The right station for a fine woman

Spain is a nation haunted by a traumatic nightmare.

That’s the Civil War in the 1930s and the 36 year dictatorship to which it led. The conflicting beliefs and emotions of those times drove a chasm through the country, and have left it divided still.

María de la Almudena Grandes

One of the finest chroniclers of that trauma is María de la Almudena Grandes, an outstanding novelist who died depressingly early, at 61, of cancer just at the back end of last year. She wrote a series of six novels, the last started but sadly unfinished, which she calls her Episodes of a Never-Ending War. 

The word ‘episodes’ refers to one of the emblematic figures of nineteenth-century Spanish literature, Benito Pérez Galdós who, as she explains at the end of Ines and Joy, the first novel in her series, she profoundly admired. He wrote a series of National Episodes, in which he relates the lives of fictional characters against the background of the major episodes of Spanish history in his century.

Almudena Grandes does the same kind of thing but, in my view, having read two of his novels and having started on the third of hers, she does it incomparably better. His characters feel like cardboard cut-outs, either good or bad but never mezzo-tints, which he simply parades against his background of historical events.

In Almudena Grandes, on the other hand, the characters live and develop, occasionally driving, or at least leaving their imprint on, the events around them, and always moulded themselves by their experiences. Even the historical sequences, sometimes quite long in the first book, sparkle along as she turns the figures she talks about into story characters in their own right, without distorting the history.

So what is this never-ending war? Why, it’s the long bitter struggle against Franco’s style of Fascism. Her characters are born in the time leading up to the Second Republic that Franco overthrew and live on into the dictatorship, going from open war against it into a clandestine fight that is even more dangerous. Or they’re born after the war and live with its legacy, coping with the dictatorship around them. 

They’re the living embodiment, in the world of the novels, of the way that terrible time divided Spain, and left it divided still.

The characters come to life because of the vitality of her writing. On occasions it can even be poetic. She uses a technique of repeating the same set of words as a kind of refrain. It can happen in several short passages close to each other – a set of paragraphs, for instance – or it can be scattered through a book. In Ines and Joy, a recurring sentence is “immortal history does strange things when it crosses the loves of mortal bodies” which, as well as being a striking thought, also sums up the book: the loves of the characters are moulded and driven by the events around them.

Why did she choose the title Episodes of a Never-Ending War rather than, say, New National Episodes as a tribute to her admired Pérez Galdós? Well, she explains that, too. Franco, by calling his uprising against the legally constituted Republic a National-Catholic movement, tainted the word ‘national’ for anyone who doesn’t share his views. And Almudena Grandes decidedly doesn’t.

In fact, running through the books is her admiration of the Spanish Communist Party or PCE, even though she tells its tale with all its warts. She tells us how the iconic figure of ‘La Pasionaria’ ran away to Moscow after the Civil War and left the party, in its French exile, in the hands of an entirely unqualified young woman who’d never been more than a typist in the organisation. She also tells about La Pasionaria’s sidekick, Santiago Carrillo, organising murders of party comrades who’d strayed from the Moscow line. 

On the other hand, she’s impressed by “the only political party that actively opposed Franco’s dictatorship from April 1939 [date of the end of the Civil War] when it was declared illegal [throughout Spain] until April 1977, when it was legalised again…”. The characters in her novels who are resisting Franco are in or close to the PCE.

That did Almudena Grandes no favours in certain circles in Spain. Because the national trauma divided the nation into warring camps, and left it divided still.

She was one of the major literary figures of her time and of her city, Madrid. But both the city of Madrid and its Province are controlled by the conservative ‘Popular Party’, PP. Neither the City Mayor nor the Provincial President saw fit to honour her at her death.

The government, for now still run by the Socialists, the PSOE, saw things differently. It couldn’t change the name of a street or a square in the city to honour her, because that was up to the PP leadership. On the other hand, the great railway stations are under the control of the national government.

The biggest station in Madrid is Puerta de Atocha. The name Atocha became a symbol of sorrow around the world in 2004, when it became the target of a terrorist attack. The PSOE government of Pedro Sánchez has decided to change its name in a smart way, by leaving it intact – Atocha is too deeply embedded in the culture – while adding the writer’s name to it. 

Madrid’s main station is to be renamed ‘Puerta de Atocha Almudena Grandes’.  

But Spain has been divided by the very events that Almudena Grandes describes so vividly, and has been left divided still.

The station of Puerta de Atocha Almudena Grandes

Many have applauded this naming of a major Spanish landmark not simply for Almudena Grandes herself, not simply for a great novelist, but for a woman, a gender woefully under-represented by Spanish memorials. On the other hand,  the President of the Madrid Province, the hard-right Isabel Díaz Ayuso, reacted to the renaming with sarcasm. 

“I thought the Virgin of Atocha was already a woman.”

Well, she was. I’m not however convinced that the station was called after her. And, unless I'm badly mistaken, I don’t think she wrote novels that can hold a candle to the Episodes of an Endless War. 

Oh, well. There will be those in Spain whose heart is warmed, as mine is, by the change in name of the station. And those who are pained by it.

Because Spain is a nation divided by its trauma. And it has been left divided still.

For my part, I’ll just offer this small tribute to a fine writer who understood the need to fight an endless war against the virus of dictatorship. And, for my own pleasure and amusement, I’ll include a little nod to that touching and poetic way of hers of repeating a phrase from time to time as though it were a refrain. If only in honour of a nation divided by a traumatic war, and divided still.