Prim, and weird people

There’s nothing particularly wrong with the human race. It’s just people that are sometimes a bit weird.

That was confirmed by a visit to the fine old Catalan town of Reus. It’s rather an attractive place, as it happens, with a pretty centre. But it also has a curious history, as we learned from an old friend, Rosa, someone I’d mistakenly let drift out of contact for many years until last year, when we had a great reunion during which Danielle at last met her.

Rosa lives in Reus, which is why we made a stop there, on our way to Perpignan in southwest France. I’ll explain in a later post why we were heading for Perpignan. Probably.

Danielle and Rosa are leading the way into the
great restaurant and Vermut maker Vermuts Rofes

Reus is a great centre for vermut, which is what Spain calls vermouth. My visit allowed me to confirm that the city deserves to be proud of its production of this fine drink. I liked both the red and the white I tried, the latter in a vermut maker's which is also an excellent restaurant, where we had a great meal with Rosa.

The city's only 16 km from Tarragona, which is the capital of the province to which both belong. Now, the way Rosa tells it, Reus was for a long time the more commercially successful of the towns. It had a much more dynamic business sector and that allowed it to finance a thriving cultural life.

But, she explained, Reus rested too much on its laurels. For instance, local businesses, including shops, liked to shut at 1:00 in the afternoon and open again at 5:00. Not convenient for the people who travelled into town to buy supplies and equipment, or perhaps to see a doctor,, and might have liked to make a day of it, with lunch thrown in. Apparently, the good merchants of Reus didn’t care. Clients simply had to adapt their expectations to the way Reus businesses liked to operate.

As a further example of their outlook, Rosa also pointed out to us one of the most fashionable shops in the town. Perhaps the most fashionable. Rosa went there once, just once, and never again. She was dressed casually, though well. That didn’t stop the shop assistant she turned to for help finding an item she wanted, telling her she doubted the shop had anything to offer her.

This strikes me as the kind of arrogance that underlies the story told about many high-end shops where, if you ask the price of something, the assistant will answer, “if you need to ask, you can’t afford it”.

Faced with either of those types of snootiness, my inclination would be to do what Rosa did, and walk out of the shop, never to return.

Now whether this kind of attitude was the only cause of the relative decline of Reus or whether other factors came into play, what happened is that as the decades rolled by and turned into centuries, Reus faded while Tarragona blossomed. Eventually, the upstart on the coast overtook its rival, adding wealth and dynamism to the privilege it had enjoyed since Roman times, of being the capital of the province that includes both, and which has always carried its name. 

You can imagine how Reus felt. Even the university has its faculties split between the two centres, and rather than be called after either, has given itself the name of a person instead (Rovira i Virgili, if you must know, who was president of the Catalan government in exile from 1940 to 1949, in succession to Luis Companys who went into exile in France after the end of the Spanish Civil War but was handed back by the Nazis, to meet an unpleasant and quick end, though not quick enough, given how unpleasant it was).

We enjoyed one particular facet of the rivalry between Reus and Tarragona. This is associated with the name of General Juan Prim. If you’ve never heard of him, let me assure you that nor had we until we got there.

He was a nineteenth-century general, born in Reus, who made a name for himself in, among other things, civil wars devastating Spain in his youth and later in colonial warfare in North Africa. A couple of generations later, another Spanish general, Francisco Franco, would win prominence by his North African campaigns. The difference, however, was that Prim remained surprisingly liberal, not something anyone could say about Franco, who was just prim. And nasty.

Prim in particular spent ages scouring Europe for someone who could be brought into Spain as constitutional monarch, replacing both the warring branches of the existing royal family (literally warring). That would mean accepting a crown offered by democratic election. Prim is reported to have said that looking for a democratic monarch in Europe was like looking for an atheist in heaven. 

Eventually though, Amadeo of Savoy accepted the role. In fact, he only lasted, as King Amadeo the first (and only) of Spain, for just over two years. After an attempt in 1873 on his and his wife’s lives, he decided that, quite frankly, it was too much like hard work trying to rule Spain, a nation as deeply divided then as it is now. He stood down and told the Cortes, the Spanish parliament, that Spain was simply ungovernable. 

Prim, though, didn’t see any of that. In December 1870, as he left the Cortes, of which he was a member, just a few weeks after voting for Amadeo to be given the throne, he was gunned down in the street and died soon after.

Prim and his horse
Seen from the direction of Tarragona

Reus decided to give its glorious son a suitable monument. It takes the form of an equestrian statue of Prim in the saddle, brandishing his sword.

Now there’s a story told in Reus, that the statue is so oriented that the horse’s back end and, I suppose, therefore Prim’s too, are facing Tarragona. I’ve not been able to confirm that but, hey, it’s telling that the tale is even told, isn’t it? Whether it’s true or not.

It’s great to celebrate your favourite son. But if you can do it in a way that also abuses your despised neighbour, isn’t that just win-win?

See what I mean? The human race may be absolutely fine. But think of Prim. Of what happened to Companys. Of the behaviour of Reus shopkeepers. Or of the rivalry of that city with Tarragona.

Surely you’ve got to agree that people are weird.

Smiling gaily

Let’s celebrate Netflix for making the show Smiley.

Set in Barcelona, it’s one of the best gay-scene series I’ve seen for a long time. At least, at the light-hearted end of that scene. At the darker end, It’s a sin is right up there with the best, a powerful story of young gays at the start of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. It has plenty of humour, but that highlights the tragedy far more than blunting it.

Smiley, on the other hand, had us laughing within a couple of minutes, and we kept on laughing right to the end. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t serious, even sad, moments. It’s just that it’s the other way around from It’s a sin: the sadness or tension only make the returns to humour all the more pleasing.

Smiley: quarrelling again

The protagonists are two men who have next to nothing in common. One is somewhat older and an architect, a man of culture, while the other is a bartender in a gay bar with everyday tastes. Whenever they meet, they quarrel. Can there ever be a link between them?

The relationship I find most intriguing is the lesbian one. What do they really feel about each other? Is their love uplifting or a constraint? A series of gloriously humorous situations that arise between them keeps us guessing.

There’s also a heterosexual couple and their story, though it interested me less, has its wonderful moments too. And there are others.

Finally, the drag singer – with a beard – is a wonderful creation, making the series worth watching just for the songs.

So, a glorious experience. It’s available in several languages (including Catalan, the official language in Barcelona). If you have Netflix, I’m sure you can get it and I recommend you do. 

What added to its attraction for me is that it’s set in Spain. 

It’s less than half a century since homosexuality was legalised again in the country. It had been legal during the short-lived Second Republic in the 1930s, but the Franco dictatorship that overthrew it made it unlawful. It was treated as a medical syndrome, and gays – mostly gay men – could be brutally treated in an attempt to ‘cure’ them, including long terms of imprisonment in gaols for ‘deviants’.

Funnily enough, it was in Barcelona and nearby that the first cracks began to appear. A handful of gay clubs began to operate, clandestinely, from the 1960s and up to Franco’s death in 1975. But freedom only fully came with legislation in 1979, after the return to democracy.

Thinking about all that reminded me of one gay artist, Jaime Gil de Biedma. 

Jaime Gil de Biedma: the businessman or the poet

He was born in 1929, so he was approaching seven years of age when the most infamous murder of a gay man by Spanish nationalists backing the Franco rebellion took place. That was the shooting of a poet outstanding not just in Spain but around the world, Federico García Lorca. His killers would certainly have regarded many of the things he did as offences, such as claiming that expelling the Muslim Arabs was the greatest disaster his native Granada had undergone. No doubt, however, his worst offence was simply being gay.

Gil de Biedma knew the risks a gay poet ran. Not that, in his view, it was ever he, a successful businessman in his family’s tobacco business, who wrote poetry. The way he presented things, the businessman had invented a fictional character, also called Jaime Gil de Biedma, and it was the character who was the poet. 

That fiction wrote poems about love including including its erotic manifestations. Today we can read them as gay, though he, the poet, always stayed neutral, and it’s striking that he carefully avoids ever making clear the gender of the figures he mentions. Well, whether he chose to write for gays or for everyone, he had in any case to be careful. To a friend, Juan Ferraté, he once wrote about “the suffocating system of moral inhibitions that for all these years one has had to use for everything other than relationships with personal friends”.

In the end, the businessman Gil de Biedma announced, ten years before his own death, that the fictional poet Gil de Biedma had nothing more to say. By then, Franco was dead and Spain was reverting to a more civilised state. But the poetry stopped.

The art of that fictional poet might have ended but, fortunately, the life of gays, the life of art, and specifically the life of gay art, had been given a new lease. Which adds to the pleasure of watching a series like Smiley. Its exuberance would have been unthinkable fifty years ago, and that gives us something to celebrate today.

To celebrate but also to defend. Sadly, there are far too many Spaniards who seem to hanker for a return to those days of suffocating moral inhibitions. Let’s hope there are enough of the other sort to resist them.

Let’s end with a couple of extracts from one of the poet’s pieces. This one’s called After the death of Jaime Gil de Biedma. It starts (in a poor translation of my own which I hope nonetheless gives you a flavour of the original):

In the garden, reading
the shadow of the house darkens my pages
and the sudden cold at the end of August
makes me think of you.

The garden and the house nearby
where the birds pipe on the vines,
on an August evening, when it's about to get dark
and you still have your book in your hand,
were, I remember, your symbol of death.
I only wish that in the hell
of your last days this vision could give you
a little sweetness, though I don't think it will.

At peace at last with myself,
I can now remember you
not in the dreadful hours, but here
in the summer of last year
when crowding in
- so many months erased -
happy images return
brought by your image of death...

August in the garden, in broad daylight.

And here’s the ending, with its ingenious reflection of the poem on itself and the ambiguity over who did the writing:

It was a happy summer.
... The last summer
of our youth, you told Juan
in Barcelona when we returned
loaded with nostalgia,
and you were right. Then came the winter,
the hell of months
and months of agony
and the final night of pills and booze
and vomit on the carpet.

I saved myself by writing
After the Death of Jaime Gil de Biedma.

Of the two of us, it was you who wrote better.
Now I know how much they were yours
the dreamy desire and the irony,
the romantic muffle that beats in those of my poems that I prefer
for example in Pandémica...
Sometimes I wonder
what my poetry will be like without you.

Though perhaps it was I who taught you.
Who taught you to take revenge on my dreams,
out of cowardice, by corrupting them. 

While at war: courage in admitting you were wrong

Picture a lecture theatre in an old and prestigious university. You know, wooden panelling, a lofty ceiling, rows of wooden benches reaching up to the top and back of the hall, where the students sit.

Karra Elejalde as Miguel de Unamuno

But these aren’t students. There are some teachers and local worthies, mixed with armed soldiers and Fascist Party storm troopers. For this is 1936 at the university of Salamanca in Spain. Specifically, it is the 12th of October, and the military uprising that is going to lead to three years of civil war and the overthrow of the second Spanish Republic, is a few months old.

The 12th of October. That’s no random date. Even today, it’s Spain’s national day. It was chosen to mark the moment that Spain, through Christopher Columbus, ‘discovered’ America. That’s not an event much celebrated by the descendants who were already there and quickly learned to regret being discovered.

Back in 1936, it had been baptised the ‘Day of the Race’. That’s nothing to do with trying to run faster than others. It’s to do with celebrating the Spanish race above all others. If it weren’t so ugly, and hadn’t cost so many lives, this notion of race would be laughable: the Spanish are descendants of Celtic Iberian villagers, mixed with Carthaginian traders, followed by Roman legionaries, and then Germanic tribesmen who came marauding and stayed to settle before being overrun in turn by Arab adventurers; somewhere Jewish merchants and administrators joined the mix, along no doubt with Catholics from England and Ireland or exiles from Italy, to say nothing of the many ‘Indians’ from the Americas who came back along the shipping lanes that Columbus opened in the other direction.

In other words, the Spanish even in 1936 were about as racially pure as any street mongrel. Just like the English, with their Celtic roots, their smattering of Latin speakers, overrun by Anglo-Saxons and later by Norsemen of various types, to which have been added Jews from all over Europe and North Africa or Indians – not the American variety, but the kind that includes the whole of the Asian subcontinent covering Pakistan too – Nigerians, Jamaicans, Poles and Russians, and a glorious, rich mix of every nation on earth.

Still, to Spanish Fascists of 1936, the race was something to celebrate. And they did so in the great lecture theatre of the University of Salamanca.

One of those present that day was Miguel de Unamuno, philosopher, writer, poet and then rector of the University. He had been disgusted with the disorder and chaos of the Republic and had welcomed the military uprising as a way to bring back peace and order to his country. The Republic dismissed him. The rebellion restored him.

For a while he thought he could count on Franco’s support, if only to save the lives of friends of his who had been arrested. It was a vain hope. Two of his closest companions were murdered despite his entreaties.

On the 12th of October, he wasn’t due to speak. So he listened to speeches extolling the greatness of Spain, and of the holy war now being fought to save it.

Finally, he could stand it no more. He rose and began to speak:

I know you must be expecting my words, because you know me and you know that I am incapable of remaining silent in the face of what is being said. Saying nothing can, sometimes, mean acquiescing… I had said that I didn’t want to speak, because I know myself. But… I have to. There has been talk here of an international war in defence of Christian civilisation… But this one is only an uncivil war… To win is not to convince, and above all one has to convince. But there is no convincing through hatred that leaves no place to compassion…

Another presence on the platform was that of General Millan Astray, founder of the Spanish Foreign Legion. After Unamuno spoke, there were cries from the audience of the Legion’s slogan, “¡Viva la Muerte!”, “Long live Death!” Unamuno replied:

I have just heard the cry “long live death!” That sounds the same as “death to life!” And I, who have spent my whole life creating paradoxes that annoyed those who didn’t understand them, have to say to you, as an expert in the matter, that this paradox strikes me as ridiculous and repellent… Whatever the proverb may say, I have always been a prophet in my own country. You will win, but you will not convince. You will win because you have superior brute force, but you will not convince because convincing means persuading. And to persuade you need something that you are missing in this struggle, reason and right.

The words “you will win but you will not convince” work better in Spanish: “Venceréis, pero no convenceréis”.

This is the scene to which Alejando Amenábar’s latest film, While at War, builds.

There’s controversy about the film. It’s far from certain that the words traditionally attributed to Unamuno are exactly the ones he spoke: there’s no recording or transcript available. There is even a school of thought that suggest the words were embellished by a left-wing Spanish journalist who took refuge in London after the war, Luis Portillo. In a neat irony, he had a son in Britain, Michael, who became a Conservative politician and a minister in Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet.

There are also mixed views of the film. Amenábar has a tendency to distance himself perhaps a little too much from his characters, and that makes it difficult to empathise with them, and to feel their tragedy ourselves, viscerally. I did, but my two companions, one of my sons and my daughter-out-law, didn’t: the film left them cold and unengaged.

It didn’t leave me cold. I was fascinated by its depiction of Franco as a truly little man, in moral as well as physical stature, worming his way towards power. Millan Astray came across as just the monster I’ve always believed he was. But I was particularly fascinated by the depiction of Unamuno, as a man who got the politics wrong at the beginning and had, slowly and with enormous pain, to admit his error and put it right with what was, after all, an immensely courageous public statement repudiating the Fascists and all they stood for.

It didn’t happen exactly as in the film. The audience didn’t mob him or threaten to lynch him. He wasn’t rescued by Franco’s wife. But it’s true that immediately afterward, he was dismissed as rector for the second time and definitively. He was also placed under house arrest. He died two months later.

The aftermath of Unamuno’s speech was no lynching
He’s surrounded by Fascists, but Millan Astray is shaking his hand

There’s plenty wrong with the film, but plenty right too. I enjoyed it, partly because it’s the first time I’ve seen a film in Spanish without subtitles. It means I shall watch it again as soon as I can, if only to be able to say again and again, “oh, that’s what he was saying.”

I will, however, also be watching it again because for me, at least, it’s well worth seeing twice.

Distrust the beauty spot: it may have something to hide

This weekend, we went walking up in the mountains at a place called Loriguilla, near Valencia. It overlooked a glorious lake reflecting both the encircling hills and the clear blue skies which we still get around here, with amazingly warm temperatures, even in October.

The lake and hills at Loriguilla

But while you can enjoy the beauty, it’s no bad idea to distrust the appearance…

The place has a few ruined houses, along with some new holiday cottages, clustered around the wreck of a church. Paths lead up to the high hills where one can walk along water courses rushing across the hillside and disappearing into tunnels, taking drinking water to the city. The other way, one can walk down to the lakeside and a dock for rowing boats or canoes or, indeed, for swimming from.

Mountain lakes? Even in a hot October I distrust them. “Come on,” said Danielle, and two friends who were getting rid to leap in. But I didn’t share their enthusiasm.

Besides, they didn’t actually leap in. They felt their way tentatively from rock to rock at the lake’s edge, as the water gradually came further and further up their bodies. To, I should say, an accompaniment of screams and exclamations, all of them on the subject of cold.

“Yes,” thought I, “sounds delightful. Enticing even. I might just stay here.”

The three of them eventually got in and all assured me that it was “wonderful once you’re in.”

“It’s wonderful once you’re in.”
I was happy to believe them. And observe. From a distance

What kind of statement is that? It means it’s horrible getting in, but not quite as awful once you’ve done it. They may be right, but what I loathe is the awful transition between pleasant warmth and dryness and blood-chilling wetness before you can get used to it.

“Come on, you’ll enjoy it.”

But I chose not to trust that kind of reassurance. I’ve been exposed too often to “try it, you’ll like it,” claims. Often, they’re about various kinds of particularly revolting-looking food. Long, long years of experience have taught me that if food looks unappetising, it generally is. Equally, if water looks bitterly cold, that’s generally exactly how it is.

I was enjoying being able to wear shorts and a tee shirt in October (in England, my friends have already broken out winter pullovers). So I stayed put and revelled in the feel of the dock underneath me and the sun above, while the others swam around claiming I was missing a wonderful experience. Frankly, I was happy to believe them, just as long as I didn’t have to put it to the test. Belief, sure, but trust, no.

Much more my style, to lie about on the dock

The temperature of the water wasn’t, however, the only thing to distrust in that idyllic spot.

Why, you might wonder, were there only ruined houses and an abandoned church near that lovely lake?

It turns out that the church had been the place of worship of a village further downhill. Downhill? The lake’s downhill from the church. And, yes, you guessed it, the village is at the bottom of the lake.

It was the lake itself I ought to have distrusted.

It may be beautiful, but it isn’t natural. It’s made up of valleys flooded by a dam. It is, in effect, a reservoir. It holds some of the water Valencia needs. Which is, of course, a good thing. Though not a lot of fun for the people who used to live in the old village of Loriguilla.

A ruined church: monument to a lost village

It was in the late fifties that they had to go. At the time, Spain was under the rule of the last of the West European fascist dictators, Francisco Franco. People didn’t get much of a chance to object to his decisions. Or at least, not to do it twice.

To be fair, they were moved to new houses. But did they want to go? Who knows? And if they didn’t, it barely mattered to the people who ran the place at that time.

That’s the thing about so-called ‘strong men’, and Franco liked to be referred to as ‘El Caudillo’, roughly translated as ‘the strongman’. They can make things happen. They do that because they don’t have to worry about how other people feel. It’s effective but it isn’t necessarily pleasant.

Something we ought to bear in mind when anyone expresses admiration for strong and decisive leaders today. Like Trump. Or Boris Johnson. Or Erdogan. Or Putin. Or Bolsonaro. Or rather too many people around the world for comfort.

Come and enjoy the lovely lake at Loriguilla, in or out of the water. But spare a thought for the village it hides. And then ask yourself: is this the way I too want to be treated?

Painting from memory

Memory. It’s a curious organ. And one that we don’t use anything like enough.

For outsiders visiting Spain, it’s often hard to remember that the nation isn’t that far from a fascist past. Francisco Franco, dictator for nearly four decades, only died in November 1975. A great many Spaniards living today still remember his times. 

That always strikes me when I hear a Spaniard talk about “the war”. That doesn’t mean the Second World War, as it would for a Brit or a Frenchman or a German. Generally, it means the Spanish Civil War, which brought Franco to power.

Equipo Crónica in the Reina Sofía museum

So close are the events of that terrible time, that reminders keep emerging. One that we found particularly moving was in the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid: a series of six paintings by an artistic collective, called Equipo Crónica. The group was set up in the early sixties by three artists from Valencia, Rafael Solbes, Manuel Valdés and Juan Antonio Toledo. Toledo, however, was called up for military service soon after and, when he returned, he found the collaboration between the other two had grown so close he could no longer fit in.

Within the collaboration, they used simple, plain colours, not merely to underline messages that are often intense to the point of brutality, but so as to avoid the touches and undertones of paint that would distinguish one painter from the other. They are truly collective works.

Franco remained a brutal authoritarian right up to his death. That release, for Spain and beyond, as much as for himself, came on 20 November 1975. But less than two months earlier, on 27 September, five young men were murdered – ‘executed’ is just a euphemism – by firing squad, on the orders of a court martial, countersigned by the dictator.

A salute to the last victims of Franco’s killing machine

Equipo Crónica decided to record the event in a series of ten paintings, six of which we saw in the museum. They chose not to make the paintings strictly documentary, depicting the actual event of the execution. Instead they made them “symbolically documentary”: each shows a wall (since the victims were stood up against a wall to be shot), a leaf from a desk calendar showing the date of the murders, a face with eyes blacked out to depict what happened to the young men or perhaps the blindness of the world, and a black strip for mourning across the top left.

The walls are, apparently, each in the style of an artist admired by the collective, but I can’t identify them.

In the foreground is a painter’s palette, broken into five pieces, one for each of the victims and perhaps a symbol of the impotence of art in the face of such criminality.

Palette broken into five pieces
Face with eyes blacked out
A wall for the victim to stand against
Mourning stripe at top left
The date at the top

It’s a strong and striking memorial not just to the victims of a specific crime, but of the dangers the hard right and nationalist movements represent for all of us (Franco adopted the label ‘nationalist’ for his side in the Civil War, against the ‘Republicans’ he eventually defeated with help from both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy). It was moving to see it in one of Spain’s most prestigious museum. Long may it serve as a reminder to Spaniards of what it means to accommodate the far right.

A reminder many of us outside Spain badly need, too. In Hungary. In Poland. In Italy, for pity's sake. And, far from least, in Brexit Britain.

Our memories of the dangers of fascism are over 70 years old, from the Second World War, rather than little over 40 as in Spain. And we’re becoming forgetful. Toying with notions that should have been consigned to the history books.

At our own serious peril.