Ghosts of Spain (33 page)

Beside every bed in a state hospital in Spain sits an armchair, which also folds out into a bed. This chair, and the bed, are expected to be occupied twenty-four hours a day by a relative of the patient. Spaniards find it indignant, inhuman in fact, that these do not exist in all British hospitals. The relative is there to entertain, fuss, receive visitors and act as an extra, no-cost nurse, watching the drip and relaying messages to the hospital staff. He or, normally, she is joined during visiting hours by reams of other relatives and friends who, in the maternity ward at least, could be counted on to switch the television on full blast and start watching the football, especially if Atlético de Madrid – this end of town’s team – were playing.

The Doce de Octubre maternity ward was a riot, in the best sense of the word. It was also where, as we stayed a week while my partner recovered from the caesarean, we had our first lessons in being parents under the gentle guidance of the nurses. Our
company
included several gypsy women who seemed half our age but were already onto their third or fourth. Their other children
occasionally
ran wild, despite one mother’s threats that if they didn’t behave, ‘
la paya te va a pinchar
’ (‘the non-gypsy’, as the nurse was
known, ‘will stick a needle into you’). It remains one of my favourite spots on earth. I could think of no finer place to start looking after a child, and no stranger place to go through the process of getting it out.

That said, we were back eighteen months later, with another large, very late baby looking set for a caesarean. This time we were better prepared. We had worked up our
enchufe
with the young chief gynaecologist further. He would perform the operation and, if he could persuade the duty anaesthetist, I would be in the theatre to see my second son being born. Permission was obtained after he had assured the anaesthetist, turning one brief experience in Bosnia into a lifetime of dodging bullets, that I was a hardened war correspondent with long experience of blood and gore. It was my responsibility to live up to the description, and not faint.

Even then, it was touch and go. At the last minute, I was
handed
a green hair-net and some green doctor’s pyjamas. I was told to sprint down a corridor, go into one of the doctor’s dressing rooms and put them on. This was a worryingly easy thing to do. The other doctors offered a polite ‘
buenos días
’ as I slipped on my disguise. To them, I was just a new doctor on the block. I found myself wondering how many other frauds there were wandering the hospital corridors. My mind went back to the dozens of sets of green pyjamas that had wandered through the labour room on the previous occasion. ‘Just checking!’ they had said cheerfully, before doing exactly that. If there was a next time, I decided, I would demand ID cards at the door. This time, in the neonatal unit, I was reminded how deep bull culture ran in Spain. My
second
son was ‘
un torito
’, a little bull, a passing doctor said.

Birth, we had already discovered, was about a woman and her doctor, not about a woman and her partner. Occasionally, it seemed to be about the doctor and little else. The gynaecologist’s other patients looked at him in a state of near adoration. It was hardly surprising that it seemed to have gone to his head. Our final goodbye to the Doce de Octubre, in a treatment room a few weeks later, was a reminder of how some doctors peered down at patients from their personal Mount Olympuses. He removed the
last few staples from the caesarean wound – and arranged a golf match on his mobile phone as he did it.

All that happened in the late 1990s, and Spain will have changed since then. It seems, however, to be moving
uncharacteristically
slowly. One recent father-to-be told me he was just one of two prospective dads to turn up at prenatal classes. That is, I suppose, a 100 per cent increase on my experience. It is not, however, a revolution.

If the basic idea that women might want to be in control of how they gave birth to children had not taken off, it was hardly surprising that, when it came to looking after them, Spain had not moved on very far. The only man at the prenatal class soon became one of the handful of fathers at the playground in the Retiro park on weekdays. I was not there every day, as others were, but thank you Chema, Julio, Santi, Ramón and Marcelo for the male company. We were heavily outnumbered by mothers and the middle-class replacement for parents,
la chica
, ‘the girl’.
La chica
is an Ecuadorian, Peruvian or Colombian immigrant who, despite the name, may be aged anywhere between eighteen and sixty. She is the cleaner, nanny and, sometimes, cook in a middle-class, urban household. In posher parts of Madrid, and one apartment in my building, she must wear a maid’s uniform. Middle-class Spain would fall to pieces without her.

Spain, on paper, has managed all the advances of feminism that have been achieved elsewhere in Europe. Equal rights, equal salaries, equality itself, is enshrined in law. Women are in
government
. They accounted, in fact, for half of the Socialist cabinet appointed in 2004. That is a feat only previously matched by
Sweden
and Finland. When it came to celebrating their achievement, however, the
ministras
chose to do a spread for
Vogue
. The
Spanish
progre
, progressive, woman may believe in boldly advancing forwards, but she is not going to ditch her attachment to glamour.

On Franco’s death on 20 November 1975, Spanish women’s lives were governed by what, for most of the rest of Europe, were 1930s rules. The
permiso marital
was proof of that. Progress, then, has been remarkable. Spanish feminism, however, did not appear
entirely out of nothing. As with so many other things, Spanish women seeking role models had to look back to the 1930s and the sudden, remarkable burst of reforming energy provided by those who got rid of the monarchy and founded the Second Republic in 1931. The Republic had set about reforming a Civil Code which declared, for example, that ‘the husband who, catching his wife committing adultery should kill her in the act, or the man … will be punished by banishment’. Even this minimal form of
punishment
, however, did not apply ‘should he cause them only lesser wounds’. In that case, it stated, ‘there will be no legal sanctions’.

A home-grown breed of feminist pioneers won women the vote in 1931. That was only three years after full women’s suffrage in Britain and more than a decade ahead of France, Italy or
Belgium
. ‘The concession of the vote to women caused considerable scandal in the debating chamber … The blue bench [of the
ministers
] was almost assaulted by deputies who argued with the ministers and gave signs of great exaltation,’ one contemporary newspaper report recorded. Women such as Victoria Kent and María Martínez Sierra drove through reforms. A year later they also gained divorce by mutual consent – almost forty years before this appeared, for example, in Britain and Denmark. It would be one of the first laws that Franco overturned.

One of the most remarkable of this new breed of progressive, reforming women was Hildegart Rodríguez, sometimes known as ‘the Red Virgin’. Her tragic story sums up the conflicting visions of women at the time. Hildegart, a child prodigy born in 1914 but dead at the age of eighteen, was the ambitious project of her mother, Aurora.

Aurora’s view of her own sex was decidedly warped. ‘Women, in general, lack souls. There are animals who have more
delightful
souls,’ she believed. ‘They are, it is painful to admit, the worst of the human species.’

Despite this, Aurora decided to create her own super-being. She already had money, so, ‘with no pleasure’, she found, and spent three nights with, a man to set the project going. The result, a baby girl rather than a baby boy, must have been something of a
blow, but that did not hold her back. The programme of genius creation started during pregnancy, with Aurora changing
position
every hour in bed, in order to stimulate the foetus. Proper training started as soon as the baby had popped out of the womb. Hildegart could read and write by the age of three. She was
speaking
French, English and German by the age of eight. Philosophy and sexual education, almost unheard of at the time, were high on Aurora’s list. The latter was there because ‘women lose themselves because of sex’.

Hildegart joined the Socialist Party at the age of fourteen. She started to publish in the newspaper
El Socialista
, without the editor knowing how old she was. When he found out, he declared she might become ‘one of the great figures of world socialism’. By the age of seventeen she had a degree in law, was studying medicine and was vice-president of the Socialist Youth Organisation. A
controversial
book entitled
Did Marx Get It Wrong
? saw her expelled from the party. By this stage the Second Republic had been born. Spain was experiencing a dizzying, if short-lived, burst of social progress. The teenage Hildegart was caught up in the excitement. She published more books, gave speeches, became famous and founded a League for Sexual Reform. She corresponded with, amongst others, the writer H. G. Wells, the British sexologist Havelock Ellis and, in the US, birth-control campaigner Margaret Sanger. At all times, however, she was chaperoned by Aurora.

Hildegart eventually decided to break free. She told her mother she was planning a trip to London to see, amongst others, Wells. Aurora was fiercely against the idea and they argued long and hard. One night Aurora sat beside her daughter for several hours, watching her sleep. Then she fetched a pistol and shot the teenager – one bullet through the head, three in the chest – as she slept. Aurora was carted off to the lunatic asylum. She remained
stubbornly
, deliriously proud of her crime. Hildegart, she claimed, had begged for death saying: ‘You who created me must destroy me. Punish me severely.’

Spain’s statute books have, once and for all, put paid to her mother’s ideas about women’s position. But changing laws is one
thing. Changing mores is something else. And, when it comes to families, Spanish men show little sign of wanting anything, except their size (smaller is better), to change. This, to a greater or lesser degree, is a problem everywhere. But a single statistic suffices to show how much worse it is here. Only some 5,000 men a year
currently
take up their right to up to ten weeks’ paternity leave in Spain, compared to 250,000 women who take maternity leave.

When our eldest son turned two, we started looking for a
nursery
school for him to attend for a few hours every day. We wanted a place where he could discover that other children were useful for more than just infant martial arts. So it was that we began to visit the barrio’s nurseries, almost all of which are private. With 95 per cent of children going to nursery school by the age of three, there was no lack of choice. Our first surprise, however, was that we had arrived late – by about two years. In every nursery there was a room, or two, devoted to rows of cots. Many children, it was explained, started here at sixteen weeks – exactly the moment at which their mother needed to be back at the workplace.

When we finally made our choice, we would find out for
ourselves
how this system worked. Anxious mothers, or
watch-glancing
dads, would appear at the door with a small bundle in a pram. The baby would be handed over, the pram shuffled off to the pram car park. Sometimes the child would be brought by
la chica
, other times by a grandmother. The latter would be treated with a respect that the former was seldom accorded. The bundle may, or may not cry. Medicines would, if necessary, be discussed. And off they would go, like so many pampered battery hens, to the room with the cots.

A separate door might then open and a swarm of slightly older, crawling infants appear through it. The crawlers would be shepherded this way or that like a gaggle of slow-moving geese. If they had to go upstairs, they tackled the staircase like professional climbers determined to conquer Mount Everest, a mass of bobbing, well-padded bottoms heading for the peak.

And so it went on. A couple of hundred children aged between zero and six, all encased in neat, green-and-white checked
gingham
pinafores, came here every day. Some started at 8 a.m. and were given breakfast. One of the most startling things about these children was the tweeness with which some were dressed. We had spotted the specialist children’s shops full of powder-blue boys’ outfits and pink girls’ outfits before becoming parents ourselves. But it was when a delicate, powder-blue, knitted-cotton, ribboned baby suit arrived from an acquaintance who was not only meant to be a prominent feminist but was also a Socialist minister, that we realised this was not just a fashion for 1950s nostalgists. At the nursery school and in the park, we would see parents who looked and dressed like us, parading children dressed in elaborate knickerbockers, smocked dresses, sashes, bows, Peter Pan collars, pin-tucks or matching knickers and bloomers. Often these
children
would come in matched pairs, their clothes identical or, if boy and girl, made of the same material. The occasional family of three or four kids might be identified by the fact that they were all, despite the age spread, wearing the same clothes, just in different sizes.

The children at our nursery school were, it was argued, here to learn to socialise. In reality, however, the youngest were here because their fathers would not have dreamt of stopping, or reducing, their working hours, and it was time for their mums to take up their posts at work again. There were exceptions, but mothers basically kept – and keep – all the responsibilities of the household and children’s welfare, despite having working hours that might stretch until 7 p.m. or later. One study shows that, if you combine their hours at the office with the work they do at home, Spanish women work an average of an hour a day more than their men. The normal ratio of housework between one sex and the other eleven to one (4.4 hours to thirty minutes a day). An alarming statistic from the same study was that they were, jointly, the hardest workers in Europe. The sociologist who
presented
the study, María Ángeles Durán, said that young Spanish women had opted for the easiest ‘solution’ to the problem of squeezing children into their busy timetable. ‘Given that they take up so much time, we have decided not to have them,’ she said.