There was an upsurge in noise from the public, but then the screaming, whistling and shouting quickly dropped to a low murmur. The two men approached each other, circling like crabs, their shoulders raised, hands ready to clasp one another. Then with a low, dull clap they came together in a huddle, grasping at each other’s breastbones, trying alternatively to stamp on each other’s toes.
‘¡Venga!’ Come on! came the cry from a woman sitting at the side of the ring. Her little boy had jumped off her lap and was perched on top of a stool, his chin resting on the edge of the canvas that fenced the ring, his bright blond hair almost as white as his T-shirt.
For a few seconds the fighters barely seemed to move, caught in a tight struggle of strength, then with a flip they fell to the ground and began writhing over each other like snakes, twisting and sliding between grips and holds. The audience roared again: the local champion had his opponent by the neck and was turning upwards and sideways, as though trying to snap the man’s backbone. The mulatto was clearly in pain and banged his fist against his opponent’s arm. But the local boy was in a bad position, not able to control his opponent with his weight, and with a slicing motion the mulatto swung his leg round and kicked the Valencian on the side of the head. It was enough: for a second the white man’s grip loosened and his opponent jacknifed up into the air free from his grasp. The Valencian immediately rushed towards him, but the local boy was hurt: the kick had cut the side of his head above the ear and blood was beginning to drip down on to his shoulders. He seemed not to care, though: with a torrent of fists he attacked the mulatto, who covered his face with his gloves. Then came another kick to the side, like a Thai boxer, and the two were on the floor again. The audience rose as one to its feet.
‘Dale, dale,’ came the cry. Go on, give it to him.
This time the mulatto had his opponent in a tight neck hold, his forearm pressed against the Valencian’s throat, slowly choking him, while his right hand rained punches on to the top of his head. His teeth were clenched, spittle foaming from his mouth. The Valencian was turning red, his fingers clawing at the arm that was pressing the life out of him. Reaching for the mulatto’s fingers he gave a jerk, and suddenly the hold was loosened. He slipped out and head butted the other man as they both sat on their knees on the canvas.
‘Dale,’ shouted the little boy at the side of the ring. Behind him his mother was jumping up and down hysterically.
Blood was now seeping all over the ring, the mulatto’s nose smashed by the force of the Valencian’s forehead. He stood up in a red haze but was submitted at once to a new barrage of blows. The Valencian held him at arm’s length with his left hand while his right fist bludgeoned down again and again on to his face. His glove became wet with blood, while red spatters covered his neck and chest. The mulatto began to weaken, unable to defend himself against the heavy blows distorting his face. The referee was nowhere to be seen. In any other kind of fight he would have intervened much sooner, given the amount of blood both men were now losing. But I now realized what type of fight this was: the kind where anything goes, and these two were giving each other hell.
The muscleman at my side was on his feet, barging violently from side to side as he raised and dropped his clenched fists in excitement at the events unfolding in the ring. His arms were tensed, a powerful scent of anti-perspirant radiating from every pore. In his mind he was clearly in there himself, pummelling the mulatto with all his rage. For a second I looked around in the half-light at the other spectators. Countless bulging eyes feasting on the bloody spectacle were fixed on the centre of the hall. On my other side, Luis was punching down into the darkness at an imaginary foe.
But my own attention could not drift away from the fight for long. Within seconds I was drawn back to the two men in the ring, as if in a nightmare. The mulatto had fought back now and was pushing the Valencian against the ropes, fingers pressed hard into his shoulders as he tried to drag him down to the floor again. A stream of red poured down from each nostril and he spat to clear his mouth of the blood. His opponent was too strong for him, though: as they fell to the canvas the mulatto found himself twisting in mid-air and with a slap landed face up. The Valencian was straddling his chest in an instant, pinning him down with his weight. The mulatto couldn’t move. And then the punches started once again: left, right, left, left, right. His face became a mass of pulp, arms flapping uselessly at his sides as his opponent decided to finish him off.
‘Mátale, mátale,’ came the cry. Kill him! The little blond boy at the side of the ring was slapping the canvas again in excitement. ‘Mátale.’
Not a single person was seated now, the entire audience chanting and screaming, shouting and whistling. Spaniards, whom I had always thought of as the most sympathetic and compassionate of people, were howling like mad dogs.
The mulatto appeared to be almost motionless, but still the punches hammered down. How did one of these fights end, I wondered. I couldn’t believe – didn’t want to believe – that it could be a struggle to the death. But the mulatto was going to fall unconscious, or worse, if it didn’t stop soon.
Finally, with a weak downward motion he gave a tap on the floor as a signal of submission. The Valencian was on his feet in a flash, jumping around the ring in jubilation, the cut above his ear now congealed into a black mass. The mulatto lay still, his stomach and chest rising and falling sharply as he gasped for breath, blood dripping on to the canvas beneath him.
The audience was out of control. People were jumping on to their chairs, waving and screaming. The man at my side was shuddering with excitement, bubbles of white saliva spilling from the corners of his mouth as he bellowed hoarsely like an ox. I was gripped by a sudden urge to get out, half suffocated by the mass of bodies now surging in an orgiastic crush, half disgusted at what we had seen, at what my own eyes had followed and watched from start to finish. But there was no way of leaving: the press of bodies was too strong.
In the ring the winner was being towelled down and handed a prize of some sort. There was little attention for the mulatto – just a helper nursing him back to his corner, trying to push a bottle of water into his broken mouth. The man needed a doctor, but there seemed to be no medical attention available. As he crouched on his stool, the Valencian came up and put his arms round his opponent’s shoulders in a victorious gesture. The mulatto acknowledged him then let his head drop, supporting his forehead with his hands. He had done his job – victory for the local boy had never been in doubt.
I found myself trembling as the crowd slowly began to disperse and we were at last able to make it to the door and out of this hellhole. From a corner of the hall I could hear shouting: Arriba España, ‘Up with Spain!’ Perhaps, I thought, in the minds of the crowd, the fight had turned into some kind of nationalistic battle – the local boy against the foreigner. Their cries were an echo from the past. There seemed to be a fervour and aggression in the room I was unused to in Spain; although perhaps it was more in tune with the bloodier country it had once been. The screaming of the little blond boy for the mulatto to be killed had chilled me: it seemed so out of step with a people I knew for their love of children and their cherishing of human life.
The boy scrambled past me as we climbed the steps up back towards the exit. ‘Mátale, mátale,’ he was shouting, like a chant. His elder brother ran after him, giggling.
‘Eso es, hijo,’ one of the crowd shouted in encouragement. That’s it, lad. Like the others I’d noticed at the start, he too was wearing a baseball cap with an embroidered black silhouette of a bull.
We came out into the open at last. The dog with the strange marking was still there, checking everyone that walked past with brutish condescension, like a bouncer. I breathed in deeply, as though trying to cleanse myself of what I’d just witnessed. The fight had been short, just the one bout, but the crowd had seen blood, that was all that mattered. It felt like a warm-up spectacle for a night on the town, a clandestine fix to quicken the nerves before staying
up till dawn dancing and drinking. I wanted to leave straight away, but out of politeness decided at least to say goodbye to Luis before heading off. I’d seen enough here. There was no point hanging on too long.
Luis was held up inside talking to his friends, though, and as I waited for him to appear from the hall I caught sight of some posters on the outside walls. I pushed past the crowd and walked up to have a closer look, grateful to have something to distract me momentarily.
IMMIGRANTS OUT! screamed one. SPANIARDS FIRST, said the other. The writing was laid over images of sub-Saharan Africans and Moroccans huddled in little wooden and rubber boats, the kinds that thousands travelled in every year as they tried to reach Spain and cross into Europe. Many died in the attempt. Near the top of the posters I noticed the same Osbourne bull everyone seemed to be wearing that night. The text was an angry rambling attack on everything from Brussels to ‘blacks’, with a scattering of hackneyed phrases like ‘stealing our jobs’ thrown in. It also mentioned contests like the one I’d just witnessed, and attempts by the authorities to ban them. But the authors were defiant. It was time for ACTION. They weren’t going to take anything LYING DOWN. Then at the bottom came the signature: the director of some political party I’d never heard of, in conjunction with the Spanish Falange.
The Falange. The Spanish fascist party, the party that had supported Franco during the Civil War. I was surprised to see it still existed. And so openly, like this. Were they behind what I had just witnessed? It felt bizarre that what I had assumed to be a ghost of Spain’s violent past should still be in existence and connected to this bloody spectacle. What’s more, it was taking place right here in Valencia, a city I felt so at home in. The cries of Arriba España I’d heard inside the hall began to make sense: it had once been the rallying cry of the Falange and the Nationalists. Yet instead of resting safely on the pages of a history book, it was being shouted here right in front of me: it was happening now. Silently I cursed Luis for having brought me here. It had been such a casual invitation. Did he think this was normal? Was Nationalism, Francoism, still active in Spain today? I’d thought until then that only old men and nostalgia junkies still hankered for the days of the dictatorship.
Luis came over and placed his hand on my shoulder. He was smiling broadly, as though we’d just come out of a cinema or a comedy show.
‘So,’ he said, ‘what did you think?’
I struggled to find something to say. I had just witnessed one of the most brutal acts I had ever seen, with hundreds of people screaming and shouting in blood-crazed lust. Children had been there, running around, baying out with the rest of them. I was used to bullfighting in Spain, but here we were watching human beings rip each other apart. I couldn’t comprehend what had happened. Spain, despite its faults, was for me a country where people felt the pain of others and never failed to be moved by suffering. But this, what had happened here, went against all my assumptions, all the ideas I’d built up about the country after a dozen years living there. And to make it worse, the event was being sponsored, perhaps even organized, by fascists, like some dirty secret left over from the dictatorship and the Civil War. For a moment the image of the mass grave I’d seen back near the farm flashed in my mind. What had been happening here in Valencia during that time? Had men been killed and dumped as mercilessly in the city as they had been in the country? Had the place been split in two, divided between Left and Right? There was a side of Spain that I had not wanted to acknowledge, and yet here it was, on my doorstep. I’d thought it was part of history. Now, it seemed, I had walked into a world where distinctions between past and present were less clearly discernible.
‘It was a bit heavy, right?’ Luis answered for me. ‘The mulatto will be all right. I’ve seen this kind of thing before. It looks worse than it actually is. He’ll be fine in a couple of days. Just a few bruises, that’s all. But it was a good fight. The local boy did us proud.’
I felt part of me was already moving away, had already gone home and was back at the farm, reeling from the violence and cocksure pantomime we’d just seen. I needed to get as far from here as possible.
‘Do you want to come for a drink with the others?’ Luis asked. ‘There’s a disco near here.’
‘No, thanks,’ I finally managed to say. ‘I’ve got to get back.’
‘Sure. I’ll see you around, then.’
I walked away from the crowd of heaving, sweating, inflated muscle buzzing under the lights of the entrance and headed into the night, alone. Hoping, above all, that I would never again see Luis or the side of my beloved Spain he had opened my eyes to that night.
4
The Flying Dragon
On the morning of 11 July 1936, a silver twin-engine biplane took off from Croydon airport in south London, bound for Casablanca. In the cockpit was Captain William Bebb, formerly of the RAF. The passengers, officially off on a hunting expedition in the High Atlas mountains, were a former army officer Major Hugh Pollard, Pollard’s daughter Diana, her friend Dorothy Watson and a Spaniard, Luis Bolín, of the ABC newspaper. The weather was bad on that summer morning in Britain, but the plane, a de Havilland Dragon Rapide, managed to take off nonetheless and within a few hours had landed in Bordeaux to refuel before continuing its lengthy journey. The Dragon Rapide was one of the best civilian planes around at the time for such a trip. With seating for nine people, a range of over 550 miles and a cruising speed of 130 mph, it would require only three or four stops en route and would be able to reach Morocco in about two days. Captain Bebb was an experienced pilot.
What most people at Croydon didn’t know, however, was that the story about hunting in the High Atlas was actually a cover for a far riskier venture. Pollard, a Catholic who had previously fought in Morocco, was a British intelligence agent,2 and the plane in fact was not ultimately bound for Casablanca, but for a rendezvous in the Canaries with a figure who would be crucial in the plot to bring down the democratic government in Madrid. Bebb and Pollard were to bring him to join his fellow plotters in northern Morocco, one of the launch pads of the coup. It was to be the beginning of a long journey that would eventually see him become dictator of all Spain.
Franco had spent the spring and early summer of 1936 in the Canaries in a kind of semi-exile, following the victory of the leftwing Popular Front in the February elections. It was a step down for the former chief of staff, a man widely suspected of plotting against the new government. Franco had taken it in his stride, however, adjusting to the slower pace of life on the edge of the tropics by attending private English lessons and taking up golf. With little to do but revise the coastal defences, he could but look on from afar as tensions increased in the capital, while perhaps reminiscing on a glorious military career to date. In other circumstances he might well have been entering the twilight of his soldiering days. In fact, the most important part of his life was just about to begin.
Franco was born in 1892 in the small naval town of El Ferrol in the northwestern Spanish region of Galicia. It is often said that to understand Franco you need to understand the Galician character, marked by an evasiveness and caution known as retranca. Galicians are famed for being hard to nail down – a trait often remarked on by those who knew Franco. It was a quality that was to serve him well as he rose from middle-class military cadet to head of state. Franco’s mother was a devout Catholic and a very conservative woman, while his father, a paymaster in the navy, was a passionate man who liked drinking, gambling and chasing women, and who often beat his children – Franco was the second of five: three sons and two daughters. When Franco was fourteen, his father left the family home and set up with his mistress in Madrid. Franco, however, was always closer to his mother, both emotionally and in temperament. He was later to write that the Spanish Republic had been set up by men who cheated on their wives.3 His hatred towards it, you sense, was fuelled by an association in his own mind between the liberal government and the father who had abandoned his family when he was a boy.
A
s a child, Franco had wanted to join the navy, but government restrictions on entry meant he ended up training at the artillery academy in Toledo. Never brilliant, but meticulous and with a strong nerve, he rose quickly through the officer ranks, his big break coming in 1920 when, as a major, he was offered the post of second in command of the newly formed Spanish Foreign Legion. Based on its French namesake, the force was an elite unit in the Spanish Army, being made up largely of criminals and fugitives, and was headed by Colonel José Millán Astray, a man close to King Alfonso XIII and with certain dubious ideas about soldiering that were supposedly based on the samurai code. The main function of the Legión, as it was called, was to help police Spain’s territories in northern Morocco.
In 1898 Spain, once the greatest empire in the world, had finally lost the last of its colonial possessions – Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines – to the United States in a war that became known as the Disaster. It was a wake-up call that, after centuries of decline and decadence, the country was no longer a player on the international stage. So when the opportunity arose in 1906 to take over northern Morocco, the government in Madrid took little convincing. France was busy extending its north-African territories westwards from Algeria into Morocco, but the Germans were unhappy about this. So in a compromise deal reached with Britain and the USA at the Conference of Algeciras, Spain was invited to set up her own ‘Protectorate’, stretching east–west from Larache to the Algerian border along Morocco’s Mediterranean coast, while the French took the bulk of the country to the south. The city of Tangier, meanwhile, would be controlled by an international committee.
Spain’s Moroccan possessions, however, became something of a poisoned chalice. The terrain in the area was largely mountainous, and the people were Berber tribesmen with a long tradition of scant respect for the authorities – whoever they were. Over the years the area was brought under control only at great expense, at the cost of many Spanish and Moroccan lives, and sometimes, humiliatingly, only with the military cooperation of the French from the south. Nonetheless, the Spanish occupation of northern Morocco tapped deeply into the national psyche with its echoes of the ancient struggles to clear the Iberian peninsula of the Moors. Although the Reconquest had ended in 1492 with the capture of Granada, the conflict still resonated deeply both culturally and psychologically. Fourteen ninety-two was not only the year the Reconquest concluded, it was also the date of Columbus’s famous journey and of the publication of the first Spanish grammar – the first such work in any modern Western language. It was the year in which ‘Spain’ as a concept was truly born. ‘Moor-slaying’ was part of the glue that held the fragmented nation together.
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