Saturday, October 26, 2024

the last book I ever read (Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past, excerpt six)

from Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past by Giles Tremlett:

Does the king’s ‘enthusiasm for beautiful women’ – as one biographer delicately puts it – matter to Spaniards? Not really. Gossiping is a national pastime. In the birthplace of ¡Hola! Magazine and a dozen competitors (whose enthusiasm for royal scandals seems limited to those of other countries) it is also a large publishing and television industry. Spaniards enjoy the tittle-tattle but are rarely judgemental. ‘A Borbón will always be a Borbón,’ they say knowingly, referring to the far more colourful lives of previous monarchs. (Isabel II was said to be a nymphomaniac, while Alfonso XIII had three bastard children, one of whom, Leandro Alfonso, was formally recognized as such by a Spanish court in 2003.) It is a different matter, however, when that enthusiasm encourages, in the words of the same biographer, ‘attempts at blackmail by financiers’.

Paul Preston, the professor of Spanish history at the London School of Economics, wrote the biography referred to above. He also sheds light on one of those episodes that Spanish writers generally ignore or skirt around in their – almost unanimously adulatory – descriptions of their king. In one of the most tragic moments of a difficult childhood, Juan Carlos shot his own brother dead. Juan Carlos, then seventeen, and fourteen-year-old Alfonsito were playing with a gun in the exiled family’s home in Portugal. No clear account of what happened has yet been given. The gun, it seems, was in Juan Carlos’s hands when it went off. The bullet from the .22 pistol either bounced off a wall or simply went straight into Alfonsito’s forehead. Juan Carlos’s father, Don Juan de Borbón, tried to keep his son alive. The wound, however, was mortal. He died a few minutes later. His father wrapped the teenage corpse in a Spanish flag. The incident must have been a key moment in Juan Carlos’s life – both in his relations with a father already using him as a pawn in his games with Franco and in the creation of his own personality, which was still in its formative years. ‘The incident affected the Prince dramatically. The rather extrovert figure . . . now seemed afflicted by a tendency to introspection. Relations with his father were never the same again,’ says Preston.



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