Ghosts of Spain (4 page)

As the battle of the bodies began, the splits became more apparent. For decades the victims’ families and their killers had lived cheek-by-jowl. The reburials brought an end to the silence which here, as in much of the rest of Spain, had kept the Civil War out of people’s conversations, if not their minds. And, with that, the embers of ancient loathing had begun to glow again.

This was something that, according to the accepted mores of Spain’s transition to democracy, was not supposed to happen. At the beginning of the twenty-first century Spain was ruled by the People’s Party. It was the first openly right-wing party to win power through the ballot box since November 1933. Spain, it was
claimed, had put its self-destructive past and reputation for bloody squabbling behind it. It was proud of its normality. ‘
España va bien
’, ‘Spain is going well’, was the slogan of the
modern
, self-confident and fully democratic right-wing party of Prime Minister José María Aznar. Superficially, at least, Spain
fitted
the phrase. Material progress was visible in a country flooded with new buildings, new roads and new cars. Its young people, taller, stronger and healthier than the older generations, were walking proof of the country’s success. Spain had become Europe’s model country, a vigorous young democracy with a booming
economy
and, once more, ambitions to become, however modestly, a player on the world stage.

The mores of this youthful democracy dictated that the bloody, vicious past had been overcome. Nobody was supposed to meddle with it, let alone suggest there were important, unresolved
matters
capable of re-arousing – even on a small, bloodless local scale and amongst those old enough or close enough to the victims to remember – the destructive passions that drove Spain to civil war.

The Civil War was a series of dates in school textbooks. It was a few lines of information to be memorised at exam time and then forgotten. ‘In other countries that suffered similar regimes, such as Italy and Germany, young people have been educated about what fascism was, and they are conscious of the horrors imposed by those regimes. That is not the case in Spain,’ Vicenç Navarro, a former political exile turned professor of politics, explained.

Few people, however, seemed worried about that. Had not the left-wing and regional political parties and the trades unions, after much wrangling, been compensated for the property
confiscated
from them by Franco? Had not the elderly volunteers of the International Brigades been offered Spanish nationality? Had not the
niños de la guerra
– those Republican children evacuated in rusty old merchant ships to Russia at the beginning of the war – been welcomed back sixty years later to a shiny new old people’s home built for them on the outskirts of Madrid? Were these not the proper symbols of how Spain had achieved, in the words of psychologists, ‘closure’ on the trauma of its past?

For some people, the digging up of Civil War victims – such as the three women from Poyales del Hoyo – was a kind of treason. It was a breaking of the pact of forgetting – and silence – that had kept the lid tightly screwed down on the past. That silence had been a cornerstone of the swift, dramatic and successful
transition
to democracy of which Spaniards were, justly, so proud.

What was clear in Poyales del Hoyo, however, was that
reconciliation
between the victims of that war had been left out of the equation. The families of those on the losing side were, even now, meant to suffer in silence. They were meant to leave their dead scattered in roadside ditches and, so, play their part in the agreed plan of constructing Spain’s future by forgetting their own families’ past. In this context the people in Poyales del Hoyo were rebels, breaking Spain’s own, unwritten rules about what could or could not be done with its history.

Mariano found a way past the town hall’s obstacles. He had
discovered
that the Poyales del Hoyo gravedigger was a fellow
left-winger
. The night before the burials, the gravedigger had sworn that, if necessary, he would dig up the patch of ground dedicated to
los caídos por Dios y por España
, those who fell for God and Spain. That was the name given to those who died fighting for Franco’s Nationalist forces during the Civil War. Mariano liked that idea.

In the end, a small patch of earth was found in the tight,
white-washed
, rectangular graveyard that lay down the hill, beyond the open side of the square. All Saints Day is an important public
holiday
in Spain. Florists do their best business of the year, selling ten times as many flowers as normal. People flock to cemeteries to honour dead parents, grandparents or other family members. It seemed as though the graveyard at Poyales del Hoyo, with its three or four tiers of niches on each wall, had been specially brightened up with chrysanthemums, carnations and gladioli for the event.

In a ceremony accompanied by poetry and tears, three small, brown caskets were buried side by side. Heliodora, the infant daughter whom Valeriana had handed to a neighbour in the square before climbing into the truck, was there. She was now a woman
in her sixties, with neat, short-cut silver hair. She read a simple, self-composed poem over the grave while Obdulia – a squat, olive-faced, healthy-looking eighty-year-old – looked on.

Previously, with the church bells ringing, the coffins had been carried around the village’s narrow streets. It was a symbolic act – the first time the losers of a war that had ended more than six decades earlier had paraded their dead in Poyales del Hoyo.

We gathered in the square afterwards. There, Ezekiel Lorente, grandson of Virtudes and now a Socialist village councillor, puffed his chest out and held his head high as a local right-winger walked past. ‘He knows what I am thinking. This is our moment,’ he told me.

Stories began to emerge of what life had been like in Poyales del Hoyo under the boot of Ángel Vadillo. A teary-eyed woman, Francisca Sánchez, appeared in the square with a list of names, hurriedly scribbled down on a piece of scrap paper, of those in the village who were killed. Her own father, Evaristo, was one of them. Another man, ‘
El Ratón
’ or ‘the mouse’, she claimed, had his eyes gouged out. In the Tiétar Valley – and elsewhere in rural Spain – many people, entire families, are known by their
motes,
their nicknames. There was the usual struggle to remember
people’s
real names, but soon the piece of paper was being turned over as the list headed past the two dozen.

As people drifted off, a convoy of cars headed for Candeleda for a last look at the former grave. Obdulia waited for us in the Capra Hispánica, the main bar on Candeleda’s Plaza del Castillo.

Obdulia was carrying an old, browned photograph of Pilar. It must have been taken when her mother was in her thirties. Like many elderly women still found in
pueblos
around Spain, Pilar was already in that state of semi-permanent mourning that
afflicts those whose relations are forever dying. A black shawl has been wrapped tightly across her chest and tucked into a long black skirt. She is, of course, much younger than her daughter is now. But they share the same high, rounded cheekbones, dark complexion and strong mouth. In fact, there is something severe about Pilar as she sits sideways on a wooden chair, one hand holding the back, her hair parted in a razor-sharp line down the middle and staring directly into the lens. Perhaps it is the responsibility of being able to read, or the knowledge that comes from it, that adds the
gravitas
to her face.

After the killing, Obdulia revealed, she stayed locked into her home. A few months later she left for the nearest large-sized town, Talavera de la Reina. Even there, however, the Falange tried to come for her. Franco’s repressive machine was in full and
bloodthirsty
cry in those first few years during and after the war.

But she married young and, by then, had a husband to save her. ‘I married a brave man who defended me,’ was how she put it. Obdulia’s husband had been, like General Franco himself, a ‘
novio de la muerte
’ (a ‘fiancé of death’), a member of the country’s most famously fearless fighting force, the Spanish Legion. He told them they would only get to Obdulia over his dead body. The small town Falangists, more used to marching unarmed people away at gun-point than fighting, did not test his word.

Obdulia did not set foot in Poyales del Hoyo again for over thirty years. By that time
Quinientos
Uno
was dead, having
succumbed
to a heart attack while in Arenas de San Pedro. (Francisca Sánchez still thinks this was an act of God, even though it
happened
in the 1960s. ‘His sins caught up with him.’)

She remembers, however, seeing another of the killers, El Manolo, ‘
que era malísimo
’, ‘who was very bad’, drinking in the bar. ‘I wanted to go and say something to him, but my sister wouldn’t let me,’ she said. ‘I didn’t lose my fear until Franco was dead.’

‘This thing has stayed in my mind all my life. I’ve never
forgotten
. I am reliving it now, as we stand here. All the killers were from the village. They came with the intention of killing, and then they went off to confess.’

She is struggling now, to turn that hatred and fear into
forgiveness
. Finally she fixes me with a watery stare. ‘I can pardon, but I cannot forget. We have to pardon them or it makes us just like them.’

The events of that day were, naturally, moving. But they also raised questions. In the pages of the
Diario de Ávila
– a newspaper normally devoted to recording the proceedings of local councils, the progress of public works and the endless routine of local fiestas – a former mayor of Candeleda had even accused Mariano of belonging to the armed Basque separatist group ETA. A defamation case was pending. For some people, at least, the reburials were a call once more to man – peacefully this time – the old ideological barricades.

Why had such an apparently innocent act provoked such rage and outrage? What other ghosts had been lying under the
Vuelta
del Esparragal
? I decided to ask Damiana González Vadillo, the absent mayoress of Poyales del Hoyo.

I went back to find Damiana the following Monday. But she was still away. The man who told me that, it turned out, was her deputy, Aurelio Jarillo. He spoke in the stilted jargon of the military-styled police force, the Civil Guard, he used to serve in Franco’s days. The relevant information had already been issued, he said, before adding that journalists had transformed it all into a pack of lies. When would Damiana be back? ‘I don’t know,’ he replied.

Two weeks later I returned again. Damiana was there. Already in her seventies, she was into her last year as mayoress in a village of 700 souls. Like most rural communities in Spain, Poyales del Hoyo has been on the wane since the 1950s. At the time of the Civil War – when most of Spain lived in
pueblos
– it had more than 2,000 inhabitants. ‘And it had its own notary,’ she told me proudly.

People from Madrid – two hours’ drive away – are buying up properties as second homes. Some have even moved here for a quiet life in the country. But Poyales del Hoyo was still ageing. ‘Twenty people have died since January,’ explained Damiana who, at seventy-seven, was hardly a spring chicken herself.

Damiana claimed there had been no fuss, no objections and no obstruction from the village council to the re-burials. ‘I have no problem with that,’ she said. But she clearly did.

As we spoke in her spartan office, she first expressed her shock that the church bells had been rung for ‘non-believers’. ‘How
cynical
. None of them would have liked that. They used the church here as a prison,’ she said.

Then she launched into a tirade against the left and the
Republican
committee that had controlled the village in the nine weeks between the days that generals Sanjurjo, Franco, Mola and friends had risen up in arms to the moment when Franco’s Moorish troops swept into Poyales del Hoyo. Damiana, who was eleven at the time, had no trouble recalling the dates: ‘From July 18 to September 8, the day the Moors arrived.’

The killing of dozens of left-wingers in Poyales was, she said, merely the result of the left’s own bloodletting at that time. ‘One lot finished and the next lot got started. They killed one another as much for village arguments and old hatreds as for anything else,’ she said. I heard this version of events in other places, too. The violence was already latent – with each village a ticking
time-bomb
of angry resentment.

The village was divided into what had already become known as ‘the two Spains’ – the right and the left – and the bloodletting was mutual. Here, as in nearby Candeleda, the prominent men of the right were rounded up and kept in the church. But here, unlike in Candeleda, nine were taken out and shot. ‘The priest was paraded through the village with a horse’s bridle tied around his head. They insulted him, blasphemed him and treated him like an animal. They made him drink vinegar and then killed him with two others,’ she explained.

Damiana recalled some of the several dozen names which, until Ezekiel Lorente persuaded the council to take it down, had figured on the list of ‘
Caídos por Dios y por la Patria
’ on the church wall. ‘A man called Eloy Garrido was one of the first to be killed. He left a widow and three children. They killed him because he was from the right – there was no Falange here then, just “the left”
and “the right”. Then there were Juan and Isaac. They were father and son. Three sisters were left as widows.’