by Bev Jafek
“My mother also told me stories about the kindness of villagers who lived around the prisons. They sent food in to the women and, when so many children began to die, raised them in their homes so that they could survive close to their mothers and visit them. There was horror, sadism, courage, selflessness and compassion everywhere my mother went. Strangely enough, there was inspiration, too. My mother, who was so young, played pranks and pulled off stunts to raise the morale of the older women and distract them from their worries. She would conduct mock trials of Franco in which women played the roles of judges who handed down the most chillingly horrific sentences they could imagine. Every May 1, they celebrated the anniversary of the Republic of Spain, even though it had been defeated. My mother led women who marched around the prison walls, one carrying an old broom with a red sweater hanging from it for a flag. A young girl composed their anthem, which they sang in their loudest voices, causing a roar that terrified their jailers. When women were transferred to another prison, the villagers sang this anthem to them, again showing their solidarity with them.
“My mother always said that her story was the story of so many women, imprisoned together and giving one another the strength and resilience to survive. She said that was the only meaning of life she could still believe in after what had happened to her. Many years after Franco, in the 1980s, she occasionally went out to dinner with two women who had been imprisoned with her and had become close friends over the years. They met at a restaurant right here in Barcelona. They had been through everything together—torture that had ruined their spines and stays at a prison called the Cemetery of the Living because the officials there tried to starve women to death.
“Yet there they were, together at a Barcelona restaurant, having dinner long after Franco’s death. Everyone around them saw three bent old crones, one with a walker, another with crutches; all with sparse hair, bent frames and false teeth. The other diners could not know that they were looking at the three most courageous women in Spain, who kept women alive when so many died; who did not name their comrades when all others did; who believed in the freedom of Spain when all was lost. That’s who those bent old crones were, the greatest unknown heroes of the Spanish Civil War, and I am proud to say that one of them was my mother.”
The room was silent again, but for women who were crying and those trying not to. It would be difficult to tell another story that night, they thought, yet they deeply wanted this revelatory process to continue.
The next woman to tell her story was a senior from the writer’s group, a novelist of some renown. “My mother, my sister and I lived in a small village outside of Madrid. My mother was of the same generation as the heroic women resistance fighters of the Spanish Civil War, but she was never a part of this. Still, she could be considered a kind of clandestine agent, handling dangerous secrets for a living. When I was young, all I knew about her profession was that it happened at night, and she left with several pairs of her huge collection of gloves, all kept bleached and spotlessly white. Years later, my aunt told me that she was a pajillera, a woman who jerks men off in dark corners of nightclubs for money, though I did not know this until I was an adult. Such women often sing a folk song while jerking the man off for an extra bit of money. I find the thought of this so bizarre that it may truly be unique to Spain. She left us at eleven pm, then slept at home from four am to nine am, when we woke up, allowing herself a nap in the afternoon as well as a fresh bleaching of her gloves.
“She was tall and willowy, slightly anorexic, with hugely dark romantic eyes, a pale porcelain complexion and a mouth that never smiled, all of which might have been useful to her in her work. She looked exquisitely delicate and intense rather than sensually beautiful, and might have allowed men the uniquely Spanish erotic fantasy that they were copulating in the presence of the Virgin Mary, who forgave them their sin while carefully retaining her virginity. My mother was always full of imagination and contradiction which, not knowing their source, I loved in a kind of childish delirium. My sister and I were told the most marvelous of bedtime stories. I never found another daughter who heard such splendid tales as she reserved for us.
“She knew all of the Spanish legends and bits of folklore and told us the ones that particularly highlighted the virtuous actions of girls and women. My mother said that Spain was once matriarchal, and there were remnants left of it in its legends. We heard tales from all over Spain. She told us the story of a Medieval Andalusian woman warrior who was sent into battle as a knight and saved the life of a prince, who she later married. We heard a tale from Aragon about another noblewoman whose father was captured in battle and who rescued him from his captors through an ingenious stratagem.
“Women were also heroic in defending Spain’s most honored values. A legend from Valencia involved a king’s daughter who saved Christian prisoners from the tyrannical wrath of her Moorish father. We heard stories from Seville in which old women were crime-fighters alongside of kings as well as other legends in which traditional ‘women’s work’ was eliminated by supernatural spirits. Another legendary noblewoman from Madrid split her fortune with her maid because of the latter’s distinct probity and honesty. Still another set the highest standards for her honor like a knight. Even the Medieval College for Noble Young Women in the once-distinguished University of Salamanca was given a folkloric origin. In my mother’s tale, some of its first students were the daughters of a shoemaker, who were ennobled by his good deeds and could be educated there. We grew up thinking all the legends of Spain were about heroic women.
“So, she left us every night in her spotless gloves, to dream of the heroism of women, while she went to her work of quiet desperation in the darkest and most sordid corners of Madrid. She also wrote poetry, which she never showed us. I once found it, however, hidden beneath her bedroom rug, imperceptible to anyone but a child whose world is so circumscribed and domestic that it alone can see the tiny rise on the edge of a rug that conceals a secret. I found her poems very beautiful, all concerning a countryside arcadia that was probably completely imaginary.
“As an adult, I have often meditated upon the stark division within her deepest self or spirit, creating visions of nature and folkloric women heroes when her own life was so obviously the reverse. How can a life create such insurmountable gulfs and then maintain them, I wondered. Why must we do such things? It may be the most profound question of our lives since, in its largest terms, it recreates the very division of good and evil that is the core of our religions and many philosophies as well.
“When I was twelve years old, I committed the terrible youthful indiscretion of trying to find out her secret. I followed her out one night, all the way to the bars, parks and squares on the edges of Madrid where she did her nightly work. As she lurked in the shadows and peripheries of those dens of red neon and orange globes that lit the night, so did I. It was not difficult for me to hide myself, since the principle of such shadowy corners is that their contents will never be seen or revealed. I was as invisible as she and her patrons were.
“I followed her like a spy or a lover and saw what she did without any understanding of what it meant, since my grasp of adult sex was virtually non-existent. I felt the romance of the shadows, the clandestine, the whispers, mumbled needs and muffled cries of satisfaction, the secrets at the heart of the night, whether lit by stars or neon; without truly understanding anything I was witnessing. I followed her for two nights and then, on the second night when I was hiding behind a decorative pillar in one of the bars she frequented, I stared for the last time at her interaction with a man at a dark, far table. For, in the next minute, I was face-to-face with my mother, who had seen me! Her face was very dark in the shadows and so it remained as she took me home in a silent fury. After she closed our door, she cried and screamed at me for doing what had always been forbidden.
“I had no excuse for myself and so, irrelevantly, I told her that I had found her poems and believed them to be so beautiful, so very be
autiful! I had followed her to understand their beauty, and now I was crying and screaming, too, as I told her how wonderful her words were. This made her all the more horrified and frenzied, and she tore up all the poems in front of me and said they were, in their falseness, as sordid as everything I had seen. Since I didn’t understand what I had seen and was so innocent as not to recognize sordidness, I cried even louder that the poems were wondrous transformations of the world; they were my sisters and brothers, my aunts and uncles, my cousins, my grandparents, my entire family, my cats and dogs and all the kittens and puppies they could produce, all the children I would ever have and all the tales I would tell them, and surely! Surely they were all the legendary noblewomen of Spain she had told me of! A cornucopia of real and imaginary life flooded out of me. Her poetry was all I had, the best of her, the best that she had ever thought and put down into words, and now it had been destroyed in front of me!
“My last outburst at the loss of her poems instantly quieted her. She sat me down at the kitchen table and rocked me in her arms, soothing me as we recovered from our hysteria. She caressed and kissed me and silently comforted me. At last she said, ‘Mother of God, what an imaginative child I have! I might have known there would be one like this. Whatever will become of you, my child who dreams such incredible things?’”
“There was an enormous change in our lives the very next day. My mother enrolled in one of the free People’s Universities that were available at that time. They taught reading, writing and simple math, which she didn’t need, but also such useful skills as how to repair a toilet and how to be a scavenger of garbage so as to find all the possible nutrients. At that time, too, public schools became mandatory and free, so I became a student who had to travel long distances by bus to school. My mother became a plumber. She joked that, as one who removed clogged waste, she was in the same line of work as before, though I was still too young to appreciate her irony. We loved to teach one another what we had learned in our new lives. As a result, I can fix any toilet and pick over garbage as well as any alley-cat.
“In old age, my mother died of Alzheimer’s disease, and there was no one to tend her but me and my sister. I tried to refresh her memory about all the things she had ever told me. I asked her how to repair toilets, fish through garbage, and finally I told her all the folkloric tales and legends she had given to me so long ago as bedtime stories. I told her all the lovely images of arcadia that had once filled her poetry. Her eyes grew as large and round as a child’s, and the stories and fantasies became all the more astounding and beautiful to her as her mind shrank and then disappeared. I would love to believe that the last thing she imagined was her fanciful arcadia of long ago. Of all the questions I asked her, I didn’t ask the one for which I wanted an answer: Do you remember those secret places, those shadows, mother; and how we went out at night in search of the unknown in corners, in pools of darkness and neon, in starry skies, and discovered only the sordidness of human life? Ah, but you don’t ask such questions, even to one whose mind is leaving, because the answer is too sad.”
There was again a soft, appreciative murmuring in the room. Every woman knew that this was one of the great evenings at Monserrat’s house. They found these mothers as unforgettable as their daughters did. The next woman to tell her story was from the healthcare professionals group, a hospital director who had university degrees in medicine and nursing.
“I was born in a women’s prison, and both my mother and grandmother were imprisoned for political agitation against the fascists. My father was also a resistance fighter, but he was killed in battle early in the war.
“My mother told me that when first placed on a prison blanket, I cried, and she found out why—there were forty bedbugs underneath me. It’s probably fortunate that I don’t remember it. My mother was falsely imprisoned; she had no desire to be a clandestine agent after my father’s death, but she was still under surveillance by the fascists. She was a fisherwoman in our small village of Santana and had four children to feed with her work. So, she went out fishing every night with my brother. One night, however, she stayed home because two of my sisters were sick. Since she therefore had no fish to sell on the Santana village market the following day, the fascists assumed that she had given her catch to a charismatic guerrilla leader named Cardoso, who was known to have fighters in the area.
“She was immediately imprisoned at Santander, and her children were given to my aunt and uncle. Born later, I stayed in prison with her until I was no longer nursing, so I was a part of this much Civil War history without remembering a single event. I do remember when my mother was released and came for us, however. She told me so many stories about women prisoners like the ones we’ve heard already—the women who were tortured, the terrible conditions of the prisons, the sympathetic bonding between women and their unselfishness. She was particularly struck by the powerful mountain women from Asturias; they were the most courageous.
“She also told me other stories about the women she had known, and some of these were unforgettable. There were women who went mad because of the arbitrary nature of their imprisonment and the poor living conditions. She described a woman named Rosa who was imprisoned for the sole reason that her son was a resistance fighter. When she and her husband had no information about his whereabouts, the fascists beat her husband to death in front of her and she was dragged away to the nearest prison, which was Santander. A year later, she received a postcard from her son, who had left the country after the war effort failed; but still, the fascists would not release Rosa. My mother was her closest friend, and one day she began to hallucinate and grabbed my mother by the throat in a powerful grip. When her sanity returned and she realized what she had done, she tried to hang herself. All the prisoners begged to have Rosa transferred to a mental hospital where a doctor could treat her, but this was never done. She ended up muttering in a corner, with no sense of the outside world. This was her fate, all for a son who was no longer a soldier or even living in Spain, Yes, I will always remember Rosa.
“My mother also told me about a woman lawyer named Elena who came to the prisons in an attempt to free innocent women and get better living conditions for all. She was from a wealthy doctor’s family and had a very sharp intellect as well as great self-confidence. The men running the prison were afraid of her for many reasons, according to my mother. Her criticisms were valid; because, in fact, the prison decisions and procedures were capricious, illegal, and probably had the status of war crimes. In addition, Elena was a class above them, clearly more intelligent and truly fearless. For a time, they didn’t interfere with her work, though it was apparently difficult for them to tolerate a woman so obviously superior to them. My mother was always fascinated with her forceful voice and manner.
“One day, the prisoners were told that she had committed suicide in the warden’s office by leaping out the open window and falling six stories below onto a concrete surface. No one believed it, of course, but everyone wanted to know what really happened to her. Eventually, they pieced together these facts: She was in the director’s office presenting her arguments against illegal detention and poor living conditions, and a shouting match occurred. Her body then landed on its back on the concrete, so it was obvious that she had been thrust out the window by the warden and whoever else might have been there. If she had actually tried to kill herself, her body would at least have been found face down.
“It was an incredible situation, my mother and the other prisoners all thought. The fascists could apparently not tolerate the simple presence of a woman this superior to them. At any time, they could easily have imprisoned her falsely and stopped her activities. But, they were overwhelmed by the very fact of her presence there. It was ultimately, in other words, a crime of passion; but one engendered by hate, guilt and inferiority rather than love. We are very fortunate that we no longer live in such a world. Today, this woman would be a great lawyer and judge, possibly a powerful force in politics or even a Prime Minis
ter, with a family following in her footsteps. Yet, for all her courage and brilliance, the fascists gave her a fate worse than that of the prisoners. I was most struck by this story and this woman of all I heard from my mother. Oh yes, I will always remember Elena; and as terrible as her story is, it belongs here, in this house, a truth to be told to other women. Even now, no man has ever been punished for her death.
“As you can imagine, my mother, my siblings and I had enough of the resistance after what we had seen and heard. This was never the case with my grandparents and particularly my grandmother, Tomasita, who was very short and often called Pequeña, though she was small only in body. In spirit and courage, they didn’t come any bigger than Pequeña. Since she remained in the resistance until Franco’s death, I met her for the first time when we were both relatively old. I always knew her story, however, and it is inseparable from my mother’s story and my own, so I must tell you about her, too.
“Tomasita was born in Guadalajara as the middle child of six. Her family was as poor as they come. Her father had been disabled by a fall from a horse, and her mother was constantly ill from stomach and intestinal problems. Grandma virtually supported the whole family single-handedly as a child, so you can see that I do not exaggerate her stamina. As a young child, she was briefly put into a school run by nuns but, when she had to work full-time in a knitting factory as well as care for her own mother, she could not attend every day, and the nuns refused to let her continue her education.
At the knitting factory, she quickly learned the price at which the goods were sold, which was substantial, and asked for a higher wage. Immediately, she was fired and threatened by the factory owners. They said they would see to it that she never got another job, but that never stopped her. She then worked full-time in a pasta factory and mended clothing for people at night. There was only one light in her tiny house, and it was too high up to illuminate Pequeña’s night work. So, she put a chair on top of the tallest table below this light and worked a good part of the night. She faced another crisis when her mother was told that she must drink milk every two hours or die from hemorrhaging of the stomach. The cost was far beyond what the family could pay, so my grandma just took a full-time job at a dairy and provided her mother with all the free milk needed.