“We have a lot of money invested in your country, and we would not want to lose it. We want to know if it is convenient for us to continue working and investing money here or if it would be wiser to leave. Is it true that new elections will be held soon? I arrived in Madrid last month, and the newspapers were full of photos of the new government. I have now read about a crisis; that the government will change. Look what Germany has achieved in half the time. Look at the highways, the multiplication of industrial facilities, and the millions of new jobs. And it’s not a matter of race, as some think, of efficient Aryans and lazy Latinos. Look what Italy has become in ten years. Have you seen its roads, new railway stations, and the strength of its army? I don’t have ideological prejudices either, dear Judith. It’s just a practical matter. I am just as impressed by the formidable advances of the Soviet five-year plans. I have seen the factories with my eyes, the blast furnaces, and the collective farms plowed by tractors. Ten or fifteen years ago, Russia’s countryside was more miserable and backward than Spain’s. Just two years ago, Germany was a humiliated country. Now it is once again the leading power in Europe. Despite the terrible and unfair sanctions imposed on the country by the allies, especially the French, who would not be so resentful if they were not also incompetent and corrupt.”
“Does it matter what price you pay?”
“And don’t democracies also pay a terrible price? Millions of men without work in my country [ the US], in England, in France. The rottenness of the Spanish Republic. Children with swollen bellies and eyes full of flies right here in the suburbs of Madrid. Even our president has had to imitate the giant public works of Germany and Italy and the planning of the Soviet government.”
“The Night of Time” by Antonio Muñoz Molina
In this extraordinary novel, Antonio Muñoz Molina uses a romantic story to give us his perspective on Republican Spain. This conversation occurs at a date near the precipice of the Spanish Civil War. We Spaniards are naturally impatient and excessively critical of ourselves. Only once, before the current democratic government, did we give a new regime a chance to improve the country. We were about to achieve it in 1820, implanting the Constitution of 1812, the most revolutionary in our history, La Pepa. But at that time, we had a traitor as a king, Fernando VII El Criminal. He conspired with the European countries, which agreed to help him and restore his absolute power. They sent an army of 130,000 men, the Sons of San Luis, to chop the embryo of hope for a new Spain.
