A Bloody Transition: Child Killers in Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s ¿Quién puede matar a un niño? (1976)

Long considered the model of a tidy transition from dictatorship to democracy, the Spanish Transición in fact left behind a residue of uneasiness that is still being contended with today. By and large, this uneasiness can be traced to the so-called pacto del olvido, or pact of forgetting – an “institutionalized amnesia,” as Madeline Davis describes it, silently agreed upon by all of the major power players in the Spanish transition and subsequently formalized in the Amnesty Law of 1977. Described at the time by one moderate government deputy as a “forgetting from everybody to everybody,” that law banned the prosecution of crimes of a political nature committed during the Franco regime, including “the violation of human rights by government agents and functionaries” (Davis 863). For years, scholars and writers have debated the significance of this institutionalized amnesia, as well as the spectacle of its reversal witnessed in both the political and cultural arenas during the course of the past decade: a display punctuated by the passage of the “Ley de la Memoria Histórica,” or law of historical memory, in 2007, and what Sebastiaan Faber describes as “the appearance of scores of best-selling novels, memoirs, and studies, as well as … films, television programs, exhibits, and documentaries about hitherto less broadly publicized aspects of the Civil War and Francoism” (206). While many scholars, among them Jo Labanyi, have framed the pacto del olvido as a collective act of repression subsequently manifested in various collective pathologies, others, such as Santos Juliá, have contended that the conscious decision to forget is itself a way of remembering. And while Faber interprets the historical memory “boom” of the late 1990s and early 2000s as a “sign of socio-political health” (205), Joan Ramon Resina contends that the commodification of history does not constitute a genuine working through of the memory of it so much as yet another means of repressing the same. Mediated by the market, writes Resina, the “past … is constantly neutralized” (93).

Despite such disagreements regarding the short and long-term consequences of the pacto del olvido, however, there has been a surprising consensus amongst scholars and historians with respect to its cause. Synthesizing Palomar Aguilar’s 1996 Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy Faber describes “how it was the fear of violent conflict and the overwhelming, haunting presence of a certain memory of the Republic and the Civil War that quickly discouraged any further exploration of the past,” an attitude “imposed … from above,” he concedes, but “with the approval of most of the population” (213). To this widely accepted belief that a top-to-bottom refusal of the possible repetition of past violence lay at the heart of the Spanish transition’s pacto del olvido, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador’s 1976 ¿Quién puede matar a un niño? serves as a striking counter-example – one that, as we read it, goes so far as to suggest such a repetition of violence may be the very condition of a meaningful transition from a totalitarian past to a democratic future. In a moment in which the suspicion, long held by some of Spain’s most acerbic intellectuals, that the Spanish Transición was not one from dictatorship to democracy so much as from political dictatorship to market dictatorship has become word on the street, ¿Quién puede matar a un niño? offers a critically valuable glimpse into what Christopher Prendergast calls “the sphere of the might-have-been.”

Loosely based on the novel El juego de los niños by Juan José Plans, ¿Quién puede matar a un niño? tells the story of British couple Tom and Evie’s ill-fated trip to the fictional Spanish island of Almanzora, four hours by boat from the southern coastal town of Benavís. For Tom, the journey is one of return. Twelve years earlier, he visited Almanzora on his own and retains magical memories he hopes to relive with his now...