Another thought on the Valley of the Fallen

Since my last post about the report of the commission on the fascist monument and burial place of the dictator Francisco Franco in The Valley of the Fallen on the Sierra de Guadarrama outside Madrid, there have been numerous articles in the Spanish press about its findings.

Essentially, the Commission suggested that the remains of Franco be removed and that the complex should become a permanent interpretative centre, telling the story of the Spanish Civil War, with a memorial to all the republican prisoners who were forced to build it. At first I thought this was probably the best solution.

The historian Santos Julia has a  better idea. He suggests that the Valley of the Fallen can never be given a new meaning: it cannot be other than what it was built as, any more than you can give new meaning to the Nazi prisoner of war camps of extermination. He suggests instead that, since the whole complex is so badly in need of building works at a cost of €13 million, the best thing to do is let time and nature take their course, allowing the whole thing to rot away, to become a ruin.

When in 1940, Franco let a party of falangist leaders, members of his cabinet and the diplomatic corps to the Sierrra de Guadarrama to detonate the first charge of dynamite and inaugurate the construction, he clearly intended to build a monument to his own posterity.

He said: The dimensions of our Crusade, the heroic sacrifices involved in the victory and the far-reaching significance which this epic has had for the future of Spain cannot be commemorated by the simple monuments by which the outstanding events of our history and the glorious deeds of Spain’s sons are normally remembered… The stones to be erected must have the grandeur of the monuments of old which defy time and forgetfulness.

(quoted by historian Paul Preston in his biography of  “Franco” P. 351).

I now think that Santos Julia may well be right – let it all fall into oblivion, neglected, crumbling, a fitting riposte to such hubris.

 

Paul Preston’s latest book on the Spanish Holocaust, Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth. Century Spain, a study of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, will be published in English this March.

Tags: Francisco Franco, Madrid, Paul Preston, Santos Julia, spanish Civil War, Spanish Holocaust, Valley of the Fallen

A monument to hate and vainglory

The Valley of the Fallen (Valle de los Caídos) is the mausoleum which the dictator Francisco Franco built for himself thirty miles to the north of Madrid, near El Escorial. From miles and miles away, you can see the huge ugly iron and granite cross that towers above the basilica where he and his right-hand man, the founder of the Falangistas, José Antonio Primo de Rivera are buried.

It was a megalomaniac project in which thousands of Republican prisoners were forced into slave labour and in which many died.  Their bodies are buried there too, contemptuously stuffed into walls and cavities, their tombs unmarked.

It is a vengeful, grim, cavernous place and for many years, nobody has been sure quite what is the best thing to do about it in the interest of national reconciliation.

Finally, the report of the Commission into The Valley of the Fallen has just been published.

Its main recommendations include

1. exhuming the remains of the dictator Francisco Franco and José Antonio Primo de Rivera and re-interring them elsewhere
2. turning the monument into a memorial for all the civil war victims and the thousands of prisoners who were forced to work on its construction.
3. Building a new interpretative centre, a museum of historical memory
4. Creating  a data base of all those buried there.
5. Building a “meditation” centre

The 12-person Commission was headed by two co-chairmen, Virgilio Zapatero, professor of Legal Philosophy, ex rector of the University of Alcalà de Henares and a former minister in the socialist government of Felipe González  (1986-93) and Pedro González-Trevijano, Professor of Constitutional Law, and rector of King Juan Carlos University since 2002.

The Commission was unanimous in its findings except  for the proposal to move Franco which was opposed by three of its members including Professor González-Trevijano.  Their objection to the removal is that there are no precedents in the European context for the reburial of an ex-head of State,  but especially that exhuming Franco’s corpse is “inopportune” and will contribute to dividing and radicalising public opinion. That is without doubt the case.

Furthermore, since the building itself is considered a place of worship  - it was granted basilica status in 1960 by pope John XXX111 – the Roman Catholic church would have to give permission to disinter Franco and Primo de Rivera.

Some families of the prisoners had asked for their relative’s remains to be returned to them for private burial but the Report says that identifying individual remains is practically impossible, an indication of the respect with which their remains were treated.

What will incoming Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy do with this hot potato?  He will certainly have little appetite for dealing with it, yet something certainly needs to be done.

It is shocking that such a monument to Franco’s arrogance and vainglory still exists thirty years after his death and the transition to democracy.

Tags: Commission on the Valley of the Fallen, Francisco Franco, Madrid, Primo de Rivera, The Valley of the Fallen, Valle de los Caidos

Another from My Spanish Bookshelf

This is simply a masterpiece, one of the best novels I have ever read – and on rereading it in the last few days, it is even better than I had remembered.

It is set in Lisbon in the late thirties in a blisteringly hot summer with the city “glittering, literally glittering” in the sun – but under the shadow of an increasingly paranoid fascist regime in Portugal and the civil war in Spain.

Pereira, an overweight widower with a heart condition, is the editor of the culture page of “Lisboa”, a second-rate evening newspaper. He spends his time translating French short stories, talking to the photograph of his wife, eating an awful lot of omelettes and reflecting on death.

He meets a young man, Monteiro Rossi, (“about the age of our son if we’d had a son”, he tells his wife’s photo)  and takes him on as his assistant to write obituaries for the Culture page although Rossi only writes unpublishable subversive articles – which Pereira pays for out of his own pocket.  It becomes clear that Rossi and his girlfriend Marta are dissidents, recruiting for the International Brigade to fight Franco, and although Pereira himself has until then been carefully politically naive, he finds himself changing and drawn into committing a devastating act of rebellion.

The book is written in a very unsettling form with the phrase “Pereira Maintains” a constant riff – someone is recording Pereira’s testimony but who? And what has Pereira done?

It is a brief novel – you can probably read it in a few hours and will probably want to – but then you may want to read it again.

Tags: Antonio Tabucchi, book reviews, Lisbon

The Magpie is back.

I can’t believe it has been so long since I wrote on the Magpie Press but I have just returned home after a month on the move – first of all, in Ireland, doing Children’s Book Festival visits, and finishing up in Madrid with a fun visit to the British Council school in Pozuelo where I met about 120 bilingual seven and eight year olds and their enthusiastic teachers – thank you to the school director Gillian Flaxman and all her staff who made my visit such a pleasant one.

Then it was off to COBIS, the conference of the Council of British International Schools, which was being hosted at King’s College, in Soto, on the outskirts of Madrid. I was leading seminars for KS1 and KS2 teachers but also had the opportunity to meet many of the delegates. I was delighted to hear the opening address by Matthew Syed, the inspirational journalist and author of “Bounce – The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice” and can’t wait to read his book.

I also had the greatest fun I’ve ever had at a conference, sitting in a baby chair in the hall in King’s College in Chamartin with thirty or forty Early Years teachers, listening to Alistair Bryce, a former headmaster and now author and educational consultant, talking about the impact on their attainment of getting children outdoors.

It was inspirational – I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go straight back into teaching or if I wanted to be a six-year-old again. He described how he got them building “small worlds”, like the project where the children first built a pretend toll bridge with construction blocks. Then they had to take to their bikes and pass through the bridge, select the REAL money from a bucket to pay their toll while the toll bridge keepers had to give out the right change. Everyone had a go as a toll keeper and as motorist and had a great day, learning about money and change and mental arithmetic on the sly, while they planned and cooperated on building their bridge. Alistair was brimming with ideas and had us all laughing like hyenas with his accents and affectionate imitations of the children he meets. Could he be Peter Kay’s handsome little brother?

On our shared taxi ride back to the hotel, Alistair told me that he has been commissioned to write a series of non-fiction titles for Bloomsbury over the next three years.

Look no further if you need an inspirational teacher/writer to come to your school or speak at your conference.
There was a nice surprise this morning when the postwoman arrived with copies of the second Witch-in-Training books, Spelling Trouble, which has just been published in Russian in a lovely little pocket edition.

And now it’s time to get back to my abandoned book about the Wrens, the twins who were not at all like one another.

I’ll be back soon.

Tags: Alistair Bryce, British Council School Madrid, Children's Book Festival, Children's Literature, COBIS, Halloween, King's College Madrid, Maeve Friel, Matthew Syed, Witch In Training books

A Writer’s home in Madrid – casa-museo Lope de Vega

Why are we attracted to the homes of dead writers? Or, for that matter, to newspaper features  about the rooms where living writers work such as those in El País and The Guardian? Do we think, as readers or writers, that seeing where a writer lived and worked will make us understand him or her the better? Is  it a kind of fetish, a sort of nosey-parkerism, or simply a harmless form of literary tourism?

Certainly a multi-million pound industry has been created in the last twenty-five years or so, establishing literary trails and tours around the Brontë family home in Haworth, Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon or Jane Austen’s house  in Chawton, Hampshire. You can visit Victor Hugo’s house/museum  in Paris, or the tower in Sandymount where James Joyce lived briefly and in which he set the opening chapter of Ulysses. You can even rent a room and have B&B in Stevenson House, Robert Louis Stevenson’s childhood home in Edinburgh.

And, in all probability, before you leave,  as well as the writer’s books, you can pick up a souvenir tea towel,  a poster, a plaster bust of the writer, a packet of Christmas cards, a pot of jam or a book of local recipes.

Or perhaps, you do need to look at Dublin bay from the top of Joyce’s tower on a chilly morning to understand what he meant when he wrote about “the snot green sea. The scrotum-tightening sea.”

Anyway, since I had come across by chance the casa-museo where the playwright Lope de Vega lived from 1610 until his death in 1635, I ventured in to get a glimpse of domestic life in Spain’s  theatrical Golden Age. It is a handsome three-storey house with a pretty walled garden which Lope described as his “guertecillo”, his little kitchen garden. It still has an orange, a fig and a pomegranate tree, a covered well, box hedges and a small potager with tomato, pepper and chilli plants.  Upstairs there is a chapel where the playwright celebrated Mass every day after his ordination – he had become a priest after his second wife died although that did not stop him taking a mistress and having another child. (He had a very colourful personal life and fathered at least eleven children.)

The main library/study on the first floor is a large elegant room, with a sturdy desk and wooden bookshelves containing about fifteen hundred giant books of the period, on loan from the National Library, where I longed to be left alone and browse. (In Lope’s last testament, he had left an extensive inventory of all his belongings so the house has been restored with the typical furniture and effects he described.) Off the study is the anteroom or drawing-room where the women of the household congregated – it is furnished, not with chairs but with a low platform covered in cushions, mirrors and a brass brazier, a reminder of the lasting influence of Moorish Spain even into the seventeenth century.

The attic floor was a later addition to the house when Philip III moved his court from Toledo to an overcrowded Madrid and householders, including even Lope de Vega, were impelled to offer accommodation to members of the King’s entourage. One of the rooms was the bedchamber of the swash-buckling Captain Contreras. According to our guide, Contreras was the inspiration for Capitan Alatriste, the hero of the contemporary Spanish novelist Arturo Perez Reverte.

If you are in Madrid, go and have a look  - and, amazingly, there is no “Exit through the gift shop” – not even a postcard for sale!

Tags: Lope de Vega, Madrid, Maeve Friel, Spanish dramatists, Spanish Golden Age

September in Madrid

Years ago, I spent some time researching and writing Here Lies, a guide to who’s buried where in Ireland,  and traipsed around the country recording the graves of writers and poets, heroes and villains, ancient kings, adventurers, eccentrics, saints, shipwrecks et al.  While some might think this was a macabre undertaking, it was anything but. It was a great journey of discovery that took me to tumbled-down abbeys, medieval cathedrals and municipal cemeteries, to the mass graves of nineteenth century famine victims and to megalithic cairns. It was an odd way to look at the landscapes of Ireland and its social, literary, political and cultural history but it was fascinating. (The book is long out of print but one of these days  I hope to update and publish it as an ebook, if I can master the technology!)

I still am drawn to old gravesites and burial grounds but am well aware that even the graves of the greatest literary giants may disappear without trace.

In Madrid, last week, I visited the churches where Miguel Cervantes de Saavedra (1547-161) and his great rival, the playwright Lope de Vega (1562-1635) are buried although there remains no record of their location, no tombstones, only the memories of their lives.

As a young man, Cervantes was accused of killing a man in a duel and was sentenced to have his right hand cut off. To escape his punishment, he fled Spain for Italy where he joined the army and took part in the decisive naval battle of Lepanto in 1571 against the Ottoman Empire.  He was badly injured during the battle and lost his left hand –  ironically, in an attempt to save his right hand, he lost his left one.  However, he was very proud of his nickname El Manco de Lepanto, the one-handed man of Lepanto,  and in the preface to Don Quixote remembered his years as a soldier as the best of times.

When he eventually decided to return to Spain to seek a royal pardon, the ship in which he was travelling was boarded by Algerian slave traders and he was taken hostage. He was to spend  five years as a captive in Algiers despite several attempts at escape and many unsuccessful attempts by his family to raise the ransom for his release. Finally, in 1580, two Trinitarian monks succeeded in raising the ransom of five hundred ducats and securing his freedom. Cervantes never forgot his debt to them. In the last years of his life, the impoverished creator of Don Quixote, took the habit of the Trinitarians and requested that he be buried in the Convento de las Trinitarias, near his home in Madrid, on the street now renamed Calle de Lope de Vega. It is still a convent for  the “descalzas”, the barefoot  cloistered Trinitarian nuns.

Disappointingly, the doors of the convent were firmly locked last Thursday morning – it is only open to visitors when Mass is celebrated and morning Mass had already ended.  The only reminder of Cervantes was a plaque on the façade recalling that it was Cervantes’ wish to be buried there in the church of the Trinitarian Order to whom he owed his rescue.

The convent is in one of my favourite areas of Madrid, the Barrio de las letras, the Arts Quarter, with its many literary associations, specialist and antiquarian bookshops, theatres and curiosities.

Just opposite the convent, in the street now called after him, the wild poet and satirist Francisco de Quevedo (1580-1645) lived for many years as did Luis de Góngora with whom Quevedo kept up a lifelong feud and further on, in Calle Cervantes,  next door to a tiny fábrica or workshop turning out churros and patatas fritas, I was delighted to find the home of Lope Felix de Vega, now a casa-museo.

As I had to wait forty minutes for the next tour, I took myself off to the nearby Bar Quevedo for a coffee.  It was packed with workers enjoying their “almuerzo”, the Spanish mid-morning breakfast.

The Bar Quevedo is the place to go if you are in search of castizo Madrilenian cooking – among its specialities are callos a la madrileña (stewed tripe), oreja a la plancha (grilled pig’s ear served in a spicy sauce) or mollejas al ajillo (sweetbreads with a garlicky sauce) as well as more conventional  dishes like calamares, pulpo a la gallega, (boiled octopus dressed with olive oil and paprika),  Iberian ham and patatas bravas.

I couldn’t help noticing that quite a few of the diners were blind or partially sighted and was taken aback to see that that the offices of ONCE, the Spanish foundation for the blind has its headquarters  at the end of the street. Had ONCE chosen the location deliberately, I wondered, given that the unfortunate Quevedo was famously short-sighted – he wore thick round pince-nez – in fact he has given his name to pince-nez in Spanish: quevedos.

My visit to the handsome three-storey casa-museo of Lope de Vega  with its pretty garden and intimate insight into life in Madrid in the seventeenth century was well worth waiting around for.

To be continued…

Tags: Barrio de las letras, Battle of Lepanto, Cervantes, famous graves, Lope de Vega, Madrid

Hail to Xavier I, King of Redonda

Redonda is a tiny uninhabitable island in the Caribbean, with high impenetrable cliffs and one boulder-strewn beach, home to colonies of boobies and rats.  Christopher Columbus discovered it in 1493 and named it Santa María de la Redonda.

But the Spanish novelist Javier Marías is its king and his court includes a glittering assembly of literary, cinematic and artistic giants.

The story begins in the mid 1800s when a trader from Monserrat claimed Redonda to celebrate the birth of a son after having had eight daughters. His son,  M.P. Shiel (1865-1947), later to become a popular author of fantasy literature , was crowned king of the island when he was fifteen by the Bishop of Antigua.

Shiel, or King Felipe I, moved to England and in turn passed the crown to the English poet John Gawsworth (1912-1970), whom he also made his literary executor.

Gawsworth, King Juan I, was a convivial man with a bit of a drink problem and generously gave or sold a host of dukedoms during his reign. Among his courtiers were Dylan Thomas, Henry Miller, Doris Day, Dirk Bogarde and Lawrence Durrell. He also, unfortunately, sold his own title as King many times over so that there is a swathe of pretenders to the throne. However, on his death-bed, he appointed publisher Jon-Wynne-Tyson (1924-) his only heir and literary executor, soTyson became Juan II.

Now enter Javier Marías. Marías’ novel All Souls, which is set in Oxford, features a character believed to be based on the poet Gawsworth. The then reigning King of Redonda, Jon Wynne-Tyson,  was so impressed by Marías’ portrayal of Gawsworth that he abdicated and the kingdom passed to Marías.

Since King Xavier I ascended to the (non-existent) throne, Marías has appointed several Dukes and Duchesses to his court, including Pedro Almodóvar, A.S. Byatt, W.G. Sebald and Francis Ford Coppola. In 2001 he created a literary prize which is judged by his courtiers. Among the winners of the Reino de Redonda prize are Alice Munro (Duchess of Ontario), Umberto Eco (Duke of la Isla del Día de Antes) and Eric Rohmer (Duke of Olalla).  I understand that the architect Frank Gehry (Duke of Nervión) has even designed a blueprint for the palace on Redonda.

In an interview in the Paris Review,  when asked about his attitude to the pretenders, Marías said he had decided never to reply to them, claiming that was the “kingly” thing to do. “What would the King of England or the King of Spain do? They would not reply.”

(The pretenders have also instigated their own alternative literary award, submissions open only to resident of the islands of the Eastern Caribbean.)

This is a true story.

Tags: All Souls, javier marias, John Gawsworth, Jon Wynne-Tyson, Kingdom of Redonda, M.P. Sheil, Redonda, Redonda Literary Prize