Dead babies, you’d think, would be a fairly disturbing sight in the traffic-clogged, construction-choked heart of the Spanish capital. But have a look round the corner from the Corte Inglés department store on the newly pedestrianised Puerta del Sol, Madrid’s emblematic emulation of Trafalgar Square, where the New Year receives its Dionysian Spanish welcome, and workers’ rights are vindicated by the May Day masses. Not much resting in peace gets done here.

A grassy gully a few miles west of the southern city of Granada is far quieter than the Puerta del Sol. Even in the fierce Andalusian summer, you can count on a breeze to rustle the pines that shade this bucolic spot. A spring bubbles nearby—perhaps not such a bad choice for a poet’s final resting place. Certainly an appropriate one, for here is where the poet in question was shot dead and tossed into an unmarked grave. But what might Federico García Lorca have in common with a dead baby in downtown Madrid?

A lot, perhaps, if Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero has his way. The baby is part of the period furnishings in the Convent of the Royal Discalced Carmelites, still open for business at its original location centuries after Spain’s Hapsburg rulers had it built to ensure their surplus daughters did not produce inconvenient, though bloodline-sanctioned, claimants to the empire that dominated the world.

No expense was spared in providing the princesses with all the luxury royalty can command. When today’s cloistered nuns are at their secluded offices, visitors can marvel at the heaps of silver plate, Flemish tapestries and not quite first-rate artworks (the good stuff was long ago crated off to the Prado), as well as the dead baby. The tiny, linen-wrapped corpse is identified in a bold italic hand as one of the ‘holy innocents’ slaughtered by Herod.

Sainthood status means that this nameless infant, who surely never lived his brief life anywhere near Roman-occupied Judea, qualifies as a holy relic, just like the fragment of Saint Thèrese of Lisieux, which astronaut Ron Garan carried with him on a shuttle mission to the International Space Station in June of last year. Spaniards, especially, seem to have a fetish about bonding with body parts of the illustrious dead.

King Philip II stocked his Escorial monastery retreat with 7,000 bones and wisps of hair, 12 complete skeletons and 44 jawboned skulls. Didn’t do the Armada much good, though. Supine but incorrupt, St Felix inhabits a glass sarcophagus under the altar in the chapel of Madrid’s Royal Palace, allowing him a privileged view of Princess Letizia’s shapely legs when she married Crown Prince Felipe a few years ago. And during his final—for most Spaniards, long overdue—illness, Generalissimo Franco had St Teresa of Avila’s desiccated forearm at his bedside the whole while, and to this day, everyone mimes back-scratching whenever the subject is brought up.

Now it is Zapatero’s turn. He desperately wants to locate and exhume the body of Spain’s best-known poet, so it can be venerated by right-thinking Spaniards. Not for his poetry, however. For Lorca is a victim-monger’s dream come true, murdered a couple of weeks after the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936 for voicing support for the Republic, and because Granada’s reactionary, vehemently pro-Franco middle classes had, shall we say, a poor opinion of his homosexuality. His only crime was being personally and politically obnoxious to his killers.

Perhaps even among Catholics, relics are a minority taste. Not so with the belligerently secular Zapatero, who seems obsessively fixated on ‘restoring the historical memory’ of the Spanish people by churning over toxic confrontations and old grievances dating back to the Civil War, in the belief that it is good for them, and good for his chances of remaining in power long enough to transform Spain from the country it has always been into the one he thinks it ought to be.

There is another reason. Among the rash promises enshrined in a 2007 law is that relatives of Civil War victims are guaranteed the right to have their remains exhumed, identified and reburied with dignity, and that the public administrations responsible for seeing that this law is implemented shall ‘make all necessary funding available for this purpose’. The catch, of course, is in the last bit. A grand, one-off gesture would be so much easier—and cheaper—to sell to his leftist constituencies as a kept promise.

Let us assume Zapatero’s definition of victimhood excludes the 4,000 or so junior military officers executed by the Republic as potential turncoats at Paracuellos de Jarama; 6,832 murdered nuns, priests, monks, friars and seminarians, the hundreds of Republican militiamen shot for cowardice, insubordination or political unreliability, or Trotskyites massacred by Stalin’s Spanish flunkies in Barcelona with Orwell looking on, plus assorted undesirables (landowners, aristocrats, Christian Democrats, etc) whose torture and murder does not conform to Zapatero’s notion of ‘repression’.

But it definitely includes the 30,000 people that Franco had executed after hostilities ended, as well as all ‘those who suffered imprisonment, sanctions or personal violence’ between 1936 and 1951 (why Franco, who ruled until 1975, became legitimate in 1951, is not clear). It definitely includes Zapatero’s own grandfather, an army captain executed for refusing to join the uprising. Now, let’s do the maths.

The League of Historical Memory Associations has drawn up a list with 143,000 names on it. Reputable historians generally chalk up some 70,000 extra-judicial executions or non-combat deaths to Franco’s side, vs. the 40,000 imputable to the Republic. The human body contains 206 bones. Multiply by the victim estimate of your choice. Multiply again by ₤2,700, the price of a single DNA analysis—and expect no refunds, even if there proves to be not enough intact genetic material for a match.

In fact the chances of identifying anyone from that period are at best slim, says José Antonio Lorente, head of genetic analysis at the University of Granada, who calculates the likelihood at somewhere between 15 and 30 percent. But even if money were not an issue, qualified personnel and laboratory facilities certainly would be: it is estimated that all of Spain’s forensic scientists would be kept busy for decades doing nothing else but identifying the Civil War dead.

One obstacle that Zapatero won’t have to deal with is the adamant opposition of Lorca’s family. Their argument was and is that he should be left to lie in peace alongside the people he lived with and wrote about, and that were killed for believing the same things he believed in. That was the bottom line maintained for years by Laura Garcia Lorca, the grand-niece who heads the foundation that controls the poet’s copyrights and represents five more descendants of his siblings.

All that changed when the granddaughter of a one-legged, left-wing schoolteacher who was shot and buried with Lorca appealed to the judge then handling the case, claiming one family’s preferences should not override another’s, no matter how famous and influential, and that she, personally would not rest until her grandfather’s remains were given a dignified burial in the nearby village where he taught his classes.

It is a matter of interest that this lady admits to being ‘advised’ by Ian Gibson, Lorca’s Irish-born biographer, who goes about proclaiming that the poet ‘doesn’t belong to his family any more; he belongs to the Spanish people’. In the event, the Lorca descendants opted to end the standoff. ‘We will not oppose it,’ Laura García Lorca told the daily El País. ‘Although we would prefer it not to happen, we respect the wishes of the other parties involved’. She insisted, though, that the exhumation be carried out in strictest privacy, in the presence of family members and with guarantees that it does not turn into a media circus.

Three things now must happen before Professor Miguel Botella and his colleagues from the Forensic Anthropology department at the University of Granada can unpack their ground-penetrating radar to scan the Viznar ravine. The two most likely sites are about 400 yards apart and both probably contain human remains. Identifying Lorca’s should be fairly easy, however, since the radar should have no trouble picking up the wooden leg of the unfortunate schoolteacher who shares his grave, along with two trade union organisers.

First, they are waiting for the ground to thaw. Then a Granada judge will have to issue the exhumation order. And finally the Madrid government will have to draw up a protocol with Andalusian regional administration specifying procedures and assigning responsibilities for recovering the remains. But what will Zapatero do with his trophy bones, once he’s got them? The Convent of the Royal Discalced Carmelites is certainly a place Federico might have found appealing, but it looks to be booked full up for now.