The Spanish Spectator/Land of My Father
Marin, Rick
THE SPANISH SPECTATOR LAND OF MY FATHER It was during a commercial for whole-wheat bread that I saw a woman's breasts floating languidly across a TV screen in the New Spain. First came the...
...Lorca's birthplace is now a martyr's shrine and he has become Spain's most famous literary figure after Cervantes...
...Old enough to have lived through the war, they were modestly dressed and did not look like lovers of literature...
...Madrid has been declared "cultural capital" of Europe (whatever that means) for the same year, the annus mirabilis of Eurofication...
...He immediately launched into a grand tour of the establishment for my benefit...
...The icons being carried (on foot) through the streets were religious relics and statues of Jesus or the Virgin Mary...
...Hot water above the first floor is still a rarity...
...On a cold, rainy day in Madrid during Lent, I did see a small, working-class woman walking barefoot, and not because she couldn't afford shoes...
...On the way down, we were taken into the ladies' room (this being the grand tour) and invited to marvel at its opulence: the toilets all had seats and there was a gray layer of indoor-outdoor carpeting covering the floor...
...The late-afternoon sun streamed through the tall windows, and the green walls were barely visible through the Marlboro fog of cigarette smoke rising from the round leather-topped tables crowded with men of Pepe and my father's generation...
...As a student he had performed in Lorca's traveling theater group, La Barraca...
...They've seen worse...
...The village, called Calzada de Calatrava, is where I was introduced to that admirable Spanish tradition, the casino...
...Would-be penitents in these ancient Easter parades wore sneakers under their medieval robes and dragged lightweight crosses on their shoulders...
...But how much longer before it does...
...Little kids frolicked past their bedtime...
...Euroassimilation looms in 1992...
...And much of the village, with its seventeenth-century stonework and lack of civilized amenities (little things like heat), remains distinctly anti-modern...
...Lorca, in black, played Death...
...From here we entered the ballroom, high-ceilinged and with a musicians' box built into one wall for those special occasions when women are allowed inside...
...By embarrassing coincidence, Pedro Almodovar—auteur of the X-rated Tie Me Up...
...But they nodded and mumbled respectfully when he was introduced...
...The locals eyed him suspiciously and said nothing...
...Not in the big cities...
...I nodded in manly assent...
...It was at the end of a cold April day when my father and I entered Calzada's casino in search of his cousin Pepe...
...We went together—my parents, my wife, and I —to the house/museum in Fuentevaqueros...
...Seville, site of the most famous processions, still attracts its share of self-flagellation and ecstatic crown-of-thorns wearers...
...berets sat in monastic quiet poring over newspapers and magazines lined up on both sides of a long, double-slanted reading table...
...A socialist government has created a booming free-market economy...
...The whole place was a smoking section...
...The Western cult of progress never infected Spain, as anyone who has ever tried to use a public telephone here knows...
...My wife noticed that Salman Rushdie had written something pompous prior to his exile...
...Later, during a brief film clip shown on videotape, I could just make him out among the overalled youths speeding across the by Rick Marin screen at the comically accelerated pace of an old silent movie, which this was...
...Afterwards a few old women approached him with questions...
...iOle...
...In this respect Spain has become much like the rest of Catholic Western Europe: topless beaches, legal abortion, Mass on Sunday...
...Nothing to distinguish this from, say, a Macy's parade, except that there were no product tie-ins involving Kermit the Frog or the Smurfs...
...Emphatic and deeply serious about the casino's many luxuries, Pepe was letting us in on his share of the good life...
...But the street named after my great-great uncle is still there...
...And women demand entry to the casino...
...Progress is inevitable in Spain, but not necessarily desirable...
...Tie Me Down!—was born in the same village in La Mancha where much of my father's family comes from...
...It still doesn't translate...
...A little while later we left, walking in the hot morning sun to the bus that would take us back to Granada...
...My father left the country after fighting on the losing side of the Civil War...
...We passed through the door marked "Caballeros," and ascended the black stairwell leading to the gaming room, where an "illegal" baccarat table lay under heavy plastic...
...Not only is General Francisco Franco still dead, as Chevy Chase used to crack on "Saturday Night Live," he must be doing a bolero in his grave...
...C rossing the country by train—past the white-walled cemeteries, the bent old women in black, the acre upon acre of olive and orange groves—I could imagine this as the Spain my father left fifty years ago...
...The big house in Calzada where my grandmother lived has been torn down, the lot carved up into apartments...
...W hen my father visited Spain in the 1960s, he went to the village of Fuentevaqueros, outside Granada, and asked to be shown the house where Federico Garcia Lorca—the poet and playwright murdered by Falangists during the Civil War—was born...
...My mother, like me a Canadian, demonstrated our national talent for picking other Canadians out of a crowd: she spotted poet-folkie Leonard Cohen's name in the book...
...rr he Church now wags a powerless I finger at the brazenly naked chicas pouting from newsstand displays and postcard stands...
...Pepe was there, as always...
...And the nation's most famous artist is a flamboyantly homosexual director of dirty movies...
...My father knew Lorca...
...The curator—a paunchy, fanatical man with a gray beard and breath like a sausage factory—ushered us into the patio, then fetched the VIP register...
...There was a TV room, with neatly rowed empty chairs in front of the television's high altar, and a reading room where a few old men in black Rick Marin is television critic for the Washington Times...
...Behind a curtain was another little dance floor, for the high rollers and their women...
...The curator introduced him to the small crowd of elderly Spanish tourists who had made the pilgrimage that day...
...Anyone who has never witnessed this annual spectacle should, if only for the sight of hundreds of men, women, and children dressed exactly like the Ku Klux Klan marching through cheering crowds...
...But that was the most manifest act of piety I saw, even during the Holy Week processions...
...In Spain, almost every city, town, and hamlet has its casino —a club where men gather to gossip, read, talk business, and, if so inclined, gamble...
...One night when there was nothing much else to do, we watched "thirtysomething," dubbed for Spanish TV...
...My father, under a long Jehovan prop beard, was God...
...Where we were (Merida, in the western province of Extremadura) the nightly processions were pure carnival...
...Clearly this was a country where priorities had changed...
...But we weren't in Seville...
...There was never indoor plumbing at my grandmother's house, though hers was a wealthy family...
...Today, there's a memorial fountain in the main square worthy of a patron saint...
...At the bearded curator's behest, my father wrote a characteristically brief line above his signature...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1990 41...
...In America someone would have figured a way to squeeze a McDonald's float onto the program...
...In one of the glass cases displaying relics from the Barraca period was a program cover with the cast of Lorca's production of Calderon's La vida es suelio...
...Seville is expecting 18 million visitors at the World's Fair in 1992, a frightening thought to anyone who's spent time in that den of thieves and miscreants...
...Spaniards shrug...
...Slick teenagers flirted urgently...
...In hypermod Madrid, bars and clubs attract the same gravity-defying haircuts and black-on-black poseurs as any downtown batcave in New York or Berlin...
...There was no smoking section...
...First came the breasts, then the bread...
...Women are not permitted...
...Pepe, rotund and vigorous in his mid-seventies, owns a large house across the street, but spends all his waking hours at the casino, in the same chair by the same window...
...Barcelona during the Olympics is another place to plan not to be in '92...
...Parents drank beer and coffee in ringside cafes...
Vol. 23 • September 1990 • No. 9
