Carmen, Paco and the General

One of the many men on horseback who rode across Spain in the 19th century, waving their swords and declaring Spain a republic/monarchy, was Juan Prim y Prats. Born in 1814, if he wasn't seated on a horse leading soldiers into battle in the name of the republic/monarchy he was thinking about it; and if he wasn't thinking about he was probably in exile (thinking about it). A follower of the progressive party in Spain he was one of that country's talented men who combined strong political beliefs with the ability to wave a sword. He may never have propounded a detailed political creed but it would be fair to say that he wanted to see a modern Spain, free from the grip of a small group of wealthy landed families and, of course, the church. Having said that I can't help but feel he was never happier than when seated on a horse, sword in hand, charging the serried ranks of the enemy, be that in Spain, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Morocco and, again, in Spain. On the night of the 27th December 1870, in a heavy fall of snow, he was shot by three assassins while travelling through the streets of Madrid in his carriage. He died three days later.

A popular song was, I can't say written given that it has no writer, composed some time after his death.

En la calle del turco
Le mataron a Prim
Sentadito en su coche con la guardia civil
Con la guardia civil, con la guardia rural

A las diez de la noche
En paseo real
Cuatro tiros le dieron en mitad del corazón
Cuatro tiros le dieron a boca de cañón

Al pasar por las cortes le dijeron a Prim
Vaya usted con cuidado, que le quieren herir
Si me quieren herir, que me dejen hablar
Para entregar las armas a otro general

Al llegar a la plaza, salió el hijo mayor
¿quién ha sido ese ingrato que a mi padre mató?
¿quién será ese tirano, quién será ese traidor?
¿quién ha sido el infame que a mi padre mató?

In the calle del turco
They killed Prim
Seated in his coach with the guardia civil
With the guardia civil, with the guardia rural

At ten o'clock at night
In the royal way
They shot him four times right in the heart
Four shots from the mouth of a gun

As he passed the parliament they said to Prim
Watch out, they want to hurt you
If they want to hurt me, they must let me speak
To pass the guns to the other general

As they arrived in the square, his eldest son came out
Who was the swine who killed my father?
Who is that tyrant, who is that traitor?
Who is the vile person who killed my father?

The reason I know about Prim, the reason I know about the song, is that Carmen sang it to me. The reason Carmen knows it is because her mother sang it to her as a young child. The reason her mother sang it to her is that it is a lullaby.

Carmen lives in the same flat where she was born over eighty years ago. She shares it with her husband Paco. Carmen's mother was married in 1908, which would put her birth some time in the 1880s, well within living memory of Prim's assassination. It may be that her mother sang it to her. Carmen had an elder brother and sister. Her father drove steam trains and her mother cared for the children. Her father's salary was good enough for them to employ a servant to help in the flat. Carmen was eleven years old when the Spanish civil war started. She remembers sheltering in the metro station outside the entrance to the block where the family lived, as the nationalist bombs fell on the city. She remembers the executions of priests from the nearby church of Our Lady of Atocha; seeing the Russians that came to help in the fight against Franco's forces; being stopped by a militia soldier near the Puerta del Sol and the machine gun bullets that spattered the nearby buildings. She still remembers the name of the neighbour who denounced her father and brother in the years of Franco's rule (the same neighbour who had borrowed money from Carmen's parents and was given a overcoat by her mother) and was only saved by the intervention of a friend of her brother who had some influence. A friend of her father was not so lucky. A joke at Franco's expense led to his execution. The war stopped Carmen's education and by the time she was fourteen she was already working as a chambermaid in a Madrid hotel.

Her husband Paco doesn't like to talk about the past. His father died when he was five and as they lived in the countryside outside of Leon, he went to work in the fields, looking after the animals. He rarely went to school. He came to Madrid after the war and he met, by chance, Carmen in the metro. They've been married fifty years but they never had children. He worked in a furniture shop in the Calle Alcala. He likes to ask me:
-¿Cómo es la vida en el campo de su país? (How do people make a living in the countryside in your country?)
and:
-¿Ustedes son todos protestantes en su familia? (Are you all protestants in your family?)
and:
-Digame usted, que tipo de gobierno tiene su pais. (Tell me, what type of government does your country have).
To all my answers, he nods sagely. The only time he didn't was when I told him about porridge.
-¡Pero, con esto alimentamos a los animales en el campo! (But that's what we feed to the animals in the field!).
Both he and Carmen speak an old-fashioned Spanish (they talk about “duros”, the informal name given to five pesetas) which will vanish with the passing of their generation.

If there are books in the house, they have them well hidden. Carmen reads her gossip magazines and Paco fills in his football coupons, la quiniela. But they're no fools. They're faces lit up when I asked them about Lorca. For them he was a genius and his death at the hands of Franco's assassins una vergeuenza (“shame” would be the english translation but it's stronger than that, it carries with it a shared sense of outrage ). More than one commentator has noted this; that Lorca, more than any of his contemporaries such as Rafael Alberti or Vicente Alexaindre, was embraced by the working classes, the disenfranchised and those on the margins of society. Paco speaks well of Francisco Largo Caballero, head of the government during the winter of 1936 to 1937, and Manuel Azaña, last president of the Second Republic who died in exile in France in 1940. On the other hand, Carmen can sing a song that makes fun of the decision of Juan Negrin (last prime minister of the Second Republic) to leave the country in the spring of 1939 as Franco's troops prepared to enter Madrid. This charge of cowardice has always hung heavy over the memory of Negrin.

In the lives of Paco and Carmen there can be seen the marks left by the passage of the twentieth century in Spain. A century of great men, great hopes and great disappointments. And in that lullaby sung to Carmen by her mother about the death of General Prim there is also something of Spain in the nineteenth century. When Carmen sang it to me, she smiled, as if about to share a secret.
-Era republicano, she said. (He was a republican).
In all the years of Franco's dictatorship she and Paco must have guarded their thoughts very carefully. I don't think I'm being too fanciful to say that one of the thoughts Carmen guarded was of a man born in the previous century who, never happier than when seated on a horse and waving his sword in a mocking manner at the cannons that faced him, dreamed of a better and more just Spain.

What the dickens, it's Mr. Dickens!

1805, Admiral Nelson, hopelessly romantic and missing parts of his body, leads his ships to victory against the combined fleets of Spain and France. His body, pickled, I believe, in a barrel is brought back to Britain and buried with due ceremony in St. Paul's cathedral. And then, with the arrogance of a country that can look back on many military victories, we let it merge into that general feeling that when it comes to killing foreigners we are really quite good at it. We don't ignore it. We just don’t write novels about it. Benito Pérez Galdos, quite clearly not British, uses the Battle of Trafalgar to open his series of novels called Episodios Nacionales. From 1873 until 1912, in 46 novels, he covered the main events of Spanish history in the nineteenth century. He is highly regarded in Spain, not least for using as his principal characters ordinary people who, up to then, had been largely absent from popular novels. He is compared with Balzac, Stendal, Dickens and Tolstoy. I’ve read three of his novels and feel confident that if I met him I could have a bit of a blether with him. I can’t say I would feel the same if I met Charles Dickens.

I think it was when I was reading Pérez’s account of the Spanish uprising against the French in Madrid in 1808, that I realized that I could understand it without too much difficulty. I’ve read enough in Spanish to know that I read it better than I speak it. But it was more than that. Yes, there were a few old-fashioned words which I had to ask E to translate. Some of those she had to guess because they were words which even her parents wouldn’t have used. But the main reason why I could follow the story was that his written Spanish was identical to what I was reading in contemporary Spanish novels despite being separated by more than a century. Hence the feeling that if I met him I could have a nice chat with him. Naturally, I would avoid any reference to him being dead but we could at least talk about the weather, the state of public transport and importance of eating at least three portions of fruit per day.

Charles Dickens, on the other hand, would be quite a different kettle of fish. Only a fool would criticise him as a writer but he was a man of his time. And his time was that of Britain in the nineteenth century. Reading his novels, as we read Shakespeare or Jane Austen, we have to assume that he spoke as his characters spoke. It would be a short time into the conversation with him that we would find, to our horror, that we were talking like him too. Well, you would, wouldn’t you? After all, it is Charles Dickens. “Ah yes, Mr. Dickens, I was commenting only the other day, the numerous hardships and general malfeasance that have recently befallen the poor souls of this parish who, through the intervention of the mighty potato barons, have seen their hard won potatoes torn, at times quite literally, from their calloused hands, the calloused hands, mind you, of the sons of lost fishermen.” Or some such bollocks. Charles Dickens, insulted at being patronised like this, would leave in high dudgeon, doffing his top hat , while saying, “And I wish you good day sir!”.

Am I saying that whereas English has evolved throughout the centuries, adapting itself to changes within society, renewing itself constantly, Spanish has remained static, unchanged for more than a century? Quite clearly, yes, that’s exactly what I am saying. Am I saying that this is one of the strengths of English, and one of the weaknesses of Spanish? That is a horse of another colour. What I would say, is that the more I am here and the more I read in Spanish, the more I am aware of the capacity for invention that writers in English display. Be it Winnie the Pooh and Piglet hunting Heffalumps or Winston Smith deciphering the coded layers of Doublespeak, there is in written English a sense of adventure, a search for the next discoveries, in the words themselves. This can have unforeseen consequences.

In my desire to explain this theory to E I chose as an example of this eternal search for the new in English literature, Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh. Here was the writer who would show her the capacity for invention that English has and also how it can be assimilated into popular culture. I read the passage to her. I read the passage to her and in the short silence that followed it was clear that I had misjudged her taste in literature. She then made her feelings very clear, using a range of well-chosen Spanish phrases that would have made Begsy blush and the crew of the Santisima Trinidad, flagship of the Spanish fleet that fought bravely against Nelson's ships, cheer to the rigging. English may have the capacity for never-ending renewal. But it can also weigh itself down with metaphor, imagery and ambiguity. Spanish, on the other hand, says exactly what it wants, when it wants to and to whom it wants to. My ship listing, holed below the waterline, I did what Nelson never did. I retreated.