Ghosts of Spain Read online

  I had come here to witness one of the most remarkable ceremonies to be regularly held in a Christian place of worship. Here, on the closest Saturday to after the 20 November anniversary of Franco’s death, the so-called nostálgicos – the few who still feel nostalgia for the Caudillo – gather to pay him homage. I had decided to look for what remained of the most important man in twentieth-century Spain. I should, I had decided, start here. Friends found my interest distasteful, even morbid. Why would I want to go? It would be full of fachas, as they call their home-grown brand of ultra-rightists and fascists, or casposos, literally the dandruff-ridden, they said. I might as well have been consorting with the living dead. But I wanted to see this unique conjunction of Roman Catholic and fascist ceremonial for myself.

  The first surprise was that, on this day, the state waives the fee it normally charges drivers at the entrance gate. Authorities justified this because a religious service was being held. The car park was full to overflowing, even on a rain-drenched, stormy day. ‘Silence in this sacred place,’ ordered a sign at the basilica entrance. But this was a day of exceptions. Nobody was going to enforce the rule. The basilica was awash with the banners and flags of the Falange and other historic, far-right organisations. Young boys dressed in white cassocks sat primly in the choir stalls. Benedictine monks, also dressed in white, were led by the Abbot in his dazzling mitre.

  When I arrived, holy communion was already being offered to, and received by, many of the 1,000-plus people who had come here to pay tribute to the Caudillo. Some were blue-shirted Falangists or young skinheads, but most were not. Place them anywhere else, indeed, and it would have been almost impossible to tell them apart from any other group of Spaniards. There was, perhaps, a higher than usual density of hair oil and Barbour-style jackets – trademarks of the conservative upper-class Spanish youth, the pijo – on display amongst the younger men. And there were more pastel-coloured lambswool jumpers and Hermes or Burberry scarves, trademarks of his partner, the pija, than the average group of Spaniards might display. But there were also the full range of classes and ages. Small children ran around excitedly, wearing Franco-era Spanish flags decorated with sinister black eagles as if they were Batman capes.

  The star of the show, however, was Franco’s daughter Carmen, the Duquesa de Franco – a woman once discovered, several years after her father’s death, trying to take gold coins out of the country. When the religious service ended, half of the congregation headed for the hole in the rock that would let them out onto the vast, windswept esplanade. The other half, however, crowded forward to where the Duquesa could be found. Banners were held aloft, some adorned with the Cross of St James, known as ‘Matamoros’, the ‘Moorslayer’. Others carried the Falange’s yoke and arrows. Those on the fringes of the crowd clambered up the steps of the choir stalls, craning necks to get a view of the lump of granite in the floor behind the altar that is Franco’s tomb. In a question of minutes, the transformation of this Christian temple from place of worship to political parade ground was absolute. Arms were thrown out and held stiffly in place. ‘¡Viva Franco!’ came the shouts, followed by ‘¡España una, grande y libre!’ (‘Spain, one, great and free’). The crowd continued on through the panoply of old Francoist chants. There was a bellowed rendition of the Falange’s ‘Cara al Sol’ anthem, promising that death for the cause will be rewarded by the return of banderas victoriosas, the flags of victory.

  After a few minutes of this, the Duquesa moved slowly along the tunnel followed by a small court of elderly, diminutive men. Anxious to see her close up, I found myself swept along just a pace behind her. ‘Franco! Franco! Franco!’ the clutch of excited, red-faced men beside her shouted, their arms raised. Suddenly, as we neared the exit, I found myself accompanying her through a tunnel of raised arms and shouting, chanting voices. The echoes rolled back off the underground walls, multiplying the voices. For a moment, the awe and exhilaration of fascist ceremonialism ran through me. Franco’s Spanish brand of fascism differed from those espoused by Hitler or Mussolini and had plenty of time to evolve into something else. His, and the Falange’s, sense of ceremony was relatively limited but it came directly from the same school. I felt as though I had time-warped my way back into a black-and-white newsreel to the era of the goose-step, the mass rally and the cult of personality.

  I slipped sideways through the raised arms and was just as quickly returned to reality. In fact, there were only a couple of hundred people chanting here. The Duquesa and her little party walked out onto the vast, dark esplanade – distant lightning flashes adding suitable drama to the scenario. They diminished so quickly in size that, within a minute, they looked like a small clutch of elderly pensioners lost in a storm. I wanted to rush over and offer an umbrella, or an arm to hold, in case they slipped on the sheets of water racing across the flagstones or were blown off their feet by the gale. But two minders with Francoist armbands were in attendance. A chauffeur-driven, plum-coloured Rolls-Royce, I was told, waited for them somewhere in the driving rain. The nostálgicos, meanwhile, gathered for a bit more singing under the arches outside the basilica. A handful of German skinheads looked on. Then the nostálgicos headed for the car park, drove down the road and disappeared out of sight for another year.

  That, bar a few small demonstrations and even smaller political meetings, is all that Francisco Franco, Caudillo de Dios y de la Patria, gets thirty years after his peaceful, natural death.

  The contrast between the Franco regime’s view of its own historical import and the way it is treated today could not be greater. The Valley, after all, is an imposing, arrogant reminder of victory, of the Caudillo’s visceral sense of the right of conquest. Grey, grim and intimidating, it is designed to inspire awe, respect and obedience. And that – or at least the first part of it – it still achieves. On those crystal-clear days that the thin air of Madrid, Europe’s highest major capital, is famous for producing, it can be seen, thirty miles away (fifty kilometres), from the city itself. It is an uncomfortable, and largely unwanted, reminder that Franco may be dead, but his spirit is still out there somewhere.

  Just a few miles along the Sierra de Guadarrama, at El Escorial, lies another cold, vast and imposing construction. The royal monastery of El Escorial was built in the sixteenth century by Philip II. V. S. Pritchett called Philip’s favourite building ‘the oppressive monument of the first totalitarian state in Europe’ and the ‘mausoleum of Spanish power’. From here the austere and suspicious monarch tried to administer the myriad lands received from his father, the Emperor Charles V. These, with the addition of his own aquisitions, stretched from Holland and southern Italy to North Africa, Latin America and the Philippines. His was the original empire on which the sun never set. That empire, however, did not last. Its gradual decline from the end of the sixteenth century would continue until the days of Franco’s own childhood with the disastrous loss, in 1898, of Cuba and the Philippines. To Franco, however, its prison-like walls and monolithic, dull exterior must have seemed the very expression of Castilian military virility and religious might. His own crusade would, he thought, re-establish some of that glorious past. The Valley, too, he decreed, must have ‘the grandeur of the monuments of old, which defy time and forgetfulness’.

  Franco’s court of adulators sometimes compared him to Philip, the counter-reformation zealot and man who sent the Spanish Armada to its stormy, watery grave in the Atlantic. Philip was not his only company. El Cid, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Alexander the Great and the Archangel Gabriel – to mention a few – were all named as the Caudillo’s historic equals. Visitors looking for a simplistic psychological explanation for the Valley may be tempted to speculate about small men and large objects. But Franco knew that the bigger and more impressive the monument, the longer his name would last. The Valley was his great passion. It was the not-so-secret other love of a man said to have observed, otherwise, rigorous sexual fidelity. Everything here is built to impress. From the cross and the basilica to the bleak esp
lanade and a similarly regimented square behind the Risco – home to a Benedectine monastery, a choir school and a large guest house – all here is large and imposing. The scale and drama of the Valley of the Fallen guarantee the name of Francisco Franco will survive for centuries. It was, from the Caudillo’s point of view, a good decision. For Spaniards have, otherwise, done all they can to wipe out his imprint.

  In physical terms, the Valley of the Fallen is virtually all that remains of Franco. It is an amazing disappearing act, further evidence of the power of forgetting in Spain. For Franco, or, more precisely, Francoism, has been condemned to the ignominy of silent disdain. ‘By tacit national consent, the regime was relegated to oblivion,’ says Franco’s best-known biographer, Paul Preston.

  Historians cannot be blamed for this. Dozens of biographies and memoirs of those who knew him have been written. Ever since his death, however, the Franco name has become, in the English sense, an F-word. To be called a Francoist or a facha is, almost without exception, an insult. To admit in public to the slightest grain of respect or admiration for Franco is to be a political outcast. This is despite, or perhaps because of, the attempts of a handful of Franco diehards who still see him in terms of the hagiography of his own times. One Benedictine, while I was writing this book, even suggested he should be a candidate for beatification. There can be no real debate about Franco in Spain. He is either black or white, bad or good. There is no grey area in between.

  Nowhere is the silence more eloquent than in the state-owned gift shop at the Valley of the Fallen. There are only two guidebooks on sale here. One is a cheap picture book. The other is written by the state body that owns it, Patrimonio Nacional. One does not even mention the fact that Republican prisoners-of-war were used to build the Valley. The other observes, briefly, that prisoners-of-war could redeem part of their sentence by working here. Neither mentions that more than a dozen labourers died here. They also, however, keep mentions of Franco himself to a bare minimum.

  The handful of references to him talk, coyly, of ‘the former head of state’. Photographs of the tombs of Franco and Primo de Rivera are curiously absent. The books provide, instead, illustrations of the bulgingly muscular set of sculptures known as the Allegory to the Armed Forces or the religious tapestries hanging on the wall. Patrimonio Nacional, explaining its own existence, says it looks after ‘palaces, monasteries and convents founded by Spanish monarchs’. It is difficult to see how this place, founded by a dictator, fits.

  The gift shop sells Valley key rings, pens, T-shirts, coasters and thimbles. But it does not have any of the books written by, or about, the prisoners who worked and, in some cases, died building the place. Nor is there a single book on Franco or Primo de Rivera.

  Unsure what to do with it, successive governments have tried to take the meaning out of the Valley of the Fallen. It is as if the monument had appeared here innocently, and neutrally, out of the blue. There is, their silence suggests, nothing shocking, awesome or even significant about it.

  Thirty years after the Caudillo’s death, a new Socialist government has finally suuggested it would like to tell the full story of the Valley of the Fallen. It may build a visitors’ centre here, devoted to the Civil War. There is no sign, yet, however, of any real change.

  I set out to find people who had helped build the Valley. I found two of them. Both, for very different reasons, were sure that it oozed with meaning: malicious for one, glorious for the other.

  Diego Márquez Horrillo was a genuine volunteer, a convinced Falangist who would come here during the summer vacations from his university law degree. To him it is, principally, the resting place of José Antonio Primo de Rivera – a man he still reveres as father, in the 1930s, of ‘the most modern of all political ideas’. He enjoyed those summers in the hills, where he would marvel at the ingenuity of it all. ‘It was an extraordinary project,’ he told me in the small Madrid office which is half his law practice and half headquarters of one tiny fragment of what little remains of the Falange. ‘I was excited to be involved.’

  Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz was another sort of ‘volunteer’. He was one of the political prisoners sent here with the promise of a meagre one peseta a day in a savings account, and the chance of reducing his sentence. He is now an emeritus professor at New York University. I found him at a conference in Barcelona where, for almost the first time since Franco’s death, academics were discussing the full extent of a vast prison system though which some 200,000 people – 2 per cent of the male population – passed. Sánchez-Albornoz was sent here in 1948 after being arrested as a student agitator. The cheap labour he and tens of thousands of prison workers around Spain provided would help found the fortunes of several major construction companies. Mussolini’s foreign minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, already shocked by the vast numbers being executed in 1939, found the concentration camps full ‘not of prisoners of war, but slaves of war’.

  Sánchez-Albornoz saw how food destined for the prisoners never made it beyond the camp gates. The director, like many officials during the first decade of Franco’s rule, was getting rich off black-market trading. The state, meanwhile, paid itself for the prisoners’ upkeep by taking 80 per cent of an already miserable wage. There were no prison fences here, as there was nowhere to go. Sánchez-Albornoz was one of the few prisoners who dared escape. More than fifty years later, he refuses to go back to Cuelgamuros, the finca where the basilica was built. ‘I loathe Cuelgamuros. I refuse to put my feet on what, before it was profaned, was a beautiful piece of land … unless the crypt is given a different use and now, given my age, that there is also a urinal on Franco’s grave so that I can relieve my prostate,’ he says. ‘With a little more money, and he had plenty of that, he might have hired free workers and avoided the imprint of revenge … His remains are buried in a monument to cruelty and corruption.’

  The Valley of the Fallen may have survived, but most other physical proof of Franco’s, and Francoism’s, existence has been wiped from the face of Spain. Major cities like Madrid or Barcelona returned their Avenidas del Generalísimo, their Plazas del Caudillo or their Plazas Francisco Franco to their original names in the 1970s. A single remaining public statue of Franco in Madrid was removed, under cover of darkness, shortly before this book was published. A few months earlier I had gone to look at it. Franco sat astride his horse, but those who did not know who he was could not have guessed. It was a statue without a plaque. I bumped into a Spanish history graduate beside it and asked her whether she thought it should still be here. ‘I don’t like Franco,’ she replied. ‘But I think we should remember he existed, just so we do not make the same mistake again.’ The Socialist government that ordered its removal obviously disagreed. A triumphal arch and couple of streets named after lesser Francoist generals are now all that remain in Madrid to commemorate that period of history.

  When the author and journalist Arcadi Espada went looking for the public remnants of Franco several years ago he found that, with a few exceptions, they had disappeared. Of Spain’s provincial capitals only Santander was still festooned with Franco memorabilia, despite pressure from historians for it to be removed. ‘Even the whores and beggars are rightists in Santander,’ explained the writer Jesús Pardo.

  Franco’s birthplace of Ferrol, a navy port in Galicia that became known as El Ferrol del Caudillo, waited almost thirty years but eventually also removed its equestrian statue from the central Plaza de España. A People’s Party councillor tried to save it, calling for a popular referendum, but had her wrists slapped by party bosses. Not even the party that wins the votes of the old franquistas dares show active support for him, or his memory. By the time I visited Ferrol, the statue had gone. The statue, which was later discreetly sent to a naval museum, had been placed in a municipal store.

  Espada says that sums up exactly what Spaniards have done with Franco. They have shoved him into storage. He has been placed out of sight and, largely, out of mind. ‘In reality, with museums and the street o
ut of the question, the storeroom is exactly where Spain has placed Franco. It is a jumbled, dusty, indeterminate place, somewhere without criteria. Franco showed that the best thing to do with a difficult problem was to shove it into [the back of] a drawer. That is where he is right now.’

  Sometimes the solution has been more radical. On a visit to Guadalajara province, I stopped on a road near Torija at a ridge overlooking the plain where the River Henares flows. Here, on the roadside, I discovered a pile of broken, honey-coloured stone, looking like the rubble from some ancient building site. Turning the stones over, however, I found the smashed fragments of a huge, carved Francoist shield. These must have been torn off a local town hall after Franco’s death. They had been dumped at the roadside – another anonymous, indeterminate place for the remains of Francoism.

  The business of wiping out Franco’s physical imprint has been long and slow. There are still a dozen villages, mainly founded during his life near dams or other public works, which will for ever be Franco’s. Alberche del Caudillo and Llanos del Caudillo are just two of them – though others, like Barbate and Ferrol, have returned to their original names.