Up The Republic!

The North Central Spanish plain is something like an endless car factory, a desert, and various Visigothic, Christian and Moorish castles thrown into a pot. Inhabitable it is not, although it has its inhabitants. The administrative centre of Spain, Madrid, is supposed to bind the regions together. Spain's Parliament, El Cortes, is in Madrid, as are many art galleries and Museums, most famously El Prado, flanked, as it is, with statues of Goya (pronounced Goja) and Velasquez (pronounced Belafqueth).

"What do you think of King Juan Carlos?"

"I think he is an idiot!"

I leant back in my chair as the air conditioning whirred. Intense sunlight poured through the window.

Later on I sat in the internet cafe. A song was being played about how a young man from Donegal had come to Spain to fight (and die) in the International Brigades.

As I walked back through the town centre, that peculiar dry heat, typical of Spain saturated my clothes, my hair.

One day I walked to the edge of the town and found some old field artillery and heavy machine guns. The spot was dignified with a board which had the word 'Military Museum' spelt out in black acrylic paint. All the guns seemed to be pointing towards the offices of the Guardia Civil. Perhaps with a little reactivation I might carry off the last battle cry of the Republic!

In those heady days (what else can one say about La Guerra Civil – The Spanish Civil War – except 'those heady days'!), General Yague's Army of Africa, the core of veterans that constituted Franco's elite troops, and Andre Malraux's fighter squadron had operated in this area. Andre Malraux (1901-1976), a French novelist famous for his work Man's Estate, an account of the Communist Revolution in China in the 1920s, and Days of Hope, an account of his actions in the Spanish Civil War. Later he fought for the French Resistance in World War Two and ended up in deGaulle's Post-war Cabinet as Minister for Culture from 1959-1969. By this time his Left-Wing idealism must have worn off, for he compromised his views rapidly and joined a quite far Right government. I had assumed that Malraux was an adventurer in the Ernest Hemingway mould, but was surprised to find out that he had been involved in various art scams, selling major artworks bought in China at inflated prices in Europe. Furthermore, some doubt has been cast on the actual efficacy of his leadership in both the Civil War and World War Two. One account that I read mentioned that Malraux was the kind of man that lost the war for the Republic, alongside a further account of his military incompetence and ineptitude.

Speaking of Ernest Hemingway. I realised that the Republic was a fashion item for intellectuals of the period, for no intellectal or artist dared to call him or herself a fascist (in fact there had been quite a few that had done just that, G.B.Shaw, H.G.Wells, Ezra Pound, W.B.Yeats, T.S.Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and many others had flirted with fascism for at least part of their lives. In the case of Pound this proved to be near-fatal as he found himself broadcasting radio programmes for Benito Mussolini. After World War Two he ended up in a mental institute, narrowly avoiding execution as a traitor.). Ernest Hemingway was the Republic's trumpcard, a famous American novelist and anti-fascist, who lent the Republic credence and respectability on the world stage and penned off a novel about the conflict, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Other intellectuals lent the Republic vocal support (when asked for his views on the matter, Samuel Beckett simply replied 'Up the Republic!'), George Orwell fought for the Anarchist militia POUM (supposedly Trotskyites or Anarchists, in reality the militia of the party of Left-Communist Reconstruction whose secretary happened to have been Leon Trotsky's secretary!) in the Barcelona area, and the poet John Cornford was killed in action with one of the International Brigades. Some 40,000 foreigners ended up fighting for the Republic, on Fascist side there were only 1000, and virtually none of these men came for adventure, they all fought for a cause.

In the great football match that is history, it was FC Fascists 2 FC Republic 0 until, well, until the two Western democracies Britain and France came to the painful realisation that Fascism as a political movement was eventually going to overthrow them too, and moved to defend their buffer in the East, Poland, against Soviet Communism and German Nazism. But it was Britain specifically that had opposed support for the Republic, for France's Socialist Popular Front government was naturally sympathetic, preferring to wait on the sidelines, for the Republic was packed full of 'dangerous Socialists and Bolsheviks'. Had Britain aided the Republic the Second World War might have been pre-empted or curtailed. As ever it was a case of a house divided against itself and collapsing: Britain's ruling classes had too much in common with the Fascists, and not enough in common with the Spanish masses to countenance the arms shipments that would have guaranteed a Republican victory.

"Dos cervezas, por favore?"

In the pub Alto Rey (High King) I had gone to look for Dave the ESL teacher, but found nothing but a dope sodden haze. Not unusually the barmaid offered me a free drink. Sizzling heat in mid-summer, the sour smell of marajuana which was flowing plentifully among the compadres.

At the College I discreetly asked some of my students about Guadalajara, for that was the town that I was teaching in (there is another Guadalajara in Mexico, Mexico's second city after Mexico City). They told me that Guadalajara was one of the only towns in Spain still to have a statue of the dictator Franco and one of an even earlier Spanish dictator, Primo de Rivera. They indicated that there were some fascist symbols left on Government offices in the town. These men seemed to be surprised at this. Many of them were workers from Madrid, and regarded the eccentrities of the townspeople as a sign of their dire lack of sophistication and political education. Which was unsurprising, since the authorities in Guadalajara controlled the education system and therefore the minds of the people. Most of the locals had quite recently come from the pueblos (villages) of the surrounding area and pronounced words with a thick peasant dialect and alternative pronunciation. For instance, Madrith, Amistath, Bajadoleth, instead of Madrid, Amistad and Bayadoled (Valledolid).

But not all of the people of Guadalajara were controlled by the authorities, as I discovered in one dimly-lit pub. A sign with an Anarchist symbol and the slogan Reclama los Calles! (Reclaim the Streets!). Many of the banks had Anarchy symbols and slogans daubed on them, there were punky types with (presently retro-trendy or unfashionable in Britain) Mohican haircuts, and the all-round regalia of the Punk. In many ways this town seemed to be a short step away from the 1970s, which either meant that the United Kingdom had silently evolved, or, what is more likely, had reverted back to those former and unpleasant Imperialist practices before the ascendency of the British Labour Party after the 1945 election.

Back in the pub Dave the ESL teacher was bantering me with his latest conspiracy theory and account of world history. In brief he argued that the rulers of the world (bound together as the New World Order - what a fascist titling that is! - and their latest ideology of Neo-Liberalism) were all related to each other and could trace their genes back through the Knights Templar to Jesus and beyond. After telling me that I would certainly not be welcome among Britain's ruling classes (because, as he explained, I would not have the right genes…) he slipped in the fact that he was an ex-public schoolboy.

Which is what the novelist and political journalist George Orwell had been (a graduate of that great bastion of the English ruling classes, Eton College).

Sobriety had replaced recklessness as I wandered back to my piso (apartment) with a fair awareness of what was going on around me, ie that the streets were virtually empty even though it was quite early on a Friday night. Things get busy late in Spain, with the early evening period regarded as a mealtime. I passed the Plaza de Toros (bullring) on my left (a great pleasure in Southern Spain, although it is less popular in Northern Spain. Apparantly Barcelona's bullring is only a tourist attraction. There is also bullfighting in Latin America, Portugal, and Southern France. I never went to see a bullfight, but watched some bullfights on TV. Apart from its obvious exotic appeal it seemed to me to be very boring. At one point I tried to read Ernest Hemingway's novel Death in the Afternoon but found that I couldn't identify with the facts and statistics of the sport, although I realised something of Hemingway's fascination with this primordial 'blood and sand' event.).

In the main Plaza (square – prounounced 'platha') Pablo Iglesias I stood to make a phone call. Suddenly someone grabbed my ankle. I looked down and a little gypsy girl crawled out from under the phone box. She came at me somewhat aggressively, and, surprised, I backed off. The town had a small gypsy population. The gypsies (if political correctness allows me to use this world, more politically correct terms are 'travellers' or 'travelling people') were clearly not of Spanish origin but Romanies, originating from South-Central Europe. Other distinct ethnic minorities in Spain were, most notably, the Jews, (known as Sefardic Jews, ie those Jews from North Africa and Spain as distinct from European, Russian or African Jews.), but also the Basques in El Pais Vasco, and many of the 'Moros' (this was the racist term that the Spanish gave to those North African Moroccans, Berbers or Tuaregs who today use Spain as a tourist destination, often in Winter). Up to recently scholarship had suggested that the Arabs of Medieval Spain practised a good deal more tolerance than their Christian counterparts, although this view has now been questioned. In Medieval Christian Spain Jews were made to wear a compulsory red and yellow badge of identification (eerily echoing the enforcement of coloured triangles for the various groups imprisoned by the Nazis in their concentration camps) , depictions of Jews wearing this badge can be found in the chapel of Santa Lucia in Tarragona. The most plausible history states that the Jews gained acceptance in the early Medieval period, but were later expelled from the peninsula in 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabella, King and Queen of Castille.

The little girl ran away. With no social security in Spain anyone who is unemployed, or very young and from a poor family, has to construct a placard and put their hand out. Afterwards I regretted that I hadn't thrown her 100 pesetas, or taken her into the cafe for a soft drink.

In the cafe Canas yTapas I spoke to the Polish waitress. She couldn't speak English, so we communicated through Spanish. I wondered why she was so far away from home. She told me that she had had to come to Spain to seek work, that after the fall of the former Communist regime in Poland the economy hadn't accomplished an economic miracle, and that the Poles had been made many promises that weren't ultimately fulfilled. In Poland Solidarity had left power and the Communists, re-modelled as a Social-Democratic Party, had slipped back into power. A sad realisation about the nature of promises in the Capitalist world had been gained, because this was a gain.

I walked back to the pub Alto Rey. In Spain place names tell their own story. Plaza Pablo Iglesias named after Pablo Iglesias (literally Paul Church) a 19th Century Spanish Socialist and one of the founders of the orthodox Spanish Socialist movement. But the orthodox Spanish Socialist movement was not to be the dominating factor in Spanish politics. Karl Marx and Frederic Engels had once remarked, 'we must leave Spain to him!" This him was the Russian Anarchist leader Prince Mikhail Alesandrovich Bakunin (1814-1876). Bakunin was Marx and Engel's main rival in the First International. Bakunin espoused Anarchism, a political philosophy that dispenses with any form of Vanguardism (the Marxist belief that the proletariat need to be led by a core of professional revolutionaries organised in a party structure) in favour of spontaneous action and wildcat strikes, and in Spain, notably, anti-clericalism. The Spanish clergy originally had great control over education, and detested and tried to prevent the people from gaining reading skills. With reading skills they might read the works of Karl Marx or Mikhail Bakunin, or any book of any kind that might lift them beyond the abysmal ignorance and squalor in which they lived. Anarchism had its most profound influence in semi-industrialised, agrarian and peasant societies, because its main tenet might be said to be a reversion to a pre-industrialised society (many Anarchists might dispute this). Thus, Anarchism has its roots in France, its most famous exemplar there being Pierre Proudhon with his timeless epigram 'Property is theft'. France was an agrarian society for much longer than Britain, where social upheavals such as Chartism had normally been of a non-violent character, (the Peterloo massacre is one notable exception). The two other countries enraptured with Anarchism were Russia and Spain, each positioned at the opposite ends of Europe and both partly belonging to another Continent, Spain being the only Western European country to have been once occupied by a non-European power, and most of Russia having been submerged in Asia. The non-European or semi-European nature of both of these countries is one explanation for their fervour for Anarchism, and for Left-Wing political movements in general.

Spain had also taken its eccentric route on the Right, with various groups and factions, two competing groups of Monarchists, Carlists and Alphonsists, Right-Wing Catholic organisations such as Opus Dei, the Falange, who were not recognisably Fascists. Franco was very much an orthodox Right-Winger in that his main enemy was the Left; he had none of the obnoxious racial theories of Hitler in Germany. Franco kept Spain out of World War II, sending the Blue Legion to fight and die on the Eastern Front. He stayed in power until 1975, abdicating then in favour of Rey Juan Carlos. Juan Carlos then established what he called a constitutional Monarchy; a Republican might have called it a Bourgeois democracy.

As I rounded the corner, a car sped past and stopped abruptly. I spoke English to the two men inside and they replied to me in German.

"Sprechen sie Englisch?"

They replied in broken English that they could and told me that they could give me a lift home. This was my first introduction to Klaus and Bernhard. As we prematurely crashed into the nearest wall and I emerged shaking, it dawned upon me that Klaus was as drunk as a lord. Undeterred he sped away and somehow managed to back into a parking lot right next to his apartment.

As we sat upstairs Klaus explained to me that he was a carpark attendant in Madrid and that Bernhard had come to Spain to seek a more relaxing lifestyle, and not one tied up with the eternal drag of jobs and mortgages that are the eternal obsessions of German life and society. The Germans have a far greater foothold in Spain than the British, with British people in Spain relegated to the world of language teaching. The Germans were much sought after by firms there, possibly because of their reputation as engineers, and possibly because of their former links with Franco's fascist regime.

In the pub Dave the ESL teacher is lighting up his umpteemth spliff, and Bernhard is playing with a huge bottle full of beer. Soon everyone is covered with Spanish beer.

Spain is a landscape where ideals and realities meet, and are somehow entwined. Looking beyond the red flags and the black flags, there is a landscape with an inkblot seeping through every tree, through every blade of grass, through the red clay, through every Moorish turret, through the limpid eyes of each bird, donkey, horse and through the Andalusian peasant who sits for a day dreaming up every Picasso painting in existence and then forgets them at the end of his siesta. It is a world of casual genius, uncompromising ideologies, of comedy, of abstract and round images, illogical routes to supremely simple goals and solutions, and of confusing routes to inordinately insane and obtuse non-answers. It is still best summed up in Miguel Cervantes novel Don Quixote, and in the abstract summation of the dichotomy in man between the dreamer and the realist, between the madman Don Quixote and the cynical realist Sancho Panza. Everything else that Spain has offered the world seems to be a further fugue on this original theme.