Ghosts of Spain

by Giles Tremlett

  ‘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 young
er 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.’