Ghosts of Spain

Further praise for
Ghosts of Spain
:

‘Tremlett’s love of the country is as impressive as the range of his interviews and travels.’
Literary Review

‘Tremlett’s work will bring many who think we know Spain to confront what we have hesitated to acknowledge even to
ourselves
.’ Matthew Parris

‘A transfixing, elegantly written account of Spain today.’
Metro

‘An excellent and readable book for anyone interested in Spain.’
Scotland on Sunday

‘A feast of a book.’
Irish Times

‘Tremlett’s affectionate yet critical intimacy with the country helps to make this book much more than an ordinary journalistic survey … [with the] sort of insight that vindicates his approach to a deeply traditional and fast-changing land.’
Wall Street Journal

‘An affectionate, deeply informed tour of the country.’
New York Times

‘A provocative and vividly written book that is part history, part political and social commentary, and part love letter.’
Library Journal

It is now early 2012 and a mixture of fear and vertigo has set in. Spain, once more, is moving quickly – but no one quite knows where to or who, exactly, is making the decisions as the global economy goes through a powerful readjustment. In a globalised world, indeed, it is not just harder to discern what forces are at work in Spain. It also becomes harder to pick out the essential characteristics of a country that has become less hermetic and more varied in its own cultural and ethnic make-up since I first started working on this book.

Originally I had thought of trying to rewrite or, at least, update, each and every chapter, but I soon realised that was impossible.
Ghosts of Spain
describes a moment in Spanish history – and in my personal experience of my adopted country – and to rewrite it would mean starting again from scratch. But much has changed in the half-dozen years since the first edition was published and I am pleased to have the opportunity to bring readers up to date. It is a chance, amongst other things, to fill in some holes from the first edition and to add clarification or correct small, but
annoying
, mistakes where necessary. That means the original text has been retouched in just a few points, while an extra chapter carries the story up to today – a time when Spain’s economy is, once more, in trouble and Spaniards as a whole are deeply anxious about their future.

The extra chapter replaces the epilogues written for the US
edition
and the UK paperback, updating a whole raft of themes from the early chapters, be they Spain’s ongoing battle with its own
history
, the battle against corruption or the death throes of Basque separatist terrorist group ETA. They also deal with issues that have much to say about Spain’s future and which, while hindsight
tells me they were in front of my nose while I was writing the first edition, only the passage of time has allowed me to approach in a coherent and, I hope, meaningful fashion. The two main issues are the ‘new Spaniards’ who poured into the country over the first decade of the twenty-first century – a time when only the United States rivalled Spain as a destination for migrants to the
developed
world – and the fall into dramatic economic decline and recession. Both issues are connected, and both have also required Spaniards to take a fresh look at themselves and ask what sort of a country they are now trying to construct.

There is now talk of a ‘lost decade’ in which Spain will remain frozen, or even go backwards, while it tries to work through
current
problems. By the time this book is published, indeed, Spain may have been forced to drop the euro currency that has formed such an important part of its twenty-first-century identity. If not, it will certainly be in the middle of a titanic struggle to reduce its budget deficit and remain inside a euro zone dominated by
Germany
and France. The pessimism of Ángel Ganivet, the man who spoke of Spain as a ‘cage full of madmen’, and others may soon reappear. This writer, however, continues to insist that a brighter future awaits. If there is one thing Spaniards have proven over the past four decades, it is their ability to ride change. The appearance of five million ‘new Spaniards’ – migrants who have arrived over the past decade with a keen desire to improve their lives – works in favour of that, though only if Spaniards avoid the simplistic trap of racism. So, too, does the essential stability of Spain’s
political
system – currently so dramatically different to those of other southern European countries like Italy, Portugal or Greece.

Madrid, 5 January 2012

In Spain the dead are more alive than the dead of any other place in the world: their profile wounds like the edge of a barber's razor.

Federico García Lorca

It is shortly before 7.00 a.m. on a cool Madrid spring morning. The traffic is still just a purr, though it will soon be a rumble and, some time after that, the usual riot of horns, ambulance sirens and roaring motorbike exhausts. This should be a small moment of peace in what must be one of Europe's noisiest cities. A
helicopter
, however, has spent the past fifteen minutes poised noisily at roof-top level just a block down our street. The wide-open well of our six-storey apartment block is acting as a sound box that amplifies the relentless chugging and clattering. Sleep in our
top-floor
apartment seems, under these circumstances, impossible. I lie in bed worrying about whether the helicopter – which does this every few weeks – will wake the children. It is not as though they went to bed early, even though they have school today. One of them, a seven-year-old, got out of bed to take a phone call at 10 p.m. last night. It was another seven-year-old, excitedly inviting him to a birthday party at the weekend. Madrid boasts that it is a party town, a city that never sleeps. But does this really have to apply to the under eights?

I go out onto the balcony to wave a fist at the sleek white
helicopter
– wondering why on earth it is hovering there, so low, so loud and so early. I expect all the other balconies to be filled up with angry people roused from their beds. I am, however, alone. I stand, solitary, deranged and dishevelled, amongst the wilting geraniums. Even at this stage of the year, they are gasping for water. It is one of those moments when I am reminded that,
although I now consider this to be my city, I am really an
extranjero
,
a foreigner. Noise, in Madrid, in Spain as a whole, is just background. It is part of the atmosphere, like air or daylight. I realise that I have been caught with my guard down. During the day, after I have showered and slipped my daily coat of
Madridness
on, I would not care about the mere roar of a helicopter. Noise and bustle are normally part of what I like about this city. At night, when I sleep, though, I am returned to my natural
condition
as what Spaniards like to call an
anglosajón
, an
Anglo-Saxon
. This description for native English speakers – be they British, American, or from anywhere else – has always amused me. It makes me think of runes and lyres, of Beowulf and the Venerable Bede.

This country is famous for noise. Newspapers occasionally report on how the noise levels of Madrid or Barcelona pose a danger to health and sanity. One in four Madrid streets subjects its residents to noise beyond World Health Organisation limits, one report tells me. Half of fourteen to twenty-seven-year-olds in Barcelona suffer irreversible hearing damage, another one warns. Little wonder, then, that even noise-numbed Spaniards are
occasionally
driven berserk. I recall a scene from a Barcelona square, late on a summer's night, years ago. The square was packed with busy café tables. Teenagers with noisy mopeds were driving around it in circles, their high-pitched exhausts screaming out over the hubbub of conversation and laughter. An angry, elderly woman appeared on a roof top and started shouting and waving her arms. Everyone ignored her. Then she began hurling empty Coke bottles down at us. The glass bottles exploded on the ground, shattering into tiny, flying fragments. We ran.

Yet Spaniards seem to need noise. Televisions can stay on in people's homes all day long. ‘It's like having a friend in the house,' someone once explained to me. Bars, where much of life takes place, have musical fruit machines, talking cigarette machines, coffee machines, microwaves and television sets (sometimes more than one, and set to different channels) all pinging,
chattering
, steaming, shouting and clattering at once. Raised voices,
competing to be heard above the machines, add an extra layer to the noise.

Perhaps this need to be heard above the din is why Spanish – or more accurately, in this country of many languages,
castellano
– can be so hard and direct. ‘It is a language in which one hears each word … and each word is as distinct as a pebble,' wrote V. S. Pritchett in his
The Spanish Temper
. ‘It is a dry, harsh,
stone-cracking
tongue, a sort of desert Latin chipped off at the edges by its lisped consonants and dry-throated gutturals, its energetic “r's”, but opened by its strong emphatic vowels.'

Verbal noise reaches its loudest in the
tertulias
– the hugely popular television and radio debate programmes whose daily audiences are counted in millions. At their best,
tertulias
are a serious business, a learned and informed exchange of ideas amongst knowledgeable people. Many, however, are little more than angry slanging matches. Spaniards are talented, if sometimes incontinent, talkers.
Tertulianos,
the people hired to take part in
tertulias
, are often angry people. That is their job. What they are angry about depends on what subject the show's anchor presents to them. The more inconsequential the topic, the louder everyone gets. The absolute peaks are reached in the programmes that specialise in gossip about singers, models, bullfighters and the legion of people who are famous simply for being famous.

Catch a taxi anywhere in Spain and you may find yourself sharing it with a handful of
tertulianos
vociferating on the radio. Your taxi driver – if he is not one of those immaculate, austere, proud
taxistas
who are too dignified and serious to sink to this level – may join in. Like them, he has strong opinions. If you have had a bad day, or feel strongly about the issue at hand, you are free to let rip yourself. Spanish offers you an earthy and sexually explicit vocabulary in which to unburden yourself. ‘
¡Joder, que no nos toquen los cojones¡
', ‘Fuck, why don't they leave our balls alone?' one Madrid
taxista
threw at me recently. We were listening to a right-wing, Roman Catholic church-owned radio station as we sat in a morning jam on the M-30 ring road. The presenter began
ranting
about ‘anti-Spaniards' in Catalonia and the Basque Country.
This provoked my
taxista
to unleash another tirade. ‘
Me cago
en su puta madre …
', ‘I shit on his whore-mother …' he began. This is not shocking language. I could, without seeming crude, have replied with a phrase in which pride of place was given to the female sexual organ, ‘
Coño
…'

A generous use of swear words is something we
anglosajones
share with Spaniards. Nobel laureate Camilo José Cela compiled a two-tome
Diccionario Secreto
of them. The author of
The Family of Pascual Duarte
included more than 800 terms for penis. They ranged from
arcabuz
, harquebus, to
zanahoria
, carrot.

‘A Spaniard, if he does not let loose some Iberian expletives, has too much pressure in the cooker,' the writer, diplomat and Oxford don Salvador de Madariaga once explained. It can, indeed, be a most liberating experience. Step out of the taxi cab and the whole episode – the anger and indignation – is gone. For anger is worn lightly, and easily disposed of. Perhaps that is why Spaniards do not share that
anglosajón
weakness for fisticuffs. Road rage is
considered
fine, even healthy. You may sit in your car, blast your horn and insult anyone who takes your fancy. Nobody, however, steps out with hatred in their eyes and a car-jack in their hand.

Spain is my adopted home. I have lived here for well over a decade now, mostly in Madrid but also in its great rival – the charming, sophisticated Mediterranean port city of Barcelona. I first came here, living in Barcelona for two years, almost twenty years ago. Returning to London, I found it impossible to settle and so, eventually, came back. It is ironic that my Catalan friends, some of whom claim they are not really Spaniards, sparked my own long-term interest in Spain.

I make my living from writing, as a journalist, though I do not consider myself a typical foreign correspondent. I am not here on my way through to that dreamed-of posting in Paris or New York. I will go (almost) anywhere in the world to cover a story. This, however, is my home. If I ever leave again, it will be with the intention of coming back. That was not my original plan. Once here, however, I have found it impossible to leave. When I was younger and single, life was too much fun. The city
juerga
– the
partying – was too inviting. With a family, though, it got even better. I had struck a sort of El Dorado for rearing children. Now I have a stake in this country. Everyone in this family currently carries a British passport, but my children are developing before my eyes – at least culturally – as young Spaniards. Time will tell if they feel they belong to this country and, following the strand of Spanish blood that comes down one side of their mother's family, take on the nationality of their birthplace. I have
experienced
the strange sensations – and concerns – of first-
generation
immigrants anywhere as they watch their children grow up, with enviable ease, in another culture. Spain's future matters to me. It may be theirs.

I have criss-crossed Spain many times pursuing stories to write, from north to south, from east to west and hopping from island to island. A colleague once complained that writing on Spain meant
toros, terroristas
and
tonterías
– bulls, terrorists and
silliness
. It is true that Spain, in newspaper jargon, provides ‘good colour'. But then I have always liked that. Spain has a wealth of stories to tell. The open road beckons continuously – and there are few places in Europe as open, as generous with empty spaces and distant horizons, as Spain. Often, as I am driving through those vast spaces with some easy-listening
flamenquillo
music on the CD, I imagine this is more like America than Europe.

The story does not go stale either, for Spain changes at breakneck speed. Again, there is something American about this. Spaniards not only embrace change. They expect it.

No one is more aware of this capacity for mutation than a writer trying to capture the country in a moment of time. Grasp Spain firmly in your fist and almost immediately the grains of sand start to run out from between your fingers. ‘How the commentators of Spain have aged!' observed the Catalan writer Josep Pla on 14 April 1931, after watching monarchy give way to republicanism in a single, eventful day. ‘In one day they have all gone unbearably gaga.'

I experienced something similar over four ghastly, dramatic days in March 2004. These began with the killing of 191 people by Islamist radicals who planted bombs on early morning Madrid
commuter trains. They ended with a general election in which Spaniards threw out a Conservative People's Party whose hold on power had seemed set in concrete. Spain shifted again, suddenly and swiftly. So, inevitably, did this book.

All this dizzying change did not start, however, in 2004. Spaniards have, in fact, spent almost a whole century playing catch-up – in a stop-start fashion – with the rest of Europe. ‘You could say that in the
pueblo
where I was born (on 22 February 1900) the Middle Ages lasted until the First World War,' the avant-garde film-maker Luis Buñuel said of his home town in Aragón, Calanda.

Spaniards make my job simple. They are always ready to talk, to give an opinion, to tell you things about themselves. This is partly because, wherever you go, they believe theirs is the most
fascinating
corner of the world. It has, they will tell you, the best food and, often, the best wine. It is also because, generally, they are
convinced
that their opinion is as good as, if not better than, the next man's. Most of all, however, it is because they are naturally open and welcoming. Spain's position as a world superpower in tourism is not just down to sun, sand and
sangría
.

Spanish noise is fun, but it is also distraction. ‘
Mucho ruido y
pocas nueces
' – a lot of noise but few walnuts – is what Spaniards say when something is all show and no substance. Few outsiders would place silence on this nation's list of attributes. I certainly would not have done so in my first years here. Nor, I suspect, would, Pope John Paul II. ‘The Pope would also like to talk,' he found himself telling a chattering crowd at an open-air Mass in Madrid. Recently, however, things have happened that have forced me to think again – not just about silence, but about Spain itself.

If I had to blame one person for making me rethink Spain's relationship with silence, it would have to be Emilio. He was the first one to, quite literally, go digging in history. Emilio Silva is a journalist who went back to his grandfather's village, Priaranza del Bierzo, in the northern province of León in 2000. He wanted to tell the story of what had happened there six decades earlier, in 1936. That was the time when a military rising led by General
Franco and others started the three-year round of fratricidal bloodletting known as the Spanish Civil War. Emilio ended up doing more than just story-telling, however. For he found the roadside mass grave where his grandfather, a civilian shot by a death squad of Franco supporters, was buried. Then he had him dug up, along with the other twelve corpses of those shot
alongside
him. DNA tests, carried out by Spanish forensic scientists with experience in digging up much more recent mass graves in Chile or Kosovo, finally enabled him to identify his grandfather. The bones are now in the local cemetery, alongside those of Emilio's grandmother. It was the first time a Civil War grave had been dug up like this, and the first time DNA tests had been used to identify the victims. When the ‘Priaranza Thirteen' were found, however, it seemed like a one-off. I wrote about it, as a curiosity, and then forgot about it again.