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The Necessary Courage
As a lover and student of Spain, I always felt that its people's greatest quality was their courage. There have been many geniuses and saints, but what grips my mind about Spaniards when I read their history is their grandiose, irrational and sometimes even suicidal bravery before danger and adversity. After all, they were the ones who invented guerrilla warfare and the bullfight!
Sadly, though, I notice that this noble and marvellously incautious sense of life is dying out. Risks bear an unrecoverable cost, and over recent years Spaniards have been infected with the virus of rationalistic pragmatism, undoubtedly transmitted with the lock-stock-and-barrel importation of some glittering French hypermarket such as Continent or Carrefour. Today's new, TV-weened generation is more conscious of the importance of cost reduction and quality control than living, and dying, for the moment, and it shows in their political behaviour. With all the democratic guarantees provided by their membership in Europe, they are still, at least in rural communities such as Montefrio, as timid and apathetic as under the Fascist regime which ended in 1975.
The event I am going to describe here was brought vividly back to my memory when I returned to Montefrio in 1983, and stumbled across, in a magazine I found in the local boarding house, an interview with its hero, who had been released from prison ten years earlier, at a time when it would have still been impossible to discuss the matter in public.
It was on the 20th of November, 1960, then, that I saw, up close and with my own eyes, that increasingly rare thing which I call "courage". I was doing my first year of studies at the Madrid University and living in the Residencia de Estudiantes Miguel Guitarte, which I chose from the list provided by the Spanish Consulate in New York because the name, that of a Civil War hero on Franco's side, reminded me of guitars. I had just arrived from gringolandia dressed in a baby blue drip-dry suit, I had blue eyes too, but not as blue as the suit, and I wanted to study the two poets I liked best, Lorca and Saint John of the Cross, without realizing that both were banned from the programmes of the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Since I had spent part of my boyhood in Mexico, I already spoke Spanish fluently.
I was the only foreigner in the student's hostel, and although my companions, the sons of worthy but penurious provincial families, identified me as a living representative of that other nation which had helped bring about Spain's ruin, I had come to live in their country on my own, and they had to accept me in spite of the fact that I was English. In fact I was treated by all with kindness and humour, and one of them, Pepe Avila, is still my friend today.
The 20th of November is the anniversary of the death of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the charismatic leader of the Spanish Falangist movement, who was executed after being taken prisoner by the Republicans in the Civil War. My friends at the Residencia worshipped him, and said that Franco – an uncharismatic man – had deliberately sacrificed him to the Reds because he preferred to have him dead as a glorious martyr, than alive as a political rival. Ironically, Franco himself died - 16 years after the time of this story - on the same day, so that the two rivals are now mourned together.
I hate fascism in all its forms, both Hitler's and Stalin's, but these sensitive, dreamy and above all very innocent boys had no similarity to the violent goons we see today on television. More than anything else, I felt sorry for them, because I knew that the grandeur which they longed to restore to their country was a thing of the past.
That winter they took me to all of their political meetings, which had to be clandestine or at least discreet, because Franco took a very dim view of their literal interpretation of the Falangist credo. One night they celebrated a secret tribute before the grave of a Civil War hero, a comrade proscribed by the regime, in a lonely cemetery on the outskirts of Madrid, where they read a manifesto by the light of an oil lamp - a scene which Goya could have painted! But the big day for the "pure Falangists" was the 20th of November when, they claimed, Franco had deliberately abandoned José Antonio to the Republicans' firing squad, even though they had offered to release him in exchange for prisoners of their own.
We marched all night long, shouldering the huge wreathes of flowers on long poles through the sierra, taking turns with other groups who went ahead in buses. We warmed ourselves with the brandy from our leather wineskins, the slabs of coarse bread and raw ham, the songs of the Civil War and, above all, the friendship which united us. I didn't care if I was with the good guys or the bad guys, and it wasn't clear which side they were one anyway, since the men around me hated Franco as much as any Republican. I was 19 and all that mattered was that I was in Spain, the heroic, romantic and tragic Spain of Goya and Lorca.
The day rose cold and grey, like the hard stones of the Castilian meseta. As well as the sleek aparatchiks of the Franco regime, a strange crowd began forming, like clusters of ants, in front of the imposing basilica of the Valley of the Fallen, Franco's monument to the Civil War dead of the Nationalist side, carved into the granite mountainside with the slave labour of the Republican survivors. All of the foreign ambassadors were there in full dress, under order by the regime. There were many busloads of "blue shirt" students such as my friends, nervous and grim, as if they knew that something was going to happen. There was even an old and solitary German army officer with his black boots and iron crosses, and who was lacking either an eye, an arm or a leg, although I cannot remember which.
Franco arrived, a small, timid man, between two rows of students who raised their arms and shouted "¡Arriba España!" and then, obligatorily, "¡Viva Franco!". Inside the enormous tunnel of the church, we the students sat in the last rows, half a kilometer from the altar. During the mass, the bells tolled and the lights went out for the ritual moment of the noche perpétua, creating a highly dramatic effect, since the darkness in the windowless church was total.
Then, a voice rang out, as if the dead man himself were speaking from the tomb, slowly and accusingly, filling the entire nave with its echo. "¡Franco, tu eres un traídor – Franco, you are a traitor!".
The lights were turned on, the soldiers rushed down among the rows of students, a young man struggled, not to hide himself but, rather, to offer himself to them, since his companions were trying to make him sit still. The men with the long overcoats and the machine guns slung over their backs took him away, and they kept him. When Franco left the church he had to walk once more between the two rows of blue shirts, and we saw how unnerved he seemed when the moment came for the students to shout out the customary ¡Viva Franco! but instead remained stonily silent. That marked them as his enemies, and was a sign of courage too.
The insult to Franco went down in the unwritten history of those hard years, under the name of el día del grito, the day of the shout. The Mass was broadcast direct by all of Spain's radio stations and heard by all the diplomatic corps, although the shout and its author were buried in silence for a long time. The young man was doing his military service which qualified him for a court martial, and an automatic sentence of 12 years in a military prison, those dank dungeons were so many died of tuberculosis, either during their sentence or after their release.
They tell me that, after the death of their oppressor, many of the old students of the Residencia Miguel Guitarte joined the new Socialist party, and that some of them are now administrators of the Spanish democratic government. I wonder if they have not also, with the passing of youth and adversity, given up that somehow necessary courage of theirs.
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