What remains for those of us who were born after the post-Civil War dictatorship: the testimonies of those who lived through it.
History is what it is, a sum of official or unofficial accounts. But always with a tendentious point, sometimes necessarily vindictive and other times absolutely interpretable. We are human and our ability to attest to the facts is more limited to the subjective.
The testimonies, paradoxically, have that I do not know what of absolute reality. The perception of the passage of time greatly qualifies what was experienced, but the particular story, the way of telling it, even the expression and the look perfectly communicate what it was.
In this case we cannot see the author, Jorge M. Reverte communicating to us what happened. But what is written, knowing how to find the right words, can also have the same emotional effect from which to obtain a most deeply personal impression. Being able to extract from there what really happened is easier. There may be adornment, but there is always truth. The lived is what it is ...
All postwar shares two aspects: misery and imagination. The need for survival drives away other types of completely artificial existential ghosts once the human is exposed to the harshness of hunger and cold. You have to find what to eat and what to do. It is like turning the human into an animal. And in that return to the atavistic we find the best and the worst, the fierceness and happiness of the small.
A child back then had nothing and sometimes had everything to be happy. Living is riding contradictions ...
Synopsis: A very personal and intimate book of memories, of memories, of the Spain of the fifties.
Through his own memories and those of family members, Jorge M. Reverte reconstructs the day-to-day life of a child in post-war Madrid.
The enormous weight of Catholic ideology, and of the Franco regime that had triumphed just a few years earlier in an extremely cruel war, runs through each of these pages to offer us a sociological portrait of life in Spain.
The war was followed by fear, hunger and misery, but the childhood of Reverte and his brothers was happy, as only a child can be in the face of adversity. A tough and moving portrait that makes us relive a time as distant as it is present.
You can now buy the book A happy childhood in a fierce Spain, the latest by Jorge Martínez Reverte, here: