November 20, 1975, half a century ago today, was also Thursday. I know this because I googled it. I could write a heartfelt autobiographical story crossing personal and historical data and still be so broad. I’ve already done it on these same pages. But taking away my father’s euphoric face and my mother’s horrified face, the three days of celebration they gave us at school, and the stupidity of the television that broadcast the images of the duel on loop, my memories of that day are reduced to the glimpses that the wise and questioning little girl who was the one who signed at the age of nine retained, and what I then extracted from the adults. What I remember, as if it were today, is the first time I heard the “oh, if only Franco would raise his head”, which I would later hear many times when faced with everything that deviated from the iron repression of the dictatorship. It was from the mouths of the wives on my block when Gertrudis, the gorgeous brunette in the room, and another neighbor whose name I don’t remember, because he was a man for that and the gossips didn’t crucify him, left their children with their respective spouses and ran away together to live out their clandestine love years before the divorce law was passed. So no, I personally didn’t suffer under Franco, but I have memory, curiosity and I don’t forget.
I was telling this the other night to my 24-year-old daughter, who was returning home horrified from a bar where two screaming kids had entered. “HI Hitler, long live Franco”, without anyone, including her first, daring to cough at them in case they get scared. This is, among others, the drama of Spain 2025. For too many young people, Franco is a mix of meme, myth and pop star with thin moustache, fat ass and whistling voice, and the Transition, the process of gender reassignment of transsexual people, or that of giving up dyeing and leaving their mothers’ hair white. school Neither politicians nor parents have been And the fact that, if Franco raised his head and saw that the separation of Los Javis, two boys like two castles, is the most viewed news in the most read newspaper in Spain, he would slap her again, is neither sufficient nor consoling.
