Among the estepeños I found a general sense of pride in their local curiosity down in the valley, but this pride was often tinged with scepticism. There is, some older estepeños thought, a gap between the village’s ideal and its reality. ‘The mayor is not perfect,’ they kept saying; ‘it is not perfect.’ One portly, well-read businessman in comfortable middle age, with a warm, solid handshake, was especially keen to talk to me (anonymously) about Marinaleda. He was amused and gratified that I had come such a long way to visit the Sierra Sur, and regarded Sánchez Gordillo with heavily caveated admiration – but admiration nonetheless. He showed me Félix Talego’s book, which, like several local history buffs I’d met, he had tracked down despite it being an obscure academic tome unknown even to ruthlessly thorough websites like Amazon.
‘Si la trabajas con tus manos y la riegas con tu sudor, tuya es la tierra, trabajador’, he recited, dusting off a part of his encyclopaedic brain and quoting Sánchez Gordillo’s 1980 book. The phrase translates somewhat less poetically as ‘If you work it with your hands and water it with your sweat, the land is yours, worker’ – but it is the Marinaleda philosophy encapsulated. After Franco’s death, the businessman told me, the Spanish people felt lost, suddenly deprived of a patriarch. It was a scary, fractious time, and while most of Spain ‘ran around like a headless chicken’, Sánchez Gordillo captivated the working class with declamations like the one above. That makes him sound a bit like a cynical opportunist, I said – is that how you see him? ‘No, don’t misunderstand me, I think the town is based on noble, wonderful ideals. But the reality is not so perfect.’
Isn’t it a bit unreasonable to expect it to be perfect? Absolutely, he said, they shouldn’t be attacked for imperfection; things are hardly perfect in Estepa, either. ‘It’s just that you shouldn’t believe everything Sánchez Gordillo says. When someone quarrels with him, it becomes difficult for that person to continue to live in Marinaleda.’ There are of course no gulags, no Stasi-style holding cells, no show trials, but it becomes ‘difficult’ to live there. People gossip, he explained, and make your life hard in petty little ways. Perhaps that’s actually a small-town difficulty, rather than an ideological one? In pueblos of that size, when people talk, everyone talks. Sure, he said: ostracism and gossip are more of a danger than anything else – they are the only danger, in fact.
I heard the same innuendoes a few times from estepeños, that opposing the mayor can lead to ‘problems’. One whom I met had more than just innuendo and insinuations – she had a tip-off about two Marinaleda ‘exiles’ living in Estepa. I took some details, made some phone calls, and eventually Javi helped me find the address of this allegedly dissident man and his wife. On a deathly quiet residential street in mid-afternoon, cobbles tumbling down the valley beneath us, we rang the doorbell, and a woman answered. She greeted us warmly – oh, an Englishman! – but when we explained our purpose, and mentioned the M-word, she retreated into the doorway a little.
Careless talk doesn’t cost lives out here, but it can cost friendships. In the name of prudence, I stood at a distance, as Javi made earnest assurances that we would maintain her and her husband’s anonymity, that I could be trusted. ‘I’ll take your number in case my husband is willing to speak to you when he gets in,’ she said, with a look that seemed to add: ‘and he definitely, definitely won’t.’
As we walked away from the house, Javi tried to account for this reluctance to speak. There is an expression in Spain, he told me, ‘no querer remover la mierda’; you don’t want to stir up the shit, because it smells worse. You let the bad things in your past lie dormant. It’s a phrase which sums up a lot about a nation which has spent three decades under theoretical observance of an official ‘pact of forgetting’ about their civil war and fascist dictatorship. Now, at last, some of the mass graves of those killed by Franco are being dug up, and the remains given proper burials. In left-wing communities like Marinaleda, they haven’t forgotten so easily: one programme on the radio station is called Without Memory, There Is no History.
There is of course no equivalence here, between a Spanish elite that connived in covering up the mass murder and torture of Franco’s White Terror, and a village mayor who has simplified the narrative of his people’s struggle a little, and perhaps overlooked the odd act of intimidation carried out by comrades. But while the Gordillistas rightly chide the nation around it for shrinking away from awkward questions about recent Spanish history, it’s a shame that some of the village’s own imperfections are brushed under the carpet.
Unsurprisingly, the exile never called me back.
7
The Village Against the Crisis
March 2013: driving west along the Andalusian coast road, from Malaga towards Jerez, the deep, layered, tree-lined hills facing the sea are disfigured by the marks of what the locals call the ‘brick crisis’. For once, the Costa del Sol looks like it’s never seen the sol in its life: swathed in dense fog, and the kind of rain that is so light yet so all-pervasive you’re not sure if it’s mist, precipitation, or sea-spray. Under portentous slate-grey skies, the hills have an almost mystical aspect. Here and there, concrete construction frames are cut arbitrarily into the rock. Some of these housing projects are barely started, just Meccano frames, steel girders slowly breaking out in rust. There are others which are further along the construction process: whole rows of houses, painted, rooved, but still without windows. Some are finished, and empty.
It’s as if the wind changed suddenly, and the new weather front froze everything where it stood. The numbers are unsurprisingly hard to pin down, but respectable estimates put the number of vacant properties in Spain at 4 million, of which 900,000 are new-builds. Altogether, 16 per cent of the country’s entire housing stock is empty. A staggering 400,000 families have been evicted by their mortgage lenders since the crash, over 20,000 people are on the streets (double the number in 2008), and uncountable numbers are now squatting. Some Spanish estate agents have been reluctant to put up ‘For Sale’ signs on vacant properties, for fear that doing so will attract squatters.
When you’ve grown up somewhere as cluttered and crowded as London, with its green belt tied tight around a swollen waistline, it’s difficult to conceive just how much vacant space there is for building in Spain. The country’s land mass is twice the size of the UK, with a smaller population. There’s space everywhere. So they built, everywhere.
The unsustainable fetish for growth that created the crisis was – like everything else in Spain – a physical act. Where the rest of Europe would content itself with a metaphor, Spain just had to be literaclass="underline" it built its prosperity on unsure foundations, never thinking about the future. And now there’s no money to finish the job, only stagnation and decay. Everyone I’ve met across Andalusia in the last few years knows people who’ve lost jobs in the construction industry, not to mention the related professions that suffered the knock-on effects – glaziers, roofers, clerks, surveyors, and of course, the vital business of housing, feeding and cosseting expatriates and tourists. Spain’s empty patios now echo, hollow. In the space which traditionally hosted the sociable tumult of Spanish family life, there are only dried-up fountains, the stillness of a nation’s enforced inertia.
These ruins of late capitalism scar the Spanish landscape. Spain has long had a grimly fascinating number of ghost towns: from the Civil War, when villagers fled for their lives, never to return, and from the 1950s and 1960s, when people escaped rural poverty in search of work. While Marinaleda’s population declined by 30 per cent during the 1960s for this reason, some small hamlets were abandoned altogether, and never repopulated.