“Women of my generation had no role models. We began our journey into adulthood without signposts. We moved forward taking good decisions, but also making mistakes. We progressed, although it was sometimes hellishly difficult,” recounts Almudena Grandes, the best-selling Spanish writer, whose novel Dr Garcia’s Patients was published this year in Polish.
Aleksandra Lipczak: We are talking the day after Franco’s exhumation.
Almudena Grandes: I am a little disorientated, because for me it was a strange experience. After everything I have written and said, after all the documentaries I was involved in, I spent the day they finally exhumed Franco in Kraków. Actually, not even in Kraków, but on a plane.
Today, over breakfast, I watched all the videos and read the commentaries. What do I think? I think that it is all connected to the Spanish anomaly. The fact that the dictator had been buried in a place maintained with public money, where anyone could take a selfie at his grave, had made it into a folkloric anomaly. However, this isn’t the heart of the problem.
So, what is it?
The fact that, during the transformation, they went for a slogan which sounded really good: “To move forward, one must forget.”
Spain decided to rebuild its democracy from scratch. Without recognition of earlier democratic traditions, and without breaking ties with the dictatorship. We won’t go there; we won’t talk about it. We’ll see if the problem fixes itself. This was the approach. Only, nothing fixes itself. A dictatorship that lasts 40 years shapes the feelings, thought processes and conscience of the entire country. Four decades of indoctrination and manipulation don’t just disappear overnight if we say: “From henceforth we are democrats, and the best democrats at that.”
The fact that Franco’s body was, until now, buried at the Valley of the Fallen was part of that strategy. We didn’t discuss it, because we had already moved on. As we say in Spain, we tried to make a tortilla without breaking eggs. Let me be clear: you can’t.
The exhumation is a very powerful image. It came 40 years too late, but that is no reason not to do it. I see it above all as a form of redress for the victims of the war and dictatorship. More than a hundred thousand people in Spain are still buried by roadsides, in mass graves and in the forests.
Spain comes second only to Cambodia in terms of the number of people in the world who disappeared during wartime. And our judges haven’t spent even a fraction of the time on helping the families of the missing as they have supporting Franco’s family in their efforts to block the exhumation. The dictator’s exhumation is the first step towards, finally, starting to deal properly with the issue of the mass graves.
I was surprised to learn that as much as half of the Spanish population was against the exhumation.
But that’s not true!
I found two polls that suggested this.
That’
