Ghosts of Spain

by Giles Tremlett

  Prostitution, then, is a sort of open secret. It is there for all to see, but is surrounded by either silence or indifference. Spanish friends, of both sexes, enjoyed my tales from El Romaní. Few made any comment, however, except to say that the disabled room sounded like a good idea. Most did not realise that Spain had far more, or at least far more visible, brothels than other places. Some agreed that prostitutes provided a social service. The contrast with my class-full of New York University students could not be greater. That is not to say that some Spaniards – mostly traditional, Catholic conservatives or feminists – do not want to get rid of prostitution, but they remain largely silent or unheard.

  The problems with the anglosajones, several Spanish newspaper columnists had already informed me, was that too many of us were moralistas. Although the translation, ‘moralist’, often sounds harmless enough, in Spanish it brought connotations of extreme puritanism. Moralistas, they suggested, were moral fascists, out to control the private lives of others.

  Spaniards seem genuinely unconcerned about sexual morality or, more accurately, other people’s sexual morality. A recent glut of open-to-air, late-night porn on local television channels – peppered with advertisements for chat lines – has been greeted with either jokes, or resounding silence. I once walked into a bar in a small Andalusian town to find it playing on the television set in the corner. The customers, male and female, continued their conversations as if it was just another bullfight or football match rather than a stew of naked, ejaculating bodies. Turning on the television while sitting up late one night working on this book in a small hotel in a lovingly restored old building in Granada’s Albaicín district, I was given my introduction to gay porn. Two men were mechanically sodomising one another on what appeared to be some local broadcaster. Are the conservative burghers of Granada, or any other city whose local television stations are, like the local newspaper, making money off prostitution or pornography, up in arms? Not at all. It is not just that nobody is, or is prepared to admit to being, scandalised. Sex, paid for or otherwise, just seems to be a matter-of-fact sort of business. Puritanism, it seems, really does belong to Europe’s north.

  I was reminded of this by Alex Ollé, one of the directors of the avant-garde Catalan theatre group La Fura dels Baus, as we sat at a café table in the main square of the small Murcian farming town of Lorca. I had just sat through his play XXX at the town’s quaint, turn-of-the-century playhouse. La Fura have gained themselves an international reputation for sensorial bombardment, for getting in their public’s faces. XXX was no exception. It featured a live internet link to a Barcelona peep-show as well as simulated, or filmed, threesomes, foursomes, blow-jobs, cunnilingus, spaghetti sex, sodomy, rape, S&M, incest and, to finish it all off, genital mutilation. At one stage the play had invited me to contemplate the non-dilemma of whether pornography or war was more shocking, as if the two things were somehow comparable. More seriously, it was also an invitation to think about where the limits were. I had to close my eyes for most of the last five minutes, the rape and mutilation scene, so my personal answer was obviously somewhere before that. But none of the dapper elderly gents or fierce-looking matrons, fresh from the hairdressers for their night out at the theatre, appeared, at least on the surface, terribly disturbed. Certainly none accepted the invitation to leave if they felt shocked.

  ‘This show would cause a scandal in a small British town,’ said Ollé, accurately predicting what would happened when it travelled to a London stage a year later. ‘The British are very conservative. When it comes to sex, there is not too much prejudice here in Spain.’

  I am not sure, however, whether he was completely right. There still seems to be something very male-centred and, one young Madrileña woman suggested to me, slightly seedy about this attitude. Certainly, she assured me, young men still had different ideas about what was acceptable sexual behaviour for them and what was acceptable for young women. That form of prejudice at least had not disappeared.

  Only a handful of voices on the Catholic, conservative right or the feminist left seem to get worked up about prostitution or pornography. Shortly after I had visited El Romaní, I came across a long report in El País newspaper on the country’s status as Europe’s largest consumer of cocaine. A psychiatrist suggested that one reason for that was that a defining trait of modern Spaniards was that they were radically opposed to banning anything. ‘Anything that smacks of restriction or prohibition in this country is considered immoral, old-fashioned and fascist,’ the psychologist, Carlos Alvarez Vara, said. Spaniards, in short, do not like being told what not to do.

  To be scandalised about sex is to be ‘estrecho’, ‘narrow’ or prudish – something associated with the repressive, and hypocritical, time under General Franco when the Church really did set the rules. His death set Spain on a delayed sexual revolution that was grasped with fervour. But it would be wrong to blame all this on el Caudillo. Too many years have gone by. The pendulum has had plenty of time to swing the other way.

  One measure of Spaniards’ attitudes to the rules that govern sex is the age of consent. This was raised from twelve to thirteen in 1999 by Aznar’s government. Other European countries place that age at anywhere between fourteen and seventeen. In the US it goes as high as eighteen in some states. Only a handful of countries – mostly Latin American or African – have a similar, or lower, age. In practice, however, Spaniards start their sex lives later than in other European countries. Most young Spanish men remain virgins until after their eighteenth birthday while most women wait until they are nineteen.

  There can be a brisk, often amused, frankness in the way Spaniards discuss sex. On several occasions I have been caught out, and thrown into tongue-tied episodes of embarrassment, by sudden, graphic confessions of peccadilloes or amatory experiments. What, after all, do you say to a neighbour who apologises for not answering his doorbell because he was ‘snogging the babysitter’ while his wife was out? This attitude is reflected on television. One advertisement, for a chocolate bar, starts, as a joke, with a young man waking up with a tent-pole-sized erection in his boxer shorts.

  This sexual frankness, apart from being ever-present in the films of Pedro Almodóvar and others, is also evident in the literary world. Most bookshops can be counted on to stock a few of the mauve-spined works put out by Tusquets publishing company in the Sonrisa Vertical – the Vertical Smile – collection of erotic writing. The Vertical Smile has been one of Spain’s most popular literary prizes (and there are almost 3,000 of these each year), though it has recently suffered from a paucity of entries. Nobel prize-winner Camilo José Cela once sat on the jury. The contrast with Britain, where it is a prize for bad sex writing that gets all the attention, could not be greater. Some of Spain’s best contemporary writers, including Almudena Grandes and her The Ages of Lulu – later translated into twenty languages – have walked off with the 20,000-euro prize. The jury praised one winner for ‘the richness of scenes that, aside from being fresh, turn out to be perverse, fetishistic and transgressive’.

  All this frankness and unshockability might make one think that Spaniards were avid sexual adventurers, leaping from bed to bed and experimenting with every single possible sexual variety like characters from an Almodóvar film. But the Instituto Nacional de Estadística, with its Cosmopolitan hat on again, says that is not true. Half the women under forty-nine that it surveyed, and a quarter of the men, had been to bed with just one person.

  A survey carried out in the mid-1990s by government-funded investigators at the Centre for Sociological Research found that only 41 per cent of Spaniards aged between eighteen and twenty-four had initiated their sex lives in a bed. With most still living at their parents’ homes, the others had resorted to cars, the great outdoors or anywhere else they could find a moment of privacy. ‘Parents are confused and out of touch. Most are convinced that their children do not have a sex life,’ a sociologist quoted by one newspaper explained.

  This problem has led to s
ome ingenious suggestions from local politicians. The southern seaside town of Vélez-Málaga, for example, considered turning off the seafront lights for an hour every night so couples could ‘release their sexual desires’. ‘It has always been traditional for young people to use the dark and the low tide for a roll in the sand,’ a town councillor explained. Granada’s Green Party, meanwhile, suggested handing out a hotel voucher, called a bonosex, to young people living at home. In the regional government of Extremadura, one functionary proposed setting aside ‘sex zones’ for young couples. None of these suggestions prospered. The last one was slapped down by Juan Carlos Rodríguez Ibarra, the Socialist regional premier. ‘I am not about to turn the regional government into some sort of madame,’ he snorted. ‘They will just have to find somewhere themselves.’ They do.

  In the elegant, if crumbling, Madrid apartment block where I lived before buying my own flat, I was given a great lesson in Spanish sex education over the decades. I had been called to a tenants’ meeting which was to be held around the marble coffee table of Doña Rafaela, a smart and exquisitely mannered seventy-year-old who lived on the fourth floor. A rebellion had broken out against our landlord, who also lived in the building. At the appointed hour I crept furtively down the darkened staircase and rapped on Doña Rafaela’s door. She ushered me into a neat drawing room where half a dozen grey-haired ladies sat waiting expectantly. ‘¡Dios mío, it’s a man!’ one exclaimed. With the exception of our landlord, they pointed out, I was the only adult male in a building where most people had lived for more than thirty years. Many were still paying minuscule rents, frozen, if index-linked, back then. We, relatively recent arrivals, were paying twenty times more than some of the others. As the building gave him so little income, the landlord refused to invest in it. So it was that chunks of masonry were falling off the front of the building – requiring the fire brigade to cordon off the street one day – while the stairwell ceiling had also come crashing down.

  I knew most of these señoras by sight, of course. Pleasantries had been exchanged at the doorway. Our two small children had been admired. One had even been presented with a bright yellow plastic cosh by Doña Adelaida from the second floor. But our short, shared trips in the groaning wood-and-glass lift had left time for little more than this.

  It would have been rude to get straight down to business, so we chatted. Unexpectedly, the conversation turned to sex. The subject was brought up by Raquel, a chain-smoking granny-of-two from the first floor, who burst into the room clutching two bottles of wine and a box of books.

  Raquel had just written The Address Book of Lost Friends, a publishing success which told of her daughter’s heroin addiction and subsequent death from AIDS. It is a startling tale of degradation amongst the niños bien, the rich kids, of the haughty Madrid barrio of Salamanca, in the dizzying first decade of the transition to democracy. Raquel had been at the journalistic forefront of the Transición, logging the amazing self-transformation of the Spanish parliament. While she worked, and drank, her daughter – a frightening, siren-like Lolita – descended into heroin addiction. She pulled cousins, friends and other neighbourhood kids along with her. Most were long dead. Two young grandsons, and the deep lines scoured on Raquel’s face, were all she left behind.

  The grandsons were handsome young teenagers who, in an attempt not to repeat mistakes, had been sent to the local church school. Raquel was worried about AIDS. She had been trying to explain the importance of condoms to the eldest grandson, she said, but he had cut her short. ‘They think they know it all because they get sex education at school,’ she sighed.

  ‘Well, thank God they get that,’ snorted Doña Adelaida, a no-nonsense, Miss Marple figure with sensibly cropped grey hair. ‘I remember when my professor of natural sciences at the university announced that our next lecture would be on human reproduction. “So there will be no need for the young ladies to come,” he told us!’

  ‘Oh, there was none of that silly stuff when I was a student,’ remarked Doña Rafaela. ‘We heard it all.’

  ‘That, Rafaela, is because you went to university before me, during the Republic. I had to put up with Franco!’ snorted Doña Adelaida, now a university professor herself.

  The arrival of Franco’s regime was one giant step backwards in social progress. Brothels survived, even thrived in the barrios chinos, the red-light districts in the old city centres.

  Elsewhere, however, Franco set about abolishing the Republic’s liberal rules. Divorce was abolished, except where permitted by the Church. Civil weddings were only allowed between two non-Catholics. Abortion, of course, was illegal. A Supreme Court Prosecutor’s Office report in 1974, however, put the number of abortions at the amazingly high rate of 300,000 a year, or 40 per cent of live births.

  Franco’s new Civil Code ordered that: ‘A man must protect his wife, and she must obey her husband.’ A husband’s permission was needed for women to sign all sorts of legal documents. Under this permiso marital system, she could not take a job or open a bank account without his go-ahead. Adultery by a wife was always a crime. Adultery by a husband was only one if it happened in the family home, if he lived with his mistress or if it was public knowledge.

  ‘When you are married, you must never confront him, never use your anger against his anger, or your stubbornness against his. When he gets angry, you will shut up; when he shouts, lower your head without reply; when he demands, you will cede, unless your Christian conscience prevents you … To love is to endure,’ a Church guide advised brides-to-be.

  Old ideas of honour, shame, virginity and jealousy, some still deeply rooted in rural Spain, were dusted off and given a fresh shine. These were, anyway, enough to allow British anthropologists such as Julian Pitt-Rivers (in the mid-1950s) to evolve theories on the importance of honour, shame or grace in Mediterranean societies that were required reading on my social anthropology course at Oxford University. Change was slow. By the end of the regime, supposedly risqué films were made in which, according to the writer Rafael Torres, ‘a fat, ugly, stupid Spanish man would be pursued by beautiful half-naked women simply because he was a macho español, a breed of man supposedly much valued by Scandinavians and, in fact, by most women in the world.’

  The worst thing, however, was that, as Torres puts it: ‘Women disappeared from the scene, except as passive objects. Machismo was radicalized.’ This meant women were not allowed to flaunt themselves, but men could harry them as they walked down the street. José Ortega y Gasset coined the phrase ‘violación visual’, ‘visual rape’. ‘Piropos’, words of ‘flattery’ shouted at girls as they walked down the street, reached their zenith. These are dying out. At their worst, they were straightforwardly crude. At their best, however, they could be highly amusing. My favourite, brought off the street by a Madrileña friend, remains: ‘Pisa fuerte niña, que paga el ayuntamiento’. ‘Tread firmly, niña, the town council’s paying [for the paving stones]!’

  The Church became, once more, one of the major powers in the land and a constant chaperone for Spaniards’ private lives. In 1958 the Bishops’ Conference’s Committee on Morality and Orthodoxy warned that unmarried couples who promenaded arm-in-arm were placing themselves in peligro grave, grave danger.

  In 1963 the Boletín Oficial de España published rules for film-makers which prohibited, amongst other things, ‘the justification of divorce, adultery or anything that attacks the institution of marriage or the family’. Criticism of the Church’s ‘dogma, morality or worship’ was banned in the same order, as was anything that provoked ‘low passions’ or was ‘lascivious, brutal, gross or morbid’.

  Film censors committed some celebrated faux pas, including turning two of the protagonists of John Ford’s Mogambo, Grace Kelly and Donald Sinden, from husband and wife into brother and sister. An attempt to stop Kelly’s on-screen affair with Clark Gable becoming adultery thus saw her marriage turned into incest. Even the political censorship reached moments of sublime stupidity. Bogart’s lines about
the Spanish Republic were expunged from Casablanca while, in Robert Aldrich’s Dirty Dozen, a no-good character called Franko was renamed, because his name sounded too much like that of el Caudillo.

  Sometimes it was the censors themselves who inflamed imaginations. Spaniards imagined, for example, that in Gilda, Rita Hayworth did not just peel off her long glove to the tune of ‘Put the Blame on Mame’, but stripped for the cameras completely – and that this sight had been denied them by the censor’s scissors. An obscure German documentary, Helga, became a surprise hit when put on show at one of the Arte y Ensayo, art-house, cinemas that were opened in the later, more liberal, days of the regime. Extra showings were required to cope with those desperate to see a heavily censored film on sexual education.

  The back rows of cinemas, the darker corners of parks and the doorways of streets such as Madrid’s Calle Echegaray, meanwhile, were the working places of women known as pajilleras, literally masturbators. They came equipped with a handkerchief and a vigorous wrist action. Some, according to Rafael Torres, would, for a little extra, sing a jota, a traditional folk-dancing song, while they performed their task.

  If women’s sexuality scared Franco, his regime’s views on homosexuality were wholly predictable. Browsing through my local second-hand bookstore, I found myself confronted by a book entitled Sodomitas. It was a 1956 tome, which put homosexuality into the same bag of ‘enemies of the state’ as Marxism, freemasonry and Judaism. ‘This book was written to demonstrate the danger that the sodomite poses to the Patria, the fatherland,’ its author, one M. Carlavilla, proclaimed. ‘The herd of sodomite wild beasts, thousands strong, has invaded the busy streets looking for its young prey … Your son may return home, corrupted, hiding his shameful secret.