Guerra

by Jason Webster

  I noticed, as the light softened and began to caress the landscape with shades of orange and gold, that the peace of this verdant corner was even now under attack. Where once the earth had been stained with blood, cement and concrete were now leaving their scars, housing estates and villas springing up like mushrooms in white and brown batches over the rolling hills. Not the violence of the past, perhaps, but with their uniform balustrade balconies and built-in brick barbeques, it felt like a form of violence nonetheless.

  The taxi came to a stop next to a graffiti-daubed wall, slogans condemning the government in scarlet scrawl. I waited for the driver to explain, but he said nothing.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked.

  ‘You wanted to see where Lorca was shot, right? This is it.’

  I looked up through the open window, breathing in the pure air. Weeds were growing out of a shabby flight of brick steps, with bits of litter caught on the brambles invading from either side. At the top, a memorial plaque in dark lettering declared the site to be ‘The Federico García Lorca Memorial Park’.

  I opened the door gingerly.

  ‘Hey! You’ve got to pay,’ the driver said.

  ‘I want you to wait for me here,’ I said. ‘To take me back into town.’

  ‘You pay for this trip first. You might just run off.’

  I looked around: there was nothing but a few houses, forests and fields. Where was I supposed to run off to, exactly? I handed him the money.

  ‘Wait for me, though.’

  He grunted and I took it as a yes.

  I climbed the steps and passed through the gate into an open empty space. On the far side, plaques had been placed on a wall quoting extracts from Lorca’s writing, while the floor had been laid with stone and more brick to form an ugly design. I tripped over the awkwardly laid pieces in the failing light, twisting my ankle.

  Cursing, I limped on. The place felt abandoned and unloved. The hillside rose above me with a thin covering of grass, mere twigs of occasional trees breaking through the soulless earth on this strangely bare and barren patch of land. It reminded me of the attempts developers made to lay out ‘gardens’ or ‘landscapes’ when they finished constructing a new town, with thin artificial-looking grass. There was a feeling of desolation in the park, perhaps not entirely due to the barbarous acts that had once been carried out on the same spot. It was a sorry, pathetic memorial, unworthy of either Lorca or the people who had died here with him.

  Pushing on and trying to ignore the pain now gripping my lower leg, I scampered down a path towards some trees. There, by a gate leading on to the road, was an olive tree. It was taller than most olive trees in Spain, which were zealously pruned to produce the best fruit. This one had been left to grow. It was, I recognized immediately from Miguel’s description, the marker for one of the possible sites where Lorca’s remains lay.

  I had met Miguel Botella, professor of physical anthropology at Granada University, earlier that morning to talk about the mysteries surrounding Lorca’s death and the moves being made finally to uncover his remains. The poet’s body, dumped with three others in a ditch on this hillside, was, according to the papers, soon to be dug up, formally identified and given a ‘proper burial’. Miguel, a forensic scientist, was the man charged with identifying his remains when they were found. It was often difficult to get to talk to people in positions of authority in Spain, a country where it was usually necessary to have a personal contact – a friend, or preferably a relative – to break down the barriers of suspicion between officials and ordinary members of the public, but Miguel was an exception, and had very kindly agreed to give me some of his time.

  His offices were in the basement of the Faculty of Medicine, down narrow institutional steps in what felt like a forgotten corner of a labyrinth, tucked away among pale smooth walls and low ceilings. I had the sense of entering a secret bunker, a place where you might disappear and never be found again. In the hallway leading to his rooms, glass cabinets displayed an ossuaric chamber of horrors – skulls barely recognizable after years of deformation through leprosy and syphilis, joints fused together from arthritis, trepannings that had gone terribly wrong. I began to feel uneasy about meeting a man who collected such things, who spent his working life surrounded by death.

  Miguel was a small elderly man with a long grey-white beard and an air of industriousness. As soon as I entered, his mouth opened into a wide embracing smile and he gave me a pale delicate hand to shake. We sat down amid piles of papers, assistants bustling in and out holding forms and mobile phones. On the walls were gruesome diagrams of partially dismembered bodies. I was slightly wary at first – the man appeared joyful and friendly, yet all around I could see signs of pain and mortality. Cautiously, I began to ask about the Lorca case. How soon was the body going to be dug up? I asked.

  He paused before answering, and as he did so I shuddered slightly. His expression, or perhaps just his air – the smile remained genuine and warm – made me feel there was something morbid about the question. Lorca had been written about so much, had become such a symbol, almost like a character in one of his own plays, that it was easy to lose sight of the fact that he had also been a human being.

  Miguel’s reply, when it came, was measured and detailed. In his calm, steady voice he told me dispassionately how the families of two of the men buried with Lorca had agreed that their relatives’ bodies should finally be exhumed.

  ‘This, you understand, will entail the exhumation of all four bodies in the same grave, one of which will be Lorca’s.’ From within the depths of his beard, his mouth opened and closed like a blinking eye while he spoke.

  It was this that had brought everything to a head. Descendants of the one-legged school teacher Dióscoro Galindo, and the plumber and part-time bullfighter Francisco Baladí, both of whom had been shot and buried with the poet, had now asked for the exhumation process to begin. It seemed that almost seventy years after their relatives had been shot in cold blood, the sons and grandsons of Republican victims of Nationalist terror were finally intending to recover their remains and give them a proper burial. Under Franco, Miguel explained, this had been impossible. Then, after his death in 1975 and the subsequent transition to democracy, the watchword had been ‘forgetting’: the success of elected governments depended on memories of the recent past being blacked out, hence the pacto del olvido or ‘pact of forgetting’. Now, though, this was changing, and groups were springing up who were determined that the suffering endured during the war and under Franco should not be forgotten.

  I thought for a moment about the graves I’d seen near our farm. Perhaps this was why Begoña had shown them to me. Perhaps even up there in the mountains she had been touched by this growing collective sentiment.

  ‘The problem,’ Miguel continued, his hands resting on the desk in front of him, fingers touching at the tips, ‘is that Lorca’s family is not really interested in exhuming his body. They feel it would only open up old wounds and problems, and want him to remain where he is.’

  The day before, Pepa, a young curator at the museum that now occupied the Lorca summer house, had told me that the family wanted the grave to remain untouched because the local council were trying to develop the hillside where he lay and build more villas and estates on it. As things stood they could only do so much. The best way to remember Lorca was for him to remain where he was. That was, after all, where he had been shot.

  ‘This has created a division among the lawyers,’ Miguel said. There were those who argued that if only one person was against the exhumation then their wishes had to be respected. Others said those who did want their relatives’ remains to be dug up had rights too.

  ‘We would have to exhume and identify all the bodies, as they are almost certainly lying one on top of the other, so to exhume some and not others would be impossible,’ he said with a shrug. ‘So now the case is before the regional Andalusian government to decide.’

  ‘It’s not imminent, then?’ I said.
From the newspapers I’d understood it might take place any day.

  ‘We are expecting a decision within the next few weeks, but sometimes these things can take time.’

  I knew from experience that anything that reached the hands of bureaucrats in Spain could take a very long time. It might be years before a decision was made.

  ‘We want to maintain the dignity of these people, not bring about a rise in viewing figures or circulation for the media,’ Miguel said, after pausing to sign some more papers an assistant had brought in. ‘Several channels have already asked to be there to film everything, but we’re not going to let any cameras in. We’ll have to put up some sort of tent to ensure privacy. The work must be calm, discreet and rigorous.’

  He got up and closed the door to the office to make sure we weren’t interrupted again, and began telling me about the techniques he would use if and when they got the go-ahead for the dig.

  ‘It will be easy to identify Lorca,’ he said, looking me in the face. ‘Of the others, one had a wooden leg and the other two were young men. It will be just a matter of identifying the pieces.’

  I asked if they would be using DNA testing.

  ‘That’s another department. They will do it, but only for final proof. The identity will be clear once we get him inside this laboratory.’ I had no doubts. He spoke with such assurance: surely such a respected and authoritative figure couldn’t be wrong.

  ‘But there are people who want to know exactly how he died,’ I said. ‘Did he, for example, receive a coup de grâce to the head?’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ His expression, though steady, betrayed a certain distaste. ‘Some people, you know, they seem just a little obsessed by the whole thing. I had one in here the other day and the only thing he wants to know is if Lorca got shot in the backside for being homosexual, as somebody once claimed.’ He paused. ‘All this will come out. It is inevitable, but …’

  I asked if he thought that too much attention focusing on just one man was a bad thing. Might people forget the thousands of others who had also been killed?

  ‘Lorca’s death helps people to remember, but it also, as you suggest, takes people’s minds away from the other victims,’ he said. ‘This goes very deep. There was a great injustice carried out here in Granada during the war. Per capita it was one of the worst affected cities in the whole of Spain.’

  I told him how on the previous day I had walked up to the town cemetery, beyond the tourist buses above the Alhambra hill. This, along with Víznar, had been one of the main execution sites during the early months of the war. Truck-loads of people were driven up during the night and then shot against the walls. The pock-marks were still there in the late 1940s, when Gerald Brenan had returned looking for clues to his friend Lorca’s death. But now, when I’d asked a guard to show me where the graves of these victims were, she had pointed me to a corner of the cemetery where soldiers from Franco’s forces were buried. ‘No,’ I said when I went back to find her. ‘I want to see the graves of the Republicans shot here during the war.’ The young woman looked confused; she didn’t know what I was talking about. Seventy years on and the victims were on the verge of disappearing from collective memory altogether.

  ‘The things that happened here should never happen again,’ Miguel said. ‘If I can help that in some way, that’s all I can ask.’

  The scale of the repression, he said, was staggering, all over Spain. And the problem was that it was still unclear quite how many had died under Franco’s regime. This was one of the reasons why it was so little known about around the world.

  ‘How many people do you think died in Pinochet’s coup in Chile?’ he asked me.

  ‘Three, perhaps four thousand?’ I said.

  ‘One thousand, four hundred and eighty-nine,’ he said. ‘I worked on the investigating forensics team. The dead were all communists, their names written on lists and then tracked down and killed. We know exactly who and how many died.’

  I was surprised. Not so much at the figure being lower than I’d thought, but at how precise knowledge of the repression was, and yet how seldom you heard this mentioned. It was so much easier and more emotive to talk in large round figures.

  ‘Yet here in Spain it was chaos,’ Miguel continued. ‘People were shot just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In many cases old scores were being settled. It wasn’t organized. Directed, yes – the orders came from the top for terror to be used to control the people and frighten the enemy, but there wasn’t the organization you had in Chile in ’73. We’re talking about tens, possibly hundreds of thousands. But the exact figure will almost certainly never be known.’

  I could understand why this work was so fulfilling for him: a compassionate, inquisitive man like himself could not fail to be drawn to trying to solve some of the mysteries of the Civil War.

  He asked me why I was interested in all this.

  ‘Things are finally beginning to change, slowly,’ he said when I explained to him about the graves, about Begoña and my great-grandfather. ‘Perhaps you should go to Extremadura. There’s much to be found there relating to all this. The region suffered terribly under Franco, as they’re just discovering.’

  Extremadura had been one of the main battle grounds during the early weeks and months of the war in the summer of 1936, as Franco’s troops crossed over the Strait from Morocco and then marched up the west of Spain to link up with General Mola’s army and launch an attack on Madrid. Some of the worst atrocities in the conflict had taken place in this poor, underdeveloped and arid region.

  He scribbled down the names of some people to contact and places worth visiting.

  As I left, news came in of an autopsy just starting on a woman who’d been run over by her husband. Miguel shook my hand again as he led me to the door.

  ‘As you can see, I’m busy,’ he said with a smile. Death seemed to surround him.

  I stood by the olive tree in the Lorca park, remembering our conversation. There were three or four possible sites for Lorca’s body, and this was one. Next to the tree, a body-sized rut in the ground seemed to show that someone at least had been buried here. But as I looked across at the new villas nearby, this whole area seemed little more than an impromptu graveyard. You could barely stick a shovel into the ground, someone had said, without coming across a pile of bones. Who in their right mind would want to build a house out here? Yes, the views were nice, but it was a tragic, haunted place. I sympathized with Lorca’s family. Ugly though this memorial park was, at least it marked in some way what had happened to the man. Better than a conscience-easing plaque and marble tomb lying next to his killers in Granada city cemetery.

  The sound of a car in the direction from which I’d come jerked me from my thoughts: the engine revved and then gradually died away as the vehicle disappeared round a corner. My heart sank: I knew instinctively what had happened, but needed to see it before I could actually believe it. Limping back up the path and down to the gate, I confirmed that the taxi had gone. The more generous side of me wondered whether he had gone to find a more convenient place to park. But when I caught sight of his gleaming white car hurrying away on the far side of the valley, I knew the bastard had abandoned me.

  To the west the sun was already touching the jagged lines of the horizon, the light fading quickly. A few street-lamps were flickering into life down in Alfacar. If there were any buses out to these villages they would probably have packed up for the day by now. The only thing to do was retrace the way I’d come in the taxi and see how far I got. Somewhere further along, perhaps, I might get a lift.

  Sparrows were flittering from branch to branch in the dusk air, while the heat of the day seemed to rise from the ground, allowing cooler breezes to blow in from the hillsides. The hairs on my body lifted slightly in expectation of the cold. My limbs heavy with anger, I pushed off along the road, grabbing a stick lying by the side to take some of the weight off my ankle. It would be a long walk. I had no choice but to continue in the d
ark.

  8

  Propaganda

  ‘You already know my system: for every supporter of order who dies, I will kill ten extremists at least. And let not those who run away think that by escaping they will be free. I will dig them up from the earth if necessary, and if they are already dead I will kill them again!’8

  At ten o’clock every night during the first year and a half of the Civil War, Spaniards would turn on their radios to listen to the ranting from Seville of the Nationalist General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, ruling his territories in the south like a wicked medieval warlord. Shouting, whispering and even singing his way through his dinner-time broadcasts, he became, in a pre-television age, a symbol for many around the country of the military uprising, of its cruelty, bravado, self-belief and contradictions. Every radio station in the Nationalist zone would connect with Radio Seville in order to hear the general’s words; restaurants and bars would fall silent as the people listened in, while in the morning papers the following day his talks, charlas, would be reprinted word for word. Simultaneously rousing his supporters and placing fear in the hearts of his enemies, this bombastic character with his coarse manner, simple macho language and repetition of key phrases was one of the first broadcasters to make radio a key factor in a modern coup.

  ‘The Marxists are ferocious beasts, but we are gentlemen … Señor Companys [the president of Catalonia] deserves to have his throat slit like a pig.’

  Queipo was an unlikely hero for the rebellion. A tall, striking man with a neatly clipped handlebar moustache, he was a known supporter of the Republic, having been Master of the Military Household to its first president, Niceto Alcalá Zamora, who was also a relative by marriage. He had been a sworn enemy of the dictator Primo de Rivera in the 1920s, had plotted against the monarchy and was a Freemason – a group particularly hated by Franco for their associations with republicanism. None of this made him likely to join the military coup, but Queipo was a vain man, bent on self-promotion, obsessed with medals, and always with an eye for a chance. Alcalá Zamora, an intriguer disliked by both sides of the political divide for his handling of the various political crises since the birth of the Republic, was ousted by the Left as president just before the uprising and replaced by Prime Minister Manuel Azaña, a move Queipo took as a personal slight as well as a major setback to his career prospects. Although no one in the government suspected him, joining the rebellion now became a natural step for one so ambitious.