Travels with my Donkey

until I stopped to eat a tin of pimientos by a bus shelter, whereupon an old man in a flat cap came up and called me a fascist.
    It's funny, or rather grimly shaming, to think of the blithe holiday larks many of us enjoyed in Spain during Franco's long tenure. Thirty-six years he ruled: I still can't quite believe Western Europe had a fascist dictator in 1975. How could Abba and General Franco have overlapped?
    'Falangista, Falangista !' the man croaked animatedly, poking a vague and shaky forefinger at Shinto's head. There was no audience, but I can't pretend not to have been a little alarmed. He stooped effortfully to pick up Shinto's rope, then held it up to me defiantly. ' Falangista !' he cried again, before casting it haughtily into the dust and heading across the road towards a bar. For a brief but vivid moment I imagined him re-emerging through its dangling fly curtain at the head of a heavily armed death squad masked in the long-eared balaclavas of the Donkey Liberation Front. But then I looked again at the rope, which was striped red and green, and realised the green was very dark, dark enough for a man of many years with short sight and a long memory to have thought he was looking at the red and black of Franco's army.
    If feelings run a little strong in this part of the world — I'd certainly advise Dennis the Menace to think long and hard before agreeing to that tour of the region's old people's homes — it's perhaps not surprising. Franco swore in his first fascist government at a monastery in Burgos, and that prison I'd passed had incarcerated many of his political enemies. Crossing the Montes de Oca I'd seen a memorial for the unknown thousands of Burgos republicans abducted, murdered and buried in lonely mass graves that are still being discovered. But, and there's no way of saying this without causing grievous offence, I still can't understand how the people of Spain never rose up and overthrew Franco. They waited until he got really old and died, buried him with due pomp, then quietly adopted parliamentary democracy. I mean, I could understand their trepidations in the unstable post-war climate, but — well, he was eighty when 'Waterloo' came out. An eighty-year-old dictator with no credible possibility of being survived by his odious regime. It's not great, is it?
    Pensively I trudged forth, pondering that even in Franco's absence Spain still seems oddly rooted in the fifties: the shameless love of private transport, the heavy industry nudging right into town, those blaring election tannoys. And all this rural poverty — I was now passing through towns that seemed to be shedding wealth and sophistication in layers, each scrappier and more rustic than the last. There were new cars, then old cars, then no cars. We turned an uphill corner out of a farm and there, mercifully in the distance, was the first working donkey I'd seen: incredibly, taking on the collie role at the rear end of a column of sheep, nudging the slackers into place with his snout. Donkeys, I now saw, were neither lazy nor agelessly stupid. Some donkeys. Over a distance Shinto's ears were a lot more use than his eyes, but he still did a double take.
    The sheep donk was a clear indication that we were entering the parochial periphery of the great meseta, but not as clear perhaps as a rather bleak ascent through an unremitting expanse of corn, and the epic covering of the same that filled the prospect from atop the climb's conclusion. But wasn't the chalky descent from here unusually severe for what was supposed to be a prairie? It certainly looked so: halfway down I could see a dismounted cyclist scrabbling perilously for purchase as the path split into a dozen pebbled gullies.
    'Moment please!' It was another cyclist, a German, approaching from behind and holding up a wiggling forefinger in what I could now spot at 100 paces as the universal sign for 'I would like to photograph your monkey.' Shinto was already nose down in the corn; I shrugged in assent. As he extracted his camera from the bag on his handlebars, I saw inside it an unfamiliar guidebook, long and thin and English. 'Could I have a quick... ?' I asked, as Shinto pushed out his fifth leg into a pose that perhaps at this very moment is bringing a Bavarian slide show to an early and ignoble conclusion. 'For sure. It's most useful. I believe from Canada.'
    I skimmed through the relevant paragraph with what began as mild curiosity. Rural road... uphill through