Sunday, October 27, 2024

the last book I ever read (Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past, excerpt seven)

from Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past by Giles Tremlett:

Both Gil and Ruiz-Mateos sought political power as they tried to avoid court cases and attempted to exact revenge on ‘the politicians’ who were their enemies. Natural populists, they had their small successes. These were men who, in the language of the football terrace or the bull ring, believed that what really mattered was to have un buen par de cojoines – a real pair of balls. They were examples of what the comic film-maker Santiageo Segura – in two hilarious films based around a character called Torrente – termed casposa (dandruff-ridden) Spain.

As the owner of first division Atlético de Madrid football club for his last twelve years, Gil was disciplined several times for insulting referees, including accusing a French referee of homosexuality, and inciting the club’s followers to violence. One black player, the Colombian Adolfo ‘El Tren’ Valencia, was a particular obsession. ‘I’ll kill that black man!’ he once spluttered. His contributions to racial harmony included ‘Spain stinks from so many blacks’. Even the paid-up socios, or season-ticket holders, of Atlético were not safe from his bilious comments. ‘The socios,’ he declared, were from ‘a low social stratus’. But that was not all. ‘Whoever doesn’t have a drug addict in the family, quite possibly has a prostitute.’ Gil was the archetype casposo.



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