Dublin Opinion

There´s a charity shop on Calle San Pablo, around the corner from where I live, where I like to spend my free time. (I live on Calle Las Armas.) The Spanish - well, at least the Aragonese - do not go in for tiendas de segunda mano. I´ve only come across one second-hand book shop, for example, and only one second-hand clothes shop - and this in a city of 720,000 people. So far, I´ve seen three charity shops - all thanks to Miriam. The charity shop on Calle San Pablo store sells everything from cassettes to beds. In fact, it specialises in furniture, and were it in Dublin I´m certain it would be devoured whole, such is the quality of the second-hand stuff my neighbours pass over in search of IKEA.

Well, they´re not quite my neighbours. I live in one of the immigrant quarters, and the people are mainly from Morocco or Algeria, or from Eastern Europe, with a small number from Africa. I tend to use the charity shop a lot, and so it was a couple of Saturdays ago, when I found myself trawling through a collection of around one hundred photographs dating from the 1890s to 1940s, in tandem with another immigrant who was as fascinated by the images before him as I was.

The photographs seem to have come from one family. They lived in or near San Sebastian, in the Basque country. Most of the photographs have notes on the back of them, and from what Miriam tells me the references are to aunts and mothers, cousins and sisters, fathers and brothers, uncles and nephews. (My Spanish is still slouching in the corner, waiting to be born.) The following photo says this: Mi madra y unas amigas. Mi madre ie la de ascuro. (My mother and some friends. She´s the one in the dark (clothes?))

There is no date on the above photo. The next one, however, is dated 25 March 1922. It was taken in Pamplona, Navarra, the historical capital of the Basque country.

I was only able to get about ten of the photos. It seemed such a sin to break up the collection of around 100, but I could not afford them all, and so I took the ones that appealed most to me, and left the rest behind. By Monday they were all gone, snapped up by my other immigrant companion.

This one reads, excursión á la ??? de Pagasarri. (Excursion to Pagasarri.) Pagasarri is one of two small mountain ranges outside Bilbao, Basque country.

This one is, again, undated. On the back it simply reads, amiga de mi madre. (Friend of my mother).

The following have no writing at all.

And that´s it. Just some silent photographs from a Saturday morning shop in Zaragoza.