THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR AND WORLD LITERATURES

TUESDAY 12TH JULY 2016

Senate House, Room G35
Session 5b, The Novel in Italy, Portugal, Spain (15.00-16.00)

THE SPANISH GREY ZONE: A READING OF ANDRÉS TRAPIELLO’S AYER NO MÁS

Eighty years after its outbreak, the Spanish Civil War continues to reverberate through Spain as a political
and moral conflict, as a divided memory, and as a cultural attitude. In an article entitled Conmigo, o contra
mí, ‒ originally published in September 2013 ‒ Arturo Pérez-Reverte denounced the Spanish tendency to
classify any person or idea into two radically opposed factions, to pigeonhole our interlocutor, to see the
world in terms of sealed-off blocs. As he wrote:

[…] Inquieta el lugar en que una parte de los lectores españoles se sitúan: lo airado de sus reacciones, el odio sectario, la
violenta simpleza ‒ rara vez hay argumentos serios ‒ que a menudo llegan a un desolador extremo de estolidez, cuando no
de infamia y vileza. Cualquier asunto polémico se transforma en el acto, no en debate razonado, sino en un pugilato
visceral del que está ausente, no ya el rigor, sino el más elemental sentido común.

Destaca, significativa, la necesidad de encasillar. […] Y es que en España parece inconcebible que alguien no milite en
algo y, en consecuencia, no odie cuanto quede fuera del territorio delimitado por ese algo. Reconocer un mérito al
adversario es para nosotros impensable, como aceptar una crítica hacia algo propio. Porque se trata exactamente de eso:
adversarios, bandos, sectas viscerales heredadas, asumidas sin análisis. Odios irreconciliables. Toda discrepancia te sitúa
directamente en el bando enemigo. Sobre todo en materia de nacionalismos, religión o política, lo que no toleramos es la
crítica, ni la independencia intelectual. O estás conmigo, o contra mí. O eres de mi gente ‒ y mi gente es siempre la misma,
como mi club de fútbol ‒ o eres cómplice de la etiqueta que yo te ponga. Y cuanto digas queda automáticamente
descalificado porque es agresión. Provocación. Crimen.

Qué fácil resulta entender, así, nuestra despiadada Guerra Civil. Si ahora no se dan delaciones y paseos por las cunetas, es
sencillamente porque ya no se puede. Pero las ganas, el impulso, siguen ahí.

Pérez-Reverte re-tweeted this article after the Catalan Elections of 27 September 2015. The article was then
re-tweeted by thousands of followers who were analysing the tensions between Catalonia and the Spanish
government, and within the autonomous community itself. As Pérez-Reverte’s points out, and as the current
political deadlock confirms, Spain finds extremely difficult to come to terms with its numerous divisions –
political, social, cultural, territorial, and generational. “Compromise” ‒ John Carlin recently wrote in El País
‒ is a simple word without an exact Spanish translation. This Manichean syndrome, which feeds and is turn
fed to by the divisions that split Spanish society, has a long historical pedigree. Indeed, as this incredibly
rich conference shows, nowhere is this lack of nuanced vision more evident than in the debate around the
Spanish Civil War, and in the way in which political parties and ordinary citizens discuss and remember the
war. To address these issues, my paper will analyse Andrés Trapiello’s Ayer no más, a novel published in

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2012 which deals with the complex questions of historical memory, justice, revenge, victimhood and moral
responsibility.

The novel is set in the northern Spanish town of León in the year 2005. Its main characters are José Pestaña,
a leftist academic historian specialised in the Spanish Civil War, Germán Canseco - Pestaña’s father -, an 86
years-old unredeemed fascist who fought in the war and who has a conflictual relationship with his son (as is
evidenced by the fact that José adopted his mother’s surname); other important characters are: Graciano, a
76 years-old peasant whose father had been killed by a Falangist group during the war, Don Mamés, a priest
who keeps defending Franco’s ‘crusade’, Maribel - Pestaña’s bitter ex-wife-, an historian who belongs to the
Association for the Recuperation of Historical Memory, and Raquel, Pestaña’s young girlfriend, who also
works in the University of León’s history department.
The story springs from the casual encounter of Graciano with Pestaña’s father, seventy years after the
war. Having recognised Germán’s speech defect, Graciano asks him whether in the war he was in La
Fonfría, on the hills near León. Pestaña’s father initially believes that the man talking to him is one of his old
comrades. But when Graciano switches from the Usted to the Tu, he understands that his interlocutor has
jumped over the barrier of inferiority and submission that the victors had imposed over the vanquished.

‒ ¿Te acuerdas de mí? […] ¿No estabas tú en el puesto que tenía Falange en Carrocera? […] ¿No te acuerdas? ¿No te
acuerdas de un hombre que llegó andando con un niño? Iban a pasarse a Asturias. Uno le preguntó, ¿adónde váis? El
hombre le contestó: Con un hermano, a Gijón. Entonces vino otro y le preguntó, ¿y cómo se llama tu hermano?, y él dijo:
Lázaro Custodio, y uno dijo, a tu hermano lo estamos buscando; mira por dónde no le tenemos a él, pero te tenemos a ti, y
allí, sin más, le pegó un tiro, delante del niño. ¿No lo recuerdas? Aquel hombre se llamaba Ángel Custodio Reguera y era
mi padre, y el niño soy yo.

Caught off-guard by Graciano’s accusation, and before the judging eyes of his son, who witnessed the
encounter, Germán mumbles a strained ‘Perdón’ and walks off. As Graciano had walked off in the opposite
direction, Pestaña has to a make a difficult choice: whether to follow his old father, check if he is feeling ok,
and try to reconcile himself with him by having the conversation they never managed to have, or to follow
the stranger, speak with him, and discover more about his story and why he accused his father. After
hesitating for a moment, Pestaña decides to follow the stranger. This decision marks the whole story and sets
up the conflicts and issues discussed in the novel: the difficult balance between love, truth, and justice;
memory and the importance of forgetting; the relationship between victims and perpetrators; the complexity
of human relations and the difficulty of coming to terms with the crimes committed on both sides during the
war; and the instrumentalisation of the Civil War and its victims for academic, editorial, or political
purposes.
Trapiello manages to address these issues in a truly democratic fashion by ‘emplotting’ the story through
different perspectives, each contained in a brief chapter. The omniscient narrator thus disappears, leaving the
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space to a plurality of points of view, one for each character of the novel. This network of contrasting voices
enables Trapiello to represent the narrative of the events as an ongoing debate, as a metaphor of the
ideological prism through which each party looks and interprets the war. Each character embodies indeed his
or her own Spain: the fascism of the Falange, the national-Catholicism that united the Spanish Right and the
Church, the suffering of the poor rural class to which Graciano belongs, the opportunism of a section of the
academia and the media, and, finally, a modern Spain that defends the enlightened principles of the
Republic, but that also, like Pestaña, acknowledges the atrocities committed in the name of the Republic and
seeks to find the truth. Thus, by juxtaposing different ‘Spains’, Trapiello develops and gives life to the ideas
he had previously exposed in his essay Las armas y las letras. I think that these ideas can be summarised in
three points.
First, the Spanish Civil War cannot be represented simplistically as the war between two Spains, between
the good Spaniards and the bad Spaniards. We need, rather, a critical analysis that embraces the complexity
of the events and identifies the frequent cracks in the monolithic discourses of the two sides. Second, the
tendency to rewrite history in order to push a specific political agenda is a totalitarian one. Indeed, history is
always an incomplete and problematic reconstruction of the past, and cannot be turned into a political
weapon. In this sense, literature can be seen as a complementary instrument for working through the past.
Since fiction gives space to all the subjective experiences and feelings that don’t find an outlet in history
writing, it can help to prevent the fictionalisation of history. Finally, the last point is that the history of the
Spanish Civil War should be written by starting from some basic points of agreement (what Trapiello calls
‘un relato de mínimos’). Let me now discuss how these points emerge from the interplay of voices in Ayer
no más and analyse the critical ideas that Trapiello introduces through the character of Pestaña (who to a
large extent can be seen as an alter ego of the author).

Throughout the story Pestaña tries to reconcile his father with Graciano, yet his efforts are undermined by
his father’s stubbornness, by the vengeful desires of his department’s colleagues, and by his own incapacity
to tell Graciano that the old man he has accused is his father. Although Pestaña ultimately fails, his search
for the truth provides the reader a more nuanced and sensitive understanding of the war and the moral
conflicts that its memory produces. Most importantly, Pestaña’s balanced position shows how certain cases
and certain protagonists of the war cannot be reduced to the two blocs of victims and persecutors, but belong
to a grey zone that contains within itself enough to confuse our need to judge.
While Pestaña investigates whether his father was a murderer, an accomplice, or a bystander, he
discovers that he had been the only one to feel a minimum of pity for Graciano (when he was just a kid) and
for a prisoner called Lillo. These few, immediately erased, instances of pity are certainly not enough to
absolve him. They are enough, however, to place him at the extreme boundary of what we could call the
“Spanish grey zone”. Although Trapiello doesn’t use this expression, I think that his novel shows that the
concept of the ‘grey zone’, elaborated by Primo Levi in The Drowned and the Saved, can be usefully applied
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to the Spanish Civil War. A central issue that emerges indeed from Pestaña’s discussions with his colleagues
and with a philosopher called Medinagoitia is that of the people that were at once victims and murderers.
Pestaña argues that these people do not fit in neither side of the Manichean categories of good and evil, and
that their responsibility has to be judged on a case-to-case basis:

Hay que ir caso por caso. Te pondré un solo ejemplo. A: durante la guerra distó mucho de ser ejemplar; formó parte de
tribunales populares que condenaron gente sin pruebas o inocente, propició saqueos y robos de joyas y dinero, delató a
compañeros sospechosos de trotskismo, etc. Pierde la guerra y se va al exilio, que sufre como B y miles de personas
decentes. Muerto Franco A y B vuelven a España. Las reparaciones que les debemos no podrían ser las mismas; B, las
merece todas, y con A podríamos hacer dos cosas: o pedirle cuentas o pedirle silencio.

While analysing the Spanish Grey Zone we should however avoid overstretching and trivialising this
concept by turning it into a metaphor for any kind of ambiguous situation or for Spain in its entirety.
This leads us to the second point. Given that the Civil War is such a contentious issue, how should we
write its history? After failing to reconcile his father with Graciano, Pestaña decides to write down his
investigations not in a history book, but in a novel. As we discover at the end, this novel is called Ayer no
más and it includes the voices of all the people involved in Graciano’s case. The fact that Pestaña renounces
writing a history book does not mean that he renounces the truth, but that certain things can only be
conveyed in a fictional form. As he says:

Hemos convertido los libros de Historia en una ficción, y ahora hemos de recurrir a la ficción para contar la historia, porque
la ficción de una novela puede hacer mucho para acabar con la Historia como ficción.

Which are, then, the basic points of agreement from which we should write the history of the Spanish
Civil War according to Trapiello? Through Pestaña’s discussions with other characters, Trapiello
advances three basic points. First, the military rebellion that started on 17th July 1936 was a rebellion
against a legally elected government. This seems very easy, but the Partido Popular is still reluctant to
vote this in the Parliament. Second, the principles of the Enlightenment were represented only by the
Republic, and Franco’s coup was explicitly directed against these principles. Yet cases like the massacre
of Paracuellos show that the Republicans not always lived up to these principles. The fact that among the
rebels one also found some liberal and enlightened people further complicates the matter. Lastly, we need
to acknowledge the existence of a third bloc, ‘la tercera España’, which included both left-wing and
right-wing people. This ‘Third Spain’ was, according to Trapiello, the victim of the two totalitarian
Spains that fought each other during the war.
I agree with Trapiello’s first two points, but I believe that his third point should be supplemented by
some crucial considerations. As Paul Preston and Helen Graham have argued, there is a fundamental
asymmetry between the violence occurring in Republican and rebel zones. The repression carried out by
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the military rebels was a carefully planned operation aimed at ‘cleansing’ Spain from all those who
thought differently to them. As Preston puts it, Franco’s war of annihilation constituted an ‘investment in
terror which would facilitate the establishment of his dictatorship’. In contrast, the terror in Republican-
held areas was disorganised, hot-blooded and reactive. Although this does not alleviate the sorrow of the
families of the victims, it is historically important that this random violence took place despite, not
because of, the Republican authorities.
In their effort to be as even-handed as possible Pestaña and Trapiello seem, at times, to buy into a Cold
War version of the concept of ‘totalitarianism’. This partially blunts the critical function of the concept,
for it might lead some readers to believe that the violence perpetrated in the two zones was not only
equally terrible, but also functionally similar. Yet, the plurality of voices that animate Ayer no más
represent the most effective antidote to this problem. As Pestaña and Trapiello show us, all we need to do
is to join in, listen, and take part in the collective task of exploring our past.