The true new Spain lies somewhere in between Almodovar’s wacky Barcelona and his prim hometown. Religious street festivals are still common. The long lunch is still a fixture–a daily reminder, says the journalist John Carlin, that family and friends trump work. Even the prime minister admits to enjoying the traditional afternoon siesta (though only on the weekend). Nobody gossips in print or on the air about the private life of King Juan Carlos or his family. The prime minister may have put women politicians in charge of both houses of the legislature for the first time in Spanish history, but the society as a whole remains more macho than most other European countries.
Almodovar’s image of Spain, as zany as it is, is firmly grounded in the post-Franco reality. Smoking hashish or marijuana has been decriminalized; heroin and cocaine addicts take their drugs in special centers in an attempt to cut down on violence and disease. Graffiti on the walls in the Madrid gay district of Chueca informs visitors: you are now leaving the hetero zone. Men who a generation ago feared the police now feel safe asking them for the names of the nearest gay bars. All the daily papers, including the conservative ABC, lists hundreds of personal ads from prostitutes. “The freedom with which my characters live,” Almodovar told NEWSWEEK, “would be impossible in Franco’s Spain, [when even] the freedom to tell a story from my point of view was forbidden.”
Daily life was the first thing to open up, followed quickly by the arts. Politics came next and then, more slowly, the national economy. The period of the democratic transition was the most electrifying moment of all, says Almodovar, who became the irreverent voice of post-Franco Spain. By day he was an administrative assistant at Telefonica, then state-owned. By night he was part of the movida madrilena–the wide-open Madrid youth scene–a free spirit who partied hard, brainstormed hard and made his first film (“Pepi, Luci, Bom and the Other Girls”): “It was an explosion of life, the rebirth of joie de vivre, the younger generation seeking pleasure as its immediate objective, the legitimacy of all political choices and the loss of fear of the police. All these things are reflected in my first movies.”
The change was about liberty, not just libertinism. In 1981, Picasso’s “Guernica,” which some art historians consider the greatest painting of the 20th century, finally made it to Spain after more than four decades of exile imposed by the artist. The work depicts the first instance of carpet bombing in history: the destruction of the Basque city of Guernica by the Germans, who were then aiding Franco’s forces against the republicans during the Civil War. Picasso, having painted it in France, instructed that the painting not be exhibited in Spain until democracy was firmly re-established.
“Guernica’s” return, in its day, stamped a seal of approval on democratization in Spain. The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, which opened in 1998, made a similar statement. “Like a great cathedral might have in medieval times, [the museum] speaks to this new atmosphere, this new Spain,” says Juan Ignacio Vidarte, its general director. Under Franco, the people of Barcelona and of the Basque country could not speak their own languages in public, and Spanish society as a whole shut itself off from the rest of the world. The Guggenheim Bilbao, the greatest Spanish cultural icon of the 1990s, turns Francoism on its head by being Spanish but also Basque and outward-looking: its art work is captioned in the Basque language; it was designed by the Los Angeles-based architect Frank Gehry; it’s a branch of the Guggenheim in New York; a large contingent of its more than 1 million visitors a year comes from France.
In a lofty way, the Guggenheim Bilbao raises a very basic question about Spain’s growing presence on the world stage: will success spoil hispanidad, the cherished notion of Spanishness? Already some cultural figures, like the 27-year-old director Alejandro Amenabar, are criticized for being “not Spanish enough.” Amenabar is making his first English-language movie, “The Others,” with Nicole Kidman. Paramount is planning to make an English-language version of Amenabar’s thriller “Open Your Eyes,” possibly as a vehicle for Tom Cruise. Almodovar is writing a script in English for MGM. Penelope Cruz, born in Madrid to a hairdresser and an auto mechanic the year before Franco died, is a citizen of Hollywood, not just Spain. The director Carlos Saura, whose “Tango” was nominated for an Academy Award, begins work this year on “The Maid of Buttermere”–in Britain. Are the “best” Basque painters those who work in New York, like Txomin Badiola and Dario Urzay? Is the Flamenco artist Joaquin Cortes a sensation because he’s wildly popular in London, New York and Tokyo? Is the teenage golfing phenom Sergio (El Nino) Garcia a sensation because he’s viewed as a player who can challenge America’s links superstar, Tiger Woods?
The stars of the new Spain are those whose impact reaches beyond its borders: Aznar, the model to center-right politicians across Europe; Villalonga, the global entrepreneur. The Barcelona writer Sergi Pamies says that “as prosperity rises, nationalism will decline” in the autonomous regions and across Spain as a whole. “Amnesia,” he says, “is integral to what is happening in Spain today.”
Pamies has a point, but Spain is hardly on the verge of forgetting what came before the transformation of the last 25 years. If Franco or franquismo were still alive, says Almodovar, “I imagine I would have immigrated to France and now I would be making underground films, or writing amusing cabaret-theater pieces–in French of course.” Such a storyline has a distinctive Almodovar wackiness to it. But Spain is better off with the real-life ending it is living through today.
