Ghosts of Spain Read online

  Then, a couple of years later, I found myself standing by another Civil War mass grave. This one was also near the mountains of León, at a place called Piedrafita de Babia. It, too, had been dug up by volunteers. The elderly sister of one of the victims, Isabel, helped direct the mechanical diggers to the spot where they had been buried. For years she had been going, secretly, to lay flowers at the site once a year. Isabel still hated the men who had done it.

  ‘Everybody knew the bodies were here. Back then, even after they were killed and secretly buried, people from the village came across the bones after they were exposed by rain,’ she told me. ‘The priest told them the rojos, the reds, were so vile that even the earth did not want them. Even now people remember the fear. They don’t like to talk about it.’

  Soon afterwards another grave was dug up, and then another and another. Suddenly, it turned out, there were graves all over the place. Spain was sitting on what campaigners claimed were tens of thousands of such corpses. They lay in mass graves, some in cemeteries, but many others beside roadside ditches, in forests or out in the open country. These were the victims of Franco’s purges of rojos, reds or left-wingers, during and after the Civil War. That war had ended more than sixty years before, however, and Franco himself had died, peacefully and in his bed, in 1975. Nobody had done anything about them in the quarter-century since then. Now there were demands that the government should find them all, dig them up and rebury them.

  In retrospect another catalyst for what was going on was probably José María Aznar. It was not so much a question of who he was, as what he symbolised. A few years earlier he had become Spain’s first democratically elected right-wing prime minister since the 1930s. In a country where the right – in some people’s minds – still meant Franco, that was always going to require a certain amount of readjustment. I never imagined, however, that it would raise the dead from their graves. They had been left to lie, after all, while the Socialists were in power for fourteen years. Somehow, however, the fact that the right was in power started people clamouring. Nobody was asking for justice – even though there still were, and still are, killers out there – but they did want dignity for the dead. The polemic continues today.

  As history erupted from under the ground, I decided to turn my back on Spain’s glittering, entertaining and enticing surface. I wanted to undertake what one Italian writer called ‘that difficult voyage, to travel through time and space across the country’. It would, of course, be the voyage of an anglosajón – a Spain seen through foreign eyes, looking at some peculiarities which Spaniards themselves feel hardly warrant attention.

  This would mean, in some respects, following a well-trodden road for foreign writers on Spain. Gypsies and flamenco music, for example, have long fascinated visitors here. But what, also, about some modern Spanish phenomena? The tireless pursuit of pleasure, the tourist ghettos flourishing on the coasts and, even, those gaudily lit brothels on Spanish motorways all have something to say about the priorities and attitudes of modern Spaniards. I had questions, too, about how women had fared in a country that had rocketed its way out of state-imposed, fundamentalist Catholicism into non-judgemental, ‘live and let live’ liberalism. Most of all, however, in a country where history weighed so heavily, my journey would be able to look at the past through the present, and the present through the past.

  Informing Spanish friends about this project produced conflicting reactions. Spaniards are acutely, sensitively aware of what others say about them. They do not always like their intimate selves to be exposed. That is why they meet in bars, in the plaza or on the street. Their home is an intimate space – a family refuge. It may take years before a friend invites you into their house. Some of mine never have. The street – la calle – is far more than just a stretch of tarmac and paving stones. It is neutral ground, a space to meet and, why not, to show off.

  ‘¡Sí, sí, Spain is different!’ Mercedes exclaims. It is about time, she suggests, that someone pointed out that the country is not as marvellous as its own propagandists suggest. ‘¡O sea, España es diferente!’ repeats Marga, almost word for word, in a separate conversation. Her tone, however, is opposite. I feel she suspects I am about to badmouth her country – that I will make Spaniards look less like the modern Europeans that they are and, more significantly, desperately want to be. Foreign writers have long been accused of spreading ‘black legends’ – about a Spanish propensity for violence, anarchy, inquisitions or self-destruction. Few foreigners, however, can match the gloom of late-nineteenth-century Spanish writers like Ángel Ganivet, who deemed Spain ‘a cage full of madmen all suffering from the same manía: their inability to put up with one another’. I try to explain that, amongst other things, I am looking for things that make Spaniards different to others. One of those, of course, is that many Spaniards – with their avid enthusiasm for the European Union and eager embrace of the latest cultural icons from New York, London, Paris or Berlin – would rather not be different.

  Mercedes and Marga had both reached for the 1960s advertising slogan – ‘Spain is different!’ – invented for Manuel Fraga, Franco’s information and tourism minister. The slogan was greeted with black humour at the time. With a dictator in charge, what tourist was going to find it normal? In 2005 the octogenarian Fraga was still the most voted-for political leader in Galicia, one of Spain’s seventeen partly self-governing ‘autonomous regions’, though he narrowly failed to ensure himself a fifth consecutive period as regional premier. Fraga’s continued presence in politics is, ironically, another of those things that makes modern Spain ‘different’. How many other European nations, after all, entered the twenty-first century with ministers from a right-wing dictatorship still active, and powerful, in politics? Of course Spain is different, I wanted to reply. All countries are. Most, however, are happy – even proud – for it to be that way.

  The mass graves of the Civil War were an obvious starting point for my journey into Spanish history. Aznar had refused to pay for them to be found and dug up. These dead did not interest him. An old man in a village near Ávila agreed with his decision. ‘If you stir shit, stink rises,’ he said. He was not talking about the dead themselves but about the stories they had carried to the grave with them.

  The unease caused by these exhumations was palpable. A vow of silence – one that had been adhered to in the years since Franco died – was being broken. People did not know what to make of it all. One of the first reburials of victims from a mass grave was attended by exactly four journalists. These came from the local newspaper, the New York Times, CNN and the Guardian. The latter three appeared independently. A television cameraman who worked for a national Spanish network, Antena 3, came on his own to film it because he was related to one of the dead. ‘I know they won’t broadcast it, though,’ he said. Spain’s national press stayed away.

  ‘I might as well go and dig up my uncles at Paracuellos de Jarama,’ one newspaper executive, no Francoist he, told me. It was a reference to his own family members shot by Franco’s Republican opponents during the same Civil War. So I went to see their graves, too, in a cemetery by Madrid’s airport with a giant white cross laid into the hillside. The long rows of tombstones at Paracuellos de Jarama, with their tragic inscriptions to beloved fathers, husbands, brothers and sons, were eloquent proof that the left, too, had blindly butchered unarmed opponents. Individual headstones blamed rojos or ‘Marxist hordes’ for the killings. On a cold November morning I watched small groups of people scatter pink carnations amongst the crosses. Some stayed for a short ceremony at a small cenotaph. The Falange anthem ‘Cara al Sol’ was sung. Arms were thrown out in a stiff, fascist salute. It was a rare sighting of Spain’s extreme right. It was clear that neither side had clean hands. These dead, however, were in holy ground. They were not in a ditch.

  The graves being dug up were a reminder of just how this country had set about making its transformation – la Transición – from dictatorship to democracy. After Franco die
d, in 1975, la Transición had seemed truly miraculous. At this point, there had been no falling of the Berlin wall and no full-scale toppling of Latin America’s right-wing dictatorships. Nor had Spaniards, unlike their neighbours in Portugal, pushed dictatorship out with a peaceful, carnation-wielding revolution. There was no road-map for going from authoritarian, dictatorial government to democracy. Spain was unique. It had to find its own way. And it did so by smothering the past. Truth commissions had not really yet been invented. Nuremberg-style trials of the guilty were out of the question. Many of those who would lead la Transición had, anyway, Francoist pasts. It was better to cover their personal stories, too, with a cloak of silence. An atavistic fear of the past, of not repeating the bloody confrontation of the Spanish Civil War, was one reason for this silence. Another was not to upset those, especially in the army, who were amongst the biggest threats to the young democracy.

  It was unwritten, but known as el pacto del olvido, the pact of forgetting. Historians continued their work and, with sometimes limited access to documents from the time, dug and delved. In the early days of the transition there was a sudden thirst for books, in a country used to censorship, on what had really happened to Spain since 1936. But the Civil War and, to a certain degree, Francoism itself became unmentionable elsewhere – in politics, between neighbours and even, in many cases, within families themselves. A senior academic once suggested to me that the whole matter was best studied ‘en la intimidad’, in the intimacy of one’s own home. It was, in the words of one parliamentarian of la Transición, a matter of ‘forgetting by everyone for everyone’.

  It was also a case of tapando vergüenzas – of covering up embarrassments. For, apart from a few Franco nostalgists, Spaniards felt, understandably, shame. They were ashamed of their Civil War and also about the mediocre dictator who emerged from it. Anyway, they said, what mattered was the present, the here-and-now, and the future. The latter was an argument that went down well with a nation bubbling over with optimism for tomorrow and with a hedonistic desire to make the most of today. Spaniards have settled down since the giddy days of Madrid’s 1980s ‘movida’. ‘Get stoned and stay with it,’ aged Madrid mayor Enrique Tierno Galván, affectionately known as ‘el viejo profesor’, had exhorted the city’s youth. Spaniards generally still believe it is their absolute right – even their obligation – to enjoy themselves. This, researchers have even suggested, may be the real reason why they live so much longer than other Europeans. It may also, however, be why they are Europe’s biggest consumers of cocaine.

  Once the silence began to break, however, it was unstoppable. Whole tables at El Corte Inglés, the ubiquitous department store, groaned with volumes with titles like Franco’s Graves, The Slaves of Franco, Victims of Victory, The End of Hope, The Lost Children of Francoism and Chronicle of the Lost Years. Spaniards, especially a younger generation whose grandparents and parents had often kept their own silence, suddenly wanted to know more.

  Soon, however, it became clear that the silence hid something other than just fear or shame. Spaniards, it turned out, did not agree on the past. History was a political Pandora’s box. Once the lid was opened, out flew ancient, hate-fuelled arguments.

  A new kind of book appeared. These ones had names like The Myths of the Civil War, Checas of Madrid: Republican Prisons Revealed or 1934 – The Civil War Begins, The Socialist Party and Catalan Republican Left Start the Hostilities. These were often pseudo-history, a prominent historian complained to me. He also believed they were a direct result of the graves being opened. They shot, however, to the top of the bestsellers list. These books, in the broadest sense, accused the people lying in those graves of being guilty of the whole thing in the first place. The left had provoked the Civil War with swings towards extremism, attempted revolutions and leniency with church-burners. And then there were the checas, the left-wing prisons and torture cells, and the mass shootings of right-wing prisoners by the Republicans themselves. A left-wing revolution was gathering steam when General Franco and others rebelled, they argued. It was a new version of Franco’s old argument. He had saved Spain.

  This was the argument that had been disguised by the silence. Spain had two versions of who was to blame for the Civil War. There was one for the old right, and their new apologists, and one for the rest. There was something infantile about the argument that had reappeared. ‘You started it!’ ‘No, you started it!’ had the ring of small children arguing. Proven historical facts – and the dispassionate treatment of them – were, sadly, not always a part of the debate.

  History, it suddenly became clear, was a Spanish battlefield. There was no generally accepted narrative for what had happened in the 1930s. Nor, I would discover, was there agreement on whole other areas of the past.

  The poet Machado had written: ‘Little Spaniard who is coming into this world, may God protect you. One of the two Spains will freeze your heart.’ Now, some people claimed, the two Spains were beginning to reappear. Ideas of ‘them’ and ‘us’, of ‘if you are not my friend, you are my enemy’ were becoming increasingly powerful. Aznar, especially, seemed to encourage them. There were many on the other side of the political barricades who were happy to return the treatment.

  Old fault lines re-emerged. Travelling back to Barcelona or talking to some people in the Basque Country, especially, was becoming increasingly strange. It was not so much a question of entering a different country, as of finding oneself in a different mental space. Opinions rarely heard in Madrid were commonplace in Catalonia and the Basque Country – and vice versa. Spain felt not just divided, but schizophrenic.

  Las Dos Españas, the Two Spains, seem to have something to do with the Spanish love of forming groups and clans. Spaniards like to move en masse, to belong to large gaggles. They celebrate, and demonstrate, in huge throngs – their enjoyment increased by the numbers with them. It is one of the great and enviable things about Spain to an outsider. This is a country where no politician, from left or right, would dream of echoing Margaret Thatcher’s words that ‘there is no such thing as Society’. Where anglosajones do things on their own or with their families, Spaniards often do them by the coach-load. They like the warmth, the solidarity, the sense of belonging that groups give them. That, perhaps, is why their towns and cities pack people together, ignoring the acres of open space around them. Individuality, I discovered when my own children reached school age, can be viewed with suspicion. There is something potentially dangerous, however, about these groups. Individual squabbles can turn into group squabbles. The herd, once roused, can be far more destructive than the beast on its own.

  The arguing over history, however, did not end with the Civil War. For Spaniards also had doubts that stretched much further back. Even the question of when Spain came into existence did not seem to have a clear answer. Was it, as one politician on the right proclaimed, ‘the oldest country in Europe’? Had an early version of it existed under the Romans or Visigoths as something called Hispania? Or was it Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, the so-called Catholic Monarchs, who created modern Spain by uniting the kingdoms of Castile and Aragón and completing the Christian ‘Reconquista’ in the fifteenth century? Some suggested Spain was much younger, that it did not become fully formed until Spaniards fought together against Napoleon in the early nineteenth century. The argument, once more, had strong political overtones. A Spaniard’s idea of history, I discovered, often depended on how they voted. Or was it vice versa?

  Even the Moors, who had arrived in Spain in 711 and left five centuries ago, suddenly turned up in political discourse. They were there in Aznar’s speeches about Islamist terrorism or in bishops’ warnings about attempts to bring a full separation of the Roman Catholic Church from the State. Some saw both Moors and Jews as an integral part of Spanish history and culture. For others, they were still, clearly, an alien, ancient enemy.

  The Greek geographer Strabo described the Iberian peninsula – which modern Spain shares with Portugal – as ‘like
an ox-hide extending in length from west to east, its fore-parts toward the east, and in breadth from north to south’. That ox-hide is now being pulled, stretched and squabbled over. There are warnings that it might tear. A new Socialist prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, is trying to stop that happening. It is a test of the elasticity of the constitution Spaniards wrote for themselves, under the shadow of Francoism, in 1978. Apocalyptic warnings from the opposition suggest the end of Spain is nigh. ‘We are witnesses to the dismantling of Spain,’ says one of Aznar’s ex-ministers.

  Spain, a significant number of Spaniards believe, is not really a nation. It is a state that contains – or, even, imposes its will on – several other nations. These have their own names: principally Euskadi (as the Basque Country is now known) and Catalonia, but also Galicia. In these places – which jointly account for a quarter of Spaniards – the word España is often unmentionable. It has been replaced by el estado español, the Spanish state. This is, sometimes, a country that dares not speak its own name.