In Spain the dead are more alive than the dead of any other place in the world: their profile wounds like the edge of a barber’s razor.
Federico García Lorca
It is shortly before 7.00 a.m. on a cool Madrid spring morning. The traffic is still just a purr, though it will soon be a rumble and, some time after that, the usual riot of horns, ambulance sirens and roaring motorbike exhausts. This should be a small moment of peace in what must be one of Europe’s noisiest cities. A helicopter, however, has spent the past fifteen minutes poised noisily at roof-top level just a block down our street. The wide-open well of our six-storey apartment block is acting as a sound box that amplifies the relentless chugging and clattering. Sleep in our top-floor apartment seems, under these circumstances, impossible. I lie in bed worrying about whether the helicopter – which does this every few weeks – will wake the children. It is not as though they went to bed early, even though they have school today. One of them, a seven-year-old, got out of bed to take a phone call at 10 p.m. last night. It was another seven-year-old, excitedly inviting him to a birthday party at the weekend. Madrid boasts that it is a party town, a city that never sleeps. But does this really have to apply to the under eights?
I go out onto the balcony to wave a fist at the sleek white helicopter – wondering why on earth it is hovering there, so low, so loud and so early. I expect all the other balconies to be filled up with angry people roused from their beds. I am, however, alone. I stand, solitary, deranged and dishevelled, amongst the wilting geraniums. Even at this stage of the year, they are gasping for water. It is one of those moments when I am reminded that, although I now consider this to be my city, I am really an extranjero, a foreigner. Noise, in Madrid, in Spain as a whole, is just background. It is part of the atmosphere, like air or daylight. I realise that I have been caught with my guard down. During the day, after I have showered and slipped my daily coat of Madridness on, I would not care about the mere roar of a helicopter. Noise and bustle are normally part of what I like about this city. At night, when I sleep, though, I am returned to my natural condition as what Spaniards like to call an anglosajón, an Anglo-Saxon. This description for native English speakers – be they British, American, or from anywhere else – has always amused me. It makes me think of runes and lyres, of Beowulf and the Venerable Bede.
This country is famous for noise. Newspapers occasionally report on how the noise levels of Madrid or Barcelona pose a danger to health and sanity. One in four Madrid streets subjects its residents to noise beyond World Health Organisation limits, one report tells me. Half of fourteen to twenty-seven-year-olds in Barcelona suffer irreversible hearing damage, another one warns. Little wonder, then, that even noise-numbed Spaniards are occasionally driven berserk. I recall a scene from a Barcelona square, late on a summer’s night, years ago. The square was packed with busy café tables. Teenagers with noisy mopeds were driving around it in circles, their high-pitched exhausts screaming out over the hubbub of conversation and laughter. An angry, elderly woman appeared on a roof top and started shouting and waving her arms. Everyone ignored her. Then she began hurling empty Coke bottles down at us. The glass bottles exploded on the ground, shattering into tiny, flying fragments. We ran.
Yet Spaniards seem to need noise. Televisions can stay on in people’s homes all day long. ‘It’s like having a friend in the house,’ someone once explained to me. Bars, where much of life takes place, have musical fruit machines, talking cigarette machines, coffee machines, microwaves and television sets (sometimes more than one, and set to different channels) all pinging, chattering, steaming, shouting and clattering at once. Raised voices, competing to be heard above the machines, add an extra layer to the noise.
Perhaps this need to be heard above the din is why Spanish – or more accurately, in this country of many languages, castellano – can be so hard and direct. ‘It is a language in which one hears each word … and each word is as distinct as a pebble,’ wrote V. S. Pritchett in his The Spanish Temper. ‘It is a dry, harsh, stone-cracking tongue, a sort of desert Latin chipped off at the edges by its lisped consonants and dry-throated gutturals, its energetic “r’s”, but opened by its strong emphatic vowels.’
Verbal noise reaches its loudest in the tertulias – the hugely popular television and radio debate programmes whose daily audiences are counted in millions. At their best, tertulias are a serious business, a learned and informed exchange of ideas amongst knowledgeable people. Many, however, are little more than angry slanging matches. Spaniards are talented, if sometimes incontinent, talkers. Tertulianos, the people hired to take part in tertulias, are often angry people. That is their job. What they are angry about depends on what subject the show’s anchor presents to them. The more inconsequential the topic, the louder everyone gets. The absolute peaks are reached in the programmes that specialise in gossip about singers, models, bullfighters and the legion of people who are famous simply for being famous.
Catch a taxi anywhere in Spain and you may find yourself sharing it with a handful of tertulianos vociferating on the radio. Your taxi driver – if he is not one of those immaculate, austere, proud taxistas who are too dignified and serious to sink to this level – may join in. Like them, he has strong opinions. If you have had a bad day, or feel strongly about the issue at hand, you are free to let rip yourself. Spanish offers you an earthy and sexually explicit vocabulary in which to unburden yourself. ‘¡Joder, que no nos toquen los cojones¡’, ‘Fuck, why don’t they leave our balls alone?’ one Madrid taxista threw at me recently. We were listening to a right-wing, Roman Catholic church-owned radio station as we sat in a morning jam on the M-30 ring road. The presenter began ranting about ‘anti-Spaniards’ in Catalonia and the Basque Country. This provoked my taxista to unleash another tirade. ‘Me cago en su puta madre …’, ‘I shit on his whore-mother …’ he began. This is not shocking language. I could, without seeming crude, have replied with a phrase in which pride of place was given to the female sexual organ, ‘Coño …’
A generous use of swear words is something we anglosajones share with Spaniards. Nobel laureate Camilo José Cela compiled a two-tome Diccionario Secreto of them. The author of The Family of Pascual Duarte included more than 800 terms for penis. They ranged from arcabuz, harquebus, to zanahoria, carrot.
‘A Spaniard, if he does not let loose some Iberian expletives, has too much pressure in the cooker,’ the writer, diplomat and Oxford don Salvador de Madariaga once explained. It can, indeed, be a most liberating experience. Step out of the taxi cab and the whole episode – the anger and indignation – is gone. For anger is worn lightly, and easily disposed of. Perhaps that is why Spaniards do not share that anglosajón weakness for fisticuffs. Road rage is considered fine, even healthy. You may sit in your car, blast your horn and insult anyone who takes your fancy. Nobody, however, steps out with hatred in their eyes and a car-jack in their hand.
Spain is my adopted home. I have lived here for well over a decade now, mostly in Madrid but also in its great rival – the charming, sophisticated Mediterranean port city of Barcelona. I first came here, living in Barcelona for two years, almost twenty years ago. Returning to London, I found it impossible to settle and so, eventually, came back. It is ironic that my Catalan friends, some of whom claim they are not really Spaniards, sparked my own long-term interest in Spain.
I make my living from writing, as a journalist, though I do not consider myself a typical foreign correspondent. I am not here on my way through to that dreamed-of posting in Paris or New York. I will go (almost) anywhere in the world to cover a story. This, however, is my home. If I ever leave again, it will be with the intention of coming back. That was not my original plan. Once here, however, I have found it impossible to leave. When I was younger and single, life was too much fun. The city juerga – the partying – was too inviting. With a family, though, it got even better. I had struck a sort of El Dorado for rearing children. Now I have a stake in this country. Everyone in this family currently carries a British passport, but my children are developing before my eyes – at least culturally – as young Spaniards. Time will tell if they feel they belong to this country and, following the strand of Spanish blood that comes down one side of their mother’s family, take on the nationality of their birthplace. I have experienced the strange sensations – and concerns – of first-generation immigrants anywhere as they watch their children grow up, with enviable ease, in another culture. Spain’s future matters to me. It may be theirs.
I have criss-crossed Spain many times pursuing stories to write, from north to south, from east to west and hopping from island to island. A colleague once complained that writing on Spain meant toros, terroristas and tonterías – bulls, terrorists and silliness. It is true that Spain, in newspaper jargon, provides ‘good colour’. But then I have always liked that. Spain has a wealth of stories to tell. The open road beckons continuously – and there are few places in Europe as open, as generous with empty spaces and distant horizons, as Spain. Often, as I am driving through those vast spaces with some easy-listening flamenquillo music on the CD, I imagine this is more like America than Europe.
The story does not go stale either, for Spain changes at breakneck speed. Again, there is something American about this. Spaniards not only embrace change. They expect it.
No one is more aware of this capacity for mutation than a writer trying to capture the country in a moment of time. Grasp Spain firmly in your fist and almost immediately the grains of sand start to run out from between your fingers. ‘How the commentators of Spain have aged!’ observed the Catalan writer Josep Pla on 14 April 1931, after watching monarchy give way to republicanism in a single, eventful day. ‘In one day they have all gone unbearably gaga.’
I experienced something similar over four ghastly, dramatic days in March 2004. These began with the killing of 191 people by Islamist radicals who planted bombs on early morning Madrid commuter trains. They ended with a general election in which Spaniards threw out a Conservative People’s Party whose hold on power had seemed set in concrete. Spain shifted again, suddenly and swiftly. So, inevitably, did this book.
All this dizzying change did not start, however, in 2004. Spaniards have, in fact, spent almost a whole century playing catch-up – in a stop-start fashion – with the rest of Europe. ‘You could say that in the pueblo where I was born (on 22 February 1900) the Middle Ages lasted until the First World War,’ the avant-garde film-maker Luis Buñuel said of his home town in Aragón, Calanda.
Spaniards make my job simple. They are always ready to talk, to give an opinion, to tell you things about themselves. This is partly because, wherever you go, they believe theirs is the most fascinating corner of the world. It has, they will tell you, the best food and, often, the best wine. It is also because, generally, they are convinced that their opinion is as good as, if not better than, the next man’s. Most of all, however, it is because they are naturally open and welcoming. Spain’s position as a world superpower in tourism is not just down to sun, sand and sangría.
Spanish noise is fun, but it is also distraction. ‘Mucho ruido y pocas nueces’ – a lot of noise but few walnuts – is what Spaniards say when something is all show and no substance. Few outsiders would place silence on this nation’s list of attributes. I certainly would not have done so in my first years here. Nor, I suspect, would, Pope John Paul II. ‘The Pope would also like to talk,’ he found himself telling a chattering crowd at an open-air Mass in Madrid. Recently, however, things have happened that have forced me to think again – not just about silence, but about Spain itself.
If I had to blame one person for making me rethink Spain’s relationship with silence, it would have to be Emilio. He was the first one to, quite literally, go digging in history. Emilio Silva is a journalist who went back to his grandfather’s village, Priaranza del Bierzo, in the northern province of León in 2000. He wanted to tell the story of what had happened there six decades earlier, in 1936. That was the time when a military rising led by General Franco and others started the three-year round of fratricidal bloodletting known as the Spanish Civil War. Emilio ended up doing more than just story-telling, however. For he found the roadside mass grave where his grandfather, a civilian shot by a death squad of Franco supporters, was buried. Then he had him dug up, along with the other twelve corpses of those shot alongside him. DNA tests, carried out by Spanish forensic scientists with experience in digging up much more recent mass graves in Chile or Kosovo, finally enabled him to identify his grandfather. The bones are now in the local cemetery, alongside those of Emilio’s grandmother. It was the first time a Civil War grave had been dug up like this, and the first time DNA tests had been used to identify the victims. When the ‘Priaranza Thirteen’ were found, however, it seemed like a one-off. I wrote about it, as a curiosity, and then forgot about it again.
Then, a couple of years later, I found myself standing by another Civil War mass grave. This one was also near the mountains of León, at a place called Piedrafita de Babia. It, too, had been dug up by volunteers. The elderly sister of one of the victims, Isabel, helped direct the mechanical diggers to the spot where they had been buried. For years she had been going, secretly, to lay flowers at the site once a year. Isabel still hated the men who had done it.
‘Everybody knew the bodies were here. Back then, even after they were killed and secretly buried, people from the village came across the bones after they were exposed by rain,’ she told me. ‘The priest told them the rojos, the reds, were so vile that even the earth did not want them. Even now people remember the fear. They don’t like to talk about it.’
Soon afterwards another grave was dug up, and then another and another. Suddenly, it turned out, there were graves all over the place. Spain was sitting on what campaigners claimed were tens of thousands of such corpses. They lay in mass graves, some in cemeteries, but many others beside roadside ditches, in forests or out in the open country. These were the victims of Franco’s purges of rojos, reds or left-wingers, during and after the Civil War. That war had ended more than sixty years before, however, and Franco himself had died, peacefully and in his bed, in 1975. Nobody had done anything about them in the quarter-century since then. Now there were demands that the government should find them all, dig them up and rebury them.
In retrospect another catalyst for what was going on was probably José María Aznar. It was not so much a question of who he was, as what he symbolised. A few years earlier he had become Spain’s first democratically elected right-wing prime minister since the 1930s. In a country where the right – in some people’s minds – still meant Franco, that was always going to require a certain amount of readjustment. I never imagined, however, that it would raise the dead from their graves. They had been left to lie, after all, while the Socialists were in power for fourteen years. Somehow, however, the fact that the right was in power started people clamouring. Nobody was asking for justice – even though there still were, and still are, killers out there – but they did want dignity for the dead. The polemic continues today.
As history erupted from under the ground, I decided to turn my back on Spain’s glittering, entertaining and enticing surface. I wanted to undertake what one Italian writer called ‘that difficult voyage, to travel through time and space across the country’. It would, of course, be the voyage of an anglosajón – a Spain seen through foreign eyes, looking at some peculiarities which Spaniards themselves feel hardly warrant attention.
This would mean, in some respects, following a well-trodden road for foreign writers on Spain. Gypsies and flamenco music, for example, have long fascinated visitors here. But what, also, about some modern Spanish phenomena? The tireless pursuit of pleasure, the tourist ghettos flourishing on the coasts and, even, those gaudily lit brothels on Spanish motorways all have something to say about the priorities and attitudes of modern Spaniards. I had questions, too, about how women had fared in a country that had rocketed its way out of state-imposed, fundamentalist Catholicism into non-judgemental, ‘live and let live’ liberalism. Most of all, however, in a country where history weighed so heavily, my journey would be able to look at the past through the present, and the present through the past.
Informing Spanish friends about this project produced conflicting reactions. Spaniards are acutely, sensitively aware of what others say about them. They do not always like their intimate selves to be exposed. That is why they meet in bars, in the plaza or on the street. Their home is an intimate space – a family refuge. It may take years before a friend invites you into their house. Some of mine never have. The street – la calle – is far more than just a stretch of tarmac and paving stones. It is neutral ground, a space to meet and, why not, to show off.
‘¡Sí, sí, Spain is different!’ Mercedes exclaims. It is about time, she suggests, that someone pointed out that the country is not as marvellous as its own propagandists suggest. ‘¡O sea, España es diferente!’ repeats Marga, almost word for word, in a separate conversation. Her tone, however, is opposite. I feel she suspects I am about to badmouth her country – that I will make Spaniards look less like the modern Europeans that they are and, more significantly, desperately want to be. Foreign writers have long been accused of spreading ‘black legends’ – about a Spanish propensity for violence, anarchy, inquisitions or self-destruction. Few foreigners, however, can match the gloom of late-nineteenth-century Spanish writers like Ángel Ganivet, who deemed Spain ‘a cage full of madmen all suffering from the same manía: their inability to put up with one another’. I try to explain that, amongst other things, I am looking for things that make Spaniards different to others. One of those, of course, is that many Spaniards – with their avid enthusiasm for the European Union and eager embrace of the latest cultural icons from New York, London, Paris or Berlin – would rather not be different.
Mercedes and Marga had both reached for the 1960s advertising slogan – ‘Spain is different!’ – invented for Manuel Fraga, Franco’s information and tourism minister. The slogan was greeted with black humour at the time. With a dictator in charge, what tourist was going to find it normal? In 2005 the octogenarian Fraga was still the most voted-for political leader in Galicia, one of Spain’s seventeen partly self-governing ‘autonomous regions’, though he narrowly failed to ensure himself a fifth consecutive period as regional premier. Fraga’s continued presence in politics is, ironically, another of those things that makes modern Spain ‘different’. How many other European nations, after all, entered the twenty-first century with ministers from a right-wing dictatorship still active, and powerful, in politics? Of course Spain is different, I wanted to reply. All countries are. Most, however, are happy – even proud – for it to be that way.
The mass graves of the Civil War were an obvious starting point for my journey into Spanish history. Aznar had refused to pay for them to be found and dug up. These dead did not interest him. An old man in a village near Ávila agreed with his decision. ‘If you stir shit, stink rises,’ he said. He was not talking about the dead themselves but about the stories they had carried to the grave with them.
The unease caused by these exhumations was palpable. A vow of silence – one that had been adhered to in the years since Franco died – was being broken. People did not know what to make of it all. One of the first reburials of victims from a mass grave was attended by exactly four journalists. These came from the local newspaper, the New York Times, CNN and the Guardian. The latter three appeared independently. A television cameraman who worked for a national Spanish network, Antena 3, came on his own to film it because he was related to one of the dead. ‘I know they won’t broadcast it, though,’ he said. Spain’s national press stayed away.
‘I might as well go and dig up my uncles at Paracuellos de Jarama,’ one newspaper executive, no Francoist he, told me. It was a reference to his own family members shot by Franco’s Republican opponents during the same Civil War. So I went to see their graves, too, in a cemetery by Madrid’s airport with a giant white cross laid into the hillside. The long rows of tombstones at Paracuellos de Jarama, with their tragic inscriptions to beloved fathers, husbands, brothers and sons, were eloquent proof that the left, too, had blindly butchered unarmed opponents. Individual headstones blamed rojos or ‘Marxist hordes’ for the killings. On a cold November morning I watched small groups of people scatter pink carnations amongst the crosses. Some stayed for a short ceremony at a small cenotaph. The Falange anthem ‘Cara al Sol’ was sung. Arms were thrown out in a stiff, fascist salute. It was a rare sighting of Spain’s extreme right. It was clear that neither side had clean hands. These dead, however, were in holy ground. They were not in a ditch.
The graves being dug up were a reminder of just how this country had set about making its transformation – la Transición – from dictatorship to democracy. After Franco died, in 1975, la Transición had seemed truly miraculous. At this point, there had been no falling of the Berlin wall and no full-scale toppling of Latin America’s right-wing dictatorships. Nor had Spaniards, unlike their neighbours in Portugal, pushed dictatorship out with a peaceful, carnation-wielding revolution. There was no road-map for going from authoritarian, dictatorial government to democracy. Spain was unique. It had to find its own way. And it did so by smothering the past. Truth commissions had not really yet been invented. Nuremberg-style trials of the guilty were out of the question. Many of those who would lead la Transición had, anyway, Francoist pasts. It was better to cover their personal stories, too, with a cloak of silence. An atavistic fear of the past, of not repeating the bloody confrontation of the Spanish Civil War, was one reason for this silence. Another was not to upset those, especially in the army, who were amongst the biggest threats to the young democracy.
It was unwritten, but known as el pacto del olvido, the pact of forgetting. Historians continued their work and, with sometimes limited access to documents from the time, dug and delved. In the early days of the transition there was a sudden thirst for books, in a country used to censorship, on what had really happened to Spain since 1936. But the Civil War and, to a certain degree, Francoism itself became unmentionable elsewhere – in politics, between neighbours and even, in many cases, within families themselves. A senior academic once suggested to me that the whole matter was best studied ‘en la intimidad’, in the intimacy of one’s own home. It was, in the words of one parliamentarian of la Transición, a matter of ‘forgetting by everyone for everyone’.
It was also a case of tapando vergüenzas – of covering up embarrassments. For, apart from a few Franco nostalgists, Spaniards felt, understandably, shame. They were ashamed of their Civil War and also about the mediocre dictator who emerged from it. Anyway, they said, what mattered was the present, the here-and-now, and the future. The latter was an argument that went down well with a nation bubbling over with optimism for tomorrow and with a hedonistic desire to make the most of today. Spaniards have settled down since the giddy days of Madrid’s 1980s ‘movida’. ‘Get stoned and stay with it,’ aged Madrid mayor Enrique Tierno Galván, affectionately known as ‘el viejo profesor’, had exhorted the city’s youth. Spaniards generally still believe it is their absolute right – even their obligation – to enjoy themselves. This, researchers have even suggested, may be the real reason why they live so much longer than other Europeans. It may also, however, be why they are Europe’s biggest consumers of cocaine.
Once the silence began to break, however, it was unstoppable. Whole tables at El Corte Inglés, the ubiquitous department store, groaned with volumes with titles like Franco’s Graves, The Slaves of Franco, Victims of Victory, The End of Hope, The Lost Children of Francoism and Chronicle of the Lost Years. Spaniards, especially a younger generation whose grandparents and parents had often kept their own silence, suddenly wanted to know more.
Soon, however, it became clear that the silence hid something other than just fear or shame. Spaniards, it turned out, did not agree on the past. History was a political Pandora’s box. Once the lid was opened, out flew ancient, hate-fuelled arguments.
A new kind of book appeared. These ones had names like The Myths of the Civil War, Checas of Madrid: Republican Prisons Revealed or 1934 – The Civil War Begins, The Socialist Party and Catalan Republican Left Start the Hostilities. These were often pseudo-history, a prominent historian complained to me. He also believed they were a direct result of the graves being opened. They shot, however, to the top of the bestsellers list. These books, in the broadest sense, accused the people lying in those graves of being guilty of the whole thing in the first place. The left had provoked the Civil War with swings towards extremism, attempted revolutions and leniency with church-burners. And then there were the checas, the left-wing prisons and torture cells, and the mass shootings of right-wing prisoners by the Republicans themselves. A left-wing revolution was gathering steam when General Franco and others rebelled, they argued. It was a new version of Franco’s old argument. He had saved Spain.
This was the argument that had been disguised by the silence. Spain had two versions of who was to blame for the Civil War. There was one for the old right, and their new apologists, and one for the rest. There was something infantile about the argument that had reappeared. ‘You started it!’ ‘No, you started it!’ had the ring of small children arguing. Proven historical facts – and the dispassionate treatment of them – were, sadly, not always a part of the debate.
History, it suddenly became clear, was a Spanish battlefield. There was no generally accepted narrative for what had happened in the 1930s. Nor, I would discover, was there agreement on whole other areas of the past.
The poet Machado had written: ‘Little Spaniard who is coming into this world, may God protect you. One of the two Spains will freeze your heart.’ Now, some people claimed, the two Spains were beginning to reappear. Ideas of ‘them’ and ‘us’, of ‘if you are not my friend, you are my enemy’ were becoming increasingly powerful. Aznar, especially, seemed to encourage them. There were many on the other side of the political barricades who were happy to return the treatment.
Old fault lines re-emerged. Travelling back to Barcelona or talking to some people in the Basque Country, especially, was becoming increasingly strange. It was not so much a question of entering a different country, as of finding oneself in a different mental space. Opinions rarely heard in Madrid were commonplace in Catalonia and the Basque Country – and vice versa. Spain felt not just divided, but schizophrenic.
Las Dos Españas, the Two Spains, seem to have something to do with the Spanish love of forming groups and clans. Spaniards like to move en masse, to belong to large gaggles. They celebrate, and demonstrate, in huge throngs – their enjoyment increased by the numbers with them. It is one of the great and enviable things about Spain to an outsider. This is a country where no politician, from left or right, would dream of echoing Margaret Thatcher’s words that ‘there is no such thing as Society’. Where anglosajones do things on their own or with their families, Spaniards often do them by the coach-load. They like the warmth, the solidarity, the sense of belonging that groups give them. That, perhaps, is why their towns and cities pack people together, ignoring the acres of open space around them. Individuality, I discovered when my own children reached school age, can be viewed with suspicion. There is something potentially dangerous, however, about these groups. Individual squabbles can turn into group squabbles. The herd, once roused, can be far more destructive than the beast on its own.
The arguing over history, however, did not end with the Civil War. For Spaniards also had doubts that stretched much further back. Even the question of when Spain came into existence did not seem to have a clear answer. Was it, as one politician on the right proclaimed, ‘the oldest country in Europe’? Had an early version of it existed under the Romans or Visigoths as something called Hispania? Or was it Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, the so-called Catholic Monarchs, who created modern Spain by uniting the kingdoms of Castile and Aragón and completing the Christian ‘Reconquista’ in the fifteenth century? Some suggested Spain was much younger, that it did not become fully formed until Spaniards fought together against Napoleon in the early nineteenth century. The argument, once more, had strong political overtones. A Spaniard’s idea of history, I discovered, often depended on how they voted. Or was it vice versa?
Even the Moors, who had arrived in Spain in 711 and left five centuries ago, suddenly turned up in political discourse. They were there in Aznar’s speeches about Islamist terrorism or in bishops’ warnings about attempts to bring a full separation of the Roman Catholic Church from the State. Some saw both Moors and Jews as an integral part of Spanish history and culture. For others, they were still, clearly, an alien, ancient enemy.
The Greek geographer Strabo described the Iberian peninsula – which modern Spain shares with Portugal – as ‘like an ox-hide extending in length from west to east, its fore-parts toward the east, and in breadth from north to south’. That ox-hide is now being pulled, stretched and squabbled over. There are warnings that it might tear. A new Socialist prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, is trying to stop that happening. It is a test of the elasticity of the constitution Spaniards wrote for themselves, under the shadow of Francoism, in 1978. Apocalyptic warnings from the opposition suggest the end of Spain is nigh. ‘We are witnesses to the dismantling of Spain,’ says one of Aznar’s ex-ministers.
Spain, a significant number of Spaniards believe, is not really a nation. It is a state that contains – or, even, imposes its will on – several other nations. These have their own names: principally Euskadi (as the Basque Country is now known) and Catalonia, but also Galicia. In these places – which jointly account for a quarter of Spaniards – the word España is often unmentionable. It has been replaced by el estado español, the Spanish state. This is, sometimes, a country that dares not speak its own name.
Again, history is plundered to support one or other discourse. A Catalan’s version of Catalonia’s history may have little to do with that of a Madrileño. A Basque nationalist and his pro-Spanish neighbour in Navarre – even though their history has sometimes run the same course – may also disagree on what really happened in the past. From the eighth-century Battle of Roncesvalles, when the Basques fell on Charlemagne’s rearguard as it left Spain, to the seventeenth-century Reapers Revolt in Catalonia, the interpretations of what happened – and why – are not just different, but sometimes diametrically opposed. The history young Spaniards are taught at school can often be different too. Iñaki, a Basque history teacher, told me a teenage student recently handed him a drawing – which had been approved by another teacher – in which eighth-century peasants at Roncesvalles carried an ikurriña, the flag of modern Euskadi. ‘Everybody knows that that flag was invented eleven centuries later,’ he said. Another Basque historian, a disciple of Basque nationalism, told me I should never trust historians from elsewhere in Spain when they wrote about the Basques. ‘They always twist it to their own ends,’ he said.
Spain’s Royal Academy of History came to an opposite conclusion. It issued a report claiming that the regional politicians who now control education were making sure schoolchildren received a ‘partial, skewed and inexact’ version of history. Pupils in some places were learning that their region had been in a state of constant struggle with Madrid. Schools ran the danger of encouraging ‘confrontation’. ‘In no other European country is the ignorance of history used with the political aim of distortion or creating opposition,’ it fumed.
That Spaniards were worried about the integrity of their nation was clear, again, from the bookstores. Spain, Patriotism and Nation, Hispania to España or Spain: Three Millennia of History were a few of the titles produced to apply starch to the ox-hide.
The counter-argument was there, too. I Am Not Spanish, read one Catalan-language title in Barcelona’s bookshops. In the Basque Country the row was more lethal than that. Separatist gunmen from ETA were still killing, their own version of history helping them pull the trigger. Why Are We Basques Fighting? was the title of one book, written from a prison cell, whose justifications stretched back into prehistory.
The great writer and thinker José Ortega y Gasset had warned about all this in the 1920s in his España Invertebrada (Invertebrate Spain). Spain, he warned, lacked a strong backbone to hold it together. It had been falling slowly apart since it reached a height of imperial grandeur – and superpower status – at the end of the sixteenth century. Foreign visitors had already commented on the huge contrasts between Spaniards from different regions. Vast mountain ranges and broad rivers chopped the country up into virtually incommunicable bits. The mid-nineteenth-century traveller Richard Ford called them ‘walls and moats’. That meant that Spaniards often knew little about one another. The pueblo (home town or village) and the provincia (province) were, at that stage, the entire world of most Spaniards.
Yet this new Spain has done much to demolish those barriers. European Union funds have helped bore holes through mountains, running motorways and high-speed trains through them. Long-distance journeys between places are no longer counted in days, but in hours. Every year they get a little shorter. Nineteenth-century travellers would always remark on how you could tell where a Spaniard was from by their style of dress. Today’s Spaniards buy their clothes from the same shops. These are often owned by the same man, Europe’s latest retailing billionaire – and Spain’s richest man – the publicity-shy Zara founder Amancio Ortega. Spaniards now watch the same TV soaps and the same galas, the interminable Saturday night variety shows broadcast from around the country. They are more joined up, and more homogeneous, than they have ever been. They are also more disposed to argue about whether they have anything in common.
When I first lived in Spain, spending the mid-1980s in Barcelona, I had come to admire the way Catalan friends were busy rediscovering their roots – often by studying their own language. I had arrived, fresh out of university, in a state of almost total ignorance about Spain and its different languages. They were an exciting discovery. I went to the theatre in Catalan, I read poetry in the language of the Galicians and was intrigued, on my first visits to San Sebastián, by the unusual and exotic sound of the Basque language, euskara. These languages enriched Spain. Instead of celebrating that, however, Spaniards seemed intent on squabbling about them. They were not a cause of common pride, but of division. They still are – more so, in fact, than they were then.
Superficially, Spaniards are good at relating to the past. Few countries hold on to and nurture their traditions so tenderly or so enthusiastically. From the bull-runs of Pamplona to the ku-klux-klan-like nazarenos parading through Andalucía’s cities over Easter, from the Basque stone-lifting competitions to the Catalan fire festivals – the fiesta remains sacrosanct. One estimate has put annual spending on local fiestas at half a billion pounds. Tradition and modernity somehow manage to fit snugly together in Spain. It is a wonder to those of us from countries, or cultures, where the latter has wiped out much of the former. This strange conjunction of old and new produces some of the most endearing pictures – literally so, in the photographic sense – of modern Spain: the conical-hatted nazareno astride a motorbike; the tur-banned moro from a Moors and Christians festival in Alicante, chatting on his mobile phone; or the woman bullfighter from one of Pedro Almodóvar’s films, dressed in a glittering traje de luces, a suit of lights.
Tradition and history, however, are two different things. The former is always invented at some moment – and a surprising number of Spanish fiestas are recent inventions – while the latter should not be. Fiestas, anyway, do not seem to me to be celebrations of the past. Some are genuinely spiritual, religious affairs. Others are expressions of local pride or chauvinism. Most, however, are about fun. You only have to see the men of Almonte dressed in their wide cordobés hats, their horses tethered to a rail behind the hermitage of The Virgin of El Rocío, swigging back beer or rum and coke, to see that. A million people visit this gleaming white hermitage in Spain’s south-west province of Huelva every Whitsun. It is Spain’s biggest annual religious pilgrimage. It is also Spain’s biggest annual party. Tradition then, like anger, is actually worn quite lightly. There may, or may not, be gravitas – but there is rarely the pomposity of its dwindling British equivalents. This, again, has to do with that Spanish love of doing things en masse. It is a reaffirmation of society, of the group, rather than a desperate clinging to the past. It also, of course, has to do with that deeply held belief in the right to have a good time.
Any journey across Spain is, necessarily, going to include a certain amount of having, or watching people have, a good time. But the starting point for my quest was a moment in history when Spaniards got carried away by another, more destructive, sort of emotion. It was time to find those Civil War graves.