Ghosts of Spain Read online

  It is not a new one. ‘They are neither French nor Spanish but sui generis in language, costume and habits,’ the great British chronicler of early-nineteenth-century Spain, Richard Ford, reported. ‘No province of the unamalgamating bundle which forms the conventional monarchy of Spain hangs more loosely to the crown than Catalonia, this classical country of revolt, which is ever ready to fly off.’

  History sometimes helps. Sometimes it does not. In Spain it is, to a great degree, something to argue over – another political weapon in the battle of identities. Catalan history is no exception. ‘History is a trap,’ the separatist writer Víctor Alexandre warned me. ‘What matters is now, and the future.’

  The facts of Catalan history are fairly straightforward. Northern Catalonia had been recovered from the Moors relatively quickly, in the early eighth century. Charlemagne’s son helped take Barcelona in 801. This was the Spanish March – a series of counties that acted as a buffer zone between the Franks and the Muslims. Barcelona was ruled by counts. Wilfred the Hairy, considered by some to be the founder of Catalonia, brought Barcelona and other counties together. He was, however, still a vassal to, of all people, Charles the Bald.

  Catalans liked giving their counts – as those buried at Poblet showed – nicknames. If Wilfred was Hairy – and he certainly is in later sculptures of him – his successors over the coming centuries were one of the following: Crooked, Old, Towheaded, Great, Fratricidal, Saintly, Chaste, Catholic, Liberal, Humanist, Benign, Just, Generous, Ceremonious or just plain Careless.

  In 988 one of these counts, Borrell II of Barcelona, broke his vassalage to the French king Hugh Capet. It was not exactly ‘Freedom for Catalonia’, but it could be called ‘Freedom for Barcelona’. A thousand years later, in 1988, the Generalitat would decree the millennium of the political birth of Catalonia. The Counts of Barcelona expanded their territory southwards and became, through a marriage in 1137, the Kings of Aragón – a title they used from then on. The southward roll would continue until they passed Alicante in 1266. The Aragónese kings then looked east. They gained control of the Balearics (after slaughtering or selling into slavery most of the male population of Menorca), Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia and, by the fifteenth century, Naples and the southern half of modern Italy. But the lines with Castile were already getting blurred. The original dynasty ran out of heirs on the death of Martí, the Humanist, in 1410. Martí turned out to be the last Catalan to rule. A Castilian, Ferdinand of Antequera, was brought in as king. Six centuries later some Catalans would rather that had never happened.

  In 1479 the new rulers would, again by marriage, help unify Spain under the joint leadership of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragón. Thirteen years later they conquered the last Spanish Muslim kingdom at Granada. Castile plus Aragón minus Moors meant, basically, that Spain had been founded (though there was still work to be done in Navarre). The rest, as they say, is history. But it is not. This is Spain. History, once more, is the stuff of debate, disagreement and politics.

  The origins of Catalan discontent with the results of Isabella’s and Ferdinand’s marriage can be found, some say, in an oath. It was one sworn by subjects of the Aragonese kings and it went: ‘We, who are as good as you, swear to you, who are no better than us, to accept you as our king and sovereign lord, provided you observe all our liberties and laws – but if not, not.’

  With the court now displaced from Barcelona to Castile, Catalans began to lose out. Trade to the Americas was given to Andalucía. Plague, famine and an overstretched Mediterranean empire were, anyway, taking their toll.

  The Catalan national anthem, adapted from a folk song in the late nineteenth century, recalls what the Generalitat refers to as ‘the War of the Catalans against King Philip IV’ in 1640. For a while I could find no other reference to this war. Then I discovered it was usually given another name. It is the Revolt of the Reapers, or the Reapers’ War. Whatever its proper name – and the motivation – the peasant rebels were Catalans down to their canvas espardenyes, espadrilles. They invented, as a password, a tongue-twister full of sounds that only a Catalan could hope to say: ‘Setze jutges d’un jutjat menjen fetge d’un penjat’, ‘Sixteen judges from a court eat the liver of a hanged man’. It was, for your average lisping Spaniard, as confusing and impossible a phrase as the words ‘Manchester United’ are to today’s football commentators (who, for some reason, never quite make it to that final ‘d’ sound). The Catalan aristocracy joined the peasants, Catalonia saw off the king’s army and momentarily declared independence under French protection. France did not like the idea of an independent Catalonia. A week later, Catalonia swore allegiance to the king of France ‘as in the time of Charlemagne, with a contract to observe our constitutions’. Catalans stayed French subjects for twelve years. They spent much of that time falling out amongst themselves. Eventually, with the Aragónese and Valencians refusing to help them, they were reabsorbed into Spain.

  The anthem is called ‘Els Segadors’, ‘The Reapers’. ‘We must not be the prey/ Of those proud and arrogant invaders!/Let us swing the sickle!/Let us swing the sickle, defenders of our land!’ it urges. The proud and arrogant (gent tan ufana i tan superba in Catalan) they rail against every time they sing their anthem are, of course, Castilians. Again, the Generalitat cannot resist offering a po-faced explanation for the anthem. ‘It is solemn and firm, and unites the will of the people in favour of the survival of a nation which proclaims its full national character.’ It is, in fact, a celebration of the last time Catalonia actually managed to break from the rest of Spain.

  Then, in 1705, the Catalans made a mistake. In a tussle over who was to get the crown, they backed a loser, Archduke Charles of Austria. A ferocious siege of Barcelona ensued, ending in defeat on Catalonia’s own version of 9/11 – 11 September 1714. Modern Catalonia has taken the Dunkirk approach to remembering that event: 11 September is now the day Catalonia celebrates the Diada, its national day – a celebration of defeat. Like the anthem, it also reminds Catalans that their natural enemy is in Madrid.

  The winner in 1714, Philip V, took his revenge by passing the Nueva Planta decree. Catalan was barred from schools – a measure that left the illiterate and uneducated peasantry indifferent. Castilian became the language of government and the courts. Catalonia also had some ancient institutions of its own which would now disappear. A century before England got its Magna Carta, Catalonia had already developed, in the early twelfth century, what is claimed to be Europe’s first written bill of rights – the Usatges. While this did not help the serfs, it provided a legal framework for free men to argue peacefully over their affairs.

  A parliament, les Corts, had been set up with limited powers in 1283. It represented the clergy, the nobles and the wealthier merchants. Its affairs were run by a standing committee of twelve men, the Generalitat. By the late thirteenth century Barcelona, too, had a sort of parliament – known as the Consell de Cent, the council of one hundred men. The Generalitat and the city’s consell eventually conducted their business from fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Gothic palaces facing one another across the cobbled Plaça de Sant Jaume. They still do. Catalonia’s modern-day politicians and administrators have no way of avoiding history. They work in the middle of it.

  Corts, Consell de Cent and Generalitat were, however, all abolished by Philip V. Les Corts, anyway, had met only once since 1632.

  The 1714 defeat led, in Jordi Pujol’s own words, to ‘Catalans returning to their homes and staying there, without aspiring to anything more than to survive without ambition or any collective project, for 200 years’. None of this prevented them, however, from prospering economically over the next few centuries. They exported wool and paper. In the nineteenth century the cotton trade was smaller only than that of England, France and the United States. Barcelona embraced the industrial revolution long before most of the rest of Spain.

  Growing wealth allowed Barcelona to expand, giving Ildefons Cerdà a chance to design the Eixample, where I
would later live through the 1992 Olympics. Cerdà was, however, more than aware of where the money was coming from. He was one of the few to warn about the vile living conditions into which factory hands were forced. Catalan peasants had held occasional revolts. Soon the urban working classes would be at it too. Church-burning was a particularly Catalan sport. In 1835 a bullfight was held in Barcelona. It was not a success. The crowd became angry. A popular rhyme in Catalan explains what happened next. ‘Hi haver una gran broma/ dintre del Torín./ Van sortir tres braus,/ tots van ser dolents:/ això fou la causa/ de cremar convents.’ ‘There was a big set-to/ inside the bull-ring./Three fighting bulls appeared/but all were weak: and that was the cause/ of the burning of the convents.’ Not for the first time, or the last, Barcelona’s skyline was streaked by plumes of smoke coming from church buildings. The Church, rich, powerful, arrogant and unpopular, had already seen its buildings burnt in Barcelona fifteen years earlier. Even Poblet, miles away in the fields of upper Tarragona, was torched. Lerroux’s young barbarians, or their anticlerical heirs, would be back with their matches the following century. Modern Catalans often proudly proclaim that bullfighting has nothing to do with them – but it has obviously been around for almost two centuries.

  Catalans were, of course, not all church-burners. Antoni Gaudí, the architect of the Sagrada Familia cathedral which is still rising – its colourful, ceramic-encrusted spires already a symbol of the city – eighty years after he was run over by a tram, was a deeply conservative, religious man. One of his first projects was the restoration of Poblet, which had become a crumbling, vandalised wreck. In later life Gaudí became a pious, ascetic eccentric. He lived on the Sagrada Familia building site, sleeping on a small four-poster bed in the middle of a workshop piled high with plaster models of his ongoing designs. He became a strict vegetarian and turned into a seedy-looking, emaciated, white-bearded old man. ‘We must beg God to punish and then console us,’ he once said. ‘Everyone has to suffer.’ When he wandered in front of the number 30 tram on Barcelona’s Gran Vía, it took a while for someone to recognise him. He died a few days later. Legend has it he died in poverty. His will, however, turned up recently – showing that he still had a pretty pile in the bank.

  Modernisme had emerged from the mid-nineteenth-century Renaixença, the Romantic Catalan renaissance that found its local hero in the exorcist poet Verdaguer. Literature in Catalan has had an irregular history. In the Middle Ages it produced three great writers – though none were, by today’s definition – Catalans. The Majorcan priest Ramon Llull wrote more than 250 texts of philosophy, poetry and theology – in Catalan, Latin and Arabic. He was eventually lynched to death while trying to convert Tunisia’s Muslims in the thirteenth century. A Valencian called Ausías March, wrote, amongst other things, impassioned verses to a mysterious mid-fifteenth-century married woman, his ‘llir entre cards’, or ‘lily amongst thistles’. Another Valencian, Joanot Martorell, produced a raunchy fifteenth-century novel about knights in shining armour which tossed old values of unconsummated courtly love into the literary dustbin. In his Tirant lo Blanc, considered a precursor to Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the eponymous hero’s manservant rejects a would-be lover’s offer of a few strands of hair: ‘No, my lady, no. That time is past. I know quite well what Tirant desires: to see you in bed, either naked or in your nightdress.’ It seems that Catalans, still more French than Spanish in their amorous arrangements, always were more sophisticated in sexual matters.

  Catalan literature slackened until Verdaguer’s time in the mid-nineteenth century. Today’s Catalan writers can choose between two languages. One offers them a larger market. The other offers, via the Generalitat, to buy the first 300 copies of their book.

  The Renaixença broke the emotional ground for the emergence of political Catalanism. Gaudí, when presented to King Alfonso XIII, addressed him in Catalan. His example could be an inspiration to the Generalitat’s latest language campaign which encourages people to start their conversations with strangers in Catalan. ‘Parla sense vergonya’, ‘Speak [Catalan] without shame’, it urges them.

  Gaudí‘s most fervent admirers believe, however, he is more than just a model of virtuous Catalanism. He is, they say, also a model of saintliness. The Vatican’s Congregation for Saints’ Causes seems to agree. It is studying a petition for his beatification, which looks set to go ahead. He is already known as ‘God’s architect’. God and Catalonia – the cornerstones of traditional nationalism – meet in Gaudí.

  Catalans, generally, are good at celebrating their own culture. They eagerly sign up to belong to groups and do things together. They form clubs to go rambling, to dance their peculiar sardana or to form those scary (seven-or eight-storey) human towers, the castells, that balance small children precariously on their top.

  Catalan politicians, however, have sponsored some quite absurd attempts to create a distinctive Catalan culture. Pujol made this – along with language and history – one of the main battlegrounds of Catalan nationalism. The rules set for his functionaries in the Palau Moja were simple. There was money for things in Catalan. There was relatively little, or no, money for things that were not. Half the population, which naturally did things in Castilian, was out of the loop. Catalonia has some interesting theatre, but quality, critics complained, was not always a criterion when handing out funding. The policy reached its most absurd when El Tricicle, a group of comic mime artists, presented a short film for the National Film Awards of the Generalitat. They were told, however, that their wordless film did not qualify. The reason was simple. The silent movie’s title, Quien mal anda, mal acaba, was in castellano.

  As culture in Catalan frequently depended on financing from the Catalan state, those on the receiving end were careful not to bite the hand that fed them. Catalan nationalism, as a subject, was, therefore, taboo. In the theatre world, there was one shining exception – Albert Boadella’s Els Joglars. Boadella was quick to turn his attention to the new holy cows of Catalonia. Nationalism had built him a whole new set. They were waiting to be knocked down like fairground coconuts. The chief holy cow was Pujol himself.

  Pujol embodies the view many Catalans had fashioned of themselves after Franco’s death. He was a proven anti-Francoist – having been jailed for two years for his involvement with a group of people who stood up and sang Els Segadors at Barcelona’s magnificent modernist concert hall, El Palau de la Música Catalana. He was a Catholic conservative. He was also a banker. A man who understands money is admired in Catalonia. ‘La pela és la pela’, ‘Money is money’, is one common local saying. A Catalan-language poet, the Majorcan Anselm Turmeda, wrote an eloquent ode to cash in his fifteenth-century ‘Elogi de Diners’ (‘In Praise of Money’) which ends: ‘Diners, doncs, vulles aplegar./Si els pots haver no els lleixs anar:/si molts n’hauràs poràs tornar/ papa de Rom’, ‘So you must get money!/If you get it, don’t let it go!/If you have lots, you can become/the Pope in Rome.’ The Borgias had almost certainly read that one.

  Pujol was a formidable politician. He was, in fact, too good. Over his quarter-century in charge he became Catalonia, and Catalonia became him. He was referred to simply as ‘el President’. He added a few Napoleonic touches of his own. He insisted, for example, that journalists stood for him when he arrived – usually late – for his press conferences. He sent self-interviews to Barcelona newspapers – questions and answers by Jordi Pujol. Worse still, these would be printed.

  There was a rationale behind this self-grandeur. Pujol was building, or rebuilding, a nation. The nation needed national symbols. One of those symbols was el President. By this logic, Pujol turned himself into a symbol of Catalonia. ‘When seeing him in action it is impossible not to recall De Gaulle’s ‘La France, c’est moi’, the Irish–Spanish writer Ian Gibson said.

  An Els Joglars show inspired by Alfred Jarry’s Ubú Roi, called President Ubú, saw Pujol and his wife pilloried mercilessly. The Pujol offered up by Boadella was, according to one critic, not just maniacally
ambitious and money-grabbing but also showed ‘homicidal tendencies, a double personality and delusions of grandeur’. Boadella did not bite his tongue when explaining his vision: ‘Ubú Excels [Pujol’s alter ego] invades our privacy daily, recriminating, advising, threatening, moralising and laying down the law … explaining even how we Catalans have to urinate,’ he said. His punishment included a long-running, if undeclared, veto on Els Joglars by Catalonia’s television and its national theatre house. Culture, once more, was wielded as a political weapon. It still is, even without Pujol in power. When Catalonia was invited to exhibit at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2005, the Generalitat said it would concentrate on those who wrote in Catalan – though many of Catalonia’s best writers do not. The new regional government that made that decision is headed by a Socialist, Pasqual Maragall, who has also shown some strong catalanista tendencies – and is allied with a separatist party, Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya.

  There is a terrible ambiguity to Pujol and his nationalists. They proclaim Catalonia to be a nation. They want to ‘desenvolupar la plena sobirania nacional’, ‘develop full national sovereignty’. They deny, however, having separatist ambitions. But, they add, who knows what the future will bring? In practice, Pujol’s nationalists have turned to an age-old Catalan tradition – pactisme, dealmaking. Catalonia’s burgesía has been striking deals for centuries. Barcelona, after all, was a major Mediterranean trading city when Madrid was little more than a large village.

  Catalan nationalism is still the strongest political force, even though a coalition of other parties currently keeps it out of power. It has always been determined to maintain its seny, to be moderate and sensible. On several occasions Pujol’s party has held the balance of power in the Madrid parliament, Las Cortes. It has never used it to destabilise or drive extravagant bargains. It has propped up both left and right. It has, however, always made sure it walked away with a bit more power. The result, as he himself admits, is that ‘not once over the past three hundred years have we, continuously, enjoyed such a degree of political power’.