Ghosts of Spain

by Giles Tremlett

  Mérimée’s Carmen, who was one of the cigarette girls, became the prototype of the wild and sensuous Andalusian woman. ‘She wore a red skirt, very short, which displayed her white silk stockings, with more than one hole in them, and tiny shoes of red morocco, tied with flame-coloured ribbon … She had a cassia flower in the corner of her mouth … and walked along swaying her hips like a filly from the Córdoba stud farm. In my country, a woman in such a costume would have made everyone cross himself. At Seville, everyone paid her some gallant compliment,’ one of her victims, the Basque Navarrese Don José, recounts in Mérimée’s novel. ‘Finally, taking the cassia flower, she threw it with a twist of her thumb and struck me right between the eyes. It seemed to me, señor, that a bullet had hit me.’

  Bullfighting was, for some visitors, the ultimate expression of the Spanish attitude to life and death. No one was as obsessed by the bullfight as Ernest Hemingway. He found Spaniards both noble and violent in the manly kind of fashion that he admired. The honour, pride and cruelty of the confrontation between the legendary 1950s bullfighters Luis Miguel Dominguín and Antonio Ordóñez epitomised a rugged masculinity that he sought wherever he went. The wine-fuelled bonhomie and man-against-beast adrenalin rush of the running of the bulls during Pamplona’s San Fermín fiestas fitted happily into this virile world. Men could prove themselves in front of half a dozen charging, horned, half-ton animals. With so much overexcited testosterone about, women, or at least visiting ones, did not really fit in, Hemingway thought. ‘Pamplona is no place to bring your wife,’ he says in The Dangerous Summer. ‘It’s a man’s fiesta and women at it make trouble.’

  When the Civil War broke out it got even better. Hemingway liked war. Spain, he declared, was ‘good country’. It had given him a large dose of his subject matter. His image of Spain still enraptures American college students, who often arrive with copies of Death in the Afternoon or The Sun Also Rises in their backpacks. Perhaps that is why they always seem to be the first ones gored in Pamplona’s streets every July. Death, or the proximity of it, is the key ingredient of that fiesta. At the time of writing, the last fatal victim was drawn from those US collegiate ranks.

  Even in the early 1960s, Jan Morris found Spain still not just markedly, but deliberately, set apart from Europe. This was a country proudly and obstinately turned in on herself. ‘Spain is almost an island,’ she wrote. ‘Whichever way you enter her … instantly you feel a sense of separateness – a geographical fact exaggerated by historical circumstance.’ Morris’s entrance to Spain, via the Roncesvalles pass in the Pyrenees to the River Ebro, shows just how the country seemed petrified in time – and just how much travellers loved it that way. ‘In the middle distance a group of gypsies hastens with caravans, donkeys, and skinny dogs along the road, and beyond them all of Spain seems to be expecting you – Spain of the shrines, Spain of the knights-errant, Spain of the guitars, the bull-rings, and the troglodytes.’

  Spain, it often seemed, remained frozen in one of Goya’s eighteenth and nineteenth-century etchings or the earlier portraits of Velázquez. It was a place of haughty, aristocratic Grandees, of poor but noble peasants and of picturesque fiestas. It was also, however, a playground for the Grim Reaper. The dark, primitive forces of war, hunger and violent death constantly threatened to overwhelm it.

  ‘What about the bloodlust that, as the Civil War and the Carlist War and the Napoleonic War all show, comes over them on particular occasions – that morose, half-sexual, half-religious passion in which they associate themselves with Death and do his work for him?’ Gerald Brenan asks in The Face of Spain, after his post-Civil War return to the country.

  ‘The daylight Spaniard is the man one sees – sociable, positive, capable of great bursts of energy and animation … and not very imaginative. In his ordinary conduct he is rather a simple person, as one can tell from a glance at Spanish literature,’ Brenan says. But there was another side to Spaniards, which he called ‘the night side’. ‘It is associated with thoughts of death and contempt for life … Menosprecio de la vida, disdain for life! That phrase is like a bell that tolls its way through Spanish history. The Spaniards are great destroyers.’

  This was something Protestants felt especially keenly. ‘For nearly two centuries she was the she-butcher, la Verduga, of malignant Rome; the chosen instrument for carrying into effect the atrocious projects of power,’ said the Protestant bible-seller George Borrow. But Spain’s problem was not uncontrolled violence. It was something far more sinful: ‘Fanaticism was not the spring which impelled her to her work of butchery; another feeling, in her the predominant one, was worked upon – her fatal pride.’

  The upside of Spanish pride, however, was the nobility that makes savages so admirable. ‘The suspicion common in industrial society, the rudeness of prosperous people, have not touched the Spaniards; one is treated like an equal amongst equals. There is never any avarice. One sits before the hearth, the brushwood blazes up, the iron pan splutters on the fire, and conversation goes on as it has always gone on,’ says Pritchett.

  It made Brenan, returning to London, feel floods of nostalgia. ‘As we pass through the packed and sordid streets, I see all about us a throng of plain, rounded faces that lack the distinction of real ugliness. Faces like puddings that seem never to have desired or suffered, smooth vegetable faces, placid cow-like faces, lightly creased and rippled by small worries,’ he complained.

  Add in the sensuality of the women, the joyfulness of fiesta, the deadliness of the bullfight and a widely assumed but largely undefined dose of Latin ‘passion’ and the picture of the Spaniards as close to nature was complete. That, often, is how we want them still. A major BBC series on Spain – broadcast in the early 1990s – was called Fire in the Blood. The wacky excess of Almodóvar’s early work fits in too.

  Some Spaniards, however, do not take much persuading that the foreign view is more accurate than their own. That is why, for example, Brenan is far better known in Spain than in Britain.

  There is more than a touch of masochism in this, because Spaniards are often their own most bitter critics. Fraga’s 1960s advertising slogan still jangles at the back of their minds. ‘España es diferente’, ‘Spain is different’ it tells them – but not proudly so.

  ‘They tell me the English are a people who travel all over the world to laugh at other countries,’ one Andalusian told Brenan. ‘That’s fine. I thoroughly approve of it. I hope you are having a good laugh at us … I find things to laugh at all day long.’

  Brenan’s Andalusian was not the only one who thought like that. Spaniards have a long history of being gloomy about themselves. Often they have ended up crying, rather than laughing. With their last colonies lost in 1898 and an average of a coup, a revolution or a counter-revolution every three years – they spent much of the nineteenth century and most of the first half of the twentieth century in a state of maudlin self-contemplation. Franco’s appearance only encouraged more of it. This was despite of or, perhaps, because of, his promise that he would guide them to ‘la plenitud histórica y espiritual de España’, ‘Spain’s historical and spiritual fulfilment’. The problem, many agreed, was Spaniards themselves.

  Mariano José de Larra’s epitaph for his country was: ‘Here lies half of Spain. The other half killed it.’ The poet Antonio Machado added his cheerless welcome to newly born Spaniards with his: ‘May God protect you. One of the two Spains will freeze your heart.’

  This national self-flagellation carried on well into the twentieth century, with Ortega y Gasset leading the way. ‘Spain is falling to pieces, falling to pieces,’ he wrote in 1921. ‘Today, more than a People, it is the dust that remains.’ Salvador de Madariaga went on to provide the most damning of all verdicts, diagnosing the national illness as yoismo, me-first-ness. ‘Obedience and discipline are hateful things to a Spaniard … Spain is a mound of blocks of uncut granite that support one another with the minimum number of points of contact and the largest amount of mutual bothering per square
centimetre as possible.’

  Spain is no longer so hard on itself. But it is, once more, in the grip of a round of self-doubt and self-questioning. What is Spain? What is her history? Is it one nation, or several? What sort of a country is it? Is it pulling together, or falling apart? Torrents of ink are now being used up in an attempt to defeat the arguments of nationalists and separatists in the Basque Country or Catalonia. Foreigners may be quoted as support for one or other argument – the idea being that they may, somehow, be above the fray.

  All this interest in what foreigners make of Spain means it is a remarkably gratifying place for a newspaper correspondent to work. Radio and television shows seek your opinion. Spanish newspapers reprint your articles. By belonging to the world of the written word, one is often considered to be part of the cultural elite. There is even social cachet. It makes a pleasant change from being punched on the nose on a London doorstep or finding that your profession rates you amongst the least trustworthy people in Britain.

  One of the first surprises about reading Spanish history is that many of the great men and women of the discipline are not Spanish at all. Firmly installed amongst them are the hispanistas – foreign experts on Spain. Their names, like that of Brenan, are often better known here than in their own countries.

  The hispanistas have been helped by the fact that, for many years, they could write in an atmosphere of intellectual freedom that their Spanish colleagues did not share.

  One reason why anglosajón historians of Spain have done so well, however, is because of the way they write. A certain Spanish idea of culture as medicine – good for you, even when hard to swallow – is to blame. The hispanista’s flowing, story-telling style contrasts with the often dense and learned, but ultimately turgid, prose of their Spanish rivals. A Spanish editor once explained to me that historians and biographers were either excessively dry and serious or excessively short on real investigation. This helps explain the success of historians like Paul Preston – (biographer of Franco and Juan Carlos) – Hugh Thomas (The Spanish Civil War), Stanley Payne, J. H. Elliott, Raymond Carr, Henry Kamen and the great expert on García Lorca and Dalí, Ian Gibson. These are names that trip easily off the tongues of cultured Spaniards (though not that easily, for only the British are worse linguists than the Spanish). Another reason for their success, however, remains the fact that Spaniards are not always sure whether to trust what their own writers have to say about them.

  Spaniards reach for the Bible (Matthew) to explain this suspicion, often driven by envy, of their own great or successful children. ‘Nadie es profeta en su tierra’, ‘No one is a prophet in their own land’, they say. It is certainly true of Pedro Almodóvar. Talk to Her was Hollywood’s choice for the best original screenplay of any film in English or any language. Spain’s own film academy did not even choose it that year as the Spanish candidate for best foreign film at the Oscars.

  A recent Spanish study that infuriated Almodóvar pointed out that his characters spent 14 per cent of their time getting off their heads on drugs or alcohol. A total of 170 characters, mainly women, were said to be hashish, heroin or cocaine users. The director said the study, by Spanish university psychologists, left him with ‘a Kafkaesque sensation of fear, disgust, astonishment, fury and indignation’. An artist’s job was not to judge his characters, he said. It was to explain them. ‘Imagine that we analysed Scorsese’s films and found 60 per cent of his characters were gangsters or delinquents who owned weapons and used them a lot. We would have to conclude that Scorsese was a member of an organised crime group.’ Moralistas, he warned, were on their way back.

  Moral strictness has always been a generator of the avantgarde. In this Almodóvar, with his childhood in Franco’s rural Spain, is no exception. Both the voyeuristic painter Dalí and the provocative film-maker Buñuel emerged from similar – if more bourgeois – stiff moral backgrounds. Bad Education, the Almodóvar film that came after Talk to Her, featured a paedophile priest and his victims. Almodóvar has said that Bad Education has only a few autobiographical touches. Abuse scenes in the sacristy and river, he said, were based on stories told to him by friends at the school where he boarded. In a 1982 interview, however, he admitted he himself had suffered ‘terrible things’ at the hands of priests. ‘It was a shame, because sex should be discovered naturally, and not brutally, suddenly. For two or three years, I could not be alone, out of pure fear.’ If the priests at his school were only slightly as bullying and abusive as their fictional counterparts, they could be credited with helping imbue in him an abiding interest in what, for the Roman Catholic Church, is the perverse and sinful. To that extent he is a son of the pueblo and, especially, of the pueblos of Francoism. ‘I think my life and all I have done goes against all that, but that is where I am from,’ he says.

  Almodóvar is also thoroughly Spanish, taking a special pleasure in using folkloric, religious and popular culture symbols – be they bullfighters, bolero singers or nuns – and subverting them to his own ends. In the 1980s and early 1990s his films were designed to provoke, shock and enthral. It was as if the new space of liberty had, somehow, to be filled up to the edges as quickly as possible – in case it disappeared. That may explain why, when asked by an interviewer for an unrealised erotic fantasy, he replied : ‘My erotic fantasy is to go on a bus, pass by a school, and to see, for example, a father of about thirty-eight picking up his thirteen-year-old daughter. What I would really like to do is go to bed with the father and the daughter at the same time, because I like pubescents a lot, and their fathers, even those with respectable jobs that give them a bit of a paunch.’

  To the deluge of kitsch colour was added a torrent of sexual experimentation. Pepi, Luci and Bom, Almodóvar’s first feature-film, introduced Spaniards to the golden shower and featured a penis-measuring contest. His characters have included a truck driver turned transsexual prostitute, a drag-queen judge, several porn stars, an incestuous transsexual and a retired torero who is into post-coital murder. Mostly, however, these characters manage to have a heart of gold. So it is that in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! Antonio Banderas takes Victoria Abril captive and ties her up, declaring: ‘I’m twenty-three years old and have 50,000 pesetas. I am alone in the world. I would like to be a good husband to you and a good father to your children.’ Almodóvar’s first heroes were weird but somehow good – at a time when weird finally could be good. They were also, however, transparently unreal. How many heroin-taking convent abbesses are there out there, after all?

  Almodóvar was the muse and just about the only durable cultural product of Madrid’s movida. Apart from him, and a few passable musicians, all it produced were a couple of photographers. The best of these is Alberto García-Alix. To view his movida work now, however, is to mourn the dead. Looking at his photos in his flat near Madrid’s Plaza de Santa Ana, I was struck not so much by the undoubted quality of his black-and-white images, but by a photo of a handsome young man in a black bomber jacket, with a touch of the rockabilly to his hair. Young, healthy and happy – this was García-Alix’s brother. He died, like many of the movida’s casualties, from an overdose. ‘Heroin was just part of the scene,’ someone who lived it explained.

  The colour and wackiness of Almodóvar’s films have reduced in intensity since the movida died. Almodóvar, like Spain, has matured and moved on. His films are deeper, more intense, more emotional and less noisy. His central characters, however, are still misfits, some to the point of criminal insanity. Almodóvar sets about trying to make us understand or, even, empathise with them. It is as if, having emerged from decades of intolerance, it is now important, if not to tolerate then, at least, to understand everyone. This is, at once, one of modern Spain’s most enduring and potentially dangerous beliefs.

  Almodóvar himself is aware of this. ‘I love characters who are crazy in love and will give their life to passion, even if they burn in hell … But this is art. When my friends start behaving that way, I tell them to stop. They say “But look at your mo
vies.” I say: “That is art. Art has its own world.”’

  In Bad Education, his dark depiction of child abuse by 1960s priests, Almodóvar even makes a last-minute attempt to help us understand the chief pederast. ‘I have a tendency to redeem my characters,’ he admits. ‘It is very Catholic.’ The pueblo – a phenomenon that crops up increasingly in his films – reappears in the closing scenes of Bad Education in the voice of a brother who has murdered his transsexual sibling. ‘You don’t know what it is like to have a brother like Ignacio and live in a pueblo. You can’t even imagine it!’ he says.

  Who else but Almodóvar could have persuaded Hollywood to give him an original screenplay Oscar for a film in which the hero rapes a comatose woman who is the object of his obsessive, self-invented love? That is what happens, off-screen, in Talk to Her. Almodóvar’s invitation, again, is a very modern Spanish one – to understand, or empathise, rather than moralise. He must have felt a special satisfaction at getting that one past those ‘moralistic’ anglosajones – and, especially, censorious Hollywood – of whom many Spaniards so disapprove. Could a film-maker from a different country have made the same sort of films? Almost certainly not. Would Almodóvar still be testing the limits were it not for the era – and the pueblo – he grew up in? I doubt it.

  There are signs, however, that Spain may be coming to terms with the pueblo. The Sunday evening traffic jams into Madrid or Barcelona are full of people coming back from weekend escapes to pueblos. Many have second homes in the places where their parents or grandparents were born. In August some villages find their populations multiply several times over as families come back to enjoy a holiday away from the noise and bustle of city life. The summer fiestas have generally survived – being the last thing any self-respecting pueblo will let go of. It is the slow pace and enforced intimacy of the pueblo, however, that begin to seem attractive again. The attraction grows further as Spaniards become increasingly hard-working and stressed.