http://internetreviewofbooks.com/dec08/for_a_sack_of_bones.

html

Unmarked Spanish graves

FOR A SACK OF BONES
By Lluís-Anton Baulenas (translated from the Catalan by Cheryl Leah Morgan)
359 pp. Harcourt $25

Reviewed by Rebeca Schiller

This November, Spain’s most noted jurist, Judge Baltasar Garzon, reversed the indictment of
human rights crimes against the late Generalissimo Francisco Franco and his regime, and
dropped the investigation into the atrocities and disappearances of many Spanish Republicans
that occurred during and after the Spanish Civil War. In his novel For a Sack of Bones,
Catalonian novelist, playwright, and screenwriter Lluís-Anton Baulenas tackles this very subject
and takes readers back to the time of the war to witness the horrors and atrocities of Franco’s
concentration camps and charity orphanages, and ten years later to the “sinister regime based on
corruption and abuse of authority.”

Sergeant Genís Aleu, a Spanish Foreign Legionnaire, narrates the story of a promise he made to
his dying father—to find the unmarked grave of his father’s best friend and to give the remains a
decent burial in Barcelona. Right from the novel’s beginning, we know where Genís stands.
“Franco’s Regime makes me sick,” he writes. “I find it despicable.” And from this first sentence
in the book’s prologue, we learn how the events of the war, and the post-war, have left the young
and cynical Legionnaire with a taste for vengeance.

As a parallel narrative, For a Sack of Bones also tells the story of the young Genís, known as
Niso to his family and friends (when he was a child) and after the war as an adult with a mission.
Niso’s story starts in Barcelona; he is an innocent entangled, like many other children in Spain,
in the web of war and defeat. His father volunteers to fight with the Republican army and later is
incarcerated in the Miranda de Ebro concentration camp after the Republic is crushed by Franco.
The boy’s mother, left with no means to take care of him, takes Niso to a Charity House in
Barcelona, one of many throughout Spain whose wards are orphans, poor children, and the
abandoned elderly. Here the young boy stays with the hope of being reunited with his family.
That yearning is fulfilled when Niso’s gravely ill father returns from the camp and makes his
deathbed wish of having the boy find a treasure that his friend hid on the camp’s grounds and to
bury his bones in Barcelona.

With his father dead, his mother crazy with grief and unable to financially support him, Niso
returns to the Charity House, where he and all the other children are confronted with the
uncharitable acts of nuns and priests who let their wards go hungry and make them pray for the
Generalissimo and for the victory of his friend, the Führer.

Under their care the children of Republican soldiers—labeled as “Reds” and atheists or both—
are threatened on a daily basis with horrendous scenes of Hell by the mother superior:

Bolshevism, the Antichrist and Separatism are like serpents. They are the devils within, which
devour the very fiber of our being. We must wrench them through penitence, and if necessary, by
force.

When not brutalized or harangued by the fanatic clergy members, Niso is attacked by a guard—a
former resident of the orphanage—and sent to the infirmary, where the kindly Sister Paula, a nun
of aristocratic lineage, befriends him and indirectly helps him become a Legionnaire in North
Africa.

As Genís tells the story that led to fulfilling his father’s wish, he cuts the narrative with how he
plans to carry out that promise to find the grave and treasure. By taking advantage of his
Legionnaire status, Genís travels to Miranda del Ebro and visits the former concentration camp,
now a military training barrack, under the pretense that he’s preparing a report to recruit soldiers
to the Spanish Foreign Legion. While at the camp and in the outskirts of the town, he discreetly
searches for both the goods and the unmarked grave. When he discovers the hidden spoils—a set
of documents describing the kidnapping and selling of children of Republicans to high
government officials—Genís realizes the documents’ historical magnitude and potential and
personal financial gain. Yet for Genís it’s not about money. When asked if he’s crazy to go
through the trouble and endanger himself by a former camp nurse who he’s recruited to help
him, Genís replies:

Maybe, but keeping the promise I made to my father makes me feel like I belong to the world,
somehow. It gives me a sense of worth. You don’t earn people’s respect by sitting around.
Nobody will pay any attention to you if you simply exist.

Unfortunately, during the 30 years of Franco’s hard-fisted and tyrannical rule, many Spaniards
simply existed. Written in an unsentimental and matter-of-fact voice, For a Sack of Bones is a
bleak and dark tale of the missing, the kidnapped, and the murdered supporters of the Republic
whose unmarked graves are peppered across the country. Readers familiar with the war and the
atrocities committed by Franco and his allies will applaud Baulenas for writing this gripping
story about subjects still considered taboo in Spain.