Tales from the abuelita

My mother-in-law is amazing. In her mid-eighties, she doesn't stir far from her Madrid flat in the Parque Avenidas, just to evening Mass every day. But whenever we go to visit, I try to get her talking about her younger days, because she has the most astounding stories - moving, enlightening and downright hilarious - of Spanish life before, during and after the Civil War. I want her to start writing some of them down, but she can't believe they're that interesting.......here's a sample.

Innocence
Her elder sister Maria Luisa (Marisa) was engaged to a young man called Jorge. One day Marisa confided that Jorge had broken down and asked her forgiveness because he had gone to bed with a woman. What a funny thing to do! all her sisters agreed; and why should he need forgiving? Did he get cold all of a sudden and need warming up? (Marisa was about 21 at the time).

Hard times
There were many worse off during the siege of Madrid and in the aftermath of the Civil War, but still she remembers being hungry most of the time. They ate lentils every day, which had to be picked over before cooking for bits of stone and other debris; she and her sisters would sit round the kitchen table counting them into a bowl while praying the Rosary.
The ration cards didn't provide much, and even so they were lucky. A friend of the family had deserted from the Guardia Civil (he couldn't stomach his allotted task of identifying the heaps of dead bodies every day), but he managed to get them extra cards.
At the end of the war her mother weighed 42 kilos.

Marital behaviour
Her mother was proud of the fact that she never kissed her husband, like a common floozy. Many were the times she would pass by the door of his study, see him bent over his accounts and have the urge to go in and kiss him on the cheek (because she loved him dearly), but she never did.

[note: they had 7 children!]

Courting
It's a miracle any of the 5 daughter got married at all. Their father would refuse to admit that any of them had admirers, even when said young men would make the journey from Madrid to a village the other side of Toledo at weekends, just on the offchance of being allowed to stroll in the garden while everyone else hid indoors and pretended they weren't there........
My mother-in-law had been 'walking out' with my father-in-law for 2 years before his parents would nod to her in the street. She laughs like a drain at memory, and takes it totally in her stride that her eldest grand-daughter is living with her fiancé.
What an amazing journey.

I can't wait for more stories.

It's too darn hot

Here we go, here we go, etc

Every summer this happens. Round about now, the whole country wakes up to find that, SURPRISE! it's extremely hot.
!Qué calor! sighs everyone from the portero to the check-out girl in Mercadona. Hello! This is Spain, where from the geographical waist down we are destined to swelter, toss and turn all night or catch pneumonuia from the aircon, spend so much time in swimming pools our hair turns to straw, hide indoors from 12 till 6 and drink gazpacho till we can't look another tomato in the face.

But that sounds fantastic, say my sun-starved friends from
Sheffield/west coast of Scotland/Wales etc. Bring it on!
The thing is, it's fantastic for a holiday, for lounging on a beach with a beer and nothing to do except wonder where you're going to have lunch. When you have to do your weekly shopping, keep small kids amused, go to work, take cat to vet, the novelty wears off. It was 34 degrees today - at 10 in the morning! My front gate is so hot I can't touch it! My son has conjunctivitis already from the chlorine levels in to municipal pool!

Except, except........we went out to dinner on Saturday at 10.30 (normal eating hours) - sat outside in a beautiful breeze, I could wear a lovely strappy dress and not be cold at midnight, listen to the cicadas......OK I'll take the heat for another year (like I have any choice) - but when I get to England on our holidays in August and it rains, I'll be out there in my mum's garden with my mouth open.

When Two Tribes Go To War

There is no real politics in Spain, just visceral tribal loyalties.
Depending which tribe you belong to, the other one consists of a bunch of 'rojos' or 'fachas' (reds or fascists). It's no use debating the issues, and (as an ignorant foreigner) the sooner you realize this the sooner you'll stop wasting your breath and making people hate you by accident.

My husband's family are right-wing. Franco wasn't so bad, if you belonged to 'the right sort' and kept your nose clean. All that stuff about political prisoners, the brutal repression of the catalans and Basques, that's mostly Red propoganda. My mother-in-law literally couldn't bring herself to watch 'Cuéntame', a hugely popular series about a working-class Madrid family in the 60's and 70´s - because it was 'Red', apparently (ie had vaguely liberal messages).

But that's typical. Members of the two tribes can hardly bear the sight of each other's political representatives. The Vice-president of Zapatero's government is a woman, very capable from what I can see. I ask my husband, what exactly is she saying about the Estatut de Cataluña? Who cares? he spits back. Look at the old bag, what an ugly b**


When the 1981 attempted coup happened: did you see it? History in the making, gripping stuff: one military guy, a general I think, standing tall with his arms folded in the House of Deputies while bullets flew and his distinguished colleagues hid under the benches.......
I know people on the left who burned their ID papers that day....it's all coming back, the nightmare is happening again......

As a foreigner here who's studied their Civil war history, it's dangerously easy to take sides. But the wind was taken out of my liberal sails pretty early on.

My mother-in-law lived through the Nationalist attack on Madrid in her early teens. Their flat in Calle Ferraz was on the front line, and they emerged from the shelter after one mortar attack to find the upper floor had gone. People were starving;she told me once in her typically matter-of-fact way that by the time the war ended, her mother weighed under 6 stone.

My father-in-law's 2 younger brothers (14 and 16) were taken away in the middle of the night and shot by the Republicans. They hadn't joined up; this was just to make sure they couldn't.
Tío Joaquín and tío Luís. They're buried in the cemetery in Aravaca just outside Madrid, with a lot of others. He named two of his sons after them (my brothers-in-law).

Until stories like this are a distant memory, Spain will continue to be two tribes. Just don't mention the war. You don't know what you might stir up.

Spanish farmboy punk

A new musical genre, 100% 'made in Spain' is all the rage here, shooting up the charts and now being commented on in 'serious' newspapers (if you can call ABC serious...)
I call it Spanish farmboy punk. It comes complete with touches of flamenco, animal noises and almost impenetrable Andalusian dialect, and if it didn't exist you'd have to invent it. The band is El Koala, the current hit is 'Opa, viazé un corrá' (rough translation, Pa, I'm gonna build a pen), which is now everywhere - I heard it in Carrefour yesterday. The rest of the songs on the album deal with issues like the poor cockerel wh0's sad because he's about to be eaten ('Arroz con Gallo'); the life of an itinerant castrator ('soy capa'or'), and there's even social comment (nadie es nadie). Go on, check it out on www.elkoala.es and play the video clip. Spain is different.

Stop press: this tune has been chosen as Spain's TV anthem for their World Cup team. We're talking serious popular culture.....

Chorizo

Having bilingual kids can be a monumental challenge, but also downright hilarious.

Helen, 6, loves making her own story books. Yesterday's front cover showed a round pizza-like object edged with arrows and other "misoules". Inside was a woman with rays coming out from her head, and more round objects. What's this darling? I tenderly enquired. Oh, it's the king chorizo, and inside are all his other chorizos, and they're capturing men and ladies and MESSING WITH THEIR MINDS.

You're totally mad, I managed to say between guffaws. This stuff was weird but fairly par for the course (Helen is a one-off, to put it mildly).
Later, I was on the phone to a friend who appreciates Helen's weirdness but also speaks better Spanish than me. She collapsed in fits of laughter when I told her, and so did I when she enlightened me.
In Spanish, a 'chorizo' is not only a round spicy sausage, but also a thief or other criminal. Poor Helen had been playing a game at school with her Spanish friends, and totally got the wrong end of the sausage.

How Spanish is this?

Just a little snapshot of life in Spain. (I live 30km from Madrid but this could have happened anywhere).

Husband Javier, stressed out from the effort of helping put kids in bed, popped off for a drink in the tiny bar next to the railway station where all the richest local townsfolk hang out (builders, electricians, etc). There, amid a fug of smoke to go by the stink of his clothes later, he was chatting with our ex-plumber Mariano (but that's another story) about the village in La Mancha where he and family used to spend their summers. Belmonte? says Mariano, all excited - it's a big deal here when places and people can be put together - that's where the new Guardia Civil guy comes from! No kidding! says Javier, equally moved. And if this were England, that's where it would have ended.

Not in Spain. On his way home, J has to drive past the Guardia Civil station. So of course he stops to greet his Belmonte buddy, and he and Pedro have a lengthy chat about who they both know, who's died/got married etc ect, until at long last Pedro heaves a regretful sigh, and, waving his 'puro' (LARGE cigar) in farewell, says well, Javi, great to see you, must get together for a beer sometime but got to dash, got a 'detenido' (arrested suspect) downstairs in the cells and he might be wondering where I've got to.

April brings the sweet spring showers...

...on and on for hours and hours (thanks,Flanders & Swann).
It seemed that way at times over Easter, although actually it was more short downpours. This always happens in Spain, and the poor people who have been preparing all year for Good Friday processions have to put their Virgin Mary back in the crypt. There are tearful scenes, mainly involving the parish priest and the big strong men deprived of their right to stagger through the streets of Seville or wherever carrying a ten-ton icon.

Still our Easter was great, pottering about quietly for the first week, then when my little (!) brother Pete and girlfriend Bridget arrived it was all systems go, Toledo, Escorial, Segovia, Madrid, and that was just the first morning.The sun could have shone a bit more, especially in Segovia which was as usual a grey cold day out, but it was lovely to see them. I particularly enjoyed the last day when we strolled around the old part of Madrid in the sunshine, and had a 100%non-tourist (Eva the waitress just recites the menu at top speed) lunch with Javier in Don Paco,a tiny packed restaurant just off the Gran Via. Pete is signed up for an ecological trip to Argentina next spring, counting condors and communing with goatherds etc. His Spanish is coming along fine, a little more practice and he´ll be able to order beer, pay and visit the loo in any part of Patagonia you care to mention.

In other news..... our back garden is producing mutant lifeforms. We've found loads of 4 leaf (even 5 & 6 leaf) clovers, and there are a couple of gross-looking amphibian earthworms swimming around in the ex-sandpit now full of rainwater. Shouldn't they drown? Should I call David Attenborough?

Rhinestone cowboys

Spain is currently a building site. How about this: one quarter of all the concrete produced in Europe is used in Spain, and last year more new buildings went up in Spain than in the UK, Germany and France PUT TOGETHER! How do I know? No I haven't been browsing through Civil Engineering Today or similar. It's because 'el caso Marbella' has just hit the headlines here - most of the town council from the mayoress down is behind bars, charged with the most staggeringly corrupt gold-rush type practices, aided and abetted by a mafia (possibly literally, as Russian and Eastern bloc 'black money' pours in) of lawyers, builders, and assorted hangers-on.

This is no surprise to anyone. 30,000 illegal buildings do attract some attention after a while, like 20 years. It's certainly no surprise to anyone who ever saw Jesus Gil y Gil, ex-mayor of Marbella and the pioneer of much of this slime-fest. The man was amazing, if he didn't exist you'd have to invent him. Dripping with gold chains, complete with hairy chest, big gut and peroxide wife, he was also chairman of Atlético Madrid football club (kind of Madrid's Everton) and a lot of the Marbella loot found its way to Atletico's coffers. Also, he was the most staggeringly politically incorrect Spanish man I ever heard, and that's saying something. Example: half-time during a match with a Dutch club, in Holland - Señor Gil what do you think of the match so far? Great, the only problem is all these blacks they keep bringing on, it looks like the Congo out there. (In the row that followed, Spain was divided into those who thought Gil's comments were perfectly reasonable, after all it did look like the Congo, and those who thought they were reasonable but perhaps badly timed.....)

There are little Marbellas everywhere. The small town where I live, halfway between Madrid and the Sierra de Guadarrama mountains, used to be a summer getaway for city dwellers. Now they're building a monstrous leisure/retail park next door, parking for 1,200 cars etc etc. An area which was categorized only 2 years ago as protected countryside has been hastily requalified by the local council as building land, to build a hotel and .......GOLF COURSE??
We have water restrictions! My garden will die this summer if it doesn't start raining!
So, Carlos, Mayor of Torrelodones, my eye is on you. The first whiff of a gold Mercedes and I hope you join the Alcadesa de Marbella.