The breaking of Agustín Gómez-Arcos’ silence

Text by Aitor Salinas

The Spanish writer Agustín Gómez-Arcos became one of the most prolific and respected voices in French literature during the twentieth century, yet his work—addressing the dictatorship that held Spain hostage for three decades and the pain it left behind—remained virtually unknown in his homeland. Now, twenty-seven years after his death, a new generation is rediscovering his extraordinary legacy. After giving voice to those the fascist regime had silenced—and being silenced himself for it—his singular voice is, once again, loud and clear.

The silence in Spain is deafening. It always has been. Tangled in the sharp corners of its uncomfortable history, springing like an invasive weave from the curbs of the roads where Republican soldiers were anonymously laid to rest during the Civil War. Taught in schools for generations in between Catholic prayers supported by the fascist regime, and lingering everywhere from tea rooms to bars, where each wall had a set of ears and a cruelly snitching mouth that could bring upon a family everything from shame to death. It spread through Spain like a disease, infecting a country that was left only with survivors after the war, training its people with the frightened reflex of looking away. 

Few escaped that silence. And those who did found no refuge in the barren soil of Spain, where freedom could scarcely take root as an idea. Only through exile could some authors summon enough of it to look terror in the eyes. From a distance, they could fight back. From a distance, they became free.

The wooded, labyrinthine paths of the Cimetière de Montmartre in Paris trace a biographical map of European cultural history. Among its irregular layout, sharing the earth with Degas, Truffaut, and Stendhal, lies the body of a man whose grave is marked by a single phrase. Though he created his narrative work in French and became a monumental voice in the country’s literary sphere, the inscription is not in the language of his chosen resting place—the same language that, during his lifetime, allowed him to blossom into one of the finest novelists of the twentieth century. Instead, the phrase is proudly carved in the tongue of the land that gave him life only to take it away, sending him in search of freedom abroad. But he never forgot that silence. That is why it is in Spanish that Agustín Gómez-Arcos’s tombstone eternally declares: “Un hombre libre” (A free man).

THE RESURRECTION OF A STORY

This phrase, which will accompany Gómez-Arcos forever, was borrowed by Laura Hojman (Seville, 1984) for the title of her fourth documentary feature—a poetic retelling of the author’s life, and the first of its kind in a country where he remains virtually unknown. Like many others, Hojman discovered Gómez-Arcos through the recommendation of a friend—a journalist based in France—a pattern that seems to repeat in the paths of many readers: his work is rarely found by chance, always passed on by someone. “I like to think that readers of Agustín—less so now, but back then—were part of a kind of secret club,” she says. “And we would recognise each other: ‘Oh! You too!’”

That quiet sense of belonging, combined with the haunting pull of his novels, drew her into an investigative journey that eventually became a film—the fourth in an almost accidental series of documentaries on Spanish writers: Rubén Darío, Antonio Machado, and María Lejárraga. She was weary, however. Not least because by the third consecutive film, she felt she was done with the subject of Spanish literature–after all, she admits, it was never the plan to focus her career on it. However, telling the story of a celebrated author who had unwillingly disappeared from his own country would imply untangling a great deal of pain. “It meant stepping into a completely different kind of language,” she remembers. “I had just made Los días azules and María Lejárraga, which are told from a much more luminous, gentler place. But, of course, that was never a possibility with Agustín. His life was the complete opposite.” Nevertheless, she went on with it. The story, she felt, needed to be heard.

AN EXILED MAN

Agustín Gómez-Arcos was born in 1933 into a Republican family in Enix, a small town on the Mediterranean coast in Almería, southern Spain. The youngest of seven brothers, his childhood was swiftly shrouded by the shadow of death when, less than three years later, the Spanish Civil War erupted—ushering in a reign of silence and terror. A silence that would accompany him for the rest of his life. A silence that bore a name. A silence called Franco.

That same silence was there when the regime harshly punished his family for their loyalty to the short-lived republic—a democratic utopia that had hoped to rid Spain of its monarchy but instead collapsed in flames, giving way to a thirty-six-year fascist dictatorship. It was there when he wrote his first poems as a child with an early passion for literature in his native Almería, and still there when he abandoned his law studies in Barcelona after three years to pursue writing. When he finally moved to Madrid, he devoted himself to playwriting—but it was there that the silence began to bite back.

Between 1956 and 1966, Agustín Gómez-Arcos wrote fifteen plays, most of them in open defiance of the regime or exposing the hypocrisy of the institutions that sustained it. Only three, however, were ever staged. Since the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936, the fascist regime had enforced a rigid censorship across all areas of life, under the guise of preserving ‘morality.’ And, of course, Gómez-Arcos’s work was not considered particularly ‘moral.’

Thanks to censorship files unearthed in Hojman’s documentary, we now know that Gómez-Arcos’s plays were not only condemned but also admired. Some censors openly praised his writing before concluding that it was ‘dangerous’ for the public to see—a contradiction that marked the first decade of his career. Twice he won the Lope de Vega, a prestigious theatre award granted by the city of Madrid. Twice his winning plays were banned, later released with heavy cuts, and the prize revoked. The first time, in 1962, it stung. The second, in 1965, it broke something in him. Gómez-Arcos finally understood that the only way to escape the silence strangling his work was to leave Spain. He moved to London in 1966, and two years later settled in Paris, where he would remain until his death in 1998.

A FRENCH-SPANISH AUTHOR

In a city pulsing with youth and creative ferment after the May 1968 protests, Gómez-Arcos began working as a waiter in a theatre bar in Paris’s Latin Quarter, where his plays were sometimes performed informally. One night, in a twist of fate, a prominent French editor attended a performance and, intrigued, asked to know who the playwright was. He happened to ask the waiter—who happened to be the author himself.

Days later, an offer arrived for a novel. Gómez-Arcos travelled to Greece for a few months and returned with The Carnivorous Lamb, his first book, written and published in French in 1975. The old silence no longer stung after that. He silenced it once and for all with a fierce, transgressive story of homosexual incest in post-war Spain, written with surgical rage in a language that was not his own, yet felt profoundly Spanish. That same year, Francisco Franco suffered heart failure leading to toxic shock and cardiac arrest. He died soon after, at the age of 82.

Another thirteen novels would follow, all of them profoundly successful in France, all of them dealing with stories of the vanquished by the war, the silenced. He was shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt—one of the most important literary awards in Europe–several times. Twice, he was a finalist. First, in 1978, when he lost to Patrick Modiano, who would eventually win the Nobel prize in 2014. The second time, in 1984, he lost to Marguerite Duras when she published L’Amant. He believed, however, that he had never truly won it because he had always refused to become a French citizen. Despite the French government providing him with every facility, he always remained a Spanish citizen—even when his own country turned its back on him.

A NEW SILENCE

Agustín, of course, returned to Spain after democracy was restored. From the mid-1980s until his final days, he often spent long stretches in an apartment he had rented near Madrid’s Retiro Park—his presence there a quiet form of revenge against the country that had once left no room for him. But his return, sadly, proved devastatingly similar to his past exile.

The silence imposed during the dictatorship did not die in 1975—it merely changed shape, suffocating once again the nation it had long held hostage: first its people, then their memory. At the dawn of a fragile new democracy, a pact of silence was quietly sealed across Spain. It was never discussed, only understood. If the country were to move forward, it could only look ahead. The past was a closed chapter. And it was this new silence that wounded Gómez-Arcos most deeply when it turned against him—the one he had least expected.

And it was this particular pain that fascinated Hojman, because it would become the defining aspect of the author’s legacy in Spain. “I realised there was a story to tell that wasn’t only about reclaiming the figure of Agustín, but one that carried all the themes that interested me,” she says. “The theme of memory, the theme of silence—this silence we carry about a large part of our history, of our characters—and how those silences also shape us as a society. He understood the power of storytelling to grant existence, to give life. The idea that what is not named does not exist is absolutely true. When Agustín had to leave Spain, instead of giving up his work and his voice, he clung to the French language as a way to keep all those characters alive. All those stories had been expelled from Spanish memory. He allowed them to survive by giving them a story in literature.”

But they would remain alive only in French literature. When Gómez-Arcos returned to Spain, he somewhat expected to receive an offer for a book written in his own language—perhaps even just a translation—following his success in France. Instead, he was met with that new silence, which began to shadow him once again, much like the old one. His ghosts of the past revealed an uncomfortable truth: Spain was no longer interested in his denunciation of the past—or perhaps simply unable to face it. For the first time, the country could build a tomorrow, and that left no room for looking back. His voice was lost and forgotten for years. Until it wasn’t.

THE RESURRECTION OF A VOICE

If you had asked for a Spanish edition of any of Gómez-Arcos’s most celebrated novels twenty years ago, you would have been met with a puzzled look in a bookstore. Those books, as it turned out, simply didn’t exist. After his death, there was virtually no trace of Agustín’s work left in Spain—and so he was forgotten.

But during a dinner in Paris in 2003, a friend of Miguel Lázaro (Madrid, 1969) asked if he had ever read anything by the Spanish author. He hadn’t. In fact, he had never even heard of him—but he was about to. Three years later, together with José Miguel Pomares, Lázaro founded Cabaret Voltaire, a Madrid-based publishing house specialising in translations of French authors. “When I came across that kind of literature, I realised it was time to start the publishing house,” he recalls. “And of course, he was one of the authors we included from the very beginning. In fact, the third title we published was El niño Pan (an autobiographical novel from 1983), and the seventh was The Carnivorous Lamb. After that, we began releasing almost one of his books every year.”

And people have bought them. Both The Carnivorous Lamb and Ana no, his two most popular novels, are already in their seventh edition. Together with María República, these three books form what Lázaro calls “the postwar trilogy.” “It’s a trilogy set during the Spanish post-war period, under the regime. And they are three books he wrote one after the other, in 1975, 1976, and 1977,” Lázaro explains.

“It’s astonishing—they’re three masterpieces of literature, without any doubt. And he wrote them in an almost compulsive way, as if he were vomiting them out, because it’s hard to imagine how something like that could be produced consecutively. He must have already carried them within him, fully formed. I don’t know exactly what his process was—he’s not here to tell us—but it’s truly fascinating as a calling card.”

It may have arrived with considerable delay, but as Lázaro confirms, this is clearly his moment. “Some writers are only reached by their time later. While Gómez-Arcos remained almost invisible in Spain, in France he was widely read, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. In Spain, his own generation—those who would now be around ninety—perhaps heard of him. But the next generation, the one that would have been his children’s, turned its back on him. Very few embraced his work. And now it’s the generation that would be his grandchildren’s who are devouring his books. For a writer to be read with such intensity and such a sense of contemporaneity by that generation means he was ahead of his time—that he was deeply modern.”

A NEW HOPE

At the end of our conversation, I asked Lázaro one final question: is it true that young people no longer read? He’s quick to dismiss the idea as a myth, though he pauses for a moment, uncertain about how it connects to Gómez-Arcos’s legacy. But there’s a historical echo in it. The writer fled Spain to find freedom first in London and then in Paris—two cities whose futures were being built by a generation born, for the first time in decades, without the burden of fear and destruction left by war. In Spain, that same kind of generation took much longer to emerge; in Spain, everything arrived late.

The first democratic elections were held in 1977, but the shadow of the regime remained long and tortuous. Even for those raised just after its fall, the consequences of decades of isolation were brutally felt in the economy and the social fabric. The privatisation of public industries—an effort to modernise—devastated the steelmaking and shipbuilding sectors. The transition from pesetas to euros disrupted the cost of living. The AIDS epidemic struck hard, following the late arrival of heroin in the country. Economic openness, globalisation, and market liberalisation all came at a price. Bringing Spain up to date with the rest of the world, it turned out, was not as easy as many had hoped.

For those who lost their jobs as a result of the necessary yet aggressive economic reforms of the new leftist democratic government—implemented even as it sold an image of prosperity abroad, bolstered by the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona and the Universal Exhibition in Seville—a singular phrase began to circulate, spat out like a bitter refrain: “Esto con Franco no pasaba.” This didn’t happen with Franco.

A NEW THREAT

For years, it was murmured, under the shared understanding that a dictatorship was never the answer. It was mocked, turned into a dark inside joke. But this is a new Spain—one now being shaped by a generation that has never felt the regime or its consequences. They are the equivalents of those whom Agustín Gómez-Arcos encountered when he moved to London and Paris, only this time, instead of looking forward, they are looking back. And when they say that things were better under Franco, they are no longer afraid to say it out loud.

A recent study by El País revealed that young Spaniards between the ages of 18 and 29 now place themselves further to the right than at any point in the past forty years. For the first time, people under 30 describe themselves as more conservative than the Spanish population as a whole. “Among young men who identify with the right (7–8 on a 10-point scale), the proportion has risen from 12% to 25% since 2019,” note the authors, Pablo Ordaz and Borja Andrino. “And the number who position themselves further to the extreme has tripled, from 3% to 10%.” Women still lean more to the left, but that percentage has also grown—from 10% to 24%.

On another even more worrisome note, a study by the Spanish Centre for Sociological Research shows that more than 21% of the population considers the years of the dictatorship to have been ‘good’ or ‘very good.’ The silence, once again, is taking over. But this time it isn’t being fed by fear, but by the dissolution of the memory Gómez-Arcos fought hard to keep alive.

THE DEATH OF SILENCE

“Many of the writers who wrote, or the filmmakers who created during the Franco regime, were never able to do so with a truly free voice,” reflects Lázaro. “And here, by contrast, we have an absolutely free one. That’s rare. His voice isn’t contaminated by thoughts like ‘I have to adapt,’ ‘this won’t work,’ or ‘I won’t sell books.’ He writes from a place of total freedom. And he carries with him a deeply intimate memory—the memory of his family, the only one he brought along. And it’s that memory he pours into his books.” It is also the memory his country has so persistently tried to erase, yet it is the one that could finally free Spain from silence. The kind of silence young people need to confront—the kind that can only be broken through books. “When people say, ‘Why look back? You’re just reopening old wounds,’ the truth is that we look back to heal them,” says Hojman. “And to heal, we need to face things directly. We need to talk about them, we need to put them into words, we need to build a narrative. We need to say, ‘This is what happened.’ Only then can we look forward and move on. But first, we have to know who we are. We have to acknowledge what has happened to us, and we have to go through that process.”

In Ana no, Gómez-Arcos’s third novel, based on a story his mother once told him, a seventy-five-year-old woman consumed by silence decides to clean her house, bake a loaf of bread with sugar and almonds, and walk from the south to the north of Spain to visit her only surviving child—a son she has not seen in decades, imprisoned for life for fighting on the Republican side during the war.

While recounting her pain—Ana has lost all the men in her life to war: her husband and two older sons killed in combat and buried anonymously by the roadside—Gómez-Arcos offers this deeply moving reflection: “The tragedy did not fall upon her alone. She had to swallow her pain and drown it in the anonymity of collective sorrow. She could not tell her story to anyone. She was not an isolated case, but the mirror that reflected the abandonment of others.”

Ana, like so many others, was killed by silence. Her story was forgotten, then rescued by the voice of Agustín, who wrote about her and the pain she embodied, bringing her back to life. But then Agustín too was killed by silence—his own story buried and forgotten, until a new generation began reading him again and, in doing so, brought him back to life. Twice killed, twice resurrected. And this time, there is no going back. Agustín Gómez-Arcos spent his life on the losing side of Spain’s history, but time has finally revealed what the past refused to see—that he had been right all along.