Days of the Dreaded Sun

The dreaded sun of late July has already appeared.  Though its heat never dissipated through the night, it is burn up the streets even more.

Being very pale and someone who has had cancers removed from his skin,  as well as blistering sunburns, I have never been one of those blonds who beginning as early as possible in late April begins losing his shirt and seeking every opportunity to be near reflective water. I have never developed that tawny tan that blonds get.

I slather sunscreen whenever I go outside in the day, and try, desperately try, to stay in the shade. I watch the sun on the ground, on people, and on buildings, from places where its mostly absent.

Still the beaches fill with people in daytime and northern and Eastern Europeans turned red abound.  

If only I were like my poet friend who goes to the beach at night, when the moon slides across the sky, and tucks himself into the waters of a slowly cooling sea. 

It is not only the sun that is hot, politics is also roaring and sparking, as are fires in some of the peninsula’s mountain forests. 

Last week I wrote about Torre Pacheco, a town in the melon fields filled with Moroccan agricultural workers. The right sought to create an image there of villainous criminal migrants, words that might as well have spring from the fiery tongue of an Orange hate-monger in Washington.  

The Ultras poured in, young men hoping for thuggery and to achieve some nationalist dream, internet goons and influencers, as well as politicians. The police came out and cordoned off the majority Moroccan neighborhood, arrested thugs and politicians, the latter for illegal hate. Spaniards also came out to support the immigrants whether just to pollsters or in more concrete actions.  

The Ultras tried again, in another town, a suburb of Madrid.  Again failure.  But their professional tongue waggers with colorful capes as if they could be national symbols, instead of mass producers of prairie pies, keep trying.  For some reason, the conservatives who are not Ultra, are refusing to denounce them, even while hoping their stink draws flies who vote conservative.  They play a dangerous and polluting game. 

But people are talking. Immigration is a constant theme.

It could still mire the Socialist President Sanchez whose wheels are mired in the thick mud of corruption.  

However, the opposition, conservative party, the PP, sprang a corruption scandal of their own. One can hear its hissing from their political tires. Their vehicle slows.

It is a hot summer, hotter than average. The papers occasionally publish deaths; already they number more than a thousand for Spain for two months. Mostly deaths of poor people and elderly, I am told. 

Still the days have turned noticeably shorter, and soon it will be August when many take vacation. The heat will still be here, but its abatement comes closer. 

Honestly, this year, I will not mind when the day comes I put my shorts away for the year. 

 

Braves Running in Violence at Dusk

 

As I was leaving, the mood in Alicante’s Public Market turned fierce this morning. Normally it is calm and businesslike, except when knots of tourists block stands and paths to listen to their guides and then buy nothing. 

Today, a small gray-haired man, about my age, raised his arm and shook his fist at two tallish, darker skinned men behind the display case in a meat stand. Their eyes were ready to shoot fire as their skin turned darker with rage. 

Inevitably curious about Alicante, I paused.

Spaniards like you went to work in other countries, the gray haired man shouted. That was not so long ago.  

It is all because of you guys, the Right. You create these problems

Strangely ceding a couple of points, one of the taller men shouted back, well we did not go to delinguir.

That word means to commit misdemeanors and sometimes crimes. 

I moved away before the match drew more people and turned even more angry. In Bars, and elsewhere, Spanish can argue forcefully. Their voices are resonant and really boom. But I have never seen an argument in the market through this whole year of being here. 

Part of the reason I walked away was because the context seemed to me explosive and to draw from violence last night and the night before in a neighborhood of farm workers in the next door region of Murcia.

Everyone awakened these days to news that either focused on an elderly Spanish man being apparently beaten by a young Moroccan man whose friends filmed it and put it on a Tik Tok, the news says. I have not seen it. Or, people would perceive hordes of masked self-proclaimed Spanish nationalists marauding through the evening both nights in a hunt (cacería) for immigrants, read Moroccans.

The roving men, armed with machetes and sticks, shovels and hoes, if not more, came from as far away as Madrid, Valencia, or even Alicante, to heed the call of a local leader of VOX, the ultra right wing party to hunt Moros (Moors or Moroccans in local parlance). The call was for vengeance for the man’s beating and to take security into their own hands. 

But the call also comes after the national party has called for the repatriation of millions of immigrants and their Spanish-born children using language from Germany that Trump and his ghouls also rely on, including the notion of replacement theory. 

At the same time, the ruling party, the Socialists, argue that Spains economy  is growing because of immigration to meet the demand for workers, even if young men often find it hard to obtain work. 

The issues are hot, inflamed by face to face debates in parliament where VOX and the conservative, post Franco, PP, the People’s Party through verbal thrusts of sharpened rhetoric to slice and wound the country’s president, who of course sends similarly h9ned swords of words to pierce his enemies, the PP’s Feijoo and VOX’s Abascal. 

Sanchez, the President, stood at the podium: Señor Abascal, why do you hate immigrants. Abascal merely closed his face and looked smug. His deputies delivered the charge of racial replacement later. In the meantime, to not be left out, Feijoo who most likely will become president should the socialists fall, thrust out, you Mr Sanchez, are a hypocrite. You claim to be a feminist but you have lived from money your father-in-law made from owning brothels and Gay saunas. You literally, have live from the exploitation of women. 

Not even the bulls running down the streets of Pamplona and into the bull ring where they will be killed by matadors before thousands have created such tension as Mr. Feijoo slicing Mr Sanchez with the bellowing cry putero, pimp. 

To not be out done and to change the focus of national discourse, VOX’s strong young men and more rotund older men have gone hunting for Moroccans.

Here in Alicante, all this appears in the news as neighborhoods that used to be villages carry out one of the most important annual rituals, the Moros y Cristianos, the great battles between Moors and Cristians when the Cristian kings took Alicante from Spains Moorish kings and carried out an ethic cleansing, replacing them with Christians back in the twelfth century of so. Despite nine-hundred years, that event still draws people and creates memory as well as a division in the population between Spaniards (Cristians) and Moors).

Just as I do not know what happened in the market as the smaller man faced off against the two larger men, I do not know what will happen in Spain, nor in Murcia, nor even Alicante. 

History is far from dead here. The market celebrates annually the day the Italian fascists, in support of Franco’s fascist forces bombed the town’s market and killed more than three-hundred people. Yet one of the founders of Spain’s fascist party is from here and French right wing Pied Noirs colonists were withdrawn from Algeria and settled in Alicante when not even France would take them because of their history of violence. Still, the city was the last capital of the Republic and has/had a vital Communist and Socialist presence. 

I read on line that local Communists are organizing to defend workers rights against VOX’ threats of more general cacerías of immigrants. 

Yet the blood has not settled into the bricks and stones of the streets in Murcia, nor has it fully joined the sand in Parliament. Swords, lances, and colorful banderillas (hooked stakes) have not been put in lockers.  More is sure to come. 

 

As Cretaceous Raptors Escape

The day was wan when I walked out of my building an hour or so after dawn as if exhausted after a long cold night. The cold knifed through my jacket and flicked my ears like a bully in school.  

Across the street, a man often sleeps on cardboard. At dawn he lifts it up and spreads it out to make a privacy barrier for his ablutions and to change clothes. Different people occupied that nook today, a woman in a wheelchair who I could not see well, and a bearded, blond young man, standing with his head resting against the blue tile wall. 

A modestly chi chi neighborhood, mine is a dowager whose wealth may dissipate if not careful. Yet a block and a half toward the sea, a group of women recently opened an elegantly appointed  bakery coffee house. It fills most mornings. The croissants are like those in France and they serve specialty coffee as well as much else. Their Spanish-style breakfast toasts are well crafted with a touch of flair. 

The other day, while out walking—it was warm then, I dropped in to get a brownie take-out. This chocolate madness now appears everywhere it seems, though seldom do they please this gringo’s palate. The woman who was helping me, also blond with a smile that could melt ice at a hundred paces, recommended I try a particular one of the three they offered. I made them, she coyishly said. 

I asked how she got into baking. She said she was from Huelva in Andalucia and had studied cooking and baking there, Spanish and classical. She has worked throughout Spain and now joined in this venture. I took it with me into the plaza in front of the Church with a noisy bell tower, where I sat among many other people and pigeons. 

Well, the pigeons were often flying, the people not to my knowledge. What a hit of dark chocolate—the brownie almost sent me into the air. It was melt in your mouth soft under a light crust.  

I have wondered about the homeless I see on the streets here. On the nearby, elegant avenue Federico Soto, in front of a the flagship Corte Ingles department store and right next to Alicante’s miracle-mile of shopping,  where the Avenue’s benches in white marble make a corner walled on two sides, a grizzled, bearded man lives, his library stacked high and wide. Plastic sheets are carefully folded, as are his bedding and his clothes.

When I first arrived, I stayed with friends in a neighborhood I had visited before, one that may be the poorest and roughest in the city. Homelessness there seemed harsher to me as well as partially fueled by the easy availability of whatever drugs the young men across the street on the hill were selling, People were careful to keep control of their space, in fear of the homeless, the addicts, and others who might just move in and take over--so they said.

I have met a woman from Poland, who attends one of my book groups, and is a social worker with the homeless, though I have not yet had a real conversation with her on the issue. 

Like the US, Spain has a housing crisis and I suspect the homelessness is a partial result of the issue, though I do not really know. I just see the homeless. They are different from the beggars who also populate Spanish streets, especially in relatively well off neighborhoods. 

While there are needy, such as the man from Cádiz who found himself here with not enough money to return home, they are joined by those whose ordinary work is begging. The latter are masters of separating passersby from their cash. 

These include a whole group of Albanian woman. One older Albanian woman with her young dog occupies a niche by the Santander Bank. Bible and crucifix in hand she is the veritable image of suffering older, Catholic woman. Nonetheless, early one morning, I saw her arrive at her place of work athletically riding a personal electric scooter. She seemed a wave rider on the surf of Santander.

I do not begrudge people doing the time-honored task of begging by working our fantasies and fears, except when I feel scammed. This is a venerable profession and plays a social role. 

However I am not writing about the ethics, morality, or sociology of begging. Instead this all, even if tangentially, fits into the housing crisis here. It is simply often hard to know what's what. 

The building I lived in while visiting here, in the hard scrabble neighborhood, was built in the fifties by the right wing dictatorial government as worker housing. It is in a neighborhood of four or five story complexes of multiple apartments. A plaque on mine attested to that history. Somehow the building was privatized. The owner of my flat lives in the US and contracts with a management company to handle the apartment’s affairs. 

This is all relevant because I read in today’s El País that, according to the Socialist Government Spain had a large supply of publicly built housing that “somehow’ had become private property. 

Much public discussion has been about AirBnB removing private housing from the rental market to let them short term at far higher rates that a normal rent would provide. 

Much ink, passionate rhetoric, and demonstrations have focused on this. Sometimes they have taken an anti-tourist and even anti-foreigner flair. Yet the Government, while recognizing this, has spoken about the lack of public housing and publicly funded construction as a control of the rental market. Of course the opposition argues for a more robust vendor’s market with financial assistance to buyers to qualify for mortgages. As is often the case, the two sides speak past each other.  

Earlier this year, Barcelona imposed rent controls as a means of addressing this problem. Yesterday Blackrock, as well as a whole flock cretaceous raptors that soar over the globe, announced it was withdrawing from the Barcelona market. Its peers quickly followed. They say the controls mean they can no longer make the profits they had anticipated. 

With some chagrin, I have to acknowledge that as a relatively well off retired professor, I am part of the group of foreigners coming into the local housing market and providing upward pressure. To be honest, I do not have a good answer to that concern, though I am  trying to integrate into my building community (as they call it) and learn as much as I can. I shall have to write another time about the difficult complexities of “expat”  as a category that encloses me, as opposed to “immigrant” another category that is very troubled in today's world.

The sun is well up and the day is warming up from its earlier 5 degrees centigrade. I'm going back outside,