I had slept deeply the night before, and when I woke it took some minutes for the memory of where I was and what I was doing to seep back into my mind. Kiki’s flat, the smooth wooden floor, hot summer light streaming through the upper window. I had sweated profusely again, skin clammy and thin. Staggering to the kitchen for a glass of water I almost fell over, my legs like rubber, head spinning. It seemed the virus had still not left me entirely.
Kiki was almost annoyingly jolly.
‘We’re going for a drive into the mountains. You need some mountain air.’
A couple of hours later, after I’d slowly showered, eaten and put on some of my new clothes, I was slumped in the passenger seat of an orange 2CV, wearily watching the miles of towering chocolate-brown suburbs shift gradually into dry countryside. I tried to rise above the din of the tiny engine to connect once again with where I was. Some part of my brain was aware that today Kiki was dressed most definitely as a man. Perhaps it was a disguise in order to step out of the protection the city gave him.
We stopped to pick up some newspapers and magazines, and I glanced at a photo report on Picasso’s famous painting Guernica. Commissioned by the Republican government for its pavilion at the World Fair in Paris in the middle of the Civil War, this huge black and white depiction of the bombing has become one of Picasso’s most celebrated works, a violent, chaotic scene of destruction that fits well with the painter’s fragmenting, distorting style. Inspiration for the work had come after a million people took to the streets in Paris, where Picasso was living, to protest at the news of the Basque massacre. Photos of the bombed city were soon circulating. The work got mixed reviews when it went on display – the Germans and the Soviets in particular found it displeasing – but went on to become perhaps the most famous painting of the twentieth century, touring the world from its eventual home in New York. Although he had bestowed it on the ‘Spanish people’, Picasso had insisted it could never be shown in Spain until democracy was restored. It finally reached the country in 1981. Today it hangs in the Reina Sofía museum in the centre of Madrid.
‘Picasso makes the same mistake as everyone about the Civil War,’ Kiki said.
‘What’s that?’
‘He can only see it in black and white.’
My concentration locked on to the screaming horse with its arrow-tongue, and the light-bulb eye in the sky, like a mechanical, soulless god. Try as I might to absorb other aspects of the picture, I couldn’t move my gaze from these two central motifs, my eyes moving in and out of focus in a fog-like drift. A voice somewhere inside me was speaking with solid assurance, saying how natural it was that there should be no colour in such a scene. Such wilful destruction and wrongdoing could only be depicted in shades of grey. Colour would be inappropriate here. I found myself nodding silently, taken in by the strength of the argument. But from the other side of the car came a different voice.
‘It’s simplistic,’ Kiki said. ‘If life is as complicated as it is, imagine what war must be like.’ His voice hadn’t noticeably changed, but it seemed subtly different from before in a way I couldn’t quite pin down – more suited to one wearing ‘male’ dress. Perhaps it was the style of speaking more than a blunt shift in register.
‘Do you think it’s possible there were good guys and bad guys?’ he said.
I remembered coming across a comment by Stephen Spender, who’d served on the Republican side with the International Brigades. He’d said that according to his tutor at Oxford, the Spanish Civil War was the only conflict in his lifetime where there was an absolute and clear choice between good (the Republic) and evil (Franco). Perhaps in the Europe of the 1930s it was easier to make such bold statements than it is now. Certainly I couldn’t come down on one side like that myself.
There seemed to be very few people who could treat the Civil War simply as history. As with so much in Spain, emotion and passion played a large role in the matter, so much so that the echoes of the conflict still resounded today. Would they ever fall silent, I wondered?
‘What happened to your family in the war?’ I asked. I could hear the words coming out of my mouth in a tired slur.
‘They were up in Galicia,’ Kiki said. ‘Not much. That whole area was under the Nationalists from the start. My grandfather had a shop and was too old to fight; my father was still a boy. An uncle on my mother’s side was enlisted into Franco’s army and got a bullet through the stomach at Brunete. But no one talked about the war too much. It was always there, like a headache that just won’t go away, but you try to get on with things. When I was sixteen I asked my uncle about what happened, but he broke down. I didn’t bother after that.’
The Battle of Brunete, in July 1937, had been one of the biggest battles of the war, an ultimately unsuccessful attempt by the Republicans to break out of the circle the Nationalists were slowly trying to draw around Madrid. Casualties were high on both sides, with around 42,000 men lost in total.
I sat back and closed my eyes, happy for a short while to be driven around, sickness inducing a childish desire to withdraw into a secure space where responsibility rested on another’s shoulders. The temptation to be led, to hand yourself over to one who seemed or claimed to have all the answers, was a constant threat. Wasn’t that, after all, how people had been lulled into the sleep of political extremes of the thirties? As I drifted into a dream-like state, I had visions of the Civil War turning into a battle between religious sects, Franco morphing into a tambourine-wielding Hare Krishna while his opponents lined up in the lotus position, levitating their way to the front lines and attacking their enemies with nut roasts.
I felt a hand on my arm.
We were on a country road, climbing up a hillside clad in thick pine forests, glimpses of light and spectacular views over the valley below coming into sight through breaks in the foliage. It seemed fresh and unusually green for Spain in the middle of summer, and I felt the rich dark colours washing over my senses like a cool shower.
‘How long have I been asleep?’
‘I want you to see something,’ Kiki said.
There was something bleak and unattractive about the crosses erected under Franco’s rule, as though they had all been cut by machines or cast in their thousands in some grey foundry on the edge of a once-beautiful town. Made of iron or concrete, they were to be seen dotted around the country, marking the scenes of Nationalist victories or paying homage to Franco supporters who had lost their lives to the ‘Reds’. Their inscriptions often followed the formula of the Falange, saluting the founder of the fascist party, José-Antonio, before giving a list of the fallen ‘heroes’ from the local area, with an unintentionally ironic ¡PRESENTE! proclaimed at the bottom. How the dead were supposed to be ‘present’ was anyone’s guess. Perhaps in spirit. But they were uniformly ugly monuments, the iron crosses rusted and overly ornate, the concrete versions cut along austere, utilitarian lines, unnaturally sharp and straight. It was strange that such a simple form could express so much, but you looked at a Francoist cross and you sensed all the harshness, rigidity and uninspired self-importance of his regime.
The crosses I had previously seen, however, were modest affairs, perhaps two or three metres high. Nothing had prepared me for the colossus that now appeared through the trees.
I knew immediately what it was, but was still taken aback by the scale of the place. The Valle de los Caídos was a vast mausoleum and basilica complex built by Franco after the war in the hills to the north of Madrid, intended as a memorial to the war dead and his eventual resting place. The structure was almost entirely carved out of the inside of a mountain, like a cave, while crowning the whole thing was a gigantic cross sticking out of the top of the rock.
‘That,’ Kiki said as I sat open-mouthed, ‘is a hundred and fifty metres and two hundred thousand tonnes of religious devotion.’
The granite cross was so vast and imposing there was something quite obscene about it. For miles around, unspoilt countryside stretched in all directions; it was the kind of place you could imagine appealing to romantic, nineteenth-century sensibilities, all wild, untamed and emotive, with high cliffs, deep valleys and acres of virgin forest. And right in the middle of it all stood this strange, ugly structure, completely out of balance with both itself and its surroundings.
As we drove nearer on the winding mountain road an enormous plaza came into view at the foot of the carved-out rock – a semi-circular court framing the entrance to the basilica, and leading down a number of steps to an exposed and empty space that looked like a parade ground. I could make out a handful of figures walking around, some carrying what seemed to be flags.
‘There won’t be so many people there,’ Kiki said. ‘It can get quite busy, sometimes. Especially on the anniversary of Franco’s death.’
The twentieth of November 1975 was still a day people remembered in Spain, even if only with a sigh of relief. I’d lost count of the number of people who’d told me they’d had a bottle of champagne sitting in the fridge at the time, waiting for the dictator finally to pass away.
‘Young men from across the country congregate in Madrid and then walk out here as a kind of pilgrimage. Some of them even do it barefoot. I found out that a friend of mine was involved in it all a couple of years ago.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Nothing. Didn’t bother me. But it was coming to an end anyway,’ he said.
That was Kiki: try to pin him down in any way and he slipped effortlessly through your fingers. I’d found it slightly confusing that morning, not knowing whether to use masculine or feminine endings on adjectives relating to him. Normally it was all in the feminine. But the guise he’d chosen for this day was male, as though he’d changed his skin, and very quickly I’d found the matter took care of itself. Today he was a man, and despite being a rather boyish and slightly built man, something about the subtle energy surrounding him – just as it had been quite definitely that of a woman the day before – was now unquestionably masculine.
He parked his orange car under a tree at the edge of the complex and we began walking up to the basilica. A mixture of the mountain air and the gigantic absurdity of where we were was beginning to lift my spirits, and I suppressed a schoolboy urge to start goose-stepping around the place making Hitler salutes. Such a vast folly of a place tickled some surreal comic nerve within me.
‘In the Middle Ages they spent centuries building some of the great cathedrals,’ Kiki said. ‘It took them twenty years to build this. Franco complained it was too slow.’
‘Hardly comparable to a Gothic cathedral,’ I said. A smile was playing on my lips. I felt light-headed. It was like a bizarre cross between the Eagle’s Nest and the Vatican.
‘You’re very judgemental,’ he said. ‘But I can see you’re glad I brought you.’
He took my hand and placed it on his shoulder for me to lean on as we walked across the great square, sunlight bouncing off every surface and glaring into our eyes. It would be a welcome relief from the heat to get inside this curious grotto of death.
Civil Guards eyed us with obligatory suspicion at the entrance, checking our bags and frisking us before letting us in. For a second it seemed I wouldn’t be allowed to pass as I didn’t have any ID on me, my passport having been taken along with everything else back in Saragossa. After explaining what had happened they relented. Later I almost wished they’d kept me out.
Rarely had a building produced such a sharp mood change in me as Franco’s mausoleum when I stepped inside. The cheeriness I had felt outside and the sense of fun brought on by the sheer silliness of the place was transformed in an instant into dark, suffocating depression. The basilica consisted of a long tunnel-like nave with a cross at the far end, in classic Christian architectural style. But whereas Gothic cathedrals in particular were temples of light, this was little more than a dark, grim bunker, buried as it was inside a mountain. No natural light reached this far – kitsch electric fake torches hung from pillars instead, while striplights glowed up towards the vaulted ceiling. Beneath our feet the floor was black, while along the grey, dampstained walls hung ghastly tapestries depicting apocalyptic scenes. A sense of claustrophobia gripped me at once, but I pushed on, caught between my curiosity and a desire to run back out into the square outside.
Kiki had edged away on his own and seemed to be counting the number of stones in each arch, his finger moving upwards as he mouthed numbers under his breath. They had needed twenty thousand workers to build the Valle de los Caídos and the vast majority of them had been Republican prisoners, forced to work in suicidal conditions on a hugely expensive project while the rest of the country went hungry in the harsh post-war years. Fourteen of the builders had died during the construction work, while there had been numerous mutilations. Construction had cost the equivalent of two hundred million pounds. Officially the monument was a memorial to all those who had died in the Civil War, but as so often with Franco, it was more a statement of victory and the crushing of his opponents and their vision of Spain. No mention of the other side was made at his inaugural address when the basilica was finally opened in 1959, while the small number of Republican dead buried there in the 1960s alongside Nationalists had in many cases been removed from graves around the country without even their relatives being informed. Only now were the children and grandchildren of some Republican soldiers beginning to discover that their relatives were buried alongside the very man they had been fighting against.
Franco had been obsessed by the building of the monument, and much of the architectural design was his own. It was said at the time that the Valle de los Caídos was the nearest thing he had to another woman.
Walking down the artless nave, I found Franco’s headstone near the altar, with a simple inscription. It was deliberately placed so that he would appear as the ‘head of the household’, the main protagonist welcoming people into this space. Across from it was the grave of José Antonio. Franco exploited the legacy of the founder of the Falange to the full, setting him up as a fallen hero – he was far more useful to him dead than alive. The memory of the young, aristocratic señorito was turned into a cult Franco skilfully used for his own ends.
The guards on the door made sure no desecration took place here, but you almost felt they were unnecessary. You could hardly have hoped for a greyer, danker resting place for the Generalísimo.
Kiki found me outside, leaning against a pillar in the shade as I tried to shake off some of the melancholy the place seemed to have brought on in me. Out in the blazing heat of the open square a small group of men in dark army-style trousers were attempting to march in military fashion, carrying colourful flags and shouting slogans.
Kiki placed his arm on my shoulder. I watched as the young men turned first to the left and then to the right, performing some odd ritual only they seemed to understand.
‘You’ve always insisted on being called a transformista,’ I said. ‘Never a travesti, a transvestite. Why?’
‘Travestis,’ he said, ‘are caricatures. They only pretend to be women.’
He drew his arm away, placing his hands together as though in prayer.
‘I don’t condemn them. We’re different, that’s all.’
Below us, an older man to the side was barking orders like a sergeant-major. One of the boys had dropped his flag and was hurriedly picking it up and trying to carry on as though nothing had happened.
‘I enjoy working at the club. It’s a bit of a dive, but it’s just nice to have a regular job.’
When he and Salud had been performing together, years before, they had shared the stage with a woman still having to bare her breasts at the age of sixty-five in order to pay the rent. Her tits might not have been what they once were, but the jokes and songs she performed as part of the act were so good no one really cared. There was something tragic and pathetic about her situation, nonetheless. Nobody wanted to end up like her.
‘It’s a show. I try to maintain as much dignity as I can. The travestis can give them the thrills.’
As far as Kiki himself was concerned, he was a being who could shift into either gender, with as little chance of being detected as possible. If anything, he was perhaps more convincing as a woman than as a man, when his small, slender body and cat-like walk made him stand out more. You sensed it was only as a woman that he could really slip by unnoticed.
‘The audience is made up mostly of wealthy men in their fifties. With young mistresses wearing deaf-and-dumb trousers.’ He paused. ‘Pants so tight you can read their lips.’ I laughed. From the grave faces down in the square came looks of scorn at such irreverence in this holy place. It was like a masked ball in reverse – everyone dressed the same and everyone with looks of utter seriousness. But a pantomime nonetheless.
‘You think I play around with my identity?’ he said, looking at the toy soldiers with their flags. ‘I’m an amateur compared with this lot.’
We sat down on the grey flagstones. Vultures circled on whirling thermals rising from the overheated earth, while dusty sparrows flittered nervously around the litter bins. I looked towards the horizon, over the rising and falling contours of the land – plains, mountains and forests like different textures of skin – and remembered the things I admired about this country: the passion and the colour I had so fallen in love with when I’d first come, and which had carried me along over the years. With the things I had recently seen and experienced, my vision of Spain had become increasingly grey in the past weeks and months. As though lighting a spark in the gloom, Kiki was reminding me of the country I had always been drawn to. As he sat facing the performing fascists, I began to explain how I was feeling and how confusing I had found the last few weeks: discovering the pit – the fosa – near the farm, the right-wing wrestling match, getting arrested near Ceuta, and robbed just a few days before. How well did I really know Spain?
‘You are like so many northern Europeans who have come here in the past,’ he said. ‘In Spain you find something that liberates you. I don’t know what it is – perhaps the weather, the girls. But then you stop. You create a dream of what the place is, of what Spain is, and you refuse to go any further, to look outside this bubble you have created and get to know the country for what it really is.’
I closed my eyes. I thought I’d managed to break out of that trap and truly explore the country. Perhaps he was right.
‘I used to dream about Paris, or New York – somewhere I could be more me. Where someone like me would be more accepted. But then I went to those places and you know what? I found the same prejudices as back here. OK, there are some differences, but I didn’t discover the paradise I’d conjured up in my mind before I went.’
The soldiers had stopped their prancing about and were standing to attention to listen to an address being read out by a stern-looking middle-aged woman in a black dress.
‘Your problem is that you came here and did find a kind of paradise. You did find something of what you were looking for. But that made you blind. Now you’re discovering aspects of Spain you’ve always failed to notice, or hidden from, and you think you’re falling out of love with the place.’
Perhaps it hadn’t all been quite as he was saying, but essentially he was right. I remembered the phrase that had kept popping into my head when I’d found the farm – ‘a piece of paradise’, like a cliché from the property pages in a Sunday newspaper, as though paradise were something you could possess. It seemed I’d fallen into a trap, after all – of thinking my experience of the country was somehow complete, as though there was nothing left for me to learn or do here. There in the Valle de los Caídos, sitting next to Kiki, watching neo-fascists perform their rigid, colourful spectacle, it was as though I had been asleep.
‘The only way you can love de verdad,’ Kiki said, ‘is to see everything there is to see of that which you love. Pick and choose and it will always come undone. You have to see whatever it is – a country, a person, an idea, even yourself – in all its complexity. Foreigners fall for a passionate image of Spain and that is all they see. But Spaniards themselves are blind. Everyone here talks about “the Two Spains” – throughout our history a long murderous struggle like Cain and Abel, or Goya’s Duelo a garrotazos – those two giants in the middle of the countryside clubbing each other to death. On the one side a liberal, forward-looking Spain. On the other its traditional, authoritarian sibling. One Left, one Right. One dark, the other light. One male, one female. It goes on. And one always trying to impose itself on the other.’
He pulled his hair back tight over his scalp and redid the elastic holding his ponytail in place.
‘Spain is both of these things and neither. The struggles between the two sides will continue, it is part of the national make-up. You don’t have to be limited by the visions of others, though. It’s a question of looking, not just imagining.’
The intense afternoon heat was beginning to fade as we stepped back into his noisy orange car and started heading back to the city. In the square the young men were carrying out their final steps before the show came to an end. Under the verdant canopy above the mountain road, the darkness of the interior of the basilica seemed like a distant memory.