Ghosts of Spain Read online

  Garzón believes that the corruption that marred the Socialist era had much to do with the nature of the Transición and Spain’s refusal, or inability, to make a clean break with the past. As a young man, he had wanted not reforma, but a complete break. He had opposed Suárez’s political reform referendum in 1976 (which an incredible 95 per cent of voters backed in a 78 per cent turnout), thinking it did not go far enough in burying the old regime. ‘I still think that way, even though history has run a good course and we have the constitution and our democracy. But there is too much encumbrance, too many bad habits from the past that should not have been kept. And there are blankets of silence … Look no further than GAL, which is an intragolpe, a self-inflicted strike against the state.’

  González himself argues that the Socialists inherited a dirty war whose roots stretched back into Francoism and put a stop to it. ‘People do not understand that the state apparatus was retained, in its entirety, from the dictatorship,’ he once explained.

  Given the extent to which his last two governments were marred by corruption it is remarkable that González, when he finally lost, only did so by 300,000 votes. Had the Socialists kept their noses clean, they could have run Spain for twenty years or more. Some clearly thought they would. With the appearance of José María Aznar – a tax inspector, no less – it seemed as though the much-needed clean-up in public life would finally take place. Aznar’s glaring lack of charisma was one reason why González hung on so long. Aznar clearly belonged to the legalistic and austere vein of Spanish life. During his eight years in power, corruption all but disappeared from central government. It appeared to follow the flow of money, however, to where it was being spent – by regional and local governments.

  It is in the construction companies that deal with these governments that the major fortunes of modern Spain are being made. The coming men of Spanish business – with the exception of Amancio Ortega, owner of the successful Zara retail chain – are those who place brick on brick.

  If the relationship between ladrillo and corruption is tight, then the one between ladrillo and football has been even tighter. It reached its peak in the bulky, gold-adorned shape of Jesús Gil. Until recently, builders were to be found running or owning many of the clubs in the Spanish league’s first division. This is a generation, however, that is disappearing.

  It is a sign of the times that the new football bosses are not the sort of men to indulge in the fisticuffs and foul-mouthed slanging matches of their predecessors. Nor would anyone accuse them of outright corruption. Spain has become too sophisticated for that. Real Madrid, for example, has become a huge, slick industry under Florentino Pérez, head of the mighty ACS construction empire. Under Pérez it signed many of the planet’s most marketing-friendly stars. From Beckham to Zidane and Figo to Ronaldo, Pérez’s earliest signings set the club up as a shirt-selling machine. It also produced what became, when its multi-millionaire stars decided to play their best, an electrifying sight. It is now the second richest club in the world after Manchester United.

  Even Real Madrid’s success, however, was due to a large dose of enchufe, this time of the legal kind. The signing of these players, or at least the first ones to join the firmament of what Madrid supporters call galácticos, galactic superstars, was possible due to a massive injection of cash into a club that was tottering on the brink of bankruptcy. That cash came from one of the most spectacular real estate deals – a true pelotazo – Madrid has seen.

  Four new skyscrapers, bigger than anything ever seen in the Spanish capital, are soon set to dominate the city’s skyline. They are being built, one beside another, on the site of Real Madrid’s recently demolished training ground. This is a former greenfield site conveniently located on the fringes of Madrid’s business district, known as ‘la City’. At around forty-five storeys each they will rise up above the Picasso Tower, a gleaming white and glass structure that currently holds the city’s record with forty-three floors.

  Madrid’s local authorities conveniently reclassified the training ground’s status so that the construction teams could move in. Real Madrid kept ownership of two and a half of the new towers. Local authorities got the rest. In a single stroke, Pérez netted some 390 million euros for the club. At the same time, the local authorities gained seventy floors of prime office space. The circle of private and political interest was, once more, closed around real estate. Environmentalists complained. A Barcelona-football-club-supporting Euro MP even asked the European Commission in Brussels to investigate. It declared that nothing untoward had happened. The deal, not surprisingly, led to cries of ‘foul’ from other clubs – notably cross-town rivals at working-class Atlético de Madrid. ‘They would kill us if we behaved the way they do,’ complained Gil.

  Real Madrid has always been the nearest thing Spain has to an official, state-sponsored club. Five European Cups won in the late 1950s were treated as proof of Franco’s muscular national Catholic principles at work. The club’s ‘virile’ technique was meant to reflect the qualities of the diminutive dictator’s own regime. Even then, however, the big stars were imported, foreign players like Argentine Alfredo di Stefano. As a result, a whole new category of football supporters evolved. They are the so-called antimadridistas – whose guiding passion is to see Real Madrid lose. Chief amongst them are Barcelona and Atlético de Madrid fans. Antimadridistas claim that Real Madrid success in the 1950s was due to the Caudillo’s support. In fact, it was probably Franco who used Real Madrid, rather than the other way around. It is, however, still the favoutite club of the political right. With both the city hall and the regional government of Madrid in the hands of the Conservative People’s Party, therefore, Real Madrid was on strong ground when it tried to cash in on its land. Madrid’s Socialist leader Rafael Simancas claimed the deal was a massive gift to the People’s Party club – which gained 150 times more than the amount agreed with the Socialists for a similar deal when they ran the city. ‘They have just let Pérez have whatever he wanted,’ he complained.

  Real Madrid had been spending more than it earned for years. When Pérez signed his deal in 2001 the club reportedly owed nearly 270 million euros. He turned it into a smooth machine, raking in merchandising money. Cash, however, is what drives the machine. Coaches, some fans suspect, field players who make the club money rather than those who play best. With money the dominating concept, the superstar players were not always interested in sweating out there on the pitch. When they did all decide to make an effort, however, even a Barcelona supporter and natural antimadridista, such as myself, had to admit that something special was happening.

  Football, of course, is one of the great Spanish passions. At a time when players, coaches and even fans come from all over the world, however, it is increasingly hard to identify anything different about the football played in Spain from that played elsewhere. In fact, many of the things that once made Spain different – from siestas to multitudinous families – have all but disappeared. Bullfighting remains. This, the fiesta nacional, still gets written up daily on the culture pages of newspapers (it is considered art, not sport). It does not appal me, the way it does so many of my compatriots – and some Spaniards. I can see courage in it, but not art. It is not, in short, something that interests me.

  There is, however, something recognisably artistic that remains distinctly Spanish. Flamenco, be it music or dance, has attracted the curious gaze of foreigners for more than a century. This anglosajón is no exception, though I am no expert. If I was to travel across modern Spain, I decided, I should take the opportunity to find out more – and have some fun doing it.

  6

  The Mean Streets of Flamenco

  I have come to Seville on the AVE, the high-speed train that links the city to Madrid. When it began operating in 1992, the AVE slashed the overland travel time between the two cities by more than half. It did this in uncharacteristically smooth-running, gleaming, punctilious style. Benito Mussolini would have wanted one of these – a nation�
��s glory encased in a 300 kilometre per hour train. But here, too, is a monument to enchufe. Who, after all, doubts that the reason Seville got Spain’s first high-speed train was because a Socialist prime minister and his deputy, Felipe González and Alfonso Guerra, both came from here. It remains the envy of virtually every other major city in Spain. Not even Barcelona is connected to the capital like this, the job of shifting 5,000 business executives back and forth each day being done, instead, by fuel-guzzling, cramped and crowded shuttle jets. There is a whiff of corruption to the AVE too. A dozen years after it was completed, court cases are still pending to determine where all the money went.

  Seville is the most seductive, sensuous city in Spain. Some complain that nothing of great import has happened here since the city lost its near monopoly on trade with Spain’s colonies in the seventeenth century. Drenched in New World wealth – in silver and gold from Peru and Mexico or Caribbean pearls and precious stones – Seville must have been one of the richest places on the planet. Visitors do not generally care that this all came to a rather abrupt halt. They may, in fact, like the idea. For they have been left the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century baroque architecture, the slow, charming pace of life, the broad Guadalquivir river lined with the terraces of bars and cafeterias, and the white-and ochre-painted charm of the old Jewish Santa Cruz district.

  Everything here – from the perfume of the orange blossom to the lisping, lilting Andalusian accent – seems to insist that you acquiesce and give yourself up to its charms. ‘Don’t fight it,’ Seville commands, as you are lulled into a sensual stupor. ‘You are here to enjoy.’

  Narrow, chaotic streets hide a multitude of secret places – squares, fountains, gardens, churches, palacetes, bars – allowing everybody to discover, and claim for their own, some favourite, hidden corner. Mine is a bar just around the corner from the Bridge of Triana. Here, at a shiny stainless steel counter, a team of hard-working waiters serve stewed bull’s tail, tomato soaked in oil and herbs, cubes of marinated, battered dogfish and glasses of cold manzanilla sherry. Also, though, there is the chapel at the Hospital de La Caridad. The prior, and chief benefactor, here was once the infamous, if reformed, seventeenth-century philanderer Miguel de Mañara. This prototype Don Juan asked for the following words to be inscribed where his ashes were put to rest: ‘Here lie the bones and ashes of the worst man the world has ever known.’ The dark, cruel paintings here by Juan Valdés, with their disintegrating corpses of finely dressed bishops, seem to accuse this overstuffed city of being obsessed with mundane brilliance. The chapel is so full of saints, virgins, tubby, winged cherubs and the inevitable, in Seville, paintings of Murillo that, as one local writer told me, ‘There is simply no room for anything else.’ Then there is the broad boulevard known as the Alameda de Hercules at night, with its bohemian, slightly shabby, air. Around the corner, prostitutes sit out on chairs in the street, fanning themselves in the heat. Even they are not in a hurry to hustle. Once you start making the list of personal jewels, in fact, it is hard to stop. Seville, like a haughty Andalusian beauty, simply demands your attention.

  It seemed a shame, therefore, to be stashing my valuables in a lock-up at Santa Justa railway station, keeping just a small amount of money in my pocket and preparing to turn my back on the more obvious delights of the city. This time, however, I had not come here looking for baroque Seville. I was not here for the spotted dresses and handsome, oil-haired jinetes, horsemen, of the April Fair. Nor was I coming to see the spooky Easter Week processions of the ku-klux-klan-hooded nazarenos as they parade their statues of the Virgin Mary and Jesus. Attractive as these things are, they sometimes feel like part of a fossilised, if lovingly-maintained, Seville past. I was, instead, on a quest. I wanted to find the raw, unadulterated soul of modern flamenco. For that, I needed to find Seville’s live, beating, musical heart. I knew I was not going to find it in the city-centre tourist shows, the flamenco tablaos.

  I took a hire car – insured against all eventualities – and drove out past the tropical-looking gardens of the Parque María Luisa and the pavilions left standing from Seville’s first international expo, held in 1929. From here, the broad and elegant Avenida de la Palmera, with its tall palms and purple flowering jacarandas, pointed me out in the direction of the sherry town of Jerez. Elegant, turn-of-the-century mansion houses lined the road, though most seemed to have become offices for international accountancy firms. Then came the imposing stadium of Real Betis Balompié, one of the city’s two eternal rivals in the country’s soccer first division (the other is Sevilla FC).

  Here, rather than continue towards the promised land of Jerez or the delights on the coast at Cádiz, I took a sharp left. The urban landscape went rapidly downhill. The car ducked under a railway line and there, easily recognisable by the junked cars, the patches of balding wasteland and the colourful rubbish piled about, was the most infamous barrio in Seville, ‘Las Tres Mil Viviendas’, ‘The Three Thousand Homes’. I am glad, at this stage, that nobody had told me, as I sat waiting at the traffic light, that some local citizens were, at that time, raising their own particular tax for visiting or leaving the barrio. A brick through the windscreen as you waited at the lights, a wrench on the car door, a wave of a knife and the highwaymen of Las Tres Mil would snatch whatever they wanted.

  There are monuments to the failure of 1960s planning all over western Europe. Las Tres Mil is Seville’s offering. This is where the gypsies of the riverside neighbourhood of Triana, once the cradle of flamenco, were moved. They were sent here together with chabolistas, shanty-town dwellers, from the outskirts of the city, some of whose homes had disappeared when a tributary of the River Guadalquivir, the Tamarguillo, overflowed its banks. They were, according to the jargon of the time, ‘la gente del Aluvión’, the ‘people of the flood’. Las Tres Mil, The Three Thousand Homes, was to be their Ark.

  Perched on the west bank of the broad River Guadalquivir, their original barrio of Triana looks across its murky waters at old Seville. From its riverside cafes you look out at the splendours of the Torre de Oro, the white walls of the Maestranza bull-ring, the palm-lined Paseo Cristóbal Colón and a city skyline crowned by the twelfth-century minaret turned cathedral bell-tower, the Giralda. For several hundred years this was part of Seville’s docklands. It was famous for its artisans. Their reputations spread, in the wake of the Spanish galleons, across the New World. Fifty years, or a century ago, this would also have been the place to look for the raw substance of flamenco. Théophile Gautier, the French Romantic, came across a group of gypsies camped out beside a bubbling cauldron. ‘Beside this impoverished hearth was seated a gitana with her hook-nosed, tanned and bronze profile, naked to the waist, a proof that she was completely devoid of coquetry … This state of nudity is not uncommon, and shocks no one,’ he said.

  In the 1950s, flamenco was still part of its everyday life. ‘In the afternoon one could hear the tune of bulerías and tangos (two flamenco styles or palos) coming from a cluster of houses. A baptism, a wedding, a request for a woman’s hand in marriage, a son returned from military service, a woman who had just won the lottery … any event set the tribe into action. Triana still had melody,’ recalls Ricardo Pachón, a flamenco producer who grew up there.

  From Triana the gypsy singers and dancers would be called across the river for the juergas, or parties, of wealthy señoritos and bullfighters. They would come, too, to the popular cafés cantantes of the late nineteenth century and, in the twentieth century, to the tablaos, the tourist shows. Then they were dispatched back across the bridge to their own side of town. Spaniards as a whole have never learned to love their gypsies – who are estimated to number some 650,000. Even today polls show that many would rather not live beside them.

  There are gypsies left in Triana, but nothing like there used to be. The melody has gone. Las Tres Mil was an excuse for a huge real-estate scam. The gypsies were lured away from their forges and houses in the Cava de Los Gitanos and the chabolas on the edges of Tria
na.

  They were promised brand new, ‘modern’ housing. Orders were issued for the demolition of their old homes, many with shared patios that acted as the centre of social, and cultural, life. The Cava de Los Civiles (literally ‘the civilians’), the payo, non-gypsy part of Triana, remained relatively untouched. Gleaming new blocks – their unimaginative name of ‘The Three Thousand Homes’ a giveaway to the bureaucratic nature of the project – way to the south of the city would keep them happy. It would also keep them out of sight and, by extension, out of mind.

  In the tower blocks of The Three Thousand, one of Spain’s most enduring urban legends was born. An old gypsy, at a loss about what to do with his mule in a fourth-floor flat, made him a stable in the spare room. By day the mule would work or, simply, feed on the grassy verges of Las Tres Mil. At night, however, his owner stuck him in the lift and took him home. A local photographer snapped the donkey peering out of a window. Ever since then, first-hand sightings of donkeys have been made, almost always falsely, in the flats of gypsies wherever they settle in high-rise Spain.

  Las Tres Mil is part of a vast collection of similar estates properly known as the Polígono Sur. The latter houses some sixty thousand people, 20 per cent of them gypsies. They are hemmed in on three sides: by the railway tracks to Cádiz; by the busy Carretera de Su Eminencia, the Highway of His Eminence; and by the high walls of what used to be the Hytasa textile factory. One in every twelve Sevillanos live here. That is 1 in 700 Spaniards.

  The rudimentary four-to eight-storey blocks drip with colourful washing. Self-built walled or fenced gardens eat up the wide pavements. Some are outdoor cages, covered in wrought iron bars to keep out the junkies who come to shop in the city’s drugs supermarket, a desolate corner of the barrio known as Las Vegas. Immortalised in a song, ‘En la Esquina de Las Vegas’, by the flamenco-blues guitarist-singer Raimundo Amador, this wretched, abandoned section of Las Tres Mil is home to thriving communities of rats and cockroaches.