Guerra

by Jason Webster

  But despite seriously hurting the dictatorship, ETA proved it was no friend to democracy once Franco died and a constitutional monarchy was put in place in the late 1970s. In response to a general amnesty when all political prisoners were released, the group embarked on the most violent period of its campaign, staining the newborn state with the blood of hundreds of its victims, demanding nothing less than full independence for the Basque Country. Ever since, a low-level warfare had continued, sometimes the authorities, sometimes the gunmen gaining the upper hand. During the Civil War, the Basque Country had gained a large degree of autonomy, only to be ruthlessly crushed and forced back into the Spanish fold, much as Catalonia had been. But whereas the Madrid–Barcelona rivalry was today mostly restricted to football and politics, blood still flowed from the Basque wound.

  What struck me as most curious about the issue of regional tensions within Spain, though, was how vehement the arguments were for the country to stay as one, and the anger and loathing you found towards Basques and Catalans among many Castilian Spaniards. From the way you heard them talk sometimes, jumping up and down and swearing about Catalonia this or Euskadi that, you had the sense of an intransigent husband determined to punish an unfaithful wife he couldn’t stand. Divorce was out of the question: he must make her suffer and stay with him by force.

  Yet despite my feeling that each party should be allowed to go its separate way if it so wished, I was glad that Spain was still a united, if squabbling, family. It was the very richness of the place, the pluralism and diversity of its cultures, languages and peoples, that made it such a vast and fascinating country. Break it up and its regions would lose the special quality that made Spain greater than the sum of its parts.

  The V-shaped barman twisted past the other customers to our table to take my order. Looking back up at the television as I decided what to have, it occurred to me that it was a very odd time of year for there to be a match on. We were in the middle of summer. The football season was over. Yet this was no B-team warm-up game or friendly during the holidays. The main players were all there, the stars of each team, and passions were running so high that nothing short of the eventual outcome of the League seemed to be at stake. It was only then that I realized it was a replay – a way of filling air time during the hot lowaudience months, and of giving starving fans a fix before the new season started. This match had already been played, won and lost several months ago, yet people were screaming and shouting at the screen as though it were happening live, now.

  ‘Why are you watching this match?’ I asked the barman with a laugh as he scribbled my order. ‘You must already know the result.’

  Without moving his head up from his notebook he gave me a look.

  ‘Who won?’ I said, the smile draining from my face.

  He turned on his heel and walked away. I wondered if he hadn’t heard me over the cheering and shouting. But the severity of his expression suggested otherwise. This was a hard-core football bar. It was not an opportune moment to play the innocent, however inadvertently.

  I turned back to the table in time to catch Paula and the expert exchanging a look and I felt the rattling of shutters being pulled down. Breaking away from the table at half-time, I headed up the stairs of the minstrels’ gallery above the kitchen to the loo, ducking my head under a low beam and trying not to scrape a Real Madrid team poster off the wall as I squeezed round a tight corner to close the door behind me. As I pissed I heard shouts and mocking laughter coming from the bar. I was surprised no one else was using this opportunity to empty their bladders before the second half. Perhaps they were frightened of missing something. But what?

  Back at the table I noticed the expert had moved his chair away, closer to the others, leaving me on my own with Paula. She looked up momentarily as I sat down, but this time she didn’t smile. Neither my food nor the beer I had ordered had appeared. I was beginning to feel light-headed from hunger.

  ‘Who do you support?’ Paula asked me seriously once I was back in my place. She was sucking hard on a cigarette with thick red-painted lips, bony knotted fingers ringed with bright-gold bands. The veins under her tanned skin bulged a dirty blue, while her white blouse pulled tightly over her breasts.

  ‘No one. I just enjoy a good game.’

  ‘What?’ she said, smoke streaming out of her mouth.

  ‘Really,’ I began earnestly. ‘I don’t care. It’s good entertainment whoever wins.’ Very slowly the particles cleared in the unmoving air of the bar. Her eyes were fixed on me yet she seemed to be looking elsewhere.

  ‘It’s just a game, right?’

  What failed to register at that moment was that I was not talking to an ordinary human being as such, but a football fan, and one caught up in the climax of her hit. Only one language would make sense to her at that moment and I was not speaking it. How could I not support one of the teams? It was either Madrid or Barcelona. Nothing else existed.

  ‘You’re foreign, right?’ she said finally. That was it, the only explanation she could deal with. And she drew again on her cigarette before turning her back on me to stare once more at the screen. The barman came over and handed her another drink. I tried to catch his eye and remind him I was still waiting, but failed, with the shrinking feeling of being deliberately ignored. From an unexpected outsider welcomed to the party, I was becoming an undesirable element in their midst.

  The second half of the match began and I sat back to watch. This time the women from the kitchen stopped cooking and came up to see the action for themselves, their hands stuffed in the front pockets of their smeared aprons. Within seconds of the game restarting, though, disaster struck and Barcelona scored. A noise like a whirling, screaming high-pitched wind filled the bar, men and women covering their faces in shock and pain. The man who had earlier shaken his fist at the television was standing again and bellowing until his cheeks flushed purple and his eyes bulged. Obscenity after obscenity was hurled at the opposing side.

  I shit on your father! I shit on your fucking mother! I shit on God!

  The expert, too, was enraged, leaping up from his chair and pounding his fist into his hand. Yet the constraints of his position as intellectual of the group hindered any venomous outpouring. You felt he wanted to react just like the others, but couldn’t allow himself to speak in such low terms. Finally he could contain himself no more and cried out above the din, ‘Hermaphrodite!’

  The others fell silent and looked at him. What the hell was that?

  ‘Sexually inadequate pervert!’ the expert screamed again.

  There was a groan of gradual understanding. All eyes shifted back to the television and the images of the celebrating goal-scorer, now the object of so much hate in this distant Burgos bar. Paula said nothing and simply stared at the screen, motionless. I could only marvel at how something that had already taken place, and of which everyone knew the result, could arouse such strong passions. But for the people around me, at least, it was as if they were watching the match for the very first time.

  Looking away from the television, I tried to catch the barman’s eye once more, but he stared resolutely at the screen in a way that seemed to suggest he wanted nothing to do with me. One of the women from the kitchen, though, the younger of the two, saw me looking and signalled to me that she would bring my order in a few minutes. I smiled and thanked her, my stomach already rumbling at the thought of tucking into something hot and flavoursome. A drink would also be welcome, but it looked like I was going to have to wait a bit longer.

  As the hubbub after the goal started to die down, the expert began to speak. Paula shifted her chair away from the table to hear him.

  ‘The trouble is lack of commitment,’ I heard him say. ‘These players don’t live and breathe Real Madrid. They’re pampered and spoilt so they don’t care. It’s not in their blood.’

  The usual murmurs of approval and understanding came from the others.

  ‘Too many foreigners in the team, for example,’ the expert
went on. ‘They cannot understand what this is all about. You spend millions bringing good players into the side, but what happens? This. A Barcelona match is just another pay day for them, win or lose. For us it’s life or death.’

  Everyone nodded in silent agreement.

  ‘I blame the foreigners,’ the expert concluded. ‘Get rid of them.’

  There was a cheer of assent and inwardly I groaned. I was being excluded from the group. But I had food coming and was hungry: I decided to sit tight.

  The match restarted, Madrid trying hard to score an equalizer but failing. Finally a movement on the far side of the room caught my eye and I saw the young woman from the kitchen coming towards me with a bowl of soup and some bread. She placed them down in front of me, the smell of garlic and spicy chorizo rising up with the steam into my face. Although it was boiling hot outside, the air conditioning was on full blast in the bar and I was beginning to feel a slight chill.

  Picking up a piece of bread, I was just about to dip it in the soup when the barman appeared from behind and lunged his thick arm down to grab the side of the bowl.

  ‘That’s not your order,’ he said sharply. And before I could say anything he had lifted the offending article away from me and was carrying it back to the kitchen, scolding the girl as he did so. Perplexed, I stared at the one small piece of bread in my hand that I’d been left with.

  The football match continued ever more frustratingly for the Madrid supporters as their team struggled but failed again and again to equalize. Then, in the dying minutes of the game, Barcelona scored once more and defeat was assured.

  Real Madrid had lost. Just as they had when this match had originally taken place. Nothing had changed. For the people in the bar, though, the disappointment was as intense as it had been the first time.

  From the counter the barman held out the remote control and with a flick of the wrist switched the television off, leaving a momentary hiatus in the noise level. People began to lift themselves from their seats. Perhaps, I thought, now that it’s over I might get my food. The customers started to leave, pushing their chairs back with a scrape on the ash-stained floor, barely bothering to say goodbye to their friends and companions, too depressed even to nod or smile. A few looks were cast in my direction as they plodded out, twisting past the crates of beer still blocking the entrance. I averted my eyes, sensing that in some way I was being blamed for their team’s defeat. A non-supporter was in their midst: the fault was mine.

  Among the last to go were Paula and the expert. After their initial warmth to me, I simply didn’t exist any more. Fair enough, I thought – I’d only come in looking for a bite to eat. Friendly company – albeit brief – had been a bonus. But as they got up, a half-empty beer bottle sitting on the edge of the table went tumbling over, spilling its contents on to the table and over my lap. Jumping up, I started wiping myself down, reaching for the thin paper serviettes Spanish bars keep in plastic boxes on the tables. I looked up, expecting the incident to produce some kind of final interchange between us, but they simply walked away. No word of apology or regret. I watched them pass out of the door and into the street, then turn and head off in opposite directions. I was on my own. The bar was deserted.

  ‘Come on, we’re closing.’

  The barman came over with a cloth and started wiping up the spilt beer, making me feel as if I was the one responsible for giving him this extra work.

  I thought for a second about remonstrating, asking for my food finally to be brought to me, but decided against it. I was being pushed out – that was it. I would gain nothing but more hostility and perhaps the ignominy of being physically ejected. I picked up my beer-stained bag and walked to the door. The lights were already off, and the barman was hurriedly placing chairs on table tops to allow the girl to sweep. Outside it was still light and sunny, being no later than mid-afternoon, but here in this bar it seemed like five in the morning after a particularly long and busy shift. The girl with the broom stared at me as though querying why I was still there and I moved to the door, scrambling out as I had scrambled in.

  Before I could adjust my eyes to the light, the door behind me was slammed shut and locked. I stood still for a moment on the pavement, hungry and lost. In the sky above, high winds were pushing the clouds into distorted forms, crashing into one another and stretching in odd, scattered shapes.

  From an open window somewhere I could hear the sound of the old song about Spain and the costas, ‘Y Viva España’. I tried to remember the words from my childhood that everyone used to sing, about how wonderful Spain was, how the people were so nice and friendly.

  ‘La la la-la-la-la lah,’ I sang along under my breath as the emptiness welled up inside me. And I walked away from the bar, away from the centre of the city and out, down the drab streets towards the suburbs and the country, not knowing where my feet would take me.

  España por favor. España por favor.

  12

  Unamuno and Millán Astray

  Few countries in the world are made up of such a rich mixture of peoples as Spain. Iberians, Celts, Basques, Alans, Suevi, Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Jews, Romans, Vandals, Visigoths, Byzantines, Arabs, Berbers, Persians, Slavs, Franks and Germans can all contribute to the genetic and cultural make-up of an average Spaniard. Typical of the contradictory nature of the place, though, the Spanish give great importance to the idea of ‘Spanishness’ – referring both to national character and ethnicity. The day set aside for its celebration is 12 October, the day Columbus (Genoese? Portuguese? Perhaps Ibizan, according to one of the latest theories) touched land on the far side of the Atlantic. Now they simply call it El Día de la Hispanidad. In 1936, just three months into the Civil War, it was more usually and bizarrely referred to as El Día de la Raza – the festival of the Spanish Race.

  If Lorca, shot two months earlier, was the greatest poet and playwright in Spain at the time, Miguel de Unamuno was the country’s greatest intellectual and philosopher: a Catholic and an admirer of Kierkegaard. White-haired, and with a clipped white beard, he looked not unlike the elderly Freud, with his small round glasses, elegant suits and hunched shoulders, hardened after a life spent with books.

  In his early seventies now, he was at the tail end of his academic career, having been professor of Greek at Salamanca University and now holding the post of rector of this, one of the oldest universities in Christian Europe. A Basque, he had spent most of his life at Salamanca, where he was regarded as something of a national treasure: a renowned Spanish writer, admired internationally, who had often been at the forefront of the galloping intellectual evolution in Spain over the past half-century. He moved to the political centre after being a member of the Socialist Party when young, becoming a celebrated liberal in the 1920s during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, who exiled him to the Canary Islands for his attacks on the king and himself. Primo de Rivera finally gave in to pressure and pardoned Unamuno in 1924, but the proud philosopher took himself to Paris and then to the town of Hendaye, just over the border in France, refusing to set foot in Spain again until the dictator’s fall from power in 1930.

  Now, in the early days of the Civil War, the old man seemed to have completed his political journey from Left to Right by declaring in favour of Franco and the rebellion, believing the Nationalist movement would restore order to the Republic, an institution he had greatly supported at its birth five years earlier. Like many moderate Catholics at the time, the sight of churches being burned by anarchists while the Popular Front government appeared to stand by perhaps blinded him at first to the brutality of those he backed. But in the early days of Franco’s rule in Salamanca, there was repression all around him which he could not ignore. His eyes were beginning to open.

  There was great pomp surrounding the celebrations of El Día de la Raza in Salamanca in 1936. Only days before, the city, beautiful and austere, home to the finest square in all Spain, had become the headquarters for Franco, now officially declared generalísimo
and head of state by the other Nationalist generals. United behind one leader and courting recognition from abroad – principally Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and the Vatican – all attempts were being made to give an air of legitimacy to this rebel movement. The university ceremonial hall was used to provide some of the pageantry associated with past kings and rulers of Spain: ancient tapestries hung from the walls and the dons dressed in red, yellow, light-blue and dark-blue robes, representing the schools of law, medicine, literature and science. And a large photograph of Franco hung from the front wall where once a royal portrait might have been. The heavyweights of Salamancan society were there: professors, deans, judges, Unamuno presiding over the ceremony as university rector, with Franco’s wife Carmen Polo seated beside him on the presidential dais along with the bishop of Salamanca. Sitting in the crowd were a number of blue-shirted Falangists, armed with machine-guns, and the founder of the Spanish Foreign Legion – and soon to be Unamuno’s nemesis – General José Millán Astray.

  Millán Astray was Franco’s mentor, a hysterical, one-eyed, one-armed sadist who coined the unforgettable battle cry, ‘¡Viva la muerte!’ ‘Long Live Death!’. He’d founded the Legión back in 1920 on the model of the French Foreign Legion, taking on the young Major Franco as his second-in-command. The two had quickly transformed the rabble of ex-convicts who volunteered for the new force into the most ruthless section of the Spanish Army, brutally repressing any unrest among the local population of Spain’s Protectorate in northern Morocco. Spanish legionaries were true machos Latin-style, their shirts open at the chest, never marching like ordinary soldiers but running in unison, laughing in the face of death and with scant regard for human life or suffering. A legionary was effectively married to the Legión and was pretty much expected to die in service: recruits were often referred to as los novios de la muerte – the bridegrooms of death – and were subjected to a system of violent punishments. Meanwhile, anyone who came in their way was given short shrift, the favourite way of despatching victims being to slit their throats. The men, women and children of Moroccan rebel villages were often given the Legión treatment, with many resultant massacres. In 1922 the duquesa de la Victoria organized a group of volunteer nurses for the Legión and was offered a tribute of thanks – a basket of roses, in the centre of which sat the severed heads of two Moroccan rebels. The dictator Primo de Rivera was once shocked while inspecting a battalion of legionaries to find them with severed Moroccan heads on the ends of their bayonets.