Nestled in her silk scarves, my mother always kept a bar of Myrurgia’s Maja soap, wrapped in the dis­tinc­tive red-and-black paper with a fla­menco dancer on the label. Because my father—an American my mother met in med­ical school—had been sta­tioned at the Rota naval base, near Cadiz and the Strait of Gibraltar, I was born in Spain and we stayed there for two years…