Ghosts of Spain Read online

  As the petitions from relatives of the disappeared flooded in, a national Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory was formed. It tried to stay clear of party politics. It petitioned parliament for help. The petition claimed that up to 30,000 victims of General Franco’s supporters were buried in several hundred mass graves – some in cemeteries and others scattered along roadsides, in woods or open country.

  ‘The conflict of the two Spains has not finished, nor will it finish until the truth of what happened is restored and the pain suffered, and still endured, by these families is recognised by handing back the bodies so that they can, at last, be given a dignified burial. Those who lost the war were condemned to silence, imposed on them by the dictatorship and agreed on by the democracy in the Amnesty Law of 1977. That condemnation has now reached the third generation of these families … Today there are people who still feel the need to lower their voices or even to close their windows when talking about these events, as if they themselves were doing something clandestine,’ the group said in its parliamentary petition.

  The group asked parliament to fund its activities, open up all the military archives, exhume and identify the bodies and bring an end to the ‘discrimination’ against Franco’s victims and their families.

  The parliament, where Aznar’s People’s Party held an absolute majority, trod around the subject as if walking on egg shells. Eventually it was agreed that local councils and regional authorities could, if they wanted, set funds aside for exhuming bodies. The same local authorities were ordered, sixty-three years after the war had ended, to avoid ‘reopening old wounds or stirring up the rescoldo, the embers, of civil confrontation’. The motion was approved, by consensus, on 20 November 2002 – twenty-seven years to the day since General Franco had died.

  That a European parliament should, at the turn of the twenty-first century, be passing motions about a war that finished sixty-three years before may seem surprising. That it should include in one of those motions a stern warning about reviving the embers of that confrontation shows that the Civil War still had the power to provoke fear.

  The political debate over what to do with the Civil War and its victims continues. A political class which had publicly declared the war to have been overcome has found it impossible to avoid in its own debating chambers. The left found a sudden enthusiasm for the subject when Aznar was in power. It tried, amongst other things, to pass motions that formally recognised the war had been started by an illegal rebellion against the established and elected government. It was an enthusiasm that had been entirely absent when the Socialists were in power in the 1980s and early 1990s.

  A significant part of the right continues to insist, however, that the war cannot be blamed on Franco’s side alone. People’s Party spokesmen at parliamentary debates talked of ‘civil confrontation’ and ‘national self-destruction’. Blame, the modern right insists, should be shared by all. Some believe it should be pinned firmly on the left. Right and left, it seems, are forever destined to disagree.

  The Socialist government that has now taken over from Aznar has vowed that it will, finally, do something about the mass graves. It is a sign that something is changing. The plans look set, however, to provoke cries of outrage from the right. More than six decades later there are still political arguments to be had – and, presumably, votes won or lost – on the issue of the Civil War. Spain has yet to put that war to sleep.

  What about the killers? No one has ever been tried for crimes like the killings at Poyales del Hoyo or Priaranza. Nor can they be. Most of the killers are dead, of course. But some are not.

  In an attempt to find one of them, I travelled back to Candeleda. Here, I was told, an infamous Falangist gunman was still alive. His name was Horencio Sánchez, but like most people here he was known by his mote, or nickname – Sartén, Frying Pan. The search for him, with Mariano as my guide, proved comical. Candeleda boasts some bizarre nicknames. Amongst those I would hear as we went around the pueblo were Cagacantaros, Pitcher-crapper, Chupahuesos, Bone-sucker, Mataperros, Dog-killer and Cagamillones, ‘He who craps millions’. (This last mote, I was told, was given to a man who boasted about his wealth.)

  First, however, Mariano wanted to introduce me to some of those who remembered the Civil War. We started off looking for Feliciano Pérez, who was not at home and, we were told, would be at the funeral of the oldest man in the village, who had died the previous day. We tried the church. This created a serious problem for Mariano. It is quite acceptable to wander in and out and chat to people in church services in Spain, but Mariano refused, on principle, to enter. The priest, he explained, had secretly said a Mass for his deceased father. This had led to a violent argument in the street. A boot, it was suggested, had been applied to the priest’s backside. And, anyway, there was the Church’s past to be considered. ‘You have to understand … the Church, the landowners and Franco were one and the same thing,’ he explained.

  We thought we had the solution to that one when we found the local newsagent chomping on a cigar stub as he stood under the trees outside of the church with a handful of other men. But the newsagent, it turned out, had also sworn never to set foot inside the church, which has a plaque commemorating the local priests killed in the Civil War. ‘Not on my life,’ he said. So, having discovered that anti-clericalism was still alive and kicking, we gave up.

  Eventually we found Feliciano back at home. ‘Te cagarás, you’ll crap yourself, if I tell you how old I am,’ he said, by way of greeting. Feliciano was in a good mood. With the previous day’s death he had, at ninety-six, become the new oldest man in town. Unfortunately his memory was fading and his story of how Franco’s Moorish troops took the town was jumbled and confusing.

  Felipe Grande Nieto, a gentle old man in his late eighties, had much clearer memories. We talked to him in the back room of a tiny three-room flat. To get to the kitchen-cum-sitting room, we had to walk through the bedroom, where his frail stick of a wife lay shivering with cold. Her small body was stretched out and her arms clasped together on her chest like some medieval figure on top of a cathedral tomb. She moaned softly from time to time, giving every impression of preparing for the other world.

  Felipe’s father had been relatively well off and had owned a truck. He was, however, a Republican. The Nationalists took the truck away and his family had lived in relative poverty ever since. Felipe apologised as he talked, because, out of his already rheumy blue eyes, tears began to flow. He found two stories especially hard to tell. One was of a man, known as el Ebanistero, taken off at night to be shot with five others. ‘But, for some reason, he did not die that night. When they sent a man to bury them, he found el Ebanistero still alive. “Kill me with the spade, I don’t want to be left alive,” he begged. So two guardias came and finished him off. They were buried down by the river,’ he said, the tears running down his cheeks. The other was the story of a man shot as he fled the attacking Moors. His corpse was discovered by a dog. The animal appeared at its master’s door with half a human limb in his mouth. ‘He killed that dog immediately. It had tasted human flesh,’ Felipe said, the tears still flowing.

  After hearing the bloodcurdling tales of Falangist violence and humiliation, the idea of meeting Frying Pan – the alleged Falangist killer – was distinctly chilling. I imagined a hard, dry old man, still twisted by hatred or flushed with brutal pride. Or, just possibly, he would be crippled by guilt, ashamed at where the brutality of the time had pushed him and nervously awaiting the final judgement.

  I found Frying Pan in the old people’s day centre on the palmlined Avenida de Palmeras. The busty, middle-aged matron, in her blue cardigan, was more than happy to see me. Before introducing us, she made it quite clear which side of the historical divide she sat on. ‘This man was one of the ones who killed for cash,’ she whispered, surveying a large, open room with tables full of white-haired, fragile bingo players. ‘They are all right-wingers in here. There are a lot of bastards loose.’

 
; The matron told me that Frying Pan had got into a bit of trouble recently when another old-age pensioner had thrown his past in his face, spitting at him: ‘You should have joined the Civil Guard, given as how you enjoyed pulling the trigger so much.’

  She dived in amongst the bingo tables to get Frying Pan. The man who stood up, however, did not fit my image of a blood-thirsty assassin.

  Frying Pan was an eighty-six-year-old peasant on his last legs. He hobbled over on two crutches, a bulky, white plastic shopping bag tied to his belt, bouncing awkwardly against his side. The shopping bag held his anorak. Any drama that the meeting might have had was taken away by the matron, who was bobbing around behind his back, blowing imaginary smoke from the end of two imaginary pistols.

  Once he realised what was up, Frying Pan did not feel much like talking. He admitted being part of the Falange, but denied having anything to do with the killings. His uncle, he explained, had been ‘a man of the right’ as well as being the head of the family. ‘My mother was a widow and I had four sisters to look after. I was seventeen years old and spent my time working on the fields in my uncle’s finca. It was my uncle who put my name down for the Falange,’ he said. All the killings, he said, had been carried out while he was away at the front in Robledo de Chavela. By the time he came home in 1938, he said, all that was over and done with. And, with that, he excused himself and shuffled off.

  José Antonio Landera had better luck at finding killers. A tall, gentle, quietly spoken thirty-one-year-old, José Antonio comes from Fabero, one of the mining pueblos of northern León. Fabero lies in El Bierzo, where the plain of Old Castile comes to an abrupt end as it hits the Montes de León and the mountains and steep valleys of the Cordillera Cantábrica. The mountain chain’s most spectacular peaks, the Picos de Europa, rear up nearby, ending up just short of the luxuriously green coast of Asturias. The people of El Bierzo are rugged hill-folk or miners, more like their neighbours across the mountains in Asturias and Galicia than their fellow Castilians of the plains.

  We met on a humid summer’s day in the Atlantic port city of Gijón, where José Antonio was stationed as a member of the Civil Guard. Just as Emilio Silva had done a few miles away in Priaranza, José Antonio had managed to find and dig up a relative assassinated by the Falange. The victim was his great-uncle Periquete, a left-wing miners’ leader from Fabero for whom José Antonio had developed an almost filial devotion. Despite resistance from his family, who feared local reactions, and pressure from local right-wing mayors and the families of two local doctors – both prominent Falangists who had a hand in the killing – he has pieced together his great-uncle’s last week of life.

  When José Antonio started his inquiries, two of the killers were still alive. He rang one of them at the old people’s home, run by nuns, where he was living. The man, Arturo Sésamo, known as Arturón or ‘Big Arthur’, was almost deaf but said José Antonio could come round. Impressed by José Antonio’s Civil Guard card, and unaware that he was Periquete’s great-nephew, he told the story in great detail. He even explained how the great-uncle had, at first, survived being shot. He had eventually been beaten to death by the gang of killers after he disturbed their lunch by sitting up and insulting them when he was meant to be dead.

  Eventually, José Antonio could take no more. So he got up and left. ‘It was too much for me. I had been thinking about his death for a long time. It was something I felt about strongly,’ the gentle policeman, a man too young to remember Franco, explained.

  Arturón’s reaction was to shout after him, in a hopeful tone of voice: ‘So, are they reforming the Falange, then. Are we going to kill some rojos?’ Three days later, when José Antonio rang back, the nuns told him that Arturón, who was in his nineties, had died of a heart attack

  Arturón showed little sign of remorse. Amongst the band of people who have, in the past few years, started the work of finding and digging up the victims of the Falangist paseos, stories abound – many undoubtedly apocryphal – of other old Falangists with blood on their hands who are still proud of their work. In Val-ladolid, there is a retired butcher who reputedly killed people with a descabello, the dagger used to finish off fighting bulls who take too long to die in the bull-ring. In a village near Miranda del Ebro there is said to be an old man who used to tie his victims to the front of a car and parade them around town. He still, apparently, claims that he did his country a service by shooting so many rojos.

  The killers, then, are still out there. They are in their late eighties and nineties now, old men with blood on their hands – but whose time is past. Not one has ever been tried for murdering a rojo. The same cannot be said of those on the left who also butchered civilians.

  It is true that the far left has latched onto the Civil War, the Republic and the cause of what has become known as the ‘recovery of historical memory’. A movement that grew spontaneously has split in two. Spain’s communists have taken control of part of it. Keen young radicals will now march with an anti-globalisation banner in one hand and a purple, red and yellow Republican flag in the other. But many, like Emilio Silva and José Antonio Landera, simply see it as an opportunity to right the wrongs suffered by the families of the victims. It is, above all, a chance to put the record straight. They tried, at least initially, to avoid party politics and were annoyed when left-wing parties got involved. Revenge is not in their vocabulary. The justice they seek is historical. There has, therefore, been no pressure to bring the old mass murderers to trial, or, so far, to expose them to public reprobation. That would be pushing the non-aggression pact on which Spain’s modern democracy is founded too far. What they demand is the truth, and the right to bury the dead with decency – two rights that were accorded to the victims of the winning side long ago.

  Nearly seven decades after the beginning of the war, the truth they seek has only just begun to emerge. Historians are investigating, old people are talking, local groups are taking the matter into their own hands and, with mechanical diggers and shovels, digging up the past. Spain will probably not be fully ready to confront its most bloody episode, however, until all those involved are dead.

  Even then Spaniards will be left arguing about what that war brought them. For if the war itself was twentieth-century Spain’s most important event, General Francisco Franco, el Generalísimo, was its key figure. If Spaniards had tried to keep the memory of the Civil War at bay what, I wondered, had they done with the man who ruled their lives for almost four decades afterwards. The place to find that out, I decided, was in a valley in the countryside outside Madrid – the Valley of the Fallen.

  2

  Looking for the Generalísimo

  The Valle de los Caídos is a delightful, shallow dip in the folds of the Sierra de Guadarrama. Overlooked by dramatic outcrops of bare granite, it is populated mainly by pines but punctuated by a scattering of oak, ilex and poplar. Driving up the valley road on a wet, windy November afternoon, I was struck by how peaceful this most controversial of places really was. Dog roses and wild thyme lined the road. Signs warned me to drive slowly and be careful not to run over the wild boar, squirrels or other wildlife that inhabit this oasis of protected parkland. The greedy, growing octopus that is greater Madrid felt far away, though its tentacles of housing and office blocks stretch ever closer.

  Juanjo, my barber, used to come here for picnics when he was a boy, back in the 1960s and 1970s. His family would look for wild mushrooms under the fallen pine needles. ‘It is a beautiful spot,’ he explained. ‘Even if you don’t like what it stands for.’ And therein lies a problem. For Juanjo was one of the few people I had heard speak well of the Valley of the Fallen. Few of my Madrid friends had ever been here, to one of the most bucolic, verdant spots within striking distance of a city that spends half the year marooned in the middle of a burnt, parched flatland. On later visits I occasionally invited someone to accompany me. ‘¡Ni muerto!’ – ‘Not even when I am dead’ – was a typical, and unconsciously ironic, reply. Not even offering to
pay the entrance fee charged by Patrimonio Nacional, the state body that owns this and a dozen parks, palaces and monasteries around the country, would persuade them to go.

  The reason for this lies at the end of the five-kilometre road that swings up the valley, through the well-tended pines and across a pair of elegant, stone bridges. For here stands the largest, and most recent, piece of fascist religious monumental architecture to have been erected in western Europe. A huge, blue-grey granite cross soars 150 metres into the sky. The base is planted in the Risco de la Nava, an already imposing outcrop of lichen-clad, brownish rocks, dotted with spindly, buckled-over, wind-tortured trees. Down below, a series of vast, austere, arched galleries have been built against the rock. They overlook a wide, Spartan, featureless esplanade. Between the galleries sit two, relatively small, bronze doors.

  Stepping through the doors was an Alice in Wonderland experience. An entirely different world lay on the other side. I had swapped the rugged, natural beauty of the sierra for the damp, echoing chamber of what must be the world’s biggest underground Christian basilica. It tunnels its way through the rock for 260 cold, still metres. An interior dome, lined in gold mosaic, has been hollowed out to a height of twenty-two metres above the granite and black marble floor. The troglodyte basilica – granted the latter status by Pope John XXIII in 1960, the year after the nineteen-year project was finished – is built to the dimensions of the ego of its creator, General Franco. It is, its admirers point out, longer than St Peter’s in the Vatican, and almost as high. Nominally, and according to the literature published by Patrimonio Nacional, it is a monument to all the dead of the Civil War. Damiana González, mayoress of Poyales del Hoyo, had insisted to me that it remained exactly that – a symbol of forgiveness and peace between the two, bitterly opposed, Spains of yesteryear. The bodies of some 40,000 dead were brought here. I could, however, find only two names on the tombstones inside. One was that of the Falange founder José Antonio Primo de Rivera, taken from his Alicante prison cell and shot by the Republicans during the war. The owner of the other one, General Franco, reserved his spot well before his death. ‘When my turn comes, put me here,’ he told the architect, pointing to the floor behind the altar.