Pedro Menendez de Aviles

I came back from Santiago da Compostela yesterday. The roads were deserted because of the fiesta of Corpus Christi so it was an unusually pleasant drive on the winding roads that unite the two sections of motorway, dipping through foggy valleys between Galicia and Asturias. I went straight up to the village where Carmen was working on her rental house and spent a moist afternoon tugging at the nettles around the herb garden in the mist before descending to Aviles in the evening.
Aviles is a port with a steel factory and a historic centre that combines charm with bad taste in equal measures. I'm sitting in a cyber cafe here now having walked through the gardens of the Parque Ferrera that used to belong to a mansion- now a luxury hotel. There is still mist in the air and the declining light gave everything a melancholy tinge.
This morning, however, I went out onto the street in a buoyant mood with a list of things to do and a number of extra ideas of my own. My first stop was a small shop that sells plastic models and Warhammer miniatures. I was surprised to find it in Spain because it seems so English to me: the orcs and goblins, the ogres and knights come straight out of Tolkein and are used in a complex game with great tomes of rules you struggle to apply in a game that can last two hours.
José showed me around the shop. In the back he has three tables laid out with scenery so that people can come and play out their campaigns there and, in an adjoining room, there are benches with paints and materials for painting the figures.
"Look at this one," he said, showing me a model that looked like a cross between a skeleton and the monster from the Alien films. It was painted with great care.
"The difficult part is the back." His delicate white fingers pointed out the scales in graded colour descending the spine: it was a work of patience and care.
"We get girls as well," he added. "Sometimes they paint things in strange colours, but they have a lot of skill. And if the girls paint things pink, well the boys... One of them painted his Bretonians with the colours of all his favourite football teams. Not so you would notice, but when you know..."
José is a kind of lay teacher for the people that use the workshop: far too shy to function in the hurly burly of a school but with a lot of ability in helping people. He told me how kids come in expecting to be able to do everything all at once and he has to show them how to go about things more slowly, building up the colours carefully.
When I left the Warhammer shop I went around the corner to the secondhand bookshop to talk to Pedro Menendez de Aviles. He has the same name as the 'famous' navigator whose statue is in the park by the riverside and gives a wry grin in acknowledgement of this coincidence. Whereas the original was a buccaneering conquistador, Pedro is another gentle character like José in the Warhammer shop. His shop is a box with the typical dusty smell of secondhand books and he sits at a desk between piles of them waiting to be shelved.
Pedro is also a kind of teacher. He loves his books and can help people to find what they are looking for either in the shop or on the internet. He is a guide for the lost old things that some people no longer cherish.
"There are no bad books," he said. "They come here because someone wants to throw them out and I find new owners for them. There is something good in all books."
He told me to buy the newspaper and look for an article on some photographs that had been found in someone's attic in eastern Asturias. There were over 500 photographs taken during the brief period up to 1946 when Spain was an ally of Nazi Germany: pictures of the historic meeting of Hitler and Franco at Hendaye and of Himmler shaking hands with the monks at Montserrat.
This photo album had survived the time when it was imprudent to ally oneself with fascists by being stowed away and forgotten. And now with the passage of time had revealed itself to be a true treasure. Another book waiting for its reader.