Two elderly women, to put it nicely and quickly, were carrying shopping bags along the sidewalk of a populous Valencian town. Overtaking women of these generations is a difficult task because they maintain the ancient habit of walking arm in arm while occupying the street, and it can happen, as has happened, that they suddenly stop to underline a statement, so the pedestrians who are behind us must have reflexes not to fall on us. Despite this, I am grateful to have heard valuable information from their mouths: they both concluded that we were living in a communist dictatorship. I confess that this statement surprised me because they were old enough to have experienced the mandate that the national Catholic regime imposed on women, but then I deduced that they distinguished between dictatorships of different types. The communist dictatorship we live in has such particular characteristics that oppression is not caught the first time. I can’t get any news because it’s not the first time I’ve heard something like this. If you walk any morning at the old aperitif time through the Manuel Longares neighborhood of Salamanca, you might come across ladies brandishing a vermouth shouting at you that they are gagged by such a singular dictatorship. Perhaps what they accuse is that their neighborhood is being bought by rich Latin Americans who leave the cream of traditionalist rancidity in the minority, but the fact is that this permanent denunciation of the Sanco dictatorship, led by the president of Madrid, is permeated. Apparently, in communist dictatorships, those who evade taxes or those who enrich themselves with healthcare supplies are mercilessly persecuted in moments of extreme gravity, and on the other hand, in ideal democracies, the professional propagator of hoaxes is rewarded, those who report them are punished, and the voices of journalists who work to tell us the truth are ignored. Oh, sir, and then they say about the young people who are becoming Franco supporters.
We’ll have to start thinking about who injects these ideas into their brains. Someone told them that Franco improved the infrastructure, which sounds very technical. We were talking about swamps before, remember? But it seems that even nostalgics find the appropriate term for a narrator fascinated by No-Do and have decided to update it. The great thing about Franco was the infrastructure, wow. The mayor of Valencia, queen of common sense, came to say it, declaring that every era has had its wish. Far be it from me to take credit away from the Caudillo, but the infrastructures of Hitler, hey, please, or Mussolini, are very visible for being an ax of fascist architecture, not to mention that of Pinochet, he of the economic miracle. Of the missing, that’s all then. Nostalgic people remember little of the infrastructure of Franco’s economic policy that caused more than a decade of famine. But of course, once the hunger subsided thanks, among other things, to the money of the emigrants, the work of the prisoners and the nascent tourism, the city began to breathe and even dream of the future. What is, is. But now, say those who denounce the current dictatorship, you highlight something good in Francoism and they call you a Francoist. You know, in this dictatorship you can’t say anything, not because they put you in prison but because they criticize you. Terrible.
In this 20-N, which proved to be unforgettable, I saw Nati Camacho and other anti-Franco veterans who suffered imprisonment in the same infrastructure era, put their hands on their heads: Madrid was full of shacks! They said, if the water didn’t reach many neighborhoods! If people built their houses at night! That Silence time. But why not see the positive side of that period. With Franco some lived better and others, as Vázquez Montalbán said, climbed the stairs better.
