Marble on the Brain

We were meeting friends of my girlfriend in a bar in the Santiago Bernabeu, home of the football team Real Madrid. Now whatever you might think of Real Madrid, and the camareros in my local bar, fans of their arch rivals Atletico Madrid, would certainly have some strong feelings about them, they are not short of a bob or two. Although lacking the important silverware in the trophy cabinet over the past few years, they have made some very neat property deals. Very, very neat property deals. To put it bluntly, they have shitloads of money. Now, a dedicated fan of Real Madrid might ask themselves why, with all this money, can’t they buy a team that is just that, a team and not a bunch of talented individuals who play as a bunch of talented individuals? I, on the other hand, couldn’t help but think, as I stood in the bar, eating baby squid in their own ink, “Why do I feel as if I’m in a brothel?”.

I suppose it could have been the amount of marble used in the bar. Apart from the chairs and tables, I couldn’t see anything that wasn’t marble. The bar, the walls, the floor - everything was made of marble. Now, I’ve got nothing against marble. In fact, it’s a lovely material which in the hands of a Michelangelo can express the very essence of what it is to be human. In the hands the of the designer of the bar in the Santiago Bernabeu it said quite simply “We have shitloads of money”. It may have been the pictures on the walls. The visual presentation of food, in the hands of a crack advertising team, will tend to emphasis its sensuality, its eroticism. Everything that a brothel, for example, where sex is simply another commercial transaction, can never do. Looking at the photographs on the walls of the bar it appeared that Real Madrid had given someone a disposable camera and a selection of plastic food. Out of focus and underexposed, populated with blurry images of what you could only guess were Spanish celebrities, they would have shamed the greasiest of greasy spoon cafes. In their own way the photographs were also saying “We have shitloads of money” while adding “And we don’t care”.

You see, I have a theory about the Spanish. They don’t have the shame gene. For example, a British person running for a train will, when the bus or train pulls away, break into that special slowing-down jog which says to the world “I wasn’t really running for it. I was just exercising a little”. A Spanish person, on the other hand, will, as the train is moving, run even faster, press the button on the door in an attempt to open it and when that doesn’t work will hit the door. In fact they only stop their attempt to get on the train because it is accelerating away at sixty kilometres per hour. At traffic lights, people who have missed their bus, will knock on the bus doors very, very loudly to attract the attention of the driver. Sometimes they even have conversations. To this day I haven’t found a way of embarrassing a Spaniard in public. It was this lack of public shame that lay at the root of my reaction to the bar in the Santiago Bernabeu and nowhere was this clearer then when Guillermo, one of my girlfriend’s friends, took me on a tour of the place. There, on the way to the gents, just where there was no need for it, was a huge fucking chandelier.

I sometimes think that the Spanish got to the eighteenth century and everything went a little weird. On the one hand you have a genius such as Goya hiding his pictures of nude women from the Inquisition (imagine the Archbishop of Canterbury turning up on William Blake’s doorstep telling him that the neighbours were a little bit upset at him and Mrs. Blake sitting naked out in the garden and if they didn’t stop it he’d have to, well, burn him; all this would be done in embarrassed, low voices, with no eye contact and William Blake saying “Yes, yes. I quite see what you are saying.”) and on the other the wholehearted embrace given by Spanish culture to the Baroque. An embrace which can be summed up in a simple phrase: “huge fucking chandeliers”. It’s as if the Spanish all went on a day trip to France and despite the very careful explanations given by the French on the nature of form and function, the importance of achieving balance in the elements of a building, they all got off the bus in Madrid, turned to each other and as a people, "el pueblo de España", said with one voice:
-Huge fucking chandeliers.

You only have to go to Zaragoza, up in the north east in Aragón, to see the Spanish baroque in full flow. On the spot where the Romans had built the forum, the public expression of the city’s civic values, and where later the Moslems would build their mosque, the visual expression of a faith that shunned images, Saint James built himself a cosy, little gang hut with twigs on the spot where Mary had appeared to him and gave him a nice statue of herself. Eighteen hundred years later the Spanish came along, kicked over his gang hut and built a marble Basilica of Our Lady of the Pillar the size of Hampden stadium. Clearly I’m exaggerating here (the gang hut “burned down”). But only slightly. It’s the kind of building that, if transplanted to presbyterian Edinburgh, Scots would ignore very, very pointedly. As in: “Look how carefully I am ignoring this building”. It’s that baroque.

After eating our baby squid in their own ink and the roasted red peppers, we went through to the night club. After my reaction to the bar I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. But I have to admit I was impressed by what I saw. The night club with its dance floor and bars had been built on a deck that extended out into and over the pitch. It was open air and you could look up into the stands and the night sky above. It had begun to rain, that gentle, warm, summer rain that falls in Madrid in July. I turned to my girl friend and her friends to say
-"Impresionante. ¿Verdad?"
But there was no one there. They had vanished. I looked around me and saw them, five Spaniards, adults, clustered under a plastic column that could just about give shelter to a small child.
-"Llove." (It’s raining) They said as if the rain was lashing down in torrents. If they’d had umbrellas they would have opened them and probably said:
-"Raro ver a lluvia tan fuerte en julio, ¿no?"
Which could be roughly translated as
-Unseasonable weather for the time of year, isn’t it?
Shameless. Utterly shameless.