COLUMN Overseas Briefing

After living and studying in Madrid for one month, I found myself experiencing the first so-called feelings of rechazo, Spanish refusal -- a sentiment that the directors of our program had so delicately warned us we would feel toward our sudden immersion in a foreign culture, and for some, such as myself, our first time being away from everyone and everything that we know and love.
This feeling came to a head one afternoon as I was sitting in the living room of my seÒora's apartment. She was sitting across from me, smoking her cigarettes and drinking her whiskey, her frail 80 year-old body bundled up in front of the television.
I felt the sudden impulse to understand this aristocratic Spanish woman with whom I lived, and the first question that came to mind was, "What are your feelings on Spain's government?" I had chosen the right question. Carmen proceeded to indulge me for the next 30 minutes straight on the awful state of her country. Since the death of Franco, she said, all had gone straight to hell. She told me the story from her childhood of the rojos, Spanish for "reds," her term for everyone who opposed Franco during the civil war.
In the initial phases of the civil war, they had come to her house to kill her whole family, simply because they were wealthy and Catholic. Upon returning from a vacation in Franco-controlled territory, they learned from their doorman that the rojos were waiting there to murder them.
They consequentially returned to safety in Franco's territory. If she had not been in the safe-haven under Franco, she and her whole family would have been assassinated.
She tells me of the derelicts who now roam the streets. The police should be able to physically hit these criminals, as they did under Franco, in order to maintain a "safe" city, she maintains.
Clearly, I was shocked by Carmen's passionate words. It contradicted everything I had ever learned in the United States. Never had I heard such an old, seemingly sweet woman, express such strong and extreme convictions. She explained that she used to love history when she was my age, but that the records of the brutal murders and crimes, which Franco's opposition had committed, have been conveniently forgotten and erased. Her words transformed this shock into revelation and a storm of thoughts and questions and an eerie sense of comfort. My rechazo became my strength because I, from that point on, realized how amazing this moment was and how closed my eyes had been to the world outside of my small-town American education and to what I had thus far witnessed in Spain.
Carmen later told me of the problem with domestic abuse in Spain. Abusive men are not punished until they finally kill their wives, a problem she is sure was not tolerated during the dictatorship. I find that extremely difficult to believe, yet she does have credence in the fact that the problem was far better controlled under Franco, a fact I have validated with Spaniards equally opposed to Franco as to Carmen who supported him. Months have passed since then, and I no longer live in Carmen's ornate apartment, yet her words stay with me during my discovery of this country and culture.
As far as the horror of battered women in Spain goes, I recently learned that last year 70 women were killed as a result of abuse, and in 2003, in less than two months, there have already been 9 documented deaths. I also saw a play that touched on this subject as well as on the issue of prostitution, something I witness almost every day. As early as one in the afternoon, I saw prostitutes lining a certain large street in the center of Madrid, right in the heart of the city. Although this issue is often addressed on the local news, no one seems to confront it head on.
On the other hand the Spanish city still riddled with public displays of affection that would make many Americans cringe. However, I learned two weeks ago that this overt expression of love is not simply because the Spanish people are less "bashful" than Americans, as my own preconceived stereotypes had led me to believe.
My theater professor told me a story of his youth in the late seventies, following Franco's death. He was passionately kissing his girlfriend in the street. A police car drove up to the couple, two policemen climbed out and one proceeded to hit the back of my professor's head with his night stick, growling in his ear that such behavior was reserved for the privacy of one's home. My professor said that at that time public displays of affection were considered a form of rebellion against the suppressive government.
I could only think of Carmen's desire that the policemen today would physically punish the street dwellers to maintain order, and how ironic it was that the first example I heard of such a punishment in the past was that of a boy being beaten for kissing his girlfriend. This process of learning two such different sides to the story and all that falls between, while also observing from my own biases the world around me, affords me a perspective that continues to have striking relevance.
Consequently the rechazo is long gone, my eyes are open much wider to what makes this country and the Spanish culture what it is today. However, I also recognize that first appearances, which so easily provoked rechazo in my first months here, can be far from the truth. I learned this above all from Carmen and my initial shock to her vehement love of Franco and his reign -- a shock that transformed into a new appreciation of views that first seem wrong and disgusting, but in the end that have justly arisen from witnessing and experiencing history rather than reading and believing only one of its interpretations.