Sometimes we would go up to Las Mercedes or La Esperanza, much-loved mountains in Tenerife, and the elders who went with us would point out traces of other times. Those things were still talked about in a low voice, it was the dictatorship.
We boys didn’t really know what the war had been about, we didn’t talk about it at home, we didn’t say how things had happened and why the two older ones were so quiet. The father and the mother, why were they silent when the radio was on, brandishing the hymn that gave way to the news like a whip?
We did not know what the war was, or what it had been, until much later. But that silence, like blood, with which the national anthem was received, as well as the news in which the Generalissimo was the protagonist of the well-being of the nation that he had saved, actually meant war. It was war. The prolongation of the war that came to be called post-war.
It was a civil war, this means that it was for the extermination of the other. The rebels were really the thugs, they wanted an order to subvert the one that the republicans had given themselves. They rummaged until they made the future out of blood and death. In Seville, for example, a thug had more than forty thousand individuals killed, adorned at dawn with the symbols of his command. He shouted insults over the radio at the enemies of the country, who were of course patriots. He asked for the wall to citizensamong them poets and professors, people without weapons, whom he adorned with the worst virtues so that those who pulled the trigger would feel nothing but patriotic ardor.
War was not waged to claim a place, a mountain or a shore. It was done to point out that what was defended by those who started it, the so-called national side, was fair, and to repudiate those who were with the opposite side, which was the Republican side in this case. They made hatred a patriotic obligation, and when the war was over they kept saying it, thus arming themselves to kill even when the caudillo who had them killed was in his agony.
Those who won the war were not content with simply exterminating the diversity of ideologies that made up the remaining symbols of the Republic. They continued, in the long aftermath, to exterminate any form of opposition to those who had won. The bayonets never stuck, not even when that man, Minister Herrera Esteban, announced at dawn that Franco had died. They killed, they ordered to kill, as Raimon said in his song, “the hands that order to kill.” The horrible need for ridicule that is murder in the name of the Fatherland.
It was a long agony. That of the country, until Franco’s death, a prolonged agony due to the desire of his family and other relatives that this dying symbol would not end. They wanted it to extend the forty years of peace that the news and speeches spoke of since Fraga found the occurrence of the 25 years of peace that the nation celebrated when it was that time of the end of the war. They filled the walls (and walls) of the Spain that attracted tourists with that word, peace, as if their presence were going to eliminate the traces of the conflict and here peace and then glory.
That peace to which they alluded coincided with the great grievances of the homeland, the memory of the dead, of those assassinated after the war, of the exiles who rebuilt their lives in distant homelands with no other possibility than to draw maps so that their grandchildren would know what Where did your ancestors come from? From what land viciously uprooted from the bare feet of those who left.
In the long post-war period (until a few weeks before the dictator’s death) there were executions in the barracks, there were persecutions and arrests, there was no freedom in the universities or in the chairs, there were arbitrary incarcerations of students and workers, and Spain lived a long darkness seen from exile by those who were expelled forever.
I heard the news of Franco’s death in a house in Villa Benítez, high above Santa Cruz de Tenerife. First I heard the tremulous, early-rising voice of that Minister of Information, and immediately I shouted to those who were sleeping: “Now!” I went to EL DÍA, my newspaper, and there I saw a colleague crying, who was a Francoist, whom I encouraged because he was dying for a reference. In reality, a dictator was dying whose people wanted to remove, in vain, the blood from his hands.
I never forget that moment, and I don’t forget because I felt like a good person doing charity at the time, but because perhaps at that moment that co-worker was the tearful symbol of an era of deceit and intimidation, of propaganda dark in a country that the war bled. The cry for a bandit. Franco died, that was obvious, but it took so long, it took so long, for his mark to die that now those hands that remained inert on November 20, 1975 inhabit other hands and other throats and other memories that cleanse that period as if nothing had happened . A political leader has said, when those who have been transferred, in Seville precisely, from religious soil to common land, are restored to civil land, that it is better to remember the living. As if the dead who were sent to kill those gyrfalcons did not deserve to be remembered and not forgotten.
The war did not end when Franco said or when he died, the war continued. The Valley of the Fallen continued as a symbol of the gray past, which were the fallen of those who fought for the winning side, and there were other symbols that persist until now, among them those raised by those who defend the cuttings of the patriotic Falangism of the extreme right, that has its own names and also lives in Congress. The war was too long for it to find a truce now, because what happened was much more than a war, it was a civil war and that adjective can never be removed from the worst of our memories. So Queipo, cruel symbol of that barbarism, the one who ordered to be killed, the one who made the trigger loosen, is no longer on blessed land, they took him at dawn, at the time he himself was preparing his radio speeches marked by laughter and shrapnel, to the common land. Nobody has the privilege of surviving in sacred the evil that was allowed in life, and even after the war. The surviving children have the right to know that justice was going to be done some day, and it has already been done and without blood.
In our land there are vestiges of that barbarity that was born right here, in our mountains, and how hard it was since then for so many to survive the consequence of the agreement of those thugs, the hands that ordered to kill until making what they called post-war unbearable.
