"But monuments have nothing to do with graves," she went on. "Probably 90 percent of the Franco monuments are already gone. We've had amnesties. We've recognized the rights of exiles. We compensated professors who lost their jobs. We changed streets names, the flag, always trying not to hurt one another." She said Zapatero is making an issue of monuments to appease parliamentary allies: "Separatists, Republicans, radicals." He needs their votes, she added, "and the votes from the Catalan and Basque regions - from those who look for confrontation."
She has a point. Now watered down from when it was called a law of "historical memory," as if such a thing could have ever been legislated, the law excludes objects of religious and artistic significance (the determination of art being left notably unclear). Not even at the Valle de los Caidos will anything likely happen except that political rallies have been banned, a provision intended to thwart the annual tributes on Nov. 20, the anniversary, as it happens, of both Franco and Primo de Rivera's deaths. But nobody seems to know whether this can be enforced.
I made a last stop at the apartment of Blas Pinar, 89. A couple of years back, on the prime minister's orders, a statue of Franco was spirited away in the middle of the night from a plaza in Madrid. Pinar and others protested. The founder of the ultra-rightist Fuerza Nueva, he greeted me, eager to launch headlong into a kind of stump speech for the old dictatorship, pausing, from time to time, to gasp through a tracheotomy tube.
His complaint about the transition, unlike that of the new generation of leftists, was that it was a political wolf in sheep's clothing. "A trick," he called it, "billed as reform but in fact a rupture, which changed the most fundamental elements of society: protection of the family, moral and religious values, the unity of Spain."
Now even the monuments are being removed, "the final blow," as he put it: "The law of historical memory is anti-historical because it tries to erase the memory of Franco, and all the good that he did for Spain." Prohibiting Francoists from gathering at the Valle de los Caidos will not change anything, he warned. "The place has always had a particular significance. You can never separate Franco from it."
I hated to agree with anything he said. But legislating monuments doesn't rectify injustices of the past, it just fumbles with the symbols of history, reminding us why we devise them in the first place. Ultimately, monuments gain meaning when we imbue them with it, otherwise they join the statues of cruel monarchs and bloody generals that have become the civilized backdrop to our parks and plazas.
You might say Spain's situation after Franco's death was not unlike a marriage: each side holding in reserve those remarks that would do the other side most harm. Silence created a bond. It's golden, as the saying goes; statues and plaques are just metal and stone. That said, the new law, forged by the children of this silence, paradoxically injects these rusting symbols with fresh significance for a new century.
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