Pandora's Box, and the opening thereof

-Los catalanes huyeron y recorrieron por la universidad. No se pararon hasta cuando estaban en Argüelles. Y por eso los moros enteraron en la ciudad.("The Catalonians fled and ran through the university. They didn't stop until they reached Argüelles. That's how the Moors entered the city")
The guide paused and looked us each in they eye. No one spoke. No comment was made but I knew everyone in the group was thinking the same thing. Except me, who was thinking:
-There's nothing a Spaniard likes doing more than blaming other Spaniards when things get fucked up.
The left blame the right for rampant urban corruption. The right blame the left for the growth of nationalism in the Basque Country. The Madrileños blame the Catalonians for speaking and being Catalonian. And everyone thinks the folk from Seville are great to invite to parties but are just the kind of people who would leave a baby on a bus and forget all about it.

I had gone on a guided tour of what was the site of one of the most important battles in the Spanish Civil War, the Siege of Madrid. From November of 1936 to the early Spring of 1937 the people of Madrid endured daily air raids, artillery bombardment, hunger, cold and the presence of enemy troops on their doorstep. When I write of a doorstep I am not speaking of a collective and metaphorical doorstep but rather of the unsettling feeling of waking up one morning and finding the enemy on your own, and very real, doorstep. Today this battlefield is largely hidden by the modern development of Madrid. Largely hidden, that is, if you ignore the countless bullet holes, bunkers, trenches, artillery emplacements, republican command centres, air raid shelters, craters and battle scarred buildings that litter much of the city.

It took a good four hours to walk through the site of the battlefield, the ten of us in the group and the guide. To be honest I had pretty worked out the sequence of events from my own visit a few months before and reading Jorge Reverte's book La Battalla de Madrid. But it's always interesting to start a visit to what is a site of major historical importance and the guide begins by saying:
-Voy a hablar de la historia del sitio. No voy a opinar a las actos de las protagonistas ("I'm going to talk about history of the siege. I'm not going to voice an opinion about what the different sides did"). It's hard to imagine a guide at Culloden or Bannockburn saying the same thing. We just assume that what we are going to hear is history and not opinion. But you have to remember that in a country like Spain, British authors who write about the Spanish Civil War are more trusted than Spanish authors because they are:
a) Not Spanish and
b) They are British.
Spain is a country where not only was history written by the winners but, unlike the Scots, the losers did not get to set it to music. Spain is a country where opinions matter greatly, particularly when you are leading a group whose members may have grandparents who shot at each other.

The guided tour took us from the Puente de los Franceses where the men of the International Brigades held back wave after wave of attacks by the legionaries and the moors, crack troops of Franco's army; the Facultad de Filosofía where the men barricaded the windows with the works of Hegel, Plato and Aristotle; the Clinico where the men fought from ward to ward and where the English poet John Cornford manhandled his Lewis machine gun across the blasted landscape and knocked seven kinds of shit out of the fascists; all the way to Argüelles where General Miaja, dismissed by his contemporaries as mediocre and devoid of imagination but who gave Franco his first defeat, pulled his revolver on the fleeing Catalonians and made them turn and face the charging moors. And how many monuments did I count to these, and many, many more, examples of devotion to the democratically elected government of Spain? Let me put it this way: there is a street in Madrid named after one of Franco's Generals, General Yagüe, whose Nationalist troops, after their capture of the Republican city of Badajoz, massacred between 1,500 and 4,000 civilians, many of the men being castrated before they were killed.

There is one very good reason for this collective amnesia about what happened here in the Winter of '36. After the death of Franco the politicians negotiating the shape of the new democratic Spain decided it would be better if no one mentioned the war. Nobody would go to jail; nobody would have to account for what they had done; Spain could join the family of democratic nations and everyone would be happy. As for the thousands of families who didn't know where their father was buried, well, no one bothered to ask them. Franco had made sure the victims of the forces loyal to the Republic were exhumed and reburied with honours. As for the socialist mayors of the little pueblos outside of Toledo; the leaders of agricultural reform movements; or the people with the appellido Rojo or Red, they could stay where they were, in mass graves, many of which still remain unopened.

There have recently been a few attempts to affect a cure for this amnesia. The socialist government has passed a Ley de la Memoria Histórica. Amongst other things it will allow the families of those sentenced by Franco's tribunals to have these sentences annulled. This will include those sentenced to death. The Partido Popular (the party of the right) has called it "innecesaria, extemporánea, errónea, hipócrita, falsaria y jurídicamente irrelevante" ("unnecessary, untimely, wrong, hypocritical, false and legally irrelevant"). I'm not quite sure what they would have made of the family of Gregorio Mazariegos Sebastian. In 2006 they had him, and his seven companions, lifted carefully out of the mass grave where their francoist executioners had left them on the 14th of October 1936, just outside the town of Hornillos de Cerrato. Their coffins, draped with the flag of the Second Republic, were then buried, following a public ceremony, in the local cemetery. Presumably they would have said "We're very sorry for your loss but we think what you did was unnecessary, untimely, wrong, hypocritical, false and legally irrelevant". Gregorio was 40 years old. He worked as a labourer and he had seven children.