Ghosts of Spain Page 41
Even when gunning for Franco, Catalans are remarkably shy about naming their own. I found further evidence of this in a book written to prove how badly the Catalan language had been treated – Catalan, a language under siege. It informed me that Antonio Tovar, the Madrid academic who masterminded Franco’s 1940s crackdown on Catalan, ‘had a number of intellectuals in Catalonia who were his allies’. Rather than tell me who they were, however, the authors coyly declared that these were ‘names we will not mention because some are still alive’. It was okay, in other words, to name Madrid Francoists, but not one’s own.
Reading Anna Funder’s study of East Germany under communism, Stasiland, I found that East Germans had a similar attitude to Hitler and Nazism. ‘History was so quickly remade, and so successfully, that it can truly be said that easterners did not feel then, and do not feel now, that they were the same Germans as those responsible for Hitler’s regime,’ Funder says. She calls it the ‘innocence manoeuvre’. Just how innocent, I wondered, had Catalans really been? The answer, one prominent Catalan publisher explained, has yet to be written.
Catalans have always shown an ability to adapt themselves to circumstance. In the eighteenth century their aristocrats upped sticks and moved to Madrid. Their chameleon nature was noted by George Orwell when he arrived in 1936 to fight in the Civil War. ‘Down the Ramblas … the loud-speakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist … Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of militia uniform … I did not realise that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being,’ he wrote in his Homage to Catalonia.
Catalans were indignant when the head of Spain’s Constitutional Court, Manuel Jiménez de Parga, recently claimed they had welcomed Franco with open arms when he visited in 1972. ‘Few places welcomed Franco with the enthusiasm shown by the Catalans,’ he said. It was a blatant piece of Catalan-baiting which, predictably, worked. As for history, Jiménez de Parga would later claim that, in the year 1000, his native Andalucía (then Muslim) boasted fountains of coloured or perfumed water while other self-proclaimed ‘historic communities’ in Spain ‘did not even know what washing themselves at the weekend was’. Pujol tried to take him to court.
After the Olympics, I left Barcelona for Madrid. Of all the great rivalries between all the great cities of Europe, few can summon up the bile that Spain’s biggest cities – which are almost equal in size – reserve for one another. Up to now I had only ever experienced the rivalry from one end. Barcelona, according to this story, was always the victim. Madrid was always the villain. I had noticed, however, that Sergio, a Barcelona friend whose company car had a Madrid licence plate, always made sure it was in a car park in the days before a Real Madrid–Barcelona match. ‘I don’t want it scratched,’ he explained.
In Madrid, I found, people often threw up their hands at the mention of Catalans. ‘If they want to go, let them!’ said one. ‘To think we used to sing their songs,’ said another, referring to the protest songs that a generation of Madrileños had learned to sing, in Catalan, in the final years of Franco.
A few months later the so-called ‘Guerra de la Llengua’, the ‘Language War’, broke out. This was a rebellion against linguistic normalisation. A group of mothers in the resort town of Salou set up an association to lobby for less Catalan at school. They demanded the right to choose, as Basque parents could, between schools that taught mainly in Catalan and schools that taught mainly in Castilian. One night, one of their leaders, Asunción García, claimed to have been kidnapped and beaten. Her car was torched. A group of intellectuals, from both the left and the right, set up something called the Foro of Babel. They called the Generalitat’s linguistic policies ‘xenophobic and reactionary’. They, in turn, were accused, in semantic overkill, of being ‘the intellectual heirs of those who sought to commit genocide against Catalan during the Franco regime’. The other allegation, which revealed that the strains between Catalonia and its migrant working classes were by no means new, was of a phenomenon that strikes fear into good bourgeois Catalan hearts, lerrouxismo.
The left-wing populist Alejandro Lerroux had been the ‘Emperor of the Paralelo’ at the start of the twentieth century when that area of Barcelona housed the city’s immigrant slums. Barcelona already had a reputation as the capital of European anarchism. Anarchists and paid pistol-wielding assassins employed by factory owners fought a dirty war against one another. Regional nationalism in Catalonia has traditionally been a strongly bourgeois thing, so this was, to a certain degree, the nationalist class protecting itself against the immigrant masses who laboured in mills and factories.
Italian Giuseppe Fanelli – a friend of the great anarchist theorist Mikhail Bakunin – had introduced anarchism to Spain in 1869. It spread like wildfire through Barcelona’s shanty towns and the countryside of Andalucía. Spain was the only country where anarchism truly took off. In the 1890s Barcelona’s anarchists became Spain’s first bomb-throwers. The most spectacular attack came in 1893 when a young man called Santiago Salvador tossed two bombs down from the cheap seats at the Liceu opera house in the Ramblas during a performance of Rossini’s William Tell. They landed in the stalls, amongst the rich of a city whose upper classes had grown fat on the almost slave labour of their factories. Twenty-two were killed. Salvador and five other anarchists were garrotted. He shouted ‘Long live anarchy!’ before the iron collar of the garrotte – a very Spanish invention – tightened slowly around his neck.
Lerroux arrived on the scene a few years after the Liceu attack. He was a great, angry hater. He hated the Church, the monarchy and Barcelona’s upper classes of industrialists and bankers. Most of all, however, he hated Catalanistas. His followers were known as the ‘the young Barbarians’. When the city rebelled against a general call-up to send troops to Morocco in 1909, they led a week of violent rampaging. The Tragic Week, as it was called, remains seared into Catalonia’s political memory. Some eighty churches, monasteries, convents and church schools were sacked or burnt. Mummified corpses of nuns were pulled out of crypts and put on display. Lerrouxismo has terrified Catalonia ever since.
My search for Catalonia’s ‘different’ soul took me onto the outdoor escalators than run up the side of a Barcelona hill called Montjuïc to the National Museum of Catalan Art. This, in the words of one of its first directors, was established in order to ‘construct a history of its own for Catalan art … that will allow us to show the differences that exist between Catalan art and hispanic or foreign art’. As museums around the world looked for connections between all kinds of art, Catalonia had decided to use its greatest gallery to look inward. The choice of building – a neo-classical monster known as the Palau Nacional – was apt for the stated aim of the project. It had been built, in the years of dictator Primo de Rivera, for the 1929 International Expo – a patriotic attempt to impress Spain’s brilliance on the world. It took fourteen years to turn into the shining new symbol of a different nation, Catalonia. The museum finally opened all its spaces in 2004.
The result, I find, is both tasteful and spectacular. Whatever the original intentions, it does not seem to be about seeking ‘differences between Catalan art’ and ‘foreign art’. Perhaps the curators, when it came down to it, realised that it was ridiculous to apply absolute frontiers to art. If anything, those who finally put it together after the ex-director was moved on have been careful to show how local art fits in with the rest of Europe. The museum’s jewels are a series of Romanesque wall paintings dating back to the eleventh century. They are taken from churches high in the folds of the Pyrenees – especially the valley of the River Boí. Experts ripped them out in the 1920s, fearing they would fade and disappear. They were brought to Barcelona, to be installed in what has now become the
MNAC. Art critic Robert Hughes has pronounced this place to be ‘to wall painting what Venice and Ravenna are to the art of mosaic’. He adds, however, that: ‘It seems unlikely these murals were painted by locals.’
Art is one of those things Barcelona and Madrid like to squabble over. In the first half of the twentieth century Barcelona produced some of the most remarkable artists of the time. The modernismo of Gaudí and his fellow architects was accompanied by that of artists like Santiago Rusiñol and Ramón Casas. They looked to Europe and loved all things modern. Like Gaudí, however, they also looked back at the Romanesque, at the twelfth-century Cistercian monasteries of the Catalan countryside and at Barcelona’s own, unique, Gothic architecture. Their headquarters, in true Spanish style, was a bar – Els Quatre Gats, The Four Cats. A teenage Pablo Picasso who, although born in Málaga, spent his formative years in Barcelona – was welcomed here. One of his first exhibitions sat on the café’s walls.
Picasso had been studying – and his father teaching – at the fine-art school lodged in the top floor of the fourteenth-century Llotja, the old stock exchange. Another pupil there was Joan Miró, who started off painting the countryside and farms of his father’s native Tarragona before moving on to Paris and surrealism.
The mad, moustachioed, paranoid surrealist Salvador Dalí was a notary’s son from that most conservative of Catalan places, Figueres. When Dalí died it was found that he had recently changed his will. Instead of giving his work to the Generalitat, he donated it to the Spanish state. Catalans cried foul, claiming Dali had been manipulated into changing the will at the last moment. The inventor of the so-called paranoid critical method left behind him a museum installed alongside his old Torre Galatea house. He had topped it with giant eggs and encrusted, on the outside, plaster imitations of Catalan bread rolls. It is now one the most visited museums in Spain. Dalí is perhaps the last person to have willingly sported a barretina, the sock-length, floppy red beret of the Catalan peasant. Some catalanistas prefer to forget his enthusiasm for Spain. This included highly formative years in the company of the poet Lorca and film-maker Buñuel as a Madrid student. It also included a fawning reverence for Franco.
A comic tug-of-war between Madrid and Catalonia involved that unlikely-sounding symbol of national pride – Dalí’s The Great Masturbator. Catalan separatists insisted in the Madrid parliament that the picture, currently hanging in Madrid’s Reina Sofía museum, should be returned to Figueres.
I was not convinced that art – however brilliant the things produced here were – was proof of a defining national characteristic for the Catalans, so I decided to look elsewhere. Nationalism and religion always seem to go together. This is especially so in Spain – National Catholicism was, after all, the name given to Franco’s political ideas. It is as if each ‘nation’ needs, apart from its symbols, some sort of spiritual home. In Catalonia that home is to be found on the extraordinary-looking, towering outcrop of rocks known as Montserrat, the Serrated Mountain.
Montserrat must have provoked wonder in those who set eyes on it long before the temple that is considered the religious soul of Catalonia was established here in the eleventh century. The jumble of upright, rounded peaks here are unlike any rock formations nearby. From far off it looks like a dumping ground for giant menhirs, stacked as tight as space allows. Closer up, they look like the weathered backs of the carved stone gods of Easter Island. Catalans call it ‘the Sacred Mountain’. Legend has it that a statue of the Virgin Mary was found in a cave here at the end of the ninth century. True, or not, there were, by the year 900, four separate chapels tucked into the hillside. The main Benedictine monastery was founded in 1025. A Montserrat monk, Bernat Boïl, travelled with Columbus to the Americas, giving this mountain’s name to a Caribbean island along the way.
The original buildings were ravaged by man. Most of the monastery was destroyed by Napoleon’s troops in 1811. It later suffered temporary disestablishment. During the Spanish Civil War, it was saved from being looted and razed by anarchists thanks to the Catalan regional government – though twenty-three monks were killed. Its current facade, made of polished rock from the mountain, was not finished until 1968. The symbols of Catalonia, especially the red and gold striped flag, are to be found discreetly draped around the monastery. The most important feature here, however, is another Catalan symbol. It is a statue of the Virgin Mary. Almost uniquely, the Virgin of Montserrat is black – probably the result of too much exposure to candle-smoke rather than design. Her nickname is ‘la moreneta’, or ‘the little dark girl’. On the folds of her golden robe sits a crowned child Jesus, also with a darkened face. A queue of visitors wishing to meet her stretches out of the monastery doors. They are waiting to kiss her right hand, which holds a sphere representing the universe. Anyone doubting her significance should come here on the weekend after Barcelona football team, that other symbol of Catalan pride, wins a major trophy. The trophy is brought here, to receive her blessing.
Montserrat has a reputation for producing rebellious monks. Under Franco, the monks continued to talk, read, write and preach in Catalan. In 1962 the then Abbot, Escarré, became one of the first church rebels by giving an interview to Le Monde in which he accused Franco of being a bad Catholic. A famous protest saw three hundred Catalan intellectuals lock themselves inside the chapel in 1970 while Franco’s police sat helplessly outside. Even then, though, many of this self-styled gauche divine, divine left, were champagne radicals. Barcelona’s Bocaccio nightclub delivered salmon sandwiches to keep them going. Franco knew he dare not touch the place. Jordi Pujol’s Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya party was founded here and, as its propaganda eagerly points out, this was where he married.
Today the monastery’s ninety monks include respected experts on the Catalan language, with their publishing house producing seminal works. They remain, however, an argumentative bunch. Recent reports suggest there has been a bout of infighting. Older, more strident catalanistas have, it is said, been moved on. One newspaper claimed they had lost out in a factional power struggle that involved a clique of gay monks.
I find Montserrat dull and uninspiring. The singing of a wonderful boy’s choir – the oldest in Europe – fails to cheer me up. It is too new, too much a place for coach parties and day-trippers with foil-wrapped bocadillos. It has a cable car and a funicular railway. There are restaurants, gift shops and a post office. It feels like a religious-nationalist theme park. Catholicism and nationalism are, together, a spooky phenomenon, especially in a Spain that can recall Franco’s version of it. I think of another Benedictine monastery with a choir school and a nationalist aura that I have visited recently – at Franco’s Valley of the Fallen. My soul, Montserrat reminds me, is neither Catholic nor Catalan.
I drive on to another Catalan monastery. I have no trouble, however, feeling the pull of Santa María de Poblet. As I arrive the sun is going down and an icy wind is blowing through the neighbouring vineyards. The tourists have gone. The walls of the vast monastery complex, sitting under the wooded slopes of the Prades hills, emit a warm, pinkish-ochre glow as they catch the reflections of the day’s final rays. This is one of three Cistercian monasteries – the others are at Santes Creus and Vallbona de les Monges – built in the Catalan countryside in the twelfth century as the Moors were rolled south towards Valencia.
I find myself alone in the huge courtyard. Dogs are barking at the wind. A fountain provides the only other sound. I go into a huge, triple-nave chapel. It is dark, so I wait outside. A sign hangs in the entrance. ‘The services are in Catalan. Please be punctual.’ Bells ring out – a warm, booming noise that announces vespers. I go back into the cavernous chapel, where lights are slowly being turned on. A woman is confessing in one gloomy corner. Two dozen white-robed monks file in to the stalls that occupy part of the central nave. Poblet, I am surprised to see, is as multiracial as Las Ramblas. The younger monks mostly look as if they come from south America or north Africa.
There are only th
ree of us in the congregation: the woman who had been confessing, a young man in a puffa jacket and myself. A monk offers me a copy of the Antifonari so I can follow proceedings. ‘Where are you from?’ he asks. ‘Britain,’ I reply. ‘Better not then,’ he says, retiring the book. ‘It is in Catalan.’ I persuade him that I can follow it anyway – both the music and the words. In fact, the words turn out to be easier. The musical score is dense and mysterious. It loses me quickly. The singing is soft and harmonious. It feels as though it is issuing from the stones and the walls. The monks somehow manage to fill the three broad, high naves of the chapel with their music. Incense wafts slowly down from the far end of the chapel, which seems a very long way off. The chapel is not just cold, but damp. A deep chill creeps into my bones as I sit on my wooden pew. My hands go numb. I wrap them in a scarf. The monks keep singing, standing, sitting and bowing as they go through their rituals.
Towards the back of the chapel, beyond the monks, I can see an elaborate stone tomb. I wonder who it belongs to. This is the last resting place of many medieval Catalan rulers, counts and kings. Most have nicknames. The Chaste, the Conqueror, the Lover of Elegance, the Benign and the Humanist are all here.
When I leave, it is night time. I am alone again in the courtyard and the spotlights send huge shadows against the walls. For a moment I am a silhouette giant, as big as one of the hexagonal towers at the Royal Gate. I walk out thinking that, were I Catalan, I might feel the pull of history, some essence of my identity, in a place like this.
As I leave, I think about Catalan history and identity. So what makes a nation a nation, or a country a country? Does it have to be an independent state? Obviously not, if you think about Scotland. When can a country be said to have disappeared, or come into existence? And what does it mean to be a country – or, if you want, a nation – inside another country? Catalans account for nearly one in six Spaniards. They are an essential part of the mix. It is a very Spanish conundrum.