Ghosts of Spain (31 page)

This sexual frankness, apart from being ever-present in the films of Pedro Almodóvar and others, is also evident in the
literary
world. Most bookshops can be counted on to stock a few of
the mauve-spined works put out by Tusquets publishing company in the
Sonrisa Vertical
– the Vertical Smile – collection of erotic writing. The Vertical Smile has been one of Spain’s most popular literary prizes (and there are almost 3,000 of these each year), though it has recently suffered from a paucity of entries. Nobel prize-winner Camilo José Cela once sat on the jury. The contrast with Britain, where it is a prize for bad sex writing that gets all the attention, could not be greater. Some of Spain’s best
contemporary
writers, including Almudena Grandes and her
The Ages of
Lulu
– later translated into twenty languages – have walked off with the 20,000-euro prize. The jury praised one winner for ‘the richness of scenes that, aside from being fresh, turn out to be
perverse
, fetishistic and transgressive’.

All this frankness and unshockability might make one think that Spaniards were avid sexual adventurers, leaping from bed to bed and experimenting with every single possible sexual variety like characters from an Almodóvar film. But the Instituto Nacional de Estadística, with its
Cosmopolitan
hat on again, says that is not true. Half the women under forty-nine that it
surveyed
, and a quarter of the men, had been to bed with just one person.

A survey carried out in the mid-1990s by government-funded investigators at the Centre for Sociological Research found that only 41 per cent of Spaniards aged between eighteen and
twenty-four
had initiated their sex lives in a bed. With most still living at their parents’ homes, the others had resorted to cars, the great outdoors or anywhere else they could find a moment of
privacy
. ‘Parents are confused and out of touch. Most are convinced that their children do not have a sex life,’ a sociologist quoted by one newspaper explained.

This problem has led to some ingenious suggestions from local politicians. The southern seaside town of Vélez-Málaga, for
example
, considered turning off the seafront lights for an hour every night so couples could ‘release their sexual desires’. ‘It has always been traditional for young people to use the dark and the low tide for a roll in the sand,’ a town councillor explained. Granada’s
Green Party, meanwhile, suggested handing out a hotel voucher, called a
bonosex
, to young people living at home. In the regional government of Extremadura, one functionary proposed setting aside ‘sex zones’ for young couples. None of these suggestions prospered. The last one was slapped down by Juan Carlos Rodríguez Ibarra, the Socialist regional premier. ‘I am not about to turn the regional government into some sort of
madame
,’ he snorted. ‘They will just have to find somewhere themselves.’ They do.

In the elegant, if crumbling, Madrid apartment block where I lived before buying my own flat, I was given a great lesson in Spanish sex education over the decades. I had been called to a
tenants
’ meeting which was to be held around the marble coffee table of Doña Rafaela, a smart and exquisitely mannered seventy-
year-old
who lived on the fourth floor. A rebellion had broken out against our landlord, who also lived in the building. At the appointed hour I crept furtively down the darkened staircase and rapped on Doña Rafaela’s door. She ushered me into a neat
drawing
room where half a dozen grey-haired ladies sat waiting
expectantly
. ‘
¡Dios mío
, it’s a man!’ one exclaimed. With the exception of our landlord, they pointed out, I was the only adult male in a building where most people had lived for more than thirty years. Many were still paying minuscule rents, frozen, if index-linked, back then. We, relatively recent arrivals, were paying twenty times more than some of the others. As the building gave him so little income, the landlord refused to invest in it. So it was that chunks of masonry were falling off the front of the building – requiring the fire brigade to cordon off the street one day – while the stairwell ceiling had also come crashing down.

I knew most of these
señoras
by sight, of course. Pleasantries had been exchanged at the doorway. Our two small children had been admired. One had even been presented with a bright yellow plastic cosh by Doña Adelaida from the second floor. But our short, shared trips in the groaning wood-and-glass lift had left time for little more than this.

It would have been rude to get straight down to business, so we
chatted. Unexpectedly, the conversation turned to sex. The
subject
was brought up by Raquel, a chain-smoking granny-of-two from the first floor, who burst into the room clutching two bottles of wine and a box of books.

Raquel had just written
The Address Book of Lost Friends
, a
publishing
success which told of her daughter’s heroin addiction and subsequent death from AIDS. It is a startling tale of degradation amongst the
niños bien
, the rich kids, of the haughty Madrid barrio of Salamanca, in the dizzying first decade of the transition to democracy. Raquel had been at the journalistic forefront of the
Transición
, logging the amazing self-transformation of the
Spanish
parliament. While she worked, and drank, her daughter – a frightening, siren-like Lolita – descended into heroin addiction. She pulled cousins, friends and other neighbourhood kids along with her. Most were long dead. Two young grandsons, and the deep lines scoured on Raquel’s face, were all she left behind.

The grandsons were handsome young teenagers who, in an attempt not to repeat mistakes, had been sent to the local church school. Raquel was worried about AIDS. She had been trying to explain the importance of condoms to the eldest grandson, she said, but he had cut her short. ‘They think they know it all because they get sex education at school,’ she sighed.

‘Well, thank God they get that,’ snorted Doña Adelaida, a
no-nonsense
, Miss Marple figure with sensibly cropped grey hair. ‘I remember when my professor of natural sciences at the
university
announced that our next lecture would be on human
reproduction
. “So there will be no need for the young ladies to come,” he told us!’

‘Oh, there was none of that silly stuff when I was a student,’ remarked Doña Rafaela. ‘We heard it all.’

‘That, Rafaela, is because you went to university before me, during the Republic. I had to put up with Franco!’ snorted Doña Adelaida, now a university professor herself.

The arrival of Franco’s regime was one giant step backwards in social progress. Brothels survived, even thrived in the
barrios chinos
, the red-light districts in the old city centres.

Elsewhere, however, Franco set about abolishing the Republic’s liberal rules. Divorce was abolished, except where permitted by the Church. Civil weddings were only allowed between two
non-Catholics
. Abortion, of course, was illegal. A Supreme Court Prosecutor’s Office report in 1974, however, put the number of abortions at the amazingly high rate of 300,000 a year, or 40 per cent of live births.

Franco’s new Civil Code ordered that: ‘A man must protect his wife, and she must obey her husband.’ A husband’s permission was needed for women to sign all sorts of legal documents. Under this
permiso marital
system, she could not take a job or open a bank account without his go-ahead. Adultery by a wife was always a crime. Adultery by a husband was only one if it happened in the family home, if he lived with his mistress or if it was public knowledge.

‘When you are married, you must never confront him, never use your anger against his anger, or your stubbornness against his. When he gets angry, you will shut up; when he shouts, lower your head without reply; when he demands, you will cede, unless your Christian conscience prevents you … To love is to endure,’ a Church guide advised brides-to-be.

Old ideas of honour, shame, virginity and jealousy, some still deeply rooted in rural Spain, were dusted off and given a fresh shine. These were, anyway, enough to allow British anthropologists such as Julian Pitt-Rivers (in the mid-1950s) to evolve theories on the importance of honour, shame or grace in Mediterranean
societies
that were required reading on my social anthropology course at Oxford University. Change was slow. By the end of the regime, supposedly risqué films were made in which, according to the writer Rafael Torres, ‘a fat, ugly, stupid Spanish man would be pursued by beautiful half-naked women simply because he was a
macho español
, a breed of man supposedly much valued by Scandinavians and, in fact, by most women in the world.’

The worst thing, however, was that, as Torres puts it: ‘Women disappeared from the scene, except as passive objects.
Machismo
was radicalized.’ This meant women were not allowed to flaunt
themselves, but men could harry them as they walked down the street. José Ortega y Gasset coined the phrase ‘
violación visual
’, ‘visual rape’. ‘
Piropos
’, words of ‘flattery’ shouted at girls as they walked down the street, reached their zenith. These are dying out. At their worst, they were straightforwardly crude. At their best, however, they could be highly amusing. My favourite, brought off the street by a
Madrileña
friend, remains: ‘
Pisa fuerte niña, que
paga el ayuntamiento
’. ‘Tread firmly,
niña
, the town council’s paying [for the paving stones]!’

The Church became, once more, one of the major powers in the land and a constant chaperone for Spaniards’ private lives. In 1958 the Bishops’ Conference’s Committee on Morality and Orthodoxy warned that unmarried couples who promenaded arm-in-arm were placing themselves in
peligro grave
, grave danger.

In 1963 the
Boletín Oficial de España
published rules for
film-makers
which prohibited, amongst other things, ‘the
justification
of divorce, adultery or anything that attacks the institution of marriage or the family’. Criticism of the Church’s ‘dogma, morality or worship’ was banned in the same order, as was
anything
that provoked ‘low passions’ or was ‘lascivious, brutal, gross or morbid’.

Film censors committed some celebrated faux pas, including turning two of the protagonists of John Ford’s
Mogambo
, Grace Kelly and Donald Sinden, from husband and wife into brother and sister. An attempt to stop Kelly’s on-screen affair with Clark Gable becoming adultery thus saw her marriage turned into incest. Even the political censorship reached moments of sublime stupidity. Bogart’s lines about the Spanish Republic were expunged from
Casablanca
while, in Robert Aldrich’s
Dirty Dozen
, a no-good character called Franko was renamed, because his name sounded too much like that of
el
Caudillo
.

Sometimes it was the censors themselves who inflamed
imaginations
. Spaniards imagined, for example, that in
Gilda
, Rita Hayworth did not just peel off her long glove to the tune of ‘Put the Blame on Mame’, but stripped for the cameras completely – and that this sight had been denied them by the censor’s scissors.
An obscure German documentary,
Helga
, became a surprise hit when put on show at one of the Arte y Ensayo, art-house, cinemas that were opened in the later, more liberal, days of the regime. Extra showings were required to cope with those desperate to see a heavily censored film on sexual education.

The back rows of cinemas, the darker corners of parks and the doorways of streets such as Madrid’s Calle Echegaray, meanwhile, were the working places of women known as
pajilleras
, literally masturbators. They came equipped with a handkerchief and a vigorous wrist action. Some, according to Rafael Torres, would, for a little extra, sing a
jota
, a traditional folk-dancing song, while they performed their task.

If women’s sexuality scared Franco, his regime’s views on homosexuality were wholly predictable. Browsing through my local second-hand bookstore, I found myself confronted by a book entitled
Sodomitas
. It was a 1956 tome, which put
homosexuality
into the same bag of ‘enemies of the state’ as Marxism, freemasonry and Judaism. ‘This book was written to demonstrate the danger that the sodomite poses to the
Patria
, the fatherland,’ its author, one M. Carlavilla, proclaimed. ‘The herd of sodomite wild beasts, thousands strong, has invaded the busy streets
looking
for its young prey … Your son may return home, corrupted, hiding his shameful secret.

‘There is an undoubted affinity between the sodomite and the communist, both being aberrations against the family,’ Carlavilla added, before launching into a 300-page investigation of the subject.

Homosexuals were a threat to the regime’s ideal of a virile Spain. ‘Any effeminate or introvert who insults the movement will be killed like a dog,’ General Queipo de Llano once threatened. Introversion, it seems, was a thoroughly unmanly, un-Spanish, suspicious attribute. When the country’s greatest twentieth-century poet and playwright, Federico García Lorca, was shot by a Falangist death squad in the hills outside Granada, one of his assassins later boasted that he had ‘shot him twice in the arse for being a poof ’.

Thousands of homosexuals were jailed, put in camps or locked up in mental institutions. Prison terms of up to three years were imposed under laws covering ‘public scandal’ or ‘social danger’. Homosexuals were packed off to mental hospitals where some were given electric shock treatment.

Even, then, however, an underlying seam of social tolerance appeared to co-exist with the regime’s homophobic rantings. As always, the gap between the rules and what people actually did was huge. Aristocratic and pro-regime gays carried on pretty much as normal, with some even recalling the Franco period as a glorious time of illicit sexual encounters, according to one
historian
, Pablo Fuentes. Young men, some barely more than boys, who had come to Madrid to escape hunger or seek adventure would gather around the Las Ventas bull-ring. Many dreamt of becoming matadors, but ended up selling their bodies as
chaperos
, rent boys, instead.