Ghosts of Spain

by Giles Tremlett

  The film cameras are back in the pueblos too. Almodóvar was one of the first. In The Flower of My Secret his heroine, after being abandoned by her husband, found a zeal for life again after returning to the pueblo. He chose Almagro, just twenty miles away across the scorched and red plain of La Mancha from Calzada de Calatrava. He was there again in 2005 working on a feature film, to be called Coming Back. Death and ghosts returning from the past were scripted to play a major part. ‘The death culture is very strong,’ Almodóvar has explained of his native La Mancha. ‘My mother once told me that my grandfather reappeared after dying, and the whole village collaborated in sending him back to the sweet hereafter. I don’t believe in that, but that’s part of the culture where I was born, and it is part of me.’

  Almodóvar was echoing something that García Lorca once said to explain why death was an essential part of duende, the fairy-like Spanish creative spirit. ‘In all countries death is an ending. It arrives and the curtain falls. Not in Spain. In Spain the curtain is raised,’ he said.

  The pueblo is also the star of a documentary film – The Sky Turns, by director Mercedes Álvarez. It follows a year in the life of her family’s former pueblo – Aldealseñor, in Soria. Álvarez was the last person born there, more than thirty years ago. The film, shown at Spanish cinemas in 2005, watches the old grow older as the last few inhabitants head towards the grave. Álvarez compares the village’s plight with that of a painter friend who is going blind.

  Aldealseñor’s villagers are, naturally, heavily concerned with death. ‘Right up to the end you think you are going to live forever,’ says one. They also remember the Civil War, and tales of those executed by Franco’s people. An elderly shepherd sits against a stone wall and recalls one man’s final words in front of the firing squad. “¡Viva la República!” (“Long live the Republic!”), he shouted,’ says the shepherd shaking his head and cursing to himself.

  First-hand memories of those terrible, bloody years will soon be buried, along with the last remaining villagers, in the local cemetery. The passing away of the Civil War generation is part of the wider explanation of why Spain is now looking back to the past. A dark page of history is being definitively turned, and Spaniards finally feel liberated from it. That is both good and bad. They no longer feel constrained by the Pact of Forgetting. Digging up Civil War graves may not be easy, but at least it can now be done. The time lapse since Franco’s death in 1975 is not so great if you compare it with other European countries. It was the generation of 1968 in Germany, two decades after Hitler’s death, that asked how their parents had been involved with the Nazi dictatorship. The French took even longer to seriously assess Vichy and collaboration with Hitler.

  If the Transición was a success, it was because Spaniards made a supreme effort to find consensus. That effort was driven, to a large degree, by the Civil War ghosts still haunting so many Spanish households. The divisions now visible in Spain have much to do with the release of those historic constraints. How Spaniards deal with them will be the ultimate test of that Transición.

  Spaniards seem to be taking a breather – and taking stock. They have stepped back to contemplate, and to come to terms with, the achievements of the past three decades. These are both many and considerable. They include, largely, the communal Spanish aim of becoming more like other Europeans.

  Spain still has its own particular set of historical ghosts. They, above all, are what makes this country, as the hated 1960s advertising slogan put it, ‘different’. What many Spaniards have not yet learned to do, however, is love the idea of their own difference. And that is strange. Because it is precisely why so many outsiders, including this anglosajón, love them so.

  14

  The Fiesta Is Over

  In the late summer of 2011 I walked down the familiar, narrow streets of Poyales del Hoyo once more to the Plaza del Moral. The village had changed remarkably little over the previous decade. A few hillside houses with huge plate-glass windows had been built for visitors from Madrid eager to drink in the spectacular, endless views across the plain towards the Montes de Toledo. Apart from that, it was pretty much the same village that I had first encountered on All Saint’s Day, 2002, when I came to see three victims of Civil War death squads reburied. A dizzying decade of building and development across the rest of Spain seemed to have passed it by. Poyales felt strangely suspended in time – for in the intervening years Spain itself had grown at frantic speed until, unable to brake, it had driven off the edge of the cliff. An economic crisis meant almost one in four people were unemployed and, to make things worse, the euro currency was suffering a crisis of potentially epic proportions.

  Something was amiss, however, in the Poyales cemetery. The grave where Pilar Espinosa, Virtudes de la Puente and Valeriana Granada had been reburied nine years earlier was now just a rectangular strip of freshly moved earth surrounded by a few inches of chipped cement and broken bricks. A few weeks earlier the new mayor, Antonio Cerro of the Conservative People’s Party (PP), had come here with Virtudes’ granddaughter – who wanted to move the body to a family niche. Pilar and Valeriana’s families were told that only the box containing Virtudes’ bones was being moved. But Mayor Cerro decided that was not enough. He wanted the grave destroyed. The mayor, a retired military man, ordered that the remains of Pilar and Valeriana be thrown into the cemetery’s own anonymous mass grave – where the bones of paupers and those whose families have stopped paying for their niches go. The tombstone with its engraved dove of peace was smashed and taken away. ‘He said it was because the grave was damp,’ said Yash Paul Gosain, Pilar’s great-grandson. ‘But I think it was because his mother’s grave is right beside it.’

  The decision to empty the grave – which had received a further seven bodies of Francoist victims dug up from a second mass grave in Poyales earlier in 2011 – provoked furious reactions. The memoria histórica, or ‘historical memory’, movement sparked by those digging up the mass graves left untouched since the Civil War of the 1930s had grown considerably over previous years. Rumours that protesters from around Spain were about to descend on Poyales to spoil the annual summer fiestas provoked an outbreak of communal paranoia. Some villagers had even driven back from their holidays in Alicante, 380 miles away, to ‘protect’ the village against the invaders. In the end only a few dozen protesters turned up led, inevitably, by Mariano López – the man who, in 2002, had overseen the digging up of the anonymous roadside grave where the women had lain. They brought with them a provocative banner that read: ‘We are the grandchildren of the workers you could not kill’. There were angry exchanges when worshippers came out of Sunday mass. ‘If Franco rose from the dead he’d cut your head off, you bastard,’ was one phrase heard in the plaza.

  Police had to protect Yash as, megaphone in hand, he tried to explain what they were complaining about. By the time I arrived a few weeks later, only the village fool was talking to him. ‘I thought that some old timer would go for his shotgun and we would be back to 1936 again,’ he said. Police had kept a special watch for several days, while things calmed down. Writs and counter-writs had been lodged at the local court house – accusing the mayor of acting outside the law, his councillors of inciting violence and the historical memory campaigners of illegally demonstrating. Peace, decidedly, had not broken out. The atmosphere, indeed, was tenser than it had been nine years earlier when the corpses were first buried. It was as if a contained fury against the dead had finally broken through.

  I spoke separately to Mayor Cerro, to Mariano and to Yash. Cerro continued to claim he had moved the bones on ‘humanitarian’ grounds after finding the grave waterlogged. All insisted on the iniquity, deceitfulness and outright nastiness of the other side. ‘When everyone has gone you’ll be here alone, and then we’ll kill you,’ one villager had told Yash – who spoke perfect castellano, though he had been born to one of Pilar’s granddaughters after she had emigrated to England and married. A mild-mannered town councillor representing the Unit
ed Left party was rumoured to be selling his house, tired of the intolerance.

  Afterwards I drove back up the curving road to Candeleda and stopped at the site of the original mass grave where the bodies of the three women had been dumped after being shot on a rainy December night in 1936. A stone monument erected on the spot was covered in graffiti that had been sprayed the night after the PP won town-hall elections in both Candeleda and Poyales that May. ‘Arriba España!’ said one, echoing the cry of Franco’s military regime. The yoke-and-arrows symbol of the Falange, whose members had perpetrated the crime, had been spray-painted in black on the monument.

  It was a depressing find. I want to believe, but am not entirely sure, that it was an exception. In the years since their grave was dug up the three women’s names had become reasonably well known. A play had been written about them. A film, La Luna Ciega, had been made from the play. Their story had crossed borders, too. Just a few weeks before I returned, two Englishmen had driven into Poyales del Hoyo with an earlier edition of this book in their hands, looking for their grave. But I should have known that many on the other side of Spain’s divide felt the historical memory movement was getting too big for its boots. I should probably have realised, too, that if anyone was going to rile them it was Mariano with his relentless, unshaded view of a past divided between absolute good and equally absolute evil.

  Back in Madrid I bumped into Emilio Silva, whose exhumation of his grandfather’s grave in Priaranza del Bierzo had opened my eyes to Spain’s secret past and had also inspired imitators in Poyales del Hoyo and elsewhere. He now headed a nationwide organisation that had recovered some 5,500 bodies of Francoist victims from 280 mass graves – and which had finally pushed a reluctant Socialist government into regulating and, in some cases, subsidising the exhumations. Emilio was in despair. This was partly because he thought that Mariano and his friends in Poyales del Hoyo had been too provocative, but also because these were the dying days of eight years of Socialist government under Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Mariano Rajoy, the PP leader who became prime minister a few weeks afterwards in December 2011, had already expressed scorn at the historical memory movement founded by Silva and others.

  Were the events in Poyales in the summer of 2011 a taste of what was to come under Rajoy? I was not sure. Rajoy – who was handed an economy in its worst state for decades – had other worries. And he himself had moderated his tone in recent years. Historical memory was a painful issue – but the proliferation of exhumations, books, documentary films and monuments had done much to redress the balance of wilful ignorance left over by the years of silence and forgetting. Some of Rajoy’s most right-wing supporters – those, like Mayor Cerro, whose world-view is shored up by a raft of vociferous new ultraconservative media outlets – would dearly like the historical memory movement to be cut dead. Rajoy himself, whose grandfather was banned from teaching at university by Franco because he had helped draft a statute of autonomy for Galicia in 1932, seems too intelligent to seek confrontation on an issue that often makes his party look both unfeeling and vengeful. But if Emilio had his doubts, he also had his reasons. For Rajoy had been one of the main protagonists of a long period of intense political acrimony, of what Spaniards called crispación, that followed the dramatic 2004 election of Zapatero. The dead and disappeared of the Civil War were just part of a cocktail of issues that, over a four-year period, provoked a degree of confrontation between Spaniards unseen since the 1930s.

  If I had to pick a single day on which all this crystallised, it would be the last day of October 2007. It was, by chance, a day when several of the historical currents described in this book suddenly flowed together. It also marked a fresh peak of crispación, encapsulating the atmosphere of a country struggling to confront the past, both recent and distant.

  It was an unusually bright and sunny morning, something that the ranks of television journalists lined up outside a newly built court house in Madrid’s Casa de Campo park were specially glad of. Behind a bullet-proof glass enclosure inside the court sat more than a dozen men, all accused of involvement with the gang that carried out the bomb attacks on commuter trains that had shattered the Spanish capital – and Spaniards’ hearts – in March 2004. The tensest spot in the building, however, was a basement room where relatives of the 191 dead and some of the 1,856 injured in the worst-ever terrorist attack on European soil had gathered to hear the verdicts. After three years of bitter, divisive debate, Spain was about to find out what had really happened on that fateful day.

  At 11.30 that morning Judge Javier Gómez Bermúdez, the head of a panel of three judges that had spent eight months listening to testimony and then studying documents, began to read out their conclusions and hand down sentences. I had sat in that court house on the first day of the trial beside a nervous Clara Escribano, the woman who – earlier in this book – described what it was like to be on one of the trains when the bombs exploded. ‘I want to look them in the face,’ she told me before we stepped into the overheated, soporific courtroom.

  Two days earlier I had visited her at home in the barrio of Santa Eugenia. She had pulled out for me the box in which she kept – in the form of press cuttings, photos and documents – the memories of that day. Amongst the photos was one of Clara sitting on the railway station steps after her escape from the wrecked train, blood still streaked across her face and a look of absolute perplexity in her eyes. Leafing through those documents, it soon became clear that – in Clara’s house at least – the psychological scars would take a long time to heal.

  As Judge Bermúdez settled down to read out the verdict an angry debate was starting across town in that same lower house of parliament where Lieutenant Colonel Tejero’s would-be golpistas had once peppered the ceiling with machine-gun fire. The government, after years of procrastinating, was finally presenting a historical memory law designed to honour General Franco’s victims. The law would help those who – like the relatives of Pilar, Virtudes and Valeriana in Poyales del Hoyo – wished to exhume the dead still lying in the mass graves he left behind. It was an emotional moment. Many had believed that, despite the fact that Prime Minister Zapatero’s grandfather was amongst those shot by Franco’s firing squads, the government would never stick by its pledge to pass a law. The wounds were obviously still sore. Conservative Spain was in uproar and the government had become increasingly jittery about the subject.

  It is hard to convey just how strongly the two, apparently unconnected, themes of the bombings and Franco’s legacy became wedges that widened the already deep rift that had opened up between Spaniards. Along with similarly vicious debates about the rights and wrongs of negotiating with Basque terrorist group ETA or giving Catalonia greater self-government, two tides of Spanish opinion were at loggerheads. I had never seen the country so riven by apparently unbridgeable divides in my twenty years here.

  I only realised quite how deep the chasm separating Spaniards had become when I was asked to talk about this book – after it had been published in Spanish – on a radio show hosted by the conservative COPE radio station, which is partially owned by the Roman Catholic Church. I was struck dumb when a regular participant on the show suddenly claimed that, following the bombings, Spain had become a dictatorship once more. This was absurd hyperbole. A quick glimpse out of the studio window would have told him that absolute normality reigned. He was not alone, however, in his angry analysis. A significant, and highly vocal, sector of right-wing Spain saw the bombings as a kind of coup d’état.

  A form of inverted logic had been applied, in which whoever gained from a situation was deemed automatically responsible for it. The Socialists had benefited from the bombings at elections three days later, when voters threw out the Conservative People’s Party government. Therefore, the warped logic went, the shadow of suspicion must fall over Zapatero and his new Socialist government. Nobody accused the Socialists outright of planting the bombs themselves, but the idea of some kind of moral implication in t
he attacks was left to float poisonously in the air.

  The train bombings launched a thousand conspiracy theories. The only thing they had in common was that all cast Zapatero’s government – even though it had not been in power at the time – in a bad light. The theories were easy to construct, because vital evidence about who carried out the attacks had disappeared when eight of the bombers committed mass suicide by blowing themselves up. This, inevitably, left what were suspiciously called ‘black holes’ in the investigation. Wherever a question could not be answered, a conspiracy (or a conspiracy of silence) was constructed.

  Chief amongst those theories was the idea that ETA was involved in the bombings – and that the police, public prosecutors, courts and Socialist government were somehow intent on covering this up. This, of course, was the idea that the People’s Party government of the time had mistakenly and, perhaps, deliberately clung to.

  ETA was explicitly ruled out by Judge Bermúdez and his colleagues. The attack, according to the judges’ narration of the proven facts of the case, was carried out by ‘a jihadist group’. The court tried twenty-eight people, finding twenty-one of them guilty. With most of the bombers already dead, few of those directly involved were available for trial. Only Jamal Zougam, the telephone salesman from Lavapiés, was found guilty of actually planting the bombs. A second Islamist, Othman El Gnaoui, was also declared guilty of ‘terrorist murder’ for aiding the bombers. The third mass murderer was not a Muslim immigrant but a Spanish miner, Emilio Suárez Trashorras, who stole and then sold the explosives that killed so many of his countrymen.

  Spain has no death sentence, nor does it hand down life prison terms. The three men will each serve up to thirty years in jail. A dozen other defendants were given lesser prison terms for belonging to a terrorist group, but their direct participation in the attacks was not proved.