Forgotten Monument

It happened in the afternoon of August 14, 1936. The town was attacked by legionnaires who, defying the twentieth century, fought their way through with knives in a man-to-man battle. A bitter struggle ensued in the streets under the scorching sun, lasting well into the night and ending in the cathedral, where some of the republicans, following an age-old custom, had taken refuge. Their dead bodies were emasculated.

All captured “able-bodied” men were driven to the Plaza de Toros, which had been changed into a makeshift concentration camp. From there they never returned: an official order went out to machine-gun them ruthlessly. The executions continued till the next day and after, when echoes of gunshots could still be heard all over the city. Two thousand bodies had to be buried.

I stand in front of the Plaza de Toros in Badajoz, where the massacre took place shortly after the beginning of the civil war. It is siesta time and the heat has entrenched itself between the houses. The yellow walls show faint traces of posters. Could they be from the time of the civil war?
     A guard at the entrance gestures that the arena itself is forbidden territory. I outflank him over a long slope that leads to the top tier of the stands. Lifting a rusty door from its hinges I slip inside and arrive in a bowl full of wildly growing weeds and humming insects. The place looks completely abandoned, the stands are overgrown with plants that have used every crevice, every little hole in the cement to anchor their roots. Between the curly Jugendstil ironworks hang desterted bird's nests. Only deep down, in the corrida itself, do rusty car wrecks on collapsed tyres remind one of the outside world.

After the bloodshed they buried the bodies, closed the gates and never returned, I fantasise. The people refused to cheer on the same spot where once their fathers, brothers and sons were murdered, and the bull fighters refused to spill bull's blood on the same earth that was once soiled with human blood. The guilty place itself put in shackles and left at the mercy of time, till the skin wrinkles and the hair and nails grow to the ground, till memory is silted up and the engravings in stone and sand can only utter a hoarse whisper, as from a broken gramophone: it happened here, here, here.

But the man who eventually chases me out puts me firmly with my two feet back on the ground. Until two or three years ago, the Plaza had been used regularly for bull fights, but got closed because of serious dilapidation. The city council is still in two minds: raze the structure to the ground or restore it. But restore it for what?

It is an historical building, I protest, you can't just tear it down. The man sends me a puzzled look and then something seems to dawn on him. Always sentimental, those foreigners, I read in his eyes. Nowadays the Plaza is used as a dump for requisitioned cars, he informs me as an afterthought.

I didn't get a chance to take pictures, so I ask the guard if there's a way to enter the Plaza legally. Only the mayor himself can give permission, he answers. I find my way to the town hall, where I am met with the same puzzled, slightly pained look after the laborious wording of my request. Permission, however, is granted: five minutes later I am on my way to the Plaza again, with a written warrant, authorising me to enter it on the date of today, para sacar fotos.

Now I walk in through the main gate. The guard salutes, but the sense of other-worldliness is gone. I sit halfway up the stands and through the thick overgrowth try to picture the herded prisoners, the panic, the grinning legionnaires with their machine-guns, the people outside hearing the din inside, the air quavering with fear.

When news of the massacre reached the world, people were only incredulous, and the American journalist who wrote the first report was slandered by his catholic compatriots. A reporter from a Madrid newspaper was so enraged that he wrote a fantastically exaggerated story, saying that the executions had been carried out by the legionnaires as if they were shooting for prizes at a carnival, and the people in the capital went after every nationalist they could find, to retaliate in kind.

As always when confronted with the Spanish civil war, I am reminded of the man who took me up to a high cliff on the coast of Santander. Deep down, the surf was rolling off and on the rocky beach like a stubborn beast that refuses to recognise the futility of its endeavour. “When the civil war broke out,” the man said, “they took all the nationalists in the region to this spot and threw them down, one by one. When Franco's troops came, they took all the republicans in the region to this spot and threw them down, one by one.”

All is quiet, there is not a sound to be heard. And time passes, as indifferent as ever. I have no business here.