question, "¿En qué ciudad estoy?" "San Sebastián," she replied with a pitying smile.
The two markers roughly in the middle are my hotel and the bus station in Pamplona. The marker south is the town I was hoping to visit today. The marker to the north is where I ended up: San Sebastián, a lovely city in the Basque Country. Well at least I can say I've been to the Basque Country, right?
I did make it back to the AGN for a little over an hour of work-- I didn't feel like I could just go back to the hotel and sulk about the afternoon's failure. After transcribing as much as I can of the new documents I've found, and trying some other searches, I feel like I've mostly just found new things to check out. First off, I finally found a guild incorporation document for clockmakers. It is dated 1954, and even that is a guild they shared with jewellers.
But searching for a few other key words has at least given me a sense of how professions operated, even without an actual guild. Once a person became a master, he was eligible to be named a veedor (literally, a watcher or seer, but a better translation would be "inspector"). It seems that veedores were especially recognized by other masters as being qualified not only to practice a trade independently (the exclusive right of a master), but to evaluate the work of others. And they didn't just evaluate apprentices and journeymen, they also evaluated masters. One guild actually fined a master for making a work that failed to live up to the ordenanzas of the brotherhood.
That's the other thing-- my search for gremios has been so fruitless because gremio is not, by a long shot, the commonest word for "guild" in Navarre, at least in the documents held at the AGN. Cofradía and oficio both appeared more than gremio in the results I found for disputes over artisan work. Historians of Spanish religion know immediately why this is not necessarily a good thing for my AGN searches. If I search for cofradía, I'm going to get a 1,000 results (and I did, believe me) dealing not just with artisan brotherhoods, but the gobs of religious brotherhoods (and I think it safe to say that these religious brotherhoods had far more members than guilds did in the 16th and 17th centuries). And if I search oficio, even though the AGN is not primarily a repository for church records, I get a 1,000 results (again, I counted) for the Santo Oficio (the Inquisition).
This is all good information for me to have, and I'm glad I've found it. But, I've already got close to ten pages of my thesis done (mostly background information and a deeper discussion of historiographical trends which I outlined in my prospectus). I feel like a lot of the information I've included in my blogs this week is going to be great for my thesis (in much more polished form obviously, and with far fewer parenthetical comments...like this one). But how do I cite the noticing of trends from an archive computer search? Even if I had all these sources at my immediate disposal, I couldn't get information labeled by folio and recto/verso for this stuff. And, on top of that, it's just one archive. For all I know there are gobs of guild documents, buried in some other archive. I guess, as I sit here at the Maisonnave, craving tapas, I'm pondering what I'm really gaining from this trip. I know what I set out to gain, but am I getting it?
I already have an idea about it-- now that I know some of the different nuances of language, it will make searches for secondary sources more meaningful. No wonder all my searches for gremios are turning up only books about Madrid and Andalucía-- the Navarrese were much more likely to call their artisanal organizations confradías or oficios.
But I guess I hoped to come away with ten more primary sources to wow my committee with. And again, the primary source work, transcribing and analyzing, has had its own victories this week (see my previous posts). I guess I wanted to come away with a lot more of the particular, but when I'm in the Archives, I find myself more drawn to reading descriptions about multiple trials and getting a sense of wider trends and features of the groups whose mentalités I'm trying to understand. Is this the stuff a good M.A. thesis is made out of?
Tomorrow I might take Peio up on his offer to drive me to Barásoain, but I'm feeling so anxious already about the lost afternoon in the AGN, and I'm not sure I want to risk another one. But if I don't go, I'm pretty sure I'll regret it for the rest of this program. There's an awesome series of books that both the AGN and the ADP has called Monumentos de las Iglesias de Navarra, with the volumes organized by the merindad or county of the town. So I checked the volume on the merindad of Olite, and found the church at Barásoain. No mention of a clock. BUT, I checked a bunch of other town and even city churches. No mention of clocks there either. But church clocks are not just an urban thing here, like they are in the U.S. They're everywhere. Really, if nothing else, it might please the people in Barásoain to know that someone's reading a lot about their predecessors, including an obsessed priest who spent most of his career suing people or being sued over one thing or another, and when accused of making clocks, his response was that he "merely" designed them.
If there was a former pastor of Riverview UMC that had been that interesting, I'd love for a foreign student to come tell me about it in broken English.
I'll call Peio now and see if tomorrow afternoon works for him =D
Thanks for reading, y'all, and sorry for another long one!
-A
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