After the parade, people settled around the nucleus of Palo Palo, Gervasio, the Sindicato bar and Disco Pub Jesa for a long night of eating, drinking and dancing. Temporary stalls and food vans sold band t-shirts, sweets, kebabs and waffles. The under-twenty-ones established their own area around the back of the Sindicato, to drink away from their parents, smoke dope, and mill about like teenagers do to three different car-boot sound-systems, blaring cheesy techno, the inevitable reggaeton, and Gangnam Style, this last seemingly on a loop. Disco Pub Jesa was home to a lot more cheesy global pop music and a lot more dancing – even intergenerational dancing – while directly outside it, tied to a lamppost, stood a donkey. While the parents drank, many of their young children were still up and about, playing football in their costumes into the small hours. Indeed, at 2 am there were still as many actual prams outside the bars as there were drunk men in their late twenties dressed up as babies.
Even at that time, more revellers were turning up from other villages, some of them in costume. The latest point at which I managed to have a serious conversation about the village was around midnight in the Sindicato bar, according to my increasingly illegible notes. Paco, a smart, serious man in early middle age, was even-handed in his appraisal of the village: ‘The crisis is not just here, but everywhere … this can be a beacon for the world if we remake it and start again. A new utopia, a different one.’
‘When I first came back to Marinaleda from Barcelona [in the 1980s], I came to an assembly and his words got me, here,’ Paco said, patting his chest.
Organised fun is integral to the spirit of the pueblo, but so is the less organised kind. On a Thursday night in December, the night before Constitution Day, a national holiday, I went out for a quiet drink with a friend at 10 pm. There were only about seven people in Bar Gervasio: two young women, and a separate group of five men in their early twenties. The football was on, the fire was substantial and warm, and not much was happening. As the hours passed, the lads were knocking back not light, sensible cañas but copas, large glasses containing something like three, four or five shots of hard spirits (who knows, since they never, ever, measure in this part of the world), topped up with coke or lemonade.
By midnight they had persuaded Gervasio, the owner, to switch the cables so as to broadcast music videos from his laptop behind the bar onto the big TV. By 2 am the drink and carefree, what-the-hell atmosphere of the village at large had persuaded not just the five lads, but the rest of us too, to get up and dance ‘La Macarena’, complete with every one of the silly choreographed moves, hip thrusts and twists. La lucha, the way Sánchez Gordillo tells it, is a solemn fight to achieve those moments where the inherent, irrepressible dignity of the people finally triumphs. This was not, perhaps, one of those moments.
Cheesy pop music is enduringly popular in this part of the world, and after an equally rumbunctious sing-along and dance-along to Whigfield’s ‘Saturday Night’, we were treated to La Macarena’s less local contemporary equivalent, ‘Gangnam Style’ by Psy. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but it did feel striking that a pop phenomenon from South Korea was that familiar to the denizens of a village so isolated thirty years ago that its mayor compared it to a Native American reservation, an island in a sea of latifundios. Most of these young men’s grandparents had never seen the sea, one hour’s drive to the south, much less rejoiced – dance moves and all – in the music of a country 10,000 km away.
It was followed by a popular Spanish Gangnam parody about the cuts, entitled En el paro estoy, I’m on the dole. Mouthing the kind of lyrics common to everyday conversation – ‘I don’t know what to do anymore ’, ‘I moved back in with my parents’, ‘my grandmother can’t go to bingo’, ‘my girlfriend left me’, a sarcastically grinning young man in a yellow reflective jacket and protective helmet goes around doing Psy’s cowboy dance and picking up euros off the floor in desperation. ‘Rajooooy, give me work!’ runs the chorus. Parodying something which is already a parody is fairly low-level art, and it hasn’t got the deep-set pain of blues or indeed, more relevantly, flamenco, but it obviously touched a nerve with the 9 million people who viewed it on YouTube.
Later, slightly tired from all the excitement, the young men in the bar switched away from music, re-stocked their rum and cokes, and cued up YouTube clips from a Catalan sketch show called Polònia, the one about el Régimen de Franco, or the Franco Regime. Since régimen means both regime and slimming diet, the conceit is a spoof advert from the old days, in flickering black-and-white, in which an effete, over-eager General Franco advertises his regime like a diet. With the Franco regime, you can’t eat meat in Easter week, you can’t have sex, you can’t smoke pot, you can’t speak Catalan; and all of this will bring you guaranteed weight loss. Follow this diet, it concludes, ‘para tener mejor facha’, for a better look – a pun on the other sense of facha, short for fascist.
At some point closer to 4 am than midnight, Gervasio disappeared into a back room and re-emerged a little later dressed in the unmistakable outfit of the Guardia Civil, complete with bizarre green tricorne hat. The young men fell about laughing, and when they’d picked themselves up off the floor, jostled to have their photos taken with him.
The costume was a caricature, Cristina explained the following night, laughing at my photo of her wasted young peers, thumbs up, posing with the pretend Guardia. It was mockery, not an affectionate tribute to the enemies of the people. It was also related to it being the eve of Constitution Day: a day that celebrates Madrid, and the central state, epitomised by the Guardia. Caricature is a popular form, as the Cadiz carnaval testifies.
There was another custom Gervasio practised that I was fond of. Cristina and I had just paid our tab after a slightly quieter evening in his bar – you always pay at the end of the night – when a fresh round of drinks arrived at the table. I was confused: I had thought we were leaving. It turned out that Gervasio had ‘invited’ us. Crisis or no crisis, the bar owners often do this in Marinaleda: you pay, and one more round arrives, on the house.
The landlord at Palo Palo, León, was king of these extravagantly generous invitations; I lost count of the number of drinks I had on the house with him. His bar is one of the key landmarks in the town, open for over a decade now, and famous far beyond the village, thanks to its mix of high-profile gigs and eccentric Wild West theme, complete with fake logs around the walls and saloon doors. Its exterior is if anything even more striking: above the broad entrance is a fifty-foot-long guitar, whose base is shaped exactly like the map of Andalusia.
Palo Palo specializes in rock music, booking bands with such illustrious names as DP Ebola and Anvil of Doom. As one critic sarcastically complained, ‘They have broad taste at Palo: punk, hard metal, dark metal, Satanic metal.’ It’s not entirely fair.
León took a liking to me the first time he met me, when an English filmmaker, Uzma, was visiting too. He came around the bar to join us for shot after shot of sweet rum liquor (on the house, at his insistence). As the clock ticked gently past 3 am, he swayed to the live blues guitarist’s mixture of French, Spanish and English rock and pop – playing to a crowd of less than ten.