Ghosts of Spain (8 page)

Nowhere is the silence more eloquent than in the state-owned gift shop at the Valley of the Fallen. There are only two guidebooks on sale here. One is a cheap picture book. The other is written by the state body that owns it, Patrimonio Nacional. One does not even mention the fact that Republican prisoners-of-war were used to build the Valley. The other observes, briefly, that prisoners-of-war could redeem part of their sentence by working here. Neither mentions that more than a dozen labourers died here. They also, however, keep mentions of Franco himself to a bare minimum.

The handful of references to him talk, coyly, of ‘the former head of state'. Photographs of the tombs of Franco and Primo de Rivera are curiously absent. The books provide, instead, illustrations of the bulgingly muscular set of sculptures known as the Allegory to the Armed Forces or the religious tapestries hanging on the wall. Patrimonio Nacional, explaining its own existence, says it looks after ‘palaces, monasteries and convents founded by Spanish monarchs'. It is difficult to see how this place, founded by a
dictator
, fits.

The gift shop sells Valley key rings, pens, T-shirts, coasters and
thimbles. But it does not have any of the books written by, or about, the prisoners who worked and, in some cases, died
building
the place. Nor is there a single book on Franco or Primo de Rivera.

Unsure what to do with it, successive governments have tried to take the meaning out of the Valley of the Fallen. It is as if the
monument
had appeared here innocently, and neutrally, out of the blue. There is, their silence suggests, nothing shocking, awesome or even significant about it.

Thirty years after the Caudillo's death, a new Socialist
government
has finally suuggested it would like to tell the full story of the Valley of the Fallen. It may build a visitors' centre here, devoted to the Civil War. There is no sign, yet, however, of any real change.

I set out to find people who had helped build the Valley. I found two of them. Both, for very different reasons, were sure that it oozed with meaning: malicious for one, glorious for the other.

Diego Márquez Horrillo was a genuine volunteer, a convinced Falangist who would come here during the summer vacations from his university law degree. To him it is, principally, the resting place of José Antonio Primo de Rivera – a man he still reveres as father, in the 1930s, of ‘the most modern of all political ideas'. He enjoyed those summers in the hills, where he would marvel at the ingenuity of it all. ‘It was an extraordinary project,' he told me in the small Madrid office which is half his law practice and half headquarters of one tiny fragment of what little remains of the Falange. ‘I was excited to be involved.'

Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz was another sort of ‘volunteer'. He was one of the political prisoners sent here with the promise of a meagre one peseta a day in a savings account, and the chance of reducing his sentence. He is now an emeritus professor at New York University. I found him at a conference in Barcelona where, for almost the first time since Franco's death, academics were
discussing
the full extent of a vast prison system though which some 200,000 people – 2 per cent of the male population – passed. Sánchez-Albornoz was sent here in 1948 after being arrested as a student agitator. The cheap labour he and tens of thousands of
prison workers around Spain provided would help found the
fortunes
of several major construction companies. Mussolini's
foreign
minister, Count Galeazzo Ciano, already shocked by the vast numbers being executed in 1939, found the concentration camps full ‘not of prisoners of war, but slaves of war'.

Sánchez-Albornoz saw how food destined for the prisoners never made it beyond the camp gates. The director, like many officials during the first decade of Franco's rule, was getting rich off black-market trading. The state, meanwhile, paid itself for the prisoners' upkeep by taking 80 per cent of an already miserable wage. There were no prison fences here, as there was nowhere to go. Sánchez-Albornoz was one of the few prisoners who dared escape. More than fifty years later, he refuses to go back to Cuelgamuros, the
finca
where the basilica was built. ‘I loathe Cuelgamuros. I refuse to put my feet on what, before it was profaned, was a beautiful piece of land … unless the crypt is given a different use and now, given my age, that there is also a urinal on Franco's grave so that I can relieve my prostate,' he says. ‘With a little more money, and he had plenty of that, he might have hired free workers and avoided the imprint of revenge … His remains are buried in a monument to cruelty and corruption.'

The Valley of the Fallen may have survived, but most other physical proof of Franco's, and Francoism's, existence has been wiped from the face of Spain. Major cities like Madrid or Barcelona returned their Avenidas del Generalísimo, their Plazas del Caudillo or their Plazas Francisco Franco to their original names in the 1970s. A single remaining public statue of Franco in Madrid was removed, under cover of darkness,
shortly
before this book was published. A few months earlier I had gone to look at it. Franco sat astride his horse, but those who did not know who he was could not have guessed. It was a statue without a plaque. I bumped into a Spanish history graduate beside it and asked her whether she thought it should still be here. ‘I don't like Franco,' she replied. ‘But I think we should remember he existed, just so we do not make the same mistake again.' The Socialist government that ordered its removal
obviously
disagreed. A triumphal arch and couple of streets named after lesser Francoist generals are now all that remain in Madrid to commemorate that period of history.

When the author and journalist Arcadi Espada went looking for the public remnants of Franco several years ago he found that, with a few exceptions, they had disappeared. Of Spain's provincial capitals only Santander was still festooned with Franco
memorabilia
, despite pressure from historians for it to be removed. ‘Even the whores and beggars are rightists in Santander,' explained the writer Jesús Pardo.

Franco's birthplace of Ferrol, a navy port in Galicia that became known as El Ferrol del Caudillo, waited almost thirty years but eventually also removed its equestrian statue from the central Plaza de España. A People's Party councillor tried to save it, calling for a popular referendum, but had her wrists slapped by party bosses. Not even the party that wins the votes of the old
franquistas
dares show active support for him, or his memory. By the time I visited Ferrol, the statue had gone. The statue, which was later discreetly sent to a naval museum, had been placed in a municipal store.

Espada says that sums up exactly what Spaniards have done with Franco. They have shoved him into storage. He has been placed out of sight and, largely, out of mind. ‘In reality, with museums and the street out of the question, the storeroom is exactly where Spain has placed Franco. It is a jumbled, dusty, indeterminate place, somewhere without criteria. Franco showed that the best thing to do with a difficult problem was to shove it into [the back of] a drawer. That is where he is right now.'

Sometimes the solution has been more radical. On a visit to Guadalajara province, I stopped on a road near Torija at a ridge overlooking the plain where the River Henares flows. Here, on the roadside, I discovered a pile of broken, honey-coloured stone, looking like the rubble from some ancient building site. Turning the stones over, however, I found the smashed fragments of a huge, carved Francoist shield. These must have been torn off a local town hall after Franco's death. They had been dumped at the
roadside – another anonymous, indeterminate place for the remains of Francoism.

The business of wiping out Franco's physical imprint has been long and slow. There are still a dozen villages, mainly founded during his life near dams or other public works, which will for ever be Franco's. Alberche del Caudillo and Llanos del Caudillo are just two of them – though others, like Barbate and Ferrol, have returned to their original names.

Not everyone, however, embraced the first wave of
name-changes
and statue removals. A young politician called José María Aznar complained in the
La Nueva Rioja
newspaper in 1979 that town councils were removing the honours and street names of ‘the former Head of State who, although it obviously bothers some people, governed for forty years and was called Francisco Franco'.

‘Instead of devoting themselves to improving their
municipalities
, they spend their time rubbing away history,' wrote Aznar. Seventeen years later, as Spanish prime minister, he would avoid, as far as possible, even mentioning Franco's name.

Some right-wing mayors agreed with Aznar and refused point blank to rename their squares and avenues. They can still be found, normally in small towns and villages of what was once ‘
zona nacional
' – the western half of Spain that fell almost
immediately
to the right's rebellion.

I only had to travel a few miles south from the mass grave near Poyales del Hoyo to find an example. In the small town of
Navalcán
, as in many
pueblos
, the contrast between old and new was immediate. Here old women dressed in black still sat out in small groups on the pavements on low, wood and wicker chairs. Broad straw hats kept the sun off them as they sewed or embroidered. The Socialist mayor of this town of 2,300 people was just
twenty-five
years old. He was not just the youngest mayor in living history, he was also the first left-wing mayor since before 1936. This was a child of Spain's democratic transition. He had no memory or first-hand knowledge of Franco or Francoism.

During the Franco years Navalcán had been governed by a
series of mayors who were the natural heirs of the old
caciques
, the local political strongmen who had traditionally controlled the Spanish countryside. It remained right-wing after his death.

The arrival of a Socialist mayor had been a major event. It was also an eye-opener for the young mayor. ‘Some elderly people insisted on congratulating me in private. They did not want others to see them doing it. They still thought there might be something to be afraid of,' he said.

An elderly man with a Valencian accent came and sat with us. He was the town's former bank manager, a former clerk to the local priest and self-appointed local historian. He pointed to a white-painted three-storey building on the far side of the square. ‘That is where one of the mayors would rape the girls,' he
whispered
. ‘His illegitimate children are still here. In this town, all we have to do is look into people's faces to know where they come from.' His story may well have been a local myth. It summed up, however, the combined feelings of fear and acquiescence in places where Francoism conferred extraordinary power on its local representatives.

In Navalcán it was still possible, stepping out of the town hall, to go for a circular walk without leaving for more than a few moments the streets with Francoist names. The walk took you through the Plaza General Franco and streets dedicated to
General
Yagüe, the Defenders of the Alcázar (a fortress in nearby Toledo) and General Queipo de Llano.

Born after Franco died, the young mayor's generation had learnt the basic facts of his life and times at school, but little more. Now, however, he was being forced to catch up on some local history. Several graves of those shot by
Quinientos
Uno
had been located nearby and there was talk of digging them up. There were also
proposals
for changing some, or all, of the streets back to the original names they had borne for centuries. Those proposals had, in turn, caused a stink in the town. It was unclear what would happen. But there was no doubt that, here at least, Franco's ghost was still about.

Santos Juliá, a prominent historian, sums up Spain's attitude to its former dictator like this: ‘Spaniards have an ambiguous valuation of
Franco. They do not
satanizan
, (literally diabolicalise), him like the Germans do with Hitler. Perhaps that is due to the fact that most living adults do not remember the worst years of the thirties and forties, rather they remember the fifties, sixties and seventies … And they recall that in the second half of Francoism there was a lack of freedom but also an improvement in the material
quality
of life.'

When he first attained power Franco embarked on a disastrous drive for autarky, of proud national self-reliance. He blamed the failure of that not on rampant corruption and his own regime but on an international plot of freemasons, communists and
so-called
false democracies – meaning Britain, France and the US. Eventually, he handed the economy over to technocrats, many of them from the austere Opus Dei Catholic movement. The result was an opening up to the world and a chance to start playing catch-up with the rest of Europe. The economy eventually boomed, giving rise to what became known as the ‘
años de desarrollo
', ‘years of development'. From 1961 to 1973 Spain's economy grew by 7 per cent a year. In the developed world, only Japan was growing quicker. Incomes quadrupled. This, in turn, helped produce what came to be referred to as ‘
franquismo sociológico
'. In other words, Franco became – admittedly to a degree that was never formally measured – popular in some parts of Spanish society. This was because, in a country which had suffered from famine, hunger, war and need for the best part of two decades, life suddenly, and rapidly, got better. ‘After all, Franco did not rule by repression alone: he enjoyed a considerable popular support,' comments Preston. This, he adds, was largely due to ‘the passive support of those who had been conditioned into political apathy by political repression, the controlled media and an appallingly inadequate state education system'.