Dignity and Decorum (1996)
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
