Rancor on the right

I am beginning to see the advantage inherent in writing my columns weeks beforehand, because it allows me to speak of things that happened just the other day - and then two weeks later you, dear reader, can look back and see them more in perspective. Writing a magazine column to be read two weeks later used to make me a little dizzy, even scared. Nowadays, even its disadvantages - for example, not being able to criticize persons far advanced in years, in case they die in the meantime and you look like dog shit for speaking ill of them - seem more bearable.

Our Spanish future is a man with a shovel. This future man is bent on burial. But not in the manner of Antigone, who gives her brother a decent burial in spite of the law (as lately performed at the theater festival in Mérida). And not in the manner of those families of Civil War execution victims who, under the terms of the Historical Memory Law, exhume the bones of victims of their grandfathers buried in nameless pits, again to give them a decent burial.

Quite the contrary. This man in our near future wishes to hide the witnesses to the past - those whose bones proclaim that this country once lived through a sinister reality of arbitrary executions, which certain "historians" of the far right are stubbornly bent on denying.

It was Manuel Fraga Iribarne - minister of information and tourism in the final years of Franco's regime, and in some ways an unusually frank and straight-talking voice of the Spanish right - who invented, or popularized, the slogan "Spain is different." Believe me, he was right. It is. At least, a part of Spain. The part that just can't stop doing it. These people, the rancorous right, are still with us.

A man who has been elected mayor in a village in the province of Ávila (the story appeared in EL PAÍS on July 9) has exhumed the remains of some local victims of fascist executions in 1936. But not from a nameless pit, in order to give them a decent burial. Their relatives had already accomplished this, going to some lengths to do so, under the Historical Memory Law. What he did was remove the bones from the decent burial (a niche) and put them back in a nameless pit nearby.

This is no mere isolated incident. It is the same dirty old hatred, coming out from under the stones like bugs, in matching tones with the folk costumes favored by right-wing church ladies, and the rancorous rhetoric favored by reactionary bishops like Cañizares. Since I don't know exactly how far advanced Cardinal Cañizares is in years, I venture to write of him. Priests, like nuns, are archaeologically inscrutable. They say that Europe is in crisis because it has turned its back on God.

All these people of the right are preparing now to settle their grudges, nurtured for years, as if they had been the ones who suffered. In the chats I participate in, and at the talks I give when I am promoting something, someone always shows up who asks me why we of the left are so full of rancor. And I always say the same: what we have is a good memory. Not long ago, at a talk I gave in a nice town, a couple of old hens showed up who looked like clones of the fascist doyenne Pilar Primo de Rivera. They faced me and told me I was saying offensive things about decent people. And all I had said was that Popular Party leader Mariano Rajoy reminded me of the stiff in a coffin in one of Machado's poems.

The remark was a bit over the top, perhaps - poetic license and all that. But these hens know who I am. Why did they come to my talk, if they didn't want to hear stuff like that? Later someone there told me: "They're regulars here. They show up every time a lefty gives a talk. The rabid right is really masochistic. They like to wallow in their supposed sufferings, lay in a store of rancor." God save us from the shovel, the folk costume, and the rancor.