Death of the Leader

...one couldn't buy newspapers critical of the government's policies...

...Fall From Grace and Redemption...

...I'm thinking of Cipriano Mera, Commander of the Fourth Corps of the Republican Army, who died in a Paris hospital in poverty and obscurity—while the most modern surgical team in the world kept him alive by artificial means...

...His stubborn hanging onto his life—that obstinate resistance that so surprised those who witnessed his endless agony—paints an even darker image of the character who, ignoring the protests of the entire world, a few weeks before had coldly sent to the firing squad five young compatriots, guilty of the unforgivable crime of answering with violence the legalized violence of his government...

...and the national per capita income jumped within 10 years from $400 to $2,000...

...He turned me into a Wandering Jew, a sort of John Landless, unable to acclimatize myself and to feel at home in any place...

...A small, courageous minority chose a third and more difficult route: that of sharing the valor and misery of an underground struggle...

...Now, in 1975, I am, as the poet Luis Cernuda said, "an unenthusiastic Spaniard"—one who is a Spaniard because he cannot be anything else...

...Along with the censorship he enforced, his regime imposed something far worse—a system of self-censorship and spiritual atrophy that condemned Spaniards to adopt the sinuous art of writing and reading between the lines...

...I remember as if it were happening now: when I was twenty, I wrote a naive story, denouncing his power...

...the rise of foreign investments, mainly North American...

...In order for it to have had all its impact, this news should have arrived 15 years ago when I still had my passion for my country and could have participated with greater faith and enthusiasm than I can now muster in its public affairs...

...of pursuing private lives, or pushing selfishly for personal wellbeing...

...His ubiquitous presence weighed heavily on us all...

...But for the socially oriented men and women of the last two generations, for whom material advantages alone couldn't satisfy their aspirations for equality and justice, the consequences of the system have been devastating...

...We must constantly keep in mind the presence of a censor having the monstrous power to mutilate our texts...

...I find the verbal formula difficult, but I shall tear it from my lips, on the condition, of course, that he may not continue to rule from his grave: so that at last, free from his presence, the country may live and breathe, I say, "may he rest in peace...

...We had no freedom to meet with other dissenting citizens, no freedom to protest against civil abuses, and, certainly, no freedom to unionize...

...What I am today I owe to him...

...This reality, which ironically was feared and fought against by his own claque, given their preference for a traditional and static Spain, forced those who had not died to witness the apotheosis of values, which neither the Protestant Reformation nor the Age of Enlightenment nor the Industrial Revolution had managed to impose on our land...

...the aversion to the conformist order to which his claque tried to mold me and whose hateful scars I still retain...

...They faced moral genocide...

...His end, worthy of Goya's brush or Valle-Inclan's pen, comes too late...

...HE ALONE did not change...

...He was the executioner—and at the same time the involuntary creator—of modern Spain...

...the precocious desire to abandon for good a country forged after his image and in the midst of which I felt like a stranger...

...rivers of automobiles were inundating the roads and highways...

...Nor will I refer to the somewhat paradoxical yet predictable causes of the economic changes that took place under his rule and at a severe price...

...No one will be able to bring them back to life...

...the end of an old-fashioned agrarian economy...

...We all will have to learn step by step to read and write without fear, to speak and to listen with complete freedom...

...Translated by BARBARA PROBST SOLOMON and CARLOS RIVERA q 212 JUAN GOYTISOLO...

...I have, throughout my life, tried to prevent the moral or ideological conflicts inherent in my participation in Spanish cultural affairs from degenerating into personal battles...

...We have had years and years of pain, frustration, and bitterness while—for reasons that had little or nothing to do with his personal ability, and did not reflect the internal political situation—the landscape was being covered with the factories, housing developments, and tourist complexes that were destroying the face of Spain...

...and adults saw their hair thinning and their teeth falling out...

...But it is up to the historians, not to me, to determine his true role during the last 40 years—preferably, without indulging in either the lies of official hagiography nor in the distortions of the alternative black legend...

...At the hour of his death, I would rather dwell on what his existence has meant to those of us who were children during the Civil War—today men and women—condemned to the bizarre situation of growing old without ever having known, because of him, either youth or responsibility...

...Already permanent victims of a sterilizing Superego, which is the internalized projection of his unlimited power, they may never easily accustom themselves to writing freely...

...Through my own experience, I know that I had to exert great efforts to eliminate from my psyche an uninvited guest: the policeman who sneaked in, uninvited...

...resigning ourselves as if castrated, or becoming cynical and disillusioned...

...All through the long, unrealistic agony of these past weeks—while he was being cruelly tortured by a sort of compensatory medical justice for the historic and moral injustice that allowed him to die of old age in bed—this emotion never left me: I felt no touch of pity in reading the medical bulletins, objectively monstrous, of the latest horrible afflictions that, day after day, were officially revealed by his group of physicians that seemed to grow in direct proportion to his number of ailments...

...As a result, we were all reduced to a limited sphere of action...

...Meanwhile, children became adolescents...

...I won't trace now the bloody history of his rise to power, nor the repressive methods that helped him hold onto it during the span of 39 years: the wellknown 1 million dead in the Civil War...

...the adolescents became adults...

...I honestly believe that hatred does not figure in the list of my faults and character defects...

...The struggle is internal, rather than external: Freud called this type of intrapsychical censure part of the "mechanism of the soul...

...For years and years, since the time I was first a university student, I have waited, like millions of my compatriots, for this day, the day par excellence that would divide—a little like the birth of Jesus in the egocentric perspective of Christianity— my life, our life, into two eras: Before and After...

...It is going to be a difficult task, in addition to surmounting obvious present political problems, to train each Spaniard to think and act on his own account...

...There was a growing imbalance between this modern dynamic society and an archaic political superstructure...

...One has to acknowledge that a great number of Spaniards have adjusted relatively well to a material progress that precludes personal liberty...

...the accelerated industrialization of the country...

...The rigid military suppression of the working class and the incredible oppression of the peasantry resulted in a process that transformed the country into a modem industrial society during the decade of the '60s...

...Perhaps, for many intellectuals who are my age, liberation comes too late...

...Vital sources of potential energy, shut off from normal creative outlets, inevitably were turned into neuroses, rancor, aggression, alcoholism, suicidal impulses, and other small private infernos...

...The distinctive characteristic of the time in which we grew up was perhaps this: the impossibility of fulfilling our roles as free adults in the midst of events, of in some way participating in our own social destiny outside channels implacably and permanently delineated by him...

...There he was, Dorian Gray—on postage stamps, in newspapers, in his framed picture in official buildings...

...It is much like the acceptance of a lover's proposal long after it has been made, when the proposer has grown tired of waiting and has already built his life around another person...

...I never saw this person physically, and he probably did not know that I existed, but he was the origin of the chain of events that was the cause of my exile and of my vocation as a writer: the incurable trauma of the Civil War, and the death of my mother, caused by a bombing raid from his air force...

...With this system he created a corrupt minority that jealously hoarded for itself the spoils while the great DEATH OF THE LEADER 211 mass of citizens were subjected into being a perpetual legal minority: there was no vote...

...The former was quietly undermining the latter by its very obvious and ostentatious success...

...the exile of another million Spaniards, among them the most distinguished personalities of the Spanish cultural world, from Picasso to Casals, from Americo Castro to Jorge Guillen, from Bufluel to Luis November 25, 1975 Cernuda...

...Hampered by the practical impossibility of dismantling the repressive apparatus institutionalized by him, we all have been faced at one time or another with the dilemma of having to 210 emigrate or to compromise with a situation that demanded we keep silent when we didn't want to give up our principles in a suicidal manner...

...I'm thinking of Leon Felipe, Max Aub, Julio Alvarez del Vayo, and so many others who, until the end, heroically maintained their loyalty to the principles for which they so generously fought...

...For me also the news arrives too late...

...he was the authoritarian, castrating father who governed our destinies by decree...

...The damage has been irreparable in my case too, and I adjust to it in my own way, without resentment or nostalgia...

...I am sure that when Spanish newspapermen and writers first sit down to write relieved from the load of this Superego they will experience the same fear that overtook me when I faced the vertigo of a sudden emptiness—the freedom that opens up under one's feet—to be able to say without reservation what one thinks...

...I'm not a man particularly given to bitter grudges...

...The chain of transformations included: the annual peaceful invasion of 30 million tourists...

...He gave me the childhood impulse to write in order to exorcise my conflicting relationship with my environment and with my very self...

...Picasso, Casals, and those like them who vowed they would not return to Spain as long as he remained in power were lowered into their graves, far from the land of their births where, under normal circumstances, they would have been able to live out their lives and express themselves...

...one couldn't read an uncensored book or see an uncensored movie...

...Limbo and Heaven...

...His political pragmatism, samples of which can be found in his testament—he was, as I recently read, "the only tactical man in a country of strategists''—do not encompass any ideological loyalty other than that of pure obedience...

...The taboos and repressions, the mental habits of submissiveness to power, the uncritical acceptance of official values, which during this long period of time have conditioned us, can't be uprooted in one day...

...Others have been less fortunate than I. I'm not only referring to his numberless physical victims, but also to the destruction and ruin in the consciences of those who had to accept the downfall of their most noble ideals, their own moral death— those who saw their hopes crumble for the dismantling of the order that he imposed upon Spain...

...The citizens of a nation whose population has been forced to live for almost 40 years in conditions of irresponsibility and impotence must necessarily be a sick people, and their convalescence will take some time...

...When the opposite has occurred, in the rare cases of enmity I can remember, my ability to forget has always been stronger than my anger...

...the mass migration of labor to Europe's Common Market countries...

...His official scale of virtues and merits measured people only in proportion to their faithfulness to him...

...I'm not oblivious to the solving of immediate economic problems, despite his cruel and unjust procedures for doing so, which signified a considerable improvement of Spanish society...

...Many times—while my bonds of affection with my country were breaking apart, and spiritual estrangement was being added to physical estrangement— I have thought of this person whose shadow has weighed on my life with more force than my own father...

...How then can I explain the tenacity of my hatred concerning him...

...The inherent conditions of a small, tenacious group of people fighting against tremendous odds has turned politics, until very recently, into a sort of drug...

...That night, I dreamed I had been put in prison...

...This addiction, so common in Spanish life, with its monotonous rhetoric, constantly prophesying victory, in spite of the crude reality, was a reflection of our political impotence...

...the hundreds of thousands of prisoners and victims of executions during the postwar era...

...Freedom of expression for our generation was not easily acquired...

...At some future date, Spanish psychiatrists must analyze seriously the results of this pernicious guardianship over a mass of adults constrained to tolerate a degraded self-image and adopt before others the conduct of an invalid, a child, or a guilt-ridden adult...

...Exile, silence and despair, combined with wishful thinking, have been transformed during the long wait into mythomania...