Ghosts of Spain

by Giles Tremlett

  The immigrants were setting up English butchers and German pastry-shops. A ghetto mentality had set in, he said. ‘They stick together and have their own bars and shops. If you go into one, they look at you strangely. That’s not the way we do things here. We leave the door open to everybody.’

  Deputy mayoress Sylvia Tatnell, half-British and half-Spanish, defended the immigrants. ‘It is very difficult for elderly people to learn a new language,’ she said. ‘But if you go to the Moors and Christians Festival you will find a third of those taking part are foreign.’

  A few weeks later, at midnight on a summer’s evening, I was standing amongst a crowd of people looking out at the beach in Moraira. We were here to watch part of the Moors and Christians Festival that Tatnell had wanted me to see. These are celebrated throughout Alicante and date back more than three centuries in some places. Groups of townsfolk form filas, or groups, of either Moors or Christians. Once a year they dress up and ‘re-enact’ the conquest of Spain by the Moors in 711 and the Christian Reconquista that ended in 1492.

  Tonight the Moors were invading, or at least, a handful were arriving on the beach in a couple of local fishing boats backed up by a small yacht, while a hundred more awaited them on the beach. The Christians, meanwhile, had taken up position on the natural, exposed rock ramparts of the fortress. All were dressed in exotic outfits that seemed to have come from the wardrobe department of the 1961 Hollywood version of El Cid – the Christian men doing their best to look like Charlton Heston, the women like Sophia Loren’s strong-willed Ximena.

  Elaborate firework displays feature heavily in local fiestas across Valencia and up into Catalonia. Tonight was no exception. Nobody in Moraira could have slept as the noisy battle raged. A bloodied El Cid character wandered across the beach on a horse – past the lifeguards’ chair that had been left centre-stage – and fell off, mortally wounded, at the foot of the castle ramparts. A loudspeaker played ersatz Arab music full of trumpets, timpani, horns and wailing chants. Not a cliché was missing. The Moors got down on their hands and knees and prayed. Then a troop of dancing girls wearing semi-transparent gauze dresses came on and did a seven veils number that was all bare bellies and gyrating hips. The Christian and Moorish kings exchanged gruff, manly, melodramatic lines over the PA system.

  ‘Identify yourself or I will give you a hiding,’ blustered the Christian. ‘I am the chief of the all-victorious Moorish horde … My hand is impatiently stroking the handle of my sword,’ the Moor replied. History never got more kitsch, but the sun-tanned crowd was enjoying it.

  A middle-aged British couple beside me were passing comment. ‘Oooh! Do we have a disagreement?’ the wife said as the protagonists strutted angrily on the sand. Then a dead Christian tumbled down the ramparts. ‘Oh dear, is he rolling down those rocks?’ asked my neighbour. ‘That’s not very comfy, is it?’

  Eventually, the Moors won their battle amid amplified shouts of ‘Ala is great! Ala is victorious!’ The Christians shuffled off and the PA system announced: ‘Thank you for coming to the nighttime invasion of Moraira. Tomorrow at 7 p.m., the Reconquista.’

  The crowd filed back into town. A pile of fresh vomit on the pavement made me think that the British must be here in force (Spaniards hold their drink). A group of ten-year-old children, meanwhile, threw little bangers at one another and squealed in delight in the square at 1.30 in the morning. They were a reminder that I was in the province of Alicante and was not likely to get much sleep.

  Still, I was impressed with the Moraira immigrants. By getting involved with their adopted land, they had ensured that this was a much nicer spot than virtually anywhere else I could find on the costas. The new immigrants are lucky that Spaniards show no real animosity. (Marzal’s party in Teulada failed to win any seats). This is despite the fact that, at least in the early days, Málaga’s psychiatric wing for young people quickly filled up with stressed-out waiters. A 1971 study recorded that 90 per cent of non-chronic mental illness in rural Málaga was amongst teenage boys who had gone to work on the costas. In moments of gloom, Spaniards sometimes refer to themselves as ‘the waiters of Europe’.

  When Spaniards want to laugh at tourists they call them ‘guiris’. One humorous definition described the British sub-species as: ‘Famous for their punctuality, they can be counted on to start singing football chants after just five minutes of drinking, and start head-butting everything in sight.’ Little has changed, then, since Sir Edward Cecil led an ill-fated strike against Cádiz in 1625. He was forced to flee after his troops got so staggeringly drunk in a particularly well-stocked bodega, or wine-cellar, they had captured that they were unable to fight.

  A serious study of guiris was carried out by anthropologist Nadja Monnet. She found that they ‘provoke laughter, are subject to jokes and can be easily fooled’. Perhaps that was what happened to George Sand when she fled to Majorca with her lover, the composer Frédéric Chopin, and her two children in 1838, looking for ‘some faraway retreat where there would be no notes to write, no newspapers to peruse, no callers to entertain’.

  It seemed to work for Chopin, who completed his Preludes here. Sand, however, never worked up much appreciation for the Majorcan peasant. ‘Though he would never rob his neighbour of so much as an olive, he believes that in God’s scheme of things the only use for human beings from overseas is to bring the Majorcan nice little profits,’ she recorded in A Winter In Mallorca. Little did she, early tourist as she was, know that those profits would, eventually, make the Majorcans amongst the wealthiest people in Spain – or turn parts of their island into little outposts of Germany. Nor could she have foreseen that Majorcans, scared by soaring property prices and seeing traditional, rural culture under threat, would be the first Spaniards to take to the streets to protest at some of the results of their self-created tourism boom.

  Quite what will happen to the Majorcas, Marbellas and Benidorms of Spain, no one can tell. The package holiday is in crisis. Cheaper rivals, meanwhile, are appearing in Tunisia, Turkey and elsewhere. There is talk of blowing up old hotels, or converting them into apartment blocks. Meanwhile, a whole new generation of euro-Spaniards, children of foreign couples studying at local schools, is growing up on the costas. Already one finds them manning bars and selling real estate, slipping easily between one culture and another. Some families moving out of London are choosing Marbella as their base, rather than Essex or Wiltshire. Freelance parents work from home or weekly commute back to the British capital from Málaga airport. Britons own 450,000 properties and are said to be buying upwards of 30,000 costa homes a year. One report said to be circulating amongst property developers suggests that 800,000 Germans wish to retire to Spain. The waiters of Europe look set to become Europe’s geriatric nurses. Whatever happens, the revolution that started with Benidorm and its bikinis is bound to bring even more, huge changes.

  Dirty money and corruption are part of the price Spaniards pay for the wealth the tourists bring. The danger, as those Málaga University investigators pointed out, is if they spiral out of control and give rise to a mafia economy. Spain has a recent history of flirting with the kind of deep corruption that can shake the state itself. It has also shown, however, that it knows when to pull back. Two contradictory impulses, both very Spanish, are at play. They are anarchy and order. The struggle between the two has, on occasions, been titanic.

  5

  Anarchy, Order and a Real Pair of Balls

  It is August. Most of Spain has shut down for the traditional month of holidays. So we are sitting beside the swimming pool at Carlos’s house in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, where the broad, muddy Guadalquivir River runs into the Atlantic near Cádiz. The kids are splashing in the water. There is a bottle of cold manzanilla wine on the table. Several more are chilling in the fridge. The Spanish rap of ‘La Mala Rodríguez’, ‘The Bad Girl Rodríguez’, is blaring out of his music system. A mountain of shrimps await their turn to be torn into with sticky fingers. They are to be dunked into the mayonnaise Ca
rlos is making, the mixer in one hand and the phone wedged between ear and shoulder as his mother gives step-by-step instructions from Madrid. Spaniards, I am reminded once more, take their leisure – and their food – seriously. Their mothers, as always, are on hand to help. Life could not be much better.

  Carlos, however, is still working. He has just set up his own company designing, amongst other things, corporate newsletters. The mayonnaise done, his mobile phone goes. He looks happy. A big client has just come his way. The woman in charge of corporate communications at a major company has made clear, however, what she wants in return. ‘It’s great,’ he says enthusiastically, after hanging up. ‘I’ll do all their magazines. All I have to do is employ her son. He wants to be a designer. I’m sure I’ll find something for him to do. Even if he’s useless, it will be worth it.’

  They call it enchufe. It is the art of being ‘plugged in’ – of having, cultivating and using contacts. It is not generally as crude as this. At its best, in fact, it is invisible – a subtle and apparently inoffensive use of one’s address book, or especially, one’s network of siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles.

  I have tried to resist it, but either it is not that easy or I am not that strong. A residual and, friends assured me, absurdly exaggerated sense of fairness initially held me back from full use, or abuse, of my contacts in my early days in the Spanish capital. In Madrid, they insisted, only losers try to remain above it. This, after all, was the capital of enchufe – a place that had centuries of experience of handing out, or demanding, favours from kings, ministers or governments. What is more, they added, I was a journalist. I had enchufe by the bucketful.

  Then we bought our flat, installed a new gas boiler and waited for the gas company to switch on the supply. An inspector came. There were new regulations, he explained. We would have to knock a larger hole in our kitchen wall – a place for excess gas fumes to escape from – if we were to be connected. Our existing hole was now too small. That afternoon I got a chisel and hammer and widened it myself.

  I rang the gas company and told them we had fixed the problem. When could they send the inspector back? ‘Soon,’ they said. We waited, and waited. Days went by, then we started counting weeks. The weather got cold. Both the boiler and the cooker worked off gas. Our children’s baths got colder. We lived off microwaved food. The children’s noses ran. As Madrid’s icy winter set in, I rang daily. ‘You are on the priority list,’ a voice repeated down the phone. I tried losing my temper. I demanded to talk to a superior. But to no avail. The voice just hung up. The inspector never came.

  I finally recalled that journalists, the sort of people whose written words might affect a company share price, have enchufe at stockmarket-listed utility companies. I rang the gas company’s press office. I made it sound as innocent as possible. I was only looking for advice, I said. Could they suggest how I might set about solving my problem?

  Two hours later the doorbell rang. The inspector, and his assistant, had come. ‘We’re here to connect you,’ they said cheerily. Within minutes the job was done. I do not remember them looking at my carefully widened hole. I was pleased with myself, though. I had solved the problem. My partner, however, was not so happy. ‘If it is that easy, why didn’t you do it earlier?’ she asked.

  That was my conversion to enchufe. I tried saving it for emergencies, but after a while it just came naturally. A few weeks later I found myself standing at the Iberia airlines desk at Málaga airport after a long, difficult day’s work. I wanted to get home to Madrid. I had, foolishly, lost the return half of my ticket. The clerk behind the counter, I soon realised, was not going to give me a new one. I rang a contact at head office. A few minutes later the clerk was obligingly issuing the ticket.

  So I found myself asking people to put a word in for me here or ring friends of friends for favours and introductions there. I, in turn, would offer up – or be asked for – my help. A word with the headmaster, to see if a friend’s child can get into our over-solicited school? Seats at the theatre when it is sold out? Just pick up the phone and ask. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. If you do not try, however, you will never know.

  Enchufe is not without its enemies. One Spanish website, run by the so-called Publicity, Equality, Merit and Capability group, PIMYC, as it is known for short, roots out enchufe in the jobs-for-life world of public employment. For every person who gains by enchufe, it points out, there is another who loses. It lists offspring, friends and relatives of politicians who do surprisingly well when sitting oposiciones, the exams that are set for everyone from library assistants to judges. Even the armed forces are, according to one current case, suspected of it – the sons of several air force generals being unfairly booted up the ranks, according to the complainants.

  Is enchufe a form of corruption? In the strict, moralistic, anglosajón sense, it is. It keeps those already in the loop, inside it. It stops those outside from getting in. When outright cheating is involved, it is obviously corrupting. ‘The tradition of nepotism, cronyism and of a subterranean market in mutual favours is one of the features of the lowest Spain,’ says El País columnist Rosa Montero.

  Not being given to moral absolutes, however, a little bit of cheating does not generally rate high on the list of things Spaniards care about. It is there at bullfights, where rumours of doped animals with their horns shaved off abound. It is a feature of exam time, in the form of the chuleta – the crudely hidden list of vital facts. It is there, too, when parents fill out their application forms for school places. These are said to be full of borrowed addresses and fake, point-winning illnesses diagnosed by friendly doctors. It is, of course, also there in the declaración de la renta, the annual tax return. Even literary awards (and Spain has some of the biggest, with the Planeta prize handing out 601,000 euros) seem to be affected. Like enchufe, however, all this is not really frowned on. It is, rather, seen as a bit of sporting rule-bending.

  Chancers and adventurous rule-breakers have always intrigued, or been admired by, Spaniards. A whole genre of writing, the picaresque novel, emerged in the seventeenth century with stories of heroes who had managed to cheat their way through life – with Francisco Quevedo’s La Vida del Buscón, usually translated as The Swindler, the most famous example. ‘Queremos comer sin trabajar’, ‘We want to eat without working’, was how one writer expressed the pícaro’s dream.

  As I thought about corruption one day, a Barcelona woman came on the radio to talk about why her apartment block was about to be bulldozed. The building, along with several others, was threatening to collapse into a new metro tunnel dug underneath it. It seemed that not enough cement had been used. This, in turn, was because project money had allegedly been raked off to pay bribes. The Catalan regional premier had already claimed that builders routinely paid a 3 per cent commission to his predecessor. Asked if she believed that, the woman gave an answer many Spaniards would have provided: ‘I always assumed that people took a cut.’ Even she did not seem scandalised.

  The main corrupting power in Spain is what, generically, has become known as ‘el ladrillo’ – ‘the brick’. The phenomenon is by no means restricted to the costas. As Spain’s economy booms, towns and cities have been turned into vast building sites. The building of new homes, office blocks, EU-funded motorways or other public works is being done on a scale unthinkable in cluttered northern Europe. Everywhere you look in Spain, the city skylines are crammed with cranes. Vast new barrios appear almost overnight in Madrid, complete with their shopping malls, sports centres and underground stations. Tiny satellite pueblos become, in the space of just a few years, busy new towns. Massive bulldozers push new motorways through olive groves as bewildered elderly villagers look on, and their grandchildren calculate whether they can now go for nights out in the nearest city.

  The People’s Party regional government that came to power in Madrid in 2003 owed its existence to a scandal – and internal split – which prevented the Socialists from forming a government. Many
people in Madrid are convinced that the succulent profits and under-the-counter payments for building licences provoked an otherwise inexplicable rebellion by two newly-elected Socialist deputies. As is usual in these cases, however, nothing was proven. In Seville, meanwhile, the Socialist mayor is trying to explain how a major builder close to his party managed to be paid for several public buildings that were never erected.

  Catalonia, Madrid, Seville and the Costa del Sol account for much, if not most, of Spain’s new building work. Where politicians are builders, as they often are in the Costa del Sol, corruption seems inevitable. Where they are also football club owners, as some also are, then corruption, for some reason, seems even more likely.

  Things could be a lot worse, however. Compared with the deep, institutionalised corruption in, say, Italy, Spain is a clean country. For while corruption – or the popular belief in it – floats freely around regional and local government, it has not settled in the core of the Spanish state.

  It could, however, have been all so very, very different. For there was a time when corruption came close to tearing the country apart. It was a time when Felipe González’s Socialist governments – in so many other ways a shining, brilliant success – began to split at the seams. Socialist corruption was not just a question of a few missing millions. It was also, as the victims of police-backed death squads operating against Basque radicals would find out, a matter of lives and deaths.

  The fact that this corruption never became institutionalised was due to the combined efforts of judges, journalists and straight cops. One man, however, stood out. Baltasar Garzón, known as the superjuez, the super-judge, is Spain’s most controversial, crusading magistrate – the country’s answer to the Clean Hands judges of Italy. He is a distinguished, if self-loving, torchbearer for those other Spanish values – nobility, fairness, valour and justice – that, in a somewhat more deranged fashion, Don Quixote de la Mancha preached. He is, like all heroes, imperfect. Vanity, arrogance, ambition and a weakness for the eye-catching gesture all contribute to a large Achilles heel.