Ghosts of Spain (32 page)

For those who fell foul of the regime’s laws, life was hell.
Antonio
was sent to prison at seventeen in the early 1970s after he told his mother that he was gay. She asked a nun for advice. ‘The nun went straight to the police and I was arrested and sent for trial,’ he told me. ‘I spent three months in prison. I was raped there and in the police cells.’

When Franco died, however, there was no immediate change. In fact, when thousands of political and other prisoners,
including
terrorists, were pardoned the year after Franco’s death,
homosexuals
were left to serve out their sentences. They could still be jailed until 1979.

In the late 1990s, when stopped by police officers who checked his identity with the precinct, Antonio discovered that his
homosexuality
was still registered on a police file. ‘Watch out, that one’s queer,’ one of the police officers said. It was not until 2001 that Spain’s parliament finally pledged to erase the criminal records of gays locked up by Franco’s regime. But Spain, as ever, changes quickly. A police officer stopping a man wandering around Madrid’s ‘pink’ barrio of Chueca today would probably expect his victim to be gay. He might, in fact, be openly gay himself.

When Spain changed governments in 2004, one of the first things the incoming Socialists of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero did was to stick to a pledge to give equal rights to gays and transvestites. Spain, suddenly, became the third country in the world to introduce gay marriage – after
traditionally
liberal Holland and Belgium. The government had done its homework. More than 60 per cent of Spaniards were actively in favour of gay marriage. They were, in fact, more tolerant about it than, say, Swedes. That did not stop the church bringing half a million demonstrators onto Madrid’s streets to complain about it.

At heart, most Spaniards are highly tolerant of the sexual choices of others. Even before the new gay marriage law, the Civil Guard, that symbol of Francoist repression, had begun allowing gay officers to cohabit in its barracks.

I decided to test just how deep Spanish tolerance was by going to Villalba, a traditional, conservative town in Galicia, on the day Zapatero’s government announced it would legalise gay marriage. This country town of just 15,000 was the birthplace of Manuel Fraga, founder of the People’s Party and, at the time, premier of the Galician regional government. He had been known to declare that those favouring gay marriage were ‘vandals’ and ‘anarchists’ who were ‘seeking to destroy the family’. It was also the home town of Cardinal Antonio María Rouco Varela, Spain’s senior bishop, whose officials had warned that it was ‘a virus in society’. I had expected the town, dotted with granite
cruceiro
crosses and signs pointing pilgrims along the Way of St James, to be foaming at the mouth with indignation. But the People’s Party deputy mayor, a country vet, said local farmers were beyond surprise. ‘Different sexual expressions have always existed in the
countryside
. People have always known that,’ he said. ‘There have always been priests in these parts with children, too. Nothing shocks people around here.’

At dinner that same night in a classy Santiago de Compostela restaurant, a senior, if urban, executive of a Spanish company seriously suggested that, when thinking about sexuality in the
countryside, one should not forget a farmer’s relationship with his livestock. More pertinently, a gay activist in Santiago pointed out that Spanish homosexuals had no need to hide or close themselves in. ‘Spain has always been more open. That is why we do not have gay ghettoes like you get in Britain or other countries,’ he said.

As Franco headed for his deathbed, Spaniards began to party. When he died, they, or some of them, went wild. It was, according to Rafael Torres, a question of ‘a mass negation of what had come before, without concession to shame, to feelings or to intelligence.

‘Given that hunger is resolved by eating a lot, not by sampling small rations of delicacies, Spanish society tried to rid itself of its starvation with an uncontrolled, if inevitable, sexual revolution, which tore down the whole absurd edifice of repression and
censorship
,’ he explains. ‘But, just as happened in politics, there never was a true revolution of the affairs of the heart … The long,
interminable
Franco years left behind them a wilderness, a land sown with salt, a space that has simply been burnt out.’

It was an exciting time, and one of dizzying choices. Carmen Maura, the actress who was Pedro Almodóvar’s first muse, described it to me this way. ‘These were the silly questions of the time: Do I want sex, or don’t I? If I don’t, does that mean I am not
moderna
? Am I political, or aren’t I? Right or left? You might suddenly find yourself trying to learn the words to “The
International
”, because the following day there was a political
meeting
.’ It was an atmosphere reflected in film director Fernando Colomo’s 1977
Paper Tigers
, which starred Maura.

When Franco died, the Roman Catholic Church finally lost its grip on Spain. Some priests had supported the illegal democratic opposition, spawning a group of revolutionary ‘worker priests’, otherwise known as the
curas rojos
. These had gone to work on building sites and in factories. A special priests’ prison had, in fact, been opened in Zamora. A 1973 police report catalogues 10.6 per cent (exactly!) of the country’s 23,971 parish priests as
activistas
. Some bishops had also pressed for reform, but many Spaniards had, with reason, come to think of the Church and Francoism as one thing. Was his doctrine not called, after all,
National Catholicism? Franco had signed a concordat with the Vatican that gave the Spanish church money, censorship rights and media powers – but gave him power over the appointment of bishops.

Spain is, formally, now a secular state. Despite this, however, the Church’s claws are still sunk into government. When I fill out my annual tax returns I, along with all tax-paying Spaniards, am invited to tick a box saying that I want to contribute a small part of my taxes to the Roman Catholic Church. Some 40 per cent of Spaniards do, while a similar number mark a box giving to
charities
. In fact, the state continues to subsidise the Church, making sure it receives a fixed sum every year, regardless of how many people ‘volunteer’ to help it out with their taxes. A ‘temporary’ agreement signed in 1979 was meant to end in 1985 when the Church would become self-financing. It is still in place.
Taxpayers
, including non-Catholics such as myself, thus pay out 140 million euros extra each year to pay priests’ salaries. One estimate puts the amount of public funding received by the church at almost one-third of its total spending.

The Church also controls many private schools and, in the State sector, appoints the country’s 13,000 religion teachers. It requires them to impart ‘proper doctrine’ and bear ‘testimony of Christian life’. It can, and does, sack them on ‘moral or religious grounds’. Examples included sackings for marrying a divorcee, going on strike or refusing to pay part of their salary back into a ‘voluntary’ Church fund.

It is difficult to tell how religious Spaniards really are. One recent poll saw more than 80 per cent say they were Catholics, while 48 per cent admitted to being ‘practising’ Catholics. The proportion of Spaniards who define themselves as religious is, according to a different poll, no different to the proportion of Germans or Dutch who do so. It is significantly smaller than their southern Catholic neighbours in Portugal or Italy. Only the British and French consider themselves less religious. In fact, the Franco period now looks more like a last-gasp attempt at hanging on to already waning Church powers.

Strong, anti-religious sentiments of
anticlericalismo
also
existed
. These reached their violent zenith with the church-burning and priest-killing of the Civil War. Hatred of a powerful Church, however, went back much further. Barcelona’s so-called Semana Trágica, Tragic Week, in 1909, saw plumes of smoke dotting the city horizon as church after church was set alight. This mirrored similar episodes from earlier in the century. ‘Destroy its temples, tear aside the veil of novices and elevate them to the category of mothers,’ the populist demagogue Alejandro Lerroux had urged.

In 1835 a progressive liberal, Juan Mendizábal, came to power. He confiscated much of the Church’s landed property, selling it off at auction. The liberals’ enemies, a group of conservative catholics known as the Carlists, not only supported a rival dynastic line for the Crown but also rallied to the battle cry of ‘the church in Danger’.

While the bishops huff and puff, the gulf between the Vatican’s teachings and what Spaniards do continues to widen. Rebellion, meanwhile, has also come from within. Spain boasts the Roman Catholic church’s first avowedly gay and sexually active priest, Father José Mantero. I met Father Mantero at the offices of a glossy gay Spanish magazine,
Zero
, on whose front cover he had proclaimed that, ‘Being gay is a gift from God.’ Father Mantero, from the southern town of Valverde del Camino, was a
thirty-nine
-year-old bearded man with a silver earring. ‘The Church says we must have compassion for homosexuals, which means it thinks there is something wrong with us. For many gay priests this is a personal hell. They see themselves as defective beings,’ he told me. ‘This Church should be about love and justice. Now it is just worried about sex.’

Sick of seeing straight priests get away with breaking their celibacy vows, Father Mantero eventually broke his. In his parish he was ‘Don José’ or, to the young, ‘Pepe’. In gay internet chat rooms he was ‘Kyrlian’. He would travel to Madrid, visit gay bars and go to ‘hairy bear’ parties (a sub-genre of the gay scene, whose clientele consists chiefly of big paternal men with beards). There were, he insisted, hundreds, if not thousands, of gay priests in Spain. Spanish bishops declared him ‘sick’ and suffering from
‘moral disorder’. A Vatican spokesman talked of ‘a sceptic boil’.

Mantero was by no means typical of Spanish Catholics, or of their clergy. But, after meeting him, I found myself wondering why a practising gay Spanish priest, rather than, say a Pole, an Italian or an Irishman, should be the one to come out and rebel in such a public, defiant fashion. I wondered, also, why I was not surprised. Was it because I thought of Spaniards as naturally rebellious? Or because they were so often convinced they,
personally
, were in the right? Perhaps it was that he knew there was no need to fear social rejection? Or, simply, because other Spaniards were so rarely shocked by sex? The answer, I decided, was
somewhere
in a mixture of all those things.

As time goes by, the Church is losing all its battles, bar the money one, with the Spanish state. Abortion, already available practically – but not quite – on demand, is due for further
liberalisation
by the current Socialist government. Some British women now travel to Spain for later-term abortions that they could not legally get at home. It is a reversal of the once
traditional
traffic of young Spanish women travelling to London clinics. Here, again, Spaniards are deaf to the Vatican. Not even the Conservative People’s Party, during its eight years in power until 2004, dared turn the clock back.

Divorce was legalised in 1981. It was a moment of true
liberation
for many women, but still one that came a full six years after Franco’s death. Carmen Maura had first-hand experience of what life was like for the ‘separated’ woman under Franco. Born into a conservative family, she was educated by nuns, married at
nineteen
and became a full-time actress at twenty-four. She paid a huge, unfair cost for that decision. Her husband took her two children. In Franco’s Spain, having agreed to separate, she was in a no-win situation. Her own family also disowned her. Her emblematic status as Almodóvar girl and, therefore, icon of the
movida
is somewhat ironic. She lived little of the fervour of that exciting period in Spanish history when everything was changing at breakneck speed. ‘I was too busy trying to get my children back,’ she explained.

Franco’s death would, eventually, bring Spanish women legal equality. A new law approved in 2005 even obliges men to share domestic work and the care of children and elderly dependants. What is written in the law books, however, is still clearly not matched by what happens in most Spanish homes or, especially, workplaces. Feminism, the writer Tobias Jones said about Italy recently, passed that country by. That is not true in Spain. Spanish women have grabbed, if not militant feminism, then at least its fruits, with fervent relief. They have one big problem, however. Spanish men, as I was to discover when my children were born, have not.

After five years living in Spain I had thought I was immune to
culture
shock. Proudly integrated, linguistically adapted, accepted by friends and neighbours, I felt I had cracked Madrid. Like many foreigners who establish themselves in a new place, I had at first tried to become like my hosts, a pseudo-Spaniard. But that did not really work. My
anglosajón
soul was obviously too hard set. So I finally settled for an in-between status as an integrated outsider – half inside and looking out, half outside and looking in. It was a comfortable, liberating sort of position, fixed neither to the rules of one culture nor to those of the other. I was, literally, living the best of both worlds. Then parenthood struck.

This was a collision with the best and worst of Spain. On the one hand, I was to discover the glorious existence, and hallowed status, of the Spanish family and its adored and spoilt star-turn – the child. On the other, I was to find out just how, as Spanish
society
has rocketed forward in so many ways, its women have been left trailing – and toiling – in the slipstream.

Madrid is a wonderful place for children. Society, a maligned concept in the
anglosajón
world, is alive and well in Spain.
Families
are at its heart. A barely concealed frisson of excitement ran through our barrio when my partner became visibly pregnant. The butcher’s ‘
filetes
’ got fatter and the breakfast rations at the Bar Urbe got longer. In the winter months pregnancy was one of the few things that could dislodge Cati, the door-lady, from the warmth of her windowless, three-room, ground-floor flat. She emerged daily from her hideaway, wrapped in a fleecy, green dressing gown, to demand her regular bulletin, with as much medical detail as possible, on the pregnancy’s development.

There is nothing quite so personal, particular and culturally conditioned as the way people have babies. Elsewhere, the natural childbirth revolution was in full gear. At kitchen tables from Manchester to New York I had listened to women talk, boast even, of rejecting pain relief, of giving birth in water tanks, and of men who massaged, soothed or even chanted their partners through the hours of childbirth. The stories were often inspiring,
sometimes
hilarious and occasionally appalling. But this was the way we expected to go.

For the first pregnancy we had been given a whole library of
anglosajón
and French natural birthing books. They included a rather scary one in which West Coast hippy women and their very hairy partners got off on the ‘rush’ of childbirth. The essence of their message was this: women give birth; their husbands, or partners, are handy as cheerleaders, comforters and confidence builders; doctors, meanwhile, are useful, occasionally vital, but are generally extras in the drama. The obvious protagonists were the mother and her child.

It was at our first prenatal class that I realised the childbirth revolution and, with it, a large chunk of feminism, had not reached Spain. We arrived early, sat down in the front row and began chatting with Encarna, the midwife. As we talked, and the seats behind us filled up, I began to get an uneasy feeling. When Encarna stood up to start the class, I swivelled slowly,
surreptitiously
around and looked back. Yes, I was the only man.

Over the coming weeks, barring an occasional, one-off
showing
from a nervous-looking fellow father-to-be and a single ‘bring-your-partner-or-else’ occasion, it was me and a dozen pregnant women. Occasionally I, too, joined the male flight. Encarna, with her husky smoker’s voice, hangover eyes, an empty plastic cigarette holder clamped between her teeth and a box of Marlboro peeking from her gown pocket, was a lively
representative
of the earthy, carefree side of Spain. She made us moan, groan, push, shove, soothe and laugh. Smoking, she agreed, was a bad thing. But, this being Spain, there was no moral prohibition, no disapproval of those who could not give up. Who was she to
tell anyone off? Instead, she gave advice about how long to leave between a cigarette and the next round of breast feeding. Encarna wanted to talk about sex. Her basic message was to have as much as possible, both before and as soon as possible after childbirth, because it made you feel good. She recommended washing babies’ bottoms in public drinking fountains (Madrid has a lot, though fewer every day). But no, she was sorry, men were not allowed to be present at the birth, at least not at the hospital we were meant to go to. And no, nobody had home births. Things were changing, but not that quickly. Giving birth meant stepping onto the conveyor-belt and letting the doctors take charge.

Spain’s state health system is a command economy. My view of it is of course, largely subjective. Once you have got beyond
primary
care, you are there to do as you are told. You fill out this form, stand in that queue and remember that ‘
el doctor
’, or ‘
la
doctora
’, knows best. Spaniards are normally wonderful, imaginative abusers of bureaucracy or rules of any kind. Given the chance, they will charm, cheat or bulldoze their way through them. Stand them in front of a man, or a woman, in a white coat, however, and they go meekly wherever they are led. Doctors, pharmacists and even the owners of health food shops – who have adopted the uniform to hide their quackery – are all treated with a degree of respect, even awe, that their counterparts elsewhere could only dream of.

The long, complex words of medicine are magical to Spaniards. Their ability to discuss illness, in a combination of detailed
medical
jargon and vivid, no-holds-barred descriptions of symptoms – pustules, bowel movements and genital itches included – is prodigious. In newspapers and radio programmes footballers’ injuries are described in minute, loving detail. One player, I read in today’s sports daily
As
, has a fracture to the
escafoides carpiano
of his hand. Another has torn the
cápsula posterior
of his knee. Does your average Spanish soccer fan know what these remote corners of the body are? Or is it just that, as I suspect, the medical words are too mysteriously impressive to miss out? The magical remedies spelt out by their doctors, and the machines used on
them, are named, word-by-staggeringly-scientific-word, as if they were the potions of ancient alchemists –
electroencefalografía,
res-onancia
magnética, artroscopia
.

Spain has a historically high caesarean rate. One study, from 1998 and concentrating on Catalonia, showed 26 per cent of births were done by Caesarean. This was two and a half times, for example, the rate in Holland or Sweden. Numbers were rising rapidly. One
hospital
reached 38 per cent. Some other western countries are now beginning to catch up with that figure, but others have kept them down to around 10 per cent. Medical intervention, in Spain, does not end there. Episiotomies are performed on nine out of ten
first-time
mothers. Enemas and pubic shaving are also a routine part of the mother-to-be’s trip down the birthing production line at
Spanish
hospitals. All this, the report pointed out, contravenes a World Health Organisation (WHO) resolution on the rights of pregnant women. The fact that the rate of caesareans surges on Friday and Saturday mornings suggests some are performed for the
convenience
of doctors keen to get away for the weekend (though some mothers are also keen on ‘convenience’ births). Private hospitals are the worst, performing 30 per cent more caesareans. One child I know was, her parents now suspect, delivered several days early by programmed caesarean just so a doctor could get his bill in before the end of the second quarter. I would like to think that was not true. But a theatre nurse said she once threw a doctor’s surgical instruments to the ground – so they would require re-sterilising – because he was trying to rush an operation so he could get to a Real Madrid game.

Spanish women rarely complain about any of this. Respect for the man, or woman, in the white coat is absolute. Only 1 in 4,000 births takes place outside a hospital (compared to more than a quarter in Holland). Doctors say Spain has cut its perinatal
mortality
rate considerably over the last couple of decades, thanks to hospital births. It may just be, however, that Spaniards are not squeamish about the scalpel. This is estimated to be the country with the highest plastic surgery rate in Europe. It also has one of the highest rates of organ donorship.

Spain’s public primary health care is especially good. Wherever you are – even in remote country towns – there is a doctor on hand twenty-four hours a day at the local
centro de salud
. Spain, unlike other European countries, has too many doctors. It
currently
exports them, especially to Britain and Portugal. This
surfeit
means there is a large pool of semi-employed, part-time doctors. They are still willing to sit up all night for not very much money. The primary health care they offer is one reason, along with a Mediterranean diet heavy in fresh fruit and vegetables, fish and olive oil, why Spaniards outlive almost all other Europeans.

Our patience with public health ran out, however, with the preparation for childbirth. We had found ourselves locked into a dreary routine of seeing
tocólogos
, specialist doctors who monitor pregnancies on a monthly basis. They performed this task with all the zest of bored mechanics forced to check the oil, filters and tyre pressures of two dozen cars a day. So we went to see a private gynaecologist who was one of the few survivors of the first women’s clinics that emerged in the 1970s. These had been places where contraception was not a sin and women could talk freely about abortion. She kept her medical implements wrapped up in silver foil on a shelf, like so many take-away
bocadillos
– the plump, bready sandwiches of the Spanish emergency lunch. We had gone from one extreme to another, for the new gynaecologist was an impassioned enthusiast. She gave me long, ecstatic descriptions of my partner’s cervix. ‘What beauty!’ she exclaimed. Invitations were even issued to join her at the viewing end of the examining table. But no, she could not recommend a hospital in Madrid, private or public, that specialised in natural birthing.

So we did our own market research. And that is how we ended up at the Ciudad Sanitaria Doce de Octubre, the Twelfth of October Health City, a huge public hospital covering Madrid’s southern neighbourhoods. This we picked because it allowed a partner to be there at the moment of birth. It was not our
designated
hospital, but we applied the logic of Spanish
rule-breaking
and reasoned that they would not turn away a woman in labour. We also organised some
enchufe
, swapping the private
services of the enthusiast for those of one of the hospital’s chief gynaecologists, a youngish man we had met at a dinner party. That way we could drop his name at the admissions office.

At first sight, this vast medical ‘city’ looked like some remnant of a five-year plan in an ex-Communist state. It was a jungle of drab high-rise buildings and low, square, concrete blocks tucked between the warehouses and working-class housing estates of southern Madrid. Closer up, it turned out to be like a small,
self-contained
Spanish town. There were bars, restaurants, a bank, double parking, car thieves and tow trucks.

Appearances can deceive, however. Inside the tower blocks are some of the best facilities and finest researchers in Spain. More importantly, the Doce de Octubre had the best maternity ward in the city. It owed this honour to the fact that it was also the busiest. Spain may now have one of the lowest birth-rates in the world, at 1.3 children per woman of child-bearing age, but the country’s immigrants and gypsy families who populate the south of the city do not know that. In fact, Spain’s suddenly burgeoning
community
of immigrants, attracted by a dozen years of strong, constant economic growth, have already turned around a declining
birthrate
that hit a low of fewer than 1.2 children in 1998.

The day the waters broke, we sat nervously in the back of a big, white Mercedes taxi bumping our way along the hospital
driveway
while the
taxista
informed us excitedly just how wonderful his own two children, born at the same place, had turned out. Our experience of the joy, humiliation, anger and wonder involved in having a baby in Spain was about to enter its final, and defining, stage.

We had wanted this to be a natural birth, but recognised it was unlikely to happen. The baby was already two weeks late. Scans showed he was also very large. Connected to a drip, hours of exhausting contractions were gone through without any result. In the meantime, a constantly changing cast of doctors, nurses,
cleaners
and assorted others in green or white coats, wandered in and out.

A surgeon was, eventually, called. My request to be present during the caesarean was turned down. This was not unexpected.
Surgeons and anaesthetists are by no means all keen to have visitors in the operating room. It was not, however, a strange request. Some Spanish surgeons, as we would discover when our second child was born, are quite happy to have the father there. Our mistake was to ask why, in this case, the answer had been no. ‘
¡Porque lo digo yo!
’ – ‘Because I say so!’ came the imperious reply. It sparked an unseemly row – involving surgeon, mother-to-be and myself – in which British phlegm, that alien characteristic that so intrigues Spaniards, went out of the hospital window. The anaesthetist had to act as peacemaker.

All that was, of course, forgotten when I found myself, an hour later, holding the little fingers of a puce-coloured baby as he lay in an incubator in the neonatal ward. With his mother still out from the operation, I was tolerated as a visitor but sent home at ‘closing time’ that evening. He would have to spend his first night on his own.