Spain (16 page)

Incomparable old cities of the interior! No other towns on earth are anything like them. They have no peers, no rivals, no imitators. A circle a hundred miles across would contain them all; but you can stand ten thousand miles from their walls, close your eyes and think of Spain, and see them clear as sunlight still.

Down the road—down any Spanish road—lies Madrid, which was no more than a village until Philip II made her his capital in 1561, and is still compact enough for the country to show at the end of many city streets. Her two most enviable possessions are an art gallery, the Prado, and a park, the Retiro, and she is the capital of Spain chiefly because she happens to stand in the middle. Madrid was founded, they say, as a Moorish fortress, in the days when Castile was a no man's land between the Christian north and the Islamic south, and her original function was only military. No roads crossed at her site, no great river flowed there, there were no shrines, mines, or historical memories. Philip, plucking her from this obscurity, made her a kind of Brasilia for Spain—an earnest of the future and a symbol of unity. The disparate provinces were all to pay allegiance to her, centralizing the energies of the nation, and from her brave new offices of Government, equidistant from the Primate at Toledo and the King at the Escorial, the purity of Spain was to be maintained, Besides, it looks neat and logical to have your capital in the centre, and nothing pleases the Spaniard more than symbolical precision.

The height of human happiness, infatuated Madrileños like to
say, must be to go to that part of Heaven from which there is a view of Madrid. Others may feel they can survive Paradise without her. Standing as she does high in the tableland, with the desert plateau at the end of her suburbs, and a climate of horrid extremes, Madrid can hardly help sharing the melancholy of Castile; and in the winter especially she seems a capital half frozen in the attitudes of a past generation. In the 1930s she had a universal symbolism. In her, as so often in Spain before, the passions of the world were demonstrated, and men everywhere could see themselves and their societies reflected in her agonies. It was this guinea-pig status that brought the young idealists ‘to this plateau beneath the sky's grave manifold of stars', and placed Madrid at the very heart of the world's preoccupations.

Today she offers us no pattern of hope or warning. Her example fires nobody. To the world outside the future of Madrid makes very little difference. She is no longer one of the archetypal capitals, and contributes little to the great issues that inflame us now—issues of morality, diplomacy, or strategy that scarcely intrude upon this peripheral metropolis. Her tastes are those of Paris, London or New York the year before last. Yesterday's pop music blares through her streets. Her art is mostly derivative, and the only really original programmes on her television screens are bull-fights. There is hardly a single striking modern building in Madrid.

And yet Madrid is one of the raciest, noisiest, and most boisterous of all the capitals of Europe; and this is because economics has overtaken politics in Spain, and introduced change by the service door.

Upon Madrid herself change has fallen like a pile of concrete, for skyscrapers now dominate the centre of the capital, and immense new housing estates, mile after mile, district after district, are extending the city limits ever further into the
meseta
. The last of the slums has almost vanished, and Madrid feels rich. Here are the headquarters of the powerful Spanish banks, whose huge central offices have almost banished from the pavements of the
Calle de Alcalá the café life that once distinguished it—in the days when the bull-fighters had their own coffee-house, the liberal intellectuals theirs, the poets another, the generals a fourth. Here are the diplomatic offices of the Americans, whose vast payments in return for strategic favours have helped to revise the fortunes of Spain, and here too are the headquarters of the Directorate-General of Tourism, whose staggeringly successful efforts to bring foreign visitors to Spain have acted as a yeast, to ferment the outlooks of the Spaniards. From Madrid, herself a babel of ill-digested modernism, all rushing traffic and gaudy cinemas, you may see how the influences of material advance, channelled through the offices of Philip's capital, are whittling away at the insularity of the State.

Industry has done most to change Spain, and bring her. in step with the world. This is because it was the lack of industry that kept her an anachronism for so long. Until the 1960s this was a country whose mores, by and large, had been neither invigorated nor corrupted by the industrial way, whose dignities were essentially pastoral and whose manners were those of men in direct and personal contact with the earth. The fundamentals of human life—food, shelter, procreation, God—had not been filtered through the industrial mesh of machinery and mass employment, and this helped to give the Spaniard his sense of individual importance. He was no cog, even in the serf-like employment of the great southern estates, even beneath the rigid authoritarianism of Franco's system. He was that most important thing, a man—an
hidalgo
, which means in the dictionary definition ‘a generous or noble man', but is literally ‘a son of something', a somebody.

It was this security of status that gave the Spaniard his dignity—but also kept him poor: now he is offered a chance to change it. Every year more Spaniards move to the cities, to work in the factories that are fitfully appearing all over Spain. Every year new technical schools turn more peasants into mechanics, more investment creates new industries, the rising standard of living creates more demand for manufactured goods. Every year the growing economic power of Europe, spilling over the Pyrenees,
makes it more inevitable that this stubborn survivor of an earlier age must lower its barricades. Spanish industry is still patchy, often old-fashioned, and sometimes uneconomic; but the Spaniards have, for better or for worse, now plumped for materialism, and you may already see the dams, the new roads and railways, the steel mills and the power plants that are the props of the philosophy.

Diplomatically, too, Spain is reconciling herself to the norm. At the end of the Second World War Spain stood forlornly alone in Europe—her Fascist friends obliterated, her Communist enemies riding high, her democratic neighbours hostile and contemptuous. It was not the first time in history that she had endured such isolation, but nowadays self-sufficiency is no longer a stimulant for nations, and long before Franco's death Spain had begun the long, difficult haul towards acceptance by the world. Even then, before democracy released the aspirations of the great public, many Spaniards were declining to accept the innate superiority of
casticismo
. If we take money from the foreigners, the reasoning went, why not ideas too? If a dollar is good for a refinery, why not for a juke box? If liberal democracy did this for them, why not for us?

Now that the barriers are down, Spain moves almost headlong towards membership with the rest of us: but it is an ironic truth that the most spectacular of all the pressures for change in this deeply conservative society has not been economic ambition, or religious disillusion, or even political frustration, but the often unprepossessing example of the tourist trade. It was in the tourists that the Spaniards first recognized their future selves: in the hippies of the fifties and the blue-rinsed Senior Citizens, in the portly parade of the sunburnt Germans, in the girl secretaries hitch-hiking down from Stockholm, in the urbane French plumbers with luxurious trailers, in the lovers kissing on open beaches and the women in trousers screaming obscenities at their disrespectful young.

So this was the world, the Spaniards reasoned. Perhaps it could be more fun, after all, than
casticismo
let it seem.

So the Spaniards reached, early in the 1970s perhaps, that moment of catharsis that economists call a ‘take-off'—the moment in a nation's history when its economy gets into the rhythm of expansion, and its people realize that life may actually be expected to improve. The death of Franco, and the almost immediate dismantlement of the whole apparatus of his despotism, symbolically sealed the event, and opened the way to successions of many sorts.

Already the manners of the Spaniards have drastically altered. The duenna is a vanished figure, you no longer see the lovers kissing awkwardly but romantically through the grilles of Andalusian windows, young people are freer, loyalties wider. Spanish women have always been more powerful in the land than you would think from their cramped circumstances—there was a woman professor at Salamanca in 1606, and the most remarkable Communist of the Civil War was the fiery Basque known as The Passion Flower. In the last few years, though, they have swept almost at a stride through all the stages of emancipation, violently shifting the social, political, intellectual and not least the moral balance of the nation—perhaps the most revolutionary of all the revolutionary changes that have hit this country in our time.

The Spaniards drink more beer than they used to, and less wine. They go rather less to the bull-fight, and far more to the
futbol
. The famous old bull-ring at Ronda, where the rules of the modern bull-fight were invented, is used as a cinema on offseason Saturdays. The traditional Spanish device called a
mesa de
Camilla
, a round table with a charcoal burner beneath it, can now be bought with electric heating. Old people still tend to disbelieve the possibility of your speaking a few words of Spanish, but children instantly understand you. The rock forms of the West often appeal to young Spaniards more than flamenco, and even at tie Seville Feria you may find, in one or two of the festive pavilions, that the couples have abandoned their Andalusian heritage at last, and are dancing to some universal beat of the discos.

The middle classes of Spain are growing in numbers, wealth,
and aspiration. In many a Spanish service station the ladies' lavatory is represented by an exquisite elbow-length glove and a rose, and the men's by an impeccable topper and a silver-headed cane—and somehow these old images, with their inferences of Noël Coward and the Astaires, properly represent the awakening of the Spanish bourgeoisie. They are in a familiar stage of sophistication. They have Popsy Krisps for breakfast, even if the packets do still find it necessary to assure the customer that no cooking is required. They wash their cars on Sunday afternoons. Their shops are full of washing machines, their roofs are cluttered with television aerials, and if they dine out they sometimes take their transistors along too, and prop them against the wine bottle. They are still thin on the ground, to be sure—they are almost entirely urban, and are still most numerous in the Basque and Catalan provinces. Every Spanish city, though, now has its quota, and one of these days we may expect the Spanish Babbitt, with his well-pressed suit and his prospects, once and for all to replace the cloaked and noble countryman as emblematic of his people.

Manners maketh man, perhaps, but history maketh manners. Already, as pastoral Spain retreats before the assaults of our material civilization, you may see the corrosion setting in. Hideous, vulgar, and gimcrack are the new tourist towns of Andalusia, where Spanish speculators have allied themselves with hordes of shady foreigners to develop the Costa del Sol; forgotten are the old instincts of form and balance, the organic strength of Spanish architecture, the sense of frank and decorous resignation. All is flash and easy profit. The truck-drivers of Spain are among the best in Europe, bringing to their calling the old courtesy and good sense of the muleteers; but the limousines of the new rich are driven with a rudeness, an ostentation, and an incompetence scarcely to be equalled anywhere.

So times change. The Spaniard, so grave, so courteous, so passionate, so reserved, turns out to be, when given the opportunity, much like the rest of us. He will push you in the supermarket, toot his horn at the traffic lights, leave the curtains open to impress the neighbours; for he is coming to terms with the world at last, and the world is teaching him how.

In the end it is bound to make the Spaniards more ordinary, as the petty squalors of industrial life overcome them too, and they lose their sense of separateness. It may be foolish to be proud and insular, but at least it makes for style. It may be wrong, even wicked, to remain a poor anachronism among the nations, but at least it kept Spain on a plane all her own, possessing what the theatre calls ‘star quality', as distinct from the Swedens and the Switzerlands as a phoenix from a pair of pigeons. Progress is sure to weaken the Spanish identity, that powerful and often baffling abstraction, and the journey over Roncesvalles will inevitably lose some of its drama. Perhaps the ordinary Spaniards, often poor, often hungry, often bullied, often cold, will profit in the end; but the world, to whom the Spanish style stands as a reassurance of individual worth, come triumph come tragedy, come democracy or dictator—the world can only lose, as Spain becomes less Spanish, and the last illusions fade. ‘Spain is an absurd country.' wrote Ganivet, ‘and metaphysically impossible; absurdity is her nerve and mainstay. Her turn to prudence will denote the end.'

For though every country has its Sanchos, Quixote could only be Spanish, and often his illusions went deeper than the truth. To the squire it was only a brass bowl that they stole from the barber, but the knight looked beyond, and saw it to be the helmet of Mambrino the enchanter. ‘Do you know what I think, Sancho? This famous piece, this enchanted helmet, must have fallen by some strange accident into the hands of someone who did not esteem it at its true value. So, not knowing what he was doing, and seeing that it was pure gold, he must have melted down the other half for the sake of the metal, and made from this half what looks like a barber's basin.'