Tag: Basque

Day 4 -Bilbao

Last night was too sober, I had trouble getting to sleep and everything irritated me. I was sitting in the common room of the hostel late at night drinking a glass of water and looking at the posters – British colonial, Chinese communist and Hindu – when the lady who ran it came in. 

“The common room is closed.” 

I felt snappish and down but said only “perdone” as I washed my glass and went back to bed. 

In the morning I am desperate to leave the hostel. I finish a diary entry before I realise I have missed the bus I had planned to get. I rush pack and shower and leave for the station. There, I wait at the terminal but when the bus arrives they turn me away – I need a ticket. No matter, I buy one for the next bus with space – the 1220. I sit on the steps outside and eat my first cigarette of the day. Bilbao is worrying me. I haven’t booked anywhere to stay when I get there, nor found any connections to meet. Never mind, I head to the library and do some research on my laptop and engage with everyone back home. Roger Hallam says we have one year to change society. They always exaggerate, but not by much – 18 months is the figure I’ve heard. 

I feel incredibly far away, denialist and self-indulgent. 

I head back to the station and grab a coffee on the way. On the bus to Bilbao I speed write one article and plan another. I for one will go down fighting. 

We rise up into the basque land, fiercely beautiful and steep, the home of irregular warfare. Turning a corner, Bilbao appears as an almost equal city, every building a similar size and style except for a monolithic oval of glass and steel at its centre, phallic and strangely imperial. The bus arrives and I step out realising I’m in a big city again. I’m a little freaked out by its bustle and anonymity, so after a detour to a cafe toilet – no lock on the door – I book a hostel. It’s cheap and there is only one room left and I know I’m being stupid but I do it and when I’ve paid I check where it is – an hour across town, on top of a mountain. I’m exaggerating but hill just doesn’t cover it. Never mind, I hoist my bag onto my shoulder and get my walk on, rationing myself to only two pictures of graffiti on the way. There are many older ladies begging in doorways, in what I think are Kurdish shawls, but i don’t stop to talk. I tell myself I’ll find out what this means later. Bilbao is already more metropolitan and multi-ethnic than Santander. I even saw a vegan option in a restaraunt! 

Half way there I see a punk looking at me friendly and ask “por favor, donde espacio anarchistas?” 

“Like a squat?”

“Yeah”

“It’s just round the corner, up the steps”

Fuck sake. I mark it for later and continue. 

– later – 

Wandered into town, bought coffee, talked ear off possible new organiser from home, supermarket bought basics, back to the hostel…

Came out to a beautiful sunset. Walked down into town – realised I wasn’t wearing a jumper. Back to the hostel…

Descended the mountain to the river, then right up a thin street, I hear the roar of a crowd from the next street over. Calle Somera is crowded with small groups drinking beers and smoking, fed by the bars that open on both sides of the street. Radical stickers are everywhere. I can’t find the squat so I buy a beer and wander round, but like so many scenes like it it’s hard to join. I stop and buy weed from a geezer (twice the price it should be, I later learn – fuck it, I’d bleed the tourist too) and chat to the Swedish guy sitting next to him, but we share approximately nada. I keep wandering until I see a young woman on her own in an antifascist hoodie, waiting around. I stop to chat and find she has passable English, just bad enough to be fun working out words she doesn’t know – good diversion. I explain I am an anarchist – “but I am a communist!” She exclaims. I try to draw her into discussing politics but she says it’s hard enough in Spanish.

Her friends, a bunch of punks, show and we roll a joint (porro). They are all quite beautiful and young and fill me with nostalgia and sadness. We have the conversations I’ve had so many times before; stoned surrealism – her friend‘s cat can teleport, possibly see ghosts, maybe is a ghost – drugs as a right of passage – she’s 17, says one year she couldn’t stop doing amphet – romantic violence in punk music – ‘Volo volo, Carrero volo!’ (1) And I’m filled with the same sense of wanting to reach out and protect, with a maturity born of reading of death, these fragile open egos. Somewhere, mixed in, is the usual inappropriate sexual frisson of power which I will keep locked in my shoes. 

I ask her to translate the chorus of the song I’m writing into Spanish, which she does, and tells me it is very beautiful. I want to yell ‘many things are beautiful, this is nothing, you are so young and will die!’ But just say ‘muchas gracias’ a few times. She shows me a video of her and her friends playing a cover of a punk song. The drummer is twice as fast as everyone else. She heads for home and the remainder head to a pontoon on the river, where I jump around like an overclocked robot worrying her friend wrecked on absinthe will fall. He doesn’t. More weed, more tobacco – my lungs feel full of tobacco – and rap music. Most of the kids here are communists it seems, maybe legacy of ETA, but one who is an anarchist has a tattoo that says RAP with a circle A. I can’t find anything to talk about so I head for the hostel, stopping half way up to buy crisps and beer which I consume on a bench by, apparently, the most regularly patrolled road in town. I try to catch up on my diary and work on my song as I watch the police drive by and the drunks wander past. 

– later still – 

I get back to the hostel and two men from Barcelona are smoking outside. One recognises the Anarchy symbol on my jacket and says hi – he’s an anarchist too, but we don’t share enough language to learn in depth. He’s studying to make violins; used to play but then he got meningitis and his hands can no longer tension the strings. His friend rolls a joint and shows me his poetry, then Billy Joel’s piano man. They’re good people to stay up too late with. Before I go inside I meet a German man who’s in town for the football – says it will be like street war between the teams. We talk politics and the left club St Pauli. He says there are a lot of fascist football supporters in Germany, big wide old men who get aggy with the young. I get inside and spend an age trying to sort out my bed before giving up and sleeping in the duvet cover. It’s good. 

The song:

Cariño (After Carmelita, by Warren Zevon)

 

I hear American voices talk nothing

And laughing with gossip exchanged

And as I slip between 

Awake and asleep

I’m home with you in my dreams 

 

Chorus: (Spanish parts sung in harmony)

Slowly, my sweet boy

I think I’m sinking down 

Tranquilo cariño

Creo que me estoy ahogando

As I wonder what you’re taking

On the streets of my hometown

Me pregunto Si te estaras drogando

En alguna Calle de mi ciudad 

 

Well I took the bus to Bilbao 

And I met the image of you

And as she laughed when

I told her your name

A part of me howled at the moon

 

(Chorus)

 

My darling I feel you fading

Beneath the stress of my life and the strain

Of finding yourself

Of making your way 

And always escaping the pain

(1) ‘Volo volo, Carrero volo!’: Luis Carrero Blanco, was prime minister for a time. When ETA, the paramilitary group fighting for Basque independence, blew him up in his car, the debris landed on balconies on the fifth story. So a Basque punk group wrote a song saying ‘Carrero Blanco, fly! Fly!’ They made his dreams come true!

Day 5 -Bilbao 

Wake up hungover and decide to have an easy one. Laundry, shower etc. Go looking for a library but the maps fail me – it’s a civic centre and closed anyway. Walk to a laundromat in the midday sun – mistake. Get there and it’s more expensive than getting it done at the hostel. Glad I brought water or it’d be day 2 again but minus the good bits. Walk back past the Guggenheim and pop inside but it’s all too much for me. I stop at a cafe, eat a vegan hamburger and read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Just at the point where the moon, in revolution, is attacked by soldiers of Earth and women, children and men die defending it and I feel heavy at heart, which surprises me given I’ve read it 3 times before. But it reminds me that the innocent always go first. On the way back I try the squat. No luck. I see a sticker that says ‘Tourist Go Home!’ I make it back to the hostel – just. 

– later –

When I get back to the hostel the Barcelona bais are planning a foray into the city. I make some dinner – only marginally distracted by a South African guy who asks what kind of political organiser I am (I give him the spiel) – then head out. In town, there has been a demonstration (manifestacion) and we catch the aftermath – milling crowds of middle aged basque folks wearing stickers that display their allegiance to the amnesty campaign. Recently, I am told, two young men were imprisoned for a year for ‘terrorism offences’ for telling the police to fuck off in the pub. The willingness of the police to use terrorism legislation is part of the legacy of ETA, which has a lot of support among the young here. We sit on a step near a bar and watch the traffic flow by – there are a lot of punks here, more even than in Barcelona I’m told – but I suspect it’s largely fashion. Mixed in with the punks and the protestors are tourists here for the football. It’s a weird mix, and where it’s busy it feels halfway to a riot – but the police know not to harass anyone and besides I don’t know if it is as militant as it seems – drinking in the street here is traditional, much more so than in England.

I’m waiting for the toilet in a bar and a man queuing behind me asks if I’m a punk. Si, I say, habla ingles? A little. We get by with our bits of shared language while we wait – you’re young to be a punk, no? He asks. Mi padre y my madre punks, I explain. Sex pistols? He asks. God save the queen! No! I laugh and agree. The door opens and I enter into a tiny cubicle covered in punk, anarchist and communist stickers. My friend, the Anarchist from Barcelona, tells me that his right leg is very weak, from meningitis. He’s watched the paralympics and wants to get his lower leg removed and replaced with a false one. He was going to do it, but he passed his test at making violins, so he’s put it off. There is something beautiful about his weakened, wasted skin. He’s only 26 but looks ten years older. I’m glad he and his friend have taken me in, and I feel part of a crew again. We get Chinese takeaway and go back to the hostel, chat and smoke till midnight, then crash out.

Day 6 -Bilbao 

It looks like another quiet one, at first at least. I start by getting lost in the network of streets down the hill from the hostel, which is enlivened by seeing a massive feminist symbol on a wall (no idea how they did it.) After that I visit the squat, but no one answers my knock. I lose some time after on the phone, trying to diagnose computer issues from 300 miles away – a sign of my ego maybe that I even think it possible. But it’s good to keep in touch with my friends and smothers any discomfort I might feel at being alone. Eventually I wind up back at the squat, feeling like an overplayed record, banging on the door. 

This time there is a fan running inside, but otherwise it’s the same. 

After a brief and unproductive period of irritability (mucho calor – it’s hot) I do the obvious and research anarchism in Bilbao on the phone. Turns out there’s a social centre across the river, but it’s closed. I walk there anyway on the off chance I can meet someone. When I get there I find only an imposing door and more graffiti. I decide to head to a vegan restaraunt my friend recommended but only get 5 minutes down the road when I come across a semi circle of bars with beautiful antifascist murals around them. Deciding it’s worth one more shot, I pop inside and ask my now standard ‘donde esta espacio anarchista?’ Which gets me ‘Anarchista, que?’ Eventually I show her the sign on my hoodie. She understands then and takes me outside to introduce me to two men sitting at a table. They tell me that until Tuesday, there was a space called Anna Campbell here. But the police didn’t like it, now the locks have been changed and it is closed. After some discussion though they tell me of Karmela, a former school that has been occupied. Better still, it’s on my way back to the hostel. 

I get lost again, though this time it’s the gps that’s out, not me. 

When I arrive, it’s to a nicely painted wall and a locked gate. I email the address on it, find and message their page and wait. For what, I’m not sure. Someone to come home I guess. 

I’m just not ready to go back to the hostel yet. Its utilitarian modernity is like an open prison. 

Eventually, two people come home. 

Both are Moroccan and one, H, speaks good English. They seem completely undisturbed by finding a random Englishman outside the gate, let me in and show me around. 

It’s beautiful. No other word for it. A former school, its many rooms are well looked after and prepared for different purposes: meeting rooms, including one for LGBTQIA folk only, a climbing room, a playroom for children, a gym, a cinema, a library, a kitchen, a bar… everywhere the walls have been painted with antifascist and anti state murals. Once I’ve been given the tour, I buy a beer from the bar and we sit and chat about politics. Karmela, it turns out, is an illegal squat, managed by a neighbourhood assembly. I also learn they have another word for Anarchists here, bahar (or something like it – too many words…) H is very on side, as is his friend, who tells me that in Morocco everything is taken by the king – who then lives abroad. We talk about our hatred of government – they make a problem, then charge you to fix it – and the racism of police. H’s friend shows me the marks on his wrists where he was handcuffed. I leave, with an invitation to return at 7 – one which will not go to plan. 

– later –

Got back and had dinner, then felt low on energy and didn’t get back to Karmela till 7.45. No one’s there except the boxers at the gym, who don’t take particularly kindly to me ringing the bell and refuse to let me in. H has gone home, so I sit around for a bit thinking, as it gets dark. I decide to walk to the squat for the legendary ‘one more try’, plus the chance of starting conversation in the punky bars nearby. When I get there, there is someone just about to ring the bell. When the door is answered I explain, but once again I’m not welcome – they’re in a meeting and after that they’re going home. I ask if there’s anyone I could talk to about Anarchism here. ‘Go talk to the man in the white shirt’ the lady tells me, pointing to someone sat outside a bar. 

So I stagger down the steps, by this point somewhat tired of badgering people and, at a kind of polite moment, interrupt the conversation to repeat my badly translated introduction. I finish – everyone’s looking at me like I just landed – and one says ‘we speak English’. Oh, I say, I’ll stop speaking to you in bad Spanish then. Do we look like European Anarchists? The same man asks. No, I reply, the lady up there told me to talk to you. That breaks the ice a little, they invite me to sit down and I go buy a beer.

It turns out they all used to live in Bristol and finally I get the full treatment on the political situation in Bilbao. 

There are many anarchists here, I’m told, but they work as part of other social movements; the anti state wing of independence, squatting and anti-gentrification. The CNT, the major Anarchist organisation in Spain, is largely irrelevant here – it’s too Spanish and insufficiently supportive of prison abolition and the Basque language. For the Anarchist Party back home, this raises important points – to organise a group over here it would be necessary to send someone with a strong knowledge of the independence movement, especially someone fluent in Basque. The insularity of Bilbao and the Basque land generally, with its culture of opposition to outsiders – seen as a source of oppression – explains somewhat the difficulty that I’ve had making connections and my general feeling of insecurity when not wearing a visible Anarchist symbol, itself meaning rebellion and opposition to the (Spanish) state, more than anything specific.

But if K, the person I speak to who’s lived here the longest, is unimpressed by the possibilities for any political organisation here outside of the independence movement, it’s also clear that Independence is an ever receding mirage. Just look, they tell me, at the repression that Catalonian independence has produced. Within the independence movement there are divisions between those who want a Basque state and those who don’t, which in itself suggests potential for an Anarchist movement, if one likely to be allied with and infiltrated by radical socialists and communists. 

I’m glad to have met them. If culture and age differences prevent us developing fast friendship, nonetheless we know we are comrades, and K sets me up with a contact in Madrid, who offers to let me sleep at his house. The next morning I go to Karmela one last time to meet H for coffee. He doesn’t show, and I leave after half an hour to catch the bus. It seems a fitting end to my time in Bilbao, which has been characterised by a sense of potential somehow always beyond the tips of my fingers. I’m looking forward to the opportunities a new city might bring.