At the end of Camada negra (Black Brood, 1977), a young apprentice in Fascism concludes his militant initiation into the ranks by repeatedly crushing his lover's head with a rock while he intones with nationalistic fervor, “Spain … Spain … Spain.” The movie, directed by Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón in 1977, two years after Francisco Franco's death, tells the contemporary story of a band of ultra–right terrorists organized around a family that operates under the fanatical tutelage of an authoritarian matriarch, widow of a fallen hero of the Francoist crusade. The group's intent is to safeguard the political, moral, and cultural foundations of the dictatorship against the forces of democratic change, as well as to preserve at all costs and through any means the monolithic idea of the Spanish nation imposed by that regime. Arguably this context could help to alleviate the perplexity caused by such a final act of violence, one more in the seemingly endless list of Spanish cultural and cinematic atrocities, perpetrated upon an attractive, though lower–class, single mother by an adolescent lover who, by his own admission just before killing her, likes the woman very much. The horrific deed makes up in symbolism what it lacks in practicality or sentimental congruence, since the victim might represent a threatening rival, a menacing alternative, to the biological and political matriarch, the mother, the incarnation of Franco's Spain in the figurative economy of the film. Thus the patriotic litany—“Spain … Spain … Spain”—should be understood as the unambiguous identification of the cause and beneficiary of the action, interchangeably the mother and the motherland. However, we cannot discount the possibility of a perverse audience that reads the scene taking the words of the killer as the compulsive repetition of the name of the victim: “Spain … Spain … Spain.” In fact, although seemingly opposite, both readings can be —and perhaps ought to be—conflated. Marsha Kinder has pointed out that Rosa, the ill–fated lover, “functions as a surrogate for Blanca,” the matriarch, and as such constitutes “an object of both incestuous desire and matricide” (Blood 206). The resulting nationalist conundrum can be laid out as follows: the young Falangist ends up massacring Spain—old and/or new, past and/or future, as allegorized by the two generations of mothers—on behalf of Spain, to protect Spain, as proof of his passion for Spain.