Ghosts of Spain by Giles Tremlett Read Free Book Online

family members. It seemed as though the graveyard at Poyales del Hoyo, with its three or four tiers of niches on each wall, had been specially brightened up with chrysanthemums, carnations and gladioli for the event.
    In a ceremony accompanied by poetry and tears, three small, brown caskets were buried side by side. Heliodora, the infant daughter whom Valeriana had handed to a neighbour in the square before climbing into the truck, was there. She was now a womanin her sixties, with neat, short-cut silver hair. She read a simple, self-composed poem over the grave while Obdulia – a squat, olive-faced, healthy-looking eighty-year-old – looked on.
    She wanted to tell them, though it was already obvious, that she was pregnant, five months gone./ I was two, held in her arms, crying out ‘mamá!’, as she implored them to let her live, saying she had done nothing wrong/ Those animals, who had nothing inside, said: ‘Let go of her or she will get a bullet too.’
    Previously, with the church bells ringing, the coffins had been carried around the village’s narrow streets. It was a symbolic act – the first time the losers of a war that had ended more than six decades earlier had paraded their dead in Poyales del Hoyo.
    We gathered in the square afterwards. There, Ezekiel Lorente, grandson of Virtudes and now a Socialist village councillor, puffed his chest out and held his head high as a local right-winger walked past. ‘He knows what I am thinking. This is our moment,’ he told me.
    Stories began to emerge of what life had been like in Poyales del Hoyo under the boot of Ángel Vadillo. A teary-eyed woman, Francisca Sánchez, appeared in the square with a list of names, hurriedly scribbled down on a piece of scrap paper, of those in the village who were killed. Her own father, Evaristo, was one of them. Another man, ‘
El Ratón
’ or ‘the mouse’, she claimed, had his eyes gouged out. In the Tiétar Valley – and elsewhere in rural Spain – many people, entire families, are known by their
motes,
their nicknames. There was the usual struggle to remember people’s real names, but soon the piece of paper was being turned over as the list headed past the two dozen.
    As people drifted off, a convoy of cars headed for Candeleda for a last look at the former grave. Obdulia waited for us in the Capra Hispánica, the main bar on Candeleda’s Plaza del Castillo.
    Obdulia was carrying an old, browned photograph of Pilar. It must have been taken when her mother was in her thirties. Like many elderly women still found in
pueblos
around Spain, Pilar was already in that state of semi-permanent mourning thatafflicts those whose relations are forever dying. A black shawl has been wrapped tightly across her chest and tucked into a long black skirt. She is, of course, much younger than her daughter is now. But they share the same high, rounded cheekbones, dark complexion and strong mouth. In fact, there is something severe about Pilar as she sits sideways on a wooden chair, one hand holding the back, her hair parted in a razor-sharp line down the middle and staring directly into the lens. Perhaps it is the responsibility of being able to read, or the knowledge that comes from it, that adds the
gravitas
to her face.
    After the killing, Obdulia revealed, she stayed locked into her home. A few months later she left for the nearest large-sized town, Talavera de la Reina. Even there, however, the Falange tried to come for her. Franco’s repressive machine was in full and bloodthirsty cry in those first few years during and after the war.
    But she married young and, by then, had a husband to save her. ‘I married a brave man who defended me,’ was how she put it. Obdulia’s husband had been, like General Franco himself, a ‘
novio de la muerte
’ (a ‘fiancé of death’), a member of the country’s most famously fearless fighting force, the Spanish Legion. He told them they would only get to Obdulia over his dead body. The small