Death in Granada

EXTRACT FROM BETWEEN TWO FIRES 

It was one of those winter days the citizens of Granada take for granted, cold but bathed in dazzling light. A day to bring to mind the sentiments of the 20th-century’s most famous granadino, the poet García Lorca, who once noted: “The hours are longer and sweeter there than in any other Spanish town.” Lorca met his death  in the madness of the Spanish Civil War and on this brilliant morning members of another firing squad were preparing their weapons. The first rays of the sun were gilding the snows of the Sierra Nevada that towers above the city when, at 7am, with the temperature close to freezing point, they escorted a prisoner to the municipal cemetery.

The ritual was brief and brutal. The shots rang out and the condemned man, blindfolded and erect but almost certainly destroyed by months of interrogation, slumped to the ground, where an officer applied the coup de grace. The inhabitants of Granada went about their business, unaware of the death of a legend in their city. Peace had descended on southern Spain, the peace of death. The years of struggle were over. The execution of José Muñoz Lozano, nom de guerre El Roberto, removed one of the most troublesome thorns nagging the flesh of the Franco regime . . .

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