In Europe

races by with an intravenous drip dangling from his hand, father and mother praying on both sides, a little runaway pietà.
    The next day I cross the Spanish border again, and a few hours further along I see what I call the Lake of Dried-Up Expectations. On the mountainside are a few villas, a hotel and a boarded-up village bar, but the eye is drawn only to the gravel bottom of what was supposed to be a large mountain lake, with cheerful beaches and vivacious young people.Lying here and there in the mud are a few lost boats, all that is left of all this promise. It is an absurd place, this bare valley and this drained water basin, with its brave hotelier and a few homeowners holding out in the face of it all: someday this will turn out all right, someday we will have cheerful beaches again, discos and pretty girls.
    After Franco had been in power for about ten years, right after the end of the Second World War, a visitor described Spain as a ‘washed-away chunk of South America’: parched earth, constantly circling vultures and the introspection of a dream castle. The great wars more or less passed it by, the democratisation was in no hurry. It is only in the last two decades that things have started rolling again. Franco's economic policies were based on pure autocracy, and for the Spanish this resulted in a level of starvation and disease unknown since the Middle Ages. On 31 December, 1939 he announced that all the country's problems were over: ‘Huge amounts of gold have been found in Spain!’ It was one big swindle. Not long afterwards, the Austrian Albert von Filek convinced the dictator that he could make petrol from water and a secret plant extract. He was allowed to build a factory on the River Jarama, and for a long time Franco believed that his own car was the first to run on this new fuel. Between 1940–4 alone, some 200,000 Spaniards died of starvation.
    In Madrid I take a little city tour of Franco's sanctuaries. For this general who liked nothing more than playing king, El Pardo was the perfect palace: just outside the city, nothing in the surroundings to provoke unrest, yet positively dripping with aristocracy. For fifteen years the Francos lived here in complete isolation, interrupted only by brief trips to other parts of Spain and no more than three foreign visits: to Hitler, Mussolini and Salazar. Greece is the only missing name in that line-up of kindred spirits; it was not until 1967 that Georgios Papadopoulos imposed his shaky nationalist dictatorship, and by then Franco was too old to travel far.
    Some thirty years after the war, three of the four big Southern European countries were still living under taciturn, oppressive, fascist dictatorships. Strikingly enough, all those regimes came to an end almost simultaneously: in April 1974, during the Carnation Revolution, a group of Portuguese officers seized power from Salazar's successor Marcelo Caetano;three months later the Greek regime collapsed, isolated and exhausted after a student revolt and a Turkish invasion of Cyprus, and in November 1975 Franco breathed his last, after having held Spain in a stranglehold for almost forty years.
    The palace guide leads us from one room to the next full of gold leaf, tapestries and pompous furniture. Look, there is the dining room where no table companion ever dared bring up the country's problems: they spoke only in terms of ‘traitors’ and ‘ingrates’. On the wall is a still life of hams, lobsters and slaughtered stags. The little cinema is still there, with Franco's seat right in the middle. The table where the council of ministers met. The enormous television, almost the only window on the world the dictator had in his final years.
    In her memoirs, published in 1980, his sister Pilar wrote: ‘Of course he paid no rent for El Pardo, and his expenses were paid by the national treasury. But I know for a fact that he never let the state pay for his clothing. He paid for his own underwear himself.’
    And, oh, there is his bedroom, light green in neo-imperial style, with two cute little brown reading lamps, one for him and one for his doña Carmen. The room still has the same carpet, the one that was drenched in blood on those November nights in 1975 as the life slowly flowed out of him. Next to it is his red marble bathroom; of course, we are free to view everything, even the bathtub, even the little white toilet. The only thing it brings to mind is: so this is where it began, that unparalleled