‘Is it something to do with the Civil War, Don Eduardo, I mean, Eduardo? Something that your friend did at the time and that you knew nothing about until someone came to you now with the story? Is that what it is?’ And I even dared to be more precise and urge him to explain what he meant. ‘Did he participate in a massacre? Did he carry out summary executions?’ And here I used the expression darle a uno el paseo, literally ‘take someone out for a stroll’, which few young people nowadays would know, but which was still familiar to my generation, because it formed part of the normal vocabulary of both parents and grandparents, and most families had experienced such summary executions during the three years that the War lasted: darle a uno el paseo meant going to someone’s house with a group of other men, either at night or in the early hours or even in broad daylight, bundling him into a car, driving him to the outskirts of the town, to some deserted spot or even to the cemetery walls, where he would be shot in the head or the back of the neck, and his corpse left at the gates of his future home or, more likely, kicked into the gutter; in Madrid or in Seville, in both the Republican and the franquista zones, there were months when not a morning went by without numerous bodies being picked up in the streets, as if they were a new kind of rubbish, too awkward for the road sweepers to deal with, too heavy and difficult to handle, and with a face. ‘Was he one of those Falangists who strutted around with a pistol in his belt? Or a militiaman with a rifle over his shoulder? Did he betray someone as soon as the War was over, denounce people he knew and send them to the firing squad? Was he some kind of butcher, did he commit a lot of murders or order others to do so? What is it you’ve been told, what is it you find so troubling?’
Things had changed a little in that respect, as regards telling people things, although not very much. Adolfo Suárez was in power, the first elected Prime Minister for forty years, Franco having died four or five years before. On the one hand, Franco had been instantly discarded and was seen by most as a kind of dinosaur, and, six months on, the more thinking members of the public were astonished at how little time had passed, because it felt as if entire centuries had gone by since his disappearance. It wasn’t just that one part of the population had longed and hoped and yearned for this, and that in a number of respects — insofar as this was possible — society had, for some time, begun to behave as if he had already gone; what also became clear, even to his supporters, was the extraordinary speed with which he came to be viewed as a complete anachronism, as superfluous: himself, his dictatorship and his Church, to whom he had granted unlimited powers and privileges. On the other hand, incredible though it seemed, we were aware that his regime had withdrawn almost without a murmur (people commented at the time that the regime had committed hara-kiri), obeying the will of the King, which is why we had been granted democracy. We, of course, had not imposed democracy ourselves, because it would not have been in our power to do so without further spillage of the mingled bloods of both sides, which would have ended in certain disaster, although it didn’t take us long to call for more and more freedoms. In those years, though, we were keenly aware that everything hung by a thread, that concessions can always be revoked, that the suicides might well have second thoughts and decide to come back to life, that they had the support of most of the army, who were still franquista to the core and remained in possession of the nation’s only weapons.