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

merely the result of the left’s own bloodletting at that time. ‘One lot finished and the next lot got started. They killed one another as much for village arguments and old hatreds as for anything else,’ she said. I heard this version of events in other places, too. The violence was already latent – with each village a ticking time-bomb of angry resentment.
    The village was divided into what had already become known as ‘the two Spains’ – the right and the left – and the bloodletting was mutual. Here, as in nearby Candeleda, the prominent men of the right were rounded up and kept in the church. But here, unlike in Candeleda, nine were taken out and shot. ‘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,’ she explained.
    Damiana recalled some of the several dozen names which, until Ezekiel Lorente persuaded the council to take it down, had figured on the list of ‘
Caídos por Dios y por la Patria
’ on the church wall. ‘A man called Eloy Garrido was one of the first to be killed. He left a widow and three children. They killed him because he was from the right – there was no Falange here then, just “the left”and “the right”. Then there were Juan and Isaac. They were father and son. Three sisters were left as widows.’
    The three victims in the Candeleda grave, Damiana suggested, were not as innocent as those who dug them up have claimed. ‘It was said that these women were involved [in the killings], that they pointed people out,’ she said. Lorente’s grandmother Virtudes , the mayoress claimed, had once threatened to kill her own mother with a cobbler’s spike after an argument over a loaf of bread. The mayor had to organise an escort for her.
    In a place this small, the renewed arguing over events of sixty-six years earlier had quickly turned personal. ‘The younger generations of the Lorente family and my family are friends. He has told them one side of the story. I never wanted to tell them mine. I never talked about it. But now I have been forced to,’ she said. Her own, personal, vow of silence had been broken.
    Her uncle had, she suggested, turned to violence only after several members of his own family were killed by the left. ‘My uncle fled. He hadn’t done anything by then, but they would have killed him if they could. Another uncle hid in the roof of a house. There were many families like that,’ she said.
    She was unable, or unwilling, to explain, however, the enthusiasm that her uncle would put into his job as the self-appointed avenger of the Tiétar Valley. His nickname of
Quinientos Uno
, she suggested, was an exaggeration.
    For every person killed by the left, however, his men killed several times more. That does not mean they were necessarily more bloodthirsty. They did, after all, have more time.
    One of Franco’s generals, Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, had been explicit about what was expected of the Nationalist forces when the rebellion broke out. ‘For every one of mine who falls, I will kill at least ten extremists. Those leaders who flee should not think they will escape [that fate]; I will drag them out from under the stones if necessary and, if they are already dead, I will kill them again.’
    When the right started to wreak its revenge, Damiana’s mother kept her indoors. Her explanation to her eleven-year-old daughterfor what was going on was simple: ‘Just as they treated us badly, so they are now being treated badly.’
    Damiana really could not understand the fuss about the graves of Pilar, Virtudes and Valeriana. Educated under Franco, she still believed the propaganda of the time. Had not the Generalísimo built, at the ‘
Valle de Los Caídos
’, ‘The Valley of the Fallen’, outside Madrid, a monument to all the dead of the Civil War, regardless of which side they were on? The