Ghosts of Spain (35 page)

Tradition and huge taxes on buying and selling houses mean that many people only ever buy one home, and stay in it until they die. In our building, for example, the appearance of a ‘For Sale’ sign on the front door often means that another neighbour has passed away. Mostly they died in their apartments, or within hours or days of the ambulance being called.

The routine of death in Madrid, and elsewhere in Spain, is a well-trodden path. The dead are carted off to the
tanatorio
, the city’s official morgue. This is perched above the ten-lane inner ring road, the M30, between the mosque and an ugly, concrete and glass hotel. Beautified by morticians, they are laid out in their coffins and put on public display so friends and family can make a final, posthumous visit while giving the immediate family their condolences.

Over the years the
tanatorio
has become a sadly familiar place. When a friend’s close relative dies, you are expected to appear, offer condolences, take a peek at the cadaver and stay for a chat.

One might expect this to be a solemn place. But, with vigils going on for up to twenty-six dead, all neatly arranged in
adjoining
cubicles, the
tanatorio
bustles like a railway terminus.
First-timers
might think they have stepped into a small airport terminal. Groups of people mill about. A TV monitor tells you which corpse is in which cubicle. A cash dispenser sits in the
middle
of the foyer. Another machine produces prepaid phone cards. There is, inevitably, a large bar-cum-restaurant doing brisk trade. I even have friends who, because of its extended opening hours,
have used it for the last drink on an evening out. A new
tanatorio
, I notice, has just been opened in Madrid. It advertises on the radio with the slogan ‘the most modern
tanatorio
in Europe’.

These
velatorios
do not have to be deeply tragic. I remember, for example, a friend’s grandfather, his head wrapped in a white shroud. His peaceful, nonagenarian face gave him the look of a sixteenth-century Spanish mystic. I also recall, however, Juan Carlos’s eighteen-year-old, and only, son. On that occasion, no condolences could possibly come close to easing the pain. But, at least, a grieving single father had company for the first
twenty-four
hours after death.

Madrid burials normally take place the day after death in one of the city’s handful of vast cemeteries. At the newest one, the Cementerio Sur, a priest stands at the gate, providing a drive-in rites-of-committal service. The hearses that roll through stop briefly and open their doors for him to say the words over the
coffin
before heading off to the appointed burial niche.

Inside the cemetery, the burial niches are lined up, like so many apartment blocks, in long walls, six tiers high. The niches must be paid for and rental is for a limited period, unless it is renewed by future generations. When your time is up, and if your family declines to pay, your bones are removed and tossed into a
communal
ossuary.

Gerald Brenan, travelling through Spain in 1949, came across a large pit of bones in the cemetery in Granada as he searched for the grave of the poet and playwright Federico García Lorca – shot thirteen years earlier. Mostly, the bones belonged to some of the thousands of
Granadinos
given death sentences by Franco’s
kangaroo
courts and shot during the Civil War. But one, older, body drew his attention. ‘Stretched across the rubble of bones, in an attitude of rigid attention, was a complete and well-preserved corpse, dressed in green and black-braided uniform,’ wrote
Brenan
. ‘Its face, a little greenish too with dark markings, as though the flesh were trying to take on the colour of the uniform, had the severe, self-concentrated look of a man who is engaged in some self-important task.’

The local gravedigger explained that the body belonged to a Civil Guard colonel who had died fifty years earlier. He had been well preserved because he had lain in one of the higher niches. ‘We took him up the other day because his family have stopped paying the rent,’ the gravedigger explained.

Brenan’s own death, in 1987, caused Spanish authorities
considerable
headaches. Don Gerardo, as he was known, may not have been famous in Britain, but in Spain he was an icon. He had already starred in a bizarre episode in which he left his home in Alhaurín el Grande, near Málaga, and checked into an old people’s home in Pinner. A somewhat confused Brenan was deemed to have been taken there against his will, provoking the local mayor to fly to Britain and bring him back, pledging that the town would look after him. On his death (soon afterwards), it was discovered that he wanted to leave his body to medicine. It went to Málaga
University’s
Faculty of Medicine, where it stayed for the next fourteen years. The faculty’s doctors never dared mutilate the corpse for research because, they said, Don Gerardo was too important. ‘I had hoped that, with time, people would forget that we had his body,’ José María Smith Ágreda, the professor to whom Brenan had
personally
entrusted his body, said. ‘It did not seem decent to put the author of
The Spanish
Labyrinth
on the dissecting table.’

Eventually it was agreed that he should be buried. The body was incinerated, and the ashes placed in an urn mixed with earth from the two Andalusian towns where he had lived, Yegen and Alhaurín el Grande. It was buried in the British Cemetery in Málaga, beside Gamel Woolsey, his American poet wife. The cemetery is an extraordinarily beautiful and tranquil spot in the heart of old Málaga. A small, honey-coloured stone Anglican church stands in the midst of a garden full of thick Mediterranean vegetation and plumbago flowers. It had been set up in the
mid-eighteenth
century by a British consul appalled that Protestants were not allowed to be buried in Catholic graveyards. Their coffins had, instead, to be left, during the night, standing feet-first on the seashore at a spot where the city tipped its rubbish – and where the corpses were at the mercy of scavenging dogs.

Even in death, then, Spaniards’ innate ability to operate as a social mass helps turn tragedy into occasion. This ability to shed, for a moment, their personal, liberal agenda and instinctively incorporate themselves into a social group is, perhaps, the secret to Spanish communal living. Perhaps that is why they work at it so hard at school. At moments of great political tension, they show an unmatched ability to pour onto the streets en masse and protest. The great demonstrations in Madrid over the past
twenty-five
years – against killings by the Basque terrorist group ETA, Islamist bomb attacks, coup attempts or, even, the Iraq war – each gathered more than a million people together.

The friction between a Spaniard’s liberal desire to do whatever he or she wants and their need to live in a mass with others of a similar disposition emerges in that troublesome institution known, often inappropriately, as
la comunidad
, the community of neighbours. This brings the owners of all the apartments in one building together to run its common affairs. Although there has recently been a move towards
urbanizaciones
of terraced or detached homes on the outskirts of cities, most Spaniards still like to live piled up atop one another. Small towns, as a result, often start in a startlingly abrupt fashion. There are fields or open
countryside
and then, suddenly, there is the bare brickwork flank of the first apartment block. Another is attached to it next door, and the whole medium-rise townscape can continue like that until, just as suddenly, you are back out in the countryside.

This cheek-by-jowl living is the natural state of the inner city, where I live. It is continued in many of the new barrios that emerge out of nowhere in the country’s rapidly expanding cities, where huge blocks of apartments, some with their own
communal
swimming pool, are sprouting up. With almost four out of five homes owned by the people living in them, Spaniards outdo even the British – leave the French and Germans trailing – as property owners. That means that they own their flat, but also
co-own
the building it is in with their neighbours.

Meetings of the
comunidad
are, traditionally, where you learn the ugly truth about your neighbours. These quarrelsome, heated
assemblies are often held in a smoky back room of the local bar. Hours are spent angrily debating mundane matters – such as whether the lift floor should be covered in lino or rubber. Votes are sometimes cast not on the merits of argument, but to even old scores.

It was our downstairs neighbour who plunged us into the affairs of our own
comunidad
. The man we bought from had warned us that the elderly woman downstairs was ‘
como una cabra
’ – ‘as mad as a goat’. She soon informed us that the tenants who had been in our apartment before had played nasty tricks on her. They had spotted her ceiling with black dots. They had
managed
to make smoke and fumes travel downstairs. They had also, she claimed, sneaked dead birds into her apartment.

Things started more or less well. She would bring us letters, written in English, from a foreign bank where her ex-husband had left her money, so we could translate them. She would tell us how evil the rest of our neighbours were. She would refuse to go away.

Then, one day, she sent the police round. I had almost killed her, she claimed, and ought to be locked up. Two armed police officers arrived at our door to deliver her
denuncia
and tell me I should go down to the police station and give my version of events. A long, rambling note written in her spidery handwriting on the back of a piece of scrap paper was pushed under our door. ‘If you try to fool the judge, you will go to prison,’ she warned.

Our downstairs neighbour had some reason for complaint. The false ceiling in her dining room had fallen down, showering her mock-Chippendale furniture with sodden plaster and
bringing
down a chandelier. She, fortunately, had not been in the room when it happened. But she still considered this a case of near homicidal negligence on our part.

The cause, it turned out, was a leak from our roof terrace. In Madrid it had rained for weeks. Across town a couple of
semi-abandoned
buildings had already collapsed under the weight of it. My terrace, bizarrely but fortunately, turned out not to be my legal responsibility. As part of the outside fabric of the building, it
was the
comunidad
that was meant to pay for its upkeep. The judge shelved the case against me. The
comunidad
, after a couple of years in which her dining room stayed in its semi-ruined state, eventually struck a deal.

Film-maker Alex de la Iglesia made a film which he called
La
Comunidad
. It was an Ealing-style comedy, in which the
neighbours
try to bump off an estate agent, played by Carmen Maura. She, according to the plot, had discovered a treasure trove of cash in a dead man’s apartment. It was a spoof on the underlying
tensions
that lie in all
comunidades
. One of the most popular series on Spanish television now follows a similar formula. But the truth is that, hard work as it is,
la comunidad
succeeds as an institution. A Spaniard’s social agility is, in the end, superior to their fierce feelings of personal independence.

Over time I have watched as my own children, mostly British by blood but mostly Spanish by culture, learn to belong to those huge groups that Spaniards find one of their most natural
habitats
. ‘Just imagine,’ said one mother, watching a gang of six-
year-olds
play. ‘They’ll still be friends when they are our age.’ Only if, I was tempted to say, they never move out of the barrio, like you.

But I realised she might be right one day as I watched my younger son and other four-year-olds from his infants class climbing noisily into a coach. They were going away to spend three days with their teachers and lots of farmyard animals at a ‘
granja escuela
’ – ‘a school farm’. This had been sold to us as a
further
, intensive round of group-formation training and, therefore, key to their education. I felt a pang of envy as I watched my child go. He already belonged to that noisy, congenial mass known as Spaniards in a way that I – with my innate, sometimes awkward,
anglosajón
individualism – find impossible.

The road south from Granada towards the Mediterranean rises gently uphill as it rounds the western fringes of the snow-capped Sierra Nevada. As you crest the rise, the
sierra
swells upwards on the left, a first, dramatic rampart towards the Mulhacén,
mainland
Spain’s highest peak. This is where the rivers start running south, rushing for the nearby sea. It is, however, the name of this pass – rather than the countryside around it – that impresses. For this, a modest sign indicates, is the ‘
Puerto del Suspiro del Moro
’, ‘The Pass of the Moor’s Sigh’.

It was here, according to legend, that Boabdil, the last Moorish ruler of Granada, looked back for the final time towards the city. Boabdil, whose Mediterranean kingdom had stretched west to Málaga and east to Almería, was a sentimental man. Standing here on a January day in 1492, the story goes, he wept. It was not just the end of his personal reign, but of 781 years of Muslim kingdoms in Spain. The Granadinos still celebrate the
Fiesta de la
Reconquista
, of the Reconquest, every 2 January. They are not always keen to recognise it, but a century and a half must still pass before their city can claim to have been Christian for longer than it was a place where, principally, Mohammed was revered.

Boabdil was on his way to La Alpujarra, the steep, south-facing foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragón had left him a small fiefdom in return for his capitulation. As he stood looking back towards Granada and his recently abandoned Alhambra fortress-palace, his formidable mother, Ayxa, is reputed to have scolded him. Washington Irving, the American writer who was so entranced by the Alhambra when he arrived here in the 1820s, put her words this way: ‘‘‘You do well,” said she, “to weep as a woman over what you could not
defend as a man’.’’ Irving did not invent the story himself. Well before he arrived here on his horse, this had been known as ‘The Moor’s Sigh’.  ‘
La Cuesta de Las Lágrimas
’, ‘The Slope of Tears’.

The year Granada was taken, bringing almost eight centuries of Christian
Reconquista
of Iberia to a formal end, was
extraordinary
. It is hard to overestimate the importance, not just to Spain but to the world, of the events that unfurled under the joint flags of Castile and Aragón. This year still conjures up a one-line
childhood
rhyme which I used to memorise dates. ‘In 1492,’ I learnt,‘Columbus sailed the ocean blue.’ On the far side of the Atlantic, indeed, Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ the
Americas
, creating a colony on the island of Hispaniola – now home to the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Spain’s Jews, meanwhile, were expelled on the orders of Isabella and Ferdinand. This couple, known as the Catholic Kings, had, by uniting their realms,
effectively
founded modern Spain (though it would take until 1512 to fit in the last piece of the puzzle, Navarre). Today’s Sephardic Jews, clustered in communities from Los Angeles to Paris to Tel Aviv, are the descendants of that diaspora. Legend has it that some families still conserve, five hundred years later, the old iron key to their house in Toledo. At a synagogue in the besieged Bosnian capital of Sarajevo I was once able to converse, in an admittedly stuttering fashion, with an elderly man using two similar
languages
that we could both understand – his Ladino and my Castilian Spanish. The old man’s Ladino – a quaint, time-warped version of Spanish conserved over centuries by the Sephardic community – might have been even more easily understood by Miguel de Cervantes, the creator of Don Quixote and a
contemporary
of William Shakespeare. The expulsion of the Jews was just the first stage in a process of ethnic and religious cleansing. The Moors themselves were also gradually obliged to convert to Christianity and, when they refused or only pretended to do so, eventually expelled.

Boabdil’s melancholy trip into the Alpujarra led him to one of the most beautiful spots in Spain. The steep slopes of the Alpujarra hills
are covered in scrub, deciduous woodland, olives or small orchards of apple, cherry, fig, pear, orange, lemon, medlar and almond trees. Deep gullies cut into the hillsides which, in places, are stripped nearly bare by erosion. All is bathed in that special, clear, whitish light of south and central Spain. Watered by snow-melt and springs from the Sierra Nevada, this was the ‘desert island’ discovered by writer Gerald Brenan. His Bloomsbury friends, Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington, rode mules up through the valleys to stay at his home in Yegen in the 1920s. Brenan was struck here by the stillness and the quality of the thin air. Sounds from a village four miles away – barking dogs, men singing flamenco’s
cante jondo
, even the noise of running water – would travel crisply across the valley. There was ‘a feeling of air surrounding one, of fields of air washing over one that I have never come across anywhere else’. Woolf recalled ‘scrambling on the hillside among fig trees and olives … as excited as a
schoolgirl
on holiday’.

In those days the tightly huddled houses in the
pueblos
were a drab, unpainted grey. The standard of living for some had not changed for centuries. Poorer families boasted just one possession – a cooking pot. There were no metalled roads and no money for whitewash. Now there are not only roads – though these are still bone-rattlers in places – but the white-painted villages gleam like Christmas decorations scattered down the steep hillsides.
Visitors
like to think they have always been like that. In fact the Alpujarra villages, like so many places and people around Spain, only became wealthy enough to pretty themselves up later in the twentieth century.

Driving towards Yegen from the Pass of the Moor’s Sigh on the high road towards Trevélez, which some claim is Spain’s highest village, another roadside sign gives a clue to the history of Spain’s Moors. More particularly, it tells of the
moriscos
, the Moorish population that nominally converted to Christianity after
Boabdil’s
defeat and his subsequent move, a few years later, to north Africa. Here, cutting under one of the tight curves that look down into the precipitous, bare valleys where the Trevélez, Poqueira and
Guadalfeo rivers flow, is the
Barranco de la Sangre
, the Gully of Blood. The
moriscos
of La Alpujarra, in a last-ditch attempt to hold on to the customs, language, clothes, veils and even bathing practices that had been banned by decree, rebelled in 1568. A plaque on a house in the nearby village of Válor, erected recently by a group of Spanish converts to Islam, marks the site of the home of Aben Humeya, the leader of the revolt. ‘To Aben Humeya and the
moriscos
, the height of freedom for Al Andalus,’ it says.

Rather than the height of freedom, however, the rebellion was part of the death throes of Moorish Spain. One of the worst battles was here, in the Gully of Blood. Legend has it the blood of the Christian soldiers flowed uphill in order not to mix with the Moorish, crypto-Islamic blood of the
moriscos
.

Forty years later the
moriscos
– who still accounted, for example, for a third of the population of the Valencia region – were forced to leave. Some 275,000 of them were ordered out in 1609. Many died of hunger or exhaustion. Others were massacred on their arrival in North Africa, or were killed even before they had
managed
to leave Spain.

The
moriscos
, and the Moors themselves, had always seemed to me just another quaint, if important and romantic, part of Spanish history. Their presence in modern Spain (except in language and place names) was solely architectural. Here, after all, were the
splendid
Alhambra palace, the vast
mezquita
in Córdoba with its 580 columns and the hilltop Alcazaba fortresses overlooking Málaga and Almería. They had left, too, some uniquely Spanish
architectural
forms, where east and west overlapped to produce the hybrid
mudéjar
and
mozárabe
styles in churches and monasteries.

Occasionally, Al Andalus would reappear in the news. Muslims, for example, tried to gain access for themselves and other
religions
to pray at the Córdoba
mezquita
– which now houses the city’s cathedral – but were turned down by the Vatican. Those who prostrate themselves before the
mezquita
’s sparkling, golden
mihrab
can still be thrown out. In Granada, meanwhile, a group of European converts eventually got money out of the United Arab Emirates to build a smart, gleaming new mosque on top of
the Albaicín. It symbolically overlooks the Alhambra from a charming barrio of winding lanes and cypress-filled gardens that once boasted twenty-eight mosques. That, I thought, was it. Al Andalus was a great tourism draw. Granada, with its Moroccan gift shops and restaurants offering
couscous
and
tajines
, had even become something of a Moorish theme park. Here was one piece of history that Spaniards were not about to argue over.

I could not have been more wrong. Late in 2004, José María Aznar, the former prime minister whose Conservative People’s Party (PP) had been ejected from power in favour of the Socialists of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero at elections that March, gave a lecture at Washington’s Georgetown University. His party’s defeat had come three days after 191 Madrid railway commuters were killed in the west’s worst Islamist terror attack since September 11. It had been the most traumatic moment in recent Spanish history. To understand the circumstances surrounding that defeat, Aznar told the Georgetown students, they should wind the clock back to 711. This, Spanish schoolchildren are meant to know, was the moment when a Berber called Tarik Bin Ziyad crossed the Mediterranean with a small army and began a swift invasion of Iberia (whilst also leaving his name behind at the large rock known as Jabal-al-Tarik, the Rock of Tarik, now Gibraltar).

‘Spain’s problem with Al-Qaida starts in the eighth century … when a Spain recently invaded by the Moors refused to become just another piece in the Islamic world and began a long battle to recover its identity,’ Aznar said. ‘This r
econquista
process was very long, lasting some eight hundred years.’

Aznar was widely ridiculed for his words. They were an attempt to relate the train attacks to Al Andalus. Christian Spain, he meant, had long been a target for Islamic crusaders. An old enemy, in other words, had returned.

Few people agreed. One who might have done, however, was a bearded and robed man then believed to be hiding out somewhere in Pakistan. Osama bin Laden had shown a personal interest in Al-Andalus, signalling it to his followers as an apostate territory and lamenting its loss to Islam. On the day in October, 2001,
that the United States began its campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Al-Qaida founder issued one of his famous videotapes. He was followed by his number two, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri. ‘Let the whole world know that we shall never accept that the tragedy of Al Andalus should be repeated,’ al-Zawahiri said. Two months before the Madrid attacks, Bin Laden himself returned to the theme, lamenting the weakness of the Arab world. ‘It is enough to know that the economy of all Arab countries is weaker than the economy of one country that had once been part of our world when we used to truly adhere to Islam. That country is the lost Al Andalus,’ he said on a tape broadcast by Al Jazeera.

A newspaper editorial summed up the feelings of those Spaniards who had angrily rejected Aznar’s policies and his
disastrous
handling of the bombings at the polls that March. ‘In their reinvention of the past, and their vindication of the crusades between Islam and Christianity, there is a disturbing similarity between Aznar and Bin Laden,’ huffed
El País
. Spain’s Muslims, be they immigrant Moroccans or local converts, agreed.

Aznar was not the only outraged Spaniard talking of a
conspiracy
to turn the clock back several centuries. A few weeks earlier, Spain’s leading clergyman, the arch-conservative Cardinal Antonio María Rouco, had trodden a similar path. ‘Some people wish to place us in the year 711,’ Cardinal Rouco said. He was complaining about rumours that the Socialist government planned to put other religions or denominations, be they Islam, Judaism or the Protestant churches, on the same footing as Roman Catholicism – which, amongst other things, has a near stranglehold on religious teaching at schools. ‘It seems as if we are meant to wipe ourselves out of history.’

Once again, I found, Spaniards were bickering over the
meaning
of their own history. Only this time it was about a period that stretched back, in British terms, to even before the days of the Vikings. It seemed that the country’s self-image was somehow at stake. Should Spain be defined as a proudly Roman Catholic nation that emerged, or re-emerged, from a valiant eight-century
battle against Islam? Or should it, as the historian Américo
Castro
first proposed decades ago, think of itself as being forged from a historic encounter between religions and cultures, including both Islam and Judaism? For a country of inevitably intimate relations with a Muslim world that is clearly visible across the Mediterranean from its southernmost shores, these are important questions.

This latest row had been sparked by the tragic, dramatic events of those four bitter, yet historic, days in March 2004. These were the four days bracketed, at one end, by the train bombings and, at the other, by the surprise ousting of Aznar’s party from power.

Early on the morning of 11 March, Luis Garrudo, the doorman of a small block of flats close to the railway station in Alcalá de Henares, a Madrid dormitory town, noticed a white Renault
Kangoo
van parked across the street. It was a bright, spring morning. Three men busied themselves around the van. They seemed dressed for the coldest of winter days. Their heads and faces were all but hidden behind scarves, hats and hoods.