“HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF. All stories can be repeated,” María Luz began. “The same story can take place at different times, in different places, under different skies, with different players and different faces.”
“But can’t we invent other stories, better, more beautiful ones?” I asked bluntly.
“I would be the last to deny that, Junon. Life offers us the opportunity for beautiful stories, yet sometimes we don’t know.”
Her eyes shone with emotion as she spoke.
“I’m telling you the truth, Junon; we don’t always know how to seize these opportunities, how to be inspired by them. Sometimes one story can enlighten us or allow us to understand another. How can we forget that I was the first face you set eyes on? I was the first to kiss you, on your closed fist, I first stroked your cheek. Isn’t our story beautiful?”
“And I will never say otherwise. You were also the one who taught me to love the country you call Spain, a profound love.”
“And in the name of that same love, Junon, I want to tell you another story, with roots in this land and in my flesh. It belongs to both of us, since we were both born on the same soil.”
She stopped, searching somewhere inside herself for words that didn’t exist.
“You want to talk about the Civil War and Franco, I know that,” I told her, too quickly.
She stopped me right away.
“Rather, it’s what one might call the story of life on the inside under Franco. This history took place inside people—I’m thinking of the individual stories, the personal dramas of those who were plunged into the night of franquismo. There are so many things we don’t know, so many lies, so many crimes unpunished. The work of commemoration,” María Luz told me, “has only just begun, and I hope with all my soul that it continues, that it goes on. That what the Church did during that time comes to light, among other things. Did you know that the women who were about to be murdered were paraded around the city with their heads shaved and then forced to attend Mass? And what about the thousands of children stolen at birth by the Francoists and then given to families who were friends of the regime? All those criminals had to do was tell the mother that her child had been stillborn. There was so much silence, but also so many accomplices: the hospital staff had to be in on it.”
“Forgetting settles in so easily it manages to colonize our aware-ness. Would it be easier to forget than to remember, María Luz?”
María Luz was too emotional, and we drove on in silence for a good part of the way. Finally, between the villages of Viznar and Alfacar, near a farmhouse called Cortijo de Gazpacho, María Luz stopped the car. We left the car on the side of the road and walked down a little hill and then back up a path lined with olive trees, their greyish leaves rustling. María Luz stood there, staring out into space, dreaming.
“It would be about here,” she said suddenly, “that they murdered the poet, without any kind of trial. They say he is buried at the foot of an olive tree—in other words, his resting place is everywhere in these hills, because everyone makes their own assumptions. Others claim he was killed along the road from Viznar to Alfacar. Since those who actually know what happened will never say anything, the exact circumstances of his death will always remain a mystery. The tragic story of that man lives on in me like a splinter. When I think of him I can’t help but hear the boots and rifles, the pounding of soldiers’ footsteps, I see his pale face in the blue night, his brown curls, I see him going toward death. I see the hills of Viznar too, and the thousands of dead they’ve cradled. The repression was unthinkably bloody, Junon; these hills were the scene of countless executions.”
María Luz was holding me by the arm. Shivers coursed through her whole body. She spoke of the poet as if of a loved one. I was about to ask her if she had known him.
“The historian Miguel Caballero conducted an investigation over several years to track down the perpetrators. Imagine all the challenges a historian has to overcome in order to carry out his work—the cowardice of some people, the silence of others, the indifference.”
“Sometimes I think about all of it…That silence, that indifference is a form of cruelty too. I’m powerless in the face of the malice that so often defines relationships. It frightens me…I keep telling myself that I was born of rape and torture. And I confess, Luz de mi alma, sometimes I feel like my whole being is full of violence. A constant bubbling: I’m nothing but one avalanche after another, rivers of lava so hot that I’m afraid of myself.”
“There is violence in human beings, my Junon, that’s undeniable. It does permeate society, politics, the relationships between institutions and authorities, whatever they may be, and citizens. But it is within ourselves that human beings must seek the source of that barbarism and eradicate it. Otherwise...Well, otherwise, the beast within us bares its fangs and makes the law. I had a taste of it when I was a little girl, and until the end of time I will hold the vile memory of that cursed time. Those days of such bitter tongues began for me one morning in the summer of 1937, Junon, when I was nine years old. I had to tell my father, who was already an old man—he was much older than my mother—I had to tell him that his wife and daughter, my sister Ana Catrina, who was nineteen, had been shot by Franco’s jackals. My father had been denounced for having contact with Republicans, so following the logic of those in power, his wife and daughter were arrested at the factory where they worked, along with several other family members. For two days they didn’t come home. On the second evening I had prepared supper, potatoes with a piece of ham and beans. My father ate nothing, just like the day before. Silence and foreboding blanketed the village. No one dared to come to our house to tell him the news. The hours passed, my father kept his eyes closed to avoid catching mine. I must have looked so terrified. That second day, as dusk began to bury the valley, we grew more and more anxious.
“Suddenly, as the evening unfurled, I heard a whistle. I was so afraid but I went outside. Hidden behind an old oak tree was Felipe, a twelve-year-old boy. Felipe was staring at the ground, and crying. Without looking at me—he didn’t have the strength—he told me everything.
“I wanted to die when I had to break the news to my father. For a long time I felt like I was the executioner, that I had felled an old man already dying of rage, defeated by Franco’s sadism, which took from him two women he loved and left him with a nine-year-old girl who no longer knew how to be a child. From one day to the next, my Junon, I had become a mother to my own father, a broken man who moaned day and night.
“I learned how to cope with death in the most inhuman way when my mother and sister were taken from me. I learned to deal with hatred, with how arbitrary loss can seem, with injustice and oppression—all those evils that pinned my father to the bed he never left until he left this world. He was a good man, and I know he would have wanted so much to spare me his pain. It was a suffering that humiliated him, he was ashamed to let me see what he felt was a degradation. After my mother and Ana Catrina disappeared, my father became tangled up in his grief until his lips finally closed over his pain. Even after all these years, I still can’t put words on the sorrow that overwhelmed us that night. Until I met Soledad, I had been living in silence too, because of those voices inside me: my mother, my sister, and so many others who had disappeared, beloved voices, voices mingled with the whimpers of a man, my father, José Rosales Benalva, crying out in pain. As Soli and I got to know each other, I opened these pages of my life and shared my terrible secret. I found the words I’d lost. As we spoke, Soledad and I, as I told her my story and as the words unfolded to meet hers, my pain took on a slightly more human form. By confiding in Soledad, I became human again. I saw myself in her.”
I grew up around these two women. Some days, the silence in their guts screamed louder than the wind. I drank my first gulps of milk clutching the breast of the first, the one I call my blood mother, who was wracked by sobs without ever shedding a single tear. My second mother—my mother of joy—handed me the strands of a story, and they both wove them together during those long evenings when they sat up watching for ghosts and shadows. I understood early on that a swarm of black birds flapped furiously in their souls and in their memories. There came a time when I knew I had to conquer the night so that I could at last be born.
Throughout my teenage years, my quest was strange. I often dreamed about Mika. She would be standing on top of a mountain and holding out her arms to me. I would look up along the winding path, heaped with big black stones, and, standing at the bottom, my heart beating hard, I would wonder how I could get up there.
The year I turned twenty-two, I decided to leave Soledad. I moved away without being afraid of losing her, since our shared history would go on forever. We were twinned. I moved into a small apartment on San Gregorio, in the home of a woman who introduced herself as Inés de la Cruz. She befriended me right away. I realized later that I had chosen the dimly lit, old-fashioned apartment because of doña Inés, who despite her years had an insolent elegance, and for her wonderful garden. The garden was much more than a garden to her, she explained, it was a love story, written by a man who had spent five years courting her. They married and then he died suddenly the day after their wedding. I couldn’t help laughing, because doña Inés herself had started to laugh, an unnatural, harsh laugh, like neighing.
“¡Pura verdad, hija! I laugh about it now, but for a long time I cried. Though I’ve always had company…”
Gracefully, she gathered the corners of her silk shawl and pointed to the bushes that lined the garden.
“There,” she said to me, “do you hear them? Songbirds nest here. They’re so noisy at the end of the afternoon, constantly bickering. Not to mention doves, turtledoves, finches. I’m never alone.”
The air was growing pleasantly crisp and thick with the smell of flowers; I recognized the incomparable scent of jasmine and orange blossoms. I adopted Inés’s garden, though I still went to Soledad’s house in the evenings, and sometimes slept there.
Soledad was going through a phase when painting allowed her to vomit up the previous day’s wreckage. With each seething stroke she stabbed her brush at the canvas, which all too often ended up torn or scorched. Yet you could tell: in spite of everything, she had found a way that would, in time and in different forms, lead toward the serenity she longed for. Alongside her hard charcoal lines, there were oils, silhouettes of women with soothing curves, but also a clutter of canvases with dark shapes—women too, dismembered, hanged, sheared, fragmented, crumpled women draped in veils of sadness and mourning, which she usually painted in the middle of the night.
We could see her coming and going, possessed by these images as if they were spirits. One of the paintings, entitled Procesión, she’d made with photos inlaid against a background of ochre and sand. Mika was there, from various times in her life, and Bé, Toni; María Luz, her sister Ana Catrina and their mother doña Angela; and Clarisse, Hortense, Jeanne, Sonia, Maria, and I marched along, single file, along a steep road on the edge of a cliff. Another painting, Hermanas, was a delirious collage on a red background, where Soledad painted Clarisse with half of Jeanne’s face, and Jeanne with half of Mika’s, and then Mika and I, joined at the navel. And so on. My nights at the time were an incoherent sequence of film run backwards—always the same, the tragic stories of Mika and Soli, which poured into me relentlessly. They crashed into me like stones dropping into a well, mingling in my dreams with the macabre creatures Soli invented. Apocalyptic visions hounded me through restless nights.
I was stumbling through the beginning of film school. I was convinced that only testifying could give my life meaning. I had to see for myself, and to make people understand life under dictatorships. I didn’t want to invent lives, just to present them as they were. How could I speak the unspeakable? How could I find the words? Despite my distress, I didn’t want to give in to the temptation of leaving the trace of my fingers on a parchment of woe. I needed to scream, to rip off the mask, the stubborn refusal of a scrambled memory. It was too sterile. I was only able to get free the day I started picking up the stitches again and tacking all the ends back together. It was during one of those nights, on January 5, that I decided to force dawn to break. I understood then that I had to go back to the source of unremitting death. How far back? To the original wound, the very first assault, the first lie? Backwards through the bloodshed, each slash, deliberate and deadly.