Busy day

There are masses of honeysuckle in bloom now. A quick flower blip for flower Friday during a busy day. First task, Mystère's least favourite day of the year: to the vet to get his jabs. He's again managed a year with no injuries or other reasons to visit the vet. Bravo!

After lunch we went to Lagrasse for Le Banquet du Livre, a weekend of talks and readings around the topic of modern Spanish literature. First there was an overview of Spain since the civil war, which didn't tell us much we didn't know. Then a talk and readings from Alfons Cervera. He was quite entertaining; he and his translator are clearly good friends, and sometimes the translator was laughing too much to translate what Alfons had just said. So I'll no doubt be reading some of his work, which is mostly set in the village in Valencia where he was brought up.

We had to leave early to get home for a meeting about the summer art project. This went on for two hours but was lubricated with rosé and nibbles, and was quite productive with some fruitful differences of opinion. As soon as everyone was out of the door we headed back to Lagrasse for a film, Le Mur des Oubliés (The Wall of the Forgotten). Made by the son of Spanish exiles in France, it described his return to his parents' village near Malaga to find his grandfather's grave. Dragged out of the house during dinner and shot in the street by the Guardia Civil in 1942, his body was taken away and the family never saw it again. "We had to have the vigil in an empty room," said his father.

They did not find the body, certainly thrown into a mass grave with many others, and the mayor of the village was far from cooperative. But after a public meeting Joseph talked to many people in the village who brought out photos of their murdered loved ones and talked about the injustice of their deaths, still with tears in their eyes. Spain's "pact of forgetting" did not come without a human cost. Their searches in the archives were fruitless since these extra-judicial deaths were either not recorded at all, or the records were destroyed. The film ends with Joseph putting up a decidedly unofficial plaque on the wall of the cemetery (the local council refused to have anything to do with it) during a ceremony during which the names of the disappeared were read out.

Modern estimates are that 140,000 people were "disappeared" during Franco's dictatorship -- not just during the Civil War, but for years afterwards. So don't let anyone tell you that Franco's regime was "dictatorship lite".