Ghosts of Spain Page 47

  Picaud promised pilgrims ‘absence of vice, mortification of the body, increase of virtue, forgiveness of sins, penitence … distancing from Hell and the protection of the Heavens’.

  He also warned however, that you needed a strong stomach to make it to Santiago de Compostela. ‘Whether it be the fish which are so vulgarly called barbel or that which the Poitvins call the Alose (shad) … in no part of Spain nor in Galicia should you eat them, for without any doubt you will die soon afterwards or fall ill.’

  A sixteenth-century British traveller, Andrew Boorde, agreed that mortification of the body was fully guaranteed. ‘I assure all the world that I had rather go five times to Rome out of England, than one to Compostella; by water it is no pain, but by land it is the greatest journey that one Englishman can go on,’ he wrote.

  When George Borrow came here in 1833, with the Carlist wars raging, his descriptions of living conditions could have come from the era of the castros. ‘Roofs were thatched, dark and moist, and not infrequently covered with rank vegetation. There were dunghills before the doors, and no lack of pools and puddles. Immense swine were stalking about, intermingled with naked children. The interior of the cabins corresponded with their external appearance: they were filled with filth and misery.’

  By that stage, the camino was in serious decline. St James’s miraculous bones had been lost some two hundred and fifty years earlier, apparently after being hidden out of fear that English pirates would get them. The Black Death, Protestantism and local warfare nearly killed the camino off. In 1867 only forty pilgrims could be found in the city on St James’s Day. The bones were found again in 1878 and a papal bull was issued to state that they were genuine. They now sit in a silver urn under the high altar.

  As the number of pilgrims dwindled, the first cultural tourists arrived. The Victorians fell so in love with the Pórtico de la Gloria, the twelfth-century facade sculpted by Master Mateo, that a cast was made for what was then the South Kensington Museum, now the Victoria and Albert. John Charles Robinson, sent to write a report on it, compared it to Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel. ‘I have no hesitation in stating that I consider it incomparably the most important monument of sculpture and ornamental detail of its epoch,’ he said.

  The Pórtico had become part of the inside of the cathedral when a new, baroque and infinitely inferior facade was built in the eighteenth century. Richard Ford, visiting in the mid-nineteenth century, complained that Master Mateo’s work had been disfigured. ‘The vulgar hand of some local house painter has bedaubed the central figure of Christ, and painted the countenances of several apostles, so as to give them the appearance of purblind wooden dolls,’ he wrote. Master Mateo, who immodestly placed a statue of himself at the base of one column, is now revered almost as much as Santiago. Pilgrims queue up to rub foreheads with him, hoping his genius will be passed on.

  Tourist board planning, cheap pilgrims’ hostels and New Age esoteric superstition have, once more, made the pilgrimage a phenomenon of the masses. The routes to Santiago now fill every summer with backpackers who have replaced the traditional pilgrim’s scallop shell and drinking gourd with the modern fetish objects of eco-tourism: Goretex, Timberland, mountain bikes, mobile phones and GPS navigation devices. In Holy Years the city is inundated with the curious and the pious. The cathedral fills, cash tills ring, coins drop into the hats put out by bagpiping buskers and everyone, it seems, is happy. Numbers have increased twenty-fold over the past fifteen years. More than 70,000 people a year now pick up the sheet of paper in Latin, the ‘Compostela’, from the cathedral’s Pilgrim’s Office to show they have slogged along the obligatory 100 km of camino. In the Middle Ages they would have gone on to Finisterre to marvel at the end of the world. Now they head for the souvenir shops and Santiago airport.

  Over the past decade a new sort of people have been arriving in Galicia, this time to stay. A trickle of younger emigrantes, or their children, are coming home. The reason for their return sits on an ugly industrial estate at Arteixo, near La Coruña. Here, under the roofs of a network of uninviting, cavernous modern buildings, clothes for more than 2,500 fashion shops in fifty-six countries move along 120 miles of rails. This, some say, is where the future of Galicia is being built.

  It is known by the unexciting name of Inditex. It is the personal empire of one man, a reclusive Galician billionaire called Amancio Ortega. For years Ortega was remarkable for two things: he was Spain’s richest man; and nobody had ever seen a photograph of him. His employees knew him well. He would wander the ever-expanding shop floor in his shirtsleeves and eat in the company canteen. But no photographer ever got close to him.

  Media paranoia and, some claimed, fear of kidnap, kept him a faceless mystery. Spaniards, meanwhile, found that they were all wearing his clothes, bought from store chains with names like Zara, Massimo Dutti, Stradivarius and Bershka. His photographic coming out did not happen until, as he prepared to float shares on the Madrid stock exchange, a passport-sized picture appeared in the 1999 Inditex accounts.

  For such a historic photograph, it was unremarkable. Amancio Ortega refused to don a tie. With his jowly face, stout build and receding grey hair, he looked like an average, small-town Galician businessman. Only his unseasonal tan spoke of a man worth, at the time, 4 billion pounds – more, according to Forbes magazine, than anybody in Britain. He remains one of the half-dozen richest people in western Europe and one of the forty richest in the world. That is good going for a man who started out, at thirteen, as a shirt-maker’s delivery boy in La Coruña. He learnt to cut and design clothes in his sister’s dining room. His first sales hits, when he branched out on his own, were housecoats and dressing gowns.

  Ortega’s favourite spot is said to be the womenswear design section of Zara. His eye is obviously good. Even most French Vogue readers admit to shopping regularly in Zara – paying a fraction of the price they might pay for clothes elsewhere.

  Ortega employs some 45,000 people. Much of his sewing is still done by seamstress co-operatives spread throughout rural Galicia and northern Portugal. One of the secrets of his success, indeed, is that so many Galician women can sew.

  Rivals use words like ‘innovative’ and ‘devastating’ to describe Ortega’s impact on global fashion retailing. His secret, developed over the past thirty years, is simple. Zara, the flagship that turns in the bulk of sales, has some two hundred designers. New models can get from the drawing board to the shop in two weeks. It allows a lightning response to fickle fashion tastes the world over. They call it ‘live fashion’, and churn out 10,000 new Zara models a year. Customers are treated like political focus groups, their tastes minutely monitored and instantly responded to.

  There is no brash self-promotion and no fashion posturing. Ortega does not give interviews. He does not even advertise. Instead he bombards shops with new styles, dropping ones that do not sell and mass-producing ones that do. Advertising, he believes, is a pointless distraction. When a famous Spanish actress asked to do a photo shoot in one of his shops, Ortega said no. ‘You haven’t got the idea yet have you?’ he told the newly appointed executive who suggested it would be good for the Zara name. It seems somehow appropriate that a Galician, and one so suspicious of showing off, should have so thoroughly punctured the mystique of fashion.

  Ortega, in his faceless way, is the symbol of new Galicia. Somehow, he still fits alongside the old superstitious Galicia of the coffin-occupiers at Santa Marta de Ribarteme. Perhaps it is because Ortega, in his secrecy, seems just as superstitious and mistrustful as a Galician peasant queuing up with his exvoto. Or, maybe, Ortega’s silence is just retranca, a good-humoured attempt to confuse those who try to read the Galician soul.

  Ortega’s clothes are becoming the new face not just of Galicia, but of Spain itself. In the new world of globalisation, he is Spain’s first global conquistador. His self-effacing, hard-working, innovative manner, however, does not fit the image we foreigners have built for Spaniards.

 
Mention Spain, indeed, and most people prefer to think of the loud, the extravagant and the colourful. Another modern Spaniard who has triumphed around the globe fits that image much better. Oscar-winning director Pedro Almodóvar has filled cinema screens around the world with kitsch colours, outlandish characters and – though often in a subversive form – the traditional icons of Spain. It is a story that is best started, as the opening line of Don Quixote says, ‘In a village of La Mancha …’

  13

  Moderns and Ruins

  At the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles, California, it was 5 o’clock in the afternoon but in Calzada de Calatrava, a large farming village on the parched, red-soiled plain of La Mancha, it was already 2 o’clock in the morning. The only living beasts visible in the streets were the cats, busy shredding bin bags and scattering the contents across the pavements. Candles burnt at the shrine in the hermitage of Saint Isidore, lit by elderly women seeking divine support for the village’s favourite son – film director Pedro Almodóvar.

  Apart from that, the only sign of life – as the director competed for two Oscars with his film Talk to Her – was in the Círculo Agrícola, the village’s faded, if spacious, Farmers’ Club. The hat racks and polished table legs suggested this had once been the smart place to be seen in Calzada de Calatrava. Here in the public saloon where, as a boy, Almodóvar saw his first films, some forty of us had gathered to watch the ceremony. On one wall, under a vast black-and-white picture of the nearby castle where an order of medieval knights was founded, a screen had been set up. The television picture from Los Angeles was projected onto the screen, but the words being said were lost in the disastrous acoustics of the room.

  We were a mixture of the young, the elderly, the curious and the drunk. Sleepily, we awaited the moment, three hours later, when the Oscar winner would be announced. A victory for Almodóvar in either of the mainstream categories for which he had been nominated (as best director or for the best original screenplay) would be the first ever of its kind for a Spanish film – and a rare tribute to a foreign-language director. His double candidacy was further proof that Almodóvar had become Spain’s new face to the world. From Hollywood to the art-house cinemas of Europe, his sometimes kitsch, often camp and almost always subversive take on Spanish life and mores was the colour-drenched new facade of the country.

  His message is taken seriously. In 2005, Time magazine declared Talk to Her to be the film of the decade (so far). ‘At its simplest level, this transgressively witty film is about how a hospital orderly’s sexual obsession achieves the unlikely awakening of a comatose woman. But there’s actually nothing simple about this lovely, lightly dancing film’s reflections on all the big topics: life, death, dreams – and ballet,’ Time’s critics declared.

  As the night wore on, the drunks got drunker and the rest of us got sleepier. Spaniards are generally good at holding their alcohol – they are not given to the binge-drinking, falling-over nights out of northern Europeans. Tonight, however, one or two were well over the top. One of these – another medical orderly – had decided I should be his new friend. He drew up a plastic chair and leaned over at me, his head almost resting on my shoulder. ‘We should go to the hills of the Sierra Morena to watch the sun go up,’ he suggested. ‘We can take some pork sausage with us.’

  Spaniards, wherever they are, know how to stay up late. Village fiestas always last until the small hours of the morning. On fiesta nights children scamper around the streets until they drop. As the night goes on they can be seen asleep on public benches or in their parents’ arms. Spaniards have a special verb for seeing the night through until the sun rises: trasnochar, literally to cross the night. It has been a point of pride amongst my friends to occasionally link night with day and arrive at the office without having slept. An even greater point of pride is that nobody at the office should notice. In playful Andalucía, meanwhile, a decent juerga can sometimes be measured in days. Siestas, sadly, are largely a thing of the past (except where it is too hot to work in the early afternoon). It is still a mystery to me how so many Spaniards can function on so little sleep.

  In Calzada de Calatrava a brave few were trying to uphold the tradition of Spanish nocturnal staying-power. The local florist, a small, formal man, recalled how Almodóvar used to come and play at his house as a boy. He was always ‘a bit special’, he said. ‘As a boy he stood out, all right. He would do things that other people didn’t do. If he thought people were ignoring him he would do some mischief to get our attention,’ he remembered. He was about to tell me a tale of some prank involving his chickens when his wife clamped a hand on his knee to shut him up. Discretion was being called for. The village’s most famous son should not be spoken of badly. Apart from that, however, few people could remember anything very much about him. He had moved away as a child and now made only occasional family visits to the old family house. His parents’ graves, however, were here. Calzada de Calatrava, as Almodóvar’s brother once put it, ‘is the sort of place where people spend their whole life saving for a decent headstone in the cemetery’.

  Sitting in a moulded plastic chair for three hours, there was plenty of time to reflect on a simple conundrum. How is it that the arch-proponent of modernity in Spanish culture – a man who has triumphed around the globe – should come from such a sleepy, backward, dry and barren cultural void? The answer became apparent well before Almodóvar lifted his ‘best original screenplay’ statuette above his head shortly after 5 a.m. It was that one would do anything to escape a place like this. If ever there was a case for throwing out the old and bringing in the new, this was it.

  The party folded soon after Almodóvar had lifted his statuette. I went out into the street in front of the Círculo Agrícola. Anastasio, one of the one-man-band cultural animators who are the saving grace of places like this, was rummaging around in his car boot. He pulled out three fireworks – large rockets. He lit them one by one, there in the street. They exploded above the sleeping pueblo. There were three loud bangs. I expected half of the 5,000 inhabitants to appear shouting – in anger or joy – on their balconies. Nothing, however, stirred. One newspaper reported ‘great festivities’ in Calzada de Calatrava. It obviously had not been there.

  Almodóvar’s first films – with their kitsch ‘new wave’ costumes, electric colours, complex sexual relationships and relentless drug-taking – were all a reaction to this drab, hard environment. ‘It was the kind of harsh place where nobody understood sensuality, the joy of life or even the idea of colour,’ Almodóvar once explained. His mother, who plays small roles in some of his films, wore black – the once obligatory colour of mourning – for twenty years as a young woman. ‘Perhaps that is why there is so much colour in my films,’ he said. Trips to the cinema were liable to be cut short by paternal disapproval. Almodóvar’s father, who traded goods off the back of a mule, would order them out if anything too risqué appeared on screen. A family outing to see War and Peace ended after the second kiss.

  ‘I was not born in the right family, in the right town, in the right language or in the right moment to make movies … It’s like dreaming of being a bullfighter when you’re born in Japan or England,’ he once explained.

  His pueblo upbringing, however, shaped Almodóvar’s future. ‘It allowed me to discover what I didn’t want to be, the mentality I didn’t want to live with.’

  When Spaniards want to refer to something, or someone, as backward, they often say they are ‘de pueblo’, ‘from the village’. Village life means old-fashioned values, hardship and lack of education. It also means the suffocating atmosphere and intense rivalries of a place where everybody watches everybody else. The pueblo is one of those things that not just Almodóvar, but Spain as a whole, in its headlong rush into modernity, has been desperate to leave behind. His early films, the writer Maruja Torres said, represented exactly that. ‘It is a synthesis of what we want to leave behind, and what we want to have,’ she said.

  Flight from the countryside has been
the biggest revolution in Spanish life over the past century. Hundreds of villages have, in fact, been abandoned altogether. Many more have just one or two families left in them. The killer blow has often been provided by electricity at a neighbouring village. That has been enough to force out the last few residents of those places it had not got to – who have gone and plugged themselves into the grid at the other village.

  The process of decline is all too familiar. First the young families go, then the primary school closes. This is followed soon after by the shop and – the death blow – the bar. Mayors in some remote rural communities have started importing Latin American immigrants in an attempt to stop themselves disappearing off the map. They have paid for whole families to fly from, say, Argentina to underpopulated Teruel. Some one hundred villages most under threat – mainly in rural Galicia, the highlands of Valencia, the bleak, harsh Maestrazgo hills of Teruel, or the slopes of the Pyrenees mountains in Huesca – have even formed a club to seek new occupants from abroad. It has meant reversing the time-worn flow of Spaniards towards Latin America that started in the sixteenth century.

  The pueblo is the old world. The city is the new. And, for most Spaniards, new is infinitely better than old. This is something that is obvious in a hundred small things – a virtual absence of second-hand shops, for instance, or the rarity of old cars. Nowhere is it more patent, however, than in architecture. Here great new things are being built – and great old things are left to crumble.

  Ask famous international architects like Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Richard Meier, Frank Gehry or Arata Isozaki where the best place in Europe to build exciting new buildings is, and the answer will most likely be: ‘Spain’. A vast amount of, mainly public, money has been poured into giving the international gods of architecture spectacular new contracts for spectacular new buildings across the land.