I have just visited, again, Francisco Franco’s monument to himself, the august cathedral cave in the peaks northwest of Madrid, el Valle de los Caidos, the Valley of the Fallen. Why, I ask myself only now, is this blatantly mountainous mausoleum called a “valley”? I do not know, but my first thought is that it’s one more example of flagrant doublethink; a confirmation of Orwell’s prophecies (and he would know, having fought against Franco’s troops) that who controls the narrative controls reality; a petty, frivolous show of strength:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
MOUNTAIN IS VALLEY

To get there, it’s a gradual, winding drive up past homes and pines, through a gentle, shaded nature preserve, to the parking lot beside a flat-roofed restaurant/funicular booth. Behind it, steep iron tracks climb up through granite boulders to the world’s tallest cement cross, which feels to me utterly imposing, opposed to all that I read in the stories of the humble, dusty man of Galilee. On the back side of the peak rests an immense abbey along with a school and a hostel, but we don’t see these until we’re on the way down the mountain, and even then, we register only quiet gray buildings arranged in a rectangle. It’s the front of the cross we’re headed for, the vast expanse of granite terraces and steps bordered by cypress trees and walls overlooking a panorama of green. Despite the swooping stone arch reaching to encompass us, with its eleven interior archways, the exterior feels sharp and angular, absorbing color in its mottled gray, everything modeled on Juan de Herrera’s sixteenth-century Renaissance architecture at the nearby palace/monastery/pantheon El Escorial, in styles and dimensions designed to teach us our place (and remind us to stay in it), maybe in the eternities, maybe in the systems of mid-twentieth-century fascist Spain.

But it’s the inside we’re interested in. Through the middle gate, beneath an anguished María holding her recently descended, deceased son, we pass from bright grayness to the dank tunnel of the basilica, a long vault lit by electric torches at the base of each arch, the spaces between sparsely decorated, the ceiling above by turns ordered and piecemeal, as if the spans held the rubble in place. It is cold outside, but it is colder here. Your breath catches, then wafts visibly away, doing its small part to fill the cavernous burrow. Every step, every shuffle, every sniffle, every whisper resounds, so everyone tries and fails to find silence.

When I first visited, years ago, with my family and a group of American students studying in Spain under my guidance, my three-year-old son tripped up the broad granite stairs outside and smashed his chin on the next step, which left him screaming and bleeding from the mouth. We carefully checked his incisors, determined that they were firm, gave him water to rinse with, then carried on with our tour. For the next two weeks, as our family (post-program) visited France, Switzerland, and Italy, James complained when eating and never wanted to brush his teeth, but because he had always been a picky eater, and because who knows the intricacies of overseas insurance, it took until we had returned home to Utah for us to take him to a dentist. There, with the benefit of x-rays, we discovered that his top teeth had broken two of his bottom molars, cracked them in several pieces.

This time, I prepared the students by sharing what minuscule knowledge I had and supplementing it with speculations and assumptions, hoping they’d be none the wiser. They weren’t, I suppose, but I was confronted with not only my ignorance, but my hubris, which are almost the same thing, I suppose. Particularly, I told them that Francisco Franco—who’d colluded with Nazis to bomb his own people, who’d tried to erase languages and cultures of Spain’s regional and minority groups, who’d ruled unchecked for thirty-six years, whose troops killed tens of thousands of people, including artists and writers and visionaries, including Federico García Lorca—had the cave built as a tribute to his megalomania. But, and this was key to my imagined version of events, today the place served only as a sad reminder of what dictators are capable of, and while it’s a curiosity, a lesson, I said, it’s not any sort of pilgrimage site; there’s nobody left in Spain who honors Franco’s legacy.

I said this despite the fact that my own country, a place I naïvely assumed to be immune from such cancers, seems now overtaken by people who, if they’d ever studied history or could perceive a world beyond their borders, would cheer the “strength” and “resolve” of Franco’s fascists. I’ve recently found a few of those Americans online, in fact, lamenting the exhumation of Franco’s remains from the Valle, a move driven by Spain’s desire to reckon with its past and avoid venerating the dictator. So perhaps I should say that if my countrypeople’s Dear Leader knew enough history to invoke “El Caudillo” as a role model, which I would not put past him given his bromances with Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, his sycophants would cheer the atrocities Franco commanded and cackle derisively at the “libs” he owned. And tortured. And killed. But in this case, the libs were called “Republicanos” (for their wish to reestablish the duly elected democratic republic that Franco’s troops had toppled in 1939), and such cognitive dissonance, even for the constitutionally cognitively dissonant, might be too much. Republicans as anti-fascists? Does not compute.

For all I preach against firm, extreme sentiments and statements, I still employ them myself sometimes, as I did that day with my students. It’s just that I could not, still cannot, fathom the kind of mind that would look back at the death and destruction wrought by Franco’s forces and think, “those were the days” and “we should do that again!” Of course, to avoid fathoming such a thing, you’d have to be pretty sheltered, and pretty privileged, with a dose of ignorant thrown in for good measure. And I suppose that’s what I am: uneasy with the idea that reprehensible ideas remain, spread far beyond their sources, and return again and again despite our best hopes and feeble efforts.

So I’m explaining a few things to my students as we walk slowly into the frigiddamp cave past the colorless characters peopling and animaling the dim tapestries lining the walls, under the watchful eyes of severe statues whose forbidding expressions and thrusting swords warn against trying anything funny. People are quiet and reserved. We dodge a few buckets catching the drips from above. I’m verbally slowing things down here in the essay, I’m not sure why, but something about the rhythm of the recounting wants to hold on a beat before we get to the circular apse at the end of our journey, its serious stone walls and twin grim winged guards and, four steps up, raised brown marble altar, in the middle of which stands a simple knotted, crossed tree, an agonized but beatific Christ casting his eyes skyward toward the golden cupola and its throng of angels and resurrected dead, away from the simple gray slab below engraved to identify the man it covers, FRANCISCO FRANCO, the name barely visible for all the flowers strewn about, the bunches of roses, the lilacs and geraniums, the poppy-petalled metastases. ■

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