One of the conditions for granting us democracy and for that astonishing act of hara-kiri had been an agreement that, to put it bluntly, no one would call anyone else to account. Not for the distant outrages and crimes of the Civil War committed by both sides at the front and in the rearguard, nor for the infinitely more recent crimes committed by the dictatorship, during the seemingly endless thirty-six years of punitive, vengeful rearguard actions, a boom time for their henchmen and a time of humiliation and silence for everyone else. Although it was far from equitable — the losers had been called to account time and again for both real and imaginary crimes — everyone accepted this condition, not just because it was the only way the transition from one system to another could proceed more or less peacefully, but also because those who had suffered most had no alternative and were in no position to make demands. The promise of living in a normal country — with elections every four years, the legalization of all political parties, a new constitution approved by the majority, no censorship — and, one imagined, the rapid implementation of a new divorce bill — with trade unions, freedom of expression and freedom of the press, and no bishops meddling with the law of the land — all of that was far more alluring than the old quest for an apology or the desire for reparation. Both apology and reparation had been so long postponed, and we had so little faith that they would ever appear, that they’d grown worn and frayed in the eternal, never-advancing journey of hopeless hope. The dead were dead and would not return; those who had spent years unjustly imprisoned had lost those years and would never recover them; the subjugated would cease to be subjugated; political prisoners would be amnestied and released with their criminal record wiped clean; those in exile could come home to grow old and die; no one could be arrested or sentenced arbitrarily; we could punish tyrants by not voting for them, ousting them from their posts and stripping them of their privileges, or at least some of them. So tempting was this future that it was worth burying the past — both the old and the more recent — especially if that past threatened to ruin a future that was, comparatively speaking, so good. Many people nowadays have forgotten all this or know nothing about it, either because they don’t remember or because they cannot even conceive of what it means to live under a dictatorship, but to us, who had experienced it at first hand, this promised horizon seemed like an almost impossible dream, and our overriding feeling was one of relief and of great good fortune: we were about to be set free from a totalitarian regime without having to live through any further carnage, and we could at last talk openly about that first time of bloodletting.
And that is what happened, people started talking about the War in broad, historical terms, rather than going into personal or individual details. We accepted the condition and carried it out to the letter, perhaps too faithfully. Under the general amnesty, no one attempted to bring anyone to justice, and this clearly saved us from endless bitter confrontations and accusations and the ever-present possibility of a return of the hara-kiri-ides, although each day that passed pushed them further and further into a ghostly territory from which, by the time they realized what was happening, it was impossible to escape. During those years, therefore, denouncing someone for what they had done during the dictatorship or during the War was unthinkable. Not calling for justice implied a kind of social pact, tantamount to us saying: ‘Fine, let’s just let sleeping dogs lie. If the price we have to pay for a return to normality and for us not to go back to killing each other is that no one calls anyone to account, then let’s just tear up the bills and start again, because, in exchange, we will have, if not the country we wanted, one that comes very close. That, at least, is what we’re seeking, without violence, without prohibitions and without rising up in armed struggle against those who win an election fair and square.’ They were years of optimism and generosity and hope, and I’m quite sure that, at the time, this was the best possible outcome.
However, something strange happened: the social pact became so internalized that we ended up fulfilling the condition almost too scrupulously, especially when it came to talking about the past. It made good sense for us not to get embroiled with the courts and for the courts not to get clogged up with painful lawsuits that would have made it impossible for us to continue living together and would have ended very badly. Preferring not to know and not to talk about it was another matter entirely. And yet most people chose that route, chose to remain silent, certainly in public, but often in private too. There was still a degree of stoicism and discretion then, this was before the times — which continue to this day — in which everyone saw the advantages of playing the victim and bemoaning and profiting from their personal woes, whether real or imaginary, or those of their antecedents of class or gender, ideology or region. There was a certain sense of elegance that advised against boasting about suffering and persecution, and made those most badly affected hold their tongues. This attitude only changed when a few notable individuals who had supported Franco at some point — either at the beginning, when repression was at its fiercest, or in the middle or at the end — pushed their luck and, not content with their state of impunity, which meant that they could live in peace and unreproached and with the privileges from their past careers intact, began elaborating illusory biographies, pretending that they had been democrats since the Athenian age and claiming that their anti-franquista attitudes dated back a long way, if not for ever. They took shelter in the ignorance of the younger citizens — and in the ignorance of the population as a whole — and in the discretion of those of their own age, who knew better. One novelist stated in a newspaper that, when the Civil War broke out, he was in Galicia, a franquista stronghold, and so had no alternative but to fight on their side, but that had he been in Madrid, he would have ardently defended the Republic, as had been his intention at the time. Those who knew him also knew that he had, in fact, been in Madrid at the start of the War, and had done all he could to escape from there and travel to Galicia to join the very side he was now renouncing with such aplomb. A historian boasted of his ‘years of exile in Paris’, when he had, in fact, spent those years working in the Spanish embassy, representing Franco, of course. Another intellectual mentioned his ‘enforced exile’, which had consisted of a lucrative two-year contract with an American university in the comparatively peaceful 1960s — a time when no one who had survived the worst bothered going into exile — having benefited in previous harsher years from the numerous favours bestowed on him by the regime for being a fellow Falangist and adoring supporter. And there were many more such cases.
These false declarations and denials, these inventions and presumptions, proved irritating to anyone who had genuinely opposed the regime or refused to collaborate, who had suffered for decades and had a pretty fair idea of the role played by various individuals; irritating, that is, to the few people who had the necessary knowledge and memory and so could not be deceived. Most could be and were deceived, because no letters were sent to the press or to the television stations contradicting these pompous asses who, instead of counting themselves lucky to have survived unscathed following the restoration of democracy, had absolutely no compunction about concocting these stories, presenting themselves with non-existent medals, and generally manufacturing a convenient pedigree. The people who knew the truth were accustomed to losing and to keeping quiet. The agreement, the pact of silence, weighed on them excessively, as did the general distaste for and aversion to revenge and betrayal. And so the lies of these former Franco supporters went unchallenged and no one spoke of their personal experiences in public, apart from the brazen few and their fallacious tales. However, the brazen few grew still bolder and went so far with their barefaced lies that they gradually provoked more and more of those in the know to react in private — how much restraint and patience they showed, how much they continue to show now — and to talk about what they knew, what they had done or said or written, how they had behaved during the War and during the dictatorship, behaviour that thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people were now taking great pains to hide, embellish or erase. There were so many backing each other up that the great labour of concealment and disguise was sure to succeed: I’ll stand by you if you stand by me, I’ll keep schtum for you if you keep schtum for me, I’ll put a flattering gloss on your past if you do the same for me. And I thought that perhaps it was some such murmur, from those resisting the sham and telling the truth — toned down, discreet, mentioned only to family members or at meetings and suppers with friends or in the even greater privacy of bed — that had recently reached Muriel’s ears.