The origin of the crisis went back to the origin of the new regime itself. The Republic counted on two basic supports in its euphoric beginning: on the one side the urban and rural proletariat, workers and agricultural labourers increasingly aware of the ferocious injustice that had condemned them to humiliating servitude and unending misery and increasingly anxious to rid themselves of both; on the other side, a very significant section of the middle class, the majority of the country, including an ever-growing number of land-owning labourers: this middle class rightly understood that its interests did not diverge essentially from those of the proletariat (and that the Republic could defend them), although, unlike the proletariat, they were defined by their apolitical nature and their conformism, their attachment to traditional habits and routines, their instinctive suspicion of the new, their confidence in strong authorities, and their fetishistic devotion to public order and stability. Nevertheless, the Second Republic also suffered from its first second of life from relentless harassment by the oligarchy and the Catholic Church. Wilfully entrenched in the country since medieval times, accustomed to treating it as their private property, both these forces felt their indisputable power endangered by the arrival of the new authorities and embarked on a permanent conspiracy against them. To this conspiracy was added another: it was orchestrated by a fatal historical conjunction of the country’s anaemic democratic tradition with the worldwide crisis of 1929 still wreaking havoc on its battered economy, and with fascism and communism stretching their totalitarian shadows across Europe. In these circumstances the Second Republic could not permit itself the luxury of making mistakes, at least not big ones; the fact is it made quite a few, big and small: it acted with innocence, with clumsiness, sometimes with dogmatism, and almost always with more goodwill and ambition than prudence, embarking on the huge reforms the country needed simultaneously and not successively or incrementally, without realistically measuring its own strength and the strength of its opponents, and generating impossible-to-satisfy expectations among its supporters, especially among some of its supporters, the neediest and most left wing, the suffering throng of those humiliated and offended by the high-handedness of the powerful. It was a fatal error. Because, frustrated and exasperated by the slow pace of the reforms and by the solid intransigence of the right, the humiliated and offended began to mistrust the democratic methods of the Republic and started a process of radicalisation that drove them towards violent confrontation and hopeless riots, and drove the Republic to lose a huge part of the favour of the part of the middle class that, while sharing many more real interests with the humiliated and offended than with the oligarchs and the Catholic Church, shared with the Catholic Church and the oligarchy their superstitious love for order and tradition and their mortal fear of revolution.
This suicidal process began to accelerate from November 1933 onwards. On the nineteenth of that month the second general elections of the Republic were held, and won by the right. It was by then a right that barely believed in the Republic and almost didn’t believe in democracy and that, as soon as it reached power, devoted its best efforts to dismantling the incipient reforms put in place by the new regime, while from its very entrails emerged organisations that imitated the fascism triumphant in Europe; the most important was the Spanish Falange, a political party that, with its ultramodern and fraudulent synthesis of granite-like patriotism and revolutionary rhetoric, was going to constitute itself into a de facto militia of reaction, into the violent emergency procedure secreted from the oligarchy to finish off a democracy that was trying to reduce its privileges and which it considered unfit to avoid a revolution. For its part, the left committed a mistake by taking to the streets with the aim of recovering there the space it had lost in parliament and by stopping the right by force, forgetting that it lacked sufficient force to do so. The revolution of October ’34, and the later savage military repression, was the first big, bloody testimony of the gradual failure of a democracy that was being left without democrats: a failure that the elections of February ’36 were not able to restrain. By then Spanish society had split, and although the left (grouped together as the Popular Front) won, the right did not accept the result and from that moment fed with all the fuel at its disposal a surge of disorder that created the ideal climate for the usual, powerful anti-Republicans to launch a coup d’état with the support of a traditional class horrified by the chaos and the violence, and skilfully driven by the oligarchy and the Catholic Church to the flagrant falsehood that their interests were irreconcilable with those of the proletariat and to an illusory certainty that the only way to finish off the mayhem was to finish off the Republic.
The collapse of peaceful coexistence and the crisis of faith in democracy infected the country from top to bottom, but in few places did it strike with such virulence as in Extremadura, where the majority of the population continued to live in ancestral conditions of servitude, stupefied by hunger and humiliations, and where the Republic had to confront social conflicts of a certain intensity from the start. That’s what happened in the region of Trujillo, one of the poorest in the area; it’s what happened in Ibahernando. As in La Cumbre, in Santa Marta de Magasca, in Miajadas, or in Trujillo itself, in Ibahernando at the end of June and beginning of July 1931, when the new regime was recently installed, numerous strikes of agricultural labourers were called with the objective of protesting the paltriness of daily wages and the use of machinery as replacement for manpower, and the Trujillo Association of Proprietors submitted repeated protests to the authorities about the threatening attitudes of striking workers who travelled the countryside disabling the irrigation machines. Two months later, at the beginning of September, there was a series of farm invasions in Ibahernando that resulted in a strike being called in which groups of labourers armed with stakes obliged a general work stoppage; as the Civil Governor of Cáceres informed the Minister of the Interior days later, “In the first hours of the night of September 10, the workers congregated in the village square and resisted the instructions of the Civil Guard, which ordered their dispersal. The guards were attacked with stones and one of them was injured; they charged several times. The groups reformed again, the workers put up resistance again, and the Civil Guards fired once into the air. The aggression came from the Workers’ Centre. Several individuals were arrested and handed over to the mayor, who set them free; the doctor, Juan Bernardo, and the state schoolteacher also intervened and had an influence. I have ordered the closure of the Workers’ Centre and the detention of the individuals mentioned.” The Workers’ Centre was actually the Casa del Pueblo, or village hall, attached to the Federation of Land Workers of the UGT, the socialist union; as for the state schoolteacher, this was not Don Marcelino, Manuel Mena’s teacher, but Don Miguel Fernández, a cultured, judicious, circumspect man much appreciated in the village. The clash between the workers and civil guards resulted in a protest from the mayor and the president of the Agrarian Society, “in the name of the majority of residents, for the abuses committed by the Civil Guard on September 10,” and, although some of the strikes in June and July were described by their organisers as revolutionary, the fact is that they were all short-lived (and the description decorative). So it is true that, at the beginning of the Republic, Ibahernando was not an ideal society, devoid of conflicts, and that orderly people were alarmed; but it is also true that it was not a divided or confrontational society, that conflicts were not frequent or unmanageable, and that orderly people could chalk up their natural fears in the still-intact credit side of the Republic’s accounts and could resign themselves to them as a secondary effect of the beneficial advent of the new regime.
Things got worse starting in November 1933, when the right won the general elections in the village, as in the rest of Spain. A year later, during the October Revolution, with martial law imposed all over the country and the Cáceres provincial government in the hands of a military commander, these incidents multiplied. The Young Soci
alists of the village requested the suppression of the religious festivities of Easter week, and one day the Civil Guard arrested three people for attempting to set the church on fire; another day they arrested another five, accused of intimidating political rivals with shots from firearms, and they confiscated a rifle and a pistol. But the event that caused the deepest impression in the village featured Juan José Martínez, Javier Cercas’s maternal great-grandfather, and it happened on October 7, 1934. According to the sentence passed a year later by a judge in Cáceres, that night Juan José Martínez was about to enter his house on the plaza del Pozo Castro after having spent a few hours chatting and visiting with friends; he was not alone: his wife was with him. It was ten o’clock, and Pozo Castro, which had no streetlights, was dark. At that moment someone fired at him with a hunting rifle. The shot came from forty feet away, and, although Juan José Martínez was hit by a hundred and ten pellets, forty days later the wounds had healed: the shot had hit him in the back of the legs and “the dorsal-lumbar-gluteus region”—that is to say, in the back and in the arse.
The attack caused such a commotion in Ibahernando that eighty years after it happened all the survivors of the time remember it, undoubtedly because Juan José Martínez was the boss or something very similar to the boss of the village. Five residents of Ibahernando were tried for the attack; only two were convicted and sentenced: the attacker, to twelve years and one day in prison, and the instigator, a former municipal judge, to fourteen years, eight months, and one day; both also received the additional punishment of a fine of five hundred pesetas. According to the judge’s verdict, the motive of the crime was hatred, “great hatred […] owing to political rivalries” that the instigator of the crime felt for Juan José Martínez. That sort of hatred rapidly began to spread throughout the village and, from the time of the elections of February 1936, transformed, there as in the whole country, into a venom the massive consumption of which nobody could or wanted to curb, and the effects of which were lethal.
In the middle of March of that calamitous year, after the victory of the Popular Front in the February elections, the new left-wing authorities dismissed all the right-wing councillors in the village, among them Javier Cercas’s paternal grandfather, Paco Cercas, and his maternal grandfather, Juan Mena; the manoeuvre was an inverse reflection of that realised by the right-wing authorities after the revolution of ’34, when they dismissed all the left-wing councillors and closed the Casa del Pueblo. By then Ibahernando had fully entered into the fiction, into an induced fantasy of basic inequality according to which, while the landless agricultural labourers continued to be serfs, the landowning labourers had turned into patricians and therefore the interests of the two groups diverged irremediably and their confrontation became inevitable; by then Ibahernando had already split in half: there was a bar for the right-wing people and another bar for the left-wing people, one dance for the right-wing people and another dance for the left-wing people; sometimes, right-wing young men would burst brusquely into the dances at the reopened Casa del Pueblo, protected by their servants, trying to intimidate everyone with their high-and-mighty bullying. For their part, the left-wing young men, who were increasingly well read and politicised, increasingly more prepared to assert their rights, more rebellious and better protected by their union and by the municipal authorities, contested these provocations and, unlike their fathers and grandfathers, refused to accept the abuses and faced up to the landowning labourers, who took revenge on the most turbulent of them by refusing to hire them in harvest season. “Eat Republic,” spat those who four or five years earlier had all been Republicans to a man. In revenge for that revenge, the landless young labourers burned crops, damaged olive groves, stole sheep and rams, invaded farms, and intimidated right-wing people and made their lives impossible. The violence even reached the children, who set up ambushes in the streets, pelted each other with stones, or rubbed nettles on each other’s legs. In the spring of 1936 a rumour spread around the right-wing families according to which some young socialists had put forward a list of names of people on the right during a meeting held at the Casa del Pueblo and had proposed taking them one by one from their houses and murdering them; according to the same rumour, the proposal had not gone any further thanks only to the socialist mayor, a man named Agustín Rosas, who had drawn on all his authority as a veteran leftist militant and all his sangfroid to put a stop to that raid, making it clear to those excitable young men that, while he was in charge of the council, nobody was going to kill anybody in that village. At another moment, more or less at the same time as that hair-raising rumour was going around, some right-wing men went to the Civil Guard asking for protection for themselves and their families; the reply from the Civil Guard was to assure them that they were not authorised to do more than what they were doing and advised them to protect themselves. It’s very probable that they did so, or that they tried to do so, which would explain why some on the right—including Paco Cercas and Juan Mena, grandfathers of Javier Cercas—spent a short time in the Trujillo prison, accused of stockpiling weapons at Los Quintos farm. By that time everything was prepared for the whole country to shatter into a thousand pieces.
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We might wonder how Manuel Mena experienced those months of growing anxiety: what did he do, what did he think, what did he feel as his village and his country divided into two halves pitted against each other and fuelled by a common hatred? A literato could answer these questions, because literati can fantasise, but not me: fantasy is forbidden to me. A few things, however, are certain. Or almost certain.
Manuel Mena did not spend the year before the war in Ibahernando; he spent it in Cáceres, where he was doing his final year of secondary school. He could not have been unaware of the hopes his mother and his siblings had resting on him, of the economic sacrifices they were making so that he could be the first member of the family to leave the village and study and prepare to go to university; given his character, this would oblige him to do his best at his studies, to try to be equal to his responsibility and measure up. He was living on the calle Arco de España, next to the Plaza Mayor, in the house of a Civil Guard sergeant who had become friendly with the family when he was in charge of the Ibahernando headquarters. He was named Don Enrique Cerrillo. Apart from Don Eladio Viñuela, Manuel Mena had barely any friends left in the village, because his new adolescent interests had distanced him from his childhood affiliations, but he returned frequently to see his mother and siblings, and there is no doubt he was informed of the explosive situation going on in Ibahernando, which was mutatis mutandis the explosive situation going on in the country; nor is there any doubt that he was informed of his brother Juan’s brief stay in prison or of the family’s fears. Did he devote that 1935–36 school year exclusively to his studies or, in spite of enjoying them and being interested, and his acute awareness that he should not neglect them, did the general politicisation of the country politicise him as well? There is no doubt that during the war or during most of the war Manuel Mena was a convinced Falangist—much more Falangist than Francoist, assuming he was ever really a Francoist—but was he also before the war? Or did he become a Falangist when the war started, like the majority of Falangists?
It is impossible to answer these questions. At the beginning of 1936 the Falange was still very much a minority party in Spain; in the February elections that year it won barely a seat: that of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, its leader. The party as such did not exist in Ibahernando, and its national candidates never obtained a single vote there. But none of that means that Manuel Mena could not have been attracted in Cáceres to the romantic and anti-liberal idealism, the youthful radicalism, the irrational vitality and enthusiasm for charismatic leaders and strongmen of that ideology that was all the rage everywhere in Europe; on the contrary: the Falange was a party that, with its system-bucking vocation, its jovial prestige of absolute novelty, its irresistible nimbus of semi-cl
andestinity, its denial of the traditional distinction between right and left, its proposal for a transcending synthesis of the two, its perfect ideological chaos, its simultaneous and impossible bet on patriotic nationalism and egalitarian revolution, and its captivating demagogy, seemed made to measure for a student fresh from his village who, at barely sixteen years of age, in that decisive historical period would be dreaming of putting a stop with one redemptive blow to the fear and poverty that stalked his family and to the hunger, the humiliation, and the injustice he’d seen daily in the streets of his childhood and adolescence, all of it without putting the social order in jeopardy and also allowing him to identify with the aristocratic elitism of José Antonio, Marquis of Estella. We do not know if Don José Cerrillo, the family friend he lived with in Cáceres, belonged to the Falange at that time; most likely he did not. But there is no doubt that at the beginning of that year Cáceres was one of the provinces of Spain with the highest number of party members; nor that Manuel Mena could have attended José Antonio’s second meeting in Cáceres, on January 19, 1936, in the Norba, a theatre located on the Paseo de Cánovas. There he could have seen how the young leader of the Falange addressed a crowd of comrades come from all over Extremadura, sporting his regulation blue shirt and interrupted by the persistent thunder of ovations, with words like these: “The great task of our generation consists of demonstrating the flaws of the capitalist system, the final fatal consequences of which are the accumulation of capital in big businesses and the proletarianisation of the masses.” Or like these: “The process of capitalist hypertrophy will only be ended in one of two ways: either by terminating it with a decision, even a heroic one, by some who participate in its advantages, or by waiting for the revolutionary catastrophe, which, as it burns the capitalist edifice, will set fire in passing to our immense cultural and spiritual heritage. We prefer collapse to arson.” And even like these: “To block the path of Marxism it is not votes we need, but resolute chests, like those of our twenty-four fallen comrades who, by blocking the path, left their fresh lives in the streets. But there is more to do than to counter Marxism. We must create Spain. Less ‘down with this,’ and ‘against that,’ and more ‘Arise Spain.’ For one Spain: United, Great, and Free. For the Nation, Bread, and Justice.”
Lord of All the Dead Page 6
