Free-D

Salamanca plays host to many visiting academics, having as it does one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in Europe. I first came across mention of the city and its university in a story by Irving in a collection of American short stories - an anthology which was, coincidentally, edited by an academic from my own home town of Norwich. Another scholar with a slightly less tenuous connection to both Salamanca and Norwich is Malcolm Bradbury. Sadly Bradbury died a few years ago, but shortly before he wrote an account of the city for a glossy “coffee table book”. He begins his account by saying that the best way to see Salamanca is in the capacity of a visiting academic. It’s true that such a distinction (meaning the possession of a university seat) gives one a definite advantage; not the least being access to certain select chambers and erudite circles. But I wonder if you see the true Salamanca this way. It’s been fifteen years now, but my own memories of studying at the Escuela de Bellas Artes are still intense, strange and intoxicating. Which may sound slightly poetic, until you realise that amongst these memories is a fortnight spent living on nothing but frankfurters (due to poor budgeting skills). Still, however hard up I may have been and however many cockroaches I discovered twitching their hideous antennae under my bed, there are nothing but wonderful images of the city left in my mind. And it’s not just the glow that comes with a decade and a half; Salamanca is the kind of city to make you write home feverishly, “I’m never coming back”. Therefore, with complete respect to Malcolm Bradbury, I can’t help thinking that, regardless of the privileges that come with academia, it’s better to come here as a student. Incidentally, he quotes the following from Unamuno, “Those of us who live mainly for reading and in reading cannot separate personages from poetry”. Academics spend a lot of their time drawing sharp dividing lines between things, but real magic lies at the diffuse border where all is less clear, where things run into each other. I used to try to separate my labyrinthine dreams of the city from its reality: I no longer bother; the dreams are no more unreliable than my waking memory. In fact, memory in some ways is more misleading because it constructs nearer and therefore more treacherous equivalents. So let’s leave the privileges, work, and the discerning of certainties to academics and let the students of Salamanca dream.