Having lunch in a gloomy little Argüelles restaurant yesterday when Elena revealed that she is from Guadalix de la Sierra, which is where Bienvenido Mister Marshall was filmed (under the name Villar del Río; very little, apparently, was changed in the town for the film). Elena also revealed, brightening the day up at a single stroke, that members of her family were extras – “the little schoolboy with his finger in his mouth is my uncle!”. So I know someone whose uncle is in Bienvenido Mister Marshall: my life has not been entirely wasted after all. Bienvenido Mister Marshall is the classic, bittersweet Luis Berlanga comedy, based on the Marshall Plan (U.S. assistance for post-World War II reconstruction of Europe) which was released slightly over 50 years ago, on 4th April, 1953, and which broke the mould for Spanish cinema under Franco. It is one of the great Spanish films, and quite possibly the Spanish comedy, featuring a memorable performance by Pepe Isbert. Berlanga himself, incidentally, does not believe it’s his finest film. All together, now: "Americanos/, vienen a España/ guapos y sanos/, viva el tronío/ de ese gran pueblo/ con poderío,/ Olé Virginia, /y Michigan/ y viva Texas que no está mal,/ os recibimos/ americanos/ con alegría/ Olé mi madre/ olé mi suegra y/ olé mi tía…”

And while we're here, two deeply satisfying panoramic views, one natural, one man-made (Quicktime is needed to see them): the view from the top of Mount Everest, and the Mosque of Córdoba.
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Following last Sunday’s elections (in which all parties, healthily for democracy, seem to feel they’ve done well) Ian Gibson writes in El País (27th May): “España está viviendo gozosa la revolución de la normalidad, y por fin, después de tanta historia triste, se siente segura en su casa y fuera. Y, lo más importante de todo, contempla el futuro con confianza.” He finishes his brief article with a reference to the mass graves in Iraq, and a reminder that it was not so long ago that mass graves were being dug in Spain. But Spain, Gibson concludes, is finally “en la normalidad”. But perhaps the country will only truly be “en la normalidad” when journalists no longer feel it’s necessary to write articles reminding us that Spain is finally normal. There’s a balance to be struck somewhere between over-insistent harking back to the past - which makes the risk-taking that is necessary to progress difficult - and dangerous ignorance of it.
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Extraordinarily, it was a double of Rodríguez Díaz’s who was committing the crimes. After Rodríguez Díaz has slowly come to realize what was happening (he found it hard to convince the law of his theory) he decided to start writing down everything he did – where he was, meetings, phone calls. In March 2000, having learned that the robber did his work at the start or end of the banking day, he decided to visit a notary each morning to prove his whereabouts, and having gathered 117 notary affidavits, it was the 118th which proved that he could not possibly have committed a robbery which took place on July 4, 2000. The lookalike, Fernando Alberto Pérez Fernández, known as El Dandy or El ladrón del peluquín, has now been arrested. Unsurprisingly, Rodríguez Díaz intends to take El Dandy to court. But the question remains: how did the El País journalist who interviewed him know he was interviewing the right man? I hereby reserve the right to write, one day, the film script of this twisted tale.

And here’s more crime, given a thought-provoking twist by the journalists, in their first eye-grabbing paragraph, as an instance of questionable U.S. influence on Central America.
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The following story, which was reported in El País, will be posted over two days, because a two-parter was never so appropriate. Over the past six years, Galician José Manuel Rodríguez Díaz was first arrested in 1997 and accused of three bank robberies. He was later arrested for more. As the years passed by, he found himself accused of 15 robberies in total, and of having stolen €600,000. He was singled out from line-ups, and was repeatedly identified by bank workers as the guilty man; clerks at the BBV bank in the town of Becerreá trembled when they saw him again. Rodríguez Díaz is an attorney, which for some would be proof of his innocence, for others of his guilt. But he was, in fact, innocent. Read tomorrow’s thrilling episode to find out the peculiar reason why....

62 Spanish peacekeeping soldiers were among 74 people who died in an air crash in Turkey yesterday. This should not go uncommented on today.
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Radio 4’s Hidden Voices, Ten Years On is well worth a listen. Tony Phillips revisits two Muslims living in Andalucia: Yusuf Idris Martínez, who tells us with resignation that he regularly gets taken for Osama bin Laden, and Dr Mansur Escudero, a Muslim rights activist and psychiatrist with some fascinating points to make and a tragic story to tell. This wonderfully offbeat piece of radio (you can criticize the BBC all you like, but hey) combines these personal testimonies with a brief history of Muslims in Spain (of whom there are now more than a million), some lovely atmospheric background sounds (of Holy Week in Granada, and of the Albaicín district) and some stirring clips of music.
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Recently published in Spain (and so far only in Spanish): Cela, el hombre que quiso ganar - a biography, by the sometime cantankerous, contradictory and controversial Ian Gibson, of the sometime cantankerous, contradictory and controversial scribe and 1989 Nobel Prize winner Camilo José Cela. Gibson is perhaps best-known for his work on Lorca and Dalí: the British public is most familiar with him through his BBC documentary series on Spain, Fire in the Blood. A review of the Cela biography in La Razón by Jorge Irrutia is not complimentary, and among other things accuses Gibson of believing he’s the first to say things about Cela that are long-established truths in Spain and of not knowing that by 1935 Cela had already published several poems. But in an El País interview, Gibson claims that the book is a “bio-study”, not literary criticism - even though the book dedicates plenty of time to establishing literary influences (Joyce, dos Passos, Valle-Inclán) on Cela which the writer himself often failed to acknowledge. One such “influence” is the plagiarism of which Cela was accused after publishing La cruz de San Andrés; Gibson apparently devotes plenty of the kind of detailed research at which he excels to this episode. The biography will be worth reading, because Ian Gibson, who represents a vital link between Spain and the English-speaking world, always is.
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In a local bar, which has recently been bought from its aging previous owner by Colombians, there were two Mexicans. One of them was wearing a battered backpack with the following printed on it: “One medida of Kahlúa, two of milk and one of hielo, all OK agitado”. Translate that! Where would you start? Kahlúa, the backpack man told me, is a Mexican coffee liqueur made with herbs. Whatever, they really know how to mix their languages. My experience of Mexican alcohol is sadly limited to tequila and Coronita. And I should probably know this, but what does Kahlúa taste like? And that’s a lovely accent on the “u”, isn’t it? And is it really all OK agitado? I am reading a good (monolingual) translation at the moment--Anne McLean’s, of Javier Cercas’ bestselling novel Soldados de Salamina. More of which later, no doubt. And speaking of translation, Gail Armstrong, who describes herself as a “hopelessly parenthetical freelance translator, etc.”, has an offbeat, thoughtful and eventful blog at www.openbrackets.com--well-turned anecdotes about her Southern French life, mixed in with multiple reflections on the tools of her trade, words. It all makes provocative reading for anyone interested, as she and Kahlúa so obviously are, in how languages deviously slip and slide between one and the other.
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When I booked a hotel for a week in August in Santillana del Mar, the hotel asked me to transfer some money to their bank account as a deposit, since they don’t accept credit cards. That was half an hour in the bank. They also wanted me to send the bank receipt. Knowing that in Spain, the photocopy is king, I photocopied the receipt: that was another 20 minutes, since there is always a queue in Spanish photocopy shops (incidentally, one reason why Spain is such fruitful territory for researchers is that there at least one archived copy of every document created in the country since about 1492). I stamped and sent the letter. Two days later it arrived back at my house with a mysterious message stamped on it: “DOBLE DE LA INSUFICIENCIA DE FRANQUEO: TASA 0,52€”. I looked at the stamp I’d put on: it said “65”. I didn’t understand: surely there wasn’t a problem with putting a stamp on for a higher value than the necessary amount? I asked in the local tobacconist, which is where stamps are sold. He pointed out that I’d accidentally used an old stamp worth 65 pesetas (the word “peseta” appeared nowhere on the stamp) and that peseta stamps are no longer valid, the period of grace being long over. The price of a stamp for sending a letter inside Spain is €0,26, and to send the letter, I’d now have to pay twice the price of the missing stamp - €0,52. Effectively I’d been fined. “But,” I wondered cautiously, “can’t I just use a different envelope, one which doesn’t have the mysterious message stamped on it, and pay the normal €0,26?” “That’s what most people do,” the tobacconist said. “You don’t happen to have a spare envelope, do you?” I asked. “Yes,” he said, and handed me one over the counter. “Gracias,” I said.
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In El País last Monday, a brief article states that 34 Spanish provinces, comprising an upsetting total of 31.8% of Spanish territory, run the risk of becoming desert as the result of over-exploitation of their natural resources. "El territorio de las islas Canarias, toda la costa mediterránea, Andalucía, Castilla-La Mancha y Aragón padecen procesos de desertificación, un término que define la descompensación entre los recursos naturales y su capacidad de regeneración. Para algunos expertos, este diagnóstico, que figura en el borrador de trabajo del Programa de Acción Nacional contra la Desertificación, es dramático". For others it is less dramatic, since Spain, unlike many African and Asian nations, has the means to combat the problem by, for example, planting forests – though this seems to be addressing the symptoms, rather than the causes. In poor countries, the article states baldly, the prolonged effects of desertificación are usually irreversible. Once the wells and vegetation of a region are exhausted, the people have to either emigrate or die. The problem in Spain is worst in Almeria, parts of which are already desert, and where during the 70’s a lot of money was spent on irrigating stony ground; the people who made this investment are now, in a vicious circle, economically forced to stay there and to continue to continue exploiting it.
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A report published last week by Spain’s Instituto de la Mujer (part of the Ministerio de Trabajo y Asuntos Sociales) reveals that 18 women were murdered by partners or ex-partners in the first three months of 2003, compared to 11 in the same period in 2002. 7302 women lodged formal complaints of maltreatment over the same period. The most dangerous place to be a woman in a relationship at the moment is Andalucia, where 11 of the killings took place. In the run-up to the municipal elections on May 25th, the politicians seem, for the first time, to be debating the problem. On Iñaki Gabilondo’s radio programme Hoy por hoy the day after the report, the Madrid socialist candidate Trinidad Jiménez (who is from Andalucia) launched a mini-attack on Ana Botella (the wife of Prime Minister José María Aznar), who is running on the PP ticket as the councilor for social affairs. Jiménez’s criticism was that Botella once contributed to some comments in a book of children’s stories in which Botella praised Cinderella’s ability to turn the other cheek when receiving physical abuse. Good detective work by Jiménez, though I suspect that in the bars of Spain, many men will be referring to her as crazy before they return home to hit their wives. If nothing else, Jiménez is bringing to people’s attention the suspect ideology lying behind a good deal of “harmless” children’s literature.
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Traveller 1: “In Spain I passed five years, which, if not the most eventful, were, I have no hesitation in saying, the most happy years of my existence. Of Spain, at the present time, now that the daydream has vanished, never, alas! to return, I entertain the warmest admiration: she is the most magnificent country in the world, probably the most fertile, and certainly with the finest climate. Whether her children are worthy of their mother, is another question, which I shall not attempt to answer; but content myself with observing, that, amongst much that is lamentable and reprehensible, I have found much that is noble and to be admired; much stern heroic virtue; much savage and horrible crime; of low vulgar vice very little, at least amongst the great body of the Spanish nation, with which my mission lay…” This from the Preface to George Borrow’s idiosyncratic 1842 masterpiece of travel literature, The Bible in Spain from Project Gutenberg. Borrow’s view of Spain was not, of course, always so upbeat.
Traveller 2: I was looking through the books in VIPS a couple of days ago when I saw a copy, on sale for a mere €4, of Textos y con-textos de Clarín – Los artículos de Leopoldo Alas en "El Porvenir" (Madrid, 1882), edited by Roger L. Utt (Istmo, Madrid). Roger, who died in 2001 and who was an expert in the 19th century Spanish novel, was my predecessor as editor of Puerta del Sol. It was strange seeing his name there among all the coffee-table literature: I’d no idea he'd written this. The book contains biographical information about Clarín, but none about Roger.
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In 1998, I was asked to interview the director and main actress of a film called La vendedora de rosas, The Rose Seller, which had rightly been nominated for a Golden Palm award at the Cannes film festival. After about eight phone calls to various Colombian locations, I managed to track down director Victor Gaviria and actress Leidy Tabares to Bógota airport, where they were awaiting their flight. The film, about the miserably violent, glue-sniffing lives of street children in Pablo Escobar’s Medellín, is one of the most powerful, haunting and troubling things you’ll ever see, not least because the “actors” in it were all plucked from streets or institutions by Gaviria – a bold, dangerous, and morally questionable if artistically sound choice - to make the film. Loosely based on Hans Christian Anderson’s tale “The Little Match Girl”, La vendedora de rosas was thus a film that was not only saying something, but doing something. Leidy Tabares played Mónica, a young girl who sells roses to romancing couples in the streets and clubs to try and raise a few pesos. The line to Bógota kept breaking up, and Leidy, only 16 at the time, was not very forthcoming, but I remember her saying that she’d never left Medellín before, let alone been on an airplane.

For a month, she led the life of a movie star – limos, dinners, parties, microphones, flashes. I saw her at the San Sebástian Film Festival later that year. Then it was back to Colombia to try and carry on as an actress. She was able to, for a short while, but eventually she was forced to return to her old lifestyle as a rose seller on the streets of Medellín. She had a son by Ferney, who was shot dead in 2001. And now I see that Leidy Tabares is (or has been) in jail in Bello, accused, along with Edinson Castañeda, of having paid someone to murder a taxi driver, Óscar Galvis. Leidy claims to have had neither the money nor the motive to do so. The fates of other participants in La vendedora de rosas have been no less bleak: one of them, John Fredy Ríos, is in a wheelchair; another, Giovanni Quiroz (who played the psychotic El Zarco in the film), is dead, and several more have also lost their lives. There’s so much you could say about all of this, about poverty, about blighted lives, about the morality of film-making. Leidy Tabares turns 21 this month, and the story of the rose seller has, over time, become something of an obsession with me. A part of her diary appeared in El Espectador in February. More of this, probably, in the future.
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Núria Triana Toribio, in an essay on Pedro Almodóvar in Contemporary Spanish Studies (ed. Jordan, Morgan-Tamosunas), neatly points out that the Sex Pistols played their first concert in London in November 1975 – which was the month that General Franco died. She goes on to make too much of the fact, perhaps, but it’s a nice, succinct indicator of how quickly Spain has moved on.

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A world scoop from The Puerta del Sol Blog: a preview screening of Marc Recha’s new film, Les mains vides, which will be one of very few films made with Spanish money to screen at the Cannes film festival this year. Recha (born, incredibly given the depth and quality of his work, in 1970, and interviewed, in Catalan, here) generally makes the kind of challenging arthouse fare which has reviewers worrying about the most basic things before sitting down – will I understand what relationship HE has with HER? Was SHE his DAUGHTER or his MOTHER? What is the symbolic significance of the WASHING MACHINE? And the Spain/France co-production Les mains vides (Catalan director, French language) is not exempt from such troubling questions. But this rural tale of the accidental death of an old woman and one man’s misguided attempt to keep her money is perfectly coherent in the end, making for a warm-hearted portrait of a tightly-knit community in Catalunya, up near the Spain/France border – a community stranded between coast and mountain, Spain and France, and between past and present. In my opinion, Recha has made an early candidate for a Spanish film of the year - though someone I saw it with called it “overly long and way overly demanding." Doesn’t art have the right to be demanding? It may even be art’s duty. Torremolinos 73, though, about a real-life couple who almost despite themselves started working for the Danish porn industry while the Franco regime was still in power, lives up to neither the kitsch promise of its title or the potential richness of its central idea.
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Twelve intellectuals, the majority (including Carlos Fuentes, Juan Goytisolo and Alfredo Bryce Echenique) Spanish and Latin-American, but also (including Nadine Gordimer and Paul Preston [see previous post]) foreign, have come together to write a concise, powerful public text, “Aunque” (“Although”), condemning the “penosa atmósfera de impunidad moral propiciada por las instituciones nacionalistas y por la jerarquía católica vasca” in which they perceive ETA as being able to carry out their crimes in the Basque country. The signatories also ask that on 25th May, when municipal elections will be held throughout Spain, the people of Europe “declaren el estado de indignación general”.
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The following startling, cleverly-twinned anecdotes are from Paul Preston’s magnificent ¡Comrades! Portraits from the Spanish Civil War (Harper Collins, 1999), which is out of print and doesn't deserve to be. It gathers together nine brief biographies by Preston of some of the war’s more significant figures, and thus liberates the war, as the author himself claims in his introduction, from some of the –isms which inevitably plague histories of it. Beware - this is powerful stuff: “The often careless nature […] of extremism is captured in an anecdote recounted to me by the Catalan politician, Miquel Roca Junyent. It concerned his maternal grandfather, Miquel Junyent i Rovira, a leading figure in the Catalan Carlist movement (ultra-conservative monarchists). On 22 July 1936, a group of militiamen of the anarchist FAI (Federación Anarquista Ibérica) appeared at Junyent’s house and demanded that he accompany them. Since he was a prominent right-winger, there could be no doubting that their intentions were hostile. In fact, he was beyond their reach, having died of a heart attack the day before. When informed of this by the housekeeper, the milicianos suspected subterfuge and insisted on seeing the body. She led them to the open coffin where, faced by the incontrovertible evidence of Junyent’s demise, one of them turned to the others and said “Bollocks, I told you we should have come yesterday.” An equally representative act of thoughtless cruelty may be found in an anecdote from the rebel zone. At dawn on a bitter winter's day in 1936, a truck was conducting some Republicans to their execution. One of them, shivering in his shirtsleeves, made an attempt to talk to the Civil Guards, the Falangists and the priest in the lorry: “I never realized it could be so cold!” The priest looked at him with contempt and said brusquely “Well, it’s much worse for us. We've got to make the return trip!””

And what, as imbibers and purveyors of Spanish culture, are we to make of this?
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Somewhat tardily, the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española is now available on CD-ROM (and has been since early April). It is the complete version of the 22nd edition. Comments from satisfied readers include the following hardy perennial: “Lo único malo que he encontrado es precisamente el título de la obra: ¿Cuándo querrán darse cuenta los señores de la RAE de que la lengua de Cervantes, la lengua de Delibes, se llama 'CASTELLANA' y no 'ESPAÑOLA'?” If you buy it from the above link, incidentally, you will be putting money in the bank account of one of Spain’s great literary institutions, the Casa del Libro chain of bookshops, the first of which opened in Madrid in 1923.

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Edited by Ricardo Soca and featuring a range of collaborators from all over the world, the frankly fabulous El Castellano - la Página del Idioma Español has recently redesigned its site. Describing itself as: "la revista digital pionera en la promoción del idioma español en la Internet y en la busca de nuevos espacios para nuestra lengua en la red mundial," the site offers, amongst other e-gems, a history of Spanish, links to newspapers and radio stations in Spanish-speaking countries and an addictive "La palabra del día" service, by which the etymology of a word, of either current relevance or general interest, is sent daily to your in-box. A brief recent article discusses the efforts of General Motors to increase its market share among Hispanics by having Gary Cowger, president of General Motors of North America, record an ad in Spanish. There are also plenty of answers to the kinds of questions that grammar-troubled PdS readers often come up with - when do I use b and when v? What are the rules of accentuation? And what is the connection between Don Quixote and globalization?

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No posts for the last couple of days because we’ve been down at the 6th Málaga Film Festival. I either enjoyed, watched or merely sat through twelve films in three days. The best of the ones I saw were the unashamedly nostalgic Hotel Danubio, a kind of noir pastiche by Antonio Giménez-Rico starring the underrated and underused Santiago Ramos, and Palabras Encadenadas, the second film by Laura Maña, a taut, claustrophobic little thriller about the word games played by a serial killer (Dario Grandinetti, from Almodóvar’s Hable con ella), and his kidnap victim (Goya Toledo). The worst film was called Diario de una becaria, which took a very real social problem in Spain – the fact that many graduates cannot get jobs, and may even have to pay for work experience – and turned it into a frothy teen fantasy. Apparently there was also an undignified press conference ruckus between team and journos about the film's sexism. A shame, because the producer's last project, El efecto Iguazu, was a powerful and moving documentary. The film which won all the main Málaga awards – Pablo Berger’s debut Torremolinos 73 – I haven’t yet seen, but I believe I’ll be able to mention in the next issue of PdS under the recuperación del la historia banner. (More when I have seen it.) It's not very likely that any of these films will ever be shown in English-speaking countries. For most non-Spanish commentators, Spanish Cinema = Pedro Almodóvar, y ya está.

One film that will definitely be shown in English-speaking countries is Mary McGuckian’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, based on Thornton Wilder’s novel, which has been shooting in Málaga. There was tension over the fact that this high-profile international production, which stars Robert de Niro and Harvey Keitel amongst others, should take over the city center just at the time of the festival - but apparently it was the only time the cast could come together. As a journalist, I was invited onto the set – they were shooting inside Málaga Cathedral – and had just popped outside to make a phone call when a limousine drew up and de Niro got out, wearing the garb of an 18th century archbishop of Lima, and came striding up the cathedral steps to the applause and cheering of the locals. It was a powerful symbolic half-second – in my mind, Hollywood and Christianity met, and for a moment, I was confused about which was which. The scene being shot in the cathedral had de Niro giving the service for the people who die when the bridge collapses: at the same time, 500km north of Málaga, in Madrid, Pope John Paul II was visiting, and TVE 1 gave over most of the day’s coverage to the event. So it was quite a weekend in Spain for both major religious figures and for the cameras in front of them.

Having lunch in the Plaza del Obispo after the shoot, I watched as a tubby tramp (who looked exceptionally happy and healthy) took a slug from his tetrabrik of cheap wine and looked on puzzled at the many extras, all in 18th century costume, as they milled around the square. He looked at the wine in his hand, and then back at the extras again, then back at the wine. Then he decided it was all real, after all, and moved on.

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