The Devil’s Backbone
Last summer I was having coffee with a Spanish writer at a café in an upscale Madrid neighborhood just off the bustling Avenida Concha Espina. The thoroughfare is named after an insignificant twentieth-century author who supported Francisco Franco. As my colleague explained with a slight grimace, civic spaces like these were part of the legacy of Francoism, cosmetic but telling. Middling literati such as Espina are memorialized at well-trafficked hubs, while their more accomplished counterparts who ran afoul of Franco’s regime have had their names consigned to remote side streets.
The enmities