Ghosts of Spain

by Giles Tremlett

  At the end of the talk I met General Chicharro. He was a polite, pleasant man, the archetype of what I had come to call ‘a friendly fascist’. This was a nickname I applied to the impeccably-mannered, if somewhat worrying, old rightists I had started coming across in my own barrio. He was also, at the time, president of the Brotherhood of the División Azul – a division of Francosponsored Spanish volunteers that had donned German uniform and gone to fight for Hitler on the eastern front. After a long battle with Spain’s defence ministry, the families of the Blue Division veterans were beginning to dig up the graves of their dead and bring them home. The funds given to them by the Defence ministry would become a sore point for those paying from their own pockets for mechanical diggers to find the remains left behind by Franco’s death squads.

  Chicharro told me about a recent visit to Russia where bottles of vodka had finally broken the ice between the Spanish Hitler veterans, the Germans they had fought alongside and their old Russian opponents. It was a pleasant tale of reconciliation between old adversaries. Before I left, however, he wanted me to know something: ‘Those of us who went,’ he said proudly, ‘we still think exactly the same as we did back then.’

  The members of the División Azul won Iron Crosses, admired Hitler and wore the red Falangist beret. Some of them must have been close to Juan Carlos while Franco oversaw his education and he dutifully fulfilled his obligations as the anointed successor-in-waiting. The king probably courted some of them during the transition to democracy – trying to ensure their loyalty to him and to the new Spanish state. They had been privileged members of Francoist society, guaranteed jobs and prestige on their return (though many never returned and some were not freed from Russian prison camps until the mid-1950s, causing Franco to pull Spain out of the first European Nations soccer cup in 1960 when drawn to meet the USSR in the quarter finals). The owner of the Hitler portrait, I suspected, had been one of them.

  It turned out that General Chicharro was from my barrio. He was not the only one. Angelines, the bed-ridden old woman who lived opposite us when we moved in, had been a División Azul nurse.

  This is not surprising. My building, and many of the neighbouring ones, went up in the 1940s – a period when few of those who were not Franco supporters were in a position to be buying apartments. The original owners are dying off now – Angelines was carried off in a stretcher down the communal staircase and died a few days later in hospital. In the space of just three years she has been followed by Dr Bueno and charming old Paco, who would take his dog out for a walk every night but only, as far as I could tell, to the Bar Goyesca, just a twenty-yard walk away.

  The stereotypical elderly, well-off Francoist couple steps out on a winter’s day with the lady immaculately coiffured and made up, wearing her fur-coat. The man, his upper lip adorned with a pencil-thin moustache, wears a bottle-green, Austrian-style, pressed wool jacket. Such types can still be found occasionally in my local newspaper shop buying ABC or La Razon, two conservative Spanish daily newspapers. I suspect some of the surviving older people in my block were, or still are, Franco supporters of some kind. At least one is said to have a Falangist flag on his desk. A Franco portrait appeared on a balcony across the road on the thirtieth anniversary of his death in 2005. The old lady who lived beneath us when we moved occasionally muttered that ‘things were better under Franco’. Usually, however, these old Franquistas are silent, and thus unquantifiable. Some see no conflict between Franco and democracy, believing that one was the direct result of the other. Franco, they reason, cured the divide between the two Spains so that, after his death, they could come together again in peace and join the club of free European nations. He was, they claim, more successful in producing a united country than that other long-lived European strongman and contemporary, Yugoslavia’s Marshal Tito.

  These were amongst the people who helped place Pío Moa’s revisionist The Myths of the Civil War on the best-sellers list. ‘Franco did not think he had rebelled against a democratic republic but against an extreme danger of revolution … Undoubtedly he was right,’ Moa argues. ‘His regime saved Spain from involvement in the world war, modernised society and established the conditions for a stable democracy.’ Moa blames modern right-wing politicians for not defending the Generalísimo’s reputation. ‘The right will swallow anything, just so that it does not seem itself to be Francoist,’ he observes.

  Moa, the nostálgicos and a handful of neo-Francoists aside, one is hard put to find a Spaniard spontaneously prepared to defend Franco in public – with the eternal exception of the odd Madrid taxi driver. Mostly, they keep their appreciation of the Generalísi-mo to themselves and their friends. I even know one, a publishing proofreader, who refuses to vote because he dislikes Spain’s new democracy, but dutifully turned up when called on to serve at a polling station at election time. Their silence, broken by a handful of mainly elderly writers and historians, is appreciated.

  It has also, until recently, been matched by the silence surrounding that other uncomfortable reminder of Franco’s existence, his victims – both the living and the dead. As they grow in confidence, but decline rapidly in numbers, the victims have slowly raised their heads in recent years. Their stories, deliberately forgotten and buried during the transition to democracy, are a belated reminder of how the Caudillo ensured he could die, still in power, in his bed.

  Mariano called me from Candeleda. He was hugely excited. ‘We are going to pay homage to a great freedom fighter, a true hero, one of the few men prepared to risk their lives to fight Franco,’ he announced. The hero’s name was Gerardo Donate, alias Tito, a local leader of the maquis guerrilla movement that, briefly and to no great effect, acted across much of Spain in the 1940s and early 1950s. Tito had led the guerrillas of the Gredos mountains and had died in a shoot-out by the River Alardos, which separates the Extremadura region from Castilla y León. His family, now living in Valencia, had only just discovered what happened to him. The family was on its way – typically, by the coachload – to pay its respects at the place where he died. This was a picturesque pool in one of the mountain streams that bring the snow-melt rushing down through a series of gargantas – the streams known literally as ‘throats’ – cut into the southern slopes of Gredos. The pool has popularly been known as ‘El Charco de los Maquis’, ‘The Maquis’ Pool’, ever since.

  I was curious. Here, after all, were a group of resistance fighters who had fought a right-wing dictatorial regime run by an ally of Hitler and Mussolini. As a child in 1960s and 1970s Britain, I had grown up enthralled by tales of men and women like this. In comics, trash mags, films and cheap novels the resistance fighters of France, Italy, Yugoslavia and Greece had often been there as the key, heroic supporters to some frightfully brave, and slightly sentimental, British hero. Even today, these loyal partisans occasionally raise their heads in British novels – such as Sebastian Faulks’s Charlotte Gray.

  In most countries the resistance members remain national heroes. They have medals, monuments and museums. Yet, in the Spanish mind, the maquis have largely been forgotten. A handful of ex-fighters, local historians and people on the far left kept their memory from disappearing. They had no place, however, in the pantheon of national heroes. Not even those socialists who had worn their anti-Francoism as a badge of identity and pride in the 1960s and 1970s, and had gone on to run democratic Spain in the 1980s, had bothered with this group of ageing, defeated men and women. Ironically, some of them, exiled from Franco’s Spain, could claim hero status in France, having fought with the Resistance there in the Second World War. The tanks that led the Free French into liberated Paris in 1944 bore the names of Spanish cities and pueblos such as Zaragoza, Guadalajara and Belchite, and were manned by Spaniards.

  Although some Republican fighters had survived in small groups in the sierras as fugitives, they did not become organised until late in the Second World War. Franco’s opponents became convinced that, with Hitler and Mussolini on the run, it would not be long bef
ore the Allies turned their attention to Europe’s other major right-wing dictator. Organised by the Spanish Communist Party, they set up a network whose principal aim was to be in place when the British, French and Americans invaded.

  But, just as Britain and the other allies had abandoned the Republic to its fate during the Civil War while Hitler and Mussolini sent troops and money to Franco, so they turned their backs on these appeals for the ‘liberation’ of Spain. No British heroes would be parachuted in here. The Caudillo, instead, would become an early Cold War winner, a right-wing bulwark against the Communist Warsaw Pact countries. Initially a rabid anti-American, he considered the new superpower ‘childish’. But he was wily enough to seal a lifelong grip on power in 1953 by signing a deal that gave the United States air bases on Spanish soil. This, he later observed, appeared to have emptied ‘Madrid bars and cabarets of whores, since they almost all marry American sergeants or GIs’.

  An invasion of Spain did eventually take place. Led by many of those French resistance heroes, it was launched in the Val d’Aran, a north-facing part of the Pyrenees that is Spanish territory and which boasts its own version of the Gascon language, Aranese. The invasion’s planners had hoped the sight of troops coming across the border would encourage a popular uprising. No such thing happened. The Spanish, it seems, were either more tired of war than they were of Franco or were so downtrodden after half a dozen years of vengeful rule that nobody dared lift a finger.

  I met Tito’s family at a restaurant near the ‘Lobera’ (‘the wolf ’s lair’) – a place where the wolves of Gredos had once roamed freely. They were toying with a paella, wondering why, as Valencians, they were being served up a mediocre dish of what is a speciality in their own region. They had hired a coach and set out at 6 a.m. to get here for an afternoon of ceremonies before setting off again, at nightfall, for the six-hour return trip.

  ‘He was one of three brothers separated by the Civil War who never saw each others’ faces again,’ said his great nephew Enrique, a paid-up member (and local councillor back in his home town near Valencia) of Spain’s communist-led United Left coalition. ‘One brother fled to France and was killed there fighting for the Resistance. My grandfather, who died recently, fought for the Republic and was captured and imprisoned. Two of his uncles were Falangists, so they allowed him back to the family village. The war split the family. He had other uncles on the left.’

  I had heard many stories like this, of split families with brothers and cousins pleading for the lives of their relatives on the other side to be spared when the death squads and military tribunals of one side or the other came around.

  ‘Before he died, my grandfather said that he never regretted fighting for his ideals. His biggest regret, however, was not knowing where his younger brother, who was only nineteen when the war started, was buried,’ explained Enrique, a Republican badge pinned to his chest. ‘All he knew was that he had escaped from a prison work camp in Talavera de la Reina and been killed by the Guardia Civil. He did not dare ask any more than that. My father’s generation was also too scared to find out, so I started looking myself,’ he said. He contacted a historian who had collected the stories of this forgotten group of men and so, eventually, discovered that Tito had died near Candeleda.

  Now Tito’s great-nephews and great-nieces, and one nephew, were gathering to give him a proper send-off. Mariano had arranged for a local historian, a maquis specialist, to give them a talk in Candeleda’s town hall. There was standing room only as locals joined the family. Someone placed a republican flag on the dais, thus raising loud complaints from two town councillors who claimed this was an insult to King Juan Carlos. The Spanish monarch’s portrait hung on the wall immediately behind them. The historian’s tale was a sorry one. The guerrilla movement in Gredos had survived for about five years from 1942 onwards. It had killed two people in that time, including a noted Falangist in Candeleda. But it had to devote most of its energies to just keeping itself alive, kidnapping people for money and relying on those in far-flung country spots to feed it – either out of solidarity or of fear. Only a handful of people had been involved. They were finished off by a combination of treason from within their own ranks, Civil Guard infiltrators and the use of pseudo-maquis groups, the contrapartidas, set up by the police to terrorise locals and persuade them that the resistance fighters were really bandoleros, common bandits or outlaws.

  Tito and his group had been spotted near El Raso, a small village in the mountains above Candeleda. They had hidden in a cave above a mountain pool but had been cornered by the Civil Guard. Tito and one other were killed. Three of his men were wounded, captured, cured of their wounds, tried and shot. Only one escaped.

  The Charco de los Maquis, the mountain pool where Tito died, is a magical Gredos spot. The road here from Candeleda twists up-hill to El Raso, passing orchards of fig trees and, in early June, cherry trees weighed down with fat, red cherries. An unpaved track leads out towards the garganta. The water here is transparent. Fish dart across a mottled background of large, sunken boulders, their size magnified by the still, crystalline water. Boatmen scuttle across the surface. On both banks there are narrow stretches of green pasture and, higher up, olive groves. A blackened, scorched patch on one hill is a reminder of one of Spain’s perennial dramas, the forest fire.

  For the last stretch of the road to the charco I gave a lift to Benjamín Ruiz. A miner’s son from the rebellious northern region of Asturias, he had first seen the inside of a police cell in 1934, at the age of fifteen. An Asturian miners’ revolution was put down by Franco on behalf of the elected Conservative government. Some consider this to be the first skirmish of the Civil War. Benjamín would later be Tito’s enlace, his contact for information and food, in El Raso. He was the last person outside his group to see him alive. ‘None of those captured gave me away. If they had ever found out that I was the enlace they would have killed me,’ he said. Now in his eighties, he had recently suffered a mild heart attack and had trouble walking. But his spirits were lifted by the sight of so many young people. ‘Back then there were only a handful of us prepared to do anything against Franco. The young people should know that,’ he said.

  The valley is fairly steep here and, right above the pool, a narrow crack in the rock gives way to the cave where Tito had spent his last night. I imagined a handful of desperate men, staring at defeat and wondering whether it was better to fight and die or give up and be executed.

  The great-nieces and great-nephews read poetry and threw red carnations on the water. Amongst the revolutionary icons dusted off for the occasion was Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. ‘Tomorrow when I die, do not come to me to cry, nor look for me in the ground, I am the wind of freedom,’ someone read. A wreath of flowers in the purple, red and yellow colours of the Republican flag was cast onto the water and left to float downstream. Curiously distant from the proceedings, however, was Tito’s nephew. A man in his sixties, he was Enrique’s father and the closest living relative to the deceased ‘hero’. I sidled up to him. ‘Moving, don’t you think?’ I asked. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘Just sad. He had no need to escape from the prison work camp. He didn’t even have a long sentence to serve. They were three brothers. But, because of politics, they never saw one another again after 1936.’

  The person closest to Tito, I realised, was the most reluctant to participate in what had clearly become a left-wing homage to him. Later, the nephew would, once more, stand away from the crowd as Mariano – on crutches, having badly singed his legs a few days earlier while using a blow-torch to make a rough, iron plaque to Tito – harangued the gathering. The nephew’s generation had been given the option of being ardent, and privileged, pro-Francoists, downtrodden opponents or simply apolitical. Like many Spaniards of his time, he had chosen the last. He still blamed ‘politics’ for the tragedy of his father and his brothers. Mariano’s words just made him uneasy.

  Franco’s regime publicly claimed the maquis were nothing more than a bunch of rural
bandoleros. The Spanish parliament belatedly agreed in 2001 that official references to them as bandoleros should be removed. It was something, one of the forty aged survivors who turned up said, that happened ‘twenty years too late’.

  Small stories, picked up along the way, gave me some idea of what it had been like to be on the losing side of the war. In Poyales del Hoyo one woman told me that, as a child, a neighbour had tipped a bedpan of faeces and urine over her head in the street ‘for being the daughter of a rojo’. Another starving boy, son of a rojo, was invited by a local right-winger to dip some bread into a steaming cauldron of stew being prepared for a hunting party, only to have his arm thrust deep into the boiling pot as a cruel joke.

  In Palacios del Sil, a small village in the hills of León, an eighty-four-year-old woman, Isabel González, told me she was still bitter about the way her father, whose son was shot and left in a roadside mass grave, was continually humiliated by his Falangist neighbours. ‘They would come at any time of the day or night and demand milk from the cow or take whatever they wanted. My father just had to do what they said. It killed him,’ she recalled.

  The desire to humiliate, terrorise and exact revenge – already apparent at the Valle de Los Caídos – was summed up by Franco’s chief army psychiatrist, Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Vallejo-Nagera. This man, who went on to be Spain’s first university professor of psychology, carried out tests on International Brigade prisoners and Spanish roja women prisoners in Málaga in an attempt to prove that Marxists were genetic retards. His recommendations on what to do with those from the other side included that they should ‘suffer the punishment they deserve, with death the easiest of them all. Some will live in permanent exile, far from the Mother Country which they did not know how to love. Others will lose their freedom, groaning for years in prisons, purging their crimes with forced work in order to earn their daily bread, and will leave their children an infamous legacy: those who betrayed the Patria cannot leave an honourable surname for their children.’