Ghosts of Spain by Giles Tremlett Read Free Book Online Page A

town Falangists, more used to marching unarmed people away at gun-point than fighting, did not test his word.
    Obdulia did not set foot in Poyales del Hoyo again for over thirty years. By that time
Quinientos
Uno
was dead, having succumbed to a heart attack while in Arenas de San Pedro. (Francisca Sánchez still thinks this was an act of God, even though it happened in the 1960s. ‘His sins caught up with him.’)
    She remembers, however, seeing another of the killers, El Manolo, ‘
que era malísimo
’, ‘who was very bad’, drinking in the bar. ‘I wanted to go and say something to him, but my sister wouldn’t let me,’ she said. ‘I didn’t lose my fear until Franco was dead.’
    ‘This thing has stayed in my mind all my life. I’ve never forgotten . I am reliving it now, as we stand here. All the killers were from the village. They came with the intention of killing, and then they went off to confess.’
    She is struggling now, to turn that hatred and fear into forgiveness . Finally she fixes me with a watery stare. ‘I can pardon, but I cannot forget. We have to pardon them or it makes us just like them.’
    The events of that day were, naturally, moving. But they also raised questions. In the pages of the
Diario de Ávila
– a newspaper normally devoted to recording the proceedings of local councils, the progress of public works and the endless routine of local fiestas – a former mayor of Candeleda had even accused Mariano of belonging to the armed Basque separatist group ETA. A defamation case was pending. For some people, at least, the reburials were a call once more to man – peacefully this time – the old ideological barricades.
    Why had such an apparently innocent act provoked such rage and outrage? What other ghosts had been lying under the
Vuelta
del Esparragal
? I decided to ask Damiana González Vadillo, the absent mayoress of Poyales del Hoyo.
    I went back to find Damiana the following Monday. But she was still away. The man who told me that, it turned out, was her deputy, Aurelio Jarillo. He spoke in the stilted jargon of the military-styled police force, the Civil Guard, he used to serve in Franco’s days. The relevant information had already been issued, he said, before adding that journalists had transformed it all into a pack of lies. When would Damiana be back? ‘I don’t know,’ he replied.
    Two weeks later I returned again. Damiana was there. Already in her seventies, she was into her last year as mayoress in a village of 700 souls. Like most rural communities in Spain, Poyales del Hoyo has been on the wane since the 1950s. At the time of the Civil War – when most of Spain lived in
pueblos
– it had more than 2,000 inhabitants. ‘And it had its own notary,’ she told me proudly.
    People from Madrid – two hours’ drive away – are buying up properties as second homes. Some have even moved here for a quiet life in the country. But Poyales del Hoyo was still ageing. ‘Twenty people have died since January,’ explained Damiana who, at seventy-seven, was hardly a spring chicken herself.
    Damiana claimed there had been no fuss, no objections and no obstruction from the village council to the re-burials. ‘I have no problem with that,’ she said. But she clearly did.
    As we spoke in her spartan office, she first expressed her shock that the church bells had been rung for ‘non-believers’. ‘How cynical . None of them would have liked that. They used the church here as a prison,’ she said.
    Then she launched into a tirade against the left and the Republican committee that had controlled the village in the nine weeks between the days that generals Sanjurjo, Franco, Mola and friends had risen up in arms to the moment when Franco’s Moorish troops swept into Poyales del Hoyo. Damiana, who was eleven at the time, had no trouble recalling the dates: ‘From July 18 to September 8, the day the Moors arrived.’
    The killing of dozens of left-wingers in Poyales was, she said,