In November 1975 there died in Madrid General Francisco Franco, for thirty-five years the dictatorial Caudillo of Spain, and in a sense this book died with him. It essentially and retrospectively evokes Spain at the time of his death, and the state which he ruled and represented.
Franco had come to power when his dogmatically right-wing, fiercely Catholic armies defeated the elected Socialist government in the terrible Spanish Civil War of 1936–9, which had become in effect a war between the ideologies of Fascism and Communism. It was a precursor of still more dreadful international conflicts to come and resulted in the anachronistic isolation of Spain from the progress of contemporary Europe. Neutral during the Second World War which so radically transformed the continent, a totalitarian state when Western Europe was vigorously democratic, defiantly Catholic among increasingly secular peers, isolationist in a gradually uniting Europe, tainted by its credentials, Franco’s years Spain was an enthralling prodigy among the powers – dark but sunny too, fascinating but forbidding, unique at once in its ancient glories and its twentieth-century anomalies.
This is the place that my book chiefly portrays – a country on the brink of a turning-point. Excluded for so long from the comity of Europe, clamped within the strait-jacket of despotism, Spain then was still peculiarly on its own. The old mores were powerful, the habits of autocracy, the power of the Church, the sense of separateness that gave Spain its habits of lordly arrogance. It was still one of a kind, recognizably descended from the Spain of the conquistadores, and this book is instilled with my own sensations of wondering alienation – nobody could have been less Spanish than me. I was new to the magnificent balefulness of things Spanish, and I wandered from cathedral to fortress, hamlet to city, brilliant mountains to blistered plains, through scenes of battle and legend and high fiction, in a somewhat hallucinatory state.
Remarkably soon it was all to change, and Spain’s isolation would be ended. Once Franco was consigned to his portentous tomb, the nation transformed itself into a progressive parliamentary kingdom, ceremonially presided over by a Bourbon prince, but governed by elected governments of generally enlightened views. There was an attempted coup, and terrorist activity was endemic, but on the whole the Spanish return to the world was peaceful. In 1986 Spain joined the European Union, and became an international power again. Its dogmatic centralist authority was relaxed, tempering the old sense of overbearing unity. Capitalism found its full fruition, bringing Spanish enterprise once more to the forefront of the world. The Catholic Church was no longer the ultimate arbiter of life, and in sport, the arts, entertainment and tourism the Spaniards built themselves new reputations. I was wrong, in my Envoi of 1982, in doubting Spain’s democratic instincts: for better or for worse, the prodigious old State became less sui generis, more like the rest of us, more ordinary in fact.
By no means entirely, though, at least aesthetically. It is nearly half a century since I originally wrote this book, but when I go back to Spain I still feel, if not the majestic frisson that I used to sense, at least a tremor of the marvellous. Much of the coastline has been degraded by the excesses of tourism, but much of the hinterland is tremendously different still. Spanish pride is still lofty. Spanish dogs are still dogs. There may not be so many monks and nuns about, but matters of birth control, same-sex marriage or stem–cell research still exercise the Spanish political conscience, and to this day an endless tide of pilgrims makes its weary way along the road to Santiago de Compostella. Great motor-roads criss-cross the landscapes now, but there are still gypsies about, storks sometimes, and tapas bars awash with litter.
I went to Santiago myself a year or two ago, and parked my car in the glorious Plaza de España immediately outside the cathedral, in a very sanctuary of Spanishness. When I came to leave I found the car would not start – it had been electronically immobilized, by some invisible cyber-authority, as a precaution against terrorism. A burly policemen and sundry bystanders, discarding their jackets, had to manhandle it out of the square, beyond the esoterically prohibited zone; and as they did so, exchanging earthy jokes with one another, and I dare say obscenities too, I could not help thinking that nowhere but in Spain could such a moment be experienced – a moment of farce, a moment of mystery, a demonstration of brawn and fellowship sat against the pinnacled splendour of one of Christendom’s supreme memorials.
So when I say this book is about a particular Spanish time, perhaps it is about all Spanish times, really.