It's Expo time in Seville, but GUY WELLS heads nostalgically in the
other direction. The Casa de Carmona involved a long and monumental work
of restoration

Travelling backwards is one of the most dangerous things you can ever do. The past is another country, and it almost certainly hasn’t aged any more gracefully than the rest of us. And yet the compulsion to get back in search of a lost time and place can overwhelm the spirit - as Marcel Proust knew so well- at any stage of life. It happened to overwhelm mine early last spring.

The impulse began in a restaurant in New York, with a (wooden) forkful of bany eels. The angulas appearead in a battered earthnware dish, swiming around in a pool of red-hot peppers, oil, and whole cloves of garlic; they looked more like some mysterious sea-spawned pasta. But whith a glass of ice fino sherry, they quite innocently took me back to Salamanca, where I had first tasted them.

About a week later, the impulse became more compelling at an exhibition of Goya’s dark and unforgiven Los Caprichos etchings at the Metropolitan Museum. I felt as though I were in the Prado on the day, twenty years before, when I first saw his Black Paintings, painted when he was deaf- some say detanged- and already half dead. A glimpse of a young girl dancing a sevillana, her arms raised "like startled serpents" high above her head, transported me to a hot, smoky bar in the back streets of Cádiz, just before dawn. And so I decided, after a short but persuasive telephone call to Madrid., to go back and see if you can play games whith your memories and turn time’s arrow around.

The last time I had been to Spain, in 1974, Franco was not only alive but still El Caudillo, the man who had led the country ever since the Nationalists won the civil war in 1939. His old allies, Hitler and Musolini, had long since died and gone to hell and the history books, but there he was, the great survivor. He had been around so long that a new generation had grown up unable to imagine what Spain could be like without him. In private, but never in public, there was speculation about what would happen when he "went" and death was understood to be the only way in which he would go. One of the many consequences of Franco’s regime was that Spain remained isolate and cut off from the rest of Europe: an anachronism that had stood on the side lines during World War II and whose relationship with the late twentieth century was of a some what tenuous nature.

Franco and his propagandists took perverse pride in emphaszing Spain‘s otherness, its resistance to American influence and "culture"(though in exchange for military assistance, it permited U.S. bases on Spanish soil),and its independent spirit, harking back to the glory of its -sadly distant- past. It remained, both in the eyes of its lovers and supporters, the most foreign country in Europe. Which was, of course, a large part of its allure.

The flip side to this seductive appeal of a country preserved in reaction was a dictatorship where civil rights were restricted, the press was censoreded, and elections had not been censored...

HIDDEN IN THE HEART of Carmona, about twelve miles east of Seville, there lies an ancient palace whose gigantic conerstones were carved by the Romans. The patio (watered twice daily in the summer), with its cool herringbone brick floor and its miniature scented orange trees, is of Moorish provenance, and the pool, shaded by a date palm (one pleated...

For more than five hundred years the Casa de Carmona was the home of the Lasso de la Vega dinasty, which, like so many aristocratic families, had come south with their king in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to fight the Moors. Crumbling, dilapilated, and inhabited by several generations of distinctly unaristocratic termites, it was bought about five years ago by Alfonso Seoane and Marta Medina, who only recently completed their monumental work of restoration. Rumors had reached me in New York via a cousin of Alfonso’s, of the "project", which is how Carmona became my point of reentry into Spain.

I have decided not to return to Granada or Seville. It was the height of summer, and this region is not called the frying pan of Spain para nada. I wanted to avoid crowds, tour buses, and Columbus groupies. But I was also in search of a town I had heard about long ago. There is an expression in Spanish, irse por los cerros de Ubeda, which translates literally as "to wander off on the hills of Ubeda," meaning to wander off the point, or to be distracted. I had always been intriged by the idea of a place so remote that it had become a part of the language, and when I was told that it also happened to have some of the most spectacular Renaissance architecture in the whole of Spain, I knew I had to go.

I THEN DISCOVERED, LIKE A stunned mother-to-be, that Ubeda had a twin named Baeza, whose beauty and charms were the equal of her sister’s. One sibling could not, naturally, be seen without the other. And so my trip was set. I would fly to Seville, avoid the town (which is hosting the infamous Expo this year), drive straight to Carmona, spend a palatial couple of days there, and then head due east and wander off into the hills of Ubeda-and Baeza. In this year of our Lord 1992, of all years, it could just be an itinerary worth seriously considering.

Carmona claims, and not totally insanely, to be one of the oldest settlements in Spain. The Romans felt that it was worthy of both a mint, hence Carmona -the coinage was called the Karmo, hence Carmona- and the second-largest necropolis after Rome. Money and death: what more powerful proof of superstatus within the Roman Empire?

On the outskirts of town, off the Seville road, is an overgrown amphitheater (money, death, and the circus), and just opposite is the entrance to the necropolis, which was used from about the second century B.C. to the fourth century A.D. The walls remain scorched by the heat of ancient fires, some retain faint traces of decorations, and a table and a bench in one tomb are set up for the ultimate last supper.

Look very carefully and you might see that two gigantic stones are missing... After the collapse of the Empire, there was nothing to prevent people from "borrowing" building materials from the site, which is how the Casa de Carmona came to be anchored, at its corners, by those lapidary reminders of the glory that was once Rome’s.

Enter the old town of Carmona by the Córdoba gate -it is Roman, with the addition of two octagonal Moorish towers- and you are again reminded of Andalusia’s dual ancestry. And if you take a taxi from the airport in Seville, as I did, it is at this precise point that your driver will start cursing Romans, Moors, and whoever the hell else ever thought of building a gate and alleyways so narrow and constricted.

Car and driver steaming, we inched and wiggled our way through, like the fat lady who believes optimistically that if she holds her breath and takes it real slow, she will get into the dress and be able to zip it up. But zip it up we did, my driver deposited me outside the Casa de Carmona. The ground beneath my feet was covered in the ocher yellow Albero sand that is used on the floor of bullrings to soak up the blood (red and yellow, the elemental colors of the Spanish flag). The heavy mahogany door, studded with iron nailheads, was, I later discovered, as old as the conquistadors. Maybe Spain hadn’t changed that much after all. After the sweat-soaked strain of squeezing into a size four, I was ready for the cloistered calm of the oasis.

Lunch was being served as I arrived. Tables were set up around the shaded edges of the patio or, if you preferred, in the loggia by the pool, their creamy linen cloths gently sweeping the floor. No menu, just a series of traditional dishes arranged upon a side table. Cool, coral gazpacho surrounded by a planetary system of miniature side dishes: crisp croutons, finely chopped tomatoes, onions, and parsley. Next appeared some inky black squid en su tinta, accompaigned by a Castillo de San Diego white wine from the vineyards near Cádiz. Then, for dessert, the ubiquitous flan -unwanted and unbidden- followed by thick, dark coffee.

Outside, even the wind was hot: It must, like so much else in this part of Spain, have come across from North Africa in order to torment and then to seduce. The only solution was gracious surrender. I undressed and decided to spend the afternoon lolling about the shallow steps of the pool in a pleasant, heat-induced torpor. My decadent dreams of Moorish torment and seduction were almost immediately interrupted by someone shouting very loudly in my ear, "Gorbachev se ha ido, Gorbachev se ha ido."

Forget the Moors, where was Peter Jennings when I really needed him? How could I be expected to follow the Moscow coup in Spanish? Did my room, which appeared to be a converted mosque (the ceiling was an Allah-pleasing, nonfigurative red, black, and gold geometric maze), even have television? The new Spain was about to be put to the test. Alfonso showed me how the sleek, black parabolic TV set worked and then asked, "Would you prefer to watch CNN, the ABC news from New York or Antenne 2 from Paris" So Spain had changed. I settled down, in my mini-Alhambra, with Peter Jennings to watch live reports from the other White House halfway across the world.

The next day, after a morning dose of CNN (the news from Moscow had become grimmer overnight) and fortified by sugary, deepfried churros (no high-fiber grains, thank God, even in the new Spain) and coffee, it was time to wander off into the hills of Ubeda.