The "Spanish Robin Hood" is just the beginning; Feelgood Friday

Ready to feel good?

From this report

Unemployment in Spain right now is 37%, and over 55% among the 16-24. Banks are foreclosing on people right and left, and when this happens in Spain, you still have to pay the bloody mortgage. Suicides by overwhelmed ex-homeowners are becoming common, and in some cases while the bailiffs are coming up the stairs, the homeowners jump off the balcony. The international banking mafia has pushed the Spanish government to pass laws making it even easier to fire employees and pay them less severance when you do it, so unemployment is only increasing, while the masses see the political and economic elites as hopelessly and unapologetically corrupt, in the country with the worst income inequality in Europe (though still not as bad as the US, apparently).

Feeling good yet? Wait for it.

All these problems are at their worst in the south (a global trend that may seem familiar), which in Spain’s case means Andalucia. I remember beautiful Andaluz mountain towns where not much was going on, and I fear for the people now. But not all of them. Not the ones in Marinaleda.

In the late 1970s, when Spain was roiling after the death of Franco, trying to catch up to a world from which they’d been isolated for 35 years, Marinaleda elected a mayor named Juan Manuel Sanchez Gordillo. A very different 35 years later and he’s still in office, elected with overwhelming majorities in every election. Why? What has he been doing?

I saw this on a wall in Bogota, Colombia in 2012, before I'd
ever heard of Marinaleda.

They started with a “hunger strike to end hunger” and multiple occupations of large estates under the slogan “Land for those who work it”, alternating with legal appeals within the system. After twelve years of this, they gained control over a stretch of farmland, and now roughly 2,650 of the 2,748 people in the town are part of a farm co-op on it. They work up to six and a half hours a day and are paid twice Spain’s minimum wage, while all profits from the farm are reinvested to create more jobs. Use the profit/product of the land to help people, instead of enriching the 1%? What an astonishing idea.

From this excellent article in The Guardian: “‘We believe the land should belong to the community that works it, and not in the dead hands of the nobility.’ That's why the big landowners planted wheat, (Sanchez Gordillo) explained – wheat could be harvested with a machine, overseen by a few labourers; in Marinaleda, crops like artichokes and tomatoes were chosen precisely because they needed lots of labour.”

From a NY Times article on Marinaleda

The crops they chose required “the creation of a processing factory that provided a secondary industry back in the village, and thus more employment. ‘Our aim was not to create profit, but jobs,’ Sánchez Gordillo explained to me. This philosophy runs directly counter to the late-capitalist emphasis on ‘efficiency’ – a word that has been elevated to almost holy status in the neoliberal lexicon, but in reality has become a shameful euphemism for the sacrifice of human dignity at the altar of share prices."

I don’t know about you, but I get a big ol’ ethical boner when I read those paragraphs. Feeling good yet? Want more?

Remember those evictions? Marinaleda bought and expropriated thousands of square meters of land, and now returns it to the people, along with building materials, labor, and architectural plans through public grants. Homeowners pay 15 euro/month for the rest of their lives, and cannot sell their homes (to prevent speculation).

People in Marinaleda like their mayor

More feelgoodery? Last August, Sanchez Gordillo led supporters into a grocery store, loaded up basic foodstuffs, and took them, without paying, across town to donate to a food bank. “There are families who can’t afford to eat. In the 21st century this is an absolute disgrace. Food is a right, not something with which you speculate.” Of course, if everyone did this, we might have a problem with the people we depend on to transport our food, but the statement, and its willingness to act on behalf of what’s right, are powerful things, a powerful call for higher standards than profit for the few.

The town has no police (and no crime), everyone shares in cleaning and maintaining the community, and they spend the money they save on free internet for all and heavily subsidized childcare. While the neoliberal world decays in entrenched systems of exploitation and corruption, disenfranchised and segregated, apathetic or angry, in Marinaleda co-op members are part of the town’s workings, have a voice, and participate in their community. Private enterprise is absolutely allowed, but exploitative mega-chains are not welcome. Sorry, Walmart, but vete al carajo.

I remember back to the Occupy movement, the indignados in Europe, and all the world’s people who recognize that a system that sucks the blood from the masses to fatten the 1% is not the best we can do, and I can hear the opposition and critics who said “Okay, unfettered rapacious capitalist greed doesn’t work for you, but what do you suggest?” Occupy didn’t seem able to produce a clear alternative, but 108 kilometers from Sevilla, I know where you can find one.

Gifts in Granada

That last post about Tarifa came from an old journal, a paragraph not relevant enough to include in my book, but I enjoyed giving it a little life somewhere else. Another such moment popped up a day and a page later, in Granada. After a long morning walk among the flamenco byways and impressive graffiti of the Andalusian city, I had found a small neighborhood park to rest for a moment.

Losing all my own pictures and having
to use other people's is driving me crazy

Granada was messing with me, one moment of still sunlight would make me wish I’d worn shorts, then the next a winter wind gave meaning to my jeans-ing. I was temporarily in the warmer former, in that place where as much grass grew in the paths as between them, when a child ran up to me.

Yellow sweater, yellow stockings, and a green shirt...with yellow triangles on it. All eclipsed by hair so blond, Rapunzel read about it as a child. Given her gouda complexion, I was expecting Swedish when she opened her mouth to address me, but instead I heard Spanish.

“Hello!”

“Hello, how are you?” The words were the same as high school oral presentations, but the premise had never been: You’re talking to a strange ethereal five year-old in a park in Granada. Introduce yourself and carry on a polite conversation.

“I’m well. Do you speak English?”

“Yes I do.” To prove it, I switched to my mother tongue to say “And do you speak English too?”

An intent pause as she examined my face. A giggle. A solid look at my feet before continuing, in Spanish. “Why are you barefoot?”

Grumble. I liked my angle of this one better.

I sited the beautiful weather, and told her I’d walked a lot that day already. She considered this, then repeated her question, verbatim, and added “My grandpa doesn’t let me take my shoes off.”

Oops. I’d been in this situation before, the accidental bad example, during my hippie days at university when my ten-toed sasquatch presence implicitly countermanded the edicts of new-parent friends. Time for damage control.

“Your grandfather is right. There are a lot of stones here, you might hurt yourself on them...” I’m sorry grandfather, I’m trying.

A moment more careful examination, then she ran off, returning with a double handful of stones. She showed them to me, then dribble-dropped them at our feet and cheerfully informed me: “Rain!” A solid giggle. Warmer than the sunlight.

But it is a good thing I'm not the only one
who noticed Granada's beautiful street art.

“Wait for me!” And she ran off to my right, disappearing behind a bush. I stood blinking, dazzled by the sun and the unexpected contact with an unfamiliar age group, then she was back, appearing from my left with a handful of leaves and twigs. She sang me an unintelligible tune that ended with a shout of “Christmas!” and the plants flung in the air. More giggles. She repeated the loop-song-toss cycle, first with grass, then with rocks. The last round, the ditty may have been about someone’s culo de caca, not sure what the deal was with that one, though it still ended with “Christmas!”

I was about to ask her about it, but she ran back to play with the other children, and left with her grandfather a little while later. I resumed my journey, so did she, so did the entire city, but it’s nice to remember a golden moment of a giggling child on a sunny day at the end of winter.

Alone together in Tarifa

If Spain were a big, worrisomely lumpy breast, then Tarifa would be the downward-sagging nipple, poking across the Strait of Gibraltar at my goal for the day: Morocco. But Tarifa was also the home of the wind, and the first two ferries were already cancelled when I arrived at the harbor in the whiskey-colored lamplight before dawn.

Hours of unrelenting wind cancelled ferry after ferry, until my last chance was the 5:00, four hours away. Tired of hard plastic chairs and neon lights, I wandered down to the beach below rotting cliffs, where the stone ribs of the Mediterranean stuck up on shore in a ragged shirt of dying drying seaweed.

Somehow over the years I lost my photos of this part of that
trip, so these are from elsewhere, in this case, and Kayakoy,
an abandoned village in Turkey.

Down among the fallen rock and discarded shoes stood a line of forgotten fortifications, broken walls with nothing much to do, but makeshift doors and the barking of barely contained dogs testified that somebody was doing something here.

The King of the Shattered was a circular bastion, gun slot barricaded with broken beer bottles and spent cigarettes. It seemed almost whole, though the roof was gone. It’s always the roofs that are the most mortal. Evicted from the beach by a rising tide, I turned to see the door of the bastion now open, framing a man in olive (canvas) pants and a camo jacket with the East German flag on the left shoulder.

We nodded our greetings in passing, but then he sent some Spanish mumbling and crumbling my way. Most of it caught in the wind and landed somewhere in Cyprus, but he added a machine-gun gesture. A wind-scoured moment passed before I realized he was telling me the history of the building. Why not, I got no place else to be. Pleased by my interest, he became an eager tour guide, albeit uninformed and unintelligible.

Windy afternoon in Iceland

His steel hair didn’t speak comb, and he had the watery eyes of someone who had spent long hours in conversation with alcohol, but their sadness was harmless. I looked down at my own olive (canvas) jacket, felt the wind in my overgrown hair, and wondered how the eyes of a traveler who’d spent too many weeks alone might look to him.

I asked to take a look inside and he gestured me forward with a shy smile of a few broken teeth, and the sweep of a quaking hand. In a mess of more broken bricks and crumbled mortar I found his treasure: five underweight chickens of missing feathers and hideous feet.

When I took out my camera, my host disappeared in a hunt-and-peck of words about someone finding out he was there. I wondered who?  I put the camera away and he reappeared, now with a few small eggs decorated with feather fluff and chicken shit, which he carefully slid into a plastic bag. Was he going to give them to me?

Same abandoned village, Kayaköy, Turkey

We hung there for a still moment, two men and five chickens, a bag of eggs awkward between us, while the wind raged just outside.  The thought that he was my future was too heavy, too possible, and I drifted out the door. We dispatched a few last words at each other, with customary incomprehension, and parted as friends.

As I pushed through air that didn’t want me there, wet sand scraping inside my socks, on my way to a barren room for one, my brain deciphered his last words:

“Perhaps you will come back, and next time take my picture.”

This man, alone in this place, as I was lonely on my road, had wanted me to take his photo. Something in our contact had reached him. Maybe he wanted someone else to see him. To recognize him, and hold a camera up to prove it. I knew how that felt.

I considered staying another day to see if the wind would relent. Perhaps go back down to that broken beach and look for him. Maybe take his picture. But that moment was gone, so I caught a bus to Granada, early the next whiskey-colored morning.

(If you are in the San Francisco area, I'll be reading this piece, or something like it, tonight at Book Passage, around 7:00 PM)

Manjarin

The Knights Templar... I knew the name, but little beyond a vague sense of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Then I met some and they did more than attempt to assassinate charismatic archaeologists with chiseled jawlines. Tell me more, Indiana Google.

Among the most powerful military organizations during two centuries of the Middle Ages, the Templars were founded to protect pilgrims to Jerusalem after the First Crusade, and played a key part in many battles during those ill-advised conflicts.

Individual members were sworn to poverty and a life of servitude, but the order prospered, partly due to the creation of an early form of banking, whereby crusaders would give their money to the Order and receive a paper script, which could be redeemed in The Holy Land and/or their return home. This meant they didn't have to carry their money, leaving them less tempting to bandits on the long road to/from Jerusalem, but also that the ones who died, effectively gave their earthly fortunes to the Knights.

Being rich and sort-of-banks, the Templars eventually loaned a bunch of money to King Philip IV of France, who was an asshole.  Instead of paying them back, he eradicated his rivals in 1307 by having them all arrested (on Friday the 13th) and tortured into confessions of idolatry, homosexuality, and spitting on the cross.  History records that the last Grand Master of the Templars was burned at the stake in Paris in 1314 for having recanted his earlier confession.

There is a popular legend that as he died he cursed the Pope and the King to join him in death; both died within the year.

Almost seven hundred years later, somewhere in the 1980s, a snowstorm hit the mountains of western Castilla-Leon. The people of the already semi-abandoned village of Manjarin were forced to take refuge in the lower lands, and when they returned, they found that snow had caved in their roofs, and looters had taken most of their possessions.  Harsh, no?  The town had been struggling to survive for some time already, and that was the flake that broke the villagers' back, so they packed up what remained and left, leaving the town to fall into ruin, like several others in the area.

A few years later a generous and hard-working man named Tomas opened an encomienda in the abandoned schoolhouse.  It is separate from the albergue system of the Camino de Santiago, and is located just before the highest point on the French Way of the Camino in an area characterized by bad weather.

Tomas is a Templar Knight.

I reached Manjarin coming down through the mist after passing the Iron Cross, a pilgrim landmark and guide post with an unfortunate name (though the cross was there long before the Nazis hatched from their eggs). The town is largely reduced to piles of fallen stones, with the notable exception of the refugio, that welcomes you with a display of flags and woodsmoke from the chimney.

The building is basic, stone, and the fireplace in the corner provides all the heat, some of which is carried by a chimney up to the loft where a dozen lucky pilgrims can sleep on mats, nervous about the smoke that lingers in the room but grateful for the heat.

There is no running water in the abandoned town, so the toilet is a dry one, with a pile of sawdust to dump in after you use it. The generator is for emergencies, and illumination comes from candles, a propane tank providing the cooking, and a bellows is an everyday tool for keeping the fire going.

A few serious men have dedicated themselves to this ancient order, and live in that empty stone town, offering peregrinos a unique experience in a place without street lights, clean of the cacophonies of traffic and television, and wrapped in mist that holds the sound of the Gregorian Chant close and intimate.

Tomas was away the night I was there, but the two men who were there prepared a simple dinner for us, which we took together at a trestle table, discussing their belief that Jesus took a wife, had children, and that women can exist outside of the Virgin v Whore dynamic promoted by some other dogmas over the centuries.

They believe celibacy is a powerful tool for getting closer to God…if the brother chooses it.  Otherwise it does not work.  It is always nice to hear common sense.

That place is no softer now than it was in the 1980s, and the modern Knights alternate years staying during the winter. They get few pilgrims during the snowbound months, but they do get some. The thought of that isolated mountain shrine, wrapped in snow, Gregorian chant hanging in the stillness…that would be worth the cold climb.