Ghosts of Spain (49 page)

Montserrat has a reputation for producing rebellious monks. Under Franco, the monks continued to talk, read, write and preach in Catalan. In 1962 the then Abbot, Escarré, became one of the first church rebels by giving an interview to
Le Monde
in which he accused Franco of being a bad Catholic. A famous protest saw three hundred Catalan intellectuals lock themselves inside the chapel in 1970 while Franco’s police sat helplessly outside. Even then, though, many of this self-styled
gauche divine
, divine left, were champagne radicals. Barcelona’s Bocaccio nightclub delivered salmon sandwiches to keep them going. Franco knew he dare not touch the place. Jordi Pujol’s Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya party was founded here and, as its propaganda eagerly points out, this was where he married.

Today the monastery’s ninety monks include respected experts on the Catalan language, with their publishing house producing seminal works. They remain, however, an argumentative bunch. Recent reports suggest there has been a bout of infighting. Older, more strident
catalanistas
have, it is said, been moved on. One newspaper claimed they had lost out in a factional power struggle that involved a clique of gay monks.

I find Montserrat dull and uninspiring. The singing of a wonderful boy’s choir – the oldest in Europe – fails to cheer me up. It is too new, too much a place for coach parties and day-trippers with foil-wrapped
bocadillos
. It has a cable car and a funicular railway. There are restaurants, gift shops and a post office. It feels like a religious-nationalist theme park. Catholicism and nationalism are, together, a spooky phenomenon, especially in a Spain that can recall Franco’s version of it. I think of another Benedictine monastery with a choir school and a nationalist aura that I have visited recently – at Franco’s Valley of the Fallen. My soul, Montserrat reminds me, is neither Catholic nor Catalan.

I drive on to another Catalan monastery. I have no trouble, however, feeling the pull of Santa María de Poblet. As I arrive the sun is going down and an icy wind is blowing through the neighbouring vineyards. The tourists have gone. The walls of the vast monastery complex, sitting under the wooded slopes of the
Prades hills, emit a warm, pinkish-ochre glow as they catch the reflections of the day’s final rays. This is one of three Cistercian monasteries – the others are at Santes Creus and Vallbona de les Monges – built in the Catalan countryside in the twelfth century as the Moors were rolled south towards Valencia.

I find myself alone in the huge courtyard. Dogs are barking at the wind. A fountain provides the only other sound. I go into a huge, triple-nave chapel. It is dark, so I wait outside. A sign hangs in the entrance. ‘The services are in Catalan. Please be punctual.’ Bells ring out – a warm, booming noise that announces vespers. I go back into the cavernous chapel, where lights are slowly being turned on. A woman is confessing in one gloomy corner. Two dozen white-robed monks file in to the stalls that occupy part of the central nave. Poblet, I am surprised to see, is as multiracial as Las Ramblas. The younger monks mostly look as if they come from south America or north Africa.

There are only three of us in the congregation: the woman who had been confessing, a young man in a puffa jacket and myself. A monk offers me a copy of the
Antifonari
so I can follow proceedings. ‘Where are you from?’ he asks. ‘Britain,’ I reply. ‘Better not then,’ he says, retiring the book. ‘It is in Catalan.’ I persuade him that I can follow it anyway – both the music and the words. In fact, the words turn out to be easier. The musical score is dense and mysterious. It loses me quickly. The singing is soft and harmonious. It feels as though it is issuing from the stones and the walls. The monks somehow manage to fill the three broad, high naves of the chapel with their music. Incense wafts slowly down from the far end of the chapel, which seems a very long way off. The chapel is not just cold, but damp. A deep chill creeps into my bones as I sit on my wooden pew. My hands go numb. I wrap them in a scarf. The monks keep singing, standing, sitting and bowing as they go through their rituals.

Towards the back of the chapel, beyond the monks, I can see an elaborate stone tomb. I wonder who it belongs to. This is the last resting place of many medieval Catalan rulers, counts and kings. Most have nicknames. The Chaste, the Conqueror, the Lover of
Elegance, the Benign and the Humanist are all here.

When I leave, it is night time. I am alone again in the courtyard and the spotlights send huge shadows against the walls. For a moment I am a silhouette giant, as big as one of the hexagonal towers at the Royal Gate. I walk out thinking that, were I Catalan, I might feel the pull of history, some essence of my identity, in a place like this.

As I leave, I think about Catalan history and identity. So what makes a nation a nation, or a country a country? Does it have to be an independent state? Obviously not, if you think about Scotland. When can a country be said to have disappeared, or come into existence? And what does it mean to be a country – or, if you want, a nation – inside another country? Catalans account for nearly one in six Spaniards. They are an essential part of the mix. It is a very Spanish conundrum.

It is not a new one. ‘They are neither French nor Spanish but
sui generis
in language, costume and habits,’ the great British chronicler of early-nineteenth-century Spain, Richard Ford, reported. ‘No province of the unamalgamating bundle which forms the conventional monarchy of Spain hangs more loosely to the crown than Catalonia, this classical country of revolt, which is ever ready to fly off.’

History sometimes helps. Sometimes it does not. In Spain it is, to a great degree, something to argue over – another political weapon in the battle of identities. Catalan history is no exception. ‘History is a trap,’ the separatist writer Víctor Alexandre warned me. ‘What matters is now, and the future.’

The facts of Catalan history are fairly straightforward. Northern Catalonia had been recovered from the Moors relatively quickly, in the early eighth century. Charlemagne’s son helped take Barcelona in 801. This was the Spanish March – a series of counties that acted as a buffer zone between the Franks and the Muslims. Barcelona was ruled by counts. Wilfred the Hairy, considered by some to be the founder of Catalonia, brought Barcelona and other counties together. He was, however, still a vassal to, of all people, Charles the Bald.

Catalans liked giving their counts – as those buried at Poblet showed – nicknames. If Wilfred was Hairy – and he certainly is in later sculptures of him – his successors over the coming centuries were one of the following: Crooked, Old, Towheaded, Great, Fratricidal, Saintly, Chaste, Catholic, Liberal, Humanist, Benign, Just, Generous, Ceremonious or just plain Careless.

In 988 one of these counts, Borrell II of Barcelona, broke his vassalage to the French king Hugh Capet. It was not exactly ‘Freedom for Catalonia’, but it could be called ‘Freedom for Barcelona’. A thousand years later, in 1988, the Generalitat would decree the millennium of the political birth of Catalonia. The Counts of Barcelona expanded their territory southwards and became, through a marriage in 1137, the Kings of Aragón – a title they used from then on. The southward roll would continue until they passed Alicante in 1266. The Aragónese kings then looked east. They gained control of the Balearics (after slaughtering or selling into slavery most of the male population of Menorca), Sicily, Corsica, Sardinia and, by the fifteenth century, Naples and the southern half of modern Italy. But the lines with Castile were already getting blurred. The original dynasty ran out of heirs on the death of Martí, the Humanist, in 1410. Martí turned out to be the last Catalan to rule. A Castilian, Ferdinand of Antequera, was brought in as king. Six centuries later some Catalans would rather that had never happened.

In 1479 the new rulers would, again by marriage, help unify Spain under the joint leadership of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragón. Thirteen years later they conquered the last Spanish Muslim kingdom at Granada. Castile plus Aragón minus Moors meant, basically, that Spain had been founded (though there was still work to be done in Navarre). The rest, as they say, is history. But it is not. This is Spain. History, once more, is the stuff of debate, disagreement and politics.

The origins of Catalan discontent with the results of Isabella’s and Ferdinand’s marriage can be found, some say, in an oath. It was one sworn by subjects of the Aragonese kings and it went: ‘We, who are as good as you, swear to you, who are no better than
us, to accept you as our king and sovereign lord, provided you observe all our liberties and laws – but if not, not.’

With the court now displaced from Barcelona to Castile, Catalans began to lose out. Trade to the Americas was given to Andalucía. Plague, famine and an overstretched Mediterranean empire were, anyway, taking their toll.

The Catalan national anthem, adapted from a folk song in the late nineteenth century, recalls what the Generalitat refers to as ‘the War of the Catalans against King Philip IV’ in 1640. For a while I could find no other reference to this war. Then I discovered it was usually given another name. It is the Revolt of the Reapers, or the Reapers’ War. Whatever its proper name – and the motivation – the peasant rebels were Catalans down to their canvas
espardenyes
, espadrilles. They invented, as a password, a tongue-twister full of sounds that only a Catalan could hope to say: ‘
Setze jutges d’un jutjat menjen fetge d’un penjat
’, ‘Sixteen judges from a court eat the liver of a hanged man’. It was, for your average lisping Spaniard, as confusing and impossible a phrase as the words ‘Manchester United’ are to today’s football commentators (who, for some reason, never quite make it to that final ‘d’ sound). The Catalan aristocracy joined the peasants, Catalonia saw off the king’s army and momentarily declared independence under French protection. France did not like the idea of an independent Catalonia. A week later, Catalonia swore allegiance to the king of France ‘as in the time of Charlemagne, with a contract to observe our constitutions’. Catalans stayed French subjects for twelve years. They spent much of that time falling out amongst themselves. Eventually, with the Aragónese and Valencians refusing to help them, they were reabsorbed into Spain.

The anthem is called ‘Els Segadors’, ‘The Reapers’. ‘We must not be the prey/ Of those proud and arrogant invaders!/Let us swing the sickle!/Let us swing the sickle, defenders of our land!’ it urges. The proud and arrogant (
gent tan ufana i tan superba
in Catalan) they rail against every time they sing their anthem are, of course, Castilians. Again, the Generalitat cannot resist offering a po-faced explanation for the anthem. ‘It is solemn and firm, and unites the
will of the people in favour of the survival of a nation which proclaims its full national character.’ It is, in fact, a celebration of the last time Catalonia actually managed to break from the rest of Spain.

Then, in 1705, the Catalans made a mistake. In a tussle over who was to get the crown, they backed a loser, Archduke Charles of Austria. A ferocious siege of Barcelona ensued, ending in defeat on Catalonia’s own version of 9/11 – 11 September 1714. Modern Catalonia has taken the Dunkirk approach to remembering that event: 11 September is now the day Catalonia celebrates the Diada, its national day – a celebration of defeat. Like the anthem, it also reminds Catalans that their natural enemy is in Madrid.

The winner in 1714, Philip V, took his revenge by passing the Nueva Planta decree. Catalan was barred from schools – a measure that left the illiterate and uneducated peasantry indifferent. Castilian became the language of government and the courts. Catalonia also had some ancient institutions of its own which would now disappear. A century before England got its Magna Carta, Catalonia had already developed, in the early twelfth century, what is claimed to be Europe’s first written bill of rights – the Usatges. While this did not help the serfs, it provided a legal framework for free men to argue peacefully over their affairs.

A parliament, les Corts, had been set up with limited powers in 1283. It represented the clergy, the nobles and the wealthier merchants. Its affairs were run by a standing committee of twelve men, the Generalitat. By the late thirteenth century Barcelona, too, had a sort of parliament – known as the
Consell de Cent
, the council of one hundred men. The Generalitat and the city’s
consell
eventually conducted their business from
fourteenth- and
fifteenth-century Gothic palaces facing one another across the cobbled Plaça de Sant Jaume. They still do. Catalonia’s modern-day politicians and administrators have no way of avoiding history. They work in the middle of it.

Corts,
Consell de Cent
and Generalitat were, however, all abolished by Philip V. Les Corts, anyway, had met only once since 1632.

The 1714 defeat led, in Jordi Pujol’s own words, to ‘Catalans
returning to their homes and staying there, without aspiring to anything more than to survive without ambition or any collective project, for 200 years’. None of this prevented them, however, from prospering economically over the next few centuries. They exported wool and paper. In the nineteenth century the cotton trade was smaller only than that of England, France and the United States. Barcelona embraced the industrial revolution long before most of the rest of Spain.

Growing wealth allowed Barcelona to expand, giving Ildefons Cerdà a chance to design the Eixample, where I would later live through the 1992 Olympics. Cerdà was, however, more than aware of where the money was coming from. He was one of the few to warn about the vile living conditions into which factory hands were forced. Catalan peasants had held occasional revolts. Soon the urban working classes would be at it too. Church-burning was a particularly Catalan sport. In 1835 a bullfight was held in Barcelona. It was not a success. The crowd became angry. A popular rhyme in Catalan explains what happened next. ‘
Hi haver una gran broma/ dintre del Torín./ Van sortir tres braus,/ tots van ser dolents:/ això fou la causa/ de cremar convents.
’ ‘There was a big set-to/ inside the bull-ring./Three fighting bulls appeared/but all were weak: and that was the cause/ of the burning of the convents.’ Not for the first time, or the last, Barcelona’s skyline was streaked by plumes of smoke coming from church buildings. The Church, rich, powerful, arrogant and unpopular, had already seen its buildings burnt in Barcelona fifteen years earlier. Even Poblet, miles away in the fields of upper Tarragona, was torched. Lerroux’s young barbarians, or their anticlerical heirs, would be back with their matches the following century. Modern Catalans often proudly proclaim that bullfighting has nothing to do with them – but it has obviously been around for almost two centuries.