Spain's northern fortress city

Burgos was a surprisingly small place for somewhere that called itself a city. It had barely spread out from the constraints of its medieval limits and felt very much like a provincial town. Which is all it would have been had it not been home to one of Spain’s most important Gothic cathedrals, a main stopover point on the route to Compostela, and the capital of old Castile — the county, later a kingdom, which had so dominated the Iberian peninsula over the past thousand years.

During the civil war, Burgos had also been a centre of the Nationalist campaign and, latterly, Franco’s headquarters. Few places symbolised better the tenets of his reactionary movement, being both devoutly Catholic and strongly centralist, insisting on all power being concentrated in Madrid. It had been the polar opposite of anarchist-controlled Barcelona, which followed a pattern well established throughout Spanish history of trying to break away or gain greater autonomy, only to be forced back into uneasy matrimony with the rest of the country. This had been the case in the years of the Republic leading up to the civil war, and today similar moves were being made under Spain’s new democracy. The age-old tension at the heart of Spain was flaring up again.

All eyes were turned towards the television set; a football match was under way and not a soul was aware of anything else. Even the barman had his eyes fixed on the match, filling the glasses on the counter in front of him by intuition. The blonde woman by my side was jumping up and down in her seat, while a man on the other side of our tiny table breathed out smoke through flared nostrils. He seemed to be the intellectual of the group, making studied comments on what was happening on the pitch in a heavy, slow voice. The others murmured in agreement when he spoke.

“Who’s playing?” I asked.

The woman turned and smiled again. “It’s Barcelona-Madrid,” she said. “I’m Paula, by the way.” And she leant over briefly to kiss me on the cheeks before taking her place once again. I was used to Spaniards being friendly and affectionate at unexpected moments, but this was exceptional. I put it down to the excitement of the game.

The energy that a Real Madrid-Barcelona football match produced in Spain was extraordinary, as the ancient conflict was played out by 22 men manipulating a leather sphere with their feet.

I looked around the bar and quickly realised that this was solid Real Madrid territory. Here we were close to the front line: Burgos was the symbol of old Castile, the dominating centre of the country; Vitoria, the Basque capital with its ancient traditions and language, was only an hour’s drive away to the northeast.

What struck me here was how vehement the arguments were for the country to stay as one. You had the sense of an intransigent husband determined to punish an unfaithful wife. Divorce was out of the question: he must make her suffer and stay with him.

Yet I was glad that Spain was still a united, if squabbling, family. It was the pluralism and diversity of its cultures, languages and peoples that made it such a fascinating country. Break it up and its regions would lose the special quality that made Spain greater than the sum of its parts.

AS I decided what to order, it occurred to me that it was a very odd time of year for there to be a match on. We were in the middle of summer. The football season was over. It was only then that I realised it was a repeat — a way of giving starving fans a fix before the new season started. This match had already been played, won and lost several months ago, yet people were screaming at the screen as though it were happening live, now.

“Why are you watching this match?” I asked the barman with a laugh as he scribbled my order. “You must already know the result.”

Without moving his head up from his notebook he gave me a look.

“Who won?” I said, the smile draining from my face.

He turned on his heel and walked away. This was a hard-core football bar. It was not an opportune moment to play the innocent, however inadvertently. I turned back to the table in time to catch Paula and the expert exchanging a look and I felt the rattling of shutters being pulled down.

“Who do you support?” Paula asked me seriously. She was sucking hard on a cigarette with thick red-painted lips, bony knotted fingers ringed with bright-gold bands.

“No one. I just enjoy a good game.”

“What?” she said, smoke streaming out of her mouth.

Very slowly the particles cleared in the unmoving air of the bar. Her eyes were fixed on me, yet she seemed to be looking elsewhere.

What failed to register at that moment was that I was not talking to an ordinary human being as such, but a football fan, and one caught up in the climax of her hit. How could I not support one of the teams? It was either Madrid or Barcelona. Nothing else existed.

“You’re foreign, right?” she said finally. That was it, the only explanation she could deal with. The barman came over and handed her another drink. I tried to catch his eye, but failed, with the shrinking feeling of being deliberately ignored. From an unexpected outsider welcomed to the party, I was becoming an undesirable element in their midst.

Continued on page 2

()The second half of the match began and I sat back to watch. Within seconds, though, disaster struck and Barcelona scored. Obscenity after obscenity was hurled at the opposing side.

“I shit on your father! I shit on God!”

As the hubbub started to die down, the intellectual began to speak.

“The trouble is lack of commitment,” I heard him say. “These players don’t live and breathe Real Madrid. It’s not in their blood. Too many foreigners in the team, for example. A Barcelona match is just another payday for them, win or lose. For us it’s life or death.”

There was a cheer of assent and inwardly I groaned. I was being excluded from the group. But I had food coming and was hungry: I decided to sit tight.

Finally I saw a young woman coming towards me with a bowl of soup. She placed it down, the smell of garlic and spicy chorizo rising up with the steam into my face. I was just about to dip a piece of bread when the barman appeared and lunged his thick arm down to grab the side of the bowl.

“That’s not your order,” he said sharply. And before I could say anything he was carrying it back to the kitchen, scolding the girl as he did so.

THE MATCH continued. In the dying minutes, Barcelona scored once more. Real Madrid had lost. Just as they had when this match had originally taken place. For the people in the bar, though, the disappointment was as intense as it had been the first time.

From the counter, the barman held out the remote control and switched the television off. The customers started to leave, barely bothering to say goodbye to their companions, too depressed even to nod or smile. I averted my eyes, sensing that in some way I was being blamed for their team’s defeat. A non-supporter was in their midst: the fault was mine.

Among the last to go were Paula and the expert. I watched them pass into the street; the bar was deserted.

“Come on, we’re closing.”

The barman came over with a cloth and started wiping up. I thought for a second about remonstrating, but decided against it. I was being pushed out — that was it. I would gain nothing but more hostility and perhaps the ignominy of being physically ejected.

I stood still for a moment on the pavement, hungry and lost. From an open window somewhere I could hear the sound of the old song about Spain and the costas, Y Viva España. I tried to remember the words from my childhood, about how wonderful Spain was, how the people were so nice and friendly.

“La la la-la-la-la lah,” I sang along under my breath as the emptiness welled up inside me. And I walked away from the bar, down the drab streets towards the suburbs and the country, not knowing where my feet would take me.

España por favor. España por favor.