Spain and the Civil War, part three

Part one is here and part two is here.

Oh, for an editor! Because I forgot to note last night that there would be another post on Spain today, Steve weighed in with a sharp comment on yesterday's post that anticipates some of the topics in today's:

Levi, you raise some interesting questions but I think there are a few things working against "truth and reconciliation." Briefly, the war in Spain was super-political. That statement may seem obvious but There's a fairly well documented history of the actions of both the right and the left and neither come off particularly well. Next, Spain is flourishing. Supposedly their economy is about to pass Italy's in size. It's completely transformed from the backwater of Europe that it was before the Civil War--really agrarian and highly impoverished. It's a totally different country. These days, with the socialists in power you would think they might be interested in this sort of exercise but they have enough on their plate dealing with immigration, the Basques, and keeping the country growing. With the 70th anniversary of Guernica there's a lot of new scholarship coming out but unfortunately it's still fighting the battles of the 30's and not a pretty sight.

All these points and more come up in Ghosts of Spain: Travels through a Country's Hidden Past (2006), by Giles Tremlett, a Guardian correspondent who has lived in Spain for the past twenty years, watching as Spain recovered from the hangover of fascism and became a full participant in modern Europe. Thought he takes the reader on a fascinating trip throughout contemporary Spain, from its booming economy--especially its growing tourist industry--to changes in sexual mores to politics, the Iraq war, and the Madrid bombings of March 11, 2004, he opens with and regularly returns to the legacy of the war.


The book begins with the highly publicized reburial in 2002 of some Republicans who had been assassinated and left in roadside graves by the Falange during the war. The reburial, and the heated public arguments about it, seemed to open the floodgates to larger questions about the war and the buried history of violence on both sides. Tremlett travels the country being a good listener, interviewing veterans and visiting sites of remembrance, learning that the decades of silence have done little to lay the ghosts to rest; the meaning of those years remains in vigorous dispute--even where facts are indisputable--and the wounds are still raw. The silence has been viewed by many as serving everyone, for who wants to learn that a friend or neighbor was a killer when young? Who wants others to know their secrets? As Javier Marias's narrator says in Your Face Tomorrow:

No, I should not tell or hear anything, because I will never be able to prevent it from being repeated or used against me, to ruin me or--worse still--from being repeated and used against those I love, to condemn them.

But of course secrets have a way of coming out, and silence cannot be maintained forever. How Spain will answer the lingering questions about its past--and who will get to answer them--is still up in the air.

In an afterword to the UK edition, Tremlett explains that Spain's current Socialist government is slowly beginning to officially accept that the silence needs to end. A new law has been proposed that would, among other things,

set aside money to do something about Spain's abandoned Civil War and Franco-era archives. They will provide valuable extra material for historians and investigators, who continue to flood the market with work on the period.

But, just as when they were in power for the twenty years after Franco's death, the Socialists are still wary of going too far:

The pact of forgetting, however, remains intact as far as the naming of perpetrators is concerned. The draft law says documents emitted by the committee of experts will "omit any reference to the identity of anyone who took part in the events." There will, in other words, be no individual guilt. The only bad guy will be Franco himself. No one else must be blamed or punished for whatever they did in his name. Francoism, in that respect, remains an abstract thing.

The crimes will be brought to light, but the criminals will be left to their own consciences.

Maybe Steve's right about more information at this point not helping much: Tremlett agrees with him that in recent years, a spate of diametrically opposed histories of the war haven't really improved understanding of the period. At best, they've muddied the waters; at worst, they've inflamed unquenchable old passions. Maybe the majority of Spaniards would rather keep moving into the future, letting the past worry about the past. Maybe they would prefer, even when reburying the unjustly dead, simply to memorialize them and lay them to rest, leaving larger questions of blame and justice to the ages.

I think that impulse might be harder, at least to some extent, for a Brit to understand than for an American--even if we disagree with it. Tremlett seems a bit surprised that the war is still such a charged topic, but an American observer of Spain immediately starts thinking about our own civil war and its aftermath. It ended more than 140 years ago (though I suppose its last overt battles weren't really fought until the civil rights movement), yet in any of a dozen southern states, its legacy is still hotly, if covertly, contested. Any Republican candidate for high office has to at least give a wink and a nod to the idea that the South was right all along, that all we white folks (which can be read as "all we good Americans") would be better off had John Wilkes Booth been there on Inauguration Day in 1861.

Old loyalties die hard--and in a climate where it is assumed that one ought to be ashamed of one's past, resentment and self-righteousness can make a toxic brew. In that context, it's a bit easier to understand if Spain, less than forty years removed from fascism, wants to let troubling questions rest for another generation and instead take satisfaction in its stunning transition to democracy.

Spain and the Civil War, part two

Part one, which discusses Javier Marias's Your Face Tomorrow, is here.

A similar sense of uncertainty and secrecy runs through Carmen Laforet's Nada (1945), which was just issued in a new translation by the Modern Library. Written a few years after the civil war, when Laforet was only twenty-three, it tells of Andrea, a nineteen-year-old girl, orphaned by the war, who moves to Barcelona to live with her grandmother and aunts and uncles. The family has been impoverished and is clinging desperately to their run-down old house, reduced to selling off pieces of furniture to buy insufficient food. The war is rarely mentioned, but its effects are everywhere, from the poverty plaguing Barcelona to the psychological damage that has nearly destroyed the girl's aunts and uncles. Andrea's arrival at the house sets the book's gothic tone of secrecy and decay:

The old woman still couldn't understand very much, and then through one of the doors to the foyer came a tall, skinny man in pajamas who took charge of the situation. This was Juan, one of my uncles. His face was full of hollows, like a skull in the light of the single bulb in the lamp.

As soon as he patted me on the shoulder and called me niece, my grandmother threw her arms around my neck, her light-colored eyes full of tears, and saying "poor thing" over and over again. . . .

There was something agonizing in the entire scene, and in the apartment the heat was suffocating, as if the air were stagnant and rotting. When I looked up I saw that several ghostly women had appeared. I almost felt my skin crawl when I caught a glimpse of one of them in a black dress that had the look of a nightgown. Everything about that woman seemed awful, wretched, even the greenish teeth she showed when she smiled at me. A dog followed her, yawning noisily, and the animal was also black, like an extension of her mourning. They told me she was the maid, and no other creature has ever made a more disagreeable impression on me.

Over the course of a year, Andrea tries to grow up and establish a normal life, all the while watching as the family slips deeper into poverty and spins further out of control, driven apart by a variety of poorly kept secrets. Hints are dropped of betrayals, denunciations, affairs, violence, but nearly everything remains a bit cloudy, partially apprehended. As in the novels of Kazuo Ishiguro, characters damage themselves by intentionally closing off thought, by pretending not to know things they know--in this case, about the civil war and who did what to whom. The gravity of that hidden topic warps everything in the house and the novel, making for an atmosphere so claustrophobic that, when Andrea finally escapes, it's as if we've escaped, too.

Andrea is able to leave behind her obviously damaged family members, but in reality, Spain itself can't quite do the same. Many veterans of that brutal war survive, and Franco himself ruled until his death just over thirty years ago. Spain's almost immediate transition to democracy, spearheaded by Franco's handpicked successor, King Juan Carlos I, was remarkable, but it was built on an implicit understanding that no one would inquire too closely into the war years. Moving on peacefully, it was argued, required that there be no truth commissions, no war crimes trials, and no assessment of guilt. A silence that under Franco was enforced by law continued under democracy, enforced by custom--and of fear of what might be learned.

Yet can such important questions be suppressed forever? I think Javier Marias and Carmen Laforet would surely argue that they cannot. For a person to hide truths, especially painful ones, is to risk real psychological damage; who knows what it can do to an entire culture?

Spain and the Civil War

I've been letting my anglophilia show a bit too much lately, so today I'll write about some books I've recently read that deal, directly or indirectly, with the Spanish Civil War. The most impressive of the batch, the stunning first two novels in Javier Marias's projected trilogy, Your Face Tomorrow (2002 and 2004, English translations 2005 and 2006), have perhaps the most oblique relationship to the war. If Marias's Written Lives (2004), which I've praised here before, is a model of compression, distilling the lives of various writers to a couple of thousand words highlighting their lives' oddest and most eventful moments, Your Face Tomorrow is a model of extension, of expansive drawing out and study of individual moments, thoughts, and feelings.

Marias is clearly following Proust in his method, taking pages and pages of rich, circumspect prose to track, for example, a single sentence that opens a conversation--or most of a book to detail the interactions at a cocktail party. His narrator, a middle-aged Spaniard, newly divorced and lonely, is forever examining his impressions, weighing his subjective perceptions, attempting to read, between lines of a conversation, the intentions of his interlocutors. After all, if, as he has learned, one's deep-rooted perceptions of one's own marriage are not to be trusted, then of what use are first impressions, passing thoughts, hasty judgments?

That question is both the central thematic concern of the novel and the driver of its plot--which Marias somehow gets rolling despite his oh-so-deliberate pace. The narrator is recruited by an Oxford professor to a shadowy secret service agency, whose mission and whose ties to the government are both unclear, and whose work--at least the narrator's portion of it--consists largely of meeting businessmen, diplomats, and the like and writing instant, candid assessments of their character, trustworthiness, and likely future actions. Though the narrator seems to have a knack for the job, he remains skeptical, for the reasons given above; that skepticism allows Marias to tie his story to the story of the Spanish Civil War. The narrator stays up all night at his friend the professor's house reading a history of the war and reflecting on its confusing welter of split loyalties, double agents, political violence--and its hidden, mostly unspoken presence in modern Spanish life.

After all, the narrator thinks, there are Francoists, people who carried out political assassinations, alive and living quietly in Spain today, growing old under a different face from the one they wore during the war. Who and what and how can you trust, especially when--as in the case of the narrator's secret occupation or the post-war refusal to discuss war crimes and culpability--there is no way to verify your impressions, no outside confirmation of what you think you know?

That's what happens sometimes with those things that we deny or keep silent about, that we hide away and bury, they inevitably start to fade and blur, and we come to believe that they never actually existed or happened, we tend to be incredibly distrustful of our own perceptions once they have passed and find no outside confirmation or ratification, we sometimes renounce our memory and end up telling ourselves inexact versions of what we witnessed, we do not trust ourselves as witnesses, indeed, we do not trust ourselves at all, we submit everything to a process of translation, we translate our own crystal-clear actions and those translations are not always faithful, thus our actions begin to grow unclear, and ultimately we surrender and give ourselves over to a process of perpetual interpretation, applied even to those things we know to be absolute fact, so that everything drifts, unstable, imprecise, and nothing is ever fixed or definite and everything oscillates before us until the end of time, perhaps it's because we cannot really stand certainty, not even certainties that suit us and comfort us, and certainly not those that displease or unsettle or hurt us, no one wants to be transformed into that, into their own fever and spear and pain.

More tomorrow.