Ghosts of Spain (9 page)

Just how popular Franco was, is, of course, impossible to say. Manuel Jiménez de Parga, head of the country's Constitutional Court, caused a stink by claiming the ‘immense majority' of Spaniards were
franquistas
. It was one of the least politically
correct
– and most debatable – commentaries on the twenty-fifth
anniversary of the constitution in 2003. True or not, most Spaniards do not want to believe that about themselves, or about their parents and grandparents. It would imply that, somehow, they had supported or collaborated with the dictator. Judge Jiménez de Parga's view, however exaggerated, would certainly explain why up to half a million Spaniards queued up to pay their last respects to him as his coffin lay in state in 1975.

It also, however, raised a difficult question. If the country's senior judge was right, or even partially so, where were all those
franquistas
now?

If finding physical proof of Franco's existence proved nearly impossible, finding those willing to defend his name – or admit that they themselves had supported him – proved even harder. I had gone to Márquez Horrillo because I thought his branch of the Falange, the long-winded Falange Española de las JONS, might provide some examples. But it turned out that not only did Márquez barely have any support, he did not really consider
himself
a Francoist either.

In private, Márquez Horrillo turned out to be a lonely, gentle, polite old man still suffering after the recent death of his wife. I was the first foreign journalist to interview him, the ‘national leader'and direct heir to José Antonio Primo de Rivera, in over twenty years. That alone was proof of how marginal the once powerful Falange had become. Franco, he said, had betrayed the Falange, using it as an instrument for keeping power and debasing its principles. Primo de Rivera, he insisted, had been a visionary and a revolutionary.

At a campaign meeting for his party at Madrid local elections only one hundred people turned up. A similar number of police stood guard outside the school where the meeting was held. We watched a film of Primo de Rivera giving the 1933 speech, at Madrid's Teatro de la Comedia, when he founded the Falange and warned that it would use ‘knuckles and pistols'. The occasion ended, once more, with stiff arms and a rendition of the ‘Cara al Sol'. It was distinctly uncomfortable to be the only person in the audience not standing and singing.

Real Falangism, with its talk of nationalising banks and empowering workers, had gone to the grave with Primo de Rivera in 1936, just three years after he thought it up. Falangism, with its ideas of an ‘organic democracy' representing families, trades and professsions, villages and towns, had been the last great political theory of the twentieth century, Horrillo said. It is one which, curiously, inspired a political movement in the Lebanon which would also be known as Falangism. Talk of knuckles and pistols, Horrillo claimed, was simply standard for the time and place. It was not relevant to today.

Other Falangist groups I tracked down proved more adoring of Franco, though hardly more popular. Some were barely concealed fronts for right-wing thuggery. These recruited amongst the
skinheads
of Real Madrid's violent, racist Ultra Sur supporters and other gangs of football hooligans. Others were serious-minded radicals. I went to see a small, rag-tag crowd of them gather on a chilly street corner outside the National Court in the Calle
Genóva
on 19 November. Here they listened to José Cantalapiedra, a young Falangist leader with a black leather jacket and film-star looks. Cantalapiedra delivered a speech through a crackling microphone. He denounced Spain's democratic governments, Basque and Catalan separatism, immigration, abortion,
globalisation,
banks and liberal capitalism. When he had finished, the crowd of a few hundred set off on an all-night walk to the Valley of the Fallen, carefully marshalled by several vanloads of police. It was one of the biggest dates in the Falange calendar. Yet, in a city whose streets are daily blocked by marchers of one kind or another, they occupied just a hundred metres of bus lane.

Francoism, as a political concept, is long dead. Some argue that it never really existed as a properly defined ideology. Franco
simply
amalgamated all the right-wing and conservative elements of Spanish society – be they the army, the Church, the monarchists, Carlists, the landowners or the Falange – and did his best to stop them squabbling amongst themselves. Historians have pointed out that the cause of Francoism is best described ‘in negatives – what they were against'. Marxists, freemasons, free-thinkers and
separatists formed an eclectic group of enemies. Franco's early admiration for totalitarianism gave way, with the opposition either wiped out or left too cowed to act, to a form of
authoritarian
pragmatism. The brutal early repression has been described as ‘a kind of political investment, a bankable terror, which accelerated the process of Spain's depoliticisation'.

Franco's main achievement was to stay in power, something he managed by force and instinct. His political philosophy, ‘
National
Catholicism', was, as the name implies, mainly about patriotism and God. His main rule was that of obedience, to Church and State. It was hardly a recipe for major change in Spain. Along the way, however, the Generalísimo inoculated several generations of Spaniards against the extreme right. Their parties have never gained more than 2 per cent of the vote in the three decades since his death.

There seemed to be something deeply ironic about the silence into which Francoism had been buried. For the Caudillo was, himself, an expert at silence. ‘One is the master of what one does not say, and the slave of what one does,' he once warned his
self-designated
successor-to-be, the then prince Juan Carlos. This was the opposite of another, much older, Spanish theory on silence. Alonso de Ercilla, in a heroic sixteenth-century depiction of the Chilean natives' resistance to the Spanish conquistadores, La Araucana, noted the tactical usefulness of silence but added: ‘There is nothing more difficult, if you look closely, than
discovering
a
necio
, a fool, if he keeps his quiet.'

This particular facet of the Caudillo's character is attributed to his origins in the wet, green, north-western Atlantic province of Galicia. Gallegos are meant to be famous for something called
retranca
, a sort of deliberate ambivalence or avoidance of
committing
themselves. Franco was
retranca
personified. He rarely let on what he was thinking, even to his ministers. His mysteriousness kept those around him on their toes. It allowed his propagandists to construct a mythical persona of wisdom, bravery, self-sacrifice and godliness. It also allowed Franco to reinvent himself
continually,
from Hitler ally to cunning evader of the Second World War
or from Crusader to benign and loving patriarch. It also allowed his followers to blame the regime's failings on those around him. Ultimately, critics claim, it allowed him to hide his own
mediocrity
. He was, one of his former ministers admitted, ‘a sphinx without a secret'.

His regime was also a great enforcer of silence. To the silence forced on the
vencidos
, the defeated, was added the silence enforced by the censors, both political and religious. One of the first to fall victim was the seventy-two-year-old philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. He, at the height of the Civil War, told an audience of senior Francoists that ‘You will win but you will not convince.' The retort from General José Millán Astray, founder of the Spanish Legion in which Franco had won his military
honours
as a fearless and ruthless young officer, was ‘
¡Abajo la inteligencia!
' (‘Down with intellectuals!' or ‘Down with
intelligence
!'). Unamuno, one of the few great minds left in Nationalist Spain, was removed from his position as Rector of Salamanca university and died soon afterwards. The British writer Gerald Brenan, travelling in 1949, found much of the country suffering famine, while the regime's apparatchiks got rich off the black market. The press, meanwhile, carried virtually no news about Spain. A newspaper reader ‘might well suppose that nothing happens in the Peninsula except football matches, religious
ceremonies
and bullfights'. Censorship would slacken over the years, but it remained in place – in one form or another – until Franco's death.

The one-sided view of a regime which ruled by right of conquest was reflected, most of all, in schools. Spaniards have recently found a rich, deep vein of humour in the absurd things taught to them by the Franco regime.

In Otones, a small farming village on the parched plain outside Segovia, locals have turned the former schoolhouse into a tiny museum to the education they received under
el
Caudillo
. Alicia, a friend from the village, showed me around after one of those traditional Sunday feasts beloved of Madrileños of roast kid and local wine – pointing out the antiquated text books and the
propaganda
on the wall. The museum is there to laugh at. So, too, are the recently reprinted Francoist school textbooks (which have provided a small publishing boom and spawned films, like
El
Florido Pensil
, based on them). These remind Spaniards of how they once learned that Franco was ‘a new El Cid, the saviour of Spain'. They contain such edifying teachings as: ‘Stimulants like coffee, tobacco, alcohol, newspapers, politics, cinema and luxury undermine us and waste our bodies away'; or ‘women have never discovered anything. They lack the creative talent, which God has reserved for men'; and ‘a wife has no rights over her own body. On marriage she gives up those rights to her husband. He is the only one who can use those rights and only for reproduction.'

When General Franco died in 1975 the half a million people who queued up to pay their respects were not there, as the joke went, to check that he really was dead. Nor was it simply one of those occasions when Spaniards, often obstinate individualists when faced with authority, indulged their passion for doing things en masse. Bottles of cava, Spanish sparkling wine, were broken open in some homes where the dictator's death seemed long overdue. ‘Above the skyline of the Collserola mountains, champagne corks soared into the Autumn twilight. But nobody heard a sound,' writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán said of his home city, Barcelona. There was also a genuine outpouring of grief. Most of those who mourned, however, reneged on the
Generalísimo
long ago. The rest have, quite simply, sunk into silence.

I found a few clues as to where they were, however, in my own Madrid neighbourhood. The most startling example came when I was shown an apartment in a street not far from the Retiro park by a smart Argentine woman who said she ‘liked to help friends sell their houses'.

‘You might not like the decoration,' she warned. ‘These are elderly people with elderly peoples' tastes.'

At first sight there was nothing special about the décor, which showed the same taste for heavy wooden furniture, old leather, wooden crosses and fake papyrus lamp shades I had encountered in many other homes. Walking into the sitting room, however, I
found myself gasping, involuntarily, with shock. The room was dominated by a life-size oil portrait of a man in a Second World War German military uniform. Adolf Hitler stared out at me, a slight smile under his trademark moustache, wearing a field greatcoat and with something like a map case clutched in his hands.

The effect, for this
anglosajón
, was like being punched on the nose. One of the greatest practitioners of genocide of the past century was a daily companion for the owners of this house. Even more bizarrely, however, the woman showing us around simply considered this a case of ‘old-fashioned' décor.

Unable to speak, I looked around me, taking in a glass cabinet containing an Iron Cross and a red (Falange or Carlist) beret and, to confuse me further, a photograph of the current king, Juan Carlos. My journalistic instinct should have led to a
thorough
quizzing of the ‘estate agent' about who her friends were. Instead, I pushed my two small children out of the door and fled onto the street without even bothering to check the names on the mail-boxes in the reception hall downstairs. I was perplexed. It was not just the presence of a symbol which would turn the owner of any house in London, Paris or Berlin into a social
pariah
, but also the strange mixture of symbols. It was also the casual acceptance that this was just ‘old-fashioned décor'. Hitler, Juan Carlos, Iron Crosses and red berets just did not seem to make sense to me. It would take me a while to work out how they might fit together.

A few months later I went to the Gran Peña club on Madrid's Gran Vía, the city's answer to Oxford Street or Shaftesbury Avenue. Roughly equivalent to a traditional London club, its members, many of them former military officers, had erected a bust of Franco in 1992. That was seventeen years after his death and the same year that ‘modern' Spain was busy promoting itself at an Expo fair in Seville, at the Barcelona Olympic Games and during Madrid's turn as the European Union's ‘cultural capital' for a year. The occasion was a public appearance by Blas Piñar, the virulently right-wing leader (and editor) of Fuerza Nueva, a
neo-Francoist party that disbanded in 1982. The recalcitrant Blas Piñar was famous in the final days of Francoism for his
denunciations
of left-leaning priests. He was also one of the inspirations, if not fathers, of a gang of right-wing thugs called ‘The Guerrilleros of Cristo Rey', who had attacked left-wingers in the 1970s (and 1980s). A handful of tall, shaven-headed young Germans stood respectfully in the crowded room as Blas Piñar, a gifted orator, railed against Spain's young democracy. His speech was
peppered
with references to the saints and quotations from the bible, a large number of which he obviously held in his head.