Authors: Giles Tremlett
None of this fitted with their palatial new property. When I rang on the video-phone at the
pazo’s
elegant, wrought-iron entrance gate, a modern gate next to it slid silently open. A voice invited me to drive up the long, gently curved gravel path. The
pazo
was, temporarily, in the hands of the Spanish courts. A deal had been struck with a well-known wine company to tend the vines and produce the Pazo de Baión
albariño
wine until the place was auctioned off.
‘The
narcos
are not exactly famous for their good taste,’ warned an estate worker as he tugged at the
pazo
’s heavy front doors and prepared to show me around.
This was deliberate understatement. The
pazo
was built at the turn of the century by a Galician emigrant who made his fortune
in Argentina and wanted to impress the neighbours when he returned with his ex-prostitute wife and thirteen children. The man had time to build a remarkable house before his wife gambled the fortune away. They never moved in, being forced to live in a smaller, older building on the estate. Styled after a French chateau, the
pazo
’s spacious rooms had beautiful, carved wooden ceilings and intricately laid parquet floors.
These, however, proved not to be to Esther’s taste. The first thing she did after buying the house was have the floors pulled up. She replaced them with the sort of bleach-resistant, heavy, shiny brown tiles that one sees in Spanish motorway service areas. Outside, a large concrete plinth was erected on the flight of steps sweeping grandly up to the front door. The plinth had been, my guide insisted, due to hold a life-size statue of Esther herself. Four other plinths were also set up in the garden: there was one for her husband and partner in crime, Laureano Oubiña; there were two for her daughters; and the last one, conveniently tucked around a corner, was said to be for her mother-in-law.
Fortunately, she did not have time to indulge in much redecoration. First a judge arrested her, seizing the
pazo
and its contents. Then, when let out, she drove her SUV off an empty straight road into a wall. That was the end of Esther Lago. Was it an accident? Or was it another professional hit? Many believe it was the latter.
A wall of silence, however, surrounds the
narcos
. Their wealth has helped pump new cash into what, until recently, was one of western Europe’s poorest, most backward regions. Fear and admiration prevent locals tipping police off, even though everybody knows, or claims to know, who they are. The wives of three traffickers who disappeared together one night, and are widely believed to have been murdered, are said to be swimming in cash. Their silence, it is said, was bought with money backed by threats. One local
narco
, the Vilagarcía schoolteacher told me, was famous for the glass-bottomed swimming pool he had on the second floor of his house. Naked prostitutes were said to frolic in it when he and his friends partied downstairs.
Some of the
narco
stories sounded too good to be true. Where
did reality end and story-making start? In a region fond of myths and stories, I decided, the
narcos
were becoming the stuff of modern legends.
It was, perhaps, inevitable that the first public opposition to the
narcos
should come from another group of Galician women. In the port city of Vigo a group of mainly middle-class mothers who watched their children succumb to cocaine and other addictions decided to make the
narcos
’ lives as difficult as possible. Their most famous action was to try to tear down the iron gates of the Pazo de Baión. They once chased Carmen Carballo down the street in her wheelchair after she had appeared in court. And they were there at Esther Lago’s funeral, shouting ‘
asesino
’, ‘murderer’, at her husband.
I met a roomful of these fierce mothers, some attired in fur coats, twin-sets and angora sweaters, in Vigo. Cocaine, not surprisingly, is both cheap and plentiful in Galicia. The mothers’ aim was to break the silence surrounding the clans. ‘Galicia is a closed society,’ explained Carmen Avendaño, the group’s leader. ‘But Galician women are not naturally submissive. The
narcos
do not scare us.’
The
narcos
are one of the least attractive modern phenomena to have appeared in a country where the juxtaposition of old and new, accentuated by the speed of progress, is a constant source of surprise and wonder. Nowhere, however, is the contrast so great as in Galicia. Leave one of the fast new roads or motorways that, suddenly, seem to criss-cross it and you soon find yourself back in the lost world of country farmsteads, confusing road signs, eucalyptus and cows. ‘Down a winding road, a turbo-charged diesel car overtakes a tractor, which is overtaking a cart,’ is how Rivas explains it.
On a summer’s afternoon I found myself, lost again, in the mountainous country – wolf territory – around Mondoñedo, near the border with Asturias. I was looking for somewhere called Santo Tomé. As usual, in a region where a single place name may be shared by up to two dozen locations, there was more than one choice. Also, as usual, I chose the wrong Santo Tomé first. I was
looking for a
rapa das bestas
, a rounding-up of wild Galician ponies from the mountainside. By the time we got to the mountain top, however, the ponies had already been corralled and the foals branded to match that of their mother. They were handsome chestnut beasts, with dark manes, small, slim and famously surefooted. Some of the Galician cowboy horse-herders rode them with just one rein. The horses were normally left to roam for their first three or four years of life. ‘That way they learn to keep their footing on the uneven land up here,’ one rider said.
At the
rapa das bestas
we bought T-shirts off a local environmental group and were given, as a present, a small, thin book with dark green, cardboard covers. The title was ‘
El Valle de Oro. Sociedad de instrucción, protección y recreo
.
Memoria Social 1928
’. It was a reprint of the report on the work of an association of emigrants from this valley who had fled its poverty for Cuba, made money and decided to form a charity to fund school-building and other activities back home. The book was a reminder of just how neglected Galicia had been. ‘There probably wasn’t a single family in the Valle de Oro that did not have a relative on that island. Cuba was, for us, something more than a distant country and Havana was more familiar than many a Spanish city,’ commented Antonio Orol Pernas in an introduction to the book.
An estimated 900,000 Gallegos left the region in the nineteenth century, mainly for Latin America where, in some countries, those of Spanish origin are still routinely called
gallegos
. Boys, most unable to read or write, were shipped off at ages as young as twelve. Well over a million more followed in the twentieth century. ‘The biggest Galician city is still Buenos Aires,’ says Rivas. ‘And the biggest Galician graveyard is the Cristóbal Colón cemetery in Havana.’
The Valle de Oro report contained pictures of smart, bow-tied and besuited Cuban–Galicians with carefully combed and oiled hair. Their sophistication contrasted with the pictures of the openings of their
Casa-escuelas
back in the valley, attended by peasants clad in their Sunday best of thick, woollen trousers and jackets, and collarless shirts with their top buttons done up.
‘
Escuela que se abre, celda de cárcel que se cierra
’ (‘For every school that opens, a prison cell closes’) the Cubans reminded their poverty-stricken brothers back home.
The emigrants even tried to intervene in the valley’s courts. They had raised 160 dollars for the defence of a young man, Manuel Acebo Rey, who had murdered his sister’s lover. In a letter to the governor of Lugo, they spelt out why Acebo should be treated leniently. ‘The deceased (may God pardon him) cheated on and dishonoured the sister of the accused, who was working in his house. After leaving her in a sorry state, he then declined to have her in his service: she, naturally, returned to the parental home, where he would go to see her with one does not know what intentions … On one of these occasions he was required to explain himself by the master of the house, whose soul was greatly pained by his daughter’s disgrace and the trampling of his honour: but, unable as he was to control his arrogance, the [deceased] man attacked the old man, which caused the son to intervene. There was a scuffle and, finding a kitchen knife to hand, young Manuel grabbed it and, without premeditation and in order to defend himself, killed the aggressor who had tricked his sister.’
Perhaps only the Irish can fully understand the Galician experience of emigration. For here, as there, famine drove the desperate away. Rosalía de Castro was, as a child, appalled by the sight of the hungry masses begging in her home town of Santiago de Compostela in 1853. ‘I don’t know how our country can resist such supreme pain,’ she wrote, at a time when she herself contracted typhus on a trip to Muxía. Her husband, the
rexurdimento
writer Manuel Murgía, said those scenes were repeated in 1880 at a time when ‘the inhabitants of the province of Lugo ate grass’.
Only the cows eat grass in Galicia now, but centuries of emigration mean there is an easy two-way flow between this corner of Spain and other parts of the world. Standing one day with the women dropping off their clams and cockles at the Vilagarcía
lonja
(the dockside shed where wholesalers buy the fresh shellfish) I found myself chatting to two with New Jersey accents. On other occasions I have bumped into Gallegos from
Hammer-smith
,
Notting Hill, Luton or Sydney, Australia. And those are just the ones with
anglosajón
connections. In the 1960s and 1970s Gallegos headed for the car factories of France and Germany and the restaurants of Switzerland. They have also been huge migrants within Spain. There is, for example, a Gallego restaurant on the corner of my block in Madrid. A second one lies fifty metres away. And, the same distance further on, there is a third. The result is that, at sometimes exorbitant prices, yesterday’s catch from Vilagarcía’s
lonja
is available for lunch around the corner today.
Poor, desperate and easily exploited, other Spaniards looked down on Galicians for centuries. They were the country’s cheap labourers. A strong back and an obedient attitude were their only virtues. ‘The Galician is a very similar animal to a man, invented to relieve the ass,’ the nineteenth-century Madrid commentator Mariano José de Larra wrote.
Many
emigrantes
, and their children, can still vote in Spain. In fact, every ninth Galician voter lives abroad – usually thousands of miles away. Voters far outweigh actual residents in some towns. In the
concello
of Val do Dubra, for example, the vote is decided in Argentina, where some 40 per cent of its 7,318 voters live. In Avión, almost half the 4,370 voters live abroad, many in Mexico. Emigrants can, therefore, choose mayors in towns and villages some have not visited for decades or, indeed, may never have seen. It is some consolation for the
morriña
(nostalgia) Galicians are meant to feel for their homeland.
Manuel Fraga, while regional premier, did regular tours of Argentina and other Latin American countries. He is great friends with, of all people, that other long-lived populist of Galician origins, Cuba’s Fidel Castro. On one visit to Buenos Aires, however, he was greeted by shouts of ‘
asesino
’ as the children of exiled former Republicans reminded him of his own Francoist past and called out names of those killed by Franco’s governments.
Here, as in the rest of Spain, emigrants often come home to retire. A large, modern house – just that much bigger than the neighbour’s – is the traditional sign of their relative wealth. In the
nineteenth century, for those who had made money in Cuba, the house would included a palm tree in the garden. These houses, the
casas de indianos
, can still be found, the palm trees bigger than ever, dotted around Galicia and Asturias.
Emigration was proof of the Galician’s hard-done-by status.
Morriña
, felt for Galicia rather than Spain, was proof of their love for their own land. Neither explained the Galicians’ continued attachment to a Spain that is, relatively, so unloved in the Basque Country and Catalonia. The reason for that, I felt, must lie in Galicia’s place in the founding legends and myths of Spain. To understand them, I would have to follow a road already trodden by millions of pilgrims, to the Galician capital of Santiago de Compostela.
As miracles go, the one that brought the remains of Santiago El Mayor, St James The Apostle, to the site where a city named after him, Santiago de Compostela, would grow, requires a larger than normal suspension of rational thought. Legend has it that Santiago, brother of St John, was the first to bring Christianity to Spain. He later returned to Judaea, only to be put to the sword by King Herod Agrippa in ad 44. His disciples, Atanasio (Athanasius) and Teodoro (Theodore), placed his corpse on a boat with neither oars nor sails and, guided by an angel, travelled the length of the Mediterranean. They passed through the Strait of Gibraltar into the Atlantic. Then they headed north, eventually reaching the Galician Ría of Arousa. The trip took just a week. The boat came to a stop against a rock at the neck of the
ría
at a place known as Pedrón, Big Rock, and now known as Padrón. A devious heathen queen tried to trick Santiago’s disciples by offering them a cart and two wild bulls to pull it. These fierce, dangerous beasts, however, turned into docile oxen as soon as they discovered the importance of the job in hand. They wandered inland, dragging the saint’s body behind them, and came to a halt in the middle of a forest known as Libredón. This, it seems, was a sign that Santiago should be buried there. And so, they claim, he was.
Mysteriously, it took locals another eight centuries to discover this fact. Apparently the forest grew denser and greener, hiding its secret occupant. Then, sometime after 813, locals began to notice
that, at night, they ‘could see shining lights in the same place where it was said that angels had frequently appeared’. Closer investigation revealed the hidden tomb. Santiago de Compostela – said to derive from Campus stellae, the field of stars – was born. That, at least, is the official, Church version. The appearance of the tomb happened at a time when Christianity in Spain was, quite literally, cornered. The Moors had come, and then gone, from Galicia in the first half of the eighth century. The Christian
Reconquista
was still taking its first, unsteady steps out from Asturias and the north west.