Before I get into what I really want to write about, I should mention my trip to La Cova Tallada, a small cove just south of Denia, accessible by trail. The path there is mostly a flat, easy walk, but it gets gradually more difficult until the final stretch, where you are forced to briefly cling to rocks, wet from the sea spray, and chains bolted into the mountainside, before clambering into a three-story tall cave scooped out of the cape. There you will find a placid wading pool, protected from the surf by a ridge of underwater rocks and from the sun by a ceiling of stone. The water, along with Roman and Arab miners, has eaten away at the floor of the pool, carving out curves and corners that look like petrified artifacts of the beams of light which refract off of gentle waves. Just past the cave, in a calm nook of sea, silver-scaled fish swim so close they brush your feet and devour jellyfish that threaten the bathing apes. As I sat snacking on the intricately pockmarked stone, it was easy to picture, some day in the distant past, a young, sandaled shepherd sneaking away from his flock to dive into the placid water, emerging silently and from his seat in the very same human-sized hole, throwing Poseidon a tribute of round bread. Anyway, on to the interesting stuff.
Spain is a country designed for people in their forties and fifties. As of 2023, they were each 8% of the population, by far the largest age-decades. 20-to-29-year olds and teenagers were roughly even at five and half percent while those 0-10 barely broke four. In other words, there are about twice as many Spaniards between the ages of 40 and 59 as children. I am twenty four, and it is obvious that this is essentially a nation of people my parents’ age trying to forget how old they are. The music that plays in the bars is theirs. The movies that play on television are theirs. The politicians that haven’t passed a budget in three years are theirs.
It is not a coincidence that this demographic earthquake corresponds roughly to the end of the Franco regime, to the collapse of the last fascist society in Europe and its integration into the modern world. Like fascism’s Italian pioneers and their Teutonic imitators, in fact, perhaps to an even greater degree, the leaders of Spain’s reactionary dictatorship, along with their families, friends, politics, and ideology were not so much purged or rejected as papered over and remodeled to facilitate this absorption. In fact, if you look closely, and you know where to look, the old ways peek out from behind every corner.
I work in a semi-public school, or concertado, which receives most of its funds from the government, both federal and regional, though it is administered by a private company. Its name is Colegio Scientia Denia, but nobody knows it by that name. Everyone in Denia calls it Carmelitas, because that’s what it was called when it was run by the Catholic Church, and the teachers were all nuns. A church that condemned the different, the queer, the disobedient, that was one of the fundamental pillars of fascist power. The same church which ran “reformatories”, prison schools for girls that strayed too far from Franco’s vision for the country, a vision shared by those girls’ parents and teachers. The teachers are former students, once taught by their older coworkers, who are themselves former students. It is politically incorrect for the government to fund religious schools, so now, on paper, they are not religious. But there is an unbroken line of succession, Jesus still hangs bleeding in every classroom, and every Wednesday the students have mass.
Some of the teachers from that school took me out drinking this week. All, of course, between 40 and 59. They took me to a rock bar, a themed joint plastered with kitsch Americana. The music was an inoffensive mix of southern rock, Elvis, and Spanish hits. It has the largest variety of beers in the city, over 170, they said, and it took me over an hour to realize that hanging just behind my table, there was a large confederate flag with a Harley Davidson motorcycle in the center. When I pointed it out, my companions said they had never been to the bar before, and I pretended to believe them. It reminded me of something another teacher said in our introductory meeting. After World War II, many Nazis fled to Spain, and a number of them settled here in Denia. I wondered, after 1975, what flags they chose to replace their old ones.
After the fall of Francoism, Spain threw a giant, generation-long party. Nearly overnight, sex and drugs were permissible and plentiful, and like a teenager suddenly out from under his parents’ roof, the country went wild. Token concessions were presented to those who had gotten the short end of the stick for the past four decades, half-hearted amends made with regionalist and leftist movements that could finally breathe out in the open. But there was no real reckoning. The fascists were never strung up by their feet. None of them shot themselves and their children in a poorly-ventilated bunker. The secret police were disbanded but never liquidated. And it seems to me that the last generation of Spanish fascism made a pact to conserve their power in a most peculiar way.
Knowing, as a cohort, that their way of life, their values, traditions, and beliefs were more or less temporally limited to their own lifespans, they decided to steal, through their collective decision to reduce the number of children they brought into the world, the only real advantage the young have ever had against the domination of the old order; that is, their numbers. They tried to ensure that their children, and their children’s children, would never have the numerical superiority to overthrow them, and that the fundamental ways of life, the assumptions and unquestioned implications of life in Spain, would slip under the radar of the modern, secular, supposedly liberal world.
I do see young people around. I saw them at a punk show at La Mistelera (which, though I didn’t know it two weeks ago, also has an indoor venue). I see them hiking, serving food and drinks, dancing energetically but squeezed by a stationary crowd of gray hair. But they’re mostly not Spanish, even this far out of peak tourist season. They are Latin American, Dutch, German. Spanish youth congregate, it seems, in fortresses like Valencia and Alicante. If they can’t make it there, they are forced into the outskirts, where the elderly won’t find them even by mistake. The prime real estate is perpetually occupied by their parents, tapping their feet to the songs they danced to, like we dance, when they were our age.
Irony Poison 