All Hallows, or a monster for the day after Halloween

I had an unusual experience on All Saints’ Day. Or All Hallows day, to give it its older name, which at least has the merit of explaining why the day before – the eve of All Hallows – is called ‘Halloween’. 

All Hallows is the day for all saints, or rather all other saints, the ones that haven’t been officially recognised by the Catholic Church. Which means, in Christian theology, anyone who died in whatever the Church regards as a State of Grace. 

Most Catholics are pretty certain that this goes for all their dead relatives. Even when they were rotten crooks, bullies and serially cheated on their partners throughout their lives. Nothing but good of the dead, is the old saying, so we all know, or at least claim, that the dead – well, our dead anyway – were uniformly good.

In many Catholic countries, All Hallows is when people visit cemeteries to pay their respects to dead relatives. Here in Spain, the day is a public holiday. So nobody has any excuse for not popping down to the cemetery and showing Granddad José María or Auntie Inmaculada Concepción that they still care.

With me, my visit to a dead man happened by accident, without a plan. I know they say, “fail to plan, plan to fail”, but the other saying is “If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.” I know that comes from the Gospel according to Woody Allen, but it has an air of sanctity about it (unlike Allen himself), so it seems more appropriate to All Hallows.

I was out with the dogs, up near where we’re staying in the hills to the north of Madrid. This area does autumn much more seriously than our home region near Valencia. So we’d had three days of rain and dropping temperatures.

But on the morning of All Hallows, the sun came out, the clouds cleared, and the only traces of rain were ephemeral streams criss-crossing my path, and they only made the landscape, usually so dry, more attractive than ever.

At a junction of two paths, I had an experience worthy of the poet Robert Frost. Should I go down the road less taken, as he did? Well, I decided I would. Especially as, unlike Frost, I’d been down the other one before, had the chance of trying the second one, and felt like a change.

Palacio Canto y Pico
Also known as ‘Franco’s House’

Soon I saw an imposing building on a hill ahead of me. Which I recognised. It was what I’d always thought of as ‘Franco’s House’. So it turns out I was, indeed, remembering a dead man on All Hallows. Unfortunately, that wasn’t one of the dead I might have wished to respect, but the man who’d been dictator of Spain for nearly forty years. The caudillo as he liked to call himself. That translates roughly as ‘chieftain’, a fine expression of the primitive and brutal nature of his regime.

The house was a villa in the hills to which he could retreat, if he needed a break from the cares of office and the stress of despotic rule. I’d never seen it close up, so I walked towards it.

I got relatively close. Half a kilometre away or so. But there was a fence and I decided not to go through it. I could have, since it was a holy fence – not in the sense of sacred, just in the sense of containing many holes – perhaps the right word is hole-y. I decided I’d walked far enough – the dogs agreed – and was as close as felt appropriate for a man with such bloodstained hands

Back at home, however, I discovered that the full story is, as so often, more complex. The house is called the Canto y Pico mansion. It was built by a Spanish nobleman, the Count of Almenas, in 1922. He wanted somewhere to hang his extensive collection of paintings. He’d married money and could afford the gesture, though things turned tougher when his wife died. He even had to sell some pictures.

He lived in his mansion for twenty years, except for the three years of the Spanish Civil War, which he spent in London – oddly, the city of his birth (not that he’d lived there long). However his son, a politician of the right, didn’t get away, and was murdered by his enemies in the early months of the war. The father was distraught. There was still a granddaughter to whom he could have left the house, but he chose instead to bequeath it, on his death in 1947, to the caudillo.

I don’t think Franco ever lived there. I suspect he would have visited the place at least once, if only because he was the kind of man to gloat over his defeated enemies, and the house had for a while been the command headquarters of a Republican army fighting the Franco rebels. 

Franco’s granddaughter and her husband lived there for some years from the end of the seventies. I say ‘granddaughter’ but she may not have been. Franco took a wound to the groin during colonial warfare in Morocco, and it’s possible he no longer had the equipment to father a daughter: the gossip is that her natural father was Franco’s brother with a prostitute, who later died.

The house was eventually sold to a company that may be about to turn it into a hotel, after twenty of years of disputes about the licences needed in a protected region. It’s empty now and in a bad way. It’s been looted – I mentioned that the fence is holy or hole-y. A fire destroyed any works of art that still left.

A sad place with an unfortunate history, with Franco as only a minor element. The association for the protection of heritage in the Madrid region rightly points out that referring to it as ‘Franco’s House’ doesn’t do justice to the ups and downs of its misfortunes. So, to my relief, I hadn’t really been paying my respects to a rotten old dictator. Instead, I simply needed to revise my view of a building I knew well as a landmark but whose real nature I’d misunderstood. 

A valuable lesson from a casual walk on All Hallows.