They said the food in Burgos was so rich it could ‘wake up a dead man’. The main square, pressing against the Gothic cathedral, was filled with bars to accommodate the visiting crowds – sandal-wearing pilgrims, mostly, making their way towards Santiago with uniform staffs, sun hats and expressions of holiness. It was very picturesque, the needle-sharp towers of the temple rising up into a cloudless sky, quaint postcard views in almost every direction. I headed out and away from the centre down the side streets looking for a place to eat. Crossing the Arlanzón, an uncannily clean river for one that flowed through a city, I found a grimy café down a blind alley and immediately walked in: when in unfamiliar Spanish towns in the past, a general policy of making for the busiest and dirtiest workers’ bar had usually served me well. Beer crates had been left in the entrance and I had to climb over them to get in, but I was quickly greeted by a joyous smell of frying garlic and sour smoke filled my nostrils. The place was packed and the television was yelling from the corner. I found a free chair at the side of a shared table and sat down. A woman with greasy dyed-blond hair who had her back to me turned round and smiled, revealing black stains like caves between each yellowed tooth.
The bar was a dark cramped space with walls painted in odd colours – one blue, another purple, another brown – while miniature imitation street-lamps stood at angles in the corners as though they were about to fall down. Behind my back, a chimney stack had been covered in shiny ‘brick-look’ wallpaper. Down some steps at the back, underneath a minstrels’ gallery, was a kitchen, from which steam and fatty odours wafted up and mingled with the nicotine and hot breath of the customers. Behind the bar stood a body builder looking like a model for Action Man, with protruding forehead and tight hips. There was so much bulk on his upper arms and chest it was a wonder how he could even turn round amid all the bottles and trays of food, but somehow he managed to slip through, wiping his hands on the dark-blue cloth sticking out of his front trouser pocket. Down in the kitchen, what looked like his mother and sister were clad in white aprons, their hair wrapped up in nets. I looked over towards the metal bar and the plates of food warming under the glass: boar stew, tigres – stuffed mussels, Burgos-style black pudding packed with rice, and sopa castellano – stomach-lining garlic and chorizo soup with egg. A few tapas and some warming red wine and I would feel like new.
Burgos was a surprisingly small place for somewhere that called itself a city. It had barely spread out from the constraints of its medieval limits and felt very much like a provincial town. Which is all it would have been had it not been home to one of Spain’s most important Gothic cathedrals, a major stop-over point on the route to Compostela, and the capital of old Castile – the county, later a kingdom, which had so dominated the Iberian peninsula over the past thousand years. During the Civil War Burgos had also been a centre of the Nationalist campaign and, during the latter part of the conflict, Franco’s headquarters. Few places symbolized better the tenets of the reactionary movement of which the Generalísimo was the head, being both devoutly Catholic and strongly centralist – insisting on all power in Spain being concentrated in Madrid to the detriment of the regions. It had been the polar opposite of anarchist-controlled Barcelona, which during the war followed a pattern well established throughout Spanish history of trying to break away or gain greater autonomy, only to be forced back into uneasy matrimony with the rest of the country. Spain had always been a patchwork of a place, divided by the Romans and later by the Moors, and seemed to swing every so often between breaking apart completely and being held together by force, as though two opposing laws of nature were battling it out over the centuries for the identity of the country. Whenever anything less than an authoritarian regime was in power in Madrid, the regions, particularly Catalonia and the Basque Country, began pushing for independence. This had been the case in the years of the Republic leading up to the Civil War and was a major factor in the start of the conflict, and today similar moves were being made under Spain’s new democracy. Whereas in the past these tendencies had been stamped out mercilessly, it looked as though this time they might get somewhere. The age-old tension at the heart of Spain, which served to give the country a certain dynamism, was flaring up again.
But the threat of violence was still alive, too. The president of the northwestern region of Galicia, Manuel Fraga, a former propaganda minister under Franco who was still going strong in his eighties, had reminded the armed forces only months before that they had a duty to defend the unity of Spain under the modern democratic constitution. It seemed very old-fashioned language in the early twenty-first century, but it struck a strong chord with some. The newspapers had recently reported how a colonel in the army had been arrested for circulating ‘coupist’ literature on the Ministry of Defence intranet, calling on the military in the name of God not to stand idly by while the country was broken up in front of their eyes. The danger of Spain splitting into several smaller states still, today, had the potential to cause certain sectors of society to turn to violent preventative measures. Occasionally the spirit of Franco seemed alive and well.
All eyes were turned towards the television set, so I looked over to see what people were watching. A football match was under way and not a soul was aware of anything else. Even the barman had his eyes fixed on the match, filling the glasses on the counter in front of him by intuition. The blonde woman by my side was jumping up and down in her seat as events unfolded on the screen, while a man on the other side of our tiny table breathed out smoke through flared nostrils. He had the air of an actor: lean, with well-defined features, a large Adam’s apple, short-cropped grey hair and a straight back. He seemed to be the intellectual of the group, making studied, informed comments on what was happening on the pitch in a heavy, slow voice. The others murmured in agreement when he spoke.
‘Who’s playing?’ I asked.
The woman turned and smiled again. ‘It’s Barcelona– Madrid,’ she said, before turning back to watch.
I squinted up at the screen, making out the familiar blue-and-red and white strips of the famous football rivals. A noise like a building collapsing was coming from the speakers. I tried to make out if there was any indication of the score.
‘It’s a draw at the moment,’ the woman said. ‘I’m Paula, by the way.’ And she leaned over briefly to kiss me on the cheeks before taking her place once again. I was used to Spaniards being friendly and affectionate at unexpected moments, but this was exceptional. I put it down to the excitement of the game. From the other side of the table the football expert signalled to the barman and pointed in my direction: I was without food or drink and needed attending to.
I appreciated the gesture and began wondering what I would order. The morcilla looked good, as did the soup. I was starving and needed a good meal to lift my spirits. I had spent weeks on my own now. Salud was still touring around Europe, and on the few occasions when she’d managed to call me I’d either not had coverage for my phone or else the batteries had run out. Our inability to talk in this age of communications was almost comical. Now I wanted to feed off the energy and warmth of the atmosphere I’d unexpectedly found in the bar. Until I felt Paula’s face pressed against mine, and picked up the smell of her day-old perfume, I’d forgotten how good it was to have some company.
Up on the television something had happened to stir up passions in the bar. One man near the front was on his feet and shaking his fist at the screen, while his companions jeered and swore.
‘It’s the same problem as always,’ the expert said. ‘Weakness on the left.’
The energy that a Real Madrid–Barcelona football match produced in Spain was extraordinary. Most fans across the country would support a local team, but would then always take sides when the great clash of the season came up between these two most important clubs. Betis or Deportivo might ordinarily be the object of their devotion, but on that day almost every Spaniard was either del Madrid or del Barça. Whereas in the past the Spanish had fought battles over whether the country was a single nation or a collection of nations, now the ancient conflict was played out by twenty-two men manipulating a leather sphere with their feet. It wasn’t just a football match – the very tectonic plates that had moved under Spain throughout its history were at the heart of it. Real Madrid represented centralism, Barcelona the aspirations of the regions.
Franco had recognized this and had cannily poured huge amounts of money into the Madrid side during his dictatorship. A victory for the men in white was a victory for the regime, and the Madrid team was used for propaganda purposes as a symbol of all that was good about a centralized, unified country. A Barcelona win, on the other hand, was a poke in the eye – the only non-lethal form of opposition to Franco under his brutal rule. Needless to say, all attempts were made to prevent Madrid from losing. In 1943, during the semi-finals for the King’s Cup, the major tournament in Spanish football, Barcelona went on to lose the second leg against Madrid 11–1, having won the first round 3–0. The only apparent explanation for the Barça players’ sudden drop in form was a visit to their dressing room before the second match by Franco’s head of state security. Threats were made, and the azulgranos – the ‘red and blues’ – duly handed the match over to their rivals by a score line that has never been matched since.15 Some say it was Franco himself who paid a visit to the dressing room.
I looked around the bar and quickly realized that this was solid Real Madrid territory. I hardly expected anything less. Burgos, the birthplace of Castile, was centralist to the core. The Basque Country was only a few miles away to the north. A couple of days earlier, a woman kidnapped by the Basque terror group ETA had been found tied up in a car in an abandoned village not far from the city. Drunken revellers, looking for a late-night party venue, had stumbled upon her in the dark and been able to set her free, but the event was still all over the papers, serving as a reminder of the violence which still marred the division at the heart of the Spanish state. Hatred ran deep.
Back home in Valencia, the Basque problem seemed distant and only ever touched us when the gunmen brought their violence to the coasts to damage the tourism industry, bring attention to their ‘cause’ and leave broken bodies and lives in their wake. Here we were close to the front line: Burgos was the symbol of old Castile, the dominating centre of the country; Vitoria, the Basque capital with its ancient traditions and culture and language, was only an hour’s drive away to the northeast. Attempts had been made to place Euskera – the Basque tongue – on pretty much every branch of the world’s linguistic family tree, but without success. It was a thing apart, an icon of Basque otherness. Not all Basques wanted to break with Spain, but a committed, violent minority certainly did.
The problem was that for the last years of Franco’s life, ETA had been the only real effective military group fighting against the dictatorship. The communists and other organizations from the Civil War had tried to continue the struggle in one form or another after defeat in 1939, but by the early 1950s had disappeared. The emergence of the armed Basque separatists in the 1960s was a new challenge for Franco, and one which managed to cause him much damage. Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco was the Generalísimo’s right-hand man and prime minister during the latter years, and his appointed successor. In the early 1970s it was clear that Franco wouldn’t be around for much longer; Carrero Blanco was due to step into his shoes to ensure his legacy and continued authoritarian rule. It was ETA that put a stop to this plan, blowing the admiral up in the centre of Madrid in 1973 with a bomb so powerful his car flew a hundred feet into the air and over the roof of the building it was parked next to. Opponents of Franco were so jubilant they even composed a song about the historic event.
But despite seriously hurting the dictatorship, ETA proved it was no friend to democracy once Franco died and a constitutional monarchy was put in place in the late 1970s. In response to a general amnesty when all political prisoners were released, the group embarked on the most violent period of its campaign, staining the newborn state with the blood of hundreds of its victims, demanding nothing less than full independence for the Basque Country. Ever since, a low-level warfare had continued, sometimes the authorities, sometimes the gunmen gaining the upper hand. During the Civil War, the Basque Country had gained a large degree of autonomy, only to be ruthlessly crushed and forced back into the Spanish fold, much as Catalonia had been. But whereas the Madrid–Barcelona rivalry was today mostly restricted to football and politics, blood still flowed from the Basque wound.
What struck me as most curious about the issue of regional tensions within Spain, though, was how vehement the arguments were for the country to stay as one, and the anger and loathing you found towards Basques and Catalans among many Castilian Spaniards. From the way you heard them talk sometimes, jumping up and down and swearing about Catalonia this or Euskadi that, you had the sense of an intransigent husband determined to punish an unfaithful wife he couldn’t stand. Divorce was out of the question: he must make her suffer and stay with him by force.
Yet despite my feeling that each party should be allowed to go its separate way if it so wished, I was glad that Spain was still a united, if squabbling, family. It was the very richness of the place, the pluralism and diversity of its cultures, languages and peoples, that made it such a vast and fascinating country. Break it up and its regions would lose the special quality that made Spain greater than the sum of its parts.
The V-shaped barman twisted past the other customers to our table to take my order. Looking back up at the television as I decided what to have, it occurred to me that it was a very odd time of year for there to be a match on. We were in the middle of summer. The football season was over. Yet this was no B-team warm-up game or friendly during the holidays. The main players were all there, the stars of each team, and passions were running so high that nothing short of the eventual outcome of the League seemed to be at stake. It was only then that I realized it was a replay – a way of filling air time during the hot lowaudience months, and of giving starving fans a fix before the new season started. This match had already been played, won and lost several months ago, yet people were screaming and shouting at the screen as though it were happening live, now.
‘Why are you watching this match?’ I asked the barman with a laugh as he scribbled my order. ‘You must already know the result.’
Without moving his head up from his notebook he gave me a look.
‘Who won?’ I said, the smile draining from my face.
He turned on his heel and walked away. I wondered if he hadn’t heard me over the cheering and shouting. But the severity of his expression suggested otherwise. This was a hard-core football bar. It was not an opportune moment to play the innocent, however inadvertently.
I turned back to the table in time to catch Paula and the expert exchanging a look and I felt the rattling of shutters being pulled down. Breaking away from the table at half-time, I headed up the stairs of the minstrels’ gallery above the kitchen to the loo, ducking my head under a low beam and trying not to scrape a Real Madrid team poster off the wall as I squeezed round a tight corner to close the door behind me. As I pissed I heard shouts and mocking laughter coming from the bar. I was surprised no one else was using this opportunity to empty their bladders before the second half. Perhaps they were frightened of missing something. But what?
Back at the table I noticed the expert had moved his chair away, closer to the others, leaving me on my own with Paula. She looked up momentarily as I sat down, but this time she didn’t smile. Neither my food nor the beer I had ordered had appeared. I was beginning to feel light-headed from hunger.
‘Who do you support?’ Paula asked me seriously once I was back in my place. She was sucking hard on a cigarette with thick red-painted lips, bony knotted fingers ringed with bright-gold bands. The veins under her tanned skin bulged a dirty blue, while her white blouse pulled tightly over her breasts.
‘No one. I just enjoy a good game.’
‘What?’ she said, smoke streaming out of her mouth.
‘Really,’ I began earnestly. ‘I don’t care. It’s good entertainment whoever wins.’ Very slowly the particles cleared in the unmoving air of the bar. Her eyes were fixed on me yet she seemed to be looking elsewhere.
‘It’s just a game, right?’
What failed to register at that moment was that I was not talking to an ordinary human being as such, but a football fan, and one caught up in the climax of her hit. Only one language would make sense to her at that moment and I was not speaking it. How could I not support one of the teams? It was either Madrid or Barcelona. Nothing else existed.
‘You’re foreign, right?’ she said finally. That was it, the only explanation she could deal with. And she drew again on her cigarette before turning her back on me to stare once more at the screen. The barman came over and handed her another drink. I tried to catch his eye and remind him I was still waiting, but failed, with the shrinking feeling of being deliberately ignored. From an unexpected outsider welcomed to the party, I was becoming an undesirable element in their midst.
The second half of the match began and I sat back to watch. This time the women from the kitchen stopped cooking and came up to see the action for themselves, their hands stuffed in the front pockets of their smeared aprons. Within seconds of the game restarting, though, disaster struck and Barcelona scored. A noise like a whirling, screaming high-pitched wind filled the bar, men and women covering their faces in shock and pain. The man who had earlier shaken his fist at the television was standing again and bellowing until his cheeks flushed purple and his eyes bulged. Obscenity after obscenity was hurled at the opposing side.
I shit on your father! I shit on your fucking mother! I shit on God!
The expert, too, was enraged, leaping up from his chair and pounding his fist into his hand. Yet the constraints of his position as intellectual of the group hindered any venomous outpouring. You felt he wanted to react just like the others, but couldn’t allow himself to speak in such low terms. Finally he could contain himself no more and cried out above the din, ‘Hermaphrodite!’
The others fell silent and looked at him. What the hell was that?
‘Sexually inadequate pervert!’ the expert screamed again.
There was a groan of gradual understanding. All eyes shifted back to the television and the images of the celebrating goal-scorer, now the object of so much hate in this distant Burgos bar. Paula said nothing and simply stared at the screen, motionless. I could only marvel at how something that had already taken place, and of which everyone knew the result, could arouse such strong passions. But for the people around me, at least, it was as if they were watching the match for the very first time.
Looking away from the television, I tried to catch the barman’s eye once more, but he stared resolutely at the screen in a way that seemed to suggest he wanted nothing to do with me. One of the women from the kitchen, though, the younger of the two, saw me looking and signalled to me that she would bring my order in a few minutes. I smiled and thanked her, my stomach already rumbling at the thought of tucking into something hot and flavoursome. A drink would also be welcome, but it looked like I was going to have to wait a bit longer.
As the hubbub after the goal started to die down, the expert began to speak. Paula shifted her chair away from the table to hear him.
‘The trouble is lack of commitment,’ I heard him say. ‘These players don’t live and breathe Real Madrid. They’re pampered and spoilt so they don’t care. It’s not in their blood.’
The usual murmurs of approval and understanding came from the others.
‘Too many foreigners in the team, for example,’ the expert went on. ‘They cannot understand what this is all about. You spend millions bringing good players into the side, but what happens? This. A Barcelona match is just another pay day for them, win or lose. For us it’s life or death.’
Everyone nodded in silent agreement.
‘I blame the foreigners,’ the expert concluded. ‘Get rid of them.’
There was a cheer of assent and inwardly I groaned. I was being excluded from the group. But I had food coming and was hungry: I decided to sit tight.
The match restarted, Madrid trying hard to score an equalizer but failing. Finally a movement on the far side of the room caught my eye and I saw the young woman from the kitchen coming towards me with a bowl of soup and some bread. She placed them down in front of me, the smell of garlic and spicy chorizo rising up with the steam into my face. Although it was boiling hot outside, the air conditioning was on full blast in the bar and I was beginning to feel a slight chill.
Picking up a piece of bread, I was just about to dip it in the soup when the barman appeared from behind and lunged his thick arm down to grab the side of the bowl.
‘That’s not your order,’ he said sharply. And before I could say anything he had lifted the offending article away from me and was carrying it back to the kitchen, scolding the girl as he did so. Perplexed, I stared at the one small piece of bread in my hand that I’d been left with.
The football match continued ever more frustratingly for the Madrid supporters as their team struggled but failed again and again to equalize. Then, in the dying minutes of the game, Barcelona scored once more and defeat was assured.
Real Madrid had lost. Just as they had when this match had originally taken place. Nothing had changed. For the people in the bar, though, the disappointment was as intense as it had been the first time.
From the counter the barman held out the remote control and with a flick of the wrist switched the television off, leaving a momentary hiatus in the noise level. People began to lift themselves from their seats. Perhaps, I thought, now that it’s over I might get my food. The customers started to leave, pushing their chairs back with a scrape on the ash-stained floor, barely bothering to say goodbye to their friends and companions, too depressed even to nod or smile. A few looks were cast in my direction as they plodded out, twisting past the crates of beer still blocking the entrance. I averted my eyes, sensing that in some way I was being blamed for their team’s defeat. A non-supporter was in their midst: the fault was mine.
Among the last to go were Paula and the expert. After their initial warmth to me, I simply didn’t exist any more. Fair enough, I thought – I’d only come in looking for a bite to eat. Friendly company – albeit brief – had been a bonus. But as they got up, a half-empty beer bottle sitting on the edge of the table went tumbling over, spilling its contents on to the table and over my lap. Jumping up, I started wiping myself down, reaching for the thin paper serviettes Spanish bars keep in plastic boxes on the tables. I looked up, expecting the incident to produce some kind of final interchange between us, but they simply walked away. No word of apology or regret. I watched them pass out of the door and into the street, then turn and head off in opposite directions. I was on my own. The bar was deserted.
‘Come on, we’re closing.’
The barman came over with a cloth and started wiping up the spilt beer, making me feel as if I was the one responsible for giving him this extra work.
I thought for a second about remonstrating, asking for my food finally to be brought to me, but decided against it. I was being pushed out – that was it. I would gain nothing but more hostility and perhaps the ignominy of being physically ejected. I picked up my beer-stained bag and walked to the door. The lights were already off, and the barman was hurriedly placing chairs on table tops to allow the girl to sweep. Outside it was still light and sunny, being no later than mid-afternoon, but here in this bar it seemed like five in the morning after a particularly long and busy shift. The girl with the broom stared at me as though querying why I was still there and I moved to the door, scrambling out as I had scrambled in.
Before I could adjust my eyes to the light, the door behind me was slammed shut and locked. I stood still for a moment on the pavement, hungry and lost. In the sky above, high winds were pushing the clouds into distorted forms, crashing into one another and stretching in odd, scattered shapes.
From an open window somewhere I could hear the sound of the old song about Spain and the costas, ‘Y Viva España’. I tried to remember the words from my childhood that everyone used to sing, about how wonderful Spain was, how the people were so nice and friendly.
‘La la la-la-la-la lah,’ I sang along under my breath as the emptiness welled up inside me. And I walked away from the bar, away from the centre of the city and out, down the drab streets towards the suburbs and the country, not knowing where my feet would take me.
España por favor. España por favor.