Ghosts of Spain

by Giles Tremlett

  Pujol’s wife, Marta Ferrusola, represents the more visceral, unpleasant side of Catalan nationalism. The former first lady of Catalonia stirred up a major controversy when she declared that immigration might lead to Catalonia’s Romanesque churches being empty within a decade. Catalonia would, instead, be full of mosques. Her husband, she insisted, was fed up with giving council housing to ‘Moroccans and people like that’. Family aid was going to people ‘who do not even know what Catalonia is’. These were people who only knew how to say ‘¡Hola!’ and ‘Give me something to eat!’ she said. ‘Whoever stays in Catalonia should speak Catalan,’ she added. Her comments coincided with the public support offered to Austria’s chief xenophobe, Jörg Haider, by Heribert Barrera. Barrera was a head of the separatist, and supposedly leftwing, Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya. He had also been a president, or speaker, of the Catalan parliament. ‘If the current flow of immigrants continues, Catalonia will disappear,’ he claimed. ‘When Haider says there are too many foreigners in Austria he is not being racist.’

  These outbursts were worrying. As a young man Pujol had been damning about xarnegos, describing the typical immigrant from Andalucía or Murcia as ‘a destroyed and anarchic man’ who ‘if their numbers come to dominate, will destroy Catalonia’. He long ago repented of that attitude, however, saying Catalonia should be ‘just, respectful, non-discriminatory and in favour of all that can help the immigrants’. That was his public stance anyway. He must have told his wife something different. In any case, the feeling persists amongst non-Catalan speakers that they are looked down upon. The message they perceive is this: Good Catalans speak Catalan. Bad ones do not.

  Catalanism is a car with no reverse gear. It may go slow, it may go fast, but it only goes in one direction. At what stage, I wondered, would nationalists say: ‘That’s enough. We have achieved our aims. We don’t want any more power here. You can keep what is left in Madrid’? The answer to that question is almost certainly ‘never’. A nationalist needs, by definition, to keep demanding more – and to claim always that they are the victim of injustice.

  I can understand separatism. It is a straightforward and honest credo. The ambiguity of Catalan nationalists, however, makes it impossible to guess where they want to go. It also ensures that the tension between Madrid and Catalonia can never be resolved. It might vary in degree, but it will be eternal. The nationalist definition of Catalonia seems to require it.

  Jordi Pujol finally retired as president in 2003, though he still looms large, presiding over the Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya party. His successor, Artur Mas, won most seats in the elections that year. But he did not win an absolute majority. Mas was outflanked by Pasqual Maragall, the same Socialist who, as mayor, had seen Barcelona so brilliantly through the Olympics. He stitched together what, on the surface, was an unlikely coalition of left-wing parties. It included Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya – the separatist party which had doubled its support to take one in six Catalan votes.

  The best explanation of the growth in separatism has been provided by Ricardo, a cartoonist at El Mundo newspaper. He drew a cartoon of Aznar, the belligerently centralist Conservative prime minister at the time, rubbing a lamp. A genie came out and offered him a wish. ‘I want you to make all those who radicalise the nationalists disappear,’ he said. The genie responded by turning Aznar to dust.

  Maragall, however, not only needs the support of separatists to run the Generalitat but also has some nationalist tendencies of his own. His grandfather, Joan Maragall, was a major Catalan poet and admirer of Verdaguer. He penned a famous ode to Spain, which chided it for ignoring Catalonia after the disastrous losses of Cuba and the Philippines in 1898.

  On ets, Espanya? – No et veig enlloc./ No sents la meva veu atronadora?/ No entens aquesta llengua – que te parla entre perills?/ Has desaprès d’entendre an els teus fills?/ Adéu, Espanya!

  Where are you, Spain? – Nowhere to be seen./ Do you not hear my resounding voice?/ Don’t you understand this language, speaking to you amongst dangers?/Have you stopped listening to your children? /Farewell, Spain!

  Joan Maragall’s poem reflected, amongst other things, Catalonia’s pain at losing its valuable markets in Cuba. The relationship with Cuba had been strong. Catalans still sing havaneres – Cuban songs brought back by its sailors. Bacardi – the world’s most famous rum – owes its name to its Catalan founders. The disaster of 1898 marked a moment when Catalonia’s upper middle class lost faith in Spain and turned towards regional nationalism as an alternative. If Madrid could not run their affairs properly – or guarantee their markets – they would run them themselves.

  Under the poet’s grandson there will be no turning the clock back on education and language reforms. A Pujol law imposing fines on shopkeepers who fail to translate their signs into Catalan is still there, as are the offices where people can denounce those who do not comply. Maragall, meanwhile, is demanding a reform of Catalonia’s statute that will see it accrue further powers. He wants it formally recognized as ‘a nation’ – a concept that drives Spain’s traditional right apoplectic.

  A Catalan journalist explained the progress of catalanismo like this: ‘The train is going down the track. All the major parties in Catalonia except the People’s Party [which gets only one in eight votes] want it to keep moving. The only argument is where it should stop. The Catalan socialists will get off at federalism. Separatists want it to reach the end of the track. Nobody knows where the nationalists will stop.’ He might have added that the latter were, however, determined to make sure the train never ran out of coal.

  Maragall’s reforms are set to happen despite the opposition of leading Socialists in other parts of Spain. Such views can coexist in the Spanish Socialist Party because it is federal. What is strange about the Socialist Party, which currently governs Spain under Zapatero, is that it does not formally propose the same solution for Spain itself. ‘Federal’ is a word it has begun to toy with. It is not ready, however, to go the whole way. Some argue that, with so much devolution of central power, Spain is already a long way down the federal track. A formally federal Spain remains the ideal, only, of the far left and the Socialists in Catalonia – even though it seems an obvious solution to what Spaniards call ‘el problema territorial’.

  The political father of Catalan nationalism, Enric Prat de la Riba, reached a similar conclusion in 1906. ‘Catalonia is a nation … a collective spirit, a Catalan soul, which was able to create a Catalan language, Catalan law and Catalan art.’ How to square the principles of ‘to each nation, a state’ and ‘the political unity of Spain’? Prat de la Riba’s solution was ‘l’Estat compost’ – basically a federation. In 1914 Catalonia got something much less than that – an administrative body called the Mancomunitat. It was shortlived. In 1925 the dictator General Miguel Primo de Rivera dissolved it. Primo de Rivera would, amongst other absurdities, ban the Sardana – the painfully earnest and unexciting Catalan group folk dance. The striking down of cultural symbols, however minor, was part of yet another determined re-engineering of the Catalans.

  As would happen with Franco and, to a lesser but demonstrable degree, with Aznar, a militant centralist in Madrid only served to popularise Catalan nationalism. After Primo de Rivera had gone it came back with a vengeance. This time, however, it was driven by the left. In 1931, a leader of Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, Lluís Companys, proclaimed the Catalan Republic to a crowd in Barcelona. The then head of the ERC, Fransesc Macià, claimed this new republic was part of ‘the Federation of Iberian Republics.’ Federal Spain poked its nose above the parapet. It was, as in 1640, a short-lived idea. Three days later Macià backtracked and agreed to the idea of a semi-autonomous government to be called, once more, the Generalitat. It would last until the Spanish Civil War, with Companys as its last president. Companys was forced into exile. Extradited from occupied France by Hitler while Franco’s brother-in-law, the Cuñadísimo Serrano Suñer was foreign minister, he would be shot on a hill
above Barcelona in 1940. Companys’ party would later be led, for a while, by that future Haider-lover Heribert Barrera. The current generation of leaders have distanced themselves, and their party, from his racist discourse.

  Thinking of Barrera, I travelled to the town of Vic. This is the heartland of traditional Catalonia. Hairy Wilfred had begun its ninth-century rebuilding after it was recovered from the Moors. Verdaguer was born nearby. Here I found a group of ‘language volunteers’ giving free lessons to immigrants. They were making a heartfelt effort to help these people integrate in Catalonia. I wondered, however, what really motivated them. Were they zealous missionaries of Catalan, converting natives? Or were they genuinely welcoming, just trying to help them out? When I heard one enthusiastically explain to a classroom of Africans what the idiom ‘treballar com un negre’ – ‘to work like a black man’ – meant, I wondered even harder. She did not notice the sharp intake of breath from some of those – hard-working, lowly-paid and black – in the room.

  Moving back to the Ramblas, I found another group of immigrants studying Catalan. They were here for money, not love. ‘I went for a job and they said come back when you can speak Catalan,’ explained one Ecuadorian. She complained that, in the city’s hospitals, nurses and doctors often addressed her in Catalan. In fact, with Catalan required for many public-sector and some private-sector jobs, speakers are now up to 5 per cent more likely to find employment. People from abroad, or elsewhere in Spain, shout ‘Discrimination’. My Catalan friends – some of whom now work and live almost exclusively in Catalan – find that hard to accept.

  I would like to move back to Barcelona one day. This has always been where I have felt most at ease in Spain. My conscience, however, tells me that, if I do so, I should learn Catalan. I am, after all, no longer the innocent foreigner who stepped off a plane at Barcelona airport in the mid-1980s with a rucksack, little idea of Spain and – like those immigrants Mrs Pujol complains about – none at all of Catalonia.

  But I can think of many other, more useful, languages I would rather learn first – Arabic, Chinese, perhaps Italian. It makes a move to Barcelona about as attractive – and likely – as going to, say, Helsinki or Athens. Does that mean I am being excluded? Or am I excluding myself? Perhaps I just take it all too seriously. Pujol recently complained that Catalonia felt ‘uncomfortable’ in Spain. Maybe I should go to Barcelona and allow myself to feel ‘uncomfortable’ too.

  As my quest for Catalonia’s ‘differentiating fact’ drew to a close, I set off to visit the least popular museum in Barcelona. It is dedicated to none other than that great and beloved poet Verdaguer. I drove up a twisting road past the funfair at Tibidabo – the highest point in the hills that rear up above the city. This peak’s name comes from the words of the Devil’s offer when he tempted Christ. Would he have had the will-power, I wondered, to reply ‘get thee behind me Satan’ had he been offered Barcelona?

  I drove through dense woodland. Here, a stone’s throw from the city, a shepherd was tending his sheep. A sign pointed me towards a converted masía, an eighteenth-century Catalan farm house, called Villa Joana. This is where Verdaguer, disgraced and distraught, died in 1902. ‘I am in a sea of troubles that do not let me think or write, let alone sing,’ he complained. A few years earlier he had been banned from saying Mass. Although he was reinstated, the elite of Barcelona – his former patrons – had mostly turned their backs on him.

  It was a Saturday morning. I was the only visitor at the museum, silently trailed by a uniformed security guard. There was obviously no taboo, or at least not any more, on mentioning his supposed madness. His exorcism writings, I found, had now been published. The museum explains how Verdaguer became the leading light in the Renaixença and the star turn at its annual poetry competition, the Jocs Florals. The Renaixença had included, in 1841, the publication, in the preface of a poetry anthology, of a call for cultural independence by Joaquim Rubió i Ors which claimed that Spain was no longer ‘the fatherland’ of Catalans.

  The clarion call came from a man who, like many of the Renaixença figures, were from Catalonia’s prosperous upper middle class of merchants and financiers. Bonaventura Carles Aribau eventually spent much of his time in Madrid, running Spain’s treasury, mint and state holdings. That did not stop him waxing lyrical in La Pàtria (The Fatherland) about his roots and his language, which he referred to by the medieval term of llemosí. ‘En llemosí soná lo meu primer vagit,/ Quant del mugró matern la dolça llet bebia/ En llemosí al Senyor pregaba cada dia,/ E cántichs llemosins somiaba cada nit.’ (‘My first infant wail was in Catalan/ when I sucked sweet milk from my mother’s nipple./ I prayed to God in Catalan each day/and dreamed Catalan songs every night.’)

  The Renaixença gave birth to political catalanismo. In Catalonia, the poets came first, then the politicians. That explains why language and culture – and not the bullet or the bomb – are the chosen weapons of catalanismo. It also explains why some Catalans can be so touchy about Verdaguer.

  My search for the hecho diferencial ends here. Catalans are obviously different. But I do not see that this conflicts with being Spanish. In any case, it strikes me as something an outsider cannot judge. The hecho diferencial can only be felt from within. If a Catalan feels that he or she is Catalan above all else, and that this makes them different to other Spaniards – or, even, not a Spaniard – it is a wholly subjective sensation. Perhaps, like Aribau, one must first dream and suck a maternal nipple in Catalan. The outsider cannot share it. Nor, I am sure, can the immigrants on Las Ramblas.

  Catalans are not, however, the only Spaniards whose first dreams normally come in a language other than Catalan. The Basques, as we have seen, cannot compete. Euskara is still far from being their first language. The people of Galicia, however, do mostly speak their own language, galego. They, too, have their own poets. So how do they fit into the jigsaw puzzle that is Spain? To find that out, I would have to leave the warm and placid Mediterranean behind me. I would need to head for the wild, wet Atlantic, to a place that is home to The End of the World.

  12

  Coffins, Celts and Clothes

  I met Manuel standing beside his coffin. The long, wooden box, lined with quilted, padded white viscose, was standing upright, leaning against the wall of the church at Santa Marta de Ribarteme. Manuel and four friends were standing beside it, quietly waiting for the moment when he would step in.

  Santa Marta is a small village, more a loose collection of farmhouses, in the hills that rise up from the River Miño in Galicia, Spain’s misty and mysterious north-west corner. Manuel, a forty-nine-year-old, one-eyed former quarryman, had a love-heart and the letters l-o-v-e, in English, tattooed on one forearm. He had come up from the nearby cathedral town of Tui, which sits on the border with Portugal, to join the procession that is the highlight of Santa Marta’s annual fiestas.

  ‘I have stomach cancer. I have been very, very ill,’ he explained. While others walked, or even crawled, Manuel would be riding in his coffin. ‘I have prayed all I can and I have survived. It is a small miracle, so I have come to give thanks.’

  The coffin parade at Santa Marta de Ribarteme was, I had been assured, one of the supreme examples of those twin Galician characteristics of religiosity and superstition. I had come here as I tried to work out a problem that was just as mystifying, if not more so, than that posed by the Catalans or Basques. Why was it that Galicia, the most far-flung and historically abandoned corner of Spain, did not feel the same intense mistrust of Madrid as them. Why, in short, were Galicians happy being Spaniards? This, after all, was also a place with its own language. Four out of five people spoke galego – a far higher percentage than native euskara speakers. Galicia, too, could boast its own literature and culture. Geographically, it was more distant and isolated from Madrid than either the Basque Country or Catalonia. It had certainly suffered more. For centuries, and until very recently, Galicia was a byword for poverty, hunger and emigration. It was recognised, alongside the oth
er two, as ‘a historic nationality’ – marking it from Spain’s other autonomous regions. Fewer than a quarter of Galicians defined themselves as nationalists, however. Only one in thirty wanted a separate state. There was no real argument that, in Galicia, one was amongst Spaniards.

  In Santa Marta de Ribarteme it was lives and souls, not mundane politics, that were at stake. ‘He prays to Santa Marta,’ explained one of Manuel’s friends, here to act as pall-bearers for a still-living man. ‘The cancer hasn’t killed him, not yet.’

  I asked whether they had weighed Manuel before volunteering their services. ‘He weighs sixty-eight kilos,’ said the friend. ‘We’ll try not to drop him.’

  Inside the tiny, stone church, a queue of men and women was barging its way noisily forward towards a polychrome statue of Santa Marta – Lazarus’s sister, who once served Jesus his supper. A man with a microphone and a weary expression was berating them. ‘If you could hear yourselves,’ he said. ‘You would realise that this sounds like anything other than the house of God.’ But still they pushed anxiously forward. They were sweating in the summer heat – a hot crush of frail bodies, frayed nerves and raised voices.

  Some of the people here – children, women, old men – wore strange, short, transparent white tunics, made of gauze or mosquito netting, over their clothes. It made them look like baggily clad sugar-plum fairies, though none seemed particularly aware of their outer aspect. Most clutched long, thin, yellowed wax candles, as tall as a man, their flames protected by small, white cardboard cones. Some carried exvotos – rough wax sculptures of parts of the body – bought from vendors who had set up trestle tables outside. As they reached the saint, the pilgrims added their exvoto to a growing mountain of yellowy arms, legs, ankles, heads, chests, breasts and tummies that was piling up under her pedestal. I heard a steady ‘clink! clink! clink!’ of coins hitting the bottom of a money-box.