Ghosts of Spain Read online

  Again, history is plundered to support one or other discourse. A Catalan’s version of Catalonia’s history may have little to do with that of a Madrileño. A Basque nationalist and his pro-Spanish neighbour in Navarre – even though their history has sometimes run the same course – may also disagree on what really happened in the past. From the eighth-century Battle of Roncesvalles, when the Basques fell on Charlemagne’s rearguard as it left Spain, to the seventeenth-century Reapers Revolt in Catalonia, the interpretations of what happened – and why – are not just different, but sometimes diametrically opposed. The history young Spaniards are taught at school can often be different too. Iñaki, a Basque history teacher, told me a teenage student recently handed him a drawing – which had been approved by another teacher – in which eighth-century peasants at Roncesvalles carried an ikurriña, the flag of modern Euskadi. ‘Everybody knows that that flag was invented eleven centuries later,’ he said. Another Basque historian, a disciple of Basque nationalism, told me I should never trust historians from elsewhere in Spain when they wrote about the Basques. ‘They always twist it to their own ends,’ he said.

  Spain’s Royal Academy of History came to an opposite conclusion. It issued a report claiming that the regional politicians who now control education were making sure schoolchildren received a ‘partial, skewed and inexact’ version of history. Pupils in some places were learning that their region had been in a state of constant struggle with Madrid. Schools ran the danger of encouraging ‘confrontation’. ‘In no other European country is the ignorance of history used with the political aim of distortion or creating opposition,’ it fumed.

  That Spaniards were worried about the integrity of their nation was clear, again, from the bookstores. Spain, Patriotism and Nation, Hispania to España or Spain: Three Millennia of History were a few of the titles produced to apply starch to the ox-hide.

  The counter-argument was there, too. I Am Not Spanish, read one Catalan-language title in Barcelona’s bookshops. In the Basque Country the row was more lethal than that. Separatist gunmen from ETA were still killing, their own version of history helping them pull the trigger. Why Are We Basques Fighting? was the title of one book, written from a prison cell, whose justifications stretched back into prehistory.

  The great writer and thinker José Ortega y Gasset had warned about all this in the 1920s in his España Invertebrada (Invertebrate Spain). Spain, he warned, lacked a strong backbone to hold it together. It had been falling slowly apart since it reached a height of imperial grandeur – and superpower status – at the end of the sixteenth century. Foreign visitors had already commented on the huge contrasts between Spaniards from different regions. Vast mountain ranges and broad rivers chopped the country up into virtually incommunicable bits. The mid-nineteenth-century traveller Richard Ford called them ‘walls and moats’. That meant that Spaniards often knew little about one another. The pueblo (home town or village) and the provincia (province) were, at that stage, the entire world of most Spaniards.

  Yet this new Spain has done much to demolish those barriers. European Union funds have helped bore holes through mountains, running motorways and high-speed trains through them. Long-distance journeys between places are no longer counted in days, but in hours. Every year they get a little shorter. Nineteenth-century travellers would always remark on how you could tell where a Spaniard was from by their style of dress. Today’s Spaniards buy their clothes from the same shops. These are often owned by the same man, Europe’s latest retailing billionaire – and Spain’s richest man – the publicity-shy Zara founder Amancio Ortega. Spaniards now watch the same TV soaps and the same galas, the interminable Saturday night variety shows broadcast from around the country. They are more joined up, and more homogeneous, than they have ever been. They are also more disposed to argue about whether they have anything in common.

  When I first lived in Spain, spending the mid-1980s in Barcelona, I had come to admire the way Catalan friends were busy rediscovering their roots – often by studying their own language. I had arrived, fresh out of university, in a state of almost total ignorance about Spain and its different languages. They were an exciting discovery. I went to the theatre in Catalan, I read poetry in the language of the Galicians and was intrigued, on my first visits to San Sebastián, by the unusual and exotic sound of the Basque language, euskara. These languages enriched Spain. Instead of celebrating that, however, Spaniards seemed intent on squabbling about them. They were not a cause of common pride, but of division. They still are – more so, in fact, than they were then.

  Superficially, Spaniards are good at relating to the past. Few countries hold on to and nurture their traditions so tenderly or so enthusiastically. From the bull-runs of Pamplona to the ku-klux-klan-like nazarenos parading through Andalucía’s cities over Easter, from the Basque stone-lifting competitions to the Catalan fire festivals – the fiesta remains sacrosanct. One estimate has put annual spending on local fiestas at half a billion pounds. Tradition and modernity somehow manage to fit snugly together in Spain. It is a wonder to those of us from countries, or cultures, where the latter has wiped out much of the former. This strange conjunction of old and new produces some of the most endearing pictures – literally so, in the photographic sense – of modern Spain: the conical-hatted nazareno astride a motorbike; the tur-banned moro from a Moors and Christians festival in Alicante, chatting on his mobile phone; or the woman bullfighter from one of Pedro Almodóvar’s films, dressed in a glittering traje de luces, a suit of lights.

  Tradition and history, however, are two different things. The former is always invented at some moment – and a surprising number of Spanish fiestas are recent inventions – while the latter should not be. Fiestas, anyway, do not seem to me to be celebrations of the past. Some are genuinely spiritual, religious affairs. Others are expressions of local pride or chauvinism. Most, however, are about fun. You only have to see the men of Almonte dressed in their wide cordobés hats, their horses tethered to a rail behind the hermitage of The Virgin of El Rocío, swigging back beer or rum and coke, to see that. A million people visit this gleaming white hermitage in Spain’s south-west province of Huelva every Whitsun. It is Spain’s biggest annual religious pilgrimage. It is also Spain’s biggest annual party. Tradition then, like anger, is actually worn quite lightly. There may, or may not, be gravitas – but there is rarely the pomposity of its dwindling British equivalents. This, again, has to do with that Spanish love of doing things en masse. It is a reaffirmation of society, of the group, rather than a desperate clinging to the past. It also, of course, has to do with that deeply held belief in the right to have a good time.

  Any journey across Spain is, necessarily, going to include a certain amount of having, or watching people have, a good time. But the starting point for my quest was a moment in history when Spaniards got carried away by another, more destructive, sort of emotion. It was time to find those Civil War graves.

  Ghosts of Spain

  1

  Secretos a Voces

  Sitting in the late autumn sun, in what had once been the Generalísimo’s plaza, it was not difficult to imagine what had happened here, sixty-six years earlier. The same crooked, clay-tiled roofs ran down to the wood-balustraded balconies of the buildings around the square. One or two houses were new, and the town hall had been renovated, but the church was, of course, still there. The square remained open on one side, looking out over roof-tops and fields.

  I had come here to listen to a story that, were Spain not a country whose history is perforated with holes of silence and forgetting, would have been laid gently to rest long ago. It was a story that had erupted out of the past, spilt over into the present and proved one thing – the sores of the Spanish Civil War could still, even now, be reopened. Two-thirds of a century had gone by, but they were still there, untended and only partially cured.

  This was my first visit to Poyales del Hoyo. I did not know then that it would be the first of many trips to the fertile va
lley of the River Tiétar. At that moment, Poyales del Hoyo was just another Spanish pueblo of seven hundred ageing inhabitants. The square was small, neat and, thankfully, unspoilt. Light poured in from the open, southern side and lemon trees peeked around the corner of the church. But, apart from that, the pueblo had little special to recommend it. Today was, in any case, a day for the dead, All Saints Day. There was more bustle in the cemetery than in this square, now called the Plaza del Moral. Not so long ago, however, this had been the Plaza del Generalísimo – the superlative title they had given to Europe’s most enduring right-wing dictator, Francisco Franco Bahamonde.

  So here, more or less, is what happened on 29 December 1936. The details have undoubtedly been modified over the years in the minds of those who told it to me. The core of it, however, is true. It is a tale that could be told in a thousand pueblos. But in most of those places, as they were in Poyales del Hoyo, the shameful events of that period remain secretos a voces – ‘voiced secrets’ that, even today, are only whispered in private.

  29 December, 1936

  The small lorry was parked in the plaza, between the village hall, the squat, solid church and a covered walkway propped up by irregular granite columns. It was a cold December night. Rain was beating down on Poyales del Hoyo, slipping down the cobbles and mud of the steep, narrow streets and into the fields below.

  Perched on the foothills of the Gredos mountains in the central Spanish province of Ávila, Poyales del Hoyo likes to boast that it is protected by them from the extremes of the weather of the Castilian plain to the south. But the rain, when it comes, can be relentless. The water shines the streets and puts a dull, matt grey tinge on the tightly packed, white-painted buildings.

  The night chosen for killing the three women fell a few days after Christmas and just two before New Year’s Eve. A small crowd had formed as the Falangists prepared to carry out their work. There was no lack of volunteers. Only one man, a future Civil Guard officer called Miguel Suárez, protested at what was about to happen. He pulled a young cousin of his out of the crowd and dragged him out of the square, but he could not stop the rest.

  The man in charge was Ángel Vadillo. Later to be known by the nickname Quinientos Uno, literally ‘Five hundred and one’, he was the leader of the local Falange, the Spanish Phalanx. This party of the extreme right had gathered just 45,000 votes around Spain (and no seat in the Madrid parliament, Las Cortes) in national elections ten months before. But, as the only party approved by General Francisco Franco, it was growing rapidly in the areas conquered since the military rebellion against the Republic had erupted in July. Vadillo eventually boasted that he had killed 501 rojos – thus gaining a nickname which, by most accounts, he was proud of.

  In the early months, the shootings were a regular occurrence. 501 and his fellow Falangists would meet in the bars of Poyales or, seven miles (eleven kilometres) away, in Celestino’s bar in Candeleda. There they would fortify themselves with vino de pitarra, the rough red wine made from the dusty, purple grapes that grow in every garden and smallholding along this fertile stretch of the Tiétar valley. Then, after nightfall, they would go to work.

  Tonight it was the turn of Pilar Espinosa, Virtudes de la Puente and Valeriana Granada. The latter, Quinientos Uno’s niece Damiana agrees today, was only there because another woman in the village was jealous of her. Valeriana, aged twenty-six, had once been the woman’s husband’s lover. That was before they had married but, in the cauldron of village life, the jealousy still bubbled away. The woman persuaded her Falange friends to add Valeriana’s name to the list of those due to be killed. The other two were Republican sympathisers. Pilar was forty-three. She was one of the few in the village who could read. She had subscribed to the newspaper El Socialista. Virtudes, aged fifty-three, was not just a Republican but also a Protestant. She used to bathe, immodestly, in a pool in the river that still bears her name. These were all things that marked her as a potential enemy of Franco’s National Catholic crusade as it swept slowly but inexorably across Spain.

  The night has remained crystal clear in the mind of Obdulia, Pilar Espinosa’s daughter. Two-thirds of a century had gone by when she told me what had happened. As soon as she started telling the story, however, she slipped back to that night in 1936 – once more seeing the faces of those around her.

  It was the night when she, a fourteen-year-old girl, accompanied her mother in her last hours of life. ‘We were already in bed after a hard day in the fields. Suddenly they were beating at the door. There must have been a dozen of them, dressed up in their blue shirts and leather webbing, armed with rifles and pistols. They told us we had to go and speak to the police, that someone had denounced us,’ she recalled.

  They were taken to a small warehouse, or storeroom, somewhere in the village. But the only questioning they had was from the local priest – who must have known what awaited them. Before the women, together with Pilar’s daughter Obdulia and Valeriana’s two-year-old girl, Heliodora, were brought out into the square, the priest appeared. He asked whether they wanted him to hear their confession. Perhaps, like Mosén Millán, the priest in Ramon J. Sender’s ‘Requiem para un campesino español’ (‘Requiem for a Spanish Peasant’), he consoled himself with the thought that: ‘At times, my son, God allows an innocent to die. He let it happen to his own Son, who was more innocent than the three of you.’

  The Falangists, meanwhile, had gone to get Feliciano Fraile from the police cells. Feliciano was another Republican, but he was also one of the few in Poyales who knew how to drive. He was forced behind the wheel of the small, requisitioned lorry – which the owner, Rufino, had refused to drive. Then the women were brought out and pushed up into the back of the lorry with the men who would kill them.

  Back in 1936, the road out of Poyales del Hoyo hugged the contours of the Gredos foothills tightly, making gentle S-shapes as it travelled slowly towards Candeleda. It snaked its way through pastures, olive groves, and orchards of cherry trees or wide-leafed figs. On the right-hand side the Almanzor, ‘The Invincible’ – the highest of the Gredos peaks named after the warrior-like hadjib (prime minister) of the tenth-century Muslim kingdom of Córdoba, Muhammad ibn Abi Amir – occasionally came into sight. Snow-capped until late spring, it takes on a hazy blue-grey colour on hot days, its edges blurring into the cloudless sky behind. On the other side of the road, low hills led south to the scorched plains of Castile, to Oropesa and, beyond that, Toledo.

  On that rainy night, Obdulia and the three women could not see any of this. They were aware of the lurching of the lorry on the curves, the damp seeping in over the tarpaulin and, I am sure, the fearful certainty of their own deaths.

  The women could have been shot anywhere along the road. But, evidently, the killers wanted to get away from Poyales del Hoyo. The lorry did stop, once, on the way. Obdulia was ordered out. She had time for a quick embrace with her mother. Then she started back through the rain.

  ‘My mother gave me a hug, and that was the last I saw of her. I ran back through the rain and shut myself into the house. I still don’t know why they let me get off but I don’t feel any gratitude. They killed my mother. I have always hated them for it and I always will,’ she recalled, bitterness and defiance still in her face.

  The chosen spot was on the final curve just before the road straightens out and runs down the hill into Candeleda, ending under the palm trees of the Plaza del Castillo.

  The locals knew it as ‘La Vuelta del Esparragal’, ‘the asparagus field curve’. Feliciano, the driver, walked off and left the killers to it. Nobody was worried about him running away. There was nowhere to go. Considerable violence was used on Valeriana, the youngest, who was pregnant. Her skull was smashed. They say that her belly and womb were ripped open with a knife. The other two were shot through the head.

  All three bodies were left out in the open beside the road. A peasant discovered them the following morning. He dug a grave, placed the three bodies in a Z-shape, shovelled the earth
back and marked the spot with a stone. He died of a heart attack a few days later. People said it was la pena – the pain of his discovery – that killed him. By that time, however, everyone in Candeleda and Poyales del Hoyo knew the shameful secret of the Vuelta del Esparragal.

  A new year broke at the end of the following day. It brought with it more war, and many more deaths like those of Pilar, Valeriana and Virtudes. The victims were buried in roadside graves, hurled into pits, gullies and ditches or stuffed down wells. The violence, once unleashed, reached extremes of cruelty on both sides.

  The Spanish Civil War, a bloody curtain-raiser for the global war of ideologies that broke out in 1939, did not end for another two and a half years – until 1 April 1939. The country lived under the absolute control of General Franco, Caudillo of Spain, for almost another four decades. Poyales del Hoyo, Candeleda and the rest of the villages strung along the Tiétar Valley lived under the control of those who killed the three women, and those who supported them, for the same period.

  Franco died, still in power, in 1975. The Spanish people, relieved, embraced democracy in record time, consciously fleeing their own brutal past and burying it in silence.

  Fear, anyway, has a life of its own. People here kept the secret of the Vuelta del Esparragal for a quarter of a century more.

  All Saints’ Day, 2002

  Sixty-six years later there is freshly dug earth again at the Vuelta del Esparragal. Mariano is down on his knees in the gash of pale, sandy soil opened up by the mechanical digger. He works his fingers through the drying mud and passes a few small, yellowed shards of human bone and tooth into the palm of one hand. With their primitive, heavy-handed working methods, he explains, the volunteers who came here a few days earlier to disinter the three women had not managed to gather everything.