Guerra

by Jason Webster

  19

  Badajoz

  The air was so hot and dry it felt as though an electric charge had wrapped itself round my arms and legs like a creeping vine, slowing me and dragging me down as I trod the baking, broken pavements, past abandoned palaces and piles of rubble. A small, dark-eyed dog lay on its side in a shaded corner, its fur stiff and dusty, belly rising and falling in quick rhythm as it tried to cool itself. Like the dog, I tried to stay in the shaded parts of the street, hugging the sides of buildings as though seeking shelter from a rain storm, but the bricks and cement of the walls pushed their heat back in my face, almost forcing me into the deathly crossfire of the sun’s rays. Common sense told me to fall into a bar or hotel and find sanctuary in an air-conditioned world, but there were things I wanted to see before my meeting with Manolo. Most other people, I felt, had already left town.

  I heard Portuguese voices singing from a building site as I walked down from the citadel towards the bullring, their mournful cadences more suited to the sadness of the city, with its empty streets and scent of decay, than those of the Spanish to whom it belonged. Badajoz was pressed against the border, down in the southwest of the country, but it seemed a forgotten place, a ghost town in the making. The ancient Alcazaba, like the rest of the old quarter, was little more than an abandoned dump. It housed a museum and a library, but around these buildings all was neglect: weeds a metre high had taken root everywhere, broken bottles scattered the ground. The only sign of human care came from an old chapel set in the defensive walls that had been occupied by a gypsy family, their clothes hanging out to dry from rusting iron railings. It was a Spain that wouldn’t have been unfamiliar to George Borrow or Richard Ford.

  Outside the walls, nestling beneath them for protection, the city extended downwards, streets following the contours of the hill like river beds. Yet here every third or fourth house, usually a wreck, was for sale or abandoned. Blood-red paint which had once been daubed on the walls peeled in the sun, piles of broken brick and plaster had been shovelled into street corners, posters hung in faded shreds from billboards. I caught sight of a little baroque church squeezed in among all the decay, its walls scarred with black smears, and next to it an old men’s bar with cracked wooden windows, through which I could see leathery sunburnt faces sipping scratched tumblers of red wine.

  It could have been an attractive place, with its abandoned nineteenth-century colonial-style houses and palacios. These had once been proud buildings, yet now they had fallen into squalor. I continued walking through the streets. A man with his shirt open to the navel and thick grey chest hair stepped out from a nearby doorway with a whisky and ice in his hand, scratching his unshaven, glistening cheek as he crossed the road to a bar on the other side. Two drug addicts, all thin thighs and dirt-black clothes, feigned a swipe at me as they walked past. I ducked and they collapsed into hysterical laughter.

  I went into the town hall to look for some information about the city, but I could find no one inside. Like the Marie Celeste, everyone appeared to have mysteriously jumped ship. I walked on, down towards the bullring. Something called the Athenaeum Club announced itself from the entrance of a semiabandoned modern brick structure; large dry weeds poked out of the walls on the third floor.

  Finally, my head spinning like a top, I reached the bottom of the hill and the site of the bullring. I had seen photographs of this notorious place and expected it, like the rest of the old town, to be a crumbling, weed-infested building, ignored and left to rot by a city that seemed to echo with the horror that had taken place within its walls years before. Yet here, at the epicentre of the city’s woe, the structure which lay at the very heart of its dark secret, I found the first sign of change. The bullring was no longer there. In its place workmen were busy building a new, white, bullring-shaped structure which, according to a large announcement by the entrance gates, would eventually be a conference centre. Where once men had been slaughtered, now they would come to talk.

  Badajoz had been at the centre of events in the Civil War in mid-August 1936, barely a month after the fighting had begun. After the bulk of Franco’s Army of Africa had successfully crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to the Spanish mainland, a column began working its way quickly up the western side of the country, through the region of Extremadura, leaving a bloody trail in its wake. It advanced over 120 kilometres in just four days, killing any leftists and unionists in its path. Others with no involvement in politics, let alone with the Popular Front, were also murdered as the soldiers joked about carrying out ‘agrarian reform’.

  In the great push northwards towards Madrid, however, Badajoz, pressed against the Portuguese border in the southwest, got left behind. Stalling the advance, Franco’s troops, headed by Colonel Yagüe of the Legión, swung westwards and pushed down on this pocket of resistance. At dawn on 14 August they launched their attack. The defenders were mostly badly armed militiamen, but with a handful of well-placed machine-guns on the town’s ramparts they were able to inflict serious casualties on the legionaries. By midday one formation of Nationalists had entered the town and was fighting its way into the centre. Yagüe, however, was unaware of this and launched an attack on Republican positions at the Puerta Trinidad. Scores of his men fell, including Lieutenant Eduardo Artigas, who was ‘gloriously blinded by a bullet through the eyes’.24 By the time they broke through the defensive lines only a captain, a corporal and fourteen legionaries from the original assault force survived.

  The city fell shortly afterwards, but the Legión had suffered its heaviest casualties of the conflict thus far – forty-four dead and several hundred wounded. Its revenge was cruel and bloody.

  ‘No human force was able to contain the blind passion of the fighting legionary, his mind and reason all gone at the loss of his comrades,’ wrote one witness.25 The defenders were killed with anything to hand – grenades, bayonets, knives and guns. The last Republicans were shot on the altar of the cathedral. Piles of corpses were scattered around the city, while the streets ran red with blood.

  Moroccan soldiers from the Regulares cut the testicles off their male victims for trophies and looted people’s homes, often stealing from the houses of Nationalist sympathizers as well as Republicans. This was later explained away as a ‘war tax’ for their liberation. Booty taken in this manner was sent back to the soldiers’ families in Morocco as a way of encouraging more men to enlist. The legionaries, on the other hand, didn’t bother with the trinkets picked up by the Regulares, simply smashing out any gold teeth found in the mouths of their victims.

  In the immediate aftermath of the battle, thousands of people were rounded up and herded into the bullring. Anyone with a bruise or a mark on his shoulder – a sign he had been firing a rifle – was taken in, as were all known Republican sympathizers and any unfortunates in the way. Teachers, lawyers, even a photographer, were all imprisoned. For the next few weeks they were systematically shot in batches. Afterwards their bodies were taken to the cemetery outside the city walls where they were doused in petrol, burned and buried in mass graves. Some were shot outside the cemetery itself.

  Other massacres carried out by Franco’s troops had occurred in relative obscurity. The killings at Badajoz, however, were read about all over the world, thanks to the arrival shortly after the city’s fall of foreign journalists. ‘SLAUGHTER AFTER CAPTURE OF BADAJOZ’ ran the headline in the Manchester Guardian over a piece suggesting as many as two thousand had been killed – mostly by ‘excited’ Moroccan troops, or ‘natives’, as they then called them. A few days later, when interviewed by an American journalist, Colonel Yagüe seemed to suggest that double that number had been shot.

  ‘Do you think I was going to take four thousand Red prisoners while my column carried on running against the clock?’ he said when asked about the rumours and unconfirmed reports of mass bloodshed in the city. ‘Of course we shot them.’

  The news of the killings reached Madrid just as the first Nationalist aerial bombings of the city were be
ginning. There people reacted angrily, and scores of political prisoners held in the Modelo jail were taken out and shot by the militias in reprisal. The Republican government appeared helpless to prevent a massacre taking place under its very nose.

  I was in Badajoz to meet a man who had been directly touched by the massacre in the city: Manolo’s father and grandfather had both been murdered in one of the darkest chapters of the Civil War. Manolo represented much of where Spain was and where it wanted to go, but he was formed by events which took place almost seventy years earlier, when he was still growing in his mother’s womb.

  We met at a café on the top floor of a department store, a windowless cocoon of cool air and bland music which seemed like a buffer against the world and memories outside. Manolo was a bald, elderly man with large ears and drooping, sad eyes. I had come to hear his account of the massacre in the bullring at Badajoz, an event which still divided the country – according to some, it had never taken place at all.

  I had spent a few more days in Madrid, recovering from the virus that had laid me low, gradually regaining my strength with the help of Kiki’s cooking and good humour. With time, though, I had felt I should carry on – I had a growing sense that somehow, having reached Madrid, I had turned a corner. I was seeing dimensions of Spain I had previously closed my eyes to, and wanted to continue my exploration.

  Kiki had told me about a new organization that was trying to revive Spain’s memory of what had happened in the Civil War. The Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica was sponsoring digs around the country, at sites where Republicans had been shot and buried in unmarked graves. They said the bodies of over thirty thousand Spaniards were still lying in ditches around the country, places like the site Begoña had shown me. In a country like Spain, where the rites of death are so important, for decades thousands of families had been denied the chance to give their relatives a decent burial. Now at last it seemed that was beginning to change.

  The organization was also playing an important role in raising awareness of what had gone on under the Franco regime. When the dictator had died, Spanish democracy was built on an agreement not to rake over the past, almost to pretend that nothing had happened – the so-called pacto de olvido, the ‘pact of forgetting’, that Miguel in Granada had mentioned. Now, though, as the last survivors of the Civil War were dying off, an effort was being made to remember events before it was too late. ‘Recovering historical memory’ was their watchword. Many of those involved were young people wanting to know what had happened, say, to a murdered grandfather the family had always talked of in hushed tones. Once Franco was in power, the Civil Guard police force acted with impunity in much of the country, a repressive law unto themselves. It didn’t do to speak too loudly about the horrors of the past.

  There were, however, a number involved in the organization who had been touched directly by the violence of the war. One of them was Manolo Martínez, the head of the local committee of the association in Badajoz.

  Manolo spoke softly, his delicate pale hands lifting to touch his face as he told me his story. He was unusually mild-mannered and undogmatic. Spanish men often prefer to pontificate rather than communicate, handing down unquestionable gospel truth. But Manolo was different and the contrast was striking. He asked politely for a cup of coffee from the sulky teenage waitress and began to talk about his life.

  ‘My father was twenty-six when he was shot,’ he said. ‘He was a socialist, linked to the town council. They picked him up and took him to the bullring, along with so many others.’

  Behind him, up at the bar, the waitress was staring into space, twirling her hair around her finger while she bit the nail down on her thumb.

  ‘They took my grandfather too,’ he added. A neighbour, he explained, had told the Nationalist soldiers who had just conquered the city that he was ‘living in sin’. His grandfather had been separated from his grandmother for some time by then, and had had children by another woman. The soldiers went round and arrested him.

  Under the Republic, separation and divorce had been made legal. Many who had taken advantage of the new laws found themselves caught out when Franco took over, and soon discovered their new arrangements were not recognized by his authoritarian Catholic state. This was the first time I had heard of someone being shot for it, though.

  ‘My mother was pregnant with me at the time,’ Manolo continued. ‘My father and I never knew each other.’

  We fell silent for a moment. He sipped his coffee. In the background ambient music hummed above the low clatter of shop assistants on their afternoon shift. I was struck by the lack of self-pity in his voice. He was almost seventy, and had had an entire life to think about all this, but his simple, matter-of-fact delivery seemed at odds with the drama of what he was telling me. Something about the man both solicited and rejected sympathy.

  ‘Our family had a house near the Puerta Trinidad, where much of the fighting to break into the city took place,’ he continued. ‘When the troops arrived my mother moved with the family to a relative’s house near the train station. After breaching the defences, the Nationalist soldiers took over our house and turned it into a makeshift hospital. The Moors stole my mother’s trousseau – all the sheets and curtains, that kind of thing – and then sold them to the neighbours for cash. When my mother finally got back home she had to buy it all back.’

  There was another pause as he swallowed. Behind his glasses it was hard to read his expression. The sadness in his eyes seemed constant, as though fixed by the events he was describing; but, magnified by the distortion of his lenses, there seemed to flicker a whole range of responses and emotions within him: a steady, self-assured sparkle. I asked him if he knew where his father had been killed.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Either at the bullring or at the cemetery. They used to line them up against the wall by the main gates. My grandfather, though, was definitely shot at the bullring.’

  His father’s younger brother, he explained, was just a child at the time, but had been captured by the Nationalists and interned in the bullring with the thousands of other prisoners. One day he heard his father’s name being called out from a list and then a few minutes later the stuttering of machine-gun fire as he was shot. Later the boy managed to escape from the bullring and survive.

  ‘They were holding children there?’ I asked incredulously.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘And women too.’

  A woman in Badajoz had told him about her experiences: her father had been a socialist councillor and when the city fell he went to ground. As the Nationalists couldn’t find him they arrested his wife and her son – the woman’s mother and brother. She was just a girl at the time and went down to the bullring to see if her mother and brother were there. The guard opened the gate, saying, ‘We’ve got loads here – have a look.’ And she saw her mother and brother tied together. Later they were taken to the cemetery where they were shot embracing each other.

  Manolo related these anecdotes with a certain flatness in his voice, as if it mattered little to him whether or not I was absorbing this information. It struck me that perhaps the only way he could describe these events was in this slightly dry, nonemotional way. To try to dramatize them or bring them alive might strike the wrong note.

  The waitress came and brought more coffee, the stud in her exposed belly button glinting under the harsh department-store lights. I wondered how much she knew of what Manolo was telling me, if she cared about the bestial acts that had taken place only yards up the road from where we sat. A whole generation had been brought up not knowing anything about their recent past except the official textbook version about Franco’s campaign to save the country from the Reds. This had been taught in schools for many years after the Generalísimo’s death.

  I asked Manolo about his childhood, about growing up without a father.

  ‘I was always surrounded by mourning women,’ he said. ‘My mother, my grandmother, various aunts, all mourning li
ke a wailing chorus in a Greek tragedy. All of them dressed in black.’

  His eyes dropped for a moment.

  ‘It was very hard adapting to the wider world when I was older,’ he said without looking up. ‘The world is maledominated, machista, and I had no idea how to move in that environment. All my life I’d been with women. I had no male role models, no examples to follow. It took me a long time to adjust when I myself became a man.’

  I asked if other children his age had gone through similar experiences.

  He nodded. ‘Some far worse. Plenty of women here were widowed and had to find a way of staying alive. They used to cross the border into Portugal to buy wheat and bread and other things that weren’t available in the city after the war, then sell them to earn money. To get by the border guards they often had to sleep with the men on duty to pass with their goods.’

  From the counter across the shop floor a woman wearing a yellow silk summer dress was complaining to a sales assistant about something she’d bought. She wanted her money back and was making sure everyone within a thirty-yard radius could hear her. Customers in the café fell silent as the woman’s voice rose to a high-pitched whine. A long-suffering employee looked on passively, trying unsuccessfully not to betray with his face the thoughts that were passing through his mind.