Ghosts there are, but do not be afraid, Giles Tremlett’s brilliant evocation of Spain delineated by its hidden enmities — and by its difference from the rest of Europe — is not just a tour of the atrocities of the Civil War. Yet, since the beginning of the new millennium, the literal unearthing of the unmarked graves of hundreds murdered by death squads in that war has broken a tacit pact of silence that, it had been supposed, was necessary to heal the wounds of fratricidal hatred inflicted seven decades ago.
Silence, Tremlett notes, is foreign to a country ‘famous for noise’. But silence about the Civil War was partly tapando vergüenzas — covering up shame. The whole of one village on the border of Old Castile might know that on the bend of the road by the asparagus field (well outside the pueblo) three women were shot dead by a gang of gunmen on that night of 29 December 1936. But it was a matter for the pueblo, almost a family secret, not the business of national television, politicians.
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