Iberia (59 page)

There is a long bar behind which two men in traditional aprons
serve cold beer and other drinks. Upon the bar have been arranged
some two dozen open dishes crammed with a wild variety of
tidbits tastefully arranged and accompanied by glasses of
toothpicks, which are used to spear the goodies. The tapa place
that I have frequented for many years offers dishes in four
categories: first comes the seafood—the anchovies, eel, squid,
octopus, herring, shrimp, salmon, five kinds of sardines, five kinds
of fish; next come the boiled eggs, deviled eggs, egg salad, potato
omelets cut in strips, vegetables, onions, salads; third are the cold
meats in great variety, including meat balls, York ham, Serrano
ham, tripe, brains, liver in a variety of styles, beef, pork and veal;
and finally the hot dishes, which can be delicious. Shish kebab in
hot sauce is good but I prefer mussels in a sauce of burned onions
and clam broth, but there are five or six other kinds of shellfish
which are about as good.

Tapa bars, so far as I am concerned, are divided into two
groups, those that serve cocido Madrileño (Madrid stew) and
those that don’t. This is a heavy peasant concoction made of
beans, flank beef, salted ham, sausage, onions, carrots, potatoes,
kohlrabi and garlic, allowed to cook for days, with new ingredients
thrown in from time to time. A good cocido, with hard bread and
red wine, is a real Spanish dish.

The traditional way to enjoy the tapa bar, however, is not to
sit down for a dish as formal as a cocido but to gather a group of
friends and wander leisurely from one bar to the next, taking from
each the one dish for which it is famous. In this area there is one
bar that serves nothing but octopus and squid, prepared in various
ways, and another that specializes in shellfish. One of the best
known is a very small corner place called La Gaditana (The Girl
from Cádiz), which advertises ‘The largest restaurant in the world.
You enter at Cádiz and leave at Barcelona,’ those being the names
of the streets which form the corner.

One aspect of the tapa bar frightened me. About half the dishes
are bathed in a heavy, bright yellow mayonnaise that shimmies
like gelatin when you put the spoon in. The finest shrimp, the
best eggs, the fresh vegetable salad are drowned in this rich,
inedible goo, but with care one can avoid it. However, if you dine
with a Spaniard and he sees that your plate contains nothing but
wholesome octopus, mussels and anchovies, he will insist upon
slapping on a final gob of mayonnaise. Otherwise it wouldn’t be
a respectable tapa.

At my favorite bar one night a Spaniard who had learned to
speak English while working the Venezuela oil fields suggested
that I take in the jai alai at the frontón (court) where professional
teams of Basques played this swift and exciting game. He was a
nut, himself, and an ideal cicerone. ‘Don’t bother to come,’ he
warned, ‘unless you enjoy gambling,’ for the major purpose of
jai alai is betting, and to see gambling run wild, one must attend
a Madrid frontón.

‘It starts with an act of sheer insanity,’ my oil man explained.
‘At the beginning six players appear on the court but the game is
going to be two against two. So how to decide which two will play
which two?’ He took me to a large board containing the names
of the six players and their numbers, from one to six. Bookmakers
were taking a flurry of bets which I couldn’t understand. ‘Simple,’
the oil man said. ‘At this board we bet on what the composition
of the teams is going to be. Suppose you buy that ticket for Team
4-6. It means that you are betting that one of the teams will be
made up of Player 4 as captain and Player 6 as his mate. If it works
out that 6 is captain and 4 is mate, you lose. As you can see, there
are thirty possible teams, so the odds against guessing right are
thirty to one, about the same as in roulette.’

‘How do they determine what the teams are going to be?’ I
asked.

 

‘Don’t worry about that. Just pick three or four tickets here for
the fun of it.’ I chose Team 1-2 and Team 3-3 and Team 6-5.
‘They’re as good as anybody else’s,’ my oil man said, and we went
inside to watch the six players warming up and I was amazed at
their skill. Soon they began a round robin, with Player 1 taking
the floor against 2 and holding it for as long as he continued to
win, after which he gave way to player 3 or 4 or 5. A large
scoreboard showed the names, which were part of the fun, long
Basque words like Azurmendi, Urtasun, Azcarate and Yrigoyen,
and whenever one of the players approached a score of five,
excitement grew. Finally Player 2 accumulated five points, and a
red star was placed against his name, signifying that he would be
captain of the red team. Soon Player 4 scored five, and he was
designated captain of the blue team.

 

At this point the round robin halted and we all trooped back
to the gambling board. It was now known that the two teams
would be 2 plus somebody and 4 plus somebody, but who their
partners were to be would not be known till later. So bets were
placed on the right possible combinations, and since my first
tickets had been proved worthless I switched to Teams 2-6 and
4-5. We went back to the arena, where the same six players went
at it again. The scores made by 2 and 4 did not count, for they
were assured of positions, but soon the excitement grew as the
other four players approached scores of five. Finally the teams
were decided, 2-5 red, 4-6 blue. I’d picked the right players but
on the wrong teams, so once more my tickets were no good.

 

Now the game proper started and such bedlam I had not heard
for years. Inside the screen and facing the audience stood nine
husky men in official coats. Each carried a stock of tennis balls
with one side cut away leaving a hollow, and as they brandished
these balls they bellowed at the crowd, offering bets on the game
between Teams 2-5 and 4-6. ‘We better bet,’ my guide said. He
held up his hand, indicating by some signal that he wanted two
bets on 2-5. One of the gamblers caught his eye, then looked about
for someone who wanted to bet on 4-6. Pointing quickly to the
two locations, he confirmed the bet, then wrote two receipts on
government forms, stuffed them into two tennis balls, and with
lightning accuracy pitched them long distances to the two bettors.
The unit in this frontón was $6.40, of which the government took
eighteen percent.

 

I now had my money riding on Team 2-5, but as play
progressed toward the game point of 45, my team fell behind.
Then the screaming of the gamblers increased, for they offered
me a chance to copper my bet at attractive odds, and this I did,
but my partner was contemptuous of hedging, so the further our
team fell behind, the more vigorously he backed it at generous
odds and soon was in a position to make some real money if Team
2-5 pulled itself together. Sure enough, our boys drew the score
to 40-38 in favor of the other team and the excitement in our part
of the frontón, at least, grew intense, but in the end Team 4-6
steadied and pulled away to a 45-41 victory.

 

At one o’clock in the morning the frontón was echoing with
shouts, but then the games ended. ‘Damn you norteamericanos,’
my oil man growled. ‘In the old days we used to play till three or
four, but you’ve ruined it.’

 

‘How can you blame us?’

 

‘You’ve preached, “All Spaniards are lazy. They take a siesta.”
So the damned government wants to look modern. It’s outlawed
the siesta and everything has to shut down at one o’clock. Hardly
worth living in Madrid any more.’

 

Soccer, known in Spain and the rest of the world as football,
appears to be the kind of sport the Spanish government prefers
to sponsor; it’s international, it’s modern, it’s out-of-doors, and
it’s good for children, in that it can be played without expensive
equipment. For a series of exciting years, Real Madrid proved
itself to be the best football team in the world and Spaniards
turned in large numbers to this frenzied sport.

 

I have often lived in countries that played soccer, but I have
never become involved; however, during my last visit to Madrid
the World Cup was being contested in London and no one who
read a paper or listened to radio could escape being caught up in
the frenzy. Spain beat Switzerland in one of the early rounds, and
there was joy throughout the city, which closed down to watch
on television, but she lost to Argentina and West Germany, and
there was gloom. Shortly after, the local papers featured an
incident which had occurred in Mogadiscio, the capital of Somalia,
where the referee, one Salak Mobarek, made a wrong call against
the Public Works team, which proceeded to kick him to death.
The report said that because of this action, the Public Works team
had to forfeit the game, a penalty which some of my
football-playing friends considered vengeful. The Madrid papers
went on to recall the number of times in recent years that referees
had been killed, and since no plea was added to halt the violence,
I concluded that the list was meant as a warning to the local men
to watch their calls.

 

One beautiful moonlit night I went out to Madrid’s Estadio
Bernabéu to see what this madness was about, and long before I
reached the approaches to the stadium I could see that a fair
portion of Madrid’s population was converging on that spot, for
I was trapped in traffic that no longer moved. I finally had to leave
my cab and walk about one mile, but it was worth it, because the
stadium was one of those new affairs which one enters at street
level to find himself halfway up the side of a long graceful bowl
set deep into the earth. The playing field was thus three flights
below street level and the topmost seats about three flights above.
It was huge, with something like a hundred and ten thousand
seats. During the pregame period it was illuminated by the moon
and a group of soft lights, which converted the grassy area into a
kind of silver, but as game time approached, four rows of lights
around the stadium flashed on, and daylight enveloped the field
and the grass turned green. It was the most beautiful stadium I
had ever seen.

 

Barcelona was playing Madrid and the excitement was intense
as the players ran onto the field, but as play progressed it grew.
At some times all hundred and ten thousand spectators screamed
at the referee, and armed police moved into position to repel
those who might want to run onto the field. ‘We behave better
than they do in Brazil,’ a Madrid fan assured me. ‘There they’ve
had to dig a moat between the stands and the playing field, so
that the wild men can’t rush the referee, even if they want to.’

 

Madrid was favored to win, but at the half the score stood
Barcelona 1-Madrid 0. The crowd was disconsolate, but the man
next to me said, ‘Don’t worry. Madrid is bound to win. This is
the team that used to be world’s champion. They have pundonor.’

 

Their vaunted pundonor did them no good when the second
half opened, for Barcelona made a great sally at the goal and
scored again, and the men around me groaned as if such a thing
were indecent or unlawful. A moment later they were cheering
wildly because the referee had disallowed the Barcelona goal on
some technicality which no one could explain. I thought the
decision was fishy and that it had come suspiciously late, and the
next day the papers said the same thing. A statistical study had
recently been made of Spanish football, proving what everyone
had suspected, that a disgracefully high proportion of games was
won by the home team, the theory being ‘If the home team wins,
nobody riots.’ Tonight the referees seemed determined to prevent
riots.

 

Soon thereafter, Madrid tied the score, then quickly made a
second goal, but the referee was so embarrassed at having robbed
Barcelona that now he did the same to Madrid. The man next to
me really wanted to kill the swine, but a friend reminded him,
‘They’re supposed to even things out,’ and the game ended Madrid
1—Barcelona 1.

 

Some time later I was in Córdoba when Madrid visited there,
and in the days before the game one of the executives of the
Córdoba team said in the local paper, ‘The reason Córdoba has
lost its last two games is that our fans have not been terrorizing
the referees the way they do in Palma and Sevilla. Loyal fans are
the twelfth man on the field. If you want us to beat Madrid, you
must come out and scare the referee.’ I attended that game, and
the fans did their part. From the opening whistle to the last they
created a bedlam, and although they may not have scared the
referee, they did me. In the second half, when a bad call was made,
a young man leaped from the stands, grabbed a camera from a
newsman, rushed onto the field, and swinging the strap in a full
circle, cracked the referee on the head with the camera and laid
him out on the turf. The crowd applauded and apparently the
official got the message, because Córdoba won.

 

The miracle of soccer as compared to American-style football
is that the men who invented it came up with a game in which,
because of the low scoring, ties are frequent. This means that if
you bet on a game you must take into consideration three, not
two, possibilities. Your team may win, or lose, or draw, and it
would require a good man to predict accurately all the results of
the fourteen games that appear each week on the betting list. The
obvious wins and losses are easy, but what about those possible
ties?

 

It is this unpredictable aspect of football that has made it such
an ideal gambling game. Today all over Spain you see grubby little
bare-window shops with the magic sign 1 X 2. It is to these shops
that the people of Spain flock to mark their ballots for the slate
of games to be played on the coming Sunday. Each ballot lists the
fourteen games, eight from the first division, three from the
northern section of the second division, three from the southern
section, plus two reserve games to replace any of the scheduled
ones that might be rained out or otherwise suspended. Alongside
each game are the fascinating figures 1 X 2. If you circle the 1 it
means you predict that the home team will win. Circle the 2 and
you’re betting on the visiting team. But circle X and you back a
tie.