2023-05-20 23:58:34
The Hendaye interview was not as we have been told. Although on paper the forms were maintained, Adolf Hitler was dispatched at ease with his entourage. In the hours that followed, he blurted out the now mythical “mit diesem Kerl ist nichts zu machen” (“with these guys there is nothing to do”) and sketched Francisco Franco as a kind of puppet in the hands of his brother-in-law, Ramón Serrano. Suñer. But if there was one thing that greatly irritated the ‘Führer’, that was the voice of the Spaniard. In the words of Paul Schmidtof the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Nazi was annoyed that he spoke with a very high-pitched tone and in a “low and calm manner, whose monotonous soniquette was reminiscent of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer.”
And it is that, according to the experts, Franco had to have a particular voice at least. The Hispanist Staley G. Payne, in his work ‘Franco, the profile of history’, defines it as “little energetic and lisping”, as well as “decidedly acute”. He further adds that speaking through his nose and his “tendency to sway a bit when he walked” made him the perfect target for caricaturists. The historian Paul Preston, in his book ‘Franco’, is of the same opinion; In fact, he reveals that that tone, together with his short height, earned him “various minor humiliations” at the military academy, as well as the nickname “Cerillito.” And that, just to name two examples.
Common sense, the least common of senses according to our traditional proverb, dictates that that tone was given to him by fate and family genetics; Enemies that cannot be fought on the battlefield. However, the doctor did not think so. Juan Jose Iveas Serna, personal dentist of the dictator during the stage that he spent in El Pardo. In an interview published in the magazine ‘Sábado gráfico’, the doctor revealed that “the Caudillo suffered from a deviation in the septum, which is why he had that particular way of speaking” and explained the dental problems that had afflicted him during the last part of their life.
The article in question, difficult to find today, was collected in his memoirs by the doctor and personal friend of Francisco Franco for more than forty years: Vicente Gil. The doctor, whose children explained to ABC the details of their father’s relationship with the dictator in an interview published last November 2020, also left blank the few diseases that his patient suffered throughout the decades he was at the side of him. “In the long years of assistance, I can assure you that he did not take a single aspirin, nor was he treated for any disease, despite an active life with changes in the time for meals and rest,” he stated in the work of he.
unveil the enigma
By chance it was the dental problems that allowed Iveas to reveal Franco’s breathing difficulties. Inconveniences that, as explained in a report published in 2019, Colonel Francisco Bendala, they persecuted the dictator since his arrival in Africa to fight with the Legion. Already then several teeth were removed to avoid future infections. Something that was repeated during his stage under the orders of the Second Republic; years, by the way, in which he was honored and applauded by the same government against which he led a coup in 1936. After the Civil War, in the fifties, a Jewish dentist extracted several more pieces.
As Gil explained in his memoirs, it was at the beginning of the 1970s when dental problems came back to haunt Franco. They were so serious that he “was on the verge of death for the first time” due to a fungal infection. To support this theory, in his work he transcribed part of Iveas’s words to the magazine. Also a doctor in El Pardo, both met after the Civil War and became close friends that lasted for years. This is how the dentist explained that episode in the aforementioned interview:
«Fungal infection is usually benign in childhood and youth, but extremely serious in old age […]. Given the appearance and the spread that this infection was taking, Dr. Gil and I, in agreement with Dr. Lucas Tomás, decided to apply a treatment knowing how painful it would be for him. And he endured it with resignation, with tears like fists, but without a single moan.
I would like to erase that situation from my memory, since doctors Lucas, Gil and I assumed that if he did not respond to treatment in a few hours, the worst could happen. We stated this to Carrero Blanco and, the next day, in view of the improvement experienced, I heard the official part that said: ‘His Excellency he was absent from the Council of Ministers yesterday to undergo surgery on his mouth.’ It was interpreted as a dental extraction, but the London BBC reported the serious oral infection.
Francisco Franco greeting the former captives of the Fort of Guadalupe during his visit to Irún
In that part of the interview, Dr. Juan José Iveas specified that, in addition to being more dangerous during old age –Franco was in his eighties at the time– fungal infection was even more harmful in people who suffered from respiratory difficulties. “It is more serious in patients with mouth breathing (the Caudillo suffered from a deviated septum, which is why he had that particular way of speaking),” he stated.
He could not correct this problem, but he did save his life through the aforementioned intervention. Although, years later, and to the chagrin of the dictator, Dr. Vaquero had to remove even more teeth due to intense pain in his leg. Of course, after explaining his reasons in detail:
–And what does the state of the mouth have to do with a toothache?
–Sometimes dental foci can cause pain. Sepsis is always dangerous and you must convince yourself to remove these bad parts. The most that can happen is that the next day you have a swollen face.
From childhood
His tone of voice haunted Franco since childhood. Preston, for example, is in favor of the fact that little Francisco shared with his mother traits such as “affable manners, the high-pitched voice, the propensity to tears and the constant feeling of having suffered a loss.” This characteristic further fostered a character that, according to the historical popularizer José Luis Hernández Garvi reveals in ‘Brief History of Francisco Franco’, was always introverted and solitary. In ‘Franco, the rise to power of a dictator’,
Andrés Rueda is, if possible, more emphatic: “He was a sickly and weak child, with a permanent high-pitched and feminine voice, and in his maturity he retained a strange asexual and eunuchoid appearance, that is, with not very virile characteristics.”
José María Zavala –one of the greatest experts on Franco in our country– points out in his book ‘Franco frankly’ that it was during his stay at the Toledo Infantry Academy when «the scrawny Franquito had to put up with the ridicule for his high-pitched voice and his ridiculous little mustache.” So it was until, one day, tired as he was, he threw a candlestick at the head of one of his provocateurs. This was witnessed by one of his classmates, Vicente Guarnerwho stressed that the Galician was “taciturn, subdued, not at all brilliant” and had a striking “falsetto voice”.
His voice, in the words of Garvi, made him remain silent: «When he went to a gathering with his military comrades, he used to remain silent, unless they asked him directly, and only when they discussed the war in Morocco his colleagues could listen to his high-pitched voice for a long time.
For his part, Zavala also points out that, years later, the way of speaking was one of the biggest differences that existed between the future dictator and José Antonio Primo de Rivera. «The physical contrast between the two interlocutors was clear: one, 43 years old, short and not very attractive, with a high-pitched voice; the other, still 32 years old, tall, handsome and with a youthful gesture », he affects his work.
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