Shopping with the Undead: the Corte Inglés

Yesterday we went to the Corte Inglés. This department store is in a huge building on the edge of town with a fabulous view of Avilés from the car park. The store has no windows. It is right next to the cemetery, and it makes me think of those zombie movies where the living dead take over shopping malls.

I went to the cemetery last year on the Día de los Difuntos to scrub down Carmen's mother's tombstone in the company of hundreds of Spanish matrons with their buckets, bleach and nailbrushes. It is a complete barrio for the dead with weeping angels and virgins for the richer, tackier graves and simple inscriptions on the poorer ones, stacked up like apartment buildings with a square facing stone.

The Corte Inglés is an enormous undivided aircraft hangar, which also has its richer and poorer sections. At the end closest to the cemetery is the supermarket- Hipercor, Hipermejor, as the endless tannoy announcements tell you- which is always chilly with the cold cabinets and freezers pumping out cool air. Nothing much would rot here but, in case the proximity of the dead should introduce decay into the air, everything comes double-wrapped in plastic, even the oranges and bananas.

From this end you can look down the aisles of twinkling lights and advertising banners to the far distance where the 'posh' people buy their clothes and accessories from franchised vendors. Shop assistants flit around, like strange priestesses, in their tight nylon trousers and green and white tops, their nails painted with shiny, translucent varnish and their eyes and lips glistening exotically.

"Ouch!" I grunt as Carmen prods me in the ribs.
"Stop staring," she demands.
"What?"
"But look... Ouch!"
"And it's rude to point."

I can't help it. As Carmen was talking to one of the assistants I saw grains of powder moving around on her face. Her eyelashes were stuck together with a glutinous wadges of mascara. It was as though one of those painted virgins had come to life. She had at least two colours of lipstick.

"Claro," says Carmen. "If you are going to work here, you have to put on the mask."

It's fantasmagoric and makes me think of zombies even more than the sleepwalking shoppers who bumble unnaturally slowly between the rows of electrodomésticos that must have been unloaded last week from a giant Chinese container ship: they all look as though they would fall apart if you sneezed on them.

Spain has signed up heartily to consumerism and the Corte Inglés is emblematic. I enthusiastically wait for their new advertising campaigns that fill the huge billboards around Avilés with giant women pouting in high heels or baring their ferocious teeth to the world. The sheer scale of these photographs makes them extraordinary and, since I have a geeky art hstorian's delight in relgious iconography, I like to see them as the expression of a peculiarly modern Spanish cult of the ephemeral and gaudy, a new twist on the Spanish Baroque, if you like.

Yesterday we were heading for the shoe section at the far end. Carmen had bought me a pair of shoes for my birthday and they had started to come apart on the second day. This was doubly laughable because they were advertised as 'machine-washable'.

"Vamos a ver," said the curate of this particular side chapel of the Cathedral of excess. "Let's see." He was a round-faced, tubby man with a Franco-era moustache and pudgy fingers who would not have looked out of place in a cassock but was wearing a double-breasted suit that just about accommodated his double girth.

He started pulling at the seams, opened the shoes further, then grabbed a new pair and pulled them open as well. I looked at his handiwork. "That's the way they are, you see," he concluded. I wasn't sure if he wanted me to apologise: to say, "Oh, of course, I should have realised that" and forget that the Corte Inglés has a no quibble refund policy.

Behind him I could see through the open door that led to a shabby store room with boxes and disorganised papers. Looking past the mirrors, lights and glitter of the sales façade and then down at those open shoes with their gaping seams gave me the same sense of sadness you might get on discovering that magic is all trickery. And I couldn't help noticing that the underling he delegated to give us the refund was wearing a peculiarly glittery lip paint: her mask, her painted face.