Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through Spain and Its Silent Past
by Giles Tremlett
436pp, Faber, £16.99
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.
· Mark Cocker's Birds Britannica, written with Richard Mabey, is published by Chatto & Windus. To order Ghosts of Spain for £15.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875.