I was born in Tenerife in 1948 and became a journalist at a very young age, because I was writing for journalism at the age of thirteen. First it was sports journalism, and then, immediately, different journalism. My mother became a newspaper reader to spoil me, because my father said that being a journalist always meant having your pants ripped at the bottom.
I’ve been explaining these memories for a long time in case I ever forget what it was like back then, what my mother wanted journalism to be, and how far removed my father was from the profession I instantly fell in love with.
At that time something was happening, we kids didn’t know what it was, because it wasn’t mentioned at home either. Our house was a house of poor people who were rich, but became poor again when I was born.
When I was born in 1948, there was no money in the house, although there had been plenty of it for some time. As I heard people say, that money came from the black market, and also from different jobs my father did for others, like sorebas or other orders. One day, a smarter person asked him to sign a letter (said to be a well-known letter) and lent him any amount of money.
This loan ended up ruining the house and the future, as the person who requested the money went with what he had to Venezuela, and my father continued to pay (until I received my first salary as a journalist) the debt that he had contracted with the bank.
My father lost money, but he never talked about it, and it always taught me to forgive debts or insults, and not to be resentful, or not to be too resentful. The truth is that at home they did not talk about that, nor did they talk about the strange essence of the world in which we live.
We lived under Franco’s dictatorship. This man, who was both an intelligent and humble soldier, joined the far right of the time, determined to prevent the progressive district of the Republic from taking leadership.
Taking up arms, he precisely left the Canary Islands, where he had been Commander-in-Chief, to take charge of what would immediately become, in 1936, the civil war organized by his co-religionists and which he, as General of the Armies, won after a conflict with horrific consequences. Peace did not begin until 1975, when that man died (Franco, that guyIt was the film that honored him when only good things could be said about him.)
During those years I was born, so I didn’t know who Franco was until 1952, when I was more or less right. At home, this name was not mentioned, nor referred to, because anything could slip through the cracks of the neighborhood. I was the youngest in the house. For reasons of poor health (I’m asthmatic, I used to have asthma more than that) I left the house very little and never heard anything spoken, outside that environment, that indicated the victorious winner of the contest.
Like many boys, and like the inhabitants of all those houses in which he lived, the question of the war, and above all the essence of its origin and its consequences, was a secret. Only once did the regime’s propaganda reach the house, and my mother kept it where the money was.
The Regime (which is what it was always called in Franco’s time: the Regime) celebrated twenty-five years of peace. It was actually the time when tourism came, I was the boy who read at home and I was the one who read to my mother what was in this booklet. “Juanelo, put that away,” he said to me. And she kept it herself. And that was exactly what was said: “Twenty-five years of peace.”
That was a lie. It is already known all over the world, and has been known ever since. It was a lie. It was not peace. Franco continued to kill until his last breath, literally, so that the fear with which he moved into our house and elsewhere was based, above all, on the evidence that the word gutter cannot be said (it is a saying) because in those sad streets that were then roads, many were buried who were shot in the war and in the age of fear that was also called peace.
It was said that years of peace. It was a lie. After that celebration that my mother kept in the closet, I began to know what war was and what was that imaginary peace that was celebrated amidst the fear of those who knew and those of us who did not know what war was.
This war continued, as I said, until Franco died and after that, because the followers of that man continued to obstruct the citizens as if they wanted to continue the war and now it must be more mean and guerrilla. ETA, which was already active in Euskadi and beyond, helped distort the post-Franco era. At one of those stages when Franco seemed to be weakening in power, I had the opportunity to travel to England.
I did this with a passport valid for only one trip, because I wrote something in my newspaper that the civilian government did not accept. Then I was in Mexico, and the system was more relaxed. When I returned to Madrid, I brought back books that were banned at that time. I wanted them to get lost on the trip, but I went down with them, scared to death… But after that (1973), the regime sometimes turned a blind eye, and nothing happened.
You already know what happened. Spain lost Franco, embraced democracy forever, a very healthy alliance with Europe and the world emerged, and the health of democracy began to put an end to the dark disease of the past.
The war and the post-war, the long post-war period, for decades destroyed the joy of living, which had come to us, to our homes, to the schools, to the press too, as a new way of life, and which has continued in one form or another until these days.
Now in Spain a strange, confusing and difficult world is beginning to emerge, in which the feeling arises once again, and in a very dangerous way, that the man whose death has now passed half a century is returning in the shouts and insults hurled by his co-religionists (now legions) in the squares, the towns and the streets where there are local or regional leaders for whom freedom is, once again, the arousal of fear.
I’m afraid. I believe that my country, in whose capital I have lived for many years, is living in dangerous times. The combination is hellish. Judges, newspapers, politicians, shouts from the streets and the sewers, extremists of all stripes, forgetting what were the worst regimes of the twentieth century, reviving the civil distrust in the laws and in the rulers.
Suddenly, Spain took to the streets to express, with astonishment, the feeling that the best thing we had had been shattered: the possibility of talking to each other (in parliament, in the street) with the feeling that we would reach an agreement.
It happened, for example, in the Transitional Period, so named to show that that time (the Franco period) had passed so that the rest of the nation’s life would bring perpetual peace, a civilized way of moving ever further away from the discord that the word fear brings with it. There is fear that ignores hope.