Ghosts of Spain Read online

  Spain’s statute books have, once and for all, put paid to her mother’s ideas about women’s position. But changing laws is one thing. Changing mores is something else. And, when it comes to families, Spanish men show little sign of wanting anything, except their size (smaller is better), to change. This, to a greater or lesser degree, is a problem everywhere. But a single statistic suffices to show how much worse it is here. Only some 5,000 men a year currently take up their right to up to ten weeks’ paternity leave in Spain, compared to 250,000 women who take maternity leave.

  When our eldest son turned two, we started looking for a nursery school for him to attend for a few hours every day. We wanted a place where he could discover that other children were useful for more than just infant martial arts. So it was that we began to visit the barrio’s nurseries, almost all of which are private. With 95 per cent of children going to nursery school by the age of three, there was no lack of choice. Our first surprise, however, was that we had arrived late – by about two years. In every nursery there was a room, or two, devoted to rows of cots. Many children, it was explained, started here at sixteen weeks – exactly the moment at which their mother needed to be back at the workplace.

  When we finally made our choice, we would find out for ourselves how this system worked. Anxious mothers, or watch-glancing dads, would appear at the door with a small bundle in a pram. The baby would be handed over, the pram shuffled off to the pram car park. Sometimes the child would be brought by la chica, other times by a grandmother. The latter would be treated with a respect that the former was seldom accorded. The bundle may, or may not cry. Medicines would, if necessary, be discussed. And off they would go, like so many pampered battery hens, to the room with the cots.

  A separate door might then open and a swarm of slightly older, crawling infants appear through it. The crawlers would be shepherded this way or that like a gaggle of slow-moving geese. If they had to go upstairs, they tackled the staircase like professional climbers determined to conquer Mount Everest, a mass of bobbing, well-padded bottoms heading for the peak.

  And so it went on. A couple of hundred children aged between zero and six, all encased in neat, green-and-white checked gingham pinafores, came here every day. Some started at 8 a.m. and were given breakfast. One of the most startling things about these children was the tweeness with which some were dressed. We had spotted the specialist children’s shops full of powder-blue boys’ outfits and pink girls’ outfits before becoming parents ourselves. But it was when a delicate, powder-blue, knitted-cotton, ribboned baby suit arrived from an acquaintance who was not only meant to be a prominent feminist but was also a Socialist minister, that we realised this was not just a fashion for 1950s nostalgists. At the nursery school and in the park, we would see parents who looked and dressed like us, parading children dressed in elaborate knickerbockers, smocked dresses, sashes, bows, Peter Pan collars, pin-tucks or matching knickers and bloomers. Often these children would come in matched pairs, their clothes identical or, if boy and girl, made of the same material. The occasional family of three or four kids might be identified by the fact that they were all, despite the age spread, wearing the same clothes, just in different sizes.

  The children at our nursery school were, it was argued, here to learn to socialise. In reality, however, the youngest were here because their fathers would not have dreamt of stopping, or reducing, their working hours, and it was time for their mums to take up their posts at work again. There were exceptions, but mothers basically kept – and keep – all the responsibilities of the household and children’s welfare, despite having working hours that might stretch until 7 p.m. or later. One study shows that, if you combine their hours at the office with the work they do at home, Spanish women work an average of an hour a day more than their men. The normal ratio of housework between one sex and the other eleven to one (4.4 hours to thirty minutes a day). An alarming statistic from the same study was that they were, jointly, the hardest workers in Europe. The sociologist who presented the study, María Ángeles Durán, said that young Spanish women had opted for the easiest ‘solution’ to the problem of squeezing children into their busy timetable. ‘Given that they take up so much time, we have decided not to have them,’ she said.

  Socialisation has remained an obsession for our children’s teachers. In the first years of infant school, the teachers seem to care more about ‘formando el grupo’, ‘forming the group’, than, for example, maths. Reading is good, but can be viewed as a suspiciously solitary occupation. A child who seeks only their own company is deemed strange. They may find themselves up before that figure who looms large, the school psychologist. There is no white coat here, but there might as well be. Most parents meekly accept their judgements in the same way they obey their doctors.

  One thing none of my children’s friends belong to is something that could, in any way, be described as a large family. Running through my mind, I can, indeed, think of only two or three who have more than one sibling. The huge families of the past, beloved by the Franco regime and its Catholic sponsors, are just that – of the past. Three siblings walking down the street in a chain are a strange, remarkable sight. Officially this is a familia numerosa, with special welfare and education rights. Have four, and people will immediately suspect you belong to Opus Dei – the ultra-strict, mysterious Catholic group who many Spaniards see, as they once saw freemasons, lurking secretly in the shadows of power.

  Some of my children’s friends’ parents, however, can tell you what it was like to be one of six, seven, eight or twelve brothers and sisters. These were encouraged by Franco, who saw the number of families with four or more children rise from 116,000 to more than a quarter of a million during his period in power. The general verdict seems to be that it was not so wonderful to be lost amongst so many siblings.

  If life has been getting better continuously, and rapidly, for Spaniards over the past three decades, one type of Spaniard has done even better than the rest. That Spaniard is a child. The imperious little princes and princesses of the, now typical, one or two child Spanish family are a wonder to behold. The centre of attention of parents, grandparents, neighbours, aunts, uncles and an endless list of admirers, their life is as golden as it can get. They issue instructions to adults in loud voices. A cry of ‘¡Agua!’, and water is brought. ‘¡Galletas!’ and biscuits appear. ‘¡Cola Cao!’ and the chocolate drink that appears at almost any time of the day is brought out. ‘¡Quiero ver la tele!’ and the television is switched on. There are, of course, many exceptions but it seems that childhood is often an obligation-free experience. Adults tidy toys. Adults get food. Adults are there, in short, to serve. One of the Spanish words for spoil, mimar, hints at the idea that this may not be such a terrible thing. It also means to pet, coddle or pamper.

  This is not to say that Spanish children lack manners, just that they have a different concept of them. Place a piece of chocolate cake in front of them and they will stare at it blankly until you have provided a spoon or fork to eat it with. Like their parents, they would not want to dirty their hands. In fact, like their parents again, they are acutely aware of cleanliness and tidiness – even if they may be blissfully unaware of how the latter is achieved. My office at home, for example, is an object of awe for some of the visiting six-year-olds. Piled high with newspapers, magazines and books, chaos and mess are an inherent part of its life. It is a very homely sort of a mess. One regular visitor, however, had obviously never seen anything like it in his six years of life. ‘¿Qué ha pasado aquí?’, ‘What happened here?’ he asked in a shocked, high-pitched voice on one visit. ‘¿Quién ha sido?’, ‘Who did this?’ he asked on another. When I gave the office a massive spring clean, I invited him in. There was no comment. Normality had obviously been achieved.

  Spanish visitors to Britain are often shocked by what they see. No showers, carpets on bathroom floors – a sure-fire focus for infection-bearing germs – and untidy clutter are alien and worrying characteristics.
Spain, after all, must have a per capita consumption of bleach – applied daily to tiled floors and liberally sloshed around bathrooms and kitchens – that is amongst the highest on the planet. One playground discussion at our school saw a mother regretting having put wooden skirting boards, rather than a row of easily bleach-cleaned tiles, into her apartment. The problem, she explained, was the fluff that got stuck behind it. ‘There is only one way to get it out,’ she complained. ‘You have to use toothpicks.’

  Her children, however, were unlikely to be wielding the toothpicks. Spanish children already watch as much television, and suffer from nearly as much obesity, as those arch juvenile couch potatoes – their British and American counterparts. But what, in Britain and the US, is laziness is, in Spain, indulgence. If prohibition, saying ‘no’ to someone, is already broadly unacceptable when that someone is an adult, then it is doubly so if they are a child.

  This is not, however, without its benefits. This was driven home to me one day, on a return visit to Britain, in a Devon pub. The landlord not only refused our infant children entry but, as we ate his wretched food in a light drizzle in the pub garden, he stood in his doorway and regaled us with stories about why pubs were better without kids. The sign outside his door, ‘no dogs, no children’, just about summed up the status of British children and, by association, their parents.

  Whereas small children turn British parents into social lepers, they elevate Spanish parents into privileged human beings. You, the parent, have achieved a sublime status. You have created your own family and your reward is to have some of the absolute indulgence shown to your children rub off, also, on you. In restaurants, for example, rather than be shown the door or taken off to a ‘families only’ quarantine zone, you find the waiters’ attention and efforts doubling. There will be crayons, colouring books and delicacies for the kids. And when your child karate-chops his glass of mosto, sweet grape juice, onto the tiled floor, the waiter appears not just with a mop, but with a smile and a new, full glass. If the children then choose to roll around the floor practising infant all-in wrestling, well that is just a sign of robust, endearing good health. Other diners are likely to agree.

  My own children have grown up crawling over bar tops, being manhandled by waiters – even, in one regular watering hole, encouraged by the owner to pound away at the till to make it go ‘ping’ and send the money-drawer shooting out. How could one explain the ‘no children’ rule to Jesús, the owner? And what would one say to a stranger who wandered in and exclaimed, as he helped one of my muddy-footed boys walk up and down his suited trouser leg: ‘Aren’t children wonderful?’

  You have to accept, of course, that your children are in some way public property. A father out on his own with a baby on a winter’s day will, almost inevitably, be told by some busybody grandmother that he has not wrapped the child up well enough. Strange men not only expect to be able to talk to your children, they may want to touch them too.

  In Prospect magazine, Bella Thomas told the story of an elderly Spanish man, resident in Britain, who had spontaneously befriended some children on a Surrey high street. A cheek was pinched here, some hair ruffled there. This is standard, affectionate behaviour in Spain. The dynamics of what is a simple, virtuous circle are easy – and should be unnecessary – to explain: the elderly man is indulgent to the children; the children bask in his admiration; and the man goes away with a warm glow, feeling he has done a good thing. In Britain, the police were called. The old man was taken to a police station and made to explain himself. Not surprisingly, unable to understand a world where male strangers are suspected paedophiles and single women are potential baby-snatchers, he decided to move back to Spain.

  There is a central enigma to the way Spaniards bring up their children, which I have never been able to solve. How is it that the spoiled, rude under-tens later turn into such polite, agreeable and self-confident teenagers? The surly adolescent is a relatively rare sight in Spain. Teenagers may grumble about their parents, but they do not go for full-out generational hatred. Teenage rebellion, in fact, seems virtually non-existent. Spanish teenagers, when polled, have no trouble pointing out that family is the most important thing in their lives.

  If a Spanish childhood is such an indulged, golden thing, then it is no surprise that young Spaniards should try to stretch this stage of their lives out. What it does not explain, however, is why so many of them are determined to stay living with mamá and papá for as long as possible. Most remain at home into the second part of their twenties. A significant number are still there after their thirtieth birthday. It is difficult to decide whether it is Spanish parents who do not want their children to grow up, or young Spaniards who dislike the idea of becoming independent adults.

  As Spain progresses, socially and economically, at a dizzying rate, one might expect all this to be changing. But the figures show that, rather than move out earlier, Spanish children are now staying even longer at their parents’ home. In 1990 a quarter of twenty-six- to twenty-nine-year-olds were living at home. Within a decade that figure had risen to a half. Women leave slightly earlier than young men, presumably because they know how to cook and do their own laundry. By 2000, 50 per cent of men were still living with their parents at the age of twenty-nine. New figures suggesting a fall in the age at which people leave home are, I suspect, largely a reflection of the fact that many immigrants are in this age group.

  Young men and young women remain at home, if they can, until they are forced out by circumstance – often by marriage. Personal, and unscientific, observation makes me think that the higher up the class scale, the more likely they are to stay. It takes a job in the US, Paris or London to prise young merchant bankers, doctors or engineers from the parental home. The bigger the apartment or house is, after all, the more facilities it offers. It is those squashed into the tiny flats in Madrid’s working-class suburbs who are most keen to find their own place.

  Even legally, it seems, a Spanish childhood can last well into a person’s twenties. Occasionally, reminders come from the newspapers. Barcelona’s La Vanguardia, for example, informed me one day that a judge had ordered a divorced man to pay his ex-wife 225 euros a month to cover his twenty-five-year-old son’s upkeep while he did postgraduate studies. The judge ruled that the son was ‘not at such an advanced age for finishing his academic studies’ and had ‘not yet gained his own financial independence’. Another case saw a fireman from Lleida forced to pay similar upkeep for a twenty-seven-year-old who had still not managed to finish his degree. ‘When is a father allowed to stop supporting his children?’ he asked.

  Young Spaniards complain that a lack of jobs, cheap housing and university grants are to blame for this situation. But, with Spaniards getting wealthier at such a dizzying rate and new jobs attracting millions of immigrants, that does not wash. The truth is that most only leave their parent’s home when they think they can move into something as good, or better. One betrothed couple, a television cameraman and production assistant from Barcelona, proudly announced to me one day that they had bought themselves a car-parking space near the apartment they were buying together. The apartment had, like many of those that spring up around Spain’s cities, been bought on an architect’s plan, but they had put down a deposit and were already paying a mortgage. It would take several years for the building that houses it to go up. In the meanwhile, it was more important for them to secure, for several thousand euros, a spot to put their car when they got there, than to pay for a rented flat away from their parents.

  Some desperate parents have gone to court to evict children in a bid for what has been billed ‘parental emancipation’. María and Mariano Giménez convinced a judge in Zaragoza that their two sons, twenty and eighteen, had forfeited the right to live at home by treating them abusively. The couple’s lawyer warned, however, that eviction was not generally an option. ‘The law establishes that the parents’ obligation to feed and house can only be suppressed under extreme circumstances,’ he said. Th
at obligation only disappeared when a child moved out or started earning their own money, he explained. (The state, which has never been generous with unemployment pay, also benefits from this system whenever recession strikes. The young unemployed usually have someone to look after them.) Children’s rights over their parents do, in fact, continue until these are in the grave. A Spanish parent may not write children out of their will. A rule known as the legítima establishes that children are herederos forzosos, ‘forced inheritors’ – automatically sharing out a large part of the estate when the last parent dies.

  Again, however, there is an upside to this endless Spanish childhood. Young Spaniards also stay at home because they either love, like or tolerate their parents. A recent poll, in which even Spanish researchers defined ‘young people’ as being anything between fifteen and twenty-nine years old, saw 96 per cent state that they were happy with their families. The feelings are, obviously, reciprocated. The children are protected from the sometimes brutal rites of passage of eighteen-year-olds in other countries, where they are forced to fend for themselves in some alien or new environment. Most will remain close to their parents even when they do move out. Those still lucky enough to enjoy two-hour lunch breaks may turn up for lunch several times a week. And their children, too, will come to see their grandparents as a natural, and close, part of their family.

  Tradition and huge taxes on buying and selling houses mean that many people only ever buy one home, and stay in it until they die. In our building, for example, the appearance of a ‘For Sale’ sign on the front door often means that another neighbour has passed away. Mostly they died in their apartments, or within hours or days of the ambulance being called.

  The routine of death in Madrid, and elsewhere in Spain, is a well-trodden path. The dead are carted off to the tanatorio, the city’s official morgue. This is perched above the ten-lane inner ring road, the M30, between the mosque and an ugly, concrete and glass hotel. Beautified by morticians, they are laid out in their coffins and put on public display so friends and family can make a final, posthumous visit while giving the immediate family their condolences.