by Sylvia Plath
The Señora is Spanish, a widow, very stylish and a kind of town character. Not only has she taught French, and offered to exchange Spanish lessons for English lessons with us, but she is also a writer of romance stories and poems (Ted and I are dying to learn enough Spanish so we can read them). So far we are the only lodgers and plan to get established comfortably in a routine before any new people move in; we have every advantage on our side. Our balcony-terrace also adjoins another room, much larger than ours, which naturally the Señora hoped to use as a selling-point for the other room. Ted and I were horrified, for it would mean we’d have absolutely no privacy, so we explained to her that for people on vacation the beach and garden were fine, but for us, wanting to write, we needed a quiet place, and since our room was too small, the terrace was the only spot. She was perfectly understanding, being a writer herself, and so the terrace-balcony is completely ours!
In the morning, early, I wake about 6 with the sunrise coming over the sea through the palms, go down into the kitchen to make Ted and me big mugs of café-con-leche (coffee made completely with hot milk) and bring it up with muffins to eat on our balcony overlooking the breakers. Day and night we hear the blessed roar of the waves on shore and get the sea breeze which makes even the blazing Spanish sun cool!
Then we go early to market, and, miraculously, have figured that we can eat perfectly well on $1 for the two of us a day! We are very low on money, having spent more than we budgeted in Madrid; Ted needed a summer suit, so we went to a big sale and got him a nice café-au-lait brownish linen and a stylish black tie which he is very happy with; he really needs it when he applies for his teaching later in the summer, but it knocked our budget way off. As it is, we are putting train fare home aside and Ted is writing to Olwyn for more of the money she owes him, as we need at least $50 to cover the rest of the summer food expenses. We are paying $2.50 a night for our room, which at first sounds like a lot, but isn’t when you consider we have actually two rooms: the bedroom & balcony-study,-dining-room-&-solarium! use of a modern bathroom (with shower and tub) right outside, and the marvelous kitchen which enables us to save so much on food. All the tourists eat in expensive restaurants here, and Ted and I are about the only foreigners who buy food with the natives at the early-morning markets.
I wish you could see them! We’ve gotten shrewd & go all about pricing things, before we buy, to find the lowest stand. Everything is very cheap. A kilo of potatoes, about 2 pounds, is 5 cents, a pound of sardines about 10 cents, etc. The fish-market is Ted’s favorite place, for the fishermen here go out all night (we can see the lights of the sardine boats bobbing from our balcony as we eat dinner there at twilight) and the fish is literally still wet from the sea! We have a very simple but good diet, and Ted likes what I make. We have two litres of milk a day (bigger than quarts), drinking milk for breakfast in coffee and lots at lunch, which is a cold lunch, usually a picnic on the beach, of bread, butter, cheese, tomatoes & onions, deviled eggs & fruit. Supper I cook, and we have it with wine at twilight when the stars and moon are out over our balcony and the evening sea breeze-blows in the palm leaves.
We are in bed before ten p.m., going asleep to the sound of the breakers. As I write, I can see children scampering along the shore; a white donkey wagon just went by. Ted and I hope to learn Spanish well by the end of the month, to get friendly with the natives & maybe go out fishing with them. I am going to do a series of sketches with a local color article which may be sent to the Monitor. This is The Place to write. We have just been resting the last two days, getting rid of the last months’ tension & exhaustion; both of us got sunstroke our first day, Ted burning an excruciating red, which he is just recovering from, and me getting that terrible siege of diarreaha (sp?) which leaves one utterly weak. Last night, however, he hypnotized me to sleep, and I woke up completely cured and feeling wonderful. It is quite marvelous to have a husband like this! If I have a headache or am tired, he can hypnotize me and I wake up refreshed and fine and relaxed. We are utterly happy together, and I can’t imagine how I ever lived without him. I think he is the handsomest, most brilliant, creative, dear man in the world. My whole thought is for him, how to please him, to make a comfortable place for him, and I am free, as is he, from that dread narrowness which comes from growing self-centeredness. He is kind and thoughtful, with a wonderful sense of humor and we shall have a wonderful rich life. We’d love to come back here and buy a house before the prices soar. If we were drawing an American salary from writing, we could live on the Spanish shore fantastically cheaply. Good wine is only about 7 cents a bottle!
I naturally have very limited supplies on which to cook, none of the seasonings, mushrooms, spices etc. which I hope to use in America next year, but with the blessed cookbook I can make really tasty things with what I have: made a delicious cold potato salad last night with onions, French dressing, hard boiled eggs and mayonnaise, which we had with fried ham. Ted also loves deviled eggs the way I make them with onions & mayonnaise. The Señora showed me how to make a wonderful tortilla with potatoes, onions & eggs which I’ll make for us tomorrow night, with ripe tomato salad.
In about a week, Villajoyosa, next door, is having a big all-week festival in which they are re-enacting the invasion of the Moors on the Spanish coast. Ted and I will hitchhike over, & maybe write it up. Ted is now working on the best idea yet, which is utterly enchanting: a children’s book of short stories of “How the Animals Became”!* he told me the beginning introduction of how God’s Creatures were at first all the same, and the stories will be how each one became what he now is: “How the Donkey Became” is exquisite, and the same with the Hyena. It is much better than kipling’s “How the Leopard Got its Spots”,* etc. because each animal forms itself from some inner moral condition, really original and excellent. I have great faith in him as a writer of children’s books; he can make up a story like no one I’ve every heard!
We have figured that it would be good for me to write a series of stories for the Women’s magazines about Americans-abroad, because I am very good at local color and also can write dramatic contrast plots where the native scene gives rise to a parallel in psychological conflict. I’m going to begin one on the Madrid bullfights* this week. We went last Sunday evening,* and I am glad that Ted and I both feel the same way: full of sympathy for the bull. I’d imagined that the matador danced around with the dangerous bull, then killed him neatly. Not so. The bull is utterly innocent, peaceful, taunted to run about by the many cape-wavers. Then a horrid picador on a horse with a straw-mat guard about it stabs a huge hole in the bull’s neck with a pike, from which gushed blood, and men run to stick little colored picks in it. The killing isn’t even neat, and with all the chances against it, we felt disgusted and sickened by such brutality. The most satisfying moment for us was when one of the six beautiful doomed bulls managed to gore a fat cruel picador lift him off the horse, and, I hope, make him eventually bleed to death; he was carried out spurting blood from his thigh. My last bull-fight. But I’ll now write a story with it as a background. We plan to write a good four to six hours a day in a rigid routine for the next two months. At last. Bliss.
Wish you could try to arrange your last week here instead of England. We’re down the coast from Valencia, right above Alicante. Do try, even if only for a few days. You’d love it & could swim & sun & I’d cook here. You could take a train to Madrid, fly from there to London.
xxx
sivvy
Ted says to take it easy, gaze at greenery & sends love.
TO Warren Plath
Saturday 14 July 1956*
TLS (photocopy),
Indiana University
c/o Enriqueta Luhoz Ortiz
Avenida de Alcoy
Benidorm
Province of Alicante
Spain
Dearest Warren . . .
You would never believe it if you saw where I am sitting now, finally, in our summer town in Spain: by utter luck: of a Spanish woman (who speaks Fr
ench, fortunately) overhearing us talk on the bus and saying she had just the place for us, her large summer home where she was renting out rooms for the summer. After a very exhausting month of living out of suitcases and hot dusty almost nightmare traveling on bus and train, Ted and I finally came from Paris through Madrid to Alicante on the Spanish coast (an awful honkey-tonk sea-port resort) to this exquisite small village, Benidorm, an hour up the coast from Alicante, and a bit more down from Valencia (it’s probably too small to be on your map). Essentially, we wanted a quiet place, right on the sea, where we could write and cook. It looked pretty impossible to find a small house, furnished with linen, cooking utensils, etc. at the height of the season, and we were sick of hotels, and the search and expense of eating out. Well, listen to what we have now, with this fantastic character Señora (a widow) who is also a writer of poems and romance stories (in Spanish) and a teacher of languages (she has offered to give us Spanish conversation lessons in exchange for English; meanwhile, we get along famously in French; she loves Ted, and has already taught me how to make a Spanish potato-and-onion tortilla).
Ted and I live in her beautiful house which is right on the beach in the middle of a fabulous brilliant azure Mediterranean bay and our little room has just enough space for beds, bookcase-wardrobe & a dressing-table shelf. The miracle is our balcony-terrace on which I am sitting now, which adjoins our room by two French doors which we always keep open. A palm and a pine tree are waving over my head. Below is a colorful garden full of fig trees, red geraniums, daisies and roses. Across the street, as far as eye can see is the open ocean, with an island in the bay, Prussian blue toward the horizon, bright azure nearer shore. Even as we sat on the Cape and looked toward Spain, now Ted and I sit in Spain and look toward Africa! Since the Señora is also a writer, she understood when we said we’d like a balcony for ourselves to write on (it also adjoins another room) as the other vacationing guests (there aren’t any more yet) can use the garden & beach.
It is utter heaven here. The little village is a queer combination of modern tourist elegant hotels (but completely uncommercial) and colorful poverty-stricken white pueblos, blending perfectly. Donkey and burro carts fill the streets; milk is delivered by bicycle, and one carries bottles to market to fill with oil, wine and vinegar. I have the use of the big kitchen here with all kinds of pots and pans, and the two of us can eat well on $1 a day! Wine for example is only about 8 cents a bottle; sardine, 10 cents a pound.
We wake up in the early morning about 6, with the sun coming over the bay through the palms, and I go down to make two big cups of café-con-leche which I serve with muffins on the balcony; all day and night we watch and listen to the breakers along the shore opposite; a continuous salt sea breeze keeps us always cool, even in the hot direct Spanish sun. Then we go early to market (we have no refrigerator) and buy really fresh fish (all night we can see the lights of the sardine boats bobbing out in the ocean) and fruit and vegetables & bread made in dark cave-like ovens. We have a picnic lunch; bread, butter, cheese, deviled eggs, tomatoes & onions & lots of milk. Then swim in the clear glassy water, study Spanish, translate French, write. I cook supper at twilight which we eat in the moon-light on our balcony! We’re in bed and asleep by ten. It is the sort of life I’ve dreamed of all my existence, & which I thought was only for millionaires. The use of the whole house, kitchen, modern bathroom (only there’s no hot water), garden, terrace, is only $2.50 a night for the two of us!
We are staying here for two months and more, till September 29th, as we can live more cheaply here with all the natural beauty of the Riviera and none of flashy commerciality, write, sun, swim, study languages. We bought Ted a light brown linen summer suit in Madrid at a sale for $12 as he had to have something more than dungarees in applying for a job next year down here teaching English (which he hopes to do next month, after intensive Spanish study this month), and so are literally down to the minimum in budget, having had to spend also more in Madrid eating out than we thought. So it looks like we won’t be able to move from Benidorm all summer.
Which brings me to the hope nearest my heart: that if you have anything close to a week or even 5 days free at the end of your Experiment trip, that you could take the train from northern Italy (you said you were going to Venice) and come straight along the Riviera through Marseilles, Valencia, to Benidorm to stay with us for a few days, swim, sun and get to know my dear wonderful handsome brilliant husband! We’d reserve a room for you, and you could eat & swim with us if you’d just let us know ahead when you could come. It would not be very expensive for you to travel here, where it would be formidable for the two of us on our scanty budget of $1 a day for food to get train tickets anywhere. Along the coast, too, it is not hard to hitchhike if you don’t have too much baggage. It breaks my heart that we can’t afford to travel up near where you are, but I hope you will put all your resources & ingenuity to planning on a couple of days with us here. The surroundings are as beautiful as any I’ve ever seen, with purple mountainous hills as a backdrop for the sparkling white adobe villas. Please, please, write that you can come in the last week of your trip. You could get the train up here through Paris to Rotterdam. I am so longing to see you and can’t bear to wait two whole years when we are comparatively so close! I have just forwarded my mailing address to Whitstead, so hope to be hearing from you soon about your summer in Germany. – but of course write me here now
It seems so natural for me now to write about Ted and me without describing him, for I can’t imagine how I ever lived without him. We are utterly made for each other, and marrying a fine writer is the best thing I could have ever done. We are perfectly congenial, enjoying communicating with the natives, disliking parties and superficial cocktail affairs, loving the simple rich inward life, devoting most time to writing, loving good simple cooking, reading & learning languages. Ted is the only man I’ve ever met whom I’d rather be with than alone; it is like living with the male counterpart of myself: he knows all about so many things: fishing, hunting birds, animals, and is utterly dear. We finished typing a manuscript of about 30 of his best poems* & sent them off from Paris to a contest in America. He is now working on a series of wonderful children’s stories on “How the Animals Became”: each chapter tells how a particular animal turned to what he was, because in the beginning, all God’s creatures were exactly the same; you would love the one “How the Hyena Became.” He is also writing a magnificent fable called “O’Kelly’s Angel” about an enterprising Irishman who caught an angel, and what happened; hysterically funny and profound, carrying in it the whole problem of demonstrable miracles, etc. Also, Ted is a good hypnotist. I had sunstroke and an upset stomach our first day here after much dusty travel & weary nights, and he hypnotized me so I slept all night to wake up completely refreshed and cured. What a husband! You Must come meet him. Write me, Mrs. Sylvia Hughes or Mrs. Ted Hughes, c/o the address on the letter-head. PLEASE COME.
Though we are very poor now, and will be for a year (I literally don’t have a cent left till I get my next Fulbright check in September, & Ted won’t be getting money till he starts teaching) I feel we will be lucky as anything in our writing, & we have the daring to live the way most people dream of living when they are fifty: to sacrifice all for our ideal of a good life, not other people’s cars & securities & 10-year leases: we hope to learn languages, live in foreign countries all over the world, write & draw them, publish, teach & have babies as soon as we can afford them. We have fingers cross that you’ll come –
Love,
Sivvy
TO Warren Plath
Wednesday 18 July 1956
AL (picture postcard, photocopy),
Indiana University
N. 15 Alicante / Muelle de Poniente / Quai de l’ouest / Pier facing west
July 18
Wednesday
Dearest Warren –
Our fickle Señora had decided to let her whole house to one family for the w
hole summer, so after a day of feeling like DP’s, Ted & I found a huge place with our own kitchen bath, etc – one whole floor, quiet for writing, among the natives. We’d have plenty of room there for you & could feed you for less than $1. a day – so please do your darndest to come for a week – as long as you can – could you turn the end of your Experiment trip here? Wonderful salt water swimming. Write soon to: Mrs. Sylvia Hughes – Tomas Ortunio – 59, Benidorm, SPAiN
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Wednesday 25 July 1956
TLS* with envelope,
Indiana University
July 25, 1956
Dearest mother . . .
I haven’t received any new forwarding address from you, so I’ll just write out a few installments and wait till you tell me where to send them. I was so happy to get your wonderful letters about your trip and only wish that you could manage to turn the last week of it toward us in Spain. If only we could have foreseen the kind of establishment we’d be in! I wish you could see us now.
A week ago, we moved from the Widow Mangada’s house, where conditions were driving us literally mad, to this large, spacious, cool airy first floor in the native part of the village which is completely ours, no bothers, no interruptions, for the whole summer till the last week in September, at exactly the same price the Widow’s tiny room and noisy balcony cost us! During the course of the week, the emotional,* flighty, fussy temperament of the widow (always boasting of her high-born family and her dead doctor husband and her education) was on the verge of driving me to murder her: I couldn’t cook a thing in the kitchen, but she was mincing about peering under the lids of my frying pans, snatching potatoes out of my hand to show me her way of peeling them, rearranging my cupboard shelf, which I re-arranged back again. And flying into an actressy temper. She had never rented her house out as rooms before this way, having rented the whole thing to one family for the summer (obviously she thought she was going to get more money this way) and got more and more irritable as she saw inconveniences rise: her dream of nine roomers cooking in one kitchen and using one bathroom with lousy plumbing soon collapsed. Five Spaniards lived on our floor, left sand silting shower and bowl, and we discovered that our beautiful balcony with the view hung over the main boulevard promenade of the town, crowded with gaping pedestrians from 10 in the morning till ten at night. Ted was driven to write in the bedroom on the beds and neither of us was accomplishing any work except the exhausting task of coping with Widow Mangada and her ceaseless changing whims. She didn’t like me, because I understood her French perfectly and could immediately interpret all the things she said in plain practical English which bothered her fancy hypocrisy, so she turned to Ted, whose ability to speak French is most elementary. One day as I was cooking, she sweetly announced that she’d decided (or, rather, was forced by the government) to let the house out to one family for the summer instead of worrying about getting new roomers all the time; but not to be concerned, she wouldn’t really try to get anyone and we could just live on till she did. Then, two days notice if we were lucky. Ted and I were just sick. The gall of her assuming we could live under the shadow of that uncertainty, just so she could get our rent until it suited her convenience, made us furious. We had just figured that we could live out the whole summer by a frugal cooking budget of $1.25 a day for the two of us, and the prospect of being on the road again made us both exhausted. We’d lived such an utterly business-like, exterior life the last month, on trains, looking for cheap restaurants, buying more tickets, finding cheap hotels, that all we wanted was peace & quiet and a place to cook. So we dressed up that night, planning to see the mayor, who is evidently the head real-estate agent in town. He was not coming back home till late, so we went walking about. I saw a street that I intuitively liked, on a hill going up toward the mountains in a native quarter. Little old brown wizened women, clad in rusty black from head to toe, were sitting in their white pueblo doorways weaving fish nets. Ted wanted to go in the other direction to look for a cheap place, but my intuition pulled me forcibly up the road. We saw, set in a cornfield, a lovely large white stucco house with a sign which we translated as “One floor for rent.” That seemed to mean a kitchen, our biggest concern for the fantastic economy it meant. The nice woman upstairs threw open the doors of the first floor on what struck us at first as a grand mansion: three huge bedrooms, a large diningroom and livingroom and big kitchen and pantry and bathroom and garage. We were awed, and said of course it was too big. Whereupon she asked us how much we could pay for the summer. We settled on 7000 pesetas (about $175 for two and a half months), and walked away in an utter daze of joy, with a summer contract.