Rodrigo Terrasa wrote the first lines about Pepica Celda a decade ago when he was working on the Valencian edition of El Mundo. The story and tenacity of this octogenarian captivated him. “Pepica obtained one of the last grants from Zapatero’s Historical Memory Law and began a race against time to exhume the grave where she was convinced that the remains of her father rested,” a farmer shot on September 14, 1940 by be leftist.
Terrasa explains that “when they opened the grave they found some little bottles with the names of those buried” next to his father’s body in the Paterna cemetery. The Valencian journalist pulled the thread and soon discovered the figure of Leoncio Badía, a young republican whose death sentence was commuted by the Franco regime to the punishment of burying his own. Without forgetting his ideals, Leoncio secretly collaborated for years with the widows and relatives of those who were retaliated against in the Civil War to locate their graves and identify their bodies, and tried to bury them in the most dignified way possible.
This man, fascinated by philosophy and obsessed with the meaning of life and the order of the universe, decided to hide messages among the corpses, convinced that one day someone could get them out of there, as happened more than seven decades later. “We discovered that some relatives had obtained a last memory of their loved ones such as a lock of hair or a simple piece of clothing thanks to their intermediation,” the journalist explains to La Vanguardia.
The stories of Pepica, her father José and Leoncio come to life in comic form in El abismo del olvido (Astiberri) by the cartoonist Paco Roca and the journalist Rodrigo Terrasa as a tribute to the thousands of Spaniards who were brutally retaliated against. savage and executed after the Civil War and the struggle of their descendants to recover their bodies.
La Vanguardia talks from a distance with the authors of this work that has just arrived in bookstores and will be presented in the city of València on December 15 at La Beneficència, a cultural center where the moving project Les Fosses del Franquisme is exhibited .
-Whose idea is it to bring these three intertwined stories to comics?
-Rodrigo Terrasa: I have known Paco for 20 years and since I interviewed Pepica I knew that there was a story to tell. It was the perfect topic and, furthermore, it was in Valencia. I spent years insisting on him. In between we did different separate projects and, finally, 10 years later, El abismo del olvido is already in bookstores.
-What has been the most complicated?
– R. Terrasa: It has been a long documentation process. There are few protagonists of what happened. The descendants talk about what they have been told, they did not experience it firsthand or they were very young and there are things that you do not know if they are true. Furthermore, we had to tone down the epic figure of Leoncio, since the story of a teacher who taught illiterate people and who ended up helping the widows of those who were retaliated against was too incredible.
Furthermore, the journalist reflects on the difficulty of finding objective data about the historical context. How many people died? How many graves were there? “When they showed me a map of the Paterna cemetery I was amazed. There was a parallel cemetery with almost 2,000 bodies. It is incredible that after the war so many people were shot. Speaking with an archaeologist, he explained to me that we cannot imagine how much Spain has grown in recent decades and how, under highways and shopping centers, thousands of bodies are hidden that will never be exhumed. “It has been a little frustrating, but as Paco and I mentioned, it shows the anomaly that this country is experiencing.”
The journalist still remembers the impact he had when he first went to the Paterna wall, where so many people were executed: “Not a plaque, just a rotten wreath of flowers with a republican flag and remains of a bottle.”
Another problem that the two authors agree on was the need to maintain a certain balance and not use some dead against others. “We assume that they did not have a fair trial and that nothing justifies their execution, but we do not know what they did. We did not want to enter into a story of good guys and bad guys. It is not just a comic about historical memory, it is a comic about human rights “explains Terrasa.
“The idea when making this comic was to try to understand why the exhumation of bones is so important for families like Pepica’s. She made an oath to her mother, promising that when she could she would recover her father’s bones so that they would rest alongside her own. And he has spent his entire life trying to achieve it, until finally, thanks to the law of historical memory, he managed to fulfill that wish, but many other families have not achieved it,” says Paco Roca.
Terrasa adds: “Pepica did not want to overthrow a government, the only thing she wanted was to find her father’s bones to bury them with her mother and be able to bring them flowers on All Saints’ Day.”
– At one point in the comic, even the drawing style changes and the story of Achilles is explained. Because?
– Paco Roca: What moves Pepica is the same thing that Héctor’s parents feel when Achilles takes their son’s body. They are basic things that every human being carries inside. This is what people need: to say goodbye to our loved ones and we need a ritual, each culture has its ritual, but we need that ritual. We need that dignified burial, that mourning and to have the body of that loved one to say goodbye. All this was denied to all those widows or mothers of those shot during the repression.
The cartoonist outlines the reasons of thousands of relatives: “The majority of widows made their children promise that they would solve this problem. They died without being able to fulfill their wish, but they transmitted to their descendants that need that, no matter what, they would recover the remains of their loved ones. It’s like having a stone in your shoe, and until you remove it, you can’t rest.”
– Is it the hardest comic you have done?
– P. Roca: Yes, the crudest. Although my comics are usually dramas, I believe that in all of them there is more light, more hope, more humor. This has been difficult; You are working with real material, you have met the families, they have told you their testimonies, many of them get emotional when they explain it to you and having to get into the shoes of all those characters makes the whole process quite hard. It has been two years in which you wake up empathizing with the recruit who has to be shot, with the last thoughts of the shot, with that mother who has a rattle in her pocket at the last moment of her life, with the undertaker who has to bury two thousand or so people, with the widows, with the mothers… let’s say that it becomes very complicated to spend two years thinking about that.
However, Roca admits the need, as an author, to tell the story and tell it in the best way possible. “Honestly, I think it is a necessary story for people to reflect on.”
-And why the title ‘The abyss of oblivion’?
– P. Roca: Try to reflect that abyss that separates memory from oblivion. What Franco’s repression did was not only kill thousands of people, but also erase their memory. They were thrown into a common grave, covered, and attempts were made to forget their memory. There was no mourning for his widow; They could not mourn them in public and there was nothing on their grave. Exhumations try to recover not only the bodies for their families, but also the memory, since each body has a story to tell. Those who are finally identified have a story again after 80 years and are the ones who cross that abyss of oblivion.
