In Extremadura

By Nick Gilbert

Part travelogue, part diary, part history of this hidden corner of Spain, In Extremadura is also a tragi-comic treatise on the nature of mortality, and a love letter to cinema & literature. It veers from the films of Orson Welles and Luis Bunuel to meditations on torture, terrorism and Welsh holidays, from peregrination (Islamic and Christian) to wild swimming in Scotland and the death of David Bowie. A rib-tickling and thought-provoking genre-buster. Originally published in 2017, and now fully illustrated. Read what the critics say:

“My book of the year” - Nick Gilbert
“Undoubtedly one of the books about Spain I have read” – Orson Welles
“Smells like Andalusian dog” – The Salvador Daily News
“Anyone expecting a book about Spain will be disappointed. In Extremadura is largely concerned with torture, terrorism, funeral playlists, Welsh holidays and other morbid subjects... “– Toby Schneebaum

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nick Gilbert
• Release date: Dec 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370473588

Nick Gilbert

I was born in Bristol in 1964. I have been, at various times, a film student (Polytechnic of Central London, Bristol University and National Film School) actor, DJ, journalist, book reviewer, assistant editor on countless documentaries for the BBC and Channel 4 and, since the turn of the millennium, a lecturer and teacher of English to Speakers of Other Languages in London (Morley College and Westminster University).

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Read what others are saying about IN EXTREMADURA:

My book of the year. Equal parts travelogue, history of Spain, love letter to cinema & literature, and comic treatise on the nature of truth, memory and mortality. A rib-tickling genre-buster… - Nick Gilbert

Undoubtedly one of the books about Spain I have read – Orson Welles

Smells like Andalusian dog – The Salvador Daily News

Anyone expecting a book about Spain will be disappointed. In Extremadura is largely concerned with torture, terrorism, funeral playlists, Welsh holidays and other morbid subjects… – Toby Schneebaum

IN EXTREMADURA

Copyright 2017 Nick Gilbert

Published by Plankton Produktions

ISBN 978-1-910216-27-9

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About the author

Nick Gilbert studied Film at the Polytechnic of Central London, Bristol University and the National Film School. After failing to make any mark whatsoever on the British film industry, he became a teacher of English for Speakers of Other Languages and a lecturer in Communication at Westminster University. He is the author of one other book (68½ - Movies, Manson & Me) and writes a blog under the catchy name of Plankton Produktions: Cult Films & Sounds, Spain & South America.

For some of us there has been Spain. First the Spain we imagined – a place we cannot remember now – and afterwards the Spain we found. (Rebecca O’Brien)

HERE UNDER PROTEST

Late in his career, Orson Welles turned to commercials. Not that anyone would let him direct a commercial at that point. No-one would let him direct a film of any kind at that point, so Welles did straight-to-camera pieces for drinks companies and voice-over work for frozen foods as a way of funding his own unrealised projects and lavish lifestyle. Welles could make upwards of $15,000 a day from such work, or $75,000 in 21st century money.¹ One contract could be worth half a million a year. His corpulent frame was deemed perfect for Paul Masson wine and Domecq sherry adverts, and his voice, a mellifluous balance of honied tones and huskier, cigar-ruffled notes, was deemed, somewhat bizarrely, perfect for Findus Peas. Thus was a legendary advert created:

We know a remote farm in Lincolnshire where Mrs Buckley lives. Every July peas grow there....

The pleasure, the infamy, of this advert – which you can readily access online (for example, on Paul Read’s fascinating blog Speaking of Spain²) - derives not from its quality, or lack of quality, but from the many asides recorded in the sound booth, the one-sided clash between Welles’ monumental ego and the various determined if deferential ad men who, in Orson’s opinion, aren’t worthy of licking his boots. You don’t know what I’m up against, he whines to no-one in particular, claiming that the copy he has to read may be grammatically correct but it’s tough on the ear... unpleasant to read. Unrewarding.

Is the boy genius right, or is he just over the hill, out of his depth, even in a recording studio with a piddling little pea advert for company? He can’t read crumb-crisp coating because it trips on his tongue. But why should it? You only need to separate the words to make it sound effective. Crumb. Crisp. Coating. There’s alliteration. He’s an actor. Why can’t he make it work? Because, I hazard to suggest, not so deep down he resents having to do this sort of thing at all, and because, in the depths of his arrogance, he presumes that he knows more about writing copy than the people who work for Findus.

Here under protest is Beefburgers. We know a little place in the American Far West, where Charlie Briggs chops up the finest prairie-fed beef and tastes… This is a lot of shit, you know that?

Finally, he appears to storm out with the immortal words no money is worth this... But did Welles really walk? According to Gary Graver, he didn’t need the money, but he liked having it. As well as enabling him to realise his projects – or at least make a start on them – it enabled him to maintain two houses and he was proud that for the first time in his life he had Visa and MasterCards.³ Nonetheless, it suited Welles to play the downtrodden artist, forced to prostitute himself.

When poor old Dietlief Sierck – better known to film buffs as Douglas Sirk – turned up for work on the studio lot, he’d frequently bump into Bud Boetticher and they’d joke about the films they were making. Hi there, Bud, Sirk would say. What are you doing? Oh, just some lousy old Western, Boettticher would reply. How about you? Oh, just some lousy old melodrama, Sirk would say.⁴ Their remarks were self-deprecating, yet they took pride in what they were doing, and they turned out masterpiece after masterpiece - in Sirk’s case, All That Heaven Allows, Magnificent Obsession, Written on the Wind, Imitation of Life. That’s four masterpieces right there. Welles was more self-pitying. Gore Vidal would invite him to dinner, and Welles would accept, but invariably cancel, saying he had an early call. For a commercial. Dog food, I think it is this time. No, I do not eat from the can on camera, but I celebrate the contents. Yes, I have fallen so low.

Towards the end of his life, Welles was interviewed by Peter Bogdanovich, the director of Targets and The Last Picture Show, two of my favourite films. The larger-than-life legend came face to face with the young pretender, although, in truth, Bogdanovich was as burned out as Welles by this point. Bogdanovich brought a pile of papers to the interview, and Welles demanded to know what they were. Research, came the answer. Throw it all away, Welles told his interviewer. It can only cripple the fine spirit of invention.

It’s worth bearing Welles’ advice in mind as you read this book about Extremadura. Any research I conducted was largely lived research, and whatever I’ve read, or discovered through passing reference to the Internet, is only a starting point for a flight of fancy. I will digress, as I see fit, and charge off into the undergrowth, for there lie interesting things: not only the history of this little corner of western Spain, its dam construction workers, cooks and conquistadores, but also the twilight years of once-great film-makers and unsung actors, very few of them Spanish; discursions on peregrination and faith; terrorism and South American torture chambers; amphetamines and astronauts. This conscious meandering mirrors the river which gives the village in which I lived for ten months its name, Mesas de Ibor.

The Ibor springs in the Sierra de Guadalupe and flows – or sometimes trickles – north, close to but never quite through five villages collectively known as Los Ibores. These villages - Bohonal de Ibor, Castanar de Ibor, Fresnedoso de Ibor, Navalvillar de Ibor and Mesas de Ibor - lie just inside or on the fringes of the newly-created Geoparque Villuercas, in the north-east of Extremadura. To the rest of Spain, they mean only one thing: goats cheese.

As the publicity produced by the regional government has it, el Queso Ibores es uno de los productos mas emblematicos de Extremadura. Su aroma y sabor evocan bellos paisajes, sierras y monte bajo, jaras, brezo, tomillo y matorral... (The cheese of the Ibores is one of the most emblematic products of Extremadura. Its smell and flavour evoke beautiful landscape, mountain ranges and rolling hills, cistus, heather, wild thyme and scrub... )

To which could be added cork and oak, the defining trees of Extremadura. We knew of a village in Caceres province, where my partner Beni’s father lived, alone. Cork and oak trees grew there. In early 2015, we decided to join him. It had been on the cards for a long time. The desire for a quieter, less complicated life, the chance to do some writing, to gain a better knowledge of Spain, a better grasp of the language. Beni wasn’t so sure at first. For her it would mean moving back to the village where she had spent every summer since she was born; a village full, in her mind, of narrow-minded, backward-thinking peasants, rather like the malnourished idiots Luis Bunuel portrayed in his legendary documentary Tierra Sin Pan (Land Without Bread). The Bunuel film was made a long time ago, of course, in the 1930s, in the remote north-western corner of Extremadura known as Las Hurdes, a hundred and fifty kilometres from Beni’s village. Nonetheless, some of that apparent idiocy and limited world vision lingered. Beni had escaped, by going to university in Madrid, and then moving to London. She loved her family, just as she loved the countryside around the village, and the climate. But the villagers themselves… well, they were such PESTS, as Orson Welles says of the Findus Pea people.

Our daughter Alma clinched the deal. She said she wanted to be with her grand-father, who was ninety. Beni agreed. She could see the benefits, for Alma and for her dad. It would also be a chance to re-connect with her cousin, who ran one of the three bars in the village; the best bar, by some distance, the bar that never closed. Siso was like a brother to Beni, the more so because his own father had died when he was a young boy, so Beni’s dad had stepped into the void, and treated Siso like his own son.

In recent years the relationship between Siso and Beni had become strained. Beni never stopped loving Siso, but she argued with him, and his bar became, by dint of choice, more or less off limits to us. In truth, it had always been difficult for me to communicate with Siso, so this situation was reasonably satisfactory. Of all the villagers, all the members of Beni’s family, Siso was the one most difficult for me to understand, the one with the strongest accent, who made no effort whatsoever to moderate or grade it for non-Spanish speakers. So I had avoided the bar, and avoided Siso. This year in Spain, in the village, would enable both Beni and I to rebuild a relationship with Siso which had once been close.

The move didn’t happen straight away, but the decision was made, and we began planning. I asked for a year off work. A sabbatical sounds too grand, but I suppose it was a sabbatical. Beni’s dad, unable or unwilling to wait any longer, moved into the newly built residencia on the outskirts of the village, leaving the family home empty for us to occupy. We found a school for Alma in the nearest town, Navalmoral de la Mata.

Then, in July 2015, Siso died. Everything changed. It was like The Last Picture Show. In the film, which is set in small-town Texas, the two young protagonists Duane and Sonny (Jeff Bridges and Timothy Bottoms) take off for a weekend of drinking and whoring across the border, in Mexico. On their return, they discover that Sam the Lion, who owns and presides over the diner, the pool hall and the cinema – the three social hubs of the town - has died. Sam the Lion, as played with grizzled dignity by veteran actor Ben Johnson, was their rock, the one constant in their life, the adult who welcomed them, however begrudgingly, who indulged them, guided them, shared his roll-ups with them. He was, in sum, the only decent man in a small town full of idiots, although there are a number of decent, long-suffering women. Duane and Sonny took Sam for granted, assuming he would always be there - as we do with people we love. From a relatively minor role in the film, Sam becomes, in death, the moral heart of the film, the true star.

Likewise, the black housemaid Annie (Juanita Moore) is the real star of Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life. The Sirk film begins with the focus apparently on the aspiring actress (played by a plainly ageing Lana Turner) and, to a lesser extent, on her irksome daughter (Sandra Dee) but shifts, imperceptibly, to become a film about the relationship between Annie and her own daughter, who seeks to deny her blackness and pass as white. The superficiality of the white characters’ lives is inexorably stripped away, and the sacrifice, strength and determination of Annie take centre stage, building to the film’s devastating and unashamedly melodramatic climax - Annie’s funeral - at which everyone in the film, even the milkman from an early and incidental scene, is present.

Siso was Annie. Siso was Sam the Lion. It felt like the heart had been ripped out of Mesas. I would never re-build my friendship with Siso, and Beni would never recapture the brother/sister-type relationship she had had with him. We moved anyway.

SEPTEMBER

Alma and Beni had been in Mesas since early August. The village fiesta fell in mid-August, and Beni had spent every summer of her life in the village, surrounded by her family and friends, while I had spent the last few years, since the London Olympics of 2012, avoiding the heat by staying at home and teaching pre-sessional English courses to Chinese students at Westminster University. I arrived on September 11th. The significance of the date only occured to me later. It was the date of the coup in Chile in 1973.

It had been a long, hard, working summer and I was determined to treat my first few weeks in the village as a holiday, before knuckling down to the task of finding a part-time job, although, quite honestly, I wasn’t that bothered about finding work. I had a week’s well-paid exam marking in London every two months, and there was the additional income from our flat, which we had rented out to a colleague.

Thumbing through the updated Rough Guide to Spain I saw that our local town and transport hub, Navalmoral de la Mata, still got a (forgive the pun) rough ride, still had nothing to offer other than its road, rail and bus connections to more engrossing places… It was true that even the people who lived in Navalmoral disdained it. But if you gave the place a chance, it revealed its charms: the walks on the hills above the town, with their views of the snow-capped Sierra de los Gredos; a phenomenal number of supermarkets (Mercadona, Supersol, Lidl, Aldi and Dia, to name but five) a pleasant little gypsy quarter, with a peculiar, possibly gay hole-in-the-wall bar called El Abuelo (‘the Grandfather’) and Toni’s Churreria, for churros. It was also good as a base to explore the area, with Trujillo only forty-five minutes away by car, the Sierra de Guadalupe and Mesas to the south, the nature reserve of Monfrague to the west, and the aforementioned Gredos rising to the north: a solid wall of rock that separated Extremadura from Castile-Leon. As one looked at this wall, one could see, slightly to the east, the highest peak in Central Spain, Almanzor. At 2600 metres, it was chicken feed really. I’d climbed to twice that height in the Andes AND slept by a glacier - but I was much younger and fitter then. I’d never climbed Almanzor. It might have been half the height of an Ande, but it was twice the height of Ben Nevis, Snowdon and Scafell, the only three peaks I’d conquered in the previous twenty years. I made it the defining objective of my year in Extremadura to climb Almanzor.

There were reasons why I hadn’t climbed it before. It wasn’t recommended to do so for most of the year, not without crampons and an ice pick. It was covered in snow and sheet ice, not to mention thick cloud. The weather could change in an instant. And, while it looked enticingly close, sitting there just across the valley floor, the only realistic way to approach Almanzor was from the far side, the North. This entailed driving round the mountain range, via Arenas de San Pedro, and taking the Avila road, a journey of several hours just to get to the starting point. Moreover, in passing Arenas de San Pedro, it would be incumbent on us to stop and pay our respects to Beni’s cousin Chusa, which would, in turn, involve a night’s stay and a trawl of the local bars, or at the very least the local supermarket, to stock up on beer for Chusa’s husband Victor. Which is ironic, as Almanzor (Al Mansoor) means the victor, or victorious, in Arabic.

Muhammad Ibn Abi Amir was given the honorific Al-Mansur for his victories over the Christians, and was, it is said, captivated by the beauty of the mountain. But nobody climbed mountains for the sake of it in those days. As Robert McFarlane makes plain in his Mountains of the Mind, one of the dozens of books whose towering, Everest-like presence in the corner of my bedroom provided succour in the darkest moments of a Mesas winter, the obsession with Alpinism only really began in the 19th century - although as far back as 1492, the year of the Reconquista, Antoine de Ville ascended Mont Aiguille with a team, ladders and ropes, in what is the first recorded climb of any technical difficulty. The Enlightenment ushered in a new age of nature worship, and with it the desire to conquer mountains like citadels. Almanzor was only officially conquered in 1899 by M. González de Amezúa