Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through Spain and Its Silent Past

Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through Spain and Its Silent Past by Giles Tremlett

As a member of the Athenaeum’s Library Committee, I am most interested in the travel section of the collection. At all points in the Athenaeum's almost two hundred years, the proprietors have been interested in foreign lands: you can find the classics of the eighteenth century grand tour, the nineteenth century exploration of Africa and the Polar regions, and in our rare book vault, some of the earliest writings on China and Tibet by English traveler/explorers. The twentieth century is well represented, too. Freya Stark, Eric Newby, Jan Morris, and Paul Theroux can all be found on the third floor gallery of the old building.

Ghosts of Spain will make an excellent addition to our Spanish section, joining Alexander Mackenzie and Washington Irving from the nineteenth century, and most recently, Robert Hughes on Barcelona. Tremlett is a journalist writing for the English newspaper, the Guardian. He has lived in Spain for almost twenty years now and is a lively writer mixing the serious theme and anecdotal detail easily. I have to confess to being an Hispanophile, though, with a special love for Spain since spending a semester in Salamanca during high school. Franco was still in power. Spain was poor and largely pre-modern—old women clad in black washed the stoops and sidewalks each morning, and we stopped our classes for the traditional three-hour siesta each day. I was charmed by shopping for every little thing in its own specialty store: bread, cheese, gloves, and marzipan. Forty years on, the Spain that Tremlett writes about is booming with prosperity and embraces all things new, including the department store. It has an urban, well-educated population more than ready for the 21st century. The ghosts of the title come from the 20th —those women in Salamanca were quite possibly widows from the Spanish Civil War era, and now, as their generation passes on, the silence that has surrounded the war is finally being broken. With the discovery of the mass grave where the poet Lorca is buried, there is for the first time an attempt to identify the sites of other such graves throughout Spain. Added to the reality of facing this past is the effect of global politics on the present. The street cleaners of today wear colorful coveralls and tend largely to be of Arab origin. Bin Laden and his number two, al-Zawahiri, speak of the lost Al-Andalus in their propaganda videos, when the world of Islam was at its wealthiest, ruling from the cities of Granada, Cordoba and Seville. Spain, as a representative of the modern West, has become a real target. Spain’s illegal immigrants are largely Muslim, too. In my most recent visit to Salamanca in 2004, the cloisters of a church were turned into a gallery and featured a newspaper article on the death of a young Arab boy found washed up on a Spanish beach—a photographic essay traced his brief life in a small north African village.

But again, Tremlett is a lively writer who easily weaves the politics of the past and of contemporary Spain into other aspects of Spanish society. There are chapters on tourism—How the Bikini Saved Spain and the cliches of the culture—The Mean Streets of Flamenco. Most interesting to me were the lovely details of living daily in a Spanish city—the noise level [“Noise in Madrid, in Spain as a whole, is just background. It is part of the atmosphere, like air or daylight.”], the late nights […my seven year old got out of bed to take a phone call at 10pm last night. It was another seven year old, excitedly inviting him to a birthday party at the weekend.”], and a social life lived in the plaza, café, bar and restaurant [“You can live here for ten years before a Spanish friend will invite you into his home.”]

For the Athenaeum reader, it is the chapter, Moderns and Ruins, that might be of most interest as Tremlett again works the theme of the past and present in relation to rural/urban Spain and the architecture found in both. He writes: “A vast amount of, mainly public, money has been poured into giving the international gods of architecture spectacular new contracts for spectacular new buildings across the land…. These new shrines to modern architecture divert attention away from the numerous ancient churches, hermitages, monasteries, fortresses or castles that are falling down. It is probably unfair to criticize Spain for its treatment of historic buildings. They are so many, and so widely spread, that it is difficult to know what to do with them. Prehistoric, Greek, Roman, Muslim, Romanesque, Mudejar, Mozarabe and Gothic buildings, or the remains of them, dot the landscape…. This state of affairs is a delight for visitors who like discovering ruins on their own.” This book, I think, is an excellent introduction to present-day Spain and would make an excellent supplement to your guidebook were you planning a trip there.