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Nigel
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Lorca's skeleton speaks of a new Spain
Aug 30th, 2009 at 2:22pm
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The horror of the Spanish civil war had roots in every town, every village. But until recently, the past was left undisturbed, like the communal graves, writes Daniel Hannan.

"It was five in the afternoon – precisely five in the afternoon". Thus begins the saddest and most beautiful poem in the Spanish language, "Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías".

Five o'clock, for Spaniards, used to mean only one thing: it was the hour at which bullfights began. The verse is an elegy to a popular matador, gored to death in 1934. The author, Federico García Lorca, was his friend.


It is Lorca's most wrenching work: austere, macabre and utterly Spanish. We conventionally say that great poets are universal in their appeal, but Lorca's work is peculiarly Hispanic, dry as the soil of his native Andalusia, tragic as the rite of the bullring.

"Bullfighting," Lorca once explained to a friend, "is the liturgy of the bulls: an authentic religious drama in which, just as in the Mass, there is adoration and sacrifice of a god."

Like all aficionados, Lorca was keenly interested in death, and the morbidity of his verse was perhaps its most Spanish attribute. In one of his poems, he eerily foretold his own demise:

"Then I realised I had been murdered. They looked for me in cafes, in cemeteries, in churches, but they didn't find me. They never found me? No. They never found me."

Shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, when he was exactly my age, Lorca was shot by Nationalist sympathisers in Granada, and his body thrown into a mass grave. The reasons for his assassination have never been fully explained. It may have been his Leftist sympathies, or his homosexuality, or it may simply have been a grudge. Until recently, no one much wanted to raise the subject.

Now, though, Lorca's body is to be unearthed, and the story of its exhumation is the story of Spain's recent past. For a long time, the first rule of Spanish society was "Don't mention the war".

It was almost impossible to get Spaniards to talk about what happened between 1936 and 1939: as soon as they sensed that a conversation was tending in that direction, they would deftly change the subject.

I have a Spanish friend, a former MEP whom I know to be from a prominent Nationalist family. We have known each other for 10 years, stayed at each other's houses, chaperoned each other's wives.

But the closest he will come to mentioning his father's sympathies is to say: "My grandfather was a Carlist." (The Carlists were supporters of a pretender to the throne who had fought two earlier civil wars, and who fell in almost to a man behind the Nationalist side in 1936.)

My friend's squeamishness is understandable. The truth is that, during the civil war, Spaniards did unspeakable things to each other. Relatively few died in battle: the front line was a ramshackle, Iberian affair, with ordnance hurled ineffectively back and forth. When the Soviet Union started backing the Republic, a German liaison officer was heard to remark (to Franco's mortification): "This isn't a Spanish war any more: it's a real war."

No, the true abominations took place behind the lines. When territory was captured, units from the victorious side would round up people who were suspected of having voted the "wrong" way. Tens of thousands were executed in cold blood.

As another Spanish friend – this one a socialist – put it to me: "If my grandfather had burned down the church where yours was priest, and if your great-uncle had commanded the firing squad that killed my grandfather, you can see why neither of us would want to raise the subject."

Both sides were bloody, intolerant and authoritarian. Most of us, I suspect, would have wanted to be somewhere in the middle, standing for personal liberty, free elections, property rights, the rule of law. But this option was closed. The few who tried to advocate it – men like the grandfather of former prime minister José María Aznar – were promptly condemned to death by both Left and Right.

Within hours of the insurgency, the Republican Prime Minister telephoned the Nationalist General Mola to seek terms. Mola replied: "You have your followers, and I mine. If we were to strike a deal, we should both be betraying our ideals and our men."

It was true: Spaniards had reached the point where they felt they could settle their differences only by force. To their credit, they have never since tried to shuffle off the blame on to a few ringleaders. They know that the horror that overtook their country had roots in every town, every village.

Spaniards, in short, had good reason to want to bury the whole foul business. The past was left undisturbed, like the communal graves. Until perhaps 10 years ago, if Spaniards wanted to read about the civil war, they generally relied on translations of works by British historians.

Then two things changed. First, the last of the wartime generation, sensing that their end was near, started to unburden themselves. Memoirs and local histories began to appear, and sold in astonishing numbers. Fuller chronicles of the period soon followed. Today, almost every Spanish bookshop has a civil war section.

At the same time, almost accidentally, the socialists returned to power. I say "almost accidentally" because, had it not been for the terrorist atrocity in Madrid a few days before the 2004 general election, the conservative government would almost certainly have been re-elected.

As it was, a stunned looking José Luis Zapatero found himself in government without a ready programme. What he had instead was a sense that Spain was prepared to talk about the past, and that his own supporters, as heirs to the defeated Republicans, wanted to acknowledge their dead. He understood their sentiment: his own grandfather had been shot by Nationalists in León in 1936.

So began the fraught and painful process of national recollection. Not everyone was happy. Many Spaniards felt that Zapatero risked stirring up all the enmities that had been forgotten since Franco's death.

Lorca's descendants were initially against his disinterment: like many of their compatriots, they wanted no part in disturbing ghosts. In the end, in Lorca's case as in the nation as a whole, the exhumers got their way. Having had my doubts at first, I am glad of it.

Spaniards are excavating their history with as much reverence as the graves themselves: slowly, patiently and with gentle brushwork. The dead deserve as much: they have suffered enough.
  
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Re: Lorca's skeleton speaks of a new Spain
Reply #1 - Aug 30th, 2009 at 2:35pm
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Excellent post Nigel. Thank you.
  
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