Ghosts of Spain Read online

  Over the years the tanatorio has become a sadly familiar place. When a friend’s close relative dies, you are expected to appear, offer condolences, take a peek at the cadaver and stay for a chat.

  One might expect this to be a solemn place. But, with vigils going on for up to twenty-six dead, all neatly arranged in adjoining cubicles, the tanatorio bustles like a railway terminus. First-timers might think they have stepped into a small airport terminal. Groups of people mill about. A TV monitor tells you which corpse is in which cubicle. A cash dispenser sits in the middle of the foyer. Another machine produces prepaid phone cards. There is, inevitably, a large bar-cum-restaurant doing brisk trade. I even have friends who, because of its extended opening hours, have used it for the last drink on an evening out. A new tanatorio, I notice, has just been opened in Madrid. It advertises on the radio with the slogan ‘the most modern tanatorio in Europe’.

  These velatorios do not have to be deeply tragic. I remember, for example, a friend’s grandfather, his head wrapped in a white shroud. His peaceful, nonagenarian face gave him the look of a sixteenth-century Spanish mystic. I also recall, however, Juan Carlos’s eighteen-year-old, and only, son. On that occasion, no condolences could possibly come close to easing the pain. But, at least, a grieving single father had company for the first twenty-four hours after death.

  Madrid burials normally take place the day after death in one of the city’s handful of vast cemeteries. At the newest one, the Cementerio Sur, a priest stands at the gate, providing a drive-in rites-of-committal service. The hearses that roll through stop briefly and open their doors for him to say the words over the coffin before heading off to the appointed burial niche.

  Inside the cemetery, the burial niches are lined up, like so many apartment blocks, in long walls, six tiers high. The niches must be paid for and rental is for a limited period, unless it is renewed by future generations. When your time is up, and if your family declines to pay, your bones are removed and tossed into a communal ossuary.

  Gerald Brenan, travelling through Spain in 1949, came across a large pit of bones in the cemetery in Granada as he searched for the grave of the poet and playwright Federico García Lorca – shot thirteen years earlier. Mostly, the bones belonged to some of the thousands of Granadinos given death sentences by Franco’s kangaroo courts and shot during the Civil War. But one, older, body drew his attention. ‘Stretched across the rubble of bones, in an attitude of rigid attention, was a complete and well-preserved corpse, dressed in green and black-braided uniform,’ wrote Brenan. ‘Its face, a little greenish too with dark markings, as though the flesh were trying to take on the colour of the uniform, had the severe, self-concentrated look of a man who is engaged in some self-important task.’

  The local gravedigger explained that the body belonged to a Civil Guard colonel who had died fifty years earlier. He had been well preserved because he had lain in one of the higher niches. ‘We took him up the other day because his family have stopped paying the rent,’ the gravedigger explained.

  Brenan’s own death, in 1987, caused Spanish authorities considerable headaches. Don Gerardo, as he was known, may not have been famous in Britain, but in Spain he was an icon. He had already starred in a bizarre episode in which he left his home in Alhaurín el Grande, near Málaga, and checked into an old people’s home in Pinner. A somewhat confused Brenan was deemed to have been taken there against his will, provoking the local mayor to fly to Britain and bring him back, pledging that the town would look after him. On his death (soon afterwards), it was discovered that he wanted to leave his body to medicine. It went to Málaga University’s Faculty of Medicine, where it stayed for the next fourteen years. The faculty’s doctors never dared mutilate the corpse for research because, they said, Don Gerardo was too important. ‘I had hoped that, with time, people would forget that we had his body,’ José María Smith Ágreda, the professor to whom Brenan had personally entrusted his body, said. ‘It did not seem decent to put the author of The Spanish Labyrinth on the dissecting table.’

  Eventually it was agreed that he should be buried. The body was incinerated, and the ashes placed in an urn mixed with earth from the two Andalusian towns where he had lived, Yegen and Alhaurín el Grande. It was buried in the British Cemetery in Málaga, beside Gamel Woolsey, his American poet wife. The cemetery is an extraordinarily beautiful and tranquil spot in the heart of old Málaga. A small, honey-coloured stone Anglican church stands in the midst of a garden full of thick Mediterranean vegetation and plumbago flowers. It had been set up in the mid-eighteenth century by a British consul appalled that Protestants were not allowed to be buried in Catholic graveyards. Their coffins had, instead, to be left, during the night, standing feet-first on the seashore at a spot where the city tipped its rubbish – and where the corpses were at the mercy of scavenging dogs.

  Even in death, then, Spaniards’ innate ability to operate as a social mass helps turn tragedy into occasion. This ability to shed, for a moment, their personal, liberal agenda and instinctively incorporate themselves into a social group is, perhaps, the secret to Spanish communal living. Perhaps that is why they work at it so hard at school. At moments of great political tension, they show an unmatched ability to pour onto the streets en masse and protest. The great demonstrations in Madrid over the past twenty-five years – against killings by the Basque terrorist group ETA, Islamist bomb attacks, coup attempts or, even, the Iraq war – each gathered more than a million people together.

  The friction between a Spaniard’s liberal desire to do whatever he or she wants and their need to live in a mass with others of a similar disposition emerges in that troublesome institution known, often inappropriately, as la comunidad, the community of neighbours. This brings the owners of all the apartments in one building together to run its common affairs. Although there has recently been a move towards urbanizaciones of terraced or detached homes on the outskirts of cities, most Spaniards still like to live piled up atop one another. Small towns, as a result, often start in a startlingly abrupt fashion. There are fields or open countryside and then, suddenly, there is the bare brickwork flank of the first apartment block. Another is attached to it next door, and the whole medium-rise townscape can continue like that until, just as suddenly, you are back out in the countryside.

  This cheek-by-jowl living is the natural state of the inner city, where I live. It is continued in many of the new barrios that emerge out of nowhere in the country’s rapidly expanding cities, where huge blocks of apartments, some with their own communal swimming pool, are sprouting up. With almost four out of five homes owned by the people living in them, Spaniards outdo even the British – leave the French and Germans trailing – as property owners. That means that they own their flat, but also co-own the building it is in with their neighbours.

  Meetings of the comunidad are, traditionally, where you learn the ugly truth about your neighbours. These quarrelsome, heated assemblies are often held in a smoky back room of the local bar. Hours are spent angrily debating mundane matters – such as whether the lift floor should be covered in lino or rubber. Votes are sometimes cast not on the merits of argument, but to even old scores.

  It was our downstairs neighbour who plunged us into the affairs of our own comunidad. The man we bought from had warned us that the elderly woman downstairs was ‘como una cabra’ – ‘as mad as a goat’. She soon informed us that the tenants who had been in our apartment before had played nasty tricks on her. They had spotted her ceiling with black dots. They had managed to make smoke and fumes travel downstairs. They had also, she claimed, sneaked dead birds into her apartment.

  Things started more or less well. She would bring us letters, written in English, from a foreign bank where her ex-husband had left her money, so we could translate them. She would tell us how evil the rest of our neighbours were. She would refuse to go away.

  Then, one day, she sent the police round. I had almost killed her, she claimed, and ought to be locked up. Two armed police
officers arrived at our door to deliver her denuncia and tell me I should go down to the police station and give my version of events. A long, rambling note written in her spidery handwriting on the back of a piece of scrap paper was pushed under our door. ‘If you try to fool the judge, you will go to prison,’ she warned.

  Our downstairs neighbour had some reason for complaint. The false ceiling in her dining room had fallen down, showering her mock-Chippendale furniture with sodden plaster and bringing down a chandelier. She, fortunately, had not been in the room when it happened. But she still considered this a case of near homicidal negligence on our part.

  The cause, it turned out, was a leak from our roof terrace. In Madrid it had rained for weeks. Across town a couple of semi-abandoned buildings had already collapsed under the weight of it. My terrace, bizarrely but fortunately, turned out not to be my legal responsibility. As part of the outside fabric of the building, it was the comunidad that was meant to pay for its upkeep. The judge shelved the case against me. The comunidad, after a couple of years in which her dining room stayed in its semi-ruined state, eventually struck a deal.

  Film-maker Alex de la Iglesia made a film which he called La Comunidad. It was an Ealing-style comedy, in which the neighbours try to bump off an estate agent, played by Carmen Maura. She, according to the plot, had discovered a treasure trove of cash in a dead man’s apartment. It was a spoof on the underlying tensions that lie in all comunidades. One of the most popular series on Spanish television now follows a similar formula. But the truth is that, hard work as it is, la comunidad succeeds as an institution. A Spaniard’s social agility is, in the end, superior to their fierce feelings of personal independence.

  Over time I have watched as my own children, mostly British by blood but mostly Spanish by culture, learn to belong to those huge groups that Spaniards find one of their most natural habitats. ‘Just imagine,’ said one mother, watching a gang of six-year-olds play. ‘They’ll still be friends when they are our age.’ Only if, I was tempted to say, they never move out of the barrio, like you.

  But I realised she might be right one day as I watched my younger son and other four-year-olds from his infants class climbing noisily into a coach. They were going away to spend three days with their teachers and lots of farmyard animals at a ‘granja escuela’ – ‘a school farm’. This had been sold to us as a further, intensive round of group-formation training and, therefore, key to their education. I felt a pang of envy as I watched my child go. He already belonged to that noisy, congenial mass known as Spaniards in a way that I – with my innate, sometimes awkward, anglosajón individualism – find impossible.

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  11-M: Moros y Cristianos

  The road south from Granada towards the Mediterranean rises gently uphill as it rounds the western fringes of the snow-capped Sierra Nevada. As you crest the rise, the sierra swells upwards on the left, a first, dramatic rampart towards the Mulhacén, mainland Spain’s highest peak. This is where the rivers start running south, rushing for the nearby sea. It is, however, the name of this pass – rather than the countryside around it – that impresses. For this, a modest sign indicates, is the ‘Puerto del Suspiro del Moro’, ‘The Pass of the Moor’s Sigh’.

  It was here, according to legend, that Boabdil, the last Moorish ruler of Granada, looked back for the final time towards the city. Boabdil, whose Mediterranean kingdom had stretched west to Málaga and east to Almería, was a sentimental man. Standing here on a January day in 1492, the story goes, he wept. It was not just the end of his personal reign, but of 781 years of Muslim kingdoms in Spain. The Granadinos still celebrate the Fiesta de la Reconquista, of the Reconquest, every 2 January. They are not always keen to recognise it, but a century and a half must still pass before their city can claim to have been Christian for longer than it was a place where, principally, Mohammed was revered.

  Boabdil was on his way to La Alpujarra, the steep, south-facing foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragón had left him a small fiefdom in return for his capitulation. As he stood looking back towards Granada and his recently abandoned Alhambra fortress-palace, his formidable mother, Ayxa, is reputed to have scolded him. Washington Irving, the American writer who was so entranced by the Alhambra when he arrived here in the 1820s, put her words this way: ‘‘‘You do well,” said she, “to weep as a woman over what you could not defend as a man’.’’ Irving did not invent the story himself. Well before he arrived here on his horse, this had been known as ‘The Moor’s Sigh’. ‘La Cuesta de Las Lágrimas’, ‘The Slope of Tears’.

  The year Granada was taken, bringing almost eight centuries of Christian Reconquista of Iberia to a formal end, was extraordinary. It is hard to overestimate the importance, not just to Spain but to the world, of the events that unfurled under the joint flags of Castile and Aragón. This year still conjures up a one-line childhood rhyme which I used to memorise dates. ‘In 1492,’ I learnt,‘Columbus sailed the ocean blue.’ On the far side of the Atlantic, indeed, Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ the Americas, creating a colony on the island of Hispaniola – now home to the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Spain’s Jews, meanwhile, were expelled on the orders of Isabella and Ferdinand. This couple, known as the Catholic Kings, had, by uniting their realms, effectively founded modern Spain (though it would take until 1512 to fit in the last piece of the puzzle, Navarre). Today’s Sephardic Jews, clustered in communities from Los Angeles to Paris to Tel Aviv, are the descendants of that diaspora. Legend has it that some families still conserve, five hundred years later, the old iron key to their house in Toledo. At a synagogue in the besieged Bosnian capital of Sarajevo I was once able to converse, in an admittedly stuttering fashion, with an elderly man using two similar languages that we could both understand – his Ladino and my Castilian Spanish. The old man’s Ladino – a quaint, time-warped version of Spanish conserved over centuries by the Sephardic community – might have been even more easily understood by Miguel de Cervantes, the creator of Don Quixote and a contemporary of William Shakespeare. The expulsion of the Jews was just the first stage in a process of ethnic and religious cleansing. The Moors themselves were also gradually obliged to convert to Christianity and, when they refused or only pretended to do so, eventually expelled.

  Boabdil’s melancholy trip into the Alpujarra led him to one of the most beautiful spots in Spain. The steep slopes of the Alpujarra hills are covered in scrub, deciduous woodland, olives or small orchards of apple, cherry, fig, pear, orange, lemon, medlar and almond trees. Deep gullies cut into the hillsides which, in places, are stripped nearly bare by erosion. All is bathed in that special, clear, whitish light of south and central Spain. Watered by snow-melt and springs from the Sierra Nevada, this was the ‘desert island’ discovered by writer Gerald Brenan. His Bloomsbury friends, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington, rode mules up through the valleys to stay at his home in Yegen in the 1920s. Brenan was struck here by the stillness and the quality of the thin air. Sounds from a village four miles away – barking dogs, men singing flamenco’s cante jondo, even the noise of running water – would travel crisply across the valley. There was ‘a feeling of air surrounding one, of fields of air washing over one that I have never come across anywhere else’. Woolf recalled ‘scrambling on the hillside among fig trees and olives … as excited as a schoolgirl on holiday’.

  In those days the tightly huddled houses in the pueblos were a drab, unpainted grey. The standard of living for some had not changed for centuries. Poorer families boasted just one possession – a cooking pot. There were no metalled roads and no money for whitewash. Now there are not only roads – though these are still bone-rattlers in places – but the white-painted villages gleam like Christmas decorations scattered down the steep hillsides. Visitors like to think they have always been like that. In fact the Alpujarra villages, like so many places and people around Spain, only became wealthy enough to pretty themselves up later in the twentieth centur
y.

  Driving towards Yegen from the Pass of the Moor’s Sigh on the high road towards Trevélez, which some claim is Spain’s highest village, another roadside sign gives a clue to the history of Spain’s Moors. More particularly, it tells of the moriscos, the Moorish population that nominally converted to Christianity after Boabdil’s defeat and his subsequent move, a few years later, to north Africa. Here, cutting under one of the tight curves that look down into the precipitous, bare valleys where the Trevélez, Poqueira and Guadalfeo rivers flow, is the Barranco de la Sangre, the Gully of Blood. The moriscos of La Alpujarra, in a last-ditch attempt to hold on to the customs, language, clothes, veils and even bathing practices that had been banned by decree, rebelled in 1568. A plaque on a house in the nearby village of Válor, erected recently by a group of Spanish converts to Islam, marks the site of the home of Aben Humeya, the leader of the revolt. ‘To Aben Humeya and the moriscos, the height of freedom for Al Andalus,’ it says.

  Rather than the height of freedom, however, the rebellion was part of the death throes of Moorish Spain. One of the worst battles was here, in the Gully of Blood. Legend has it the blood of the Christian soldiers flowed uphill in order not to mix with the Moorish, crypto-Islamic blood of the moriscos.

  Forty years later the moriscos – who still accounted, for example, for a third of the population of the Valencia region – were forced to leave. Some 275,000 of them were ordered out in 1609. Many died of hunger or exhaustion. Others were massacred on their arrival in North Africa, or were killed even before they had managed to leave Spain.