Guerra

by Jason Webster

  My curiosity was immediately piqued. I wanted to know what kind of a man he was. Someone who could shift so firmly from one extreme to the other might be quite interesting, even if I didn’t agree with what he said. I was also interested in what Kiki’s reaction to him would be. She seemed strangely enthusiastic about going to his lecture. I had no idea what her politics were, but in the largely tribal world of affiliations in Spain, I expected her, if anything, to be left-leaning. Thanks to Franco, the Right was associated with austere authoritarianism. It was hard to imagine Kiki identifying with that.

  ‘It’ll be enlightening, believe me,’ she said.

  We took a taxi to the hotel where the lecture was taking place. The large mirrored room was already full ten minutes before it was due to start. Unusual for the Spanish to be so punctual, I reflected. We stood against the back wall, hemmed in by welldressed men in suits accompanied by pearl-wearing wives. Most of them, it seemed, were over fifty, although there were a dozen or so younger people with keen angry expressions in their eyes. People smiled and chatted to one another, but with a certain serious intensity I was unused to. For a second I saw them as a group apart, not the ‘real’ Spaniards of my experience. The Spanish I knew and loved were a much looser bunch of people. But at the same time I could see how they had always been there: I had just ignored them. Stiff and rather hard-looking, they had a set look of disgust and disapproval in their eyes, as though quick to condemn or to speak a sharp word.

  Kiki pulled me out of this dark reverie by treading on my foot and pointing at the arriving speaker. Moa was a slight, balding man with a grey walrus moustache and glasses. Not quite how I had imagined him.

  ‘What were you expecting?’ Kiki said when I whispered down into her ear. ‘A man in a balaclava helmet swinging in on a rope?’

  I laughed while the audience applauded Moa’s arrival. Kiki’s gloved hands pressed hard against one another in unashamed admiration. She lifted herself up on tiptoe, darting her head from one side to the other to look over the shoulders of the crowd standing in front of us. No one had given her a second glance – or at least not in any quizzical way. Men looked her up and down appreciatively, but her discreet attire ensured she slipped by almost unnoticed – except for the occasional more discerning eye. She didn’t want to be a star, or stir things up. What could be a more disturbing spectacle than a drag artist showing up at a meeting of the far Right? With a slight shudder I imagined what the reaction of these lusty elderly men would be if they discovered that the woman they had been eyeing up had a few surprises hidden inside her skirt. But this was really just idle imagining. No one there suspected anything at all, and as Kiki proved, physical gender and real gender were not always the same.

  Moa was having his photograph taken as he stood on the dais: he had removed his glasses and was staring at the camera with a fixed, determined expression. An expensively dressed woman bustled around, pouring him a glass of water and fiddling with his microphone. Men in shiny leather shoes shuffled on the carpeted floor expectantly. One of them, catching sight of Kiki, invited her to stand in front of him so she could get a better view. She accepted his kind offer, standing with her back as straight as an arrow, hair pulled up in an Italian-style bun, delicate silver necklace glimmering around her breastbone in the creamy light issuing from the candelabra above our heads. Her Japanese silk blouse hugged her torso tightly.

  The lecture began. Moa hunched over the microphone and spoke in a clear, deep voice, his physical slightness slipping away as he moved into performance mode and quickly captured the audience’s attention. It was remarkable to see the change – one minute a relatively nondescript middle-aged man, the next an orator of not inconsiderable skill, carefully and calculatingly hitting the buttons of his public. The talk was ostensibly about new ideas he was putting forward, blaming the Left for the outbreak of the Civil War, arguing that the conflict had really begun not in 1936 but in 1934, when left-wingers had staged an unsuccessful rebellion across the country. This seemed to be the main preoccupation of this second phase of his life – blaming everything on a group he once thought had all the answers. Spain in the 1930s, in his view, had been a hotbed of Marxist revolutionaries and Franco had merely stepped in at the very last minute to prevent the country falling to the Reds.

  It was what the audience wanted to hear, being essentially the view the Right had had of the Civil War since the beginning. ‘They caused it – we had no choice.’ And for it to come from the mouth of a former communist and founder member of the leftwing GRAPO terrorist organization seemed to give the theory extra weight and authority: if Moa could see the error of his ways and that the Right had been ‘right’ all along, then so could everyone else; for years the only view of the war you heard was from the Left, and it was all lies. Someone – Moa – had to come along and rectify things. And he was angry – angry that few historians took him seriously, angry that people insulted him rather than properly debating his theories, angry that the Left’s view of the war always prevailed. For a moment I had to pinch myself. Who won the war in the end? Wasn’t it Franco? From the way he talked you’d have thought it was the Right who had suffered persecution and terror all these years.

  What was most striking about the lecture, though, was the emotionalism of it. Moa talked as though the Civil War had only just taken place, as though the causes of the conflict were still alive, as though bloodshed could start again at any minute. This was not a lecture by a historian discussing some interesting but now distant period of the past. It was almost like a political rally. He spat out the names of some of the politicians of that time – President Azaña, or Indalecio Prieto, one of the main socialist leaders – as though they were alive today and still damaging the country, not men who had died fifty years previously. For a moment I felt I was back in the bar at Burgos, submerged in the seething, unthinking rage of the football fans: the energy that was beginning to circle in the room was disturbingly similar. Moa seemed under the spell of some deep-seated anger and ready to vent his spleen against anything. And the more he spoke, the more he pushed the buttons, the higher the emotional pitch rose among the audience. Here was a fallen angel who had seen the error of his ways and was now redeeming himself by preaching the gospel of the Right. They loved him because his change of political spots evoked their sympathy, while his messianic fervour excited their passions. It was strange that such an apparently unremarkable man could do all this, but he had the three-hundred-strong crowd in the palm of his hand. I could only marvel. From over her shoulder I saw Kiki applauding whenever the others clapped, nodding from time to time. The only difference was that while everyone else had serious scowls on their faces, I could make out a smile on her lips. She was enjoying every minute.

  After Moa ended his lecture, a pale-looking man in the audience stood up to ask a question. He was younger than most of the people in the room, his hair was ruffled and his clothes hung awkwardly from his body, but he was clutching a copy of Moa’s latest book under his arm and had a youthful cockiness about him. Why, he wanted to know, wasn’t he being given Moa’s books to read at university? All students were fed was the Left’s interpretation; it was time they started teaching ‘the truth’ about the Civil War. Thankfully people like Moa were doing their bit, but his lecturers ridiculed him for reading Moa’s books.

  There were cries from the audience, a wave of anger, this time with sympathy for the poor lonely student, bravely taking a stand against the establishment. Moa simply smiled and shrugged. It was, he said, to be expected, but things were slowly changing. He didn’t say it explicitly, but implied that one day – and you felt he longed for nothing so strongly – his books would be on the curriculum at universities around the world. They were right to be angry, but this anger would eventually lead to better things, like a golden dawn just waiting for them over the horizon.

  Another member of the audience stood up to ask a question about the recent general election. After a massive bomb attack at Atocha train
station just three days before the polls, the socialists had been voted back into power, to everyone’s surprise. Everyone had expected the right-wing Popular Party to win. Now, months on, the Right was still reeling from an election they had thought was in the bag. It was perfect material for the strange victim complex that seemed present in the room. I couldn’t help drawing parallels with what I’d read of the atmosphere in the 1930s, when a similar paranoia had pushed the Right to the extreme. It had been a more polarized time – anarchists were burning down churches and convents, landowners were starving their peasants to death – but I had the feeling of being back in a world where everyone was talking and no one was listening.

  The question solicited a predictable response from Moa. All the anger and rage that had been building up until that point blew up. They had been robbed. The socialist victory had been written in blood. And he went as far as he could, without actually saying so, to suggest that the Left had been behind the attack. ‘Who benefits from this?’ The paranoid conspiracytheorists lapped it up. The Basque terror group ETA was named; people were standing up and shouting; a furious hubbub filled the room. Outside, the rest of the world was convinced some Al-Qa’ida group had planted the bombs. But here they could only understand the political language of the 1930s, of Left and Right, revolutions and dictatorships. The country was falling apart: time for another Franco, law and order.

  I had often watched the old black and white newsreels of Hitler’s rallies, with their massed ranks of party faithful, flaming torches, huge flags and the little man standing on the platform whipping everyone up into a hateful frenzy, and wondered what it actually felt like to be there. Atmosphere doesn’t really come across in the moving images captured on film. That evening, with just a few hundred people crammed into a conference room, I came as close as I ever want to to experiencing it. Moa was no Hitler, and the wealthy old people making up most of the audience were not SS storm troops or officers from the Gestapo, but the hate, anger and self-righteous indignation that I sensed flowing from the audience, somehow coagulating around us until it almost had a life of its own, was something I never wanted to feel again. The echoes of what for me was a past age, with its fascist salutes, jackboots and the name-calling that could precede persecutions and shootings, were deeply disturbing. The people here were a minority, and they were mostly elderly romantics dreaming of a glorious past that had never really existed. But the energy they produced was electric, unpredictable and menacing. Multiply that a few times, inject it with youthful vigour, and it gave cause for concern.

  ‘The government and the forces of “progress” are nailing condoms to the mast as their penultimate Jacobin flag against the Church!’ Moa proclaimed, meandering momentarily away from the events of the 1930s to another of his pet subjects. ‘AIDS goes hand in hand with sexual promiscuity and this is almost always linked to drug use.’

  Bland truisms were handed out and the audience loved it. I had the sense not only of witnessing a mass hypnotism, but also of living a dream myself. This kind of power and energy was always running just beneath the surface. We went about our lives, eating, shopping, working, playing, and this kind of thing seemed a million miles away. It belonged in history books or in faraway countries, but would never happen now, here. But wouldn’t it? For the first time I began to feel less certain about things I had taken for granted, about assuming that peaceful democratic life would carry on for years to come. It might not be these OAPs who gave us a shock, but others could easily stir up passions that were clearly all too ready to ignite. I found my thoughts turning back to the fist fight in Valencia.

  After the questions had ended and the crowds had gone, we left the hotel to have a drink at a bar a couple of streets away. Kiki ordered half a litre of beer while I asked for an anise.

  ‘I try to go against people’s expectations,’ she said when I questioned her choice of beverage. ‘It’s so obvious to order a glass of wine or a sherry. They’ll think I’m a rather strange girl who likes beer, not a man in drag. You’re the one they’re probably worried about, ordering a little glass of anise before dinner. Very odd.’

  It was all thought out, yet also so natural. Like her voice: she never changed it from male to female, just something subtle perhaps in the intonation. Yet close your eyes and listen to her speak – I had tried it a couple of times now – and you really couldn’t tell if she was a man with a light voice or a woman with a deep one. It was at some perfect midway pitch that could be either. Many Spanish women had deeper voices than hers anyway, brought on, you imagined, by heavy smoking. It was an ideal country for her.

  ‘God forbid!’ she’d said once when I’d asked how she avoided the falsetto whining of other transvestites. ‘What do you think I am?’ Although that was exactly the question: what, or who, was she? With time I found myself asking the question less and less. She was Kiki, unique, a one-off. Why try to define her any other way?

  We didn’t talk about the lecture for a while. After rousing rather disturbing emotions in the audience, Moa had brought things to a close, swarms of admirers circling round him like bees. There stood this seemingly unremarkable middle-aged man at the centre of buzzing, nervous attention. I had hesitated for a moment, wondering whether to try to talk to him, but had decided against it. There was nothing more I really wanted to know. The event had left an unsavoury taste in my mouth and I had wanted to leave as quickly as possible.

  ‘You don’t look very happy,’ Kiki said after a while. Her pale lipstick had left semi-circular marks on the edge of the giant glass on the table in front of her. In the gloomy light of the bar she had taken off her gloves.

  ‘I found it rather uncomfortable in there,’ I said. ‘All that hatred.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘But Moa’s wonderful, you have to admit.’

  I looked her in the eye. She was being sincere.

  ‘What the hell do you mean?’ I said. ‘He was the one whipping it all up, all that stuff about the war, about how Franco had no choice, it was all the Left’s fault.’

  ‘What – you think they were blameless?’

  ‘No, of course not. But that’s my point: you can’t just dump all the blame on one side. Left, Right, they were all involved, all responsible. Or are we to think the thousands Franco had shot were the Left’s fault as well?’

  ‘I can see,’ she said, taking another swig of beer, ‘that you weren’t unaffected by the emotions in there yourself.’

  I sat back and sighed. She was right. I was angry – if not as angry as Moa himself, then angry at him and what he’d said.

  ‘OK, you’re right. But “wonderful”? What’s wonderful about him?’

  ‘Moa has reinvented himself,’ she said. ‘All right, it’s superficial. He was an extremist, now he’s still an extremist. He’s simply swapped one extreme for another. But he made the change. He used to be a member of GRAPO, now he’s standing there in front of people saying mea culpa and singing a different tune. One must always applaud someone like that, no matter how small the step.’

  I said nothing, but could see she was serious. And there was more than an echo of her own self in what she was describing.

  ‘Moa’s living his own Civil War, his own version of it. That’s what’s important. The war has ended – it ended seventy years ago. It no longer exists. He takes that material and casts it in whatever form he chooses, and casts himself and recasts himself in the process. When Moa’s talking about the war, he’s really talking about himself. And the way he sees it goes to the heart of who he considers himself to be.’

  ‘Aren’t you being just a bit too generous to a miserable old fascist?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s reinvented himself; he’s made his own image of himself. That takes balls.’

  I put down my drink and closed my eyes.

  ‘My head’s spinning,’ I said, getting up. ‘Let’s go and find a place to eat.’

  16

  Guernica

  ‘I arrived at Guernica at fou
r-forty in the afternoon. I had barely got out of the car when the bombing started. People were terrified … five minutes did not pass without the area turning black from the German planes. The planes flew very low, destroying the roads and woods with machine-gun fire, men, women and children in piles lying on the ground in the ditches by the side of the road. After a short while it was impossible to see more than two hundred metres for the smoke. Fire wrapped around the city. Cries of pain were heard from all sides.’22

  It was a market day in the Basque town of Guernica, just twenty miles from Bilbao, when Father Alberto Onaindía witnessed the most notorious event of the Spanish Civil War. As Madrid still held out stubbornly against the Nationalists, Franco had opened up a new front against the strip of Republican territory along the northern coast made up of the Basque Country and the regions of Cantabria and Asturias. By conquering the area, the Nationalists would gain a significant number of arms factories and centres of heavy industry, as well as taking over a handful of important ports. The Basques were the first to come under attack. Catholic and largely conservative, they might have been Franco’s allies under different circumstances, but they had, in Franco’s eyes, committed the gravest sin of entertaining hopes of independence from Spain. They would be given no quarter and Basque Catholic priests were among the thousands of victims of Franco’s ‘crusade’.