Madrid: Dignity and Indignation
By Aaron Shulman
Since I moved to
Spain two and a half years ago, my personal life has settled into a state of
contentment I’d never before even thought to contemplate. I married a Spanish
woman on an Andalusian patio with orange trees; my 89-year-old grandmother was
present, along with two dozen other relatives and friends from America. I’ve
made close friends here with whom I can grab beers and talk about anything from
private difficulties to the novels of Roberto Bolaño. My in-laws say I fit into
the family like a puzzle piece, and when Elisa and I visit they always have the
local delicacies I adore waiting for me: Córdoba-style oxtail, flamenquínes, cured
Iberian ham. In other words, though the United States is my first home, I’ve
been lucky enough to find a second home here. And yet there’s a bitter
corollary: we have to leave. “I feel like Spain is kicking us out,” Elisa says
from time to time as tears form in her eyes. I can’t help but agree, and we’re
not the only ones who feel this way.
To say that
unemployment is bad in Spain is like saying that the sea is watery. The
situation is that oceanically obvious. Since the global economic crisis began,paro—the
Spanish word for unemployment—has been rising over the country like a
patient, ineluctable flood. Twenty-five percent of the population is jobless,
and this leaves out the considerable number of eternal students, young men and
women who, lacking alternatives, accrue degree after degree. The
phenomenon has a name, titulitis, that reflects both the
Spanish sense of humor and the feeling of an ailment infecting the future of
the most highly educated generation in the country’s history. The 18-to-35 age
group faces a 50 percent unemployment rate. I think back to 2004, the year
of my college graduation. A sense of possibility remained strong even then,
long after the 1990s boom had passed. And then I think of a student protest
slogan today in Spain: Pre-Parado—another bit of wordplay—which
means both ready in the sense of educated and pre-unemployed.
It’s worth noting
that the resting pulse of unemployment in Spain during good times has always
been high—it usually hovers around 10 percent. That figure sets off
fever-pitched political debate in the United States, but fantasizing about a
return to 10 percent here anytime soon would be quixotic self-deception.
Spanish paro has already surpassed the worst levels of the American
Great Depression. The Red Cross recently launched a campaign to combat hunger
in Spain, redirecting resources previously dedicated to Haiti. More than
one in every four children live in households below the poverty line. Things
are bad in a way no one could have imagined even five years ago. The only
person I’ve talked to who is at all positive about the situation is Elisa’s
grandmother. She reassures us that things will never get as bad as they were
during the Spanish Civil War, when bread was scarce and bodies piled up in
the town square of her pueblo.
Spain’s
unemployment figures depress me because they seem to presage collapse, but the
reality of life in a country with so many unemployed is even sadder. Elisa and
I relocated from Córdoba to Madrid this past April, and since then almost every
day I see a corriente, or average, person rooting around in
the trash in search of food—never mind homeless people, who now also have
competition at soup kitchens and food banks. The border between the perennially
homeless and the newly homeless is increasingly porous and irrelevant.
For more than
three years, before moving to Madrid, I had frequently visited the city and in
that time watched street and subway performers multiply. There are clowns,
human statues, musical acts, and costumed characters—my favorite a
schlubby, potbellied Spiderman who for some reason poses for pictures with
tourists on the Plaza Mayor. On certain days the presence of such performers
fills the city center with a theatrical exuberance. But of course, busking is
not a prosperous profession— it’s one more symptom of paro.
Dignity and
indignation are words that I had never truly considered before moving to Spain.
I now think about them all the time, so ingrained are they in the vocabulary of
contemporary life—at family dinners, over drinks with friends, even in small
talk with strangers. This is indeed a moment of great self-pity, and I see
indignation as its righteous double. The Spanish are a proud people, so
indignation erupts everywhere. I think of the man in his 40s standing next to
me at a demonstration this fall who cried out with such helpless, ragged rage
that I myself started to cry and had to leave. I think of the graffiti artist
in the neighborhood of Lavapiés, where we live, who stencils a blunt, devastatingly
deadpan message onto walls, channeling the voice of an infantilized generation:
I live with my parents.
As anyone who has
been unemployed or lived amid unemployment knows, it is an intensely personal,
idiosyncratic experience. I’ve been able to get by on freelance work combined
with savings the past couple of years, but Elisa has spent a total of 15 months
unemployed: five months after we first arrived in Córdoba, then 10 more after
her seven-month contract as a community organizer in a disadvantaged Gypsy
neighborhood came to an end. Elisa’s paro enveloped us in
melancoly, like gray weather, but in the sunniest place I’ve ever lived.
Elisa’s paro story
goes like this. When her contract was up, she was offered a permanent position,
pending the arrival of tardy government money. This meant she kept working,
except now as a volunteer, as do so many Spaniards. Like an underclass of
perpetual interns, they give their time and energy not for a job but for the
remote possibility of a job. But the situation didn’t feel serious: Elisa’s
employer demanded less of her, she worked reduced hours, and she didn’t think
she gave as much. “I’m not doing anything with my life,” she said over and
over. This wasn’t true, but I knew what she meant. The waiting produced a
languid disenchantment with time itself: free time sapped of pleasure because
there was too much of it, weekdays like weekends, weekends like nothing, the
accustomed rhythms of life removed. And all the while, out of an obligation to
others worse off, Elisa reminded herself how lucky she was. In the end, the
subsidy never arrived.
I’ve come to feel
that the crisis in Spain exists as stories, stories you are told that you
inevitably pass on. Elisa’s cousin, who completed her Ph.D. in molecular
biology two years ago, still hasn’t found a job; her only good news of late was
getting accepted into a lab tech training program intended for recent high
school graduates. Or consider Esperanza, a 75-year-old woman I interviewed last
spring. She lost her home to foreclosure and ended up living in Madrid’s
Barajas airport. (It’s estimated that hundreds of families are evicted every
day in Spain.) She told me she had found temporary housing but sometimes went
to res- taurants, ate a meal, then had to own up to not having the money to pay
for it. There was D., a woman from the Gypsy community where Elisa worked, who
in the last months before we left Córdoba often asked for money so that her
kids would have dinner.
These accounts are
representative, I think, of many Spaniards. And what of the immigrant
prostitutes I pass on Montera Street in downtown Madrid, miniskirted and
made-up, looking deflated by the intense competition among them? Or the manteros, the
blanket guys, African men I often see running from police, their sacks of
knockoff merchandise bouncing on their shoulders? There are so many stories,
it’s hard to know what to do with all of them.
What brought Spain
to this point? The Spanish economic boom in the years preceding the crisis was
a grim parable described as a fairy tale we’re all familiar with: subprime
mortgages, unchecked speculation, laughable regulation, political complicity—a
world built on fictions. The Spanish version had a result even more disastrous
than elsewhere because way too many of the country’s economic eggs were in the
construction sector basket. When that went bust the tourism industry could
not carry the whole country’s burden. Bailouts came next, and since then the
Spanish economy has been contracting under impossible debt obligations and
pressure from the Eurozone, resulting in sweeping cutbacks that many see as a
brazen assault on the Spanish welfare state. Inseparable from all this, Spain
is home to the most ineffectual, least charismatic, often just plain bad
politicians I’ve come across, from Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy—whose style of
leadership entails hardly ever addressing the public while his government
undertakes austerity measures that seem tailor-made to violate all of his
campaign promises—to the more than 100 politicians who ran for election in 2011
while facing indictments for corruption. In June, Carlos Dívar, the chief
justice of the Spanish supreme court, resigned after it was revealed that he
had used public funds to pay for beach vacations. A friend of mine who’s a
Spanish magistrate was despondent when the scandal broke. “If the guy at the
top is corrupt,” he said, “what hope is there?” And in terms of where the
monarchy fits in with all of Spain’s bad news, let’s not go into it. I don’t
want to get Elisa riled up; she can’t stand the royal family.
It’s fair to ask
whether untrammeled capitalism and political corruption are the sole causes of
Spain’s current situation. For example, do some Spaniards receive an
unemployment check while also earning a salary under the table? Absolutely.
I’ve met a few, though I know far, far more people in Spain who’ve benefited
from the social safety net than have exploited it. Is there ever not a small
group of people who take advantage of the prevailing system, and is this small
group ever not used to justify cutbacks? Although cutbacks don’t improve things
for anyone, it is political legerdemain to sell cuts in health care, social
services, and other public programs as solutions to problems caused by
much more than real estate speculation and bad politics. Spain’s democracy is
still evolving, increasingly unsteady of late, from the creation of its 1978
constitution, and behind that landmark there is much tumultuous history: the
divisive legacy of a bloody civil war, followed by the almost 40 years of the
Franco dictatorship, which brought its own assortment of tragedies, among them
a mass flight of Spaniards into exile. Since 2011 nearly 120,000 Spaniards have
left Spain. Taking into account the flight of immigrants as well, the
population here is actually shrinking.
I am writing this
in October, and after 10 months of forms, administrative fees, and an almost
disappointingly straight- forward interview at the American embassy (we had our
fat folder of immigration documents and pictures in order), Elisa recently received
her visa to enter the United States as a permanent resident. This news brought
on a euphoria tempered by a dark underside: we can finally strike out in search
of new opportunities in the country I’m from, but our excitement is tempered by
the realization that we’re desperately ready to leave the country she’s from—a
place we both love.
On top of the
increasingly untenable work situation, the comportment of police in the face of
demonstrations is becoming more brutal and frightening. In September we happened
to leave Neptune Plaza just minutes before police began beating demonstrators
who had nonviolently surrounded the congress. In a restaurant we watched live
TV coverage of defenseless people holding up their hands and yet still
receiving blows. The next morning a shocking video appeared of police launching
projectiles in a train station. A few days later the head of the riot police
was awarded a medal by the government.
Is this a place
where we really want to live? At least for now, the answer is no.
No comments:
Post a Comment