Ghosts of Spain Read online

  ‘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.

  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 Sta
te 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.

  8

  Men and Children First

  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.