Alicante's Underground

Evenings, Alicante comes to life.  Shadows swell, the sun has weakened and will soon drop. A breeze kicks up to toss the locks of women and men, all the while it also kisses cheeks universally, with no worry about gender. 

The sidewalks fill with people sauntering or sitting at sidewalk cafes. The tables that ring the broad Luceros Roundabout—a main spot of connection and entrance to the underdeveloped underworld, Alicante’s tram—fill to overflowing. More so than the circle’s fountain.   

The city really does have an underground and not just from tram tracks. During the Spanish Civil War, when German and Italian planes would appear from seemingly nowhere, over the sea or over land, and drop bombs, rotten eggs of destruction, the city dug and constructed bomb shelters.  They were big enough and numerous enough to hold much of the population that then lived here.

Of course the victorious fascists, the Nationalist and their dictator Francisco Franco did not wish to remember when they rained destruction through their allies on the Mediterranean Coast that was strongly committed to the Republic and to internationalist causes of reform and even revolution.

That combination of governing a Republic relying on a combination of parties including Leninists, Trotsyists, Trotskyites, and many varieties of anarchists who wanted radical and even revolutionary change was an often tense and shifting achilles heel. 

Nonetheless, the bomb shelters remained under Alicante mouldering.  Since then, with the development of downtown as a shopping and entertainment, place—an extended mall—along with a massive increase in cars and trucks, the underground was expanded to create vast parking lots. 

With the recent development of tourism, migration, and a new pride Alicante began cleaning out the bomb shelters and rehabilitating them.  Many are now places where tourists can visit such that the buried past of the city and of the fascists can become known even if only infrequently can it rise and spread on the city’s surface.

Knowing Alicante with its complex and nuanced histories under our feet and to our sides, has been the task of a small group of writers and of institutions such as the University of Alicante and the Ayuntamiento (the City Government). 

Aiding them in this work that threatens people who depend on the established Nationalist versions of history, have been people who read and discuss. For them, book stores have been key places to meet and discuss this history and much else, as well as to peruse books, including the novels and poems of Alicantinos and an entire world of writers. 

The city’s surface seems placid, with street-side cafes and picture snapping hoards of tourists. (We have just been told that given occupancy rates of hotels, tourist season now extends into October). Yet it contains a vast underground that is mostly empty other than for occasional tour groups and loads of automobiles. 

In some ways, this is a metaphor for a city whose past seems like and extended Freudian space beneath it. Despite the efforts of historians and its intellectuals, that history remains widely unknown. 

In nearby Valencia, bats that come out from there are considered saviors of the city. That powerful image extends into Alicante and may help explain why Alicante encourages setting up bat nests throughout the city. In any case, as creatures that live at night and often come out of the underground, bats seem an apt symbol for denizens of Alicante’s often hidden past underground. 

At night, when the sidewalks fill with people and cafes rumble from vivid conversations, bats fly on the hunt for insects and thereby suggest the missing stories of this city with an underdeveloped underground.

A Walk into Shadows

Last evening, while leaving a sadly closing bookstore I love, I had an intriguing conversation. IN my stroll to my path home, I walked a ways with a colleague from my writer’s group. He is a film-maker and is seeking stories from Alicante.

As we walked in the now dark streets—amazing how quickly the sun sets now and how late it rises—I was struck by the lugubriousness of the street. 

Even in broad day, there is a strange quality to these streets, or maybe it is just in the eye of this beholder. I do not know about the latter and so will just give you my observations. 

Alicante was heavily bombed during the Spanish Civil War by Italian bombers (although I believe Germans were also involved) in alliance with the fascists who carried out a coup against the elected Republican government. 

People talk about the market bombing—I wrote a poem about it, I was so. moved when I found out—when at the height of shopping for lunch, the bombers dropped their load on the public market and killed some 300 people in one fell swoop. 

When I think of that, the images that come to mind are immediately those of warred-out cities in the Middle East, including horribly Gaza. But I also think of the core of Berlin and the places they have left unreconstructed as memorials, such as the missing dome of the Reichstag, the congress building.  

Yet I did not hear about how the market bombing was just one of hundreds of explosions in this city as part of the war effort. 

I noticed the shed-looking, small metal buildings with gates to stairwells. These go down to bomb shelters; people can take tours into them. I did not realize that there were many more entrances and bomb shelters; a network in this central part of the city. I read somewhere that at the time, they could accommodate most of the residents of the city.

However, during the long Franco dictatorship whose victory over the republicans ended the war, the shelters languished and decayed. Many have still not been restored. Though I do not know, I imagine others disappeared in the construction of the web of parking lots under parts of the city’s center.  

I imagined these underground spaces, dank and filled with cobwebs and probably rats, maybe even bats. They seemed eerie to me, witnesses to a past preferably forgotten and hidden.  

It seemed likely that over the decades youths and maybe unsheltered people had entered them for their own ends: residence or spaces beyond control for parties or to just be for a bit. That reminded me of graffiti-ridden decaying buildings in other cities, like the bombed out spaces the anarchists took in Berlin to make cooperative living spaces and government-free spaces. 

This made me recall the bat is an important symbol to Valencians. Called the Rat Penat, it is an official heraldic symbol of Valencia. 

Legends tell of how bats, which the Arabs used to control the inevitable mosquitos in the very swampy land of Valencia’s capital city and hinterlands of the same name, turned against them and enabled Christians to become victorious. As a result, the bat is seen as a protector and vanquisher.

I assume as a symbol it can switch and also speak as a denizen of the night. 

to the dangers of official power.

Alicante has a castle above it, on whose slopes the Arabic city was built. Of course there are stories, such as of the king who had a beautiful marriageable daughter. He set up a contest among two suitors to see who could build a canal to bring water to this ultra-dray place. One of them won, but also lost as the princess died leaving the space of epic in which to construct adventures. 

However, the city bravely expanded away from its walls and down the coast into the domain of fisherfolk. I do not know these tales but I am sure the people had many about the sea. Some probably remain today. 

Houses were not built, unlike today, to maximize views of azure waters and the expansive sea.  People constructed with uninterrupted back walls to the sea for protection. Only in the nineteenth century with the fall of Tangiers did this change. The result is a small warren of narrow and odd angled streets. 

From the sea, before this, came pirates to steal cargo and crops, murder and rape, as well as enslave Alicantinos. Many Spaniards, not just Alicantinos were captured, enchained, and taken to the Maghreb in north Africa.  

I am sure there are (or were) amazing stories about the pirates, the pirate wars, and family members captive among the Arabs

Today the pirate wars are a key part of the celebration of Moros y Cristianos, Moors and Christians, a feast and drama that is central to festivities throughout the region. Sword fights with the pirate king occupy a key place in the re-portrayals.

In fact, the cinema’s of the city have just opened Amenabar’s new film—the Captive— just opened in this city. It relates how the great writer and icon of Spain, Cervantes, as a young man was enslaved in Algiers. This work marks a change in Spain’s portrayal of self and its understanding of masculinity, just as Cervantes’ Don Quixote does if read and examined. 

With the destruction of the Alicante’s walls, one of which ran along the coast, the city built a  modern fin-de-siècle town, simply called El Centro today. From a hundred and fifty to maybe forty years old, these constructions are either decaying or being restored. One see abandoned buildings, or gaps where buildings were with their tiles still pasted against the neighboring building’s wall. 

Each of those has stories and is source material for stories, along with the prison camps and the mass killing of Republican captives not quite a century ago. 

One can only imagine the despair of Republicans gathered in Alicante’s port for transport out of Spain as the war came to a bitter end. Surrounded by fascists, Italian and Spanish, weapons raised, they were never rescued and their bodies now occupy mass graves around the city. 

This is a city of stories, many unheard and untold though they leave traces for those who wish to read them. 

 

My colleague and I parted company, he to seek stories and tread on in the domain of film, and I towards home and the shadows of my anthropological mind.