Eight lights blinked morosely against the vast black canvas of the sky in steady, metronomic tempo. One-two. One-two. The lights moved in tight formation, end to end, sweeping east to west.
They were German warplanes, Junkers, and as they neared Franco felt the gentle thrum of their trimotor engines in the basin of his chest. He lifted his chin to follow the movement of the aircraft. Closer and closer they came, and the lights resolved into familiar bird-like silhouettes, with broad, flat wings and narrow snouts. The airplanes moved on, framed by gently winking starlight.
Their destination was Extremadura. The troops there were massing all along the border with Portugal. 80,000 by now, and soon it would be more. Spanish as well as German. The ultimatum had not yet been delivered to Lisbon, but it would be within the week. All had been set into motion. Franco had set alight the proverbial ships of Cortés.
It was still summer – balmy, stark Castilian summer – but the bare skin of the general’s neck and arms prickled with gooseflesh.
He had been unable to sleep. He had not gotten much good sleep for the past months. So he had risen, creeping slowly from bed so as not to arouse Carmen, and he had gone for a short walk.
But now he stood alone in the central courtyard of the palace, and the sense of solitude was vastly more oppressive and unnerving than it was comforting. The paving stones were warm and rough under his feet, the shadows of the colonnaded arcades twisting and sinister, even the trim of the hedges weirdly sharp and hostile.
He could not find any rest.
He paced.
It was probably 3:00, maybe 4:00. It would be light in not too long. He had a meeting with Yagüe at first light. After that, Jeckeln.
Jeckeln!
Jeckeln’s men had burnt the church at La Codosera. Franco had been livid to hear that. How could they burn a church? Were they reds? Jeckeln said he had ordered his men to raze the town. Yes, yes. But the church?
These Germans – they were not Christians. Franco could not deny that any longer. It had not bothered him so much before, but it was beginning to. But if Moors could fight for Spain and the Church, why not Germans? And yet–
There was a scuff on the paving stones, a ripple in the shadows. Franco turned.
Someone was here. The shade of a man, moving slightly, half-obscured behind one of the pillars.
A rush of panic flared in the Caudillo’s chest. An intruder? An assassin? A red?
He opened his mouth to cry for help. The guards would come running. He was not ready to die. Heaven would open its gates to receive him when he died, wouldn’t it? Purgatory, at least. But he was not ready to give a full account to God. Not just yet.
Then the man stepped from the darkness. He was tall and broad and bluff and smiling and impossible, his dark brown coat swirling around his booted feet, his mustache crinkling as he laughed.
“José! No!”
Sanjurjo strutted towards him, still laughing, his arms swinging by his side.
“Paco! Paco, Paco, Paco! How’s that crown sitting on your head?”
Impossible. This was a dream, then. It had to be. Sanjurjo was six years dead. But he was no phantasm. He pounded Franco hard on the back and laughed again. He was solid, and here.
“I don’t wear any crown. José.”
“Sure you do.” Sanjurjo produced a cigarette from his coat pocket. “My crown.” He smelled like dust and blood, like wildness and victory. Like Morocco. His lighter made a pleasant click and he took a thirsty puff on the cigarette and offered one to Franco. Franco waved it away.
“Mother of God,” said Sanjurjo. “You always were such a prude. Like a pious old woman.”
Franco reminded himself of the unreality of this apparition. “I won’t take that from a dead man.”
“But you took the crown off my head. You took the movement from my charred dead hands. You took my place in history, Paquito.” Sanjurjo clucked his tongue. “You always were a wily one.”
“I didn’t kill you,” Franco said. “The movement needed a leader. I was there and you were not.”
“True enough. But I wonder, can you handle it?”
Franco curled his lip. Sanjurjo had always been the blustering kind, big and proud. The precise opposite of himself. He had respected him, to be sure, admired him as a man and a soldier. But liked him?
“I can. Better than you ever could.” Franco’s pride swelled. He thumped his chest with the kind of machismo that did not come naturally to him. “I saved Spain! I smashed the reds! Not you! They chant my name! And you are a photograph in a history book.”
Sanjurjo tsk-tsked. “Ah, you were a good soldier. No one could deny that.” He puffed a ring of smoke into the Caudillo’s face. The smoke wafted smoothly over Franco’s cheeks and stuck sharply in his nose. “But those were little wars, Paquito,” Sanjurjo said. “This is a big one.” He pointed up at the sky.
Another flock of German planes roared overhead, loud enough to make the stones under their feet tremble. The scream of the engines ripped the breath out of Franco’s lungs. When the dark shapes of the warplanes had disappeared beyond the western roofline of the palace, he regained his composure, and he turned to answer Sanjurjo.
But the ‘Lion of the Rif’ had changed. His face was a ruined skull, decorated only by a few spare strips of burnt skin and half-boiled fat. His cadaverous mouth stretched wide, and when he spoke the teeth clicked like castanets. One eye remained, rolling bloodshot in its black socket. A few strands of singed hair stuck hideously from his fire-scored scalp. His uniform was a charred tangle of rags, sloughing off of his mangled body.
Franco fell back onto the ground, hard. He gasped. He had been afraid before, to be sure. Afraid in Morocco, with the Moorish bullets whipping around his head. Afraid in those early days of the rising, when all hung in the balance. But not afraid like he was now
“Look at me, Paco,” Sanjurjo rasped. His voice was rough, like a desert wind ripping through a Riffian canyon. “Look at how I finished. It was my own pride that did me in. Do you understand?”
Franco squeezed his eyes shut.
“Take care, Paco. Take care.”
He opened his eyes. The shade was gone.
But Franco trembled so ferociously he took a full minute to get to his feet. He staggered down the path through the center of the courtyard, towards the royal dining hall. His head throbbed and his vision shimmered, and he did not see the man in his path until he nearly smashed into him. The first thing he perceived was the blue shirt. Then the tall, slender build, and the slicked dark hair, and the softly handsome face. Franco reeled back, and nearly fell to the ground again.
It was José Antonio.
“Enough of this!” Franco sputtered. “Enough! You ghosts! You demons! Whatever you are! In the name of the Father, the Son, and–”
José Antonio scoffed. He was hale, healthy, his face bronzed and his eyes shining. Except for the bloody constellation of bullet holes punched through his blue shirt, where the
Reds had shot him.
“And the Holy Spirit,” he finished. “Is that the greeting I get? After all I did for you? I don’t even get an ‘¡Arriba España!” He raised his right arm in salute.
Franco raised his fist. “This is an illusion. A dream. A devil’s trick–”
“But you believe in the resurrection, don’t you, Excellency? You are a good Christian, aren’t you?”
“What do you want for me?”
“A ‘thank you’ would be a start.”
“Your portrait is on every wall in Spain.”
“Aye. Right next to yours.”
“Children raise their right arms and salute you as soon as they can walk. You are a hero. And you are dead! So, unlike me, you can do no wrong!”
“Nor any right. I cannot make the National Revolution. Only you could do that. But you haven’t. Spain is still the same mess she always was. What did you beat the Reds for?”
“After the war–”
“Do you imagine there will be an ‘after the war’?”
Franco stood up to his full height. But José Antonio still loomed above him. The blood oozed wetly over his blue shirt, and trickled down his dark trousers to glisten on his boots. “You always were a useless playboy!” Franco spat. “I will thank you for the blue shirt and the Yoke and Arrows. You had nothing else to offer.”
“And that is why you let me die?”
Franco backed away, shoving a finger at him. “That is a lie!”
“You don’t need to be so indignant. There is no one else here. Only you, me, and God. If you believe in that sort of thing.”
Franco turned away, his back to the ‘Absent One.’
“Go on, then, Excellency. Turn your back on me. As you did before.” His voice echoed and was gone, carried with the wind to the Guadarraman sierras.
But still the Caudillo got no respite. For when he turned his back on José Antonio he was confronted with a third specter.
He came shuffling out of the dark in a pinstriped black suit, shoulders slumped, pale and flabby, eaten away by some consuming illness. His big frog-eyes shone flatly behind his spectacles, the bald dome of his thick head glinting dully under the wide vastness of the stars. His full, thick lips drooped sadly, chin wobbling.
“Azaña!”
“The ‘Savior of Spain’ I presume?”
“If I will not be judged by Sanjurjo, if I will not be judged by Primo de Rivera, then by God I will not be judged by you!”
“Ah, I have not come to judge. Only to observe. And maybe to laugh.”
“To laugh! How dare you? You were an infidel, a mason, a traitor! You would have handed Spain over to the Jews and the Bolshevists! You–”
Azaña did laugh now. His belly shook. It was a strange mirth on the face of one so famously morosely. “I was the traitor, General?”
”If we had not risen–”
“Then Spain might not have drowned in blood. And now she is going to drown again.”
“Don’t talk to me of blood! You of the burnt churches! You of the slaughtered priests and ravished nuns! You of the red terror–”
“Ah, we must bear our share of the blame, it is true. But so must you.”
“The war was forced upon us. Your government was a tyranny. The strikes, the shootings, the robberies. Decent people could not live–”
“But what about this war, General?” Azaña looked west, toward Portugal. “Was this one forced upon you as well?”
Franco’s tongue moved silently in his mouth.
Azaña fixed him with his bulging eyes. “How many Spaniards must die before Spain is ‘saved’? What is Spain to you, general? A flag? A march?”
The Caudillo could not bear anymore. He turned and gripped his head, and then he stumbled away into the dark, with Azaña’s laughter ringing at his back. But his way was barred again.
And this time not by one shade, not by ten, not by a hundred, but by thousands, and then tens, and then hundreds of thousands.
They filled the courtyard, spilling back through the arcade, spilling back out over the hillsides, down into the winding streets of Madrid, through the slums of Carabanchel and through the ritzy neighborhoods of Salamanca, filling Castile, filling Spain.
There were Moors with their faces blown away by artillery, falangists missing arms and legs, legionaries pierced and skewered by bayonets, ‘red berets’ with their guts hanging through holes in their stomachs, red militiamen tattered by bullets, fighters of the International Brigades smeared with blood and dust, German and Italian pilots charred beyond recognition, old men broken by bombs, little children dragging bleeding stumps, girls without eyes and tongues.
“What about me?” they asked, each one in his own turn. “What about me? Why did I die?”
Their battered, bleeding hands reached for him, and he shrank away, insane with horror, but wherever he turned there they were, pushing in on him, grasping, sobbing, laughing, screaming, moaning. They closed in, crushing him, smashing him, overwhelming him with the stink of their blood and the weight of their pain.
“Did I die for the Fatherland?”
“Did I die for the Republic?”
“Did I die for the church?”
“Did I die for the workers?”
“Did I die for tradition?”
“Did I die for freedom?”
“Or did I die for you?”
Franco fell onto the warm paving stones of the courtyard, he covered his head and screamed. “No! No! In the name of God! In the name of the Holy Virgin!”
And when took his arms away and opened his eyes they were gone. He thought perhaps his prayer had worked. Perhaps the Virgin had delivered him from these–
But they were not gone. Not all of them.
One remained.
It was a girl, perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old. She was of the simple southern peasant type, small and dark with thick raven hair and large black eyes. She wore a simple, coarse white dress. Just above her tiny, bare feet, the hem of the dress was stained with the dust of the backcountry Andalusian roadways. Her face was mottled with an ugly patchwork of black-purple bruises. Blood trickled darkly from the corner of her pink lips. Thick smears of drying blood covered the front of her white dress.
Franco tried to take a breath, but it stank of mud and blood, and he gagged. “Please,” he sputtered. “Please leave me–”
The girl stuck out an arm. She pointed across the courtyard, at the far wall. Shaking, the Caudillo turned his head. Something burned there, on the wall. It was a short, simple sentence, inscribed in the stone with white fire.
He shook his head, and squeezed his eyes shut, unwilling to believe it.
Franco awoke sweating and panting, and drew himself shakily upright in his bed. Carmen slept soundly beside him, breathing softly. She did not awaken when he thrust his head into his hands and moaned.
The message burnt into the wall. He knew it well. Franco was not like his father, the dissolute, the Mason, the atheist. He was Christian. He knew the traditions and the scriptures.
God has numbered the days of your Kingdom.
And on that very night, Belshazzar was slain.
.