Mi madre, la fascista

As many of you know, I live with a very conservative Spanish family that I love dearly. Yesterday, as we finished la comida and were wiping our chins, we began talk about the Spanish Civil War, truly one of the worst wars of the last century that continues to divide the country today. My homestay brother who visits quite frequently despite the fact that he lives in the Canary Islands off the coast of Mexico was particularly helpful in putting into relief the struggle of the Nationalists, or Fascists, if you're so inclined. I had always blamed the Nationalists to begin with for Franco calling for a revolt against a democratically elected government, and much of the bloodshed that followed was his fault. I still believe that he's probably responsible for the horrors of the Civil War, I believe now that both the Nationalists and the Republicans were equally culpable in the brutal tactics that followed.

Senorito described scenes that were beautiful and grotesque at the same time. His grandfather, Abuelo, who lives above us in the apartment was the liberator (or occupier) of Bilbao. He was the first of the Nationalist troops to cross the lines and executed the first bombing raids on a city in Pais Vasco. Before doing so, however, he ran from house to house in the neighborhood that he was to attack, rounding up people, leading them out of their homes, and taking them to the nearby church. According to the story, no one was killed in the bombing. Senorito then showed us a telegram that Abuelo had received from the people of the bombed city five years later, thanking him for his heroism and inviting him to an anniversary celebration of the bombing of the city.

Depending on who you speak to hear, the same event can have divergent names. My family referred to the the taking of Madrid, or the occupation of Madrid as the Liberation of Madrid. For a Nationalist family living in a Republican stronghold, it was a liberation. Daily, they would have to worry whether or not civil warriors would come to their house and take them out to the streets to shoot him. The same Abuelo who dropped the bombs tells stories about seeing firing squads set up in the Plazas de Toros or less scheduled executions on the streetcorners of people with smooth hands that seemed to tell signs of their bourgeois, Nationalist lifestyle. He also kept a private cache of weapons in the closet with which to defend himself should he get an unexpected knock on the door in the middle of the night.

During this, Senora told us that it was probably good that I was hearing this from Senorito because her version would be slightly less scrubbed sympathetic to Republicans who suffered the same and worse from Nationalists, particularly after the official victory of Franco. To her, Franco was the liberator of Madrid, a place where the brothers of her mother had been killed and several others had to be hidden for years, not allowed to go outside until the Nationalist troops arrived. She said that to her mind, the bad thing about Franco was not his politics of the hard-right, but rather the fact that all the power was concentrated in one man who made many mistakes. Senorita explained that I'd have to forgive his mother if she appeared a little Franquist, or Fascist, as we might refer to it. To her mind, Franco had done one of the greatest personal favors to her family by relieving them of the fear of living under a hostile government, and all the repression of women that my homestay sister described was taken as lies of revisionists to her. To be sure, she had counterexamples of women who had successful careers in Franco's Spain and is not just a deluded conservative, but you can still see the scars of the Civil War from her parents' generation inherited by her and her son of only twenty-nine years.