Los nazis escondidos en España

El escritor Andrés Pérez Domínguez aborda en ‘El silencio de tu nombre’ la implicación española en negocios con los alemanes durante la guerra

AURORA INTXAUSTI

Ver fotogaleríaEL PAÍS


Eran espías o nazis protegidos por Franco.Verlos pasear por Madrid en los cincuenta, por lugares muy concretos de la ciudad – restaurantes y bares como Chicote, Horche, Lhardy, Pasapoga: o sitios como el jardín botánico, el Museo del Ferrocarril, la estación de Atocha, las plazas Mayor o Santa Ana-, no resultaba nada extraño. Alemanes que colaboraron activamente con Hitler encontraron cobijo, una vez acabada la II Guerra Mundial, en la España del dictador. Se convirtieron en hombres y mujeres que vivían sin problemas en un país empobrecido por los resquicios de la Guerra Civil. La historia de estos personajes y el periodo que va de las décadas de los treinta a los años cincuenta del siglo XX siempre les han resultado atractivos al escritor Andrés Pérez Domínguez (Sevilla, 1969), una atracción que le llevó a investigar durante años esa etapa de la historia europea para escribir El violinista de Mauthausen y ahora la novela El silencio de tu nombre, que acaba de publicar Plaza&Janés. En ella el autor ahonda en la implicación española en el Holocausto y los negocios que mantuvieron empresarios afines al régimen con los nazis.


“El gobierno de Franco dejó que los alemanes sacasen de las minas wolframio, elemento químico estratégico, para aplicarlo en su maquinaria bélica y aprovechar sus características para endurecer proyectiles, especialmente los misiles antitanque, y el armamento”, cuenta Pérez Domínguez. Antes de empezar la II Guerra Mundial, en España había seis empresas que se dedicaban a la extracción de ese elemento químico y al finalizar la contienda se contabilizaron un centenar. El Gobierno consiguió a cambio 87.422 kilos de oro: de hecho, muchos de los lingotes que llegaban a España tenían grabada la cruz gamada.



La cantidad que pagó el dictador a los alemanes fue de cerca de 140 millones, 100 de ellos obtenidos de las zonas ocupadas. Parte de este oro se fundió y desapareció, o al menos no hay datos que certifiquen cuál fue su destino final. "Los alemanes no podían haber sacado wolframio porque Franco creó en 1939 una ley por la cual ninguna empresa extranjera podía tener más del 25% del capital en España. 

Para sortear los problemas legales, los alemanes se dedicaron a buscar testaferros españoles que figuraban como propietarios en las las empresas. Entre éstos destacaba José María Martínez Ortega, padre de Cristóbal Martínez Bordiú, yerno de Franco", puntualiza el autor de El silencio de tu nombre.


En esta novela, en la que se entremezclan aventura, intriga y romance, se refleja con nitidez cómo quedó Europa después de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, arrasada por la intolerancia y el fanatismo político. El escritor inicia su historia en 1950 en París cuando Erika Walter, viuda de un agente secreto alemán, huye a Madrid con importantes documentos que implican a altos cargos nazis en el exilio. Su amante en la capital francesa, el español Martín Navarro, ex miembro del PCE, abandona la ciudad y decide seguirla, a pesar de saber que si la policía le encuentra le meterá en la cárcel. En medio de esta historia, los amantes se verán envueltos en una trama en la que están implicados policías, nazis, comunistas y agentes de la CIA..

En El silencio de tu nombre, Pérez Domínguez tenía interés por contar los negocios que algunos españoles realizaron con los nazis: “No tuvieron escrúpulos de abastecerse con el dinero saqueado en los países ocupados por los alemanes y de proporcionales refugio o facilitarles la huida a terceros países”. De hecho, en España vivieron varios nazis hasta que murieron ya ancianos. “Era una manera de contar a través de la ficción que este país no fue neutral durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Hubo personas, vinculadas al poder franquista, que se aprovecharon y beneficiaron del expolio que los seguidores de Hitler cometieron en los países que fueron ocupando. Me gusta adentrarme en el pasado de mis personajes y que el lector contemple cómo su presente está condicionado a los actos que cometieron años atrás”, defiende el escritor.

Spain's civil war comes back to life

Spain's civil war comes back to life
Old divisions resurface across the country as descendants dig up mass graves
Giles Tremlett in Poyales del Hoyo

Sat 8 Mar ‘03 01.17 GMTFirst published on Sat 8 Mar ‘03 01.17 GMT


Mariano Lopez was down on his knees in the muddy hole opened up by the mechanical digger on a road outside the village of Poyales del Hoyo, picking up small fragments of bone and tooth.

"Look, this must be one of Valeriana's teeth. They smashed her skull. We could not find all the bits," he said.

Also missing from the grave that 26-year-old Valeriana shared with two other women, Mariano maintained, were the remains of the three-month-old foetus in her womb. "We looked for the skeleton of an unborn child, but we could not find it," he said. "It was said that they ripped her belly open with a knife."

Valeriana Granada's corpse had been left here in a field of wild asparagus on a wet December night in 1936. For more than 65 years she lay in this makeshift grave alongside Virtudes de la Puente, 53, and Pilar Espinosa, 43.

All had been hauled from their beds in Poyales that night by a rightwing execution squad working for the rebel forces of the soon-to-be dictator, General Francisco Franco.

Late last year Mariano fulfilled a desire planted in his head by his mother - who had told him terrible stories as a boy of the murders of the three women - by arranging for them to be disinterred. It was only afterwards, when he asked for permission to rebury them in the cemetery in Poyales, that he realised the deep, dark passions he had unleashed.

When he met the deputy mayor, Aurelio Jarillo, a former member of Franco's civil guard, Mariano says he was told to look elsewhere, as there was no more room in the graveyard.

"They treated the request with absolute scorn. It was the old right in action again," says Mariano, himself a former member of an anti-Franco revolutionary group.

Suddenly, the old hurts and hatreds of 65 years ago resurfaced, and a new battle was being fought in the village of Poyales.

In a place this small, with a mainly elderly population of 700 where victims' families and their killers have lived cheek-by-jowl for decades, ancient loathings are easily stoked back into life. And the pattern is being repeated in villages across the country.

During and after the 1936-39 civil war, tens of thousands of people like Valeriana were taken by rightwing gangs for night-time "strolls", or paseos, that ended with a bullet in the back of the head.

Now those graves are finally being found and the corpses disinterred as "historical memory" groups, like the one organised by Mr Lopez, are set up across the country. But digging up the past raises difficult, painful questions almost everywhere. Neither 40 years of Franco, nor 25 years of democracy, have fully healed the old wounds, or dispelled the old fears. "Even now many old people are too scared to talk about it," says Mr Lopez.

One of the biggest, and most painful, questions that the discovery of the mass graves has raised is what should be done with the victims' remains. Should the dead be given a full Christian reburial, with all the honour and dignity they were brutally denied?

New graves


It took a powerful campaign in the local press to push the authorities in Poyales to change their minds and allow a full reburial for Valeriana, Virtudes and Pilar.

In a moving ceremony, accompanied by poetry and tears, three tiny brown plastic caskets were buried side by side in the village's small, walled cemetery.

As the church bells rang, the coffins had been paraded around the village's narrow streets. The village authorities, mainly members of the country's ruling conservative People's party, showed their disapproval by staying away.

At the new graveside, Obdulia Camacho, 80, recalled how she was put on the same open truck that took her mother, Pilar Espinosa, and the other women to their deaths. Then 14, Obdulia was convinced that she, too, was about to die.

"I still don't know why they let me get off," she said. "They just stopped the truck. My mother gave me a hug, and that was the last I saw of her. It was raining and I started walking back."

In the village square after the reburial, Ezekiel Lorente, the grandson of Virtudes, and a leftwing village councillor, pushed his chest out and held his head high as a local rightwinger walked past. "He knows what I am thinking. This is our moment," he said.

That is not how the village's mayor, Damiana Gonzalez Vadillo, sees it. Her uncle, Angel Vadillo, led the gang of local men that killed the three women. She eventually granted permission for the burial to go ahead, but speaking in her spartan office above the square a few weeks later, the 77-year-old was obviously not happy.

She had been shocked, she said, that the church bells had been rung for "non-believers". "That is just hypocritical," she said. "Even the dead women would not have wanted that."

The killing of dozens of leftwingers in Poyales was, she said, the direct result of the left's own bloodletting in the first few months of the war, when the village was in their hands.

"One lot finished and the next lot got started," she said. "They killed one another as much for village arguments and old feuds as for anything else."

"The priest was paraded through the village with a horse's bridle tied around his head. They insulted him, blasphemed him and treated him like an animal. They made him drink vinegar and then killed him with two others."

The three victims, Valeriana, Virtudes and Pilar, she said, might not have been as innocent as some have claimed. "It was said that they were involved, that they pointed people out," she said.

Self-appointed avenger


Behind the murder and unceremonious dumping of the bodies stands the figure of the mayor's uncle, Angel Vadillo.

According to the mayor, he turned to violence only after at least eight members of his extended family were killed. She was unable to explain, however, the enthusiasm that he put into his job as the self-appointed avenger of the locality.

For every person killed by the left - and in most villages the left was not nearly as vicious as in Poyales - Angel Vadillo's men appear to have killed up to ten times as many.

In this area of Spain, most people are known by their nicknames. Angel Vadillo made up his own one day when he boasted in public: "I have killed 501 people."

The man known from then on as "501" imposed a rule of fear that still makes those who suffered tremble and weep. For years the families of "reds" were routinely persecuted and humiliated.

In Poyales, at least three dozen republican supporters were rounded up and killed. Nearby villages such as Navalcan, Cuevas del Valle and Candeleda, where the research is more complete, each report around 80 paseo victims out of populations of between 1,000 and 2,000.

The killers who worked for Angel Vadillo often received money for completing their tasks. Many, in those harsh years, needed it. Some of them, now mainly frail old men, are still alive.

A man now in his 80s, who sits in Candeleda's day centre for the elderly, was, according to his contemporaries in the village, one of them. Although he did not take part in the killings of the three women, villagers recall him as a gun-happy young Falangist and participant in other killings.

The old man did not look much like a killer, with his crutches, rheumy eyes and anorak shoved into a plastic bag tied to his belt, when he agreed to answer some questions during a break in a bingo session at the day centre. He certainly was not about to admit to having shed innocent blood.

"I joined the Falange because my uncle told me to. I was off at the front when people were being killed here," he said, before cutting off the conversation.

Luckily for any alleged killers who are still alive, nobody is intent on bringing them to trial. Those campaigners trying to dig up graves want the truth, not delayed justice.

"I can never forget what they did. The killers were all from the village. But I can pardon them. If we don't do that, we end up being as bad as they were," says Mrs Camacho.

Such emotions are starting to be felt even at a national level, with some surprising results. Under pressure from the new wave of excavations sweeping Spain, a parliament dominated by the new right, in the form of a People's party whose "founding president" was once a Franco minister, has finally taken the historic step of formally condemning the uprising that sparked the civil war and led to nearly four decades of dictatorship.

Mr Aznar's government appears to believe that, having condemned Franco and agreed a motion allowing the use of municipal funds to help unearth bodies, the problem has been dealt with.

But campaigners say the fight is by no means won.

They plan to take the defence minister, Federico Trillo, to court for refusing permission to disinter 50 executed Republican soldiers from a mass grave in Cartagena, where his father was a Francoist mayor and his grandfather was one of Franco's military commanders.

Back in Poyales, Mr Lorente says that younger generations had found it easier to bury the ancient enmities.

Some members of the traditional rightwing families in the village had quietly expressed their regrets about what happened to his grandmother.

Talking to the old people of the village, though, the tales of horror - rape, mutilation and humiliation - roll on, many accompanied by tears and, despite the decades, rage.

Bonifacio Morcuende recalls being woken up in the middle of the night to take his mules and cart out of town to pick up a dozen bodies of local republicans who had been shot.

A non-political man, he is dubious about the merits of delving into that period. "If you stir up shit, the stink rises," he says.

The mayor and her colleagues have refused to even discuss paying for any more digging. But Mr Lopez is determined. He has sworn to start fresh digs around Poyales in the spring. Yet more old wounds, in Poyales as elsewhere, are soon to be reopened.

update from 2015:
The residents of Poyales had been inspired by the example of Emilio Silva, who exhumed his grandfather’s unmarked grave in Priaranza del Bierzo 15 years ago and who then went on to lead the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory in Spain (ARMH). When Tremlett interviewed Silva in Madrid in 2011, after revisiting an only slightly changed Poyales, he learned that the movement had helped to exhume around 5,500 bodies of Franco’s victims from 280 unmarked ditches like the one in which Pilar, Virtudes and Valeriana were dumped. In January this year, the ARMH was awarded an €829,000 ($100,000) human rights prize by the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives and the Puffin Foundation in New York for further exhumations.
That Obdulia remembers the night of her mother’s execution in such vivid detail provides us with a harsh reminder of just how recently the Spanish civil war occurred. But despite being within - deeply traumatic - living memory for many Spaniards, discussion and knowledge of the conflict and its repercussions is still, Tremlett writes, shied away from within communities, often entirely absent on school curriculums, and passionately opposed by varying political factions.
Spain’s “pact of forgetting” was ratified, by both right and left wing parties, in the 1977 Amnesty Law; it constituted an agreement not to mention, in public or private discourse, the war itself, and not to try and seek out the perpetrators of terrible crimes or mourn openly for their victims, even if they could be identified. It was and is seen by many Spaniards, desperate to move away from this terrible epoch of their history, as the reluctantly-accepted condition of a smooth transition to democracy.
Tremlett convincingly shows that this amnesty was effectively an agreement to collective amnesia, an amnesia that is still prevalent in Spain. It has meant that no one in Franco’s rebel army, nor on the Republican side, has ever been put on trial for crimes against humanity. The tragic corollary of that is unknown numbers of murdered Spaniards languishing in anonymous oblivion for decades, their families denied knowledge of how or where their loved ones died.


The struggle of Poyales’ residents to bury their dead ceremonially, and to hold guilty individuals to account, is of course deeply moving on a human level; but it is also symbolic of Spain’s struggle as a whole to come to terms with its civil war and to what its countrymen did to one another. With seismic political changes on the horizon in Spain, it might well be that this struggle is entering a new stage of its tortuous journey. Tremlett’s book has never been more relevant.

I Spain , You Spain , He Spains..............

Spanish Holocauste ( Paul Preston's recent publication)

That is what Paul Preston, a leading British hispanicist and highly respected historian in Spain, has done in The Spanish Holocaust. The result is an essential read for anyone wishing to understand Spain and its recenthistory. It is also a damning indictment of Franco's deliberate and far-reaching brutality, which destroys the myth cherished by some Spaniards that he was a "soft" dictator.

One of the many remarkable things about thisnarrative of butchery is, indeed, how it proves Garzón's central accusation – that Franco enacted a ruthless plan involving the "detention, torture, forced disappearance and physical elimination of thousands of people for political and ideological motives … a state of affairs that continued, to greater or lesser extent, after the civil war ended".

Preston provides facts, figures and harrowing descriptions in the first full and proper attempt to explain the horror. He does not shy away from strong words – "holocaust" is deliberately chosen to describe the extent of cold-blooded killing "because its resonances with systematic murder should be evoked in the Spanish case, as they are in those of Germany or Russia". Nor does he ignore the undoubted cruelty and the crimes committed on the Republican side of a three-year civil war sparked by a 1936 military rightist uprising against an elected government. Two-thirds of the clergy in the Catalan province of Lleida were killed. A third of all monks in the Republican zone also died. That is extreme religious persecution.

about Montalban ( source The International Socialism journal on line)

The anger and ethics of Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

Issue: 110
Posted: 6 April 06

Mike Eaude

Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (1939-2003) was one of the last of the engagé writers of Southern Europe, left wing intellectuals produced by the large Communist parties of the 1960s and 1970s. Prolific journalist, essayist and novelist, he was an outstanding interpreter of Spain in its transformation from the sad, frightened country of the Franco dictatorship to its limited, but vibrant, bourgeois democracy today.

Occupied city

Montalbán, born in the year of Franco’s Spanish Civil War victory, grew up in the slums of Barcelona during the grimmest years of the dictatorship. Many men were absent—dead, exiled or in jail. Montalbán met his father for the first time when, aged five, he passed a strange man on the stairs. A few streets down from Montalbán’s home on the Calle Botella, the biggest brothel district in Europe thrived. Working class women in these post-war years often had to choose between prostitution and their children’s starvation. Mass prostitution, which the anarchists had sought to abolish during the Spanish Revolution of 1936 by closing brothels and encouraging women to take up arms against fascism, prospered under the rule of Franco and the church.

1940s Barcelona was treated by Franco and a vengeful Catalan bourgeoisie as an occupied city. For the regime, Catalans were guilty of three cardinal sins—Communism, atheism and separatism. Franco set out to extirpate all signs of Catalan and working class culture.

In the Raval, the part of Barcelona’s Old City where Montalbán grew up, particularly punished by the bombs of the Italian air force based on Mallorca during the civil war and a traditional stronghold of anarchism, 99 percent of the population was anti-Franco. Montalbán remembered women with children begging for scraps at their door, even though his mother had no income apart from what she earned by sewing. He remembered their fear of ‘fascist commandos with their heads shaved to the scalp who forced people to drink castor oil’ just for speaking Catalan. In a memorable phrase in The Pianist, a character says, ‘I know the neighbours, almost all of them have lost the war and they carry the post-war round on their backs like a dead body.’ Just to survive, the defeated and impoverished population needed basic solidarity with each other. This background, both an open wound and an ethical touchstone, pervades all Montalbán’s writing.

Montalbán was one of the few who escaped from the Raval to the university, another world only a 15-minute walk from his home. At university he became involved in opposition politics, was arrested in 1961, beaten up personally by the notorious torturer Inspector Vicente Creix and sent to Lleida jail. This was, Montalbán said, his second university. He joined the PSUC, the Catalan Communist Party, a commitment he maintained throughout his life.1 Despite his international renown as a prize-winning essayist and novelist, he remained loyal to the solidarity of his childhood right up to his fatal heart attack in October 2003.

Released from jail in 1963, in an amnesty occasioned by Pope John XXIII’s death, Vázquez Montalbán embarked on a career as a journalist. His early fame came from his skilful political analysis and acid, sarcastic turn of phrase, especially in the PCE-sponsored Triunfo. A more lasting claim to fame and the motive for this article is that, between 1977 and 1990, he wrote half a dozen novels that stand among the best in modern Spanish literature. The Pianist (1985),2 discussed below, is his masterpiece. Galíndez (1990) runs it a close second: it is a fictionalised account of the 1956 kidnapping in New York of an exiled Basque Nationalist leader and his torture and murder in the Dominican Republic by the dictator Trujillo.

Montalbán became best known, though, for crime novels, featuring his detective,
Pepe Carvalho. Of these, The Angst-Ridden Executive (1977), Southern Seas (1979) and The Rose of Alexandria (1984) fall into the half-dozen mentioned above.3 In Montalbán’s crime novels, the crooks are revealed as the rich who defend their privilege with murder. This was not new. Raymond Chandler, king of the modern ‘hard-boiled’ crime novel, explained in the 1950s:

‘The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels…where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of money-making.’

Chandler carries on in this vein, and doubtless readers of this journal need little convincing. However, Chandler was not a man of the left. Rather, like many writers of his period, he hated the gangstercapitalists who he blamed for destroying the lives of middle class people like himself in the 1930s Depression.

Like Chandler in Los Angeles, Vázquez Montalbán tears the mask of democracy off a city—Barcelona, in his case—run by crooks, but the context is very different.
The Angst-Ridden Executive and Southern Seas were written at the time of Spain’s 1970s transition from dictatorship to bourgeois democracy. The background is not the defeat of the left in 1940s Los Angeles, but the mass struggle against the Franco dictatorship. Montalbán was not (as Chandler was) a former oil company executive, but an activist in that struggle. In his 1970s and 1980s novels, Montalbán is explaining how the change in 1970s Spain was not a ‘rupture’ with the dictatorship, but a controlled ‘transition’ to parliamentary democracy. He shows how ‘the same dogs with different collars’ continued to exercise power in the new Spain. The political structures changed, but economic power remained in the hands of not just the same class, but the same individuals. 

Sceptic or cynic?

Montalbán’s experience as a campaigning journalist had taught him that, with an increasingly sophisticated mass media assimilating opposition, it was not enough for a left wing journalist just to denounce injustice. He was ambitious to reach out to an audience even wider than the big readership of his articles in Triunfo. With crime novels, Montalbán found a popular genre with down to earth language, in which he could include the songs, memories, smells and tastes common to his own and millions of others’ youth.

Montalbán conceived the Carvalho novels as a chronicle of contemporary Spanish and Catalan society, explaining events to his readers very soon after they had occurred:

‘In each book I look at different questions: in The Angst-Ridden Executive the illusions of the transition from dictatorship to parliamentary democracy, in Murder in the Central Committee the crisis in the Communist Party, in Offside sport and the fleeting nature of media fame, in An Olympic Death entrepreneurs whose athleticism consisted in lining their own pockets as quickly as possible.’

In The Angst-Ridden Executive, for instance, Carvalho investigates the murder of Antonio Jauma, found dead with a pair of women’s knickers in his pocket. The police quickly conclude that Jauma was the victim of a sex intrigue. Unconvinced,
Carvalho finds that Jauma was killed not because he was a womaniser—though he was—but because he was honest. Jauma was silenced because he had discovered a financial hole in the multinational company he worked for. The multinational had helped finance the 1973 coup in Chile, and now money is being illegally siphoned off to fund fascist groups during Spain’s transition. As one of the characters explains, ‘[Fascist groups] probably won’t be necessary, but the ruling class likes to cover all contingencies.’

In his investigation Carvalho visits six of Jauma’s friends from their time together in the underground struggle at university 15 years before. Montalbán uses the investigation to look back into history, to note how each character has evolved, to examine who has betrayed their youthful beliefs and who has not.

He gives his narrative historical depth in another way too, throughout the Carvalho novels. The detective’s office is at the seedy end of the Ramblas and he often wanders through the Raval, where streets, bars, shops and people he meets all spark off memories. In this constant inventory of the past, Montalbán is writing an alternative working class history, a history of those excluded from official history. The detective has a sort of ‘family’—his call-girl girlfriend Charo, his ‘secretary’ and ex car thief Biscuter, and the ex-fascist boot-black Bromide. All three have their own carefully documented histories. Bromide, for example, was a volunteer with the Spanish Blue Division fighting for Hitler in 1941 against the Soviet Union. Living at the bottom of society, Bromide is a reminder that Franco didn’t even look after his own.
The detective, clearly not to be identified with the author but nevertheless sharing much of his past and his point of view, is vital to making the novels work. Carvalho loves good food, wine, sex and long rambling conversations. Quite consciously, Montalbán challenged a certain puritanism on the left by creating a hedonist detective. Given the world’s a mess, Carvalho ruminates, he has to look after himself, because no one else is likely to. For this reason, he has often been called a cynic. As if to reinforce this, the detective growls, ‘I believe only in my stomach,’ early in The Angst-Ridden Executive. But at the climax of the novel, when the murderer offers Carvalho a Nuits St George, Carvalho does not act cynically. Magnificently, he pours the exquisite wine onto the priceless carpet. He is a sceptic, as you have to be when listening to the lies of the powerful, but no cynic. He will not drink with a killer. Like Chandler’s detective Marlowe, Carvalho is the moral man on the mean streets.

The revolutionary Marxist Ernest Mandel had a related criticism in his social history of the crime novel, Delightful Murder:

‘In general all Montalban’s books are soaked in an atmosphere of spleen, scepticism and fin-de-siècle ennui, very significant as the background of a whole layer of intellectual Eurocommunists. It is a break with Stalinist dogmatism and hypocrisy, but hardly a step towards greater lucidity of what this society and this world are all about’.4

There is some truth in Mandel’s comment, for Montalbán’s tone is often one of rather bitter sarcasm. This is rooted in his appreciation of the defeat the working class suffered in the transition, and his and its subsequent disenchantment with the new ‘democratic’ Spain. Mandel, however, fails to pick up the contradictions in Montalbán. As a Communist Party member, Montalbán supported all the nefarious deals made by the PCE with the ruling class to hold back working class struggle. However, as a novelist, where he lets his imagination rip, he shows a reality which does not excuse this CP-led defeat of the working class. Similarly, in his 1990s fiction he was an outspoken critic of Barcelona’s Olympic Games and the building speculation, corruption and destruction of historic memory they brought, yet the party to which he belonged supported the games.

Mandel’s remarks also make one ask, what would a revolutionary detective novel be like? How would it be different from Southern Seas, in which the detective reveals the lies of the powerful, gives voice to the working class, expresses and practises solidarity with the poor, explains the history of the people and places he describes, shows the ruling class as imbeciles or cynics, deliberately avoids handing over criminals who are criminals because of their social oppression to the police who are portrayed as the enemy, and recognises explicitly that a detective—one person— cannot change the world, however much he wants to?

No escape

Southern Seas’ title announces its theme—the yearning to run away. Carlos Pedrell, a capitalist with artistic leanings who is terrified of ageing, wants to follow in the steps of Gauguin. But a year after leaving, supposedly for a South Pacific island, he is found dead. His exotic destination was much closer to home—the cheap estate whose construction he himself had financed in the suburbs of Barcelona. Montalbán, good materialist that he is, always explains where people’s money (or lack of it) comes from. In the 1950s Pedrell had made his fortune building blocks of flats, ‘vertical shanty-towns’, for workers who migrated from southern Spain. These were thrown up without basic services or transport on the outskirts of industrial cities like Barcelona.

The central character of Southern Seas is Ana Briongos, a Communist and car factory worker who lives on the estate built by Pedrell. Unlike the other characters, she knows there is no escape to a fantasy world, which is why she fights in union and party for a better world here and now. It is Ana who explains to Carvalho the Moncloa accords of late 1977, the pact that rounded off the transition. The Communist Party, which had already accepted the monarchy in return for its legalisation, now signed with government and bosses an agreement to restrict wage rises to a maximum 22 percent when inflation was running at 29 percent. Ana, the rank and file fighter, explains:

‘No one swallowed the Moncloa pacts, but we had to defend them with all the good faith we could muster…that in the long run they would favour the working class. In short, we spouted what they’d told us to say. Soon everyone saw it was a sell-out, like all the rest.’

With the character of Ana, Montalbán breaks with traditional ‘hard-boiled’ novels by introducing the organised working class. He also breaks with their characteristic sexism—Ana speaks with her own voice.

The defeated within the defeated

The Pianist is a non-Carvalho novel that takes the two high points in Spain’s 20th century class struggle, the revolution of pares them. The choral novel is divided into three parts. In the first, a group of anti-Franco ex-university friends, on a night out in 1983, go to a fashionable club in the Raval, with transvestite singers and an elderly pianist. Javier Solana, the new Socialist minister of culture, is holding court at one of the tables. Not even Montalbán, so politically prescient, could have realised how suitable a representative of Spain’s new rulers Solana was. This affable, smiling cultural mandarin would become NATO general secretary, and be responsible for the bombing of Belgrade in 1999 on behalf of the main imperialist powers.

Half the group of friends, now building their professional or business careers, look back on the transition as ‘a confused period’, and the other half are disoriented by how little was gained in the transition. At the end of the night Montalbán leaves the group of friends and follows the old pianist, who walks home to his dingy flat where a bedridden old woman awaits him. Lovingly, the old man talks to the invalid and washes her.

The middle part of The Pianist moves back to 1946 in the same Raval. This intense heart of the novel draws on Montalbán’s childhood memories and is one of the most deeply felt and beautiful passages in his 80-odd books. A group of young people are on the flat rooftops, the only place where they can talk freely and escape the ubiquitous spies and cops of the dictatorship. They are fascinated with stories of history, unlike the group in the first section who want to escape from their recent history. A new tenant arrives, just released from prison. It transpires that he is the old pianist of 1983. Again unlike the group in the first section, this 1946 group show solidarity with Albert, as he is called, and help him find Teresa, the invalid of the first and the third section will tell us just who he is.

This third part takes place in Paris in mid-July 1936. The pianist Albert has newly arrived on a music scholarship and goes to see a well known Catalan musician, Doria, and his girlfriend, Teresa. His career loosely based on the painter Salvador Dalí’s, Doria had appeared in the first section as a grand old glory of Spanish music, revered by Solana; in the second as someone praised by the dictatorship’s press; and in the third as an iconoclastic revolutionary. To Doria’s shock, when Franco’s uprising comes on 18 July, just four days after the massive Popular Front demonstration in Paris on Bastille Day, Teresa sees through his revolutionary posing. ‘Bla, bla, bla,’ is her reply to Doria’s empty aesthetic verbiage. She leaves him and accompanies Albert, who has decided to give up his music career and return to Barcelona to defend the revolution by fighting with the POUM.

When asked in an interview why he, a PSUC militant, made Albert a POUM member, Montlbán replied: ‘Because those of the POUM were the defeated within the defeated.’ The reply reflects the novelist’s post-transition pessimism, but also his understanding that the POUM, crushed by Stalinism, represented the defeat of the revolutionaries within the general defeat of the Republic. This recognition led Montalbán in the 1980s, alongside other PSUC militants, to insist that the PSUC should correct the murderous calumny of 1937 that Andreu Nin and the POUM were fascists. It did.

When The Pianist came out in Spain in 1985, it was widely acclaimed. It was later voted book of the 1980s in an El País readers’ poll. Almost everywhere, it was reviewed as an elegiac novel looking back to the glorious, irrecoverable time of the civil war and lamenting the sad fate of Teresa and Albert, the defeated of the defeated. Times had changed, and revolution was no longer desirable or possible.

Despite their praise, though, the critics misread the novel. In fact, they reflected the point of view of the group of friends in the first section. They overlooked the critique of the friends’ ‘aesthetic’ or ‘individualist’ abandonment of class struggle, which is implicit in the novel’s backward-moving structure, in which the 1983 present can only be understood through the 1936 and 1946 pasts. Doria and Solana represent, in their different ways, the continuity of opportunism.
Nothing can be expected of them. But the 1983 friends’ lack of interest in history and in Albert, the POUMist, underlines the failure of the anti-Franco left in the transition. Albert is left alone, with nothing but his love for Teresa and his unbroken integrity. If the lessons of solidarity and history are forgotten, Montalbán is telling us, then the tragedy of losing the civil war is repeated in the tragedy of losing the transition.

The Pianist is a stunning political novel. It is written with the sarcastic anger or ‘spleen’ of Vázquez Montalbán at his best. And it contains, too, the melancholy undercurrent of understanding that, in both civil war and transition, capitalism won out. It is true that Montalbán the Eurocommunist fails to make a balance sheet of Stalinism and thus offers no political perspective that will help us win next time. Political analysis, though, is not the function of fiction. In the novels mentioned, he creates imaginative worlds with historical depth, and insists that no change is possible without understanding of our history.

NOTES
1: The PSUC, though autonomous to some degree, was part of the PCE, the Spanish Communist Party. The PSUC disintegrated in the 1980s and Montalbán ended up supporting one of its descendants, Iniciativa per Catalunya, a rather right wing ‘eco-socialist’ ex Communist Party.
2: Published in translation by Quartet in 1989, but now out of print.
3: Six of Montalbán’s 20 Carvalho novels are available in English, published by Serpent’s Tail, including The Angst-Ridden Executive and Southern Seas.
4: Out of print now, Delightful Murder was published by Pluto in 1984.

Las Dos Españas

February 16, 1936

Parliamentary elections

Elections held for the Cortes (Spanish parliament). They are won by the 'Popular Front' (a coalition of left-wing political partie
Election map of Spain, 1936: Areas coloured black had a left majority, white areas had a right majority, light grey areas were closely divided between left and right, and the dark grey area had voted for parties of the centre.

true Spain real no ghost the subterranean hatred every where deep inside

Of dance and death

Giles Tremlett finds echoes of the Spanish civil war still resounding as he examines a country that has raced to modernity in Ghosts of Spain, says Mark Cocker (The Guardian)

The small settlement of Poyales del Hoyo is an undistinguished village on the edge of the Gredos mountains in central Spain. Perhaps it's not surprising that today it bears no trace of its dark and shameful past because for almost 70 years not even its own inhabitants dared admit the events that took place there on December 29 1936. 

On that night three women were herded on to a lorry and driven to a quiet spot where they were murdered. Their crime, if one can call it such, was that in the early stages of Spain's civil war, two had shown sympathy for the Republican government. 

The third victim, however, Valeriana Grenada, did not even have any political affiliation. A jealous wife and friend to the local Falangists simply hated Valeriana for once having been the lover of her husband. 

That was enough to seal her fate. The pregnant 26-year-old had her skull smashed in and her womb ripped open with knives. 

According to Giles Tremlett, the forsaken spot where these women fell has become a focus for the process of remembrance and catharsis that has taken hold in Spain during recent years. 

For three generations these barbarous crimes were part of the nation's unacknowledged memory, a state of collective amnesia forced upon half of Spain by the triumph of Franco's fascist regime in 1939. 

Yet even at his death in 1977, Spaniards failed to revisit their past in case it opened fresh divisions just as the country was poised to move forward into an era of renewed democracy. However, victims such as Valeriana are the unquiet spirits that haunt the modern Spanish state and are the ghosts enshrined in the book's title.

Dig anywhere, according to its author, and the spectres rise to the surface. 

The grand total of political assassinations and revenge killings is about 160,000, and by no means all were perpetrated by Falangist forces. 

The Republicans were responsible for a third, but there were significant differences between the slaughter on each side. 

Whereas no Republican leader sanctioned political murder, on the Nationalist side it was an official and systematic strategy. 

Moreover, those who fell in the Caudillo's cause were accorded a hero's burial, their names memorialised in town squares throughout the country, while members of the clergy were often beatified by the Catholic church. By contrast, the 100,000 victims of the far right lay mouldering in unmarked graves, and only now, at sites such as Poyales del Hoyo, has Spain confronted its long-suppressed grief and collective guilt. 

Tremlett skilfully transports the reader back and forth from the medieval atmosphere and tragic events of Spain's mid-20th century, to its modern and sophisticated present. If I feel any disappointment in Ghosts of Spain, it is because, having opened up this psychologically rich seam, Tremlett feels he has exhausted the subject after just three chapters. Thereafter he explores a wide range of other contemporary Hispanic themes - tourism, flamenco, the national love affair with architecture, political corruption at the centre, and regional separatism in Catalonia and the Basque territory - but none looks as important, nor offers the reader the same depth of insight. 

In short, the civil war and its aftermath seem the real spectres haunting this nation. 

In understanding these subjects, we come close to comprehending so much more about its national life today. In comparison, the other subjects appear merely as good debating topics for Spain's voluble and ubiquitous café society. 

Setting aside this single lament, one senses that the Guardian's correspondent in Spain knows his adopted country extremely well. His prose is as fluent as his Spanish language, and he offers us heaps of information without ever seeming condescending or knowing. 

Like every good journalist he is also prepared to rough it in the interests of the facts. This is particularly evident in the chapter on flamenco, which turns out to be nothing like the picture-postcard song-and-dance routine of the tourist advertisement. 

Instead it emerges as Iberia's equivalent of rap or hip-hop, a dark, visceral music of the poor ghetto, where heroin is rife and cuts swaths through the ranks of flamenco's street-life troubadours. 

The model and epitome of this tortured lifestyle was the flamenco genius Camaron de la Isla, who died at 42 and was so strung out on smack and coke he had a personal nurse to administer his promiscuous chemical intake. 

To get at the truth and atmosphere of flamenco, Tremlett tracks it through the mean streets of Seville's most dangerous barrios and ends up behind bars himself - if only as a visitor - to explore the strange talent contest that takes place in Spanish prisons, where many of flamenco's most gifted exponents reside.While Spain's race to modernity has involved acquisition of these more baleful aspects of contemporary western life, Tremlett also depicts a nation with many enviable qualities, such as its new prosperity, its openness on matters of gender and sex, its passionate belief in community politics, the can-do sense of optimism and that Hispanic elan simply for enjoying life.