KILLING FRANCO

Lit­er­ary awards, from the Nobel on down, can be er­ratic to say the least. One year they give it to a work of ge­nius (or to the ge­nius in per­son); the next, to a book or an au­thor that every­body will have for­got­ten about within less than half a decade. The Sant Jordi prize – one of the three or four most pres­ti­gious awards for Cata­lan lan­guage lit­er­a­ture – is no ex­cep­tion. Some­times it is be­stowed on mas­ter­pieces, be they major or minor, and at other times you won­der what the judges were think­ing (or drink­ing). Hap­pily, the most re­cent Sant Jordi went to an ex­cep­tion­ally orig­i­nal novel: ’Jo sóc aquell que va matar Franco’ (I’m The One That Killed Franco) by Joan-Lluís Lluís. There is no other way of ex­plain­ing why this novel - which has now be­come that rarest of things, a lit­er­ary best-seller - has such an un­canny im­pact on the reader, with­out lay­ing on the spoil­ers with a trowel. Not that this will re­ally spoil much, given that the title it­self tells us how the story ends. The key to the novel’s at­trac­tion lies rather in its counter-fac­tual premise: that in­stead of re­main­ing neu­tral in 1939, Franco would have de­cided to throw in his lot with Hitler and Mus­solini, in ex­change for con­trol over cer­tain North African ter­ri­to­ries (a real, his­tor­i­cally doc­u­mented pro­posal from the Caudillo which Hitler in fact re­jected) as well as the an­nex­a­tion of French Cat­alo­nia (a pro­posal in­vented by the au­thor). Caught up in the en­su­ing mael­strom is a one-eyed lin­guis­tic cor­rec­tor of Cata­lan who ends up as a Morse code op­er­a­tor work­ing for the anti-Span­ish re­sis­tance in this same French Cat­alo­nia (not co­in­ci­den­tally, Lluís’s birth­place and life­long home, known to many Cata­lans as Catalunya Nord). In 1945, the Fran­coist regime col­lapses along with the Nazi and Fas­cist ones, and Franco finds him­self holed up in a tiny vil­lage after a failed at­tempt to flee to neu­tral An­dorra (there is a graphic de­scrip­tion of Franco the refugee in crum­pled, cheap civil­ian clothes, his head cov­ered by his Cata­lan cap­tors to con­ceal his iden­tity from would-be Fas­cist res­cuers). After sev­eral twists of fate, the lin­guis­tic cor­rec­tor ends up putting a bul­let in the Caudillo’s head. But such a per­func­tory plot sum­mary gives lit­tle idea of the force of a book which makes the de­feat of Franco’s regime and the death of its leader so per­fectly be­liev­able. A force sim­i­lar to that of an­other great what-if novel about the Sec­ond World War, Philip K. Dick’s ’The Man In The High Cas­tle’, with the dif­fer­ence that whereas Dick de­scribes a night­mare sce­nario in which the Axis forces win WWII, Lluís de­scribes one which many if not all read­ers of the book will find them­selves root­ing for or even dearly wish­ing that it had come true. As it is, we have things as they stand today: a Spain in which the bod­ies of thou­sands of extra-ju­di­cially ex­e­cuted peo­ple have been al­lowed to rot anony­mously in un­marked graves for the last 80 years; in which a hideously huge mau­soleum con­tin­ues to func­tion as a shrine for ad­mir­ers of Franco and his Fas­cist ide­o­logue (but not for the Re­pub­li­can slave labour­ers also buried there); and in which the Fun­dación Na­cional Fran­cisco Franco, ded­i­cated to the ’pro­mo­tion of the life and works’ of guess who, has re­ceived sev­eral state sub­si­dies and re­fuses to allow all but far-right his­to­ri­ans to con­sult its archive. Joan-Lluís Lluís’s novel shows us what a craftily ad­min­is­tered dose of imag­i­na­tion can do to soothe, at least for a while, the pain of the past, even one which con­tin­ues to well and truly shaft us.

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