Arms raised, torches lit, shouts from the heights of Spain. They are Falangists who march at a marked pace carrying on their shoulders the coffin of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, shot three years earlier by the Republicans. It is November 20, 1939, and the funeral procession begins that will transport the lifeless body of the great martyr of Francoism from Alicante to Madrid, where the dictator awaits him. Without stopping, day and night, with relays every 10 kilometers, the journey will end with the burial of the founder of the Falange in El Escorial, where he will rest until his remains are moved in 1959 to the Cuelgamuros Valley, from where he was exhumed. last year.
This show of force by the victors takes place in post-war Spain, but in those same days other events occur: Miguel Hernández is transferred to prison, the famous writer of CeliaElena Fortún, arrives in exile in Buenos Aires and Pepe, a member of the 127th Workers’ Battalion, is shot. These are some of the stories that Paco Cerdà (Genovés, 1985) tells in Gifts (Alfaguara), a parallel portrait of those ten days and eleven nights, in which the writer and journalist recounts the ghostly parade and what he wanted to eclipse: the stories of repression and resistance of the vanquished who, after the Falangist exaltation, were also there, present.
What was the intention of this funeral pilgrimage?
Exalt, appropriate and hide. Exalt the figure of someone who, during his lifetime, had only 0.4% of the votes and who became a creative genius and architect of empires. Franco appropriated everything that the Falange represented and did not forget the culture of death that prevailed in Spain during the Civil War and that would mark the post-war period in such a crude way. That is, to instrumentalize the figure of José Antonio to cement the dictatorship with a great symbol and demonstrate who was in charge in New Spain. Finally, let’s sweep under the carpet what was happening, all that repression and resistance on the part of the victims.
This court is perhaps the most palpable demonstration of the mythification of Primo de Rivera by the regime. What did this sanctification consist of?
By erasing his human dimension, eliminating the parts of his speech that bothered him and encompassing him as an empty icon within a mass movement, a movement that was very static. Although José Antonio preached national unionism and certain elements related to social justice that could be disconcerting for those of us who are very far from his positions, Franco abandoned this part to rely on national Catholicism, the Church and militarism. In other words, he emptied it on one side and filled it with other content on the other. It is incredible that a 33-year-old person can bear all the epithets that were attributed to him during this court.
And why him?
First of all, because he was shot during the war. We must not forget that if we want to look at history in a complex way. To use Franco’s terminology, he was a martyr, a victim of the civil war. And there were three elements that the first Franco regime emphasized: the cross, the homeland and death. Religion, his idea of Spain and many died defending these ideas. In this context, José Antonio was useful.
Generally speaking, I am interested in the losers of History, the vanquished, those who pay the price of sacrifice in the name of a collective ideal.
He speaks of the funeral procession as a show of strength by the nationals, but did it also send a message to the dissidents?
Yes, we don’t command. Place. We scare. Place. Cautious. I would sum it up like this.
You yourself say that when you saw the video of the pilgrimage filmed by the National Directorate of Cinematography, you wondered what was behind this act of exaltation. What was behind it?
Behind them was my great-grandfather in prison for having been a councilor of the Republic who would later be shot, in 1943, in Paterna. And like him, many others. Behind them were 260,000 prisoners, 100,000 war disabled, 90,000 forced workers from the battalion. There was censorship, fear, exile, concentration camps, purged teachers, women whose bodies were used mercilessly… Meanwhile, in a country that the newspapers called “home repair”, they were trying to create an invented reality, delirious, sumptuous and empires that had no basis in reality. There was a lot to hide and it was a rather clever way of building the myth, instilling fear and eclipsing repression.
Gifts It focuses precisely on this microhistory of the vanquished.
Generally speaking, I am interested in the losers of History, the vanquished, those who pay the price of sacrifice in the name of a collective ideal.
What interests you about them?
Fernando de Rojas, author of Celestinewho was censored by the regime, said “he who believes is not defeated but he who believes is.” These are stories that normally come out of the big stories, but for me there is life. When I read the letters that the peasant Marcelino wrote to Benigna from a work camp to tell him to “hold on” and ask his children to study French, it seems to me that I am truly witnessing History. And not so much when I read in the newspaper Above: “José Antonio passes, the Empire passes. It is a cardboard Spain. The other is the Spain of hope, which was the support that many of these people clung to in order to survive and, if they lost their lives, their ideals survived.
Even if the procession cemented a good part of the symbolic scaffolding of the dictatorship, this other universe of post-war defeat constitutes the symbolic scaffolding of dignity.
What were you looking for when you built this double dimension of the 1939 era?
I wanted to show what no one could perceive in that parade. People could see the enlargement of a figure and its appropriation by a dictator, but I wanted to tell the lives of others. Even if the acquaintances cemented a good part of the symbolic scaffolding of the dictatorship, this other universe of defeat during the post-war period constitutes the symbolic scaffolding of dignity. Many, too many, unbearably too many, died, but not their ideals. Making them present is an act almost of intimate reconciliation with the history of my great-grandfather and of poetic justice.
Throughout the book, fear is a very present emotion.
Yes, fear was a tool used to deter dissent. Dictatorships know this: what matters is not what they do, but what they seem to be able to do. This viscous spider web that frightens, deters and paralyzes is a danger, not only in 1939, at any time, but also today. Now, I don’t want to be dishonest. It is easy to make an epic of bravery and heroes without seeing how many of them end up. Courage has a price and an individual sacrifice that pays off? I am clear that collectively yes, but do you want to be that spearhead? It is something I think about regularly.
Although most of them are stories of the losers of the war, some are also reserved for the victors who also suffered the horrors of war. Why did you decide not to ignore them?
They are supposed to be winners instead. Look what a bitch to be a winner like Andrés, mutilated by the war, who asked permission not to wait in line for his food because he could not chew due to his jaw injuries. Or what a winner is Pilar de Valderrama, Antonio Machado’s partner, who despite her bourgeois origin and political leanings, lost a son, her house and the poet. Or that requeté who was told that dying for God is a cause of eternal salvation, and who died sick and completely alone.
Why did I include them? Because I hate Manichaeism. I find it intellectually impoverishing, broad and insulting to intelligence. It also seemed to me to distort Spain in 39. There was a lot of suffering and a lot of misfortune in many places. I am not saying that we should assimilate. My point of view is humanist and I try never to be at an equal distance, because that would also be another insult to ethics and memory, but we must not be afraid to look our monsters in the face. Whoever they are.
Do you think the book would help someone who denies historical memory, as Vox does, to do so less?
I don’t like to make translations to the present, and even less to enter worlds that are not mine. There was a first historical memory, established in 1939, which was sectarian, fanatical and false because it excluded the entire other hemisphere. Federico García Lorca said that we must remember tomorrow. For me, memory is the enemy of nostalgia, which takes comfort in the past. Memory seeks to transform the present and the future. I would like more memories than nostalgia.
At certain points in the book he uses a particular form to write certain mottos repeated at that time, such as hastaespaña or nopasarán. Why?
It is an attempt to demonstrate that there are phrases, mottos, songs that are not thought out and that are said without knowing exactly what is being said.
