Authors: Giles Tremlett
My tour of El Romaní revealed just how big a business this was. On the upper floors there were huge, luxury suites with saunas and six-seater jacuzzis. There was a small, well-equipped gym for the 60 to 100 girls who lived here in shared rooms. In the attic I was shown a fully-equipped hairdressing salon and sun-bed. Downstairs there was a boutique selling, amongst other things, miniature bikinis and pairs of platform shoes with impossibly high heels. The prostitutes had their own canteen. A cork board informed them about medical tests and gave addresses of local Western Union branches, so they could send money home. Globalisation, I realised, was firmly entrenched in the Spanish sex trade. A global need for money met a local demand for sex.
The owner’s son, a young man whose expensive black leather jacket matched that of the PR man, showed me a file full of photocopies of the girls’ passports. They came from at least two dozen countries, stretching from Poland, Portugal and Paraguay
to Lithuania, Nigeria or Brazil. ‘We send copies of their passports to the Guardia Civil,’ he explained. ‘That way they can check if any are false.’ The local police, in other words, far from being a threat, were punctually informed of exactly who was working at the club.
The owner’s son said the club filled up with eighteen- to
twenty-five
-year-olds on Saturday nights, some dropped by girlfriends who met them later at a nearby macro-discotheque. ‘There are things you just don’t believe until you see them,’ he said. Many prostitutes took Saturdays off. The youngsters were not big enough spenders for them.
An hour or so after my tour of the empty club we came back. Men were coming off shift, or finishing a day at the office. The car park was almost full, though the owner’s son insisted this was a quiet afternoon. He was still hopeful that the crews of three Nato frigates docked in Valencia – from Britain, the US and Italy – would show up. The bar was now packed with girls in micro-bikinis,
tottering
around on towering platforms with transparent, stacked heels. Some were already draped around clients at the bar. Others were leading men upstairs to the rooms.
‘
¿Fumas?
’, ‘Do you smoke?’ asked a Moroccan girl, apparently looking for a cigarette. ‘No, I’m afraid not,’ I replied. ‘
¿Y follas
?’, ‘Do you fuck then?’ she added.
After the initial shock, and the problem of where to rest your gaze, the inside of a
club
pretty soon turns mundane. The clients were an average cross-section of adult Spanish men or, at least, of those who could afford to drop twenty euros on a drink or
anything
from 60 to 600 on sex. Curiously, many really did look as though they were trying to chat up the girls – as if the credit card was not the key part of the deal.
What, I wondered, did the people of Sollana think of having El Romaní, that temple to commercial sex, in their backyard? In town I found another building with bright lights on the front. A figure of Christ decorates the front of the Santa María Magdalena church in the Plaça Major. It is surrounded, not with neon, but with a ring of clear light-bulbs. I found the priest in his parish house just behind the church. He opened the door, but did not
invite me in. ‘Does anybody in Sollana ever complain about El Romaní?’ I asked.
‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Some people complain in private. But it is out of the way in the industrial estate.
‘Whoever goes, goes, and whoever does not, does not,’ he added, somewhat enigmatically. ‘
La gente pasa
. People can’t be bothered.’ The priest himself only went to the industrial estate to officiate at the fiestas for the Virgin of Aïgues Vives in August.
There is no sign of forced exploitation in El Romaní. But this is the high end of the sex market. Only eighty clubs belong to the association, with its rules about medical check-ups and telling police who is working in them. Catalonia, where local authorities have introduced a form of registration, has some 270 clubs. The vast majority, however, make up their own rules. Some have thugs on the door and debt-laden illegal immigrants working, in effect, as sex slaves. What, I wondered when I drove past it outside
Toledo
, would a club called ‘Cow Woman’ be like?
I was still perplexed. If it was illegal to make money out of
prostitutes
– even if it was not illegal to be, or go to, a prostitute – how could the clubs be so brash about their business? And, if
prostitution
really did turn over that much money, who was getting the cash? One obvious place where the money was going was to Spain’s major newspapers.
In my highly conservative neighbourhood of Madrid, a
peculiarly
shaped newspaper is stacked high every morning at the newsagents. Called
ABC
, it is little more than the size of a
magazine
. Old men with bottle-green woollen overcoats or Burberry macintoshes queue up at my local newspaper shop every morning to buy this, the voice of traditional, Roman Catholic Spain – though, I notice that, after a recent revamp, it is also gaining younger readers. Every Thursday a religious supplement,
Alfa y Omega
, gives voice to the concerns of the archbishopric of Madrid – including, for example, warnings about the dangers of gay marriage or single parenthood.
Flick through the pages of
ABC
, however, and you will find its readers are no strangers to prostitution. For here are several pages
covered with hundreds of small advertisements from prostitutes. ‘Eva, 19. Upper-class girl from Salamanca neighbourhood, so insatiable that my parents threw me out of the house after
catching
me in bed with lots of boys. I am pure
vicio
, (vice). Now I live on my own … and can do all the
guarraditas
(dirty little things) I ever dreamed of,’ runs one. It is by no means the most explicit. All Spain’s ‘serious’ newspapers run advertisements like this.
El País
,
El Mundo, La Vanguardia, El Periódico, El Correo
… All the
worthiest
publications boast pages of advertisements that, in some newspapers, can be accompanied by photos of scantily clad women and descriptions of the world’s more bizarre sexual
practices
. The advertisements are placed by male, female and transvestite prostitutes. Like all established small-ads columns, they have their own argot. There are promises of sexual practices from across the world – Greece, Thailand, Japan, even Burma – in ‘private apartment, hotel or at your home’. Credit cards, some advertisements reassure readers, will be accepted. The
Comisiones
Obreras trade union claimed in 2005 that one newspaper, which it did not name, was gaining 6 million euros a year from these advertisements.
The contrast between a country which, when asked by pollsters, describes itself as 80 per cent Roman Catholic and its generally laissez-faire attitude to all things sexual is one of Spain’s great paradoxes. That contrast reaches its zenith in the pages of
ABC
and – lest you think that this is a last vestige of ‘old’ Spain – in its new, successful, even more conservative rival,
La Razón
. The Pope inspires the editorials but it is prostitutes who service the smallads pages. The left-wing and liberal press is, in a convenient combination of commercial and moral interests, laissez-faire on sex and, by extension, prostitution, almost as a matter of identity. Searching through the archives of the left-wing
El País
, for
example
, I find precious little room afforded to the kind of feminist thinking that says prostitution gives men the wrong idea about women.
Prostitution, then, is a sort of open secret. It is there for all to see, but is surrounded by either silence or indifference. Spanish
friends, of both sexes, enjoyed my tales from El Romaní. Few made any comment, however, except to say that the disabled room sounded like a good idea. Most did not realise that Spain had far more, or at least far more visible, brothels than other places. Some agreed that prostitutes provided a social service. The contrast with my class-full of New York University students could not be greater. That is not to say that some Spaniards – mostly
traditional
, Catholic conservatives or feminists – do not want to get rid of prostitution, but they remain largely silent or unheard.
The problems with the
anglosajones
, several Spanish newspaper columnists had already informed me, was that too many of us were
moralistas
. Although the translation, ‘moralist’, often sounds harmless enough, in Spanish it brought connotations of extreme puritanism.
Moralistas
, they suggested, were moral fascists, out to control the private lives of others.
Spaniards seem genuinely unconcerned about sexual morality or, more accurately, other people’s sexual morality. A recent glut of open-to-air, late-night porn on local television channels – peppered with advertisements for chat lines – has been greeted with either jokes, or resounding silence. I once walked into a bar in a small Andalusian town to find it playing on the television set in the corner. The customers, male and female, continued their conversations as if it was just another bullfight or football match rather than a stew of naked, ejaculating bodies. Turning on the television while
sitting
up late one night working on this book in a small hotel in a lovingly restored old building in Granada’s Albaicín district, I was given my introduction to gay porn. Two men were mechanically sodomising one another on what appeared to be some local broadcaster. Are the conservative burghers of Granada, or any other city whose local television stations are, like the local
newspaper
, making money off prostitution or pornography, up in arms? Not at all. It is not just that nobody is, or is prepared to admit to being, scandalised. Sex, paid for or otherwise, just seems to be a matter-of-fact sort of business. Puritanism, it seems, really does belong to Europe’s north.
I was reminded of this by Alex Ollé, one of the directors of the
avant-garde Catalan theatre group La Fura dels Baus, as we sat at a café table in the main square of the small Murcian farming town of Lorca. I had just sat through his play
XXX
at the town’s quaint, turn-of-the-century playhouse. La Fura have gained themselves an international reputation for sensorial bombardment, for
getting
in their public’s faces.
XXX
was no exception. It featured a live internet link to a Barcelona peep-show as well as simulated, or filmed, threesomes, foursomes, blow-jobs, cunnilingus, spaghetti sex, sodomy, rape, S&M, incest and, to finish it all off, genital mutilation. At one stage the play had invited me to
contemplate
the non-dilemma of whether pornography or war was more shocking, as if the two things were somehow comparable. More seriously, it was also an invitation to think about where the limits were. I had to close my eyes for most of the last five
minutes
, the rape and mutilation scene, so my personal answer was obviously somewhere before that. But none of the dapper elderly gents or fierce-looking matrons, fresh from the hairdressers for their night out at the theatre, appeared, at least on the surface, terribly disturbed. Certainly none accepted the invitation to leave if they felt shocked.
‘This show would cause a scandal in a small British town,’ said Ollé, accurately predicting what would happened when it travelled to a London stage a year later. ‘The British are very conservative. When it comes to sex, there is not too much prejudice here in Spain.’
I am not sure, however, whether he was completely right. There still seems to be something very male-centred and, one young
Madrileña
woman suggested to me, slightly seedy about this
attitude
. Certainly, she assured me, young men still had different ideas about what was acceptable sexual behaviour for them and what was acceptable for young women. That form of prejudice at least had not disappeared.
Only a handful of voices on the Catholic, conservative right or the feminist left seem to get worked up about prostitution or pornography. Shortly after I had visited El Romaní, I came across a long report in
El País
newspaper on the country’s status as Europe’s largest consumer of cocaine. A psychiatrist suggested
that one reason for that was that a defining trait of modern Spaniards was that they were radically opposed to banning
anything
. ‘Anything that smacks of restriction or prohibition in this country is considered immoral, old-fashioned and fascist,’ the psychologist, Carlos Alvarez Vara, said. Spaniards, in short, do not like being told what not to do.
To be scandalised about sex is to be ‘
estrecho
’, ‘narrow’ or
prudish
– something associated with the repressive, and hypocritical, time under General Franco when the Church really did set the rules. His death set Spain on a delayed sexual revolution that was grasped with fervour. But it would be wrong to blame all this on
el Caudillo
. Too many years have gone by. The pendulum has had plenty of time to swing the other way.
One measure of Spaniards’ attitudes to the rules that govern sex is the age of consent. This was raised from twelve to thirteen in 1999 by Aznar’s government. Other European countries place that age at anywhere between fourteen and seventeen. In the US it goes as high as eighteen in some states. Only a handful of
countries
– mostly Latin American or African – have a similar, or lower, age. In practice, however, Spaniards start their sex lives later than in other European countries. Most young Spanish men remain virgins until after their eighteenth birthday while most women wait until they are nineteen.
There can be a brisk, often amused, frankness in the way Spaniards discuss sex. On several occasions I have been caught out, and thrown into tongue-tied episodes of embarrassment, by sudden, graphic confessions of peccadilloes or amatory
experiments
. What, after all, do you say to a neighbour who apologises for not answering his doorbell because he was ‘snogging the babysitter’ while his wife was out? This attitude is reflected on television. One advertisement, for a chocolate bar, starts, as a joke, with a young man waking up with a tent-pole-sized erection in his boxer shorts.