Ghosts of Spain (51 page)

Under the poet’s grandson there will be no turning the clock back on education and language reforms. A Pujol law imposing fines on shopkeepers who fail to translate their signs into Catalan is still there, as are the offices where people can denounce those who do not comply. Maragall, meanwhile, is demanding a reform of Catalonia’s statute that will see it accrue further powers. He wants it formally recognized as ‘a nation’ – a concept that drives Spain’s traditional right apoplectic.

A Catalan journalist explained the progress of
catalanismo
like this: ‘The train is going down the track. All the major parties in Catalonia except the People’s Party [which gets only one in eight votes] want it to keep moving. The only argument is where it should stop. The Catalan socialists will get off at federalism. Separatists want it to reach the end of the track. Nobody knows where the nationalists will stop.’ He might have added that the latter were, however, determined to make sure the train never ran out of coal.

Maragall’s reforms are set to happen despite the opposition of leading Socialists in other parts of Spain. Such views can coexist
in the Spanish Socialist Party because it is federal. What is strange about the Socialist Party, which currently governs Spain under Zapatero, is that it does not formally propose the same solution for Spain itself. ‘Federal’ is a word it has begun to toy with. It is not ready, however, to go the whole way. Some argue that, with so much devolution of central power, Spain is already a long way down the federal track. A formally federal Spain remains the ideal, only, of the far left and the Socialists in Catalonia – even though it seems an obvious solution to what Spaniards call ‘
el problema territorial
’.

The political father of Catalan nationalism, Enric Prat de la Riba, reached a similar conclusion in 1906. ‘Catalonia is a nation … a collective spirit, a Catalan soul, which was able to create a Catalan language, Catalan law and Catalan art.’ How to square the principles of ‘to each nation, a state’ and ‘the political unity of Spain’? Prat de la Riba’s solution was ‘
l
’
Estat compost
’ – basically a federation. In 1914 Catalonia got something much less than that – an administrative body called the Mancomunitat. It was shortlived. In 1925 the dictator General Miguel Primo de Rivera dissolved it. Primo de Rivera would, amongst other absurdities, ban the
Sardana
– the painfully earnest and unexciting Catalan group folk dance. The striking down of cultural symbols, however minor, was part of yet another determined re-engineering of the Catalans.

As would happen with Franco and, to a lesser but demonstrable degree, with Aznar, a militant centralist in Madrid only served to popularise Catalan nationalism. After Primo de Rivera had gone it came back with a vengeance. This time, however, it was driven by the left. In 1931, a leader of Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, Lluís Companys, proclaimed the Catalan Republic to a crowd in Barcelona. The then head of the ERC, Fransesc Macià, claimed this new republic was part of ‘the Federation of Iberian Republics.’ Federal Spain poked its nose above the parapet. It was, as in 1640, a short-lived idea. Three days later Macià backtracked and agreed to the idea of a semi-autonomous government to be called, once more, the Generalitat. It would last until the Spanish
Civil War, with Companys as its last president. Companys was forced into exile. Extradited from occupied France by Hitler while Franco’s brother-in-law, the
Cuñadísimo
Serrano Suñer was foreign minister, he would be shot on a hill above Barcelona in 1940. Companys’ party would later be led, for a while, by that future Haider-lover Heribert Barrera. The current generation of leaders have distanced themselves, and their party, from his racist discourse.

Thinking of Barrera, I travelled to the town of Vic. This is the heartland of traditional Catalonia. Hairy Wilfred had begun its ninth-century rebuilding after it was recovered from the Moors. Verdaguer was born nearby. Here I found a group of ‘language volunteers’ giving free lessons to immigrants. They were making a heartfelt effort to help these people integrate in Catalonia. I wondered, however, what really motivated them. Were they zealous missionaries of Catalan, converting natives? Or were they genuinely welcoming, just trying to help them out? When I heard one enthusiastically explain to a classroom of Africans what the idiom ‘
treballar com un negre
’ – ‘to work like a black man’ – meant, I wondered even harder. She did not notice the sharp intake of breath from some of those – hard-working, lowly-paid and black – in the room.

Moving back to the Ramblas, I found another group of immigrants studying Catalan. They were here for money, not love. ‘I went for a job and they said come back when you can speak Catalan,’ explained one Ecuadorian. She complained that, in the city’s hospitals, nurses and doctors often addressed her in Catalan. In fact, with Catalan required for many public-sector and some private-sector jobs, speakers are now up to 5 per cent more likely to find employment. People from abroad, or elsewhere in Spain, shout ‘Discrimination’. My Catalan friends – some of whom now work and live almost exclusively in Catalan – find that hard to accept.

I would like to move back to Barcelona one day. This has always been where I have felt most at ease in Spain. My conscience, however, tells me that, if I do so, I should learn Catalan. I am, after
all, no longer the innocent foreigner who stepped off a plane at Barcelona airport in the mid-1980s with a rucksack, little idea of Spain and – like those immigrants Mrs Pujol complains about – none at all of Catalonia.

But I can think of many other, more useful, languages I would rather learn first – Arabic, Chinese, perhaps Italian. It makes a move to Barcelona about as attractive – and likely – as going to, say, Helsinki or Athens. Does that mean I am being excluded? Or am I excluding myself? Perhaps I just take it all too seriously. Pujol recently complained that Catalonia felt ‘uncomfortable’ in Spain. Maybe I should go to Barcelona and allow myself to feel ‘uncomfortable’ too.

As my quest for Catalonia’s ‘differentiating fact’ drew to a close, I set off to visit the least popular museum in Barcelona. It is dedicated to none other than that great and beloved poet Verdaguer. I drove up a twisting road past the funfair at Tibidabo – the highest point in the hills that rear up above the city. This peak’s name comes from the words of the Devil’s offer when he tempted Christ. Would he have had the will-power, I wondered, to reply ‘get thee behind me Satan’ had he been offered Barcelona?

I drove through dense woodland. Here, a stone’s throw from the city, a shepherd was tending his sheep. A sign pointed me towards a converted
masía
, an eighteenth-century Catalan farm house, called Villa Joana. This is where Verdaguer, disgraced and distraught, died in 1902. ‘I am in a sea of troubles that do not let me think or write, let alone sing,’ he complained. A few years earlier he had been banned from saying Mass. Although he was reinstated, the elite of Barcelona – his former patrons – had mostly turned their backs on him.

It was a Saturday morning. I was the only visitor at the museum, silently trailed by a uniformed security guard. There was obviously no taboo, or at least not any more, on mentioning his supposed madness. His exorcism writings, I found, had now been published. The museum explains how Verdaguer became the leading light in the
Renaixença
and the star turn at its annual poetry competition, the
Jocs Florals.
The
Renaixença
had included, in
1841, the publication, in the preface of a poetry anthology, of a call for cultural independence by Joaquim Rubió i Ors which claimed that Spain was no longer ‘the fatherland’ of Catalans.

The clarion call came from a man who, like many of the
Renaixença
figures, were from Catalonia’s prosperous upper middle class of merchants and financiers. Bonaventura Carles Aribau eventually spent much of his time in Madrid, running Spain’s treasury, mint and state holdings. That did not stop him waxing lyrical in
La Pàtria
(
The Fatherland
) about his roots and his language, which he referred to by the medieval term of
llemosí. ‘En llemosí soná lo meu primer vagit,/ Quant del mugró matern la dolça llet bebia/ En llemosí al Senyor pregaba cada dia,/ E cántichs llemosins somiaba cada nit.
’ (‘My first infant wail was in Catalan/ when I sucked sweet milk from my mother’s nipple./ I prayed to God in Catalan each day/and dreamed Catalan songs every night.’)

The
Renaixença
gave birth to political
catalanismo
. In Catalonia, the poets came first, then the politicians. That explains why language and culture – and not the bullet or the bomb – are the chosen weapons of
catalanismo
. It also explains why some Catalans can be so touchy about Verdaguer.

My search for the
hecho
diferencial
ends here. Catalans are obviously different. But I do not see that this conflicts with being Spanish. In any case, it strikes me as something an outsider cannot judge. The
hecho diferencial
can only be felt from within. If a Catalan feels that he or she is Catalan above all else, and that this makes them different to other Spaniards – or, even, not a Spaniard – it is a wholly subjective sensation. Perhaps, like Aribau, one must first dream and suck a maternal nipple in Catalan. The outsider cannot share it. Nor, I am sure, can the immigrants on Las Ramblas.

Catalans are not, however, the only Spaniards whose first dreams normally come in a language other than Catalan. The Basques, as we have seen, cannot compete.
Euskara
is still far from being their first language. The people of Galicia, however, do mostly speak their own language,
galego
. They, too, have their
own poets. So how do they fit into the jigsaw puzzle that is Spain? To find that out, I would have to leave the warm and placid Mediterranean behind me. I would need to head for the wild, wet Atlantic, to a place that is home to The End of the World.

I met Manuel standing beside his coffin. The long, wooden box, lined with quilted, padded white viscose, was standing upright, leaning against the wall of the church at Santa Marta de Ribarteme. Manuel and four friends were standing beside it, quietly waiting for the moment when he would step in.

Santa Marta is a small village, more a loose collection of farmhouses, in the hills that rise up from the River Miño in Galicia, Spain’s misty and mysterious north-west corner. Manuel, a
forty-nine
-year-old, one-eyed former quarryman, had a love-heart and the letters l-o-v-e, in English, tattooed on one forearm. He had come up from the nearby cathedral town of Tui, which sits on the border with Portugal, to join the procession that is the highlight of Santa Marta’s annual fiestas.

‘I have stomach cancer. I have been very, very ill,’ he explained. While others walked, or even crawled, Manuel would be riding in his coffin. ‘I have prayed all I can and I have survived. It is a small miracle, so I have come to give thanks.’

The coffin parade at Santa Marta de Ribarteme was, I had been assured, one of the supreme examples of those twin Galician characteristics of religiosity and superstition. I had come here as I tried to work out a problem that was just as mystifying, if not more so, than that posed by the Catalans or Basques. Why was it that Galicia, the most far-flung and historically abandoned corner of Spain, did not feel the same intense mistrust of Madrid as them. Why, in short, were Galicians happy being Spaniards? This, after all, was also a place with its own language. Four out of five people spoke
galego
– a far higher percentage than native
euskara
speakers. Galicia, too, could boast its own literature and culture. Geographically, it was more distant and isolated from Madrid
than either the Basque Country or Catalonia. It had certainly suffered more. For centuries, and until very recently, Galicia was a byword for poverty, hunger and emigration. It was recognised, alongside the other two, as ‘a historic nationality’ – marking it from Spain’s other autonomous regions. Fewer than a quarter of Galicians defined themselves as nationalists, however. Only one in thirty wanted a separate state. There was no real argument that, in Galicia, one was amongst Spaniards.

In Santa Marta de Ribarteme it was lives and souls, not mundane politics, that were at stake. ‘He prays to Santa Marta,’ explained one of Manuel’s friends, here to act as pall-bearers for a still-living man. ‘The cancer hasn’t killed him, not yet.’

I asked whether they had weighed Manuel before volunteering their services. ‘He weighs sixty-eight kilos,’ said the friend. ‘We’ll try not to drop him.’

Inside the tiny, stone church, a queue of men and women was barging its way noisily forward towards a polychrome statue of Santa Marta – Lazarus’s sister, who once served Jesus his supper. A man with a microphone and a weary expression was berating them. ‘If you could hear yourselves,’ he said. ‘You would realise that this sounds like anything other than the house of God.’ But still they pushed anxiously forward. They were sweating in the summer heat – a hot crush of frail bodies, frayed nerves and raised voices.

Some of the people here – children, women, old men – wore strange, short, transparent white tunics, made of gauze or mosquito netting, over their clothes. It made them look like baggily clad sugar-plum fairies, though none seemed particularly aware of their outer aspect. Most clutched long, thin, yellowed wax candles, as tall as a man, their flames protected by small, white cardboard cones. Some carried
exvotos
– rough wax sculptures of parts of the body – bought from vendors who had set up trestle tables outside. As they reached the saint, the pilgrims added their
exvoto
to a growing mountain of yellowy arms, legs, ankles, heads, chests, breasts and tummies that was piling up under her pedestal. I heard a steady ‘clink! clink! clink!’ of coins hitting the bottom of a money-box.

The sickly and the well reached out to wipe the statue, or its pedestal, with their handkerchiefs. Once the saint had been touched, the handkerchiefs were immediately passed over the owners’ brow, neck or face. Santa Marta’s ability to intercede with God to bring about cures gives her great weight amongst these devout, superstitious, Galician villagers. Most were here asking for her to bring an end to their ailments – though many, like Manuel, were also giving thanks for help, and cures, already given.

Most people were talking what sounds to the untrained ear like a straight mixture of Portuguese and Spanish – the harder, rawer edges of Castilian rounded off by the smooth, musical tones of Portuguese. This is
galego
, the language of the Galicians – a direct descendant of the language used by many thirteenth-and fourteenth-century Iberian
trovadores
to sing their
cántigas
, or lyric poems, of love, desire and death.

I had driven up to the village on a road that wound its way through eucalyptus woods. Small plumes of smoke still rose from the charred, smouldering soil where a forest fire had swept through the previous day. Road signs along the way had been blackened by the blaze. Forest fires are an ever-present part of the Galician summer. This one looked like a modest gust of wind might make it suddenly sputter back into life. Large, menacing clouds of black smoke spread in the distant sky from blazes still burning elsewhere. Fire-fighting helicopters were dipping their buckets into the broad River Miño and dropping the contents on flames that could be seen leaping through woodlands on the Portuguese side of the river.

The farms may be small, but the farmhouses here are large – at least by the standards of most Spanish housing. Many still conserve the
hórreo
, the separate store for maize and grains, standing up on stone stilts and shaped like a small chapel, sometimes crowned with a tiny cross.

Galicia’s countryside is a land of smallholders. Here, along the Miño valley, they grow the long-trunked vines of the
albariño
and
treixadura
grapes across head-high, horizontal trellises. These go towards making the young, crisp Rías Baixas white wines. There
are also vegetable gardens and modest plots of maize. The odd conical haystack, shaped like a giant straw breast, rises voluptuously from the ground around a tall pole. Much higher up, on top of the hills, stand two dozen of the modern wind-farm windmills that have appeared like mushrooms wherever, in the country of Don Quixote, a decent breeze blows.

The tiny church – all beautiful, weathered granite on the outside – had been unfortunately restored on the inside. The walls were fresh with new plaster and shiny stonework. The interior resembled that of an
asador
, one of those cavernous, meat-roasting restaurants that do their best, with fake stone walls, heavy furniture and wrought-iron lampshades, to look like they have been around since the Middle Ages.

It was late July, and the sun beat down on the small crowd leaning on the railings above the church. Itinerant vendors had set up stalls selling everything from T-shirts and hats to power drills and electric fans. Some, intriguingly, were manned by immigrant Ecuadorians dressed in the frilly, white shirts with colourful embroidery and the black felt hats of the Otovalo Indians. A couple of makeshift bars and restaurants were doing brisk business under canvas marquees. The smell of
pulpo a la gallega
wafted across the village from huge copper vats where octopus was stewing away in boiling water, olive oil and paprika. The priest’s voice rattled out from a tinny loudspeaker attached to the bell-tower as he entoned prayers in that inexpressive, droning voice favoured by Spanish priests. We had come here, he reminded us, in the belief that ‘by the intervention of Santa Marta, you may be cured of your ailments’.

By this stage there were three coffins arranged against the wall. It was not clear who owned the second one. A chubby boy of about thirteen leaned his back nonchalantly against it, chatting to his mother. An orange baseball cap sat backwards on his head. He wore a sugar-plum-fairy outfit over his brightly coloured shorts and sleeveless basketball-shirt. A sickly looking woman in her late thirties, equipped with a prayer book, a blue bum-bag and a small, battery-driven white plastic fan, had reserved her place in
the third coffin. A young, heavily made-up woman who had squeezed her ample upper half into a tight T-shirt had, by this stage, donned knee pads and a pair of blue slippers. She was preparing to crawl behind the procession that was due to set off soon. In a gesture that even the priest was unable to explain later, two women also appeared, each with a brand-new, red clay tile sitting on their heads. The tiles were held in place by pieces of bailing twine tied under their chins. They looked like they were trying to stop the sky falling on their heads.

A uniformed wind band struck up some doleful marching music as two statues, a smaller San Antonio leading out Santa Marta herself, lurched out of the church door, borne on the villagers’ shoulders. Manuel and the others stepped into their coffins and were raised aloft by their pall-bearers. Manuel lay there calmly, his hands held together, looking suspiciously as though he was taking the opportunity for a siesta. The coffins were open and the sun shone directly into Manuel’s eyes. Someone handed him a fan, which he unfurled and held across his face. And so, with the band playing, the priest with an amused look on his face, Manuel in his coffin, the blue-bum-bag woman in another one, the third one being carried empty, one woman crawling and two others with tiles on their heads, the procession of some three hundred people set off.

Less than an hour later, after wandering up through some woods, the procession arrived back at the church. Manuel entered in his coffin. He said his prayers, stepped out of his box, and, having paid the priest 180 euros to borrow the coffin, handed it back. It was carried over to a stone shed where it joined a dozen others. Manuel, and his exhausted friends, headed back to Tuy.

The following day, I visited some Madrid friends at their summer house in Asturias, the next ‘autonomous community’ east along the Cantabrian coast from Galicia. They listened to the story of the Santa Marta procession, incredulous. ‘You have found “
la España profunda
”,’ one said. She was referring to that mysterious ‘deep Spain’ which, like the American Deep South, Spaniards associate with strange goings-on and the dark, secret lives of
country folk. Whenever some backward tradition or grim, rural tragedy involving land boundaries, water rights and shotguns hits the headlines, city folk sigh and remind one another that
la España profunda
still exists.

In fact, you can find
exvotos
, normally wax casts or plastic moulds of body bits but also, as I once saw, a motorcycle crash helmet, in other Galician churches. I do not find anything inexplicable about them. Miracles are part of Roman Catholic belief. Hiring a coffin may be an extreme way of giving thanks, but then there are no more traditional Roman Catholics in Spain than the Galicians. There are also no people as traditionally superstitious as the Galicians.

Gallegos are proud of their supposedly Celtic origins. They have legends of
meigas
and
brujas
, good and bad witches. There are mysterious beings called
mouros
, who hoard treasure under the abandoned
castros
(iron age settlements) that sit on hilltops and promontories. Death, the afterlife and Purgatory are particular obsessions. A band of tortured souls from Purgatory known as the Santa Compaña, for example, wanders remote country roads at night, awaiting a chance for redemption. ‘You have to remember that, although Galicians go to church a lot, we are more superstitious than religious,’ a schoolteacher in a country town near Lugo explained to me. The bestiary of Galician folklore is large and scary. It includes
lobishomes
(werewolves), deceptively beautiful
nereidas
(fishwomen) and
mouchas
, melodic owl-like spirits whose calls announce the coming of Death. Even without them, the countryside was always scary enough. Wolves roamed much of Galicia well into the twentieth century. A stone cross on a rock near the village of Berdoias marks the spot where, locals insist, a pilgrim monk was eaten by a pack of them on his way to Santiago de Compostela. The wolves are still present. Thanks, partly, to a new sense of ecological protection in Spain, some estimates now put their numbers at more than 500. A further 2,000 are believed to inhabit the neighbouring regions of Asturias and Castilla y León.

The Galicians have, in the Bloque Nacionalista Galego, a growing, left-leaning nationalist party. But they are traditionally
conservative folk. Franco was born here. His home town of el Ferrol was temporarily renamed El Ferrol del Caudillo in his honour. The Conservative People’s Party ran the regional government for sixteen years – until 2005 – under the leadership of Manuel Fraga. This octogenarian former Franco minister’s opponents have jokingly given him the nickname of an invented dinosaur, ‘
El Fragasaurio
’, the Fragasaurius. Fraga, one of the authors of Spain’s 1978 democratic constitution, combines one of the largest brains in Spanish politics with the reflexes of those not used to being argued with. Like many of those who succeeded under both Francoism and democracy, his curriculum has been retouched to present him as having been a tireless worker for progress towards the latter. It is worth noting, however, that his most famous description of Franco, coined in the 1960s, was: ‘the hero turned father, who stands vigil, night and day, over the peace of his people’. Fraga’s most enthusiastic following is in the poorer, rural areas of Galicia. In 2005 he was still the most popular politician in the region. He lost power, however, when the Bloque and Socialists jointly obtained one more seat in the regional parliament.

Fish and farms – mostly vineyards, arable and dairy cows – have been the lifeblood of Galicia. The scattered farmsteads, often clustered in tiny
aldeas
, or hamlets, are a huge change from the piled up, cheek-by-jowl housing of the towns and villages of central, eastern and southern Spain.