Writing Looking for Julio was difficult for me for all sorts of reasons. The plot is drawn from a collection of real events which took place in Andalucia and there are accounts in Spanish by some of the people who took part. I researched the details carefully because I didn't want the credibility to be in question, but also because I wanted to try to understand the reality for people of the time.
In 1936, there really was a town in Andalucia, perhaps many, where more than a hundred of the town leaders were rounded up by the fascist Falange and summarily shot. The luckier ones were herded into the town bullring and later transported to a fifteen minute trial far away, then sent to prison and later, to labour camps. One of the local roads near where I live was built by the slave labour rounded up in this way by the Falange and that immediacy weighs heavy with me. It's a reality that many people living in this region have somehow come to terms with. The youngsters may largely be unaware, but if they know about the events, they don't react in anything like the visceral way that some old-timers still do.
The government in Spain has enacted the Law of Historic Memory precisely to recover those missing bodies, currently estimated at around 115,000, mostly from the Republican side of the civil war and its aftermath. As I write, court approval has been obtained for the opening of the grave of Federico García Lorca near Granada. His execution was a potent symbol of the fascist repression. The family did not want to have the grave opened but agreed not to oppose it because two other people lie in the same grave.
For the last forty years, there has been an unofficial public consensus called olvido which entails accepting that both sides were responsible for the civil war. This agreement was reached during the time when Spain was moving from dictatorship to a fragile democracy. Now that democracy is well-established and stable, that old policy no longer serves its purpose, and particularly younger people want to know what happened.
So for me, it's a sensitive issue politically and socially. I live in the area affected. I wanted what I wrote to reflect the situation accurately. But of course, it's fiction and although it draws on real events, the characters are not real. So an author is put into a false position, attempting as ever to inbue fictional characters with emotions and reactions that ring true.
In drawing the character of Julio, who lives his life as Jules in the UK, I was torn between fleshing out the character, giving him explicit emotional reactions, a detailed back story, some feelings that the reader would closely identify with, and the alternative of leaving him partly undefined. I'm still unsure whether I took the right decision in leaving him too lightly defined and I might end up reworking it. I wanted the fact that he was looking for his past, to impinge on his present in such a way that the reader didn't have too many preconceptions. I wanted the starkness of the plot to drive the reader's emotions. Perhaps I hadn't really settled in my mind whether Julio was the protagonist or Emilio, except that writing it with Emilio centre stage would have shifted the centre of the story too far, as I discovered in some earlier drafts.
Jules' search for his mother couldn't take place without unearthing some pretty stark details and I wanted that to define him as much as his past. His relationship with Emilio was crucial because however he saw himself, it was the old man whose actions defined where he grew up. There were collaborators, willing to hand over relatives to be shot, and there were people on the run, orphans, escape routes. The maqui did exist in these parts right up to the early sixties, and there were anarchists just like Emilio.
The story went through around ten drafts with a huge amount of change, each time producing more uncertainties and questions for me. And in the end, although I'm reasonably satisfied with the plot, Emilio's character, the context, and the atmosphere of the small town, I still think there's something missing. Maybe in the end I'll flesh out Jules' character more, but I don't want the reader to identify too closely with him. Odd contradiction when developing a protagonist character, isn't it?
I'm very interested in the reactions from readers.
