Ghosts of Spain (7 page)

Felipe Grande Nieto, a gentle old man in his late eighties, had much clearer memories. We talked to him in the back room of a tiny three-room flat. To get to the kitchen-cum-sitting room, we
had to walk through the bedroom, where his frail stick of a wife lay shivering with cold. Her small body was stretched out and her arms clasped together on her chest like some medieval figure on top of a cathedral tomb. She moaned softly from time to time, giving every impression of preparing for the other world.

Felipe’s father had been relatively well off and had owned a truck. He was, however, a Republican. The Nationalists took the truck away and his family had lived in relative poverty ever since. Felipe apologised as he talked, because, out of his already rheumy blue eyes, tears began to flow. He found two stories especially hard to tell. One was of a man, known as
el Ebanistero
, taken off at night to be shot with five others. ‘But, for some reason, he did not die that night. When they sent a man to bury them, he found
el
Ebanistero
still alive. “Kill me with the spade, I don’t want to be left alive,” he begged. So two
guardias
came and finished him off. They were buried down by the river,’ he said, the tears running down his cheeks. The other was the story of a man shot as he fled the attacking Moors. His corpse was discovered by a dog. The
animal
appeared at its master’s door with half a human limb in his mouth. ‘He killed that dog immediately. It had tasted human flesh,’ Felipe said, the tears still flowing.

After hearing the bloodcurdling tales of Falangist violence and humiliation, the idea of meeting Frying Pan – the alleged Falangist killer – was distinctly chilling. I imagined a hard, dry old man, still twisted by hatred or flushed with brutal pride. Or, just possibly, he would be crippled by guilt, ashamed at where the
brutality
of the time had pushed him and nervously awaiting the final judgement.

I found Frying Pan in the old people’s day centre on the
palmlined
Avenida de Palmeras. The busty, middle-aged matron, in her blue cardigan, was more than happy to see me. Before
introducing
us, she made it quite clear which side of the historical divide she sat on. ‘This man was one of the ones who killed for cash,’ she whispered, surveying a large, open room with tables full of white-haired, fragile bingo players. ‘They are all right-wingers in here. There are a lot of bastards loose.’

The matron told me that Frying Pan had got into a bit of
trouble
recently when another old-age pensioner had thrown his past in his face, spitting at him: ‘You should have joined the Civil Guard, given as how you enjoyed pulling the trigger so much.’

She dived in amongst the bingo tables to get Frying Pan. The man who stood up, however, did not fit my image of a
blood-thirsty
assassin.

Frying Pan was an eighty-six-year-old peasant on his last legs. He hobbled over on two crutches, a bulky, white plastic shopping bag tied to his belt, bouncing awkwardly against his side. The shopping bag held his anorak. Any drama that the meeting might have had was taken away by the matron, who was bobbing around behind his back, blowing imaginary smoke from the end of two imaginary pistols.

Once he realised what was up, Frying Pan did not feel much like talking. He admitted being part of the Falange, but denied having anything to do with the killings. His uncle, he explained, had been ‘a man of the right’ as well as being the head of the
family
. ‘My mother was a widow and I had four sisters to look after. I was seventeen years old and spent my time working on the fields in my uncle’s
finca
. It was my uncle who put my name down for the Falange,’ he said. All the killings, he said, had been carried out while he was away at the front in Robledo de Chavela. By the time he came home in 1938, he said, all that was over and done with. And, with that, he excused himself and shuffled off.

José Antonio Landera had better luck at finding killers. A tall, gentle, quietly spoken thirty-one-year-old, José Antonio comes from Fabero, one of the mining
pueblos
of northern León. Fabero lies in El Bierzo, where the plain of Old Castile comes to an abrupt end as it hits the Montes de León and the mountains and steep valleys of the Cordillera Cantábrica. The mountain chain’s most spectacular peaks, the Picos de Europa, rear up nearby, ending up just short of the luxuriously green coast of Asturias. The people of El Bierzo are rugged hill-folk or miners, more like their neighbours across the mountains in Asturias and Galicia than their fellow Castilians of the plains.

We met on a humid summer’s day in the Atlantic port city of Gijón, where José Antonio was stationed as a member of the Civil Guard. Just as Emilio Silva had done a few miles away in
Priaranza
, José Antonio had managed to find and dig up a relative
assassinated
by the Falange. The victim was his great-uncle
Periquete
, a left-wing miners’ leader from Fabero for whom José Antonio had developed an almost filial devotion. Despite resistance from his family, who feared local reactions, and pressure from local
right-wing
mayors and the families of two local doctors – both
prominent
Falangists who had a hand in the killing – he has pieced together his great-uncle’s last week of life.

When José Antonio started his inquiries, two of the killers were still alive. He rang one of them at the old people’s home, run by nuns, where he was living. The man, Arturo Sésamo, known as Arturón or ‘Big Arthur’, was almost deaf but said José Antonio could come round. Impressed by José Antonio’s Civil Guard card, and unaware that he was
Periquete’
s great-nephew, he told the story in great detail. He even explained how the great-uncle had, at first, survived being shot. He had eventually been beaten to death by the gang of killers after he disturbed their lunch by
sitting
up and insulting them when he was meant to be dead.

Eventually, José Antonio could take no more. So he got up and left. ‘It was too much for me. I had been thinking about his death for a long time. It was something I felt about strongly,’ the gentle policeman, a man too young to remember Franco, explained.

Arturón’s reaction was to shout after him, in a hopeful tone of voice: ‘So, are they reforming the Falange, then. Are we going to kill some
rojos
?’ Three days later, when José Antonio rang back, the nuns told him that Arturón, who was in his nineties, had died of a heart attack

Arturón showed little sign of remorse. Amongst the band of people who have, in the past few years, started the work of finding and digging up the victims of the Falangist
paseos
, stories abound – many undoubtedly apocryphal – of other old Falangists with blood on their hands who are still proud of their work. In
Val-ladolid
, there is a retired butcher who reputedly killed people
with a
descabello
, the dagger used to finish off fighting bulls who take too long to die in the bull-ring. In a village near Miranda del Ebro there is said to be an old man who used to tie his victims to the front of a car and parade them around town. He still,
apparently
, claims that he did his country a service by shooting so many
rojos
.

The killers, then, are still out there. They are in their late
eighties
and nineties now, old men with blood on their hands – but whose time is past. Not one has ever been tried for murdering a
rojo
. The same cannot be said of those on the left who also butchered civilians.

It is true that the far left has latched onto the Civil War, the Republic and the cause of what has become known as the ‘
recovery
of historical memory’. A movement that grew spontaneously has split in two. Spain’s communists have taken control of part of it. Keen young radicals will now march with an anti-globalisation banner in one hand and a purple, red and yellow Republican flag in the other. But many, like Emilio Silva and José Antonio Landera, simply see it as an opportunity to right the wrongs suffered by the families of the victims. It is, above all, a chance to put the record straight. They tried, at least initially, to avoid party politics and were annoyed when left-wing parties got involved. Revenge is not in their vocabulary. The justice they seek is historical. There has, therefore, been no pressure to bring the old mass murderers to trial, or, so far, to expose them to public reprobation. That would be pushing the non-aggression pact on which Spain’s modern democracy is founded too far. What they demand is the truth, and the right to bury the dead with decency – two rights that were accorded to the victims of the winning side long ago.

Nearly seven decades after the beginning of the war, the truth they seek has only just begun to emerge. Historians are
investigating
, old people are talking, local groups are taking the matter into their own hands and, with mechanical diggers and shovels,
digging
up the past. Spain will probably not be fully ready to
confront
its most bloody episode, however, until all those involved are dead.

Even then Spaniards will be left arguing about what that war brought them. For if the war itself was twentieth-century Spain’s most important event, General Francisco Franco,
el Generalísimo
, was its key figure. If Spaniards had tried to keep the memory of the Civil War at bay what, I wondered, had they done with the man who ruled their lives for almost four decades afterwards. The place to find that out, I decided, was in a valley in the countryside outside Madrid – the Valley of the Fallen.

The
Valle de los Caídos
is a delightful, shallow dip in the folds of the Sierra de Guadarrama. Overlooked by dramatic outcrops of bare granite, it is populated mainly by pines but punctuated by a scattering of oak, ilex and poplar. Driving up the valley road on a wet, windy November afternoon, I was struck by how peaceful this most controversial of places really was. Dog roses and wild thyme lined the road. Signs warned me to drive slowly and be careful not to run over the wild boar, squirrels or other wildlife that inhabit this oasis of protected parkland. The greedy, growing octopus that is greater Madrid felt far away, though its tentacles of housing and office blocks stretch ever closer.

Juanjo, my barber, used to come here for picnics when he was a boy, back in the 1960s and 1970s. His family would look for wild mushrooms under the fallen pine needles. ‘It is a beautiful spot,' he explained. ‘Even if you don't like what it stands for.' And
therein
lies a problem. For Juanjo was one of the few people I had heard speak well of the Valley of the Fallen. Few of my Madrid friends had ever been here, to one of the most bucolic, verdant spots within striking distance of a city that spends half the year marooned in the middle of a burnt, parched flatland. On later visits I occasionally invited someone to accompany me. ‘
¡Ni muerto
!' – ‘Not even when I am dead' – was a typical, and unconsciously ironic, reply. Not even offering to pay the entrance fee charged by Patrimonio Nacional, the state body that owns this and a dozen parks, palaces and monasteries around the country, would
persuade
them to go.

The reason for this lies at the end of the five-kilometre road that swings up the valley, through the well-tended pines and across a pair of elegant, stone bridges. For here stands the largest,
and most recent, piece of fascist religious monumental
architecture
to have been erected in western Europe. A huge, blue-grey granite cross soars 150 metres into the sky. The base is planted in the Risco de la Nava, an already imposing outcrop of lichen-clad, brownish rocks, dotted with spindly, buckled-over, wind-tortured trees. Down below, a series of vast, austere, arched galleries have been built against the rock. They overlook a wide, Spartan,
featureless
esplanade. Between the galleries sit two, relatively small, bronze doors.

Stepping through the doors was an Alice in Wonderland
experience
. An entirely different world lay on the other side. I had swapped the rugged, natural beauty of the sierra for the damp, echoing chamber of what must be the world's biggest
underground
Christian basilica. It tunnels its way through the rock for 260 cold, still metres. An interior dome, lined in gold mosaic, has been hollowed out to a height of twenty-two metres above the granite and black marble floor. The troglodyte basilica – granted the latter status by Pope John XXIII in 1960, the year after the nineteen-year project was finished – is built to the dimensions of the ego of its creator, General Franco. It is, its admirers point out, longer than St Peter's in the Vatican, and almost as high.
Nominally
, and according to the literature published by Patrimonio Nacional, it is a monument to all the dead of the Civil War.
Damiana
González, mayoress of Poyales del Hoyo, had insisted to me that it remained exactly that – a symbol of forgiveness and peace between the two, bitterly opposed, Spains of yesteryear. The
bodies
of some 40,000 dead were brought here. I could, however, find only two names on the tombstones inside. One was that of the Falange founder José Antonio Primo de Rivera, taken from his Alicante prison cell and shot by the Republicans during the war. The owner of the other one, General Franco, reserved his spot well before his death. ‘When my turn comes, put me here,' he told the architect, pointing to the floor behind the altar.

I had come here to witness one of the most remarkable
ceremonies
to be regularly held in a Christian place of worship. Here, on the closest Saturday to after the 20 November anniversary of
Franco's death, the so-called
nostálgicos
– the few who still feel nostalgia for the Caudillo – gather to pay him homage. I had decided to look for what remained of the most important man in twentieth-century Spain. I should, I had decided, start here. Friends found my interest distasteful, even morbid. Why would I want to go? It would be full of
fachas
, as they call their
home-grown
brand of ultra-rightists and fascists, or
casposos
, literally the dandruff-ridden, they said. I might as well have been consorting with the living dead. But I wanted to see this unique conjunction of Roman Catholic and fascist ceremonial for myself.

The first surprise was that, on this day, the state waives the fee it normally charges drivers at the entrance gate. Authorities
justified
this because a religious service was being held. The car park was full to overflowing, even on a rain-drenched, stormy day. ‘Silence in this sacred place,' ordered a sign at the basilica entrance. But this was a day of exceptions. Nobody was going to enforce the rule. The basilica was awash with the banners and flags of the Falange and other historic, far-right organisations. Young boys dressed in white cassocks sat primly in the choir stalls. Benedictine monks, also dressed in white, were led by the Abbot in his dazzling mitre.

When I arrived, holy communion was already being offered to, and received by, many of the 1,000-plus people who had come here to pay tribute to the Caudillo. Some were blue-shirted Falangists or young skinheads, but most were not. Place them anywhere else, indeed, and it would have been almost impossible to tell them apart from any other group of Spaniards. There was, perhaps, a higher than usual density of hair oil and Barbour-style jackets – trademarks of the conservative upper-class Spanish youth, the
pijo
– on display amongst the younger men. And there were more pastel-coloured lambswool jumpers and Hermes or Burberry scarves, trademarks of his partner, the
pija
, than the average group of Spaniards might display. But there were also the full range of classes and ages. Small children ran around
excitedly
, wearing Franco-era Spanish flags decorated with sinister black eagles as if they were Batman capes.

The star of the show, however, was Franco's daughter Carmen, the Duquesa de Franco – a woman once discovered, several years after her father's death, trying to take gold coins out of the country. When the religious service ended, half of the congregation headed for the hole in the rock that would let them out onto the vast, windswept esplanade. The other half, however, crowded forward to where the Duquesa could be found. Banners were held aloft, some adorned with the Cross of St James, known as ‘
Matamoros
', the ‘Moorslayer'. Others carried the Falange's yoke and arrows. Those on the fringes of the crowd clambered up the steps of the choir stalls, craning necks to get a view of the lump of granite in the floor behind the altar that is Franco's tomb. In a question of minutes, the transformation of this Christian temple from place of worship to political parade ground was absolute. Arms were thrown out and held stiffly in place. ‘
¡Viva Franco!
' came the shouts, followed by ‘
¡España una, grande y libre!
' (‘Spain, one, great and free'). The crowd continued on through the panoply of old Francoist chants. There was a bellowed rendition of the Falange's ‘Cara al Sol' anthem, promising that death for the cause will be rewarded by the return of
banderas victoriosas
, the flags of victory.

After a few minutes of this, the Duquesa moved slowly along the tunnel followed by a small court of elderly, diminutive men. Anxious to see her close up, I found myself swept along just a pace behind her. ‘Franco! Franco! Franco!' the clutch of excited,
red-faced
men beside her shouted, their arms raised. Suddenly, as we neared the exit, I found myself accompanying her through a
tunnel
of raised arms and shouting, chanting voices. The echoes rolled back off the underground walls, multiplying the voices. For a moment, the awe and exhilaration of fascist ceremonialism ran through me. Franco's Spanish brand of fascism differed from those espoused by Hitler or Mussolini and had plenty of time to evolve into something else. His, and the Falange's, sense of
ceremony
was relatively limited but it came directly from the same school. I felt as though I had time-warped my way back into a black-and-white newsreel to the era of the goose-step, the mass rally and the cult of personality.

I slipped sideways through the raised arms and was just as quickly returned to reality. In fact, there were only a couple of hundred people chanting here. The Duquesa and her little party walked out onto the vast, dark esplanade – distant lightning
flashes
adding suitable drama to the scenario. They diminished so quickly in size that, within a minute, they looked like a small clutch of elderly pensioners lost in a storm. I wanted to rush over and offer an umbrella, or an arm to hold, in case they slipped on the sheets of water racing across the flagstones or were blown off their feet by the gale. But two minders with Francoist armbands were in attendance. A chauffeur-driven, plum-coloured Rolls-Royce, I was told, waited for them somewhere in the driving rain. The
nostálgicos
, meanwhile, gathered for a bit more singing under the arches outside the basilica. A handful of German skinheads looked on. Then the
nostálgicos
headed for the car park, drove down the road and disappeared out of sight for another year.

That, bar a few small demonstrations and even smaller political meetings, is all that Francisco Franco,
Caudillo de Dios y de la Patria
, gets thirty years after his peaceful, natural death.

The contrast between the Franco regime's view of its own
historical
import and the way it is treated today could not be greater. The Valley, after all, is an imposing, arrogant reminder of victory, of the Caudillo's visceral sense of the right of conquest. Grey, grim and intimidating, it is designed to inspire awe, respect and obedience. And that – or at least the first part of it – it still achieves. On those crystal-clear days that the thin air of Madrid, Europe's highest major capital, is famous for producing, it can be seen, thirty miles away (fifty kilometres), from the city itself. It is an uncomfortable, and largely unwanted, reminder that Franco may be dead, but his spirit is still out there somewhere.

Just a few miles along the Sierra de Guadarrama, at El
Escorial
, lies another cold, vast and imposing construction. The royal monastery of El Escorial was built in the sixteenth century by Philip II. V. S. Pritchett called Philip's favourite building ‘the oppressive monument of the first totalitarian state in Europe' and the ‘mausoleum of Spanish power'. From here the austere
and suspicious monarch tried to administer the myriad lands received from his father, the Emperor Charles V. These, with the addition of his own aquisitions, stretched from Holland and southern Italy to North Africa, Latin America and the Philippines. His was the original empire on which the sun never set. That empire, however, did not last. Its gradual decline from the end of the sixteenth century would continue until the days of Franco's own childhood with the disastrous loss, in 1898, of Cuba and the Philippines. To Franco, however, its prison-like walls and
monolithic
, dull exterior must have seemed the very expression of Castilian military virility and religious might. His own crusade would, he thought, re-establish some of that glorious past. The Valley, too, he decreed, must have ‘the grandeur of the
monuments
of old, which defy time and forgetfulness'.

Franco's court of adulators sometimes compared him to Philip, the counter-reformation zealot and man who sent the Spanish Armada to its stormy, watery grave in the Atlantic. Philip was not his only company. El Cid, Charlemagne, Napoleon, Alexander the Great and the Archangel Gabriel – to mention a few – were all named as the Caudillo's historic equals. Visitors looking for a simplistic
psychological
explanation for the Valley may be tempted to speculate about small men and large objects. But Franco knew that the bigger and more impressive the monument, the longer his name would last. The Valley was his great passion. It was the not-so-secret other love of a man said to have observed, otherwise, rigorous sexual fidelity. Everything here is built to impress. From the cross and the basilica to the bleak esplanade and a similarly regimented square behind the Risco – home to a Benedectine monastery, a choir school and a large guest house – all here is large and imposing. The scale and drama of the Valley of the Fallen guarantee the name of
Francisco
Franco will survive for centuries. It was, from the Caudillo's point of view, a good decision. For Spaniards have, otherwise, done all they can to wipe out his imprint.

In physical terms, the Valley of the Fallen is virtually all that remains of Franco. It is an amazing disappearing act, further
evidence
of the power of forgetting in Spain. For Franco, or, more
precisely, Francoism, has been condemned to the ignominy of silent disdain. ‘By tacit national consent, the regime was relegated to oblivion,' says Franco's best-known biographer, Paul Preston.

Historians cannot be blamed for this. Dozens of biographies and memoirs of those who knew him have been written. Ever since his death, however, the Franco name has become, in the English sense, an F-word. To be called a Francoist or a
facha
is, almost without exception, an insult. To admit in public to the slightest grain of respect or admiration for Franco is to be a
political
outcast. This is despite, or perhaps because of, the attempts of a handful of Franco diehards who still see him in terms of the hagiography of his own times. One Benedictine, while I was writing this book, even suggested he should be a candidate for beatification. There can be no real debate about Franco in Spain. He is either black or white, bad or good. There is no grey area in between.