Amnesia Road by Luke Stegemann

Author:Luke Stegemann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing
Published: 2021-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

In December 2017, on a grey and bitterly cold morning – too cold for this far south – my daughter Eva and I walk to the San Fernando cemetery, close beyond the remnants of the old city walls of Seville. We are meeting the gregarious Cecilio Gordillo, co-ordinator of a civic group dedicated to the ‘Recovery of the Memory of Andalusian Social History’. Cecilio has encouraged us to join a group of local students touring the cemetery to learn of the mass graves that underlie different sections of the holy ground. This might seem a macabre but necessary part of learning their local history, yet as we talk Cecilio mentions, casually, that this is the first ever visit by local high school students. I find this hard to believe, so ask again; he tells me the only others to have come through here with an eye to the layers of history beneath the cemetery floor were, oddly enough, a group of high school students from Sweden. It has taken eighty-one years, from 1936 until this day in 2017, for a group of local students to file through and hear the accounts of what lies buried beneath the conventional dead. Some are bored, as with any school excursion, but most, despite the shivering cold, are deeply engaged.

The cemetery is under a flight path into Seville airport, and it is just a week before Christmas. Overhead, throughout the morning, tourist jets roll in, one dull metal belly after another, backed up against a soft grey sky, the fume and high growl of the engines above the headstones and pine trees, over the marble lanes, the flower stacks and sweeping widows attending to their loved ones’ graves.

We come to a site known as Pico Reja, one of several stillunopened mass graves within the compound of San Fernando. In 1936 a common grave already existed for the vagabond, the dispossessed, the unbaptised and all the nameless or unclaimed of the city. On those hot afternoons of July and into August, there was no more convenient place to throw the murdered victims of the insurrection. As the deaths continued, new sections of Pico Reja were opened, then covered over when full. The city had begun to consume its own, and cast the bodies into anonymity.

In Pico Reja alone it is estimated that up to 1100 bodies lie under the gardens and pathways. Here and there photos of the missing are tied to old pine trees that grow over the mass grave; portraits woven around with the colours of the Republican flag. Age: 26; Murdered-Missing reads one, with a photo of a young man in military dress; Age: 19; Murdered-Missing reads another with a faded image of a young boy, fist raised in salute. Below the portraits, roses have been attached to the base of the tree with sticky tape; other bunches of flowers lie on the ground. Nearby, on other trunks and poles, photos of the missing proliferate along with poems and pleas to vanished grandparents.

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