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 valley 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.
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.
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.
‘Look, this must be one of Valeriana’s teeth. They smashed her skull. We couldn’t find all the bits. We looked for the skeleton of an unborn child, but we could not find all of that either,’ he explains.
It is All Saints Day and I have been talking to Mariano on and off on the telephone for several days. His voice had been getting increasingly excited as the date drew nearer. Sitting in a traffic jam outside Madrid – stuck behind family cars packed with people taking flowers to faraway cemeteries on this, the day in which Spaniards so enthusiastically remember their dead – I had called him several times that morning.
Many of those coming to the funeral, he said, were in the same jam on the motorway leading west out of Madrid towards Badajoz and Portugal. Those already in Poyales del Hoyo could wait. ‘It has already taken sixty-six years, so a little longer won’t matter. You will be able to recognise me easily. I get nervioso, agitated, when things like this are happening,’ he explained.
On previous days he had told me of his problems with the ayuntamiento, the village council. The authorities there, members of the Conservative right-wing People’s Party, wanted nothing to do with the three sets of bones. Mayoress Damiana González was the niece of Ángel Vadillo, the infamous Quinientos Uno who was responsible for the killings. She had left town and declined to attend the reburials. She had, grudgingly, left instructions that a reburial should be allowed if it was ‘properly’ requested by relatives. But the town was to do nothing special for these bodies. They were, the mayoress reasoned, just like any others.
Then, two days before the burial, the deputy mayor – a retired Franco-era Civil Guard officer – had left a message on Mariano’s answering machine telling him there was no room for the women in the cemetery. In Poyales del Hoyo, the old splits between left and right were reappearing with vehemence. Here, at least, the accepted wisdom that, twenty-five years after Franco’s death, Spain had definitively buried the trauma of the Civil War was transparently false.
‘They treated the request with absolute scorn. It was the old right in action again,’ said Mariano. He himself was a fully paid-up member of the old left. A former political exile and ex-member of an anti-Franco group, his business card read ‘Mariano López – Trabajador y Activista Social’, ‘worker and social activist’.
As the battle of the bodies began, the splits became more apparent. For decades the victims’ families and their killers had lived cheek-by-jowl. The reburials brought an end to the silence which here, as in much of the rest of Spain, had kept the Civil War out of people’s conversations, if not their minds. And, with that, the embers of ancient loathing had begun to glow again.
This was something that, according to the accepted mores of Spain’s transition to democracy, was not supposed to happen. At the beginning of the twenty-first century Spain was ruled by the People’s Party. It was the first openly right-wing party to win power through the ballot box since November 1933. Spain, it was claimed, had put its self-destructive past and reputation for bloody squabbling behind it. It was proud of its normality. ‘España va bien’, ‘Spain is going well’, was the slogan of the modern, self-confident and fully democratic right-wing party of Prime Minister José María Aznar. Superficially, at least, Spain fitted the phrase. Material progress was visible in a country flooded with new buildings, new roads and new cars. Its young people, taller, stronger and healthier than the older generations, were walking proof of the country’s success. Spain had become Europe’s model country, a vigorous young democracy with a booming economy and, once more, ambitions to become, however modestly, a player on the world stage.
The mores of this youthful democracy dictated that the bloody, vicious past had been overcome. Nobody was supposed to meddle with it, let alone suggest there were important, unresolved matters capable of re-arousing – even on a small, bloodless local scale and amongst those old enough or close enough to the victims to remember – the destructive passions that drove Spain to civil war.
The Civil War was a series of dates in school textbooks. It was a few lines of information to be memorised at exam time and then forgotten. ‘In other countries that suffered similar regimes, such as Italy and Germany, young people have been educated about what fascism was, and they are conscious of the horrors imposed by those regimes. That is not the case in Spain,’ Vicenç Navarro, a former political exile turned professor of politics, explained.
Few people, however, seemed worried about that. Had not the left-wing and regional political parties and the trades unions, after much wrangling, been compensated for the property confiscated from them by Franco? Had not the elderly volunteers of the International Brigades been offered Spanish nationality? Had not the niños de la guerra – those Republican children evacuated in rusty old merchant ships to Russia at the beginning of the war – been welcomed back sixty years later to a shiny new old people’s home built for them on the outskirts of Madrid? Were these not the proper symbols of how Spain had achieved, in the words of psychologists, ‘closure’ on the trauma of its past?
For some people, the digging up of Civil War victims – such as the three women from Poyales del Hoyo – was a kind of treason. It was a breaking of the pact of forgetting – and silence – that had kept the lid tightly screwed down on the past. That silence had been a cornerstone of the swift, dramatic and successful transition to democracy of which Spaniards were, justly, so proud.
What was clear in Poyales del Hoyo, however, was that reconciliation between the victims of that war had been left out of the equation. The families of those on the losing side were, even now, meant to suffer in silence. They were meant to leave their dead scattered in roadside ditches and, so, play their part in the agreed plan of constructing Spain’s future by forgetting their own families’ past. In this context the people in Poyales del Hoyo were rebels, breaking Spain’s own, unwritten rules about what could or could not be done with its history.
Mariano found a way past the town hall’s obstacles. He had discovered that the Poyales del Hoyo gravedigger was a fellow left-winger. The night before the burials, the gravedigger had sworn that, if necessary, he would dig up the patch of ground dedicated to los caídos por Dios y por España, those who fell for God and Spain. That was the name given to those who died fighting for Franco’s Nationalist forces during the Civil War. Mariano liked that idea.
In the end, a small patch of earth was found in the tight, white-washed, rectangular graveyard that lay down the hill, beyond the open side of the square. All Saints Day is an important public holiday in Spain. Florists do their best business of the year, selling ten times as many flowers as normal. People flock to cemeteries to honour dead parents, grandparents or other family members. It seemed as though the graveyard at Poyales del Hoyo, with its three or four tiers of niches on each wall, had been specially brightened up with chrysanthemums, carnations and gladioli for the event.
In a ceremony accompanied by poetry and tears, three small, brown caskets were buried side by side. Heliodora, the infant daughter whom Valeriana had handed to a neighbour in the square before climbing into the truck, was there. She was now a woman in her sixties, with neat, short-cut silver hair. She read a simple, self-composed poem over the grave while Obdulia – a squat, olive-faced, healthy-looking eighty-year-old – looked on.
She wanted to tell them, though it was already obvious, that she was pregnant, five months gone./ I was two, held in her arms, crying out ‘mamá!’, as she implored them to let her live, saying she had done nothing wrong/ Those animals, who had nothing inside, said: ‘Let go of her or she will get a bullet too.’
Previously, with the church bells ringing, the coffins had been carried around the village’s narrow streets. It was a symbolic act – the first time the losers of a war that had ended more than six decades earlier had paraded their dead in Poyales del Hoyo.
We gathered in the square afterwards. There, Ezekiel Lorente, grandson of Virtudes and now a Socialist village councillor, puffed his chest out and held his head high as a local right-winger walked past. ‘He knows what I am thinking. This is our moment,’ he told me.
Stories began to emerge of what life had been like in Poyales del Hoyo under the boot of Ángel Vadillo. A teary-eyed woman, Francisca Sánchez, appeared in the square with a list of names, hurriedly scribbled down on a piece of scrap paper, of those in the village who were killed. Her own father, Evaristo, was one of them. Another man, ‘El Ratón’ or ‘the mouse’, she claimed, had his eyes gouged out. In the Tiétar Valley – and elsewhere in rural Spain – many people, entire families, are known by their motes, their nicknames. There was the usual struggle to remember people’s real names, but soon the piece of paper was being turned over as the list headed past the two dozen.
As people drifted off, a convoy of cars headed for Candeleda for a last look at the former grave. Obdulia waited for us in the Capra Hispánica, the main bar on Candeleda’s Plaza del Castillo.
Obdulia was carrying an old, browned photograph of Pilar. It must have been taken when her mother was in her thirties. Like many elderly women still found in pueblos around Spain, Pilar was already in that state of semi-permanent mourning that afflicts those whose relations are forever dying. A black shawl has been wrapped tightly across her chest and tucked into a long black skirt. She is, of course, much younger than her daughter is now. But they share the same high, rounded cheekbones, dark complexion and strong mouth. In fact, there is something severe about Pilar as she sits sideways on a wooden chair, one hand holding the back, her hair parted in a razor-sharp line down the middle and staring directly into the lens. Perhaps it is the responsibility of being able to read, or the knowledge that comes from it, that adds the gravitas to her face.
After the killing, Obdulia revealed, she stayed locked into her home. A few months later she left for the nearest large-sized town, Talavera de la Reina. Even there, however, the Falange tried to come for her. Franco’s repressive machine was in full and bloodthirsty cry in those first few years during and after the war.
But she married young and, by then, had a husband to save her. ‘I married a brave man who defended me,’ was how she put it. Obdulia’s husband had been, like General Franco himself, a ‘novio de la muerte’ (a ‘fiancé of death’), a member of the country’s most famously fearless fighting force, the Spanish Legion. He told them they would only get to Obdulia over his dead body. The small town Falangists, more used to marching unarmed people away at gun-point than fighting, did not test his word.
Obdulia did not set foot in Poyales del Hoyo again for over thirty years. By that time Quinientos Uno was dead, having succumbed to a heart attack while in Arenas de San Pedro. (Francisca Sánchez still thinks this was an act of God, even though it happened in the 1960s. ‘His sins caught up with him.’)
She remembers, however, seeing another of the killers, El Manolo, ‘que era malísimo’, ‘who was very bad’, drinking in the bar. ‘I wanted to go and say something to him, but my sister wouldn’t let me,’ she said. ‘I didn’t lose my fear until Franco was dead.’
‘This thing has stayed in my mind all my life. I’ve never forgotten. I am reliving it now, as we stand here. All the killers were from the village. They came with the intention of killing, and then they went off to confess.’
She is struggling now, to turn that hatred and fear into forgiveness. Finally she fixes me with a watery stare. ‘I can pardon, but I cannot forget. We have to pardon them or it makes us just like them.’
The events of that day were, naturally, moving. But they also raised questions. In the pages of the Diario de Ávila – a newspaper normally devoted to recording the proceedings of local councils, the progress of public works and the endless routine of local fiestas – a former mayor of Candeleda had even accused Mariano of belonging to the armed Basque separatist group ETA. A defamation case was pending. For some people, at least, the reburials were a call once more to man – peacefully this time – the old ideological barricades.
Why had such an apparently innocent act provoked such rage and outrage? What other ghosts had been lying under the Vuelta del Esparragal? I decided to ask Damiana González Vadillo, the absent mayoress of Poyales del Hoyo.
I went back to find Damiana the following Monday. But she was still away. The man who told me that, it turned out, was her deputy, Aurelio Jarillo. He spoke in the stilted jargon of the military-styled police force, the Civil Guard, he used to serve in Franco’s days. The relevant information had already been issued, he said, before adding that journalists had transformed it all into a pack of lies. When would Damiana be back? ‘I don’t know,’ he replied.
Two weeks later I returned again. Damiana was there. Already in her seventies, she was into her last year as mayoress in a village of 700 souls. Like most rural communities in Spain, Poyales del Hoyo has been on the wane since the 1950s. At the time of the Civil War – when most of Spain lived in pueblos – it had more than 2,000 inhabitants. ‘And it had its own notary,’ she told me proudly.
People from Madrid – two hours’ drive away – are buying up properties as second homes. Some have even moved here for a quiet life in the country. But Poyales del Hoyo was still ageing. ‘Twenty people have died since January,’ explained Damiana who, at seventy-seven, was hardly a spring chicken herself.
Damiana claimed there had been no fuss, no objections and no obstruction from the village council to the re-burials. ‘I have no problem with that,’ she said. But she clearly did.
As we spoke in her spartan office, she first expressed her shock that the church bells had been rung for ‘non-believers’. ‘How cynical. None of them would have liked that. They used the church here as a prison,’ she said.
Then she launched into a tirade against the left and the Republican committee that had controlled the village in the nine weeks between the days that generals Sanjurjo, Franco, Mola and friends had risen up in arms to the moment when Franco’s Moorish troops swept into Poyales del Hoyo. Damiana, who was eleven at the time, had no trouble recalling the dates: ‘From July 18 to September 8, the day the Moors arrived.’
The killing of dozens of left-wingers in Poyales was, she said, merely the result of the left’s own bloodletting at that time. ‘One lot finished and the next lot got started. They killed one another as much for village arguments and old hatreds as for anything else,’ she said. I heard this version of events in other places, too. The violence was already latent – with each village a ticking time-bomb of angry resentment.
The village was divided into what had already become known as ‘the two Spains’ – the right and the left – and the bloodletting was mutual. Here, as in nearby Candeleda, the prominent men of the right were rounded up and kept in the church. But here, unlike in Candeleda, nine were taken out and shot. ‘The priest was paraded through the village with a horse’s bridle tied around his head. They insulted him, blasphemed him and treated him like an animal. They made him drink vinegar and then killed him with two others,’ she explained.
Damiana recalled some of the several dozen names which, until Ezekiel Lorente persuaded the council to take it down, had figured on the list of ‘Caídos por Dios y por la Patria’ on the church wall. ‘A man called Eloy Garrido was one of the first to be killed. He left a widow and three children. They killed him because he was from the right – there was no Falange here then, just “the left” and “the right”. Then there were Juan and Isaac. They were father and son. Three sisters were left as widows.’
The three victims in the Candeleda grave, Damiana suggested, were not as innocent as those who dug them up have claimed. ‘It was said that these women were involved [in the killings], that they pointed people out,’ she said. Lorente’s grandmother Virtudes, the mayoress claimed, had once threatened to kill her own mother with a cobbler’s spike after an argument over a loaf of bread. The mayor had to organise an escort for her.
In a place this small, the renewed arguing over events of sixty-six years earlier had quickly turned personal. ‘The younger generations of the Lorente family and my family are friends. He has told them one side of the story. I never wanted to tell them mine. I never talked about it. But now I have been forced to,’ she said. Her own, personal, vow of silence had been broken.
Her uncle had, she suggested, turned to violence only after several members of his own family were killed by the left. ‘My uncle fled. He hadn’t done anything by then, but they would have killed him if they could. Another uncle hid in the roof of a house. There were many families like that,’ she said.
She was unable, or unwilling, to explain, however, the enthusiasm that her uncle would put into his job as the self-appointed avenger of the Tiétar Valley. His nickname of Quinientos Uno, she suggested, was an exaggeration.
For every person killed by the left, however, his men killed several times more. That does not mean they were necessarily more bloodthirsty. They did, after all, have more time.
One of Franco’s generals, Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, had been explicit about what was expected of the Nationalist forces when the rebellion broke out. ‘For every one of mine who falls, I will kill at least ten extremists. Those leaders who flee should not think they will escape [that fate]; I will drag them out from under the stones if necessary and, if they are already dead, I will kill them again.’
When the right started to wreak its revenge, Damiana’s mother kept her indoors. Her explanation to her eleven-year-old daughter for what was going on was simple: ‘Just as they treated us badly, so they are now being treated badly.’
Damiana really could not understand the fuss about the graves of Pilar, Virtudes and Valeriana. Educated under Franco, she still believed the propaganda of the time. Had not the Generalísimo built, at the ‘Valle de Los Caídos’, ‘The Valley of the Fallen’, outside Madrid, a monument to all the dead of the Civil War, regardless of which side they were on? The common grave of the three women had not been such a big secret. ‘If they didn’t get them before, it was because they didn’t want to. It was always known that they were there. They should do what has to be done, but not go around saying these things. We would be better off keeping our mouths shut, those on one side and those on the other.’
Damiana, like so many of her generation, preferred silence. The stories of who did what to whom, she says, were cosas del pueblo – village matters. ‘It was all about envies and old hatreds. What was the war for? For nothing.’
Damiana’s version of the Civil War, and especially what it was for, is accepted by many of those Spaniards who simply found themselves caught up in history. This is no more so than those with men called up by one or other side, forced to fight and die purely on the basis of whether the area where they lived had fallen under Republican or Nationalist control.
But the Spanish Civil War, was never about ‘nothing’. British historian Hugh Thomas, who wrote the definitive history of the conflict at a time when Spaniards were only allowed to hear the winners’ account, declared it to be, at least in its opening days, ‘the culmination of a hundred years of class war’. That, however, was just one of the many battles fought out on Spanish soil, and with Spanish blood, between 1936 and 1939.
The Spanish Civil War was many things. A Spain that had stumbled its way through political chaos for more than a century, and where the division between the ‘two Spains’ of right and left had reached epic and bloody proportions, would fall under the yoke of the former.
The Civil War was the end of the Second Republic. This had been a well-intentioned, if messy and poorly directed, affair. At its best, the Republic was an attempt to free Spain from the backwardness and moral straitjacket imposed on it by landowners, the Church and a monarchy that had been forced to flee in 1931.
The Republic was born with massive hopes and ambitions, some of which, especially in the field of education, bore early fruit. Had it worked, it might have transformed Spain. In the end, unfortunately, it was no exception in an ongoing history of political tragedy. It had been under assault from all sides, from within and without. Attempted revolutions, military insurrections, strikes, political assassinations, street violence and secessionist moves in Catalonia had left it worn and torn. Franco’s latter-day apologists, proponents of a theory that the Generalísimo saved Spain from a workers’ revolution, claim that it was already on its deathbed.
The Civil War was also a curtain-raiser for a much greater, global war of ideologies. For this was an early round in the great clash between the fascist ideals being promoted by Hitler and Mussolini and the communism of Stalin’s Russia. Hitler’s Luftwaffe tested out the carpet-bombing of civilian populations, with infamous consequences, in Guernica. Mussolini also provided abundant troops and supplies. Stalin backed the International Brigades, and eventually ended up with much of Spain’s gold. It was also a piece of calculated fence-sitting by Britain, France and the other European democracies. These turned their back on the elected Republican government and remained neutral, partly out of fear that communism might be the eventual winner, but mainly to avoid a punch-up with Hitler and Mussolini. Appeasement had an early outing in Spain.
But the Civil War was, first and foremost, the most important event in twentieth-century Spanish history. It could be argued, in fact, that it was the most important thing to happen for several centuries. A country that had slowly, over several hundred years, lost a once vast empire, finally turned against itself. This loss of empire had reached its final point in 1898 with what became known as el Desastre, the Disaster. In that year Spain lost Puerto Rico, the Philippines and, in a humiliating naval defeat by the United States, the Caribbean jewel of Cuba. Admiral George Dewey sank the Pacific fleet in the Philippines in May. The Atlantic fleet was ‘picked off like pigeons in a shoot’ near Cuba two months later. Spain’s empire was thus reduced to a few poor possessions in Africa. The events of that year provoked a long bout of national soul-searching and self-flagellation led by a group of intellectuals – including Miguel de Unamuno and the novelist Pío Baroja – known as ‘the generation of 98’.
The Civil War was also a bloodbath that pitted brother against brother and neighbour against neighbour. By the time the guns had stopped smoking and Franco had signed his final parte de guerra on 1 April 1939, some half a million Spaniards were dead. There are no exact figures, but it is thought that some 200,000 were executed by the two sides. There were also thousands of dead Italians and Germans, who fought for Franco, and other foreigners who had volunteered for the International Brigades. One in thirty Spanish men were dead. Some 400,000 went into exile.
The war dragged on for three years. Franco could probably have won it in a lot less time. But he preferred to avoid an early battle in Madrid and, anyway, he was not just after military victory. He wanted more than that. His fellow generals appointed him ‘Head of Government of the Spanish State’ in September 1936, thinking they were creating a wartime dictatorship. In fact, in the words of one historian, ‘They had created a Hobbesian sovereign endowed with greater powers than Napoleon, a sovereign who was to shed few of those powers over forty years.’
It was not, at the very start, Franco’s rebellion. The head of the military revolt was the conservative general José Sanjurjo. He was an inveterate conspirator who died in an aeroplane accident on the third day of the war – apparently provoked by the weight of the ceremonial uniforms he was carrying with him. Franco was, at the time, based in the far-off Canary Islands. He started off by taking control of the army in Morocco, moving it across the Strait of Gibraltar and organising a campaign that quickly won much of south-west Spain. A third general, Emilio Mola, did similar work in north-west Spain, while most of the rest of the country remained faithful to the Republic.
Once Franco took control, however, the war had two specific aims apart from military victory. For Franco the war was a cruzada, a fundamentalist Roman Catholic crusade against a conspiracy of Marxists (and their ‘Jewish spirit’), freemasons and separatists. The crusade’s purpose was not just to defeat the enemy but, in good measure, to eradicate it. It was, in that respect, a repeat of what Franco considered one of the most glorious moments of Spanish history – the Christian Reconquista of Spain from the Moors. The Reconquista had pitted Spain’s Christians against its Muslims over several centuries. It led, eventually, to the forced conversion or expulsion not just of the latter, but also, in 1492, of the Spanish Jews.
Franco’s victories rarely brought instant peace. They brought, instead, what would later be called ‘the politics of revenge’. In its earliest stages this meant retribution, vengeance and more bloodshed in a deliberate and thorough cleansing of all possible opposition. This was made all the more justified, in the minds of those who carried it out, by the fact that some rojos had been enthusiastic church-burners, priest-killers and creators of anonymous mass graves themselves. Their victims included thirteen bishops, 4,184 priests, 2,365 friars and 283 monks. Up to 60,000 people were killed by the left, a number probably doubled by Franco’s followers. The difference was not just in scale. ‘Neither the Republican authorities, nor the political parties of the left sanctioned reprisals,’ one historian points out. ‘The savage repression perpetrated on the Nationalist side, on the other hand, was an official, systematic and calculated strategy.’
‘Everyone who is openly or secretly a supporter of the Popular Front should be shot … We have to sow terror. We must eliminate without scruples all those who do not think like ourselves,’ General Mola had declared. ‘If I found my father amongst my opponents, I would have him shot.’
Franco preferred a slow, thorough war to a lightning victory. There was work to be done not just at the front, but behind one’s own lines – weeding out and eliminating the enemy. ‘There can be no ceasefire or agreement … I will save Spain from Marxism at any price,’ he would tell the American journalist Jay Allen when asked whether he would shoot half of Spain.
That work was, in great measure, carried out by the Falange, a political party which, despite its meagre showing in elections five months before the war, became the only approved party. It quickly attracted the right in all its forms, as well as chancers, opportunists, the vengeful and thugs.
The other aim of the war eventually became to consolidate Franco’s own position. Although he initially appeared to be a wary and unwilling plotter, he soon revealed a natural dictatorial bent. A small man with no sense of physical fear and certainly no belief that he might be wrong, he also made sure that, by the time war was over, there was only one person in charge – ‘Franco, Caudillo de dios y de la patria’ (‘Franco, Caudillo of God and of the nation’). As the title shows, he served God as much as his country.
One reason that Spaniards, especially older Spaniards, do not like to talk about the Civil War is that they still disagree so radically on it. Scratch the surface and most, even those on the modern right who profess dislike of Franco, will find themselves blaming the bloodletting on one side or the other. Better silence, anyway, than an argument that might see the blood of one’s grandparents being swapped across the table.
It is a sign of just how much Spain has changed that one of the volunteers involved in digging up graves should be José Antonio Landera – a young member of the same Civil Guard police force that did much of Franco’s dirty work. He told me that his schooling had left him with only vague notions of what had happened in the 1930s. ‘The Civil War was only talked about superficially. There was no mention of the civilian deaths in virtually every village, of the mass graves or of the disappeared,’ he said.
Many books have been written on Spain’s Civil War. Few Spaniards, however, have yet managed to write impartially about it. Rafael Borràs Betriu, an emblematic editor who is Spain’s most prolific publisher of twentieth-century history books, says the time is not yet ripe for agreement. ‘Winners and losers have mostly offered their personal and subjective vision because … the Civil War remains alive in the social cloth of family tradition and in the historical memory of Spaniards. Quite a few years will have to go by before what is currently a minority trend can impose itself in the writing of history: seeing the part of the truth which corresponds to the adversary, freed of all connotations of “enemy”.’
Film-makers and novelists have, generally, suffered the same partiality. British director Ken Loach cast his eye on the subject with Land and Freedom in 1995. ‘What shame Spanish cinema must feel. It has to be a foreigner who recovers for us one of the most transcendental pieces of our history,’ wrote one critic.
A recent exception to that rule is the novelist Javier Cercas, whose 2001 Soldados de Salamina – which fictionalises the story of how a Republican soldier helps a Falangist leader escape execution in the dying days of the war – was a surprise publishing success (even to the author). The novel seemed to tap a desire for reconciliation – or understanding – at least amongst the minority of Spaniards who read books. A notable recent attempt to bridge the divide was, appropriately, called A History of the Civil War that Nobody Will Like.
The digging up of graves like that in Poyales del Hoyo has had a galvanising effect on what some Spaniards have come to call their own ‘desmemoria histórica’. This expression was coined to describe an almost deliberate lack of historical memory. Amongst other things, it has set Franco’s apologists scribbling. The most popular of these is Pío Moa.
Moa has changed radically since the days when he was a member of the First of October Antifascist Resistance Group (GRAPO) – a left-wing terrorist group that still occasionally rears its ugly head in Spain. He has had a publishing hit with The Myths of the Civil War in which, having moved from one extreme to another, he launches a vicious assault on many historians. Amongst his conclusions are that Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt were both crueller than Franco, that the Republican loyalists were relatively more bloodthirsty than Franco’s rightist rebels when it came to executing opponents and that the generals’ rebellion was directed against a revolution brewing within the Republic. His rewards included a top place on the best-sellers list and long interviews on state television when it was controlled by the People’s Party.
None of that changes the fact, of course, that Franco had time to hunt down and execute most of those responsible for killing his own supporters. A retroactive law was passed in 1939 which allowed for those deemed politically responsible for political ‘crimes’ previous to that date to be arrested. The last person to be executed for Civil War crimes was the communist Julián Grimau in 1963.
The killings by rojos – especially by anarchists – formed an essential part of the Franco regime’s internal propaganda for decades. Hundreds of the priests and nuns they killed have gone down the beatification conveyor-belt at the Vatican in recent years. Pope John Paul II beatified 233 of them in one record-breaking go in 2001. The left’s victims were eventually accorded burial in cemeteries, hailed as martyrs and saw their names added to the ‘Caídos por Dios y la Patria’ plaques put up in every town and village in Spain. Thousands of the victims of Franco’s repression were, however, left in roadside graves or even stuffed down wells (one well in Caudé, in the eastern province of Teruel, is said to be the last resting place of up to 1,000 people).
The full history of the losers – by which I mean the losers’ stories rather than the left’s version of what happened – is only just being broadcast. The army, which carried out its own executions after summary trials, kept many of its archives on those executed closed until the 1990s. Some files on those executed are still unavailable, piled up in cardboard boxes at the back of military warehouses. Others are simply thought to have disappeared.
There are still thousands of bodies in unmarked graves. The highest estimates talk of 30,000 unidentified corpses. Around 300 have now been recovered. Since the three women from Poyales del Hoyo were exhumed, two other graves have been identified along the same seven-mile (eleven-kilometre) stretch of road. They are said to contain twenty corpses of men from both Poyales del Hoyo and Candeleda. The rediscovery of the graves caused the author and journalist Isaías Lafuente to pose the following question: ‘Can a democratic country allow thousands of citizens murdered like animals by a dictatorial regime to remain buried in its roadside ditches? Can it tolerate this while the man who allowed and encouraged the mass killings rests under the altar of a Christian basilica? The answer is so obvious that is almost an offence to have to ask the question.’
Why had it taken so long to broach the subject, to dig up the dead, to ask the question? Fear is often given as the main reason. Franco’s presence made it impossible to talk freely, let alone dig up graves, for almost forty years. That fear lived on into the first years of democracy. It was encouraged by coup rumours and the 1981 storming of parliament by Civil Guard Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero.
Spain’s whole democratic transition was, at least publicly, postulated on the stated belief on all sides that, as the returning Communist leader Santiago Carrillo put it, nothing was ‘worth a new Civil War between Spaniards’. Even Felipe González, the Socialist prime minister who governed for nearly fourteen years from 1982, heeded the advice given to him by a former general to leave the subject of the Civil War well alone in order not to provoke the ire of the army. Nothing official was done to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s start in 1986.
In the graves of Pilar, Virtudes and Valeriana – and in hundreds more like them – there is proof of a silence that has been both collective and willing. One of Europe’s most verbose and argumentative peoples has simply chosen to look away from a vital part of its history whose ghastly, ghostly presence is to be found under a few feet of soil.
Not even the family of poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, whose execution by the Franco Nationalists of Granada was explained by Ian Gibson in his 1974 classic The Death of Lorca, had tried to recover his body. Gibson’s work, specially remarkable for the date in which it was published, was one of the first attempts to counter the Franco-imposed ‘desmemoria’ of the time. Lorca’s family, despite the popular pressure, still refuses to go any further.
The families of three men thought to have been buried alongside the poet do not, however, agree. Two anarchist banderilleros (secondary figures of the bullfight, whose job is to rush out and sticks darts in the bull’s back) and a one-legged Republican schoolteacher are said to be in the grave. ‘If one side [of the Civil War] can bury their dead with dignity then it is time the other side was able to as well,’ the grandson of one of those bullfighters, Francisco Galadí, told me on a visit to Granada. ‘The family of García Lorca has to be respected. But my father did not want his father to be left abandoned. Our family were treated as apestados – pestilential – for years. My father never got a good job, and we had to go to schools run by priests and fachas. I lived under Franco’s repression for forty years. After seventy years, now it is time,’ he explained.
The grave of the three women was one of the first to be dug up as Spaniards slowly began to look back down at the ground. These early exhumations were interesting, amongst other things, because they showed that Spain actually had a stock of people already experienced in such things. They were forensic scientists, anthropologists and archaeologists who had already worked on similar, if fresher, graves in the former Yugoslavia or Latin America.
One of the early volunteers was Julio Vidal, an archaeologist from the University of León. He was the first to describe these graves as secretos a voces. They still, he says, provoke ‘a heavy and fearful silence’ accompanied by a certain shame. The graves, Vidal says, represent ‘the shameful part of our [democratic] transition which, while it keeps its eyes closed, will not allow this page of history to be turned.’
Spain’s local magistrates, fearful of a flood of cases, refused to get involved in digging up graves. There were, they said, no crimes for them to investigate. There was no official money for the task of digging them up, either. Aznar’s government, which had spent its time studiously trying to show that it had nothing to do with Franco-style rightism, was challenged to act. Emilio Silva took a case to the UN Committee for the Disappeared, more used to arguing over the mass graves of Kosovo or Guatemala than those on western European soil.
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.