Ghosts of Spain Page 25

  Which is how I ended up at El Club Romaní, a huge, neon-lit pile of granite and slate – half French chateau, half Galician country pazo – in an industrial estate beside the motorway running south from Valencia. This was my first-ever visit to a brothel. I was trying hard to remember that the only way you could shock a certain type of Spaniard about sex was, well, by being shocked by it. So, as a young man in a black leather jacket and a friendly, wrinkled old doorman showed me around, I adopted what I hoped was a worldly, nonchalant personality.

  I had spotted these clubs before. Who could miss them? Lit up with multi-coloured displays of neon, they shout their presence out loud. Newcomers wonder what these fanfares of pink, red, green and blue light that they see up and down Spain’s highways mean. Spaniards, however, know that much neon can mean only one thing.

  I am not sure what I was expecting, but it certainly was not this. It was early afternoon and the club was still empty. We had wandered through the bar area and into a small corridor. A sliding door had been pushed aside and I was staring at a large, round bed covered with a bright yellow bedspread. Some colourful, crocheted cushions and stuffed scarlet love hearts were scattered on it. Circling the bed was a sort of padded crash bar. In fact, lined up below the erotic prints on the walls, there were a whole variety of bars and handles. Some were recognisable as the sort that elderly people put in beside their baths so they can haul themselves out of the water.

  ‘This is the room that has been adapted for discapacitados, for the disabled,’ announced the man in the black leather jacket, half-proud, half-amused. There was an en suite bathroom, with a ramp into the shower. The toilet had all the bars and extra bits a disabled person could hope for. But the pièce de résistance was sitting in the corner. ‘This is a very special wheelchair,’ black leather jacket, a former Moscow correspondent for a Spanish newspaper group turned PR man for brothel owners, explained. ‘You press a button and it stands itself, and whoever is in it, almost upright. That means they can go to the bar and have a drink too,’ he said, chuckling.

  I was not sure whether to believe this. The room, I thought, must be a publicity stunt, something mocked up to win a bit of sympathy for his boss’s trade. But then the old man piped up. ‘In the old days we had to carry them upstairs to the bedrooms in our arms,’ he sighed. ‘It was hard work. It was pretty humiliating for them, too.’

  What is interesting about Spanish brothels is not so much that they exist, but that they are so blatant. This, in turn, reflects Spanish attitudes to them, and to sex. Where anglosajones, for example, would be shocked, Spaniards are blithely indifferent. The instituto’s findings provoked no commentary – and no debate – in Spain. Newspapers reported, and then immediately forget about them. As an experiment in contrast, I ran the figures past a class of New York University students who I taught on a Masters’ course in Madrid. ‘Gross!’ came the unanimous reply from the front-row women. A wide ocean, clearly, separates one idea of sexual morality from another. In fact sex and morality are two words that a certain kind of Spaniard does not think should be uttered together, especially if other people’s sex lives and other people’s morality are being discussed. This did not mean Spaniards were wild sexual inventors. The American postgraduates would have won hands down on real experience if they had been compared to Spaniards of the same age. The instituto’s own figures confirmed that.

  Before coming to the Club Romaní, the PR man had taken me to see José Luis, the lawyer for the brothel owners’ association that employed him, at the headquarters of his private security firm in Valencia. The lawyer had a Franco-era Spanish flag behind his desk. He was an ultra, a Spanish right-wing extremist.

  Mariló, a Spanish prostitute, joined us. A single mother and former squatter, she was twenty-nine years old, cheerful and chatty. Mariló was introduced as the spokeswoman for a prostitutes’ lobby group, though it looked decidedly as if the group had really been formed by José Luis, who fed her lines. Mariló is, in fact, one of the minority of prostitutes in Spain, fewer than 5 per cent, who are actually Spanish.

  ‘What I really want is for people to stop looking down at me and treating me like a bolsa de basura, a rubbish-bag. It is time people recognised that we provide a social service,’ she said. Mariló was convinced of this last point. She adopted the professional lingo of the social worker to explain it. ‘We help get rid of depression and stress, and we help people communicate. Those are important things.’

  The social-worker jargon slipped, however, when she mused on the only way to stop men going to prostitutes: ‘You would have to cut off their pililas, their little pricks.’

  Mariló knew exactly why she was doing this. ‘It’s a way of getting money. Who else is going to pay my daughter’s nursery school?’ she asked. ‘I am not exploited. If anybody is exploited, it is the men. We exploit their sexual desires for money. And if anyone fails to show me respect in the bedroom, then they don’t get it. I am the one in charge.’ Occasionally, however, she expressed doubts about her career choice. ‘That’s because you lack self-esteem,’ José Luis told her. ‘Yes, it must be,’ she answered.

  The association, José Luis wanted me to know, did not consider its members to be running burdeles, as brothels are properly called. It was called the National Association of Owners of ‘Alterne’ Places. He gave me a glossy magazine listing its members, places with names like S’candalo, Kiss Club, Falcon Crest and Hotel Elvis.

  The clubs, he said, were places men went to alternar. The verb itself was a clue to the ambiguity with which the whole topic is treated in Spain. We struggled to come up with a definition. José Luis offered ‘trato y amistad’, ‘socialising and friendship’. It was such a uniquely Spanish word that I later looked it up in the dictionary of the Real Academia Española, which has the final word on the Spanish language. The Royal Academy, in a long-winded definition, said it was actually the women who were practising alterne as they ‘stimulate clients to spend money in their company, thereby obtaining a percentage’.

  Whatever the exact definition, ‘alterne’, José Luis insisted, did not mean buying sex. Up to two-thirds of clients were only after a drink and a scantily clad woman to listen to their opinions, laugh at their jokes or make them feel attractive. ‘It is easy to calculate, because you may sell 1,200 tickets at the door – but only get 400 subidas – goings-up – to the rooms,’ said José Luis.

  Mariló explained that the sex side of the game normally followed a heavily over-priced drink or two, for which she got a commission, and some chat. ‘I am told that in northern Europe things are much colder. The clients come in, point to a girl and they are off. Here, at least, you get a bit of conversation,’ she said. It somehow seemed very Spanish to put talking on a par with sex, even if both were paid for.

  José Luis admitted that the confused nature of the law, which banned people from making money off prostitutes but did not make selling sex illegal, effectively allowed prostitution to flourish. Spain, he said, was probably the most permissive country in Europe (though Germany and Holland may dispute that). It even attracted sex tourists to clubs along its borders. ‘There is a lot of legal nebulosidad, haziness, and therefore there is great freedom … Prohibition would turn off the neon and bring in the mafias,’ he said. In fact, the mafias moved in long ago. Most of Spain’s more than 2,000 clubs are not members of José Luis’s association. An indeterminate number are in the hands of mafias and pimps who ‘own’ immigrant girls.

  The association’s members had got around the law on not living off prostitution by only charging the girls ‘rent’ on the rooms they used. ‘These are hotels. They provide rooms for the girls, who work for themselves,’ Jose Luis said. ‘No laws are being broken.’

  Reliable figures on Spanish prostitution are hard to come by. A Civil Guard report in 2004 counted 20,000 prostitutes working in clubs in a geographical area that contained 38 per cent of the Spanish population. It was, the same report said, twice as many as in 1999. José Luis claimed that
alterne and the sex industry turned over 18 billion euros a year (and could, potentially, pay 3 billion euros in tax). That seemed a wild exaggeration. With just over a third of Spain covered by the Civil Guard report, however, and many prostitutes working the streets or out of city apartments, this is obviously a huge, and lucrative, business. And lots of people share in the bonanza.

  A few hours later, after black leather jacket had scared the living daylights out of me in his powerful Audi, we were in Sollana, the small town that boasts El Romaní as one of its major businesses. This is where Valencia’s industrial suburbs meet the countryside. A Ford car factory, turning out Fiestas, Focuses and Kas, lies not far away. Around the corner, swallowed up by the industrial units, lies a tiny, well-cared-for, yellow-painted chapel dedicated to the Virgin of Aguavives. The industrial estate gives way to orchards of fruit trees that stretch out towards the old rice fields and wetlands of the Albufera, the large lake that runs up to the Mediterranean seashore.

  In the car, the PR man told me of a minor-division football team from Albacete, which was saved from bankruptcy by shirt sponsorship from the Night Star, a local brothel. ‘One of the bonuses for not being relegated was a night at the club,’ he confided. Some alterne clubs were a key part of the local economy. One former health spa with a chapel for celebrating ‘weddings, christenings and first communions’ had become a club called ‘Madam’s’. It was said to contribute 30,000 euros a year in municipal taxes to the frontier town of Capmany, in Catalonia – enough to employ a road-sweeper or two. Some clubs in Galicia, he said, even managed to get local mayors to the openings.

  The only legal problems the clubs got, he said, were raids from Labour Ministry inspectors. They shut the clubs down for a day or two and fined them up to 6,000 euros per girl. I never properly understood why. If alterne was a confusing word to define, then the laws that ruled it were, quite simply, crazy. On the one hand, it was illegal to make money off prostitutes. On the other, it was not illegal to have them working in your club. Then again, it was wrong, according to the Labour Ministry, not to give them proper work contracts. But giving them work contracts would, formally, mean making money off prostitutes. The law meant there was no straight answer to one of the questions I was asking myself. Was Spain formally in favour of (or, at least, not against) prostitution, or not? Perhaps, I thought, nobody wanted the question asked, or dared take a public stance on it.

  My tour of El Romaní revealed just how big a business this was. On the upper floors there were huge, luxury suites with saunas and six-seater jacuzzis. There was a small, well-equipped gym for the 60 to 100 girls who lived here in shared rooms. In the attic I was shown a fully-equipped hairdressing salon and sun-bed. Downstairs there was a boutique selling, amongst other things, miniature bikinis and pairs of platform shoes with impossibly high heels. The prostitutes had their own canteen. A cork board informed them about medical tests and gave addresses of local Western Union branches, so they could send money home. Globalisation, I realised, was firmly entrenched in the Spanish sex trade. A global need for money met a local demand for sex.

  The owner’s son, a young man whose expensive black leather jacket matched that of the PR man, showed me a file full of photocopies of the girls’ passports. They came from at least two dozen countries, stretching from Poland, Portugal and Paraguay to Lithuania, Nigeria or Brazil. ‘We send copies of their passports to the Guardia Civil,’ he explained. ‘That way they can check if any are false.’ The local police, in other words, far from being a threat, were punctually informed of exactly who was working at the club.

  The owner’s son said the club filled up with eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds on Saturday nights, some dropped by girlfriends who met them later at a nearby macro-discotheque. ‘There are things you just don’t believe until you see them,’ he said. Many prostitutes took Saturdays off. The youngsters were not big enough spenders for them.

  An hour or so after my tour of the empty club we came back. Men were coming off shift, or finishing a day at the office. The car park was almost full, though the owner’s son insisted this was a quiet afternoon. He was still hopeful that the crews of three Nato frigates docked in Valencia – from Britain, the US and Italy – would show up. The bar was now packed with girls in micro-bikinis, tottering around on towering platforms with transparent, stacked heels. Some were already draped around clients at the bar. Others were leading men upstairs to the rooms.

  ‘¿Fumas?’, ‘Do you smoke?’ asked a Moroccan girl, apparently looking for a cigarette. ‘No, I’m afraid not,’ I replied. ‘¿Y follas?’, ‘Do you fuck then?’ she added.

  After the initial shock, and the problem of where to rest your gaze, the inside of a club pretty soon turns mundane. The clients were an average cross-section of adult Spanish men or, at least, of those who could afford to drop twenty euros on a drink or anything from 60 to 600 on sex. Curiously, many really did look as though they were trying to chat up the girls – as if the credit card was not the key part of the deal.

  What, I wondered, did the people of Sollana think of having El Romaní, that temple to commercial sex, in their backyard? In town I found another building with bright lights on the front. A figure of Christ decorates the front of the Santa María Magdalena church in the Plaça Major. It is surrounded, not with neon, but with a ring of clear light-bulbs. I found the priest in his parish house just behind the church. He opened the door, but did not invite me in. ‘Does anybody in Sollana ever complain about El Romaní?’ I asked.

  ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Some people complain in private. But it is out of the way in the industrial estate.

  ‘Whoever goes, goes, and whoever does not, does not,’ he added, somewhat enigmatically. ‘La gente pasa. People can’t be bothered.’ The priest himself only went to the industrial estate to officiate at the fiestas for the Virgin of Aïgues Vives in August.

  There is no sign of forced exploitation in El Romaní. But this is the high end of the sex market. Only eighty clubs belong to the association, with its rules about medical check-ups and telling police who is working in them. Catalonia, where local authorities have introduced a form of registration, has some 270 clubs. The vast majority, however, make up their own rules. Some have thugs on the door and debt-laden illegal immigrants working, in effect, as sex slaves. What, I wondered when I drove past it outside Toledo, would a club called ‘Cow Woman’ be like?

  I was still perplexed. If it was illegal to make money out of prostitutes – even if it was not illegal to be, or go to, a prostitute – how could the clubs be so brash about their business? And, if prostitution really did turn over that much money, who was getting the cash? One obvious place where the money was going was to Spain’s major newspapers.

  In my highly conservative neighbourhood of Madrid, a peculiarly shaped newspaper is stacked high every morning at the newsagents. Called ABC, it is little more than the size of a magazine. Old men with bottle-green woollen overcoats or Burberry macintoshes queue up at my local newspaper shop every morning to buy this, the voice of traditional, Roman Catholic Spain – though, I notice that, after a recent revamp, it is also gaining younger readers. Every Thursday a religious supplement, Alfa y Omega, gives voice to the concerns of the archbishopric of Madrid – including, for example, warnings about the dangers of gay marriage or single parenthood.

  Flick through the pages of ABC, however, and you will find its readers are no strangers to prostitution. For here are several pages covered with hundreds of small advertisements from prostitutes. ‘Eva, 19. Upper-class girl from Salamanca neighbourhood, so insatiable that my parents threw me out of the house after catching me in bed with lots of boys. I am pure vicio, (vice). Now I live on my own … and can do all the guarraditas (dirty little things) I ever dreamed of,’ runs one. It is by no means the most explicit. All Spain’s ‘serious’ newspapers run advertisements like this. El País, El Mundo, La Vanguardia, El Periódico, El Correo … All the worthiest publications boast pages of advertisements that,
in some newspapers, can be accompanied by photos of scantily clad women and descriptions of the world’s more bizarre sexual practices. The advertisements are placed by male, female and transvestite prostitutes. Like all established small-ads columns, they have their own argot. There are promises of sexual practices from across the world – Greece, Thailand, Japan, even Burma – in ‘private apartment, hotel or at your home’. Credit cards, some advertisements reassure readers, will be accepted. The Comisiones Obreras trade union claimed in 2005 that one newspaper, which it did not name, was gaining 6 million euros a year from these advertisements.

  The contrast between a country which, when asked by pollsters, describes itself as 80 per cent Roman Catholic and its generally laissez-faire attitude to all things sexual is one of Spain’s great paradoxes. That contrast reaches its zenith in the pages of ABC and – lest you think that this is a last vestige of ‘old’ Spain – in its new, successful, even more conservative rival, La Razón. The Pope inspires the editorials but it is prostitutes who service the smallads pages. The left-wing and liberal press is, in a convenient combination of commercial and moral interests, laissez-faire on sex and, by extension, prostitution, almost as a matter of identity. Searching through the archives of the left-wing El País, for example, I find precious little room afforded to the kind of feminist thinking that says prostitution gives men the wrong idea about women.