During Alan Jolis' boyhood summers in Spain, he used to toss coins on the tracks. The trains would flatten them, making "Franco disappear," as he writes. "In place of his military uniform and round face, there is a shiny blankness, smooth as a mirror." "Speak Sunlight" is what got reflected. This is a lovely, sensuality-steeped memoir of a privileged boy, son of a Paris embassy official, who summered with his family's married housekeepers, Maruja and Manolo, in their native Galicia; "little Lord Fauntleroy. . . abandoned in a leper colony," as Jolis puts it. The region was scrub-poor.

"We are subversives," one of the Jolis' suave uncles explained, "Franquistas hate free time." Indeed, our hero's days are carefree; he spends whole afternoons trying to stomp on the tails of lizards (never successfully). He eats unending paella, encounters a donkey named Ludvino, men with "macassared hair" and heady wine that makes his mouth "pucker with tannin." He runs with the bulls in Pamplona, stumbles into secret Basque separatist cafes and is doused with tar by a pair of gypsies. Jolis knows how to present the telling detail: In Galicia, "the black-shawled crones hiss at girls who wear skirts that reveal their kneecaps."

The set piece on bullfights is swooningly good. You feel drenched with hot sun, blood and wine, but you also get an education. Jolis notes, for instance, how "bullfights are the only events that start on time in Spain," or how there's a move called veronica, wherein a matador wipes his cape over the bull's face "as the saint did to Christ."

What truly elevates this memoir, though, is not this slipstream of the senses, it's love pervasive. Maruja and Manolo were clearly substitute parents; his mother and father are distant figures in the book. Jolis felt cherished by his housekeepers; dusty, beautiful, backward Spain is their world, and thus becomes his world, too. That's why "Speak Sunlight" is so rich. As Jolis writes: "To love is to allow yourself to be haunted."

-- Katherine Whittamore