Ghosts of Spain Read online

  On one side of Gràcia’s square was the barrio’s ‘town’ hall. Big-bellied, armed city policemen (they are all armed in Spain) stood guard outside. A large, brick clock tower stood in the middle of the small plaza. On the other side stood three or four small-time drug-dealers. Spain was living through the anything-goes days of early socialism. The cops left the drug-dealers alone. People smoked their small blocks of Moroccan hashish at the cafe tables set out in the square. In those days, as Spain experimented with its new-found, post-Franco freedoms, people rolled-up and smoked almost anywhere – in bars, on street benches, in the metro. Waiters had to navigate the traffic of Vespa mopeds, the yellow and black, bumble-bee-coloured taxis and the groaning butano, gas bottle, lorries to get to our tables in the square. I learned to drink cremat – blazing dark rum with coffee beans and lemon peel roasting in its alcoholic fumes.

  I walked up the narrow staircase of our three-storey building to the flat, red-tiled roof. I lay in the sun and read Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s Los Mares del Sur. Vázquez Montalbán’s detective, Pepe Carvalho, showed me around the city without my having to move. From the posh heights of Pedralbes, at the top of the one-sided cauldron that is Barcelona, to the stewing mass of the Barrio Chino, he gave me a feeling for my new home. Carvalho, an avid gastronome, even took me on exotic fictional shopping trips to La Boqueria – with its displays of octopus, bulging-eyed sea bream, sheep’s brains and fat, white Catalan sausages. It was late summer when I moved in. There seemed no need for central heating. In January, however, snow settled on the city’s palm trees. We took the gas ring and the butano bottle out of the kitchen and put it in our tiny sitting room. We sat round it with our coats on, warming our hands.

  I found work teaching English. I studied at the city’s university and at the Brazilian Institute on the top floor of the Casa Amatller – a beautiful modernist building on the Paseo de Gràcia. Looking out of the window I could gaze upon what some Catalans would describe as further evidence of their ‘difference’. Paseo de Gràcia is home to some of the best work of Barcelona’s emblematic architect, the turn-of-the-century modernist Antoni Gaudí. I could see the strange organic forms and Darth Vader-shaped chimneys above the sculpted, soot-encrusted stone facade of Gaudí’s Casa Milà – long ago dubbed La Pedrera, the Stone Quarry. Gaudí’s Casa Batlló was next door. Its scaly, undulating, ceramic-tiled roof represents the dragon slain by Catalonia’s patron saint, Sant Jordi. It was, and is, breathtaking stuff – a lesson in how adventurous and imaginative the Catalan mind could be.

  I walked everywhere. Stepping on Gaudí’s jellyfish, conch-shell and starfish-decorated hexagonal tiles on the Paseo de Gràcia, gravity pulled me down to the Ramblas. It was a short hop from there to the narrow, dark, medieval, washing-adorned streets, tiny squares and austere, voluminous stone churches of the Gothic Quarter.

  Barcelona recognised that it could not match the wild movida that Madrid was enjoying at that stage of the 1980s, but it was still intent on having a good time. On weekend evenings I wandered out to the squares of Gràcia. I knew I would always bump into someone, be invited to sit down and have a night out. Even then, though, the city was changing. Barcelona was ambitious to recover its lost glories. Gràcia’s squares, some little more than strips of baked mud, were being dug up. New ones, all smooth concrete paving blocks, chrome railings and futuristic street lamps, would appear in their place. Something similar was happening to bars and night-clubs. Most were still seedy or sleazy. Some were full of men with big moustaches picking up part-time prostitutes to the sound of 1970s disco. One had a mini-golf course in its garden. Another had tables made of coffins and flashed a slide-show of human organs – hearts, kidneys, livers – onto a bare wall. It was a Barcelona version of counter-culture. New clubs, however, were big, open and slickly designed. The clientele was silently cool, busy looking and being seen. Catalans, I learnt, cared deeply about how things looked – starting with themselves.

  I ate lots of botifarra, a Catalan sausage, with mongetes, white haricot beans. On Sundays I went down to the rabbit-warren of ramshackle restaurants on the beach to eat arròs negre, rice cooked in squid ink. I wrote my first magazine article on the British vedettes who danced topless at the theatres on the Paralelo – El Molino, the Arnau – or, with more glitter, at the Scala on passeig de Sant Joan. I never dared enter the Sala Bagdad, which had live sex acts that, legend had it, had once included a donkey.

  I found my next Catalan national symbol at, of all places, a football match. I was not the only new Englishman in town. Gary Lineker had signed for F.C. Barcelona. I went to the biggest football stadium I had ever seen, the Camp Nou, to watch him play his first match against Racing de Santander. I expected thunderous noise from the 115,000 fans in Europe’s biggest soccer stadium. But the Camp Nou was remarkably quiet. Instead of the bellowing and singing I had encountered in British stadiums, the fans standing around me formed little tertulias discussing the technical merits of the players and the failings of the coach. Barça fans, I discovered, always knew better than the coach. Lineker scored twice. The fans approved. They seemed to like the season’s other British signing, Mark Hughes, just as much – pronouncing him to be una tanqueta, a little tank. I had found a club to support. But Barça, as people told me repeatedly, was ‘more than a club’. I had bought into what was, in effect, the Catalan national team. It did not seem to matter that most players were not – and, increasingly, are not – Catalan. Under Franco, supporting Barça had been one of the only ways to show outward hostility towards him – and ‘his’ team, Real Madrid – and support for Catalonia. It was still the main popular emblem of war against the old enemy – Madrid.

  I was having a good time, but mainly I was here to learn a language, Spanish. To my surprise, my new friends were also studying a language. It was their own, Catalan. For the first few weeks it was difficult to tell the difference between this and what I learned to call not español, Spanish, but castellano, Castilian. Catalan sounded drier, more clipped. It was both less exuberant and less coarse. Sometimes it sounded a bit like French. Half of my new friends spoke it at home. Few, however, knew how to write it properly. They had done their schooling in Spanish. Franco had banned Catalan from schools, universities and a vast array of official forums. Franco wanted national unity ‘with a single language, Castilian, and a single personality, that of Spain’. My new friends had left school a few years after his death. That was before responsibility for education was handed over to the Generalitat and radical changes – too radical for some – were introduced. I was impressed by their diligence. They went to night classes. They were shocked at their own ignorance. They could not spell. They did not know the rules of Catalan grammar. Shame drove them to study harder. Other friends, born and bred in Barcelona to families who had migrated here from other parts of Spain, did not speak a word of Catalan. Nor did they want to.

  A gradual linguistic change was taking place on the street, too. Street names were slowly being changed from Castilian to Catalan. In practical terms it was often a question of changing a few letters. Calle became carrer, avenida became avinguda and paseo appeared as passeig. The street called Paralelo changed, intriguingly, to Paral.lel. Written down, Catalan looked more like Spanish than it sounded when spoken. The big state enterprises – railways, post office and the phone company – refused, however, to follow suit. People would graffiti Catalan words over signs in railway stations, and on post or phone boxes. The protests were mostly good-humoured. Pink paint was a favourite weapon. Separatist protesters sometimes stopped outside the McDonald’s on Las Ramblas. ‘¡Botifarra si! ¡Hamburguesa no!’ they cried. If all they were worried about was Catalan sausages, the chances of catalanismo turning violent seemed slim.

  Catalans did not seem cut out for violence. Terra Lliure, a Catalan attempt to emulate ETA, failed so badly that all it managed to do was kneecap a journalist, blow up three of its own members by mistake and kill an innocent woman in the town of Les Borges Blanques by b
lowing a wall down on her. It dissolved itself in 1995 after fifteen fruitless years and covered in anything but glory.

  One day I walked up a scruffy wooden staircase and knocked on a door bearing a sign that read: ‘Crida a la Solidaritat’, ‘Call to Solidarity’. There was a complicated telephone entry system. Crida was a Catalan-language pressure group. Their main weapon was the aerosol can. The people at their offices, however, were jumpy. A few months earlier a man had walked through the same door with a false nose, a pistol and a bomb. He had forced everybody out and then exploded the small bomb. I walked away with a map of Europe that looked like none I had ever seen before. It was a map of stateless peoples and minority languages. The normal frontiers of Europe disappeared. Replacing the countries were languages and regions which, in some cases, I had never heard of. A large slice of southern France, for example, was now called Occitania. Spain itself was divided up into more than half a dozen bits, including Asturias, Aragón and Andalucía. The Catalans occupied a long wedge of Mediterranean coast, more than twice the size of what I knew as the Spanish region of Catalonia. The new Catalonia started somewhere near the French city of Perpignan. It stretched west into Aragón and tapered south, via Valencia, to a stiletto point somewhere after Alicante. There were island outposts, too. All the Balearics were coloured Catalan. There was even an outpost on the Italian island of Sardinia at a town Catalans called L’Alguer.

  The northern part of this region on the map coincided roughly with what, at the beginning of the ninth century under Charlemagne, was called the Spanish March. The rest was a reminder of how the Aragonese kings who – despite their title – were based in Barcelona and spoke Catalan had built a fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Mediterranean empire that stretched to Sicily. Amongst their most infamous exports to Italy was a family of Catalan Popes – the despotic and debauched Borgias.

  The dialects spoken in other places are not known as Catalan. They are valencià, mallorquí, menorquí, etc. In one of the more pointless rows in modern Spain, the Valencian regional government has fought for its version of Catalan to be recognised as a separate language. This is considered absurd by linguists. In an attempt to placate them, however, the Spanish government came up with two identical translations of the European Constitution – one marked ‘Catalan’, the other marked ‘Valencian’. Language, like history, is political stuff in Spain.

  I did not learn to speak it, but I began to feel a creeping sympathy for this language. Catalan had been repressed or persecuted, on and off, for almost three centuries. Successive Spanish kings had tried to encourage it to disappear from the early eighteenth century onwards. Two dictators, Primo de Rivera and Franco, had done their best to squash it in the twentieth century. There were, however, still meant to be more than seven million Catalan speakers – more than either Danish or Norwegian. But how could it compete with castellano, a language with 330 million speakers world-wide?

  I did not realise just how hard some Catalans were prepared to fight. A new Catalan semi-autonomous regional government had been set up in 1979. This was revival of a Generalitat that, barring a brief reappearance between 1931 and 1939 – had not existed since 1714. One of the first lines of the new Generalitat’s statute said, in Catalan, ‘La llengua pròpia de Catalunya és el català’, ‘Catalan is the language of Catalonia.’ At the time, this was more a wish than a reality. Some serious social engineering was required to make it true. Half of all Catalans spoke Spanish as their first, or only, language. All spoke Spanish but, in 1975, only 60 per cent could speak Catalan (compared to 75 per cent in 1930). A language crusade was launched, which continues to this day.

  For the first quarter century of its life the Generalitat was run by a Catalan nationalist called Jordi Pujol. He stated that the predominance of castellano was the result of ‘an ancient act of violence’. Pujol set out on a process that was given the unfortunately Orwellian-sounding name of normalització, normalisation. The main idea was to replace Castilian with Catalan as the language of education. Linguists say that, if you speak Spanish, you are already 80 per cent of the way to speaking Catalan, and vice versa – so it did not raise many practical problems. With castellano as the language of the schoolyard, television, pop music and the street, it was hardly going to be lost. Some people, however, did not like the idea of their children being ‘normalised’. It was, they said, not just a reversal of the policies of Franco. It was the mirror image of them.

  I left Barcelona, and Spain, after two years. The city, however, stayed – and, along with its football team, stays – in my heart. Five years later I came back to live here again. Barcelona was preparing to host the 1992 Olympic Games. It was bursting with energy, pride and self-importance. The first two, at least, were infectious. There were other differences too. It was less seedy. Some of the world’s biggest architectural names – Frank Gehry, Norman Foster and Arata Isozaki – were at work. Glittering new modern buildings were going up.

  Barcelona had become smarter and cooler, if more boring. The edge had gone. The sexiest things to be now were either a designer, an architect or a town planner. There can be no other city in the world where the latter has achieved such status. Advertising is another of Barcelona’s specialities. ‘Barcelona, posa’t guapa’, ‘Doll yourself up!’ the city hall urged, appealing to the natural vanity of Spain’s trendiest, best-turned-out people. It scrubbed up well – renewing much of its modernista facade – for the games. Olympic Barcelona also, however, saw the start of a long, and continuing, Barcelona obsession with transient design trends. At one club the urinals had stroboscopic lights triggered by the jets of urine aimed at them. Your piss blinked back at you.

  I found a tiny flat on top of a nineteenth-century apartment block near the all-night flower market in a part of town known as the Eixample. An idealistic nineteenth-century city planner, Ildefons Cerdà had traced out a neat grid of streets here with each square filled by a block known as a manzana, an apple. Where the core of the apple was meant to be, Cerdà had proposed gardens, parks and schools. Property speculators had eaten the cores up years before. My flat was on the roof – where the doorman of our block had lived before he was replaced by an electric buzzer. I furnished it with old chairs, cupboards and tables that people left out once a month for the municipal rubbish collectors. I had to get onto the street before the gypsies came past, throwing the best stuff into their vans. It was heavy, old-fashioned furniture. Getting it upstairs was backbreaking work. There were seven floors of steps up to my rooftop flat but no lift. (A heavily pregnant woman came for lunch, climbed the stairs and gave birth soon after getting back down to street level.) My terrace was the building’s roof – about four times the size of my flat. When the city lit bonfires and shot tons of fireworks into the sky to celebrate the eve of Sant Joan and the summer solstice, I sat out drinking cava – Catalan champagne – as fizzled-out rockets rained down onto the rooftop around me. Barcelona was still magical.

  There were linguistic changes, too. The railway company and utilities were now using Catalan. Some friends now spoke Catalan to one another in the office – though they wrote up their meetings in Castilian. By now some two-thirds of Catalans said they could speak the language. More people answered my phone calls with the abrupt Catalan command ‘¡Digui!’ which means ‘Speak!’ but sounds like ‘Diggy!’

  Generalitat-run Catalan television, which had been finding its feet when I first came, now had two channels and good viewing figures. Many people were listening to, or watching, their news exclusively in Catalan – on television or radio. Catalans were getting a different view of the world to other Spaniards.

  Something special happened in Barcelona over a fortnight in the summer of 1992. Barcelona had won the right to host the Olympic Games partly because one of the city’s own sons, Juan Antonio Samaranch, was president of the International Olympic Committee. The city knew how to design the kind of games Samaranch wanted. Both the man and the city got it right. Barcelona’s games were a success. Barc
elonans felt, and acted, like hosts to the world. More than 30,000 people became Olympic volunteers. They were proud of what they had, and they wanted to show it off. They put the Olympics, in the doldrums after decades of financial disasters and Cold War bickering, back on track.

  A former senior Catalan Francoist, Samaranch was ideally suited to his job. The pseudo-democratic Olympic decision-making processes, conducted by minor princes, faded sports stars and sporting bureaucrats, must have been highly familiar. He is a difficult figure for Catalans. He is that most desirable thing – an internationally important Catalan. He is also, however, something that is not meant to have existed – a Catalan Francoist. There are old photos of him in the uniform of the Movimiento, shaking hands with the Caudillo or giving stiff-armed fascist salutes.

  Catalonia, Catalans are mostly convinced, was always anti-Francoist. The Francoists and Falangists were ‘ocupantes’, occupiers from elsewhere. Dictatorship was a Castilian invention. A true Catalan would never have supported the Caudillo. It was an idea that Catalans took to almost as soon as the dictator was in his grave. ‘On the one hand, the Francoists wanted to disappear from the map so nobody would make them pay and so they could reappear, protected by olvido (forgetting), years later. On the other hand, the emerging catalanismo needed to present the image of a homogenous country,’ the Catalan writer Arcadi Espada explains. ‘It was a country determined to prove to itself that it had been good, beautiful and sacred – without fissures, without Francoists. A blanket of silence covered the nation.’