Ghosts of Spain Read online

  Arriving early, I had driven up the steep winding road – avoiding sheep and cyclists – to the Ibardin Pass half a dozen miles out of town, where the French frontier lay. The French Pays Basque – Iparralde to Basque speakers – stretched out below me to Biarritz and Bayonne. The other side of the frontier was a place where, a Spanish Basque taxi driver in the frontier town of Irún had warned me darkly ‘people get up early, eat lunch at 12 a.m. and nobody goes out after 8 p.m. – even though they are Basques.’ It was an eloquent, if unintended, destruction of the idea of a single, culturally unified ‘Basque nation’.

  Goya had been mayor for four years, after Batasuna won five out of eleven council seats in an election held during the 1998 ceasefire. Socialists and the People’s Party did not even bother presenting candidates in Bera, which lies in the euskaldun, or Basque-speaking, part of Navarre. The ceasefire had made life easier for everyone, he said. ‘The end of the ceasefire was a blow to all of us,’ he said.

  The idea that Batasuna had been an ETA front was ‘a lie’, Goya insisted. Some people in it supported ETA, others did not. By stamping on the few, he suggested, they were squashing the majority. He admitted, however, that two of his fellow Batasuna councillors had been arrested for terrorism-related offences. He himself refused to be drawn into criticising ETA. ‘Who am I to judge?’ he said.

  The irony of Basque political violence is that it occurs against a background of cultural renaissance almost unprecedented in Europe. Nineteenth-century linguists predicted euskara would not survive the twentieth century. ‘You are a people that are disappearing … This language that you speak, Basque people, this euzkera disappears with you; it does not matter because, like you, it must disappear; hurry to kill it off and bury it with honour, and speak in Spanish,’ Unamuno had warned in 1901. Yet, today, that language has not only been rescued but is experiencing a true literary blossoming. If Darwinian rules of selection apply to the survival of languages, Basque is not only fit but has found, in Spanish democracy, its healthiest habitat for centuries. The number of grown-up Basques who claimed they could speak or understand euskara rose from 33 per cent to 41 per cent over the decade up to 2001. Those who said they used it more or as much as Castilian rose from 14.5 per cent to 16.1 percent. Those may seem modest figures. It is certainly true that a majority of Basques do not speak the language which, according to nationalists, is a cornerstone of Basque identity. The nationalist ideal of a nation of euskaldunes – Basque speakers – still seems a dream. Turning a disappearing language around, however, is a huge task.

  The secret of this has been a school system that offers children education either mainly in euskara, mainly in Castilian or jointly in both languages. Gradually Basque parents have been opting for an education in euskara – even those who do not speak it themselves. Reasons vary. Some do this out of a genuine desire for their children to learn a language that they could not. Others know that future public sector jobs in – for example – teaching, will require their children to speak it. Most Basque parents speak only castellano. Eighty per cent of state schools, however, now teach almost entirely in euskara. Castellano is given as a separate subject. Amongst those responsible for setting up this system was Fernando Buesa, a Socialist who ran the education department when Nationalists and Socialists ran the regional government in coalition. ETA paid for his services with a bomb that killed him and his bodyguard.

  Teachers are given up to two years’ paid leave – and free classes every day – to learn euskara. Some of those who fail to learn have begun to find themselves without work. The result is, in some ways, artificial. Some classes are given in imperfect euskara by teachers who have learnt it relatively late in life and rarely practise it outside the school. Even those who do learn, say it can be difficult to keep the language up. ‘I don’t speak it at home, or watch it on the television or read it,’ one Basque teacher told me. ‘In some classes there are students who speak euskara at home and so speak it far better than the teacher who does not.’ Even Ibarretxe only learnt his euskara as a grown-up. Critics claim the Basque nationalists use language as a weapon. ‘The current political incorrectness of the concept of race … has caused nationalists to replace race with language,’ says one of the most vocal critics, the Basque professor Edurne Uriarte.

  Novelist Bernardo Atxaga has produced what have become the first widely translated novels in euskara. ETA’s shadow falls over literature, too, however. One of the best Basque writers of Atxaga’s generation is Joseba Sarrionandia, an ETA member who was sprung from jail in 1985 by a man who would go on to lead the group – Mikel Albisu, alias Mikel Antza. Albisu hid Sarrionandia in the speakers of a musical group that visited the jail. Sarrionandia still writes, sending texts from a hideout by e-mail – and even wins literary awards. Atxaga himself has taken ETA as subject matter on several occasions. His El Hombre Solo deals with a man who leaves ETA but makes the mistake of hiding two of its members who are on the run. In Esos Cielos he tells of a woman ETA prisoner’s first days out of jail and her bus ride back to the Basque Country. Atxaga’s former ETA members are disillusioned with violence, but eternally marked by it. His heroine in Esos Cielos, on leaving jail, has no trouble in getting herself out of trouble when she picks a low-life lover who turns nasty. She fashions a sharp edge out of a melted cigarette filter and attacks him with it – violence still part of her life.

  Tired of all the arguing about nationalism and history – and looking for a place where thoughts of violence would disappear, I drove to the sculpture garden of Eduardo Chillida, just outside Hernani. Chillida, a former goalkeeper for Real Sociedad, crafted hefty great sculptures out of granite and iron – two quintessentially Basque materials. They look surprisingly light and delicate here, amongst the oak trees set beside a converted caserío that serves as an indoor museum. I walk the paths and drink in the peacefulness of it all. Chillida, it seems, found harmony and contentment in his Basqueness. But then a voice comes to me from the past. It is Chillida’s rich, measured tones as they used to sound when repeated several times a day on the radio a message to ETA as it held businessman José María Aldaya for several months. ‘I am Eduardo Chillida. A request to ETA. Free Aldaya,’ it says. Even here, then, there is no escaping the shadow of violence.

  In Medem’s documentary, Atxaga suggests that, should Basques solve their differences and find a place where they were all comfortable, a form of mass levitation would take place. ‘I think that, rather than walking on the ground, people will walk about twenty centimetres off it, that they will levitate. It will be only a slight levitation, in order not to provoke a scandal, but it will be the result of the weight we have taken off our shoulders.’ It is a poetic idea. It would be nice to see Basques discreetly floating off the ground.

  Before they do that, however, they might have to learn some lessons from Catalonia. For most of the same gripes – about language, nationality and, above all, about history – can be heard there too. In many ways, the nationalist issue in Catalonia is more clear cut. It is also more important. There are three times as many Catalans as Basques. They account, in fact, for one in six Spaniards. No blood is spilt, however, in pursuing separatism there. There is no Catalan ETA. This may be precisely because Catalans have their feet on the ground. That characteristic, some claim, forms part of the proof that they are different from other Spaniards. But are they really so different? To find out, I decided to go back to my favourite city – and former home – Barcelona. That is always a pleasure. For if any place in the world could make me levitate, it would be the Catalan capital.

  11

  The Madness of Verdaguer

  I am Catalan. Catalonia had the first democratic parliament, well before England did. And the first United Nations were in my country. At that time – the Eleventh Century – there was a meeting in Toluges – now France – to talk about peace, because in that epoch Catalans were already against, against war.

  Pau (Pablo) Casals, cellist and conductor, at the United Nation
s, 1971

  Barcelona’s bustling, tree-lined Ramblas boulevard is a boisterous fusion of noise, colour and activity. Herds of pedestrians push their way past the squawking menageries at the exotic birds stalls and the bright, sweet-smelling flower stalls. Circles of spectators form around dancing, juggling and fire-eating street entertainers. Human statues stand silent watch as teenage Moroccan bag-snatchers weave through the crowds and, at the port end, a handful of dumpy, cheap prostitutes pitch for business.

  I know of no other city where a single street is so important. From sex shops and souvenir stalls to the opera house and, in La Boqueria, the best fresh food market in Spain, Las Ramblas caters – in one way or another – for the most elemental desires of life. This is where Barcelona celebrates, protests and riots. Built over the course of a stinking stream once known as the Cagalell – the Stream of Shit – it is, more importantly, where Barcelona meets itself. For it is almost impossible, in one of the densest cities in the Mediterranean, for one Barcelonés to walk down Las Ramblas without seeing another he or she knows.

  I have lived in this city before. There was a time when I, too, would meet people I knew as I walked down the Ramblas. Coming back, I find the people have changed. There is more variety. I can hear Arabic and Urdu, most of the languages of Europe and others from Africa and Asia. Some of the castellano is being spoken with Latin American accents. Barcelona, I realise, has become a city of immigrants. The Ramblas does not care. It is as noisy and busy as ever.

  Looking at all these new people pumping fresh life into the Ramblas, I question why I have come here. I am looking for just one language and one identity, Catalan. Are Catalans, whose capital city this is, really as different from other Spaniards as they claim? Are they, as a growing minority argue, not really Spaniards at all? Already the Ramblas is making my questions feel too parochial, too inward-looking.

  At carnival time Las Ramblas ramps up its innate capacity for spectacle. The already colourful boulevard is swallowed up by a long procession of clowns, horse-drawn carts, floats, musicians, mounted police, acrobats, dancers, giants, strange creatures with monstrously large heads – the cabezudos, or ‘big-heads’ – and thousands of costumed revellers. These are accompanied by excited groups of children – and quite a few excited adults – scampering after the boiled sweets that rain down like confetti from carriages and floats. The first time I watched it, I found myself shamelessly fighting with four-year-olds for my share.

  The best place to see the carnival procession when it comes down the Ramblas is from the windows of the Palau Moja. A solid, imposing eighteenth-century city palace, it is now home to the culture department of the Generalitat of Catalonia, the regional government. One year I watched from its wrought-iron balconies as, below my feet, the carnival procession dissolved under a sudden downpour of rain. The heavens rumbled. The skies opened. Sodden devils, tottering giants and wobbling big-heads ran for cover. It was a wash-out.

  With the procession suddenly over, a friendly cultural bureaucrat showed me around the Palau Moja. When we reached the sumptuous, double-height, frescoed ballroom, he let me into a secret. ‘Do you know our national Catalan poet, Jacint Verdaguer?’ he asked. ‘This is where they say he went mad.’ The great late-nineteenth-century poet-priest Verdaguer, Catalonia’s own ‘national’ poet, had lived in this palace, on the pay-roll of a wealthy marquis. Towards the end of his life, my host told me, he had taken to performing bizarre exorcism rituals. Demons, Verdaguer had been convinced, were stalking their way through Barcelona’s huddled masses. His behaviour had become increasingly bizarre. The bishops, Barcelona’s upper-middle-class burguesía and upright Catalans turned their backs on a man whose lengthy, Catalan-language epics to his homeland – especially the Canigó – had made him a sort of Catalan Tennyson. He was the towering figure of a prolonged renaissance – the Renaixença – of poetry and writing in the Catalan language. His genius had been recognised outside Catalonia. Unamuno considered him Spain’s finest living poet. Yet some of Verdaguer’s final writings – on exorcism – were rumoured to be kept firmly under lock and key, my host confided.

  It was meant to be a piece of cotilleo, a titillating jewel of cultural gossip, to be shared in private. Innocently, I got the message wrong. This, I declared, was a great subject for a newspaper article, or even a book. My host’s face fell. I had misunderstood. It would, he said, be wrong to broadcast this story. When I asked why, he struggled for a bit and then declared: ‘That would be like saying William Shakespeare was mad!’ I wanted to point out that, worse than that, Shakespeare stood accused of not even writing his own plays. I held my tongue, however. Verdaguer, I realised, was one of those untouchable ‘national’ symbols of Catalonia – a place which, depending on who you spoke to, was either just one more Spanish region, a nation within a state, or a country whose state had been stolen from it.

  Verdaguer is part of a whole pantheon of Catalan holy cows. He is accompanied by such varied ‘national’ symbols as the Catalan language itself, the black-skinned image of the Virgin of Montserrat, a ninth-century count called Wilfred the Hairy, the Generalitat itself and, even, the blaugrana – claret and blue – shirt of Barcelona football club.

  Catalans are, on the whole, convinced they are different from other Spaniards. They have a name for that difference. It is the ‘hecho diferencial’ – the differentiating fact. This not only makes them different in the way that, for example, an Andalusian southerner is from an Asturian northerner. It is a qualitative leap. Catalans, it means, are more different than others (except, most would agree, the Basques).

  I have come back to Barcelona having set myself the task of finding out exactly what this hecho diferencial is. The trouble is that there is no single, defining hecho to point to. Is it in there amongst all these carefully cosseted symbols? Is it something to do with Catalonia’s history as a fifteenth-century Mediterranean power that never quite made it into the modern era? Is it their different character? The Generalitat – in one of those outbursts of unabashed Catalan self-obsession that so annoy other Spaniards – has defined the latter itself. Catalans, its publicity material tells me, are seen as ‘well-mannered, hard-working, thrifty, enterprising, and generally prudent – with a bit of ‘seny i rauxa’ (literally ‘common sense and madness’)’.

  Catalans speak a different language to other Spaniards, but then so, too, do Valencians, Majorcans and Galicians. Catalonia has had counts and kings of its own, but then so, too, have Navarre and León. It has its own medieval architecture, but so does Andalucía. Perhaps the hecho diferencial is the sum of all these things?

  Whatever it is, the idea has often provoked ire elsewhere in Spain. ‘I notify those of the hecho diferencial that they have been defeated by force of arms and that, if they want to be brothers with other Spaniards, we will impose on them the law of the victor because … we consider the hechos diferenciales are also finished,’ one of Franco’s generals, Alonso Vega, warned at the end of the Civil War in 1939.

  When I first came to live in Barcelona twenty years ago, I was blissfully ignorant of these things. A love story gone wrong had brought me here. Recently finished at university, I had planned to move to Madrid with a girlfriend as I attempted to add some languages to my qualifications. But, a few weeks before we were due to leave, we split up. I chose Barcelona for a reason that, I would discover, was one of its defining characteristics. It was not Madrid.

  Barcelona was, of course, different then, in the mid-1980s. It still had a rough, port air to it. Quinquis, small-time crooks and pickpockets, were a threat on Las Ramblas and in the old city. Transvestite prostitutes did nightly sentry duty on the street corners of the Rambla de Catalunya, the extension of the Ramblas away from the sea. Gypsies would set up fold-out tables on street corners and rip you off with the timo de los trileros, enticing you to bet on which of three upturned cups or walnut shells hid a pea or a small plastic ball. You walked carefully, or not at all, through the Barrio Chino – the densely populate
d red light district on one side of the Ramblas. I spent my first couple of weeks in a rundown hostal in a charming but dilapidated square off the Ramblas. The Plaza Real had palm trees, peeling paintwork, a leaky fountain, a dozen drug-dealers and a weekly market in what looked distinctly like stolen goods.

  I was looking for a job. I wore my hair short, my shirts almost ironed and a suit. The plaza low-life left me alone. In retrospect, I realised, this was because I looked like one of those clean-cut young American evangelists who, even today, pound the streets of Spanish cities seeking converts. I saw my first knife-fight in the plaza. Two drug-peddlers wove circles around one another, blades in hand. I did not stop to see the result, but I recall being impressed by the way they wound their denim jackets around one arm as protection. I saw a second knife fight – two men tumbling around the wasteland behind La Boqueria market. Somehow, it never seemed as though these people were going to kill one another or even do significant damage. When an American warship visited, the sailors disappeared into the Barrio Chino and went home without their wallets. I read in the newspaper that these, empty of money, were found piled up at the foot of the gangway the next morning. A good pickpocket, I was told, made sure you got your ID card and family photos back. Barcelona was like that. It felt dangerous, but not deadly. It was sophisticated, decaying and sinful. It had an edge. It was perfect.

  I bumped into my first ‘differentiating fact’ when I found a flat-share. The tiny apartment was just off the main square of Gràcia, a barrio of low – two, three and four storey – buildings. I shared with Sònia, a student from Andorra, and her Catalan boyfriend, Xavier. They, to my initial annoyance, spoke Catalan to one another – though they always addressed me in castellano. In fact, I soon found, half of my new friends spoke Catalan. All were, again, scrupulously careful to speak castellano if there was someone present, like me, who did not understand them.