We were on a country road, climbing up a hillside clad in thick pine forests, glimpses of light and spectacular views over the valley below coming into sight through breaks in the foliage. It seemed fresh and unusually green for Spain in the middle of summer, and I felt the rich dark colours washing over my senses like a cool shower.
‘How long have I been asleep?’
‘I want you to see something,’ Kiki said.
There was something bleak and unattractive about the crosses erected under Franco’s rule, as though they had all been cut by machines or cast in their thousands in some grey foundry on the edge of a once-beautiful town. Made of iron or concrete, they were to be seen dotted around the country, marking the scenes of Nationalist victories or paying homage to Franco supporters who had lost their lives to the ‘Reds’. Their inscriptions often followed the formula of the Falange, saluting the founder of the fascist party, José-Antonio, before giving a list of the fallen ‘heroes’ from the local area, with an unintentionally ironic ¡PRESENTE! proclaimed at the bottom. How the dead were supposed to be ‘present’ was anyone’s guess. Perhaps in spirit. But they were uniformly ugly monuments, the iron crosses rusted and overly ornate, the concrete versions cut along austere, utilitarian lines, unnaturally sharp and straight. It was strange that such a simple form could express so much, but you looked at a Francoist cross and you sensed all the harshness, rigidity and uninspired self-importance of his regime.
The crosses I had previously seen, however, were modest affairs, perhaps two or three metres high. Nothing had prepared me for the colossus that now appeared through the trees.
I knew immediately what it was, but was still taken aback by the scale of the place. The Valle de los Caídos was a vast mausoleum and basilica complex built by Franco after the war in the hills to the north of Madrid, intended as a memorial to the war dead and his eventual resting place. The structure was almost entirely carved out of the inside of a mountain, like a cave, while crowning the whole thing was a gigantic cross sticking out of the top of the rock.
‘That,’ Kiki said as I sat open-mouthed, ‘is a hundred and fifty metres and two hundred thousand tonnes of religious devotion.’
The granite cross was so vast and imposing there was something quite obscene about it. For miles around, unspoilt countryside stretched in all directions; it was the kind of place you could imagine appealing to romantic, nineteenth-century sensibilities, all wild, untamed and emotive, with high cliffs, deep valleys and acres of virgin forest. And right in the middle of it all stood this strange, ugly structure, completely out of balance with both itself and its surroundings.
As we drove nearer on the winding mountain road an enormous plaza came into view at the foot of the carved-out rock – a semi-circular court framing the entrance to the basilica, and leading down a number of steps to an exposed and empty space that looked like a parade ground. I could make out a handful of figures walking around, some carrying what seemed to be flags.
‘There won’t be so many people there,’ Kiki said. ‘It can get quite busy, sometimes. Especially on the anniversary of Franco’s death.’
The twentieth of November 1975 was still a day people remembered in Spain, even if only with a sigh of relief. I’d lost count of the number of people who’d told me they’d had a bottle of champagne sitting in the fridge at the time, waiting for the dictator finally to pass away.
‘Young men from across the country congregate in Madrid and then walk out here as a kind of pilgrimage. Some of them even do it barefoot. I found out that a friend of mine was involved in it all a couple of years ago.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Nothing. Didn’t bother me. But it was coming to an end anyway,’ he said.
That was Kiki: try to pin him down in any way and he slipped effortlessly through your fingers. I’d found it slightly confusing that morning, not knowing whether to use masculine or feminine endings on adjectives relating to him. Normally it was all in the feminine. But the guise he’d chosen for this day was male, as though he’d changed his skin, and very quickly I’d found the matter took care of itself. Today he was a man, and despite being a rather boyish and slightly built man, something about the subtle energy surrounding him – just as it had been quite definitely that of a woman the day before – was now unquestionably masculine.
He parked his orange car under a tree at the edge of the complex and we began walking up to the basilica. A mixture of the mountain air and the gigantic absurdity of where we were was beginning to lift my spirits, and I suppressed a schoolboy urge to start goose-stepping around the place making Hitler salutes. Such a vast folly of a place tickled some surreal comic nerve within me.
‘In the Middle Ages they spent centuries building some of the great cathedrals,’ Kiki said. ‘It took them twenty years to build this. Franco complained it was too slow.’
‘Hardly comparable to a Gothic cathedral,’ I said. A smile was playing on my lips. I felt light-headed. It was like a bizarre cross between the Eagle’s Nest and the Vatican.
‘You’re very judgemental,’ he said. ‘But I can see you’re glad I brought you.’
He took my hand and placed it on his shoulder for me to lean on as we walked across the great square, sunlight bouncing off every surface and glaring into our eyes. It would be a welcome relief from the heat to get inside this curious grotto of death.
Civil Guards eyed us with obligatory suspicion at the entrance, checking our bags and frisking us before letting us in. For a second it seemed I wouldn’t be allowed to pass as I didn’t have any ID on me, my passport having been taken along with everything else back in Saragossa. After explaining what had happened they relented. Later I almost wished they’d kept me out.
Rarely had a building produced such a sharp mood change in me as Franco’s mausoleum when I stepped inside. The cheeriness I had felt outside and the sense of fun brought on by the sheer silliness of the place was transformed in an instant into dark, suffocating depression. The basilica consisted of a long tunnel-like nave with a cross at the far end, in classic Christian architectural style. But whereas Gothic cathedrals in particular were temples of light, this was little more than a dark, grim bunker, buried as it was inside a mountain. No natural light reached this far – kitsch electric fake torches hung from pillars instead, while striplights glowed up towards the vaulted ceiling. Beneath our feet the floor was black, while along the grey, dampstained walls hung ghastly tapestries depicting apocalyptic scenes. A sense of claustrophobia gripped me at once, but I pushed on, caught between my curiosity and a desire to run back out into the square outside.
Kiki had edged away on his own and seemed to be counting the number of stones in each arch, his finger moving upwards as he mouthed numbers under his breath. They had needed twenty thousand workers to build the Valle de los Caídos and the vast majority of them had been Republican prisoners, forced to work in suicidal conditions on a hugely expensive project while the rest of the country went hungry in the harsh post-war years. Fourteen of the builders had died during the construction work, while there had been numerous mutilations. Construction had cost the equivalent of two hundred million pounds. Officially the monument was a memorial to all those who had died in the Civil War, but as so often with Franco, it was more a statement of victory and the crushing of his opponents and their vision of Spain. No mention of the other side was made at his inaugural address when the basilica was finally opened in 1959, while the small number of Republican dead buried there in the 1960s alongside Nationalists had in many cases been removed from graves around the country without even their relatives being informed. Only now were the children and grandchildren of some Republican soldiers beginning to discover that their relatives were buried alongside the very man they had been fighting against.
Franco had been obsessed by the building of the monument, and much of the architectural design was his own. It was said at the time that the Valle de los Caídos was the nearest thing he had to another woman.<
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Walking down the artless nave, I found Franco’s headstone near the altar, with a simple inscription. It was deliberately placed so that he would appear as the ‘head of the household’, the main protagonist welcoming people into this space. Across from it was the grave of José Antonio. Franco exploited the legacy of the founder of the Falange to the full, setting him up as a fallen hero – he was far more useful to him dead than alive. The memory of the young, aristocratic señorito was turned into a cult Franco skilfully used for his own ends.
The guards on the door made sure no desecration took place here, but you almost felt they were unnecessary. You could hardly have hoped for a greyer, danker resting place for the Generalísimo.
Kiki found me outside, leaning against a pillar in the shade as I tried to shake off some of the melancholy the place seemed to have brought on in me. Out in the blazing heat of the open square a small group of men in dark army-style trousers were attempting to march in military fashion, carrying colourful flags and shouting slogans.
Kiki placed his arm on my shoulder. I watched as the young men turned first to the left and then to the right, performing some odd ritual only they seemed to understand.
‘You’ve always insisted on being called a transformista,’ I said. ‘Never a travesti, a transvestite. Why?’
‘Travestis,’ he said, ‘are caricatures. They only pretend to be women.’
He drew his arm away, placing his hands together as though in prayer.
‘I don’t condemn them. We’re different, that’s all.’
Below us, an older man to the side was barking orders like a sergeant-major. One of the boys had dropped his flag and was hurriedly picking it up and trying to carry on as though nothing had happened.
‘I enjoy working at the club. It’s a bit of a dive, but it’s just nice to have a regular job.’
When he and Salud had been performing together, years before, they had shared the stage with a woman still having to bare her breasts at the age of sixty-five in order to pay the rent. Her tits might not have been what they once were, but the jokes and songs she performed as part of the act were so good no one really cared. There was something tragic and pathetic about her situation, nonetheless. Nobody wanted to end up like her.
‘It’s a show. I try to maintain as much dignity as I can. The travestis can give them the thrills.’
As far as Kiki himself was concerned, he was a being who could shift into either gender, with as little chance of being detected as possible. If anything, he was perhaps more convincing as a woman than as a man, when his small, slender body and cat-like walk made him stand out more. You sensed it was only as a woman that he could really slip by unnoticed.
‘The audience is made up mostly of wealthy men in their fifties. With young mistresses wearing deaf-and-dumb trousers.’ He paused. ‘Pants so tight you can read their lips.’ I laughed. From the grave faces down in the square came looks of scorn at such irreverence in this holy place. It was like a masked ball in reverse – everyone dressed the same and everyone with looks of utter seriousness. But a pantomime nonetheless.
‘You think I play around with my identity?’ he said, looking at the toy soldiers with their flags. ‘I’m an amateur compared with this lot.’
We sat down on the grey flagstones. Vultures circled on whirling thermals rising from the overheated earth, while dusty sparrows flittered nervously around the litter bins. I looked towards the horizon, over the rising and falling contours of the land – plains, mountains and forests like different textures of skin – and remembered the things I admired about this country: the passion and the colour I had so fallen in love with when I’d first come, and which had carried me along over the years. With the things I had recently seen and experienced, my vision of Spain had become increasingly grey in the past weeks and months. As though lighting a spark in the gloom, Kiki was reminding me of the country I had always been drawn to. As he sat facing the performing fascists, I began to explain how I was feeling and how confusing I had found the last few weeks: discovering the pit – the fosa – near the farm, the right-wing wrestling match, getting arrested near Ceuta, and robbed just a few days before. How well did I really know Spain?
‘You are like so many northern Europeans who have come here in the past,’ he said. ‘In Spain you find something that liberates you. I don’t know what it is – perhaps the weather, the girls. But then you stop. You create a dream of what the place is, of what Spain is, and you refuse to go any further, to look outside this bubble you have created and get to know the country for what it really is.’
I closed my eyes. I thought I’d managed to break out of that trap and truly explore the country. Perhaps he was right.
‘I used to dream about Paris, or New York – somewhere I could be more me. Where someone like me would be more accepted. But then I went to those places and you know what? I found the same prejudices as back here. OK, there are some differences, but I didn’t discover the paradise I’d conjured up in my mind before I went.’
The soldiers had stopped their prancing about and were standing to attention to listen to an address being read out by a stern-looking middle-aged woman in a black dress.
‘Your problem is that you came here and did find a kind of paradise. You did find something of what you were looking for. But that made you blind. Now you’re discovering aspects of Spain you’ve always failed to notice, or hidden from, and you think you’re falling out of love with the place.’
Perhaps it hadn’t all been quite as he was saying, but essentially he was right. I remembered the phrase that had kept popping into my head when I’d found the farm – ‘a piece of paradise’, like a cliché from the property pages in a Sunday newspaper, as though paradise were something you could possess. It seemed I’d fallen into a trap, after all – of thinking my experience of the country was somehow complete, as though there was nothing left for me to learn or do here. There in the Valle de los Caídos, sitting next to Kiki, watching neo-fascists perform their rigid, colourful spectacle, it was as though I had been asleep.
‘The only way you can love de verdad,’ Kiki said, ‘is to see everything there is to see of that which you love. Pick and choose and it will always come undone. You have to see whatever it is – a country, a person, an idea, even yourself – in all its complexity. Foreigners fall for a passionate image of Spain and that is all they see. But Spaniards themselves are blind. Everyone here talks about “the Two Spains” – throughout our history a long murderous struggle like Cain and Abel, or Goya’s Duelo a garrotazos – those two giants in the middle of the countryside clubbing each other to death. On the one side a liberal, forward-looking Spain. On the other its traditional, authoritarian sibling. One Left, one Right. One dark, the other light. One male, one female. It goes on. And one always trying to impose itself on the other.’
He pulled his hair back tight over his scalp and redid the elastic holding his ponytail in place.
‘Spain is both of these things and neither. The struggles between the two sides will continue, it is part of the national make-up. You don’t have to be limited by the visions of others, though. It’s a question of looking, not just imagining.’
The intense afternoon heat was beginning to fade as we stepped back into his noisy orange car and started heading back to the city. In the square the young men were carrying out their final steps before the show came to an end. Under the verdant canopy above the mountain road, the darkness of the interior of the basilica seemed like a distant memory.
18
Orwell and the Civil War within
the Civil War
Spain caught the attention of the world in the late 1930s because the most important political issue of the time – the struggle between Left and Right – was being played out in such sharp focus on its battlefields. The political divide born out of the creation of the Soviet Union found its first significant expression in the Civil War, in a foretaste of the later proxy battles fought around the globe once
fascism had been defeated and the Cold War began. And just as Vietnam touched a nerve in a post-world-war generation, so Spain’s war became one of the most pressing questions of its day, galvanizing thousands into action. The difference was that, whereas in the 1960s that energy was channelled into demonstrations against war, in the 1930s young people around the world were drawn to take part in the fighting themselves. A small number joined Franco’s ranks. The majority caught the train south from Paris to help the Republic.
Some of those heading to Spain were artists and writers, a few already famous, others later to become so. Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and André Malraux’s L’Espoir are two books that emerged from their authors’ experiences here. Laurie Lee waited longer before publishing an account of his time in the conflict in A Moment of War. Perhaps the most important literary impact the war was to have, however, was on George Orwell, not so much for his Homage to Catalonia, where he told of his time in Spain, but for the powerful experiences during the six months he was here that went on to inspire Animal Farm and 1984, two of the most influential books of the twentieth century. If it hadn’t been for what happened to him, and around him, in Spain, phrases such as ‘double speak’ and ‘Big Brother’ might never have entered the language.
Like many, Orwell was drawn to fight in Spain out of an urge to defeat fascism, his ambition being to shoot at least one fascist as a way of doing his bit for the cause. What he was unaware of, however, was how fractured the Republican side was. Most volunteers from abroad ended up in the communist-dominated International Brigades. Orwell failed to get in because of his suspect political views, and through contacts in the Independent Labour Party ended up instead in the militia of a small anti-Stalinist communist party known as the POUM – the Marxist Unification Workers’ Party. The party was often labelled ‘Trotskyite’, as its leader, Andrés Nin, had been Trotsky’s assistant some years earlier. The two men had now split, though, and the POUM was essentially an independent party on the left, with few arms at its disposal and its support largely limited to Catalonia.
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