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It is midnight in the downtown Madrid neighbourhood La Latina, and nobody is sleeping. The bars overflow with music and chatter, and people of all ages stand around with glasses and small plates of tapas. The neighbourhoods of Madrid are laid-back and almost sleepy by day, but Madrid by night is a different beast. In the daytime, bulky churches dominate the streets, but at night, a thousand lit-up bars come to life. This week is Easter, the semana santa, and the city is relatively quiet as madrileños head out of town. I hate to think what it is like when it isn’t quiet. It’s impossible to park your car in the crammed night-time streets. My Spanish friends were ecstatic when they finally found a park in a jammed one-way street – which meant backing out all the way a few hours later, something normal by local driving standards.

We are standing at the bar, squashed on all sides, cigarette smoke blown at us, drinking grape juice and munching tostadas with salsa and prosciutto. Suddenly, the sound of solemn drums reaches us. I’ve been waiting for this: the Processions of semana santa.

You have to see the Processions to believe them, and even then you might not. There they are, advancing towards us to the medieval beat of drums: the hooded Catholic brotherhood of Spain. The dark violet hoods with high, stiff-tipped peaks have holes for the eyes, and only the girth and shape of the robed bodies suggest the age and sex of the person. They all wear a belt of thick ropes around the waist. Some of them go bare-foot, and one especially penitent sinner has chains around his ankles. Others are carrying heavy wooden crosses on their backs. The only reassuring thing about these crosses is that they threaten crucifixion for the penitent, not for the faithless onlooker. Although the Procession’s dungeon imagery is a cross between the Spanish Inquisition and Ku Klux Klan, its aggression is turned inwards. Theoretically, at least.

The ghoulish violet figures are interspersed with groups of matrons in black: the planideras, traditional criers at funerals. These middle-aged women with righteous faces surrounded by tufts of black lace pinned at the back with a silver clip march straight out of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Some of them are shoeless in their black stockings, in the Catholic penitent tradition of descalzos. There is in fact a 16th century convent in Madrid called Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales, Monastery of the Barefoot Royal Ladies, which still houses two dozen shoeless Fransiscan nuns. A few of the matrons, however, are wearing improbably high heels: macabre dominatrixes of the Catholic fetishism for pomp and pain. I am reminded of Lorca’s play about repressed sexuality and madness in an all-female Spanish household The House of Bernarda Alba. Especially when I see a beautiful adolescent walking among the matrons of death decked out in the same funereal costume, her olive-skinned face lit up by some troubled dream of eternal virginity. I almost expect her to float to the heavens any moment now. And sure enough, along comes the Virgin – a waxen apparition on a canopy of flowers carried by men. Behind her is Jesus, also waxen, with waist-long hair. This worship of suffering gives the hedonistic motto of Madrid a somewhat different slant: De Madrid al cielo, After Madrid there’s only Heaven. The crowd applauds the Virgin’s ‘apparition’, although many onlookers are sneering, like my two Spanish friends.

‘Fanatics,’ mutters Juan, a philosophy graduate and civil servant in his 30s. ‘They’re sick. Tomorrow I’ll be on the train and one of them will sit next to me. It gives me the creeps.’
Creepier yet is the Silent Procession the following day. The hoods wear black and move in total silence, like an army of Grim Reapers sneaking up on the town.
‘Don’t make eye contact, they’ll give you the evil eye,’ Juan instructs us. ‘They’ll crucify you at a moment’s notice.’

All around Spain, processions like this are taking place, and cosmopolitan Madrid has the most moderate scene of all. Still, this is a dark corner in Spain’s heart, seemingly at odds with Spanish extroversion. But in Spanish culture, perhaps even more than in other European Catholic cultures, passion is the main currency, and worshipping the ‘passion’ of the Christ is only one strand, along with the passions for flamenco, bull-fighting, good food, late nights, and loud conversation.

‘This is a country of martyrs and poets,’ Juan muses. ‘Do you know any Spanish philosophers since Seneca, who was Roman anyway? That’s because there aren’t any. OK, there is one I can think of, a modern one called Aranguren. He said ‘Con España, no puedo’, I can’t take Spain any more. But look at all the churches and streets in Madrid – San Jeronimo, San Antonio, San Marco, a bonanza of saints and martyrs. It’s because we think with our guts.’

The hoods of the Processions are practically a freak show today, especially in a vibrant metropolis made up of 4 million assorted Spaniards and immigrants. But they ruled for centuries. Many of Madrid’s enchanting squares are former sites of auto-da-fés and gruesome executions arranged by the Inquisition. In the 20th century, following tradition, Franco’s dictatorship allied itself with the Catholic far-right. Juan, who is a Republican and allies himself with the ‘moderate left’, tells me they were the two heads of the same monster.

‘Why is France a modern, evolved society with none of these marching fanatics? Because they won the Revolution, and we lost the civil war. Fifty thousand were executed by Franco in the aftermath of the war – a whole generation of intellectuals, humanists, young people, atheists, homosexuals like Lorca - so that the army and the church could have absolute power.’

A month ago, the last statue of Franco in Madrid - but not in Spain - was quietly removed from a square. The left-wing government, elected in the messy aftermath of the Madrid railway bombing, decided to do it inconspicuously, at night. But the falanguistas, the surviving fascists of Spain, protested conspicuously. Some even publicly tore their shirts, a gesture reminiscent of religious acts of penitence. One historian in the conservative daily ‘El Mundo’ claimed that ‘the socialists’, with their ‘obsession with Franco’, are erasing history instead of promoting continuity, and that 30 years after Franco, memories of his time should be ‘normalised’. This stance is reminiscent of old radical divisions in Spanish political life, and is difficult to justify, given that the ultimate monument to Franco’s rule and spirit still stands, some 50 km north of Madrid.

The hypocritically named memorial Valley of the Fallen was built according to Franco’s aesthetic of brutalism, religiousness, and megalomania, ostensibly to commemorate the dead on both sides of the Civil War, but in reality to immortalise the Generalíssimo himself. The fact that it was built by political prisoners from the Republican Army in the Civil War says it all. So do the poignant buildings in Madrid damaged by clashes between Republicans and Nationalists, like the half-destroyed medieval church in the colourful immigrant neighbourhood Embajadores, whose clock is frozen in time. As a stronghold of Republicans, Madrid was regularly shelled by the Nationalists who camped west of the city, in the park Casa de Campo.

Asking for more ‘continuity’ than this amounts to propping up the patriarchal triumvirate of army, church and far-right reaction. Modern Spain, and especially modern Madrid, have moved on from such follies and are more interested in keeping their hard-won liberties. At the Atocha railway station, scene of the terrible terrorist bombing, no traces are left of the tragedy. The tropical garden inside the station, complete with a turtle pond, is an oasis of harmony – a deliberate civic statement that the forces of fanaticism will not quash the city’s fun-loving, progressive spirit. The monument to the dead is elsewhere: a park with a tree planted for every victim.

Casa de Campo, on the other hand, is a living monument to Madrid’s carnal appetites. Aside from the ubiquitous ham and chorizo, and the sado-masochistic perversity of the Processions, Madrid harbours a seedier, franker carnality. After 6pm, Casa de Campo becomes the domain of prostitutes. They stand along the winding roads of the park, wearing little more than dental floss, and tapping the bonnets of cars. Like meat at the market, they are bunched together by race and orientation: East Europeans, blacks, transvestites, Spanish, Latin-Americans. The transactions are made in the woods, or in the client’s car. Those familiar with the films of Pedro Almodóvar will recognise the scene of his sexually ambiguous characters’ misadventures.

Prostitution, like that other Catholic sin, abortion, is illegal in Spain, but widespread and tacitly tolerated. The old saying goes that if a woman travels to London, it’s to get rid of a baby; if she travels to Paris, it’s to keep the baby. In the repressed climate of Franco’s days children were told that babies come from Paris. The council has supposedly banned prostitutes from the inner city, but there is a street running up from the epicentre of Madrid – Puerta del Sol – which is taken over by prostitutes and pimps. I see a repulsive old man in an overcoat approach a pale girl with blue eye-shadow. ‘How old are you?’ he croaks. ‘Twenty,’ she says. He moves on to her younger friend. Walking past the girls’ blank faces, I wonder how many of them are smuggled from Eastern Europe and South America as sex slaves, without papers, practically non-entities.

At the end of Montera Street we reach the huge, frantic Plaza of Puerta del Sol, Gateway of the Sun, the ground zero of Madrid. This is where countless transactions, rendezvous, pick-ups, and general purpose loitering take place. In front of the neo-classical building and once post-office Casa de Correos stand three guards wearing different uniforms and don’t-mess-with-me faces: national police, municipal police, and civil guard. Triple protection for the seat of regional government seems excessive, especially in the light of what this building used to be: the HQs of Franco’s secret police, and the scene of the murder by defenestration of communist Julián Grimau in the 1960s.

But on top of the building, Madrid’s most famous clock ticks on brightly towards the future, and down on the pavement a little sign says ‘Kilometre zero’. All distances in Spain are counted out from here - including, of course, the distance to Heaven. And most certainly Hell.

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