Long life
The change in Spain
Nigel Nicolson
My 1959 Baedeker warned me that Spaniards attach great importance to dress. 'To walk through a town in shorts, without a jacket or in short sleeves, is looked upon as positively indecent. A tie should always be worn ... Ladies are not allowed to enter a church with bare arms', and so on. In V.S. Pritchett's The Spanish Temper (1954) I read that 'the women, as they go by in their twos and threes, and so rarely With a man, have a militant, formal, prim appearance ... The decorum is distinctly Victorian.'
. Equipped with this briefing and suitably dressed, I wandered through the shady streets and squares that border the great monastery-palace of the Escorial, only to find that I alone was in coat and tie, that Young men and women consort in the cafés with the same freedom as they would in Edinburgh or Rome, and that the girls Poured in and out of the great basilica Without even a scarf to disfigure their
attractiveness. The revolution in manners, I was told, occurred only about five years ago, and not, as I had suspected, with the death of Franco in 1975.
So long is it since I was last in Spain, and so ignorant was I of the political climate, that I hesitated to mention his name. I need not have worried any more than a Spaniard in Britain need avoid speaking favourably of Cromwell. Among the people with whom I was mixing last week (admit- tedly a select audience, for it was a confer- ence about garden design), there was not one who spoke of him with bitterness, and many who honoured him from saving their country from atheism and communism, and for his remarkable skill in keeping Spain out of the second world war. Other opin- ions undoubtedly exist, but I did not hear them.
There were one or two, however, who were reluctant to come with me to visit the vast memorial to the dead of the Civil War which Franco created in the Valle de los Caidos (Valley of the Fallen) in a rocky wilderness about eight miles from the Escorial. Even for those who were born after the war, the memory of it can be too painful, or perhaps they find the architec- ture too monumentally fascist. It is indeed extraordinary. A gigantic cross, 150 metres high, stands on the peak of a mountain crag, at the foot of which lie on one side the courtyards of a great new monastery, more Lutyensy than Falangist, and on the other the portals of a cathedral hollowed out of the rock, so deeply that the high altar, beside which Franco is buried, stands beneath the foot of the great cross invisibly above it. Some rock is left unsmoothed in the coffers of the nave to remind one that this is not so much a building as a tunnel. As a feat of engineering it is amazing, an eighth wonder of the world, and its tapestries and statuary create an impres- sion of profound solemnity.
It is not only a memorial, a monastery and a basilica, but like the Escorial, a tomb. The remains of 50,000 soldiers, taken from both sides, are buried here in what are engagingly called columbaria, hidden from the public view. The knowledge that they lie there behind great doors is almost the only reminder of the Civil War. Like Napoleon's nameless tomb in the Invalides, no comment is needed other than a single slab above the sacristy engraved with the words Caidos por Dios y por Espana. All died for Spain. The statues, mosaics and tapestries are of archangels, prophets and incidents taken from the Testaments. There is not a single soldier or battle scene.
By scarcely mentioning its purpose, the memorial emphasises it. While we have the Cenotaph, a classic understatement of two much greater wars, Spain has hollowed out a mountain. I did not find it excessive. The crowds of young people caught the mood. I saw one of them toss a bunch of wild flow- ers on Franco's grave, more from sympathy than for reproach.
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