The Fountains of Silence(70)

“Yes, but why do I need—”

“You’ll see soon enough. Here, take this.” Ben hands Daniel an official press pass from the Herald Tribune. “This is worth more than gold here. But I’ll need it back as soon as you take the picture. Can’t have you running around Madrid with a Trib pass. You’ll have to wind the roll and give me the film as well.”

If Daniel wasn’t nervous before, he is now. He follows Ben outside. Ben tips the doorman who is holding a prearranged taxi.

“So, sounds like Nick returned the favor in Vallecas, eh?” Ben rubs his index finger across his teeth, brushing them. “I saw him at the club last night. He said you guys were at a dance in Vallecas and some crazy bullfighter wanted to kill you.”

Nick went to a club when they got back? He was practically passed out in the car.

“Nick was drunk,” says Daniel.

Ben nods. “Okay, newsboy. Pop quiz to prepare. Who’s the U.S. ambassador to Spain?”

“John Lodge.”

“Correct. Decent fella. He cares. Who are some of Franco’s guys?”

“Franco’s guys? You mean the Guardia Civil?”

“No, some of his ministers. His minister of information, minister of transportation.”

Daniel shrugs.

“Do you know anything about Franco?”

“Sure. He’s been in power since 1939. Devout Catholic.”

Ben rolls his eyes. “So? He also loves fishing and Fanta. Who cares?”

Daniel thinks back to Ana’s captions and things he’s overheard. He begins to recite: “He’s building the Valley of the Fallen and it’s going to cost millions of dollars. Under Franco, there is no longer freedom of religion. Protestant and Jewish religious services are not allowed outside the home. Nor are their weddings or funerals. It’s a military dictatorship. People in Catalonia and Basque Country are not allowed to speak their native languages. The people are obedient because they’re emotionally exhausted. There’s a tension that exists between history and memory. Some people are desperate to remember but others are desperate to forget.”

Ben nods. “Nice. Anything else?”

Daniel recalls Nick’s offhand commentary and adds, “Franco aims for a ‘Spain of Spaniards’ only. Nick mentioned that some babies being adopted in Spain aren’t really orphans.”

“Whoa, whoa. Nicky told you that?”

Daniel nods. “He said that Franco feels that Republicanism is a heritable disease. So, to rout it out, kids must be raised by Francoists whenever possible.”

Ben’s face is obscured by a cloud of his own cigarette smoke. “Don’t go repeating that on the street. It’s an allegation, a piece of a much bigger story. Look, you didn’t hear this from me and I don’t know where Nick heard it. But yeah, there are whispers of babies disappearing. It began after the war. Children of Republicans were taken as punishment to the parents. But some claim it’s still happening now, that parents are told their baby died when that’s not really the case, that they’re being given or sold to a family that’s deemed more worthy.”

“Are you going to break that story?”

“I’d love to break that story. But right now there is no story. The laws of the dictatorship state that the adoptive parents are the sole parents.”

“What are the birth parents doing about it?”

“Their hands are tied. They can’t challenge authority here. If a doctor or a priest tells you something, you accept it.”

Daniel decides to tell Ben. “On my first day here I took a photo of a nun. She was carrying a dead baby.”

“And?”

“The nun became upset when she saw me taking pictures.”

“Well, it’s pretty macabre to take pictures of a dead baby, Matheson. It’s not the St. Paddy’s Day parade. She was probably taking the kid to a morgue.”

Daniel thinks on the incident. The nun’s expression wasn’t one of privacy; it was one of fear. Nick repeatedly says that many people in Spain live in fear.

“Say, Ben, if Franco is such a tyrant, why is America doing business with him?”

“Various reasons. But I look at it like this: We’re a chisel. We’re slowly tapping our way into the rock. If we get deep enough, maybe we’ll crack it a bit.”

Daniel thinks of the visual, taking a chisel to Franco. It doesn’t work for him. From the photographs, Franco seems small and fleshy. It would be like chiseling rubber.

The taxi pulls to a stop.

“You ready, cowboy?

“Are we here?”

“We are. Welcome to El Pardo Palace. Get ready to photograph Franco. We’re gonna win you that contest.”





Some felt that the US Government should not be “cozying up” to this “fascist,” as they saw it; that we should not have signed the 1952 Bases Agreement; that we should not be giving aid to Spain; and that, like the Europeans at the time, we should be virtually boycotting Spain economically and politically. (It has since been amply proven in my estimation how wrong this point of view was.) Our policy at the time was to emphasize that the United States was cooperating with Spain and its government to benefit the people of Spain, as well as our own interests. Our public pronouncements would seldom, if ever, mention Franco himself as head of state or his single-party re?gime, but would always center on the Spanish people.