by Mary Gordon
Autumn, the Feast of All Saints, the Feast of All Souls, the martyrs for the faith prayed for, the hundreds of thousands killed at the fascist hands erased, their deaths a blank or a blot: no grief for their lost souls permitted.
Winter, when the poor freeze because there is no fuel, the starving are given gifts in the name of the Three Kings, but no, it is not permitted to say anyone is starving, because the Caudillo protects his beloved child, Spain, as Joseph, foster father of the Lord, kept watch over the child Jesus. It is one of the few times when Marian misses America: she wishes they had a Christmas tree; she loved the smell of pine in the cold air, the ornaments packed in tissue paper, the candles on the tree in the middle of the huge dark hallway. She’d had no use for Santa Claus, but it would be something of a relief to see his image here, something outside the ring of authority that is the Catholic Church.
Spring is the worst. A season of enforced public observance, from Ash Wednesday straight through to Pentecost. The Lenten missions, the visiting preachers railing against the dangers of dancing, “torture of confessors, favorite fare of the Devil.” Never absent from the words of the pulpit, the demand to thank God for the Caudillo, to pray for his success: “You must be grateful to Franco and his government and must ask God to illuminate them and give them comfort so they can continue with their work of enthroning social justice. I ask you to look at poverty and all trouble from the perspective of the divine, because if you look at them in this way, they will seem smoother to you and you will extract from them all the treasures of eternal life they contain.”
The operatic climax of Holy Week, the penitents that terrify Marian in their Ku Klux Klan hoods; the flagellants, venerated for the shedding of their own blood by whipping themselves on the shoulders or the back. Good Friday: an orgy of accusation against the Jews, a prayer for their conversion woven into the charge of their murder of Christ.
And May, the month of First Communions. The girls like little brides, the boys in white, cadets in training, preparing themselves for the honor of serving the Generalissimo, white satin sashes crossing their chests, marking the place that will one day be taken by what she learned was called a “Sam Browne belt” (she doesn’t know what the Spanish call it; she is afraid to ask), which the Caudillo wears beneath the jeweled crucifix that transects it.
•
This is why today Pilar’s knocks are less insistent, more distracted. It is the day of Ignacio’s First Communion. He will make it a bit early; he is six and a half years old, but special permission has been granted so he can make it with his cousin, Fernanda.
He was given his gifts a week before, because they would be needed for the ceremony. A lacquered prayer book, a gold cross on a gold chain, a bow the size of a dinner plate with images of the Eucharist embroidered onto it in blue silk, a white suit, white socks and shoes. The socks are silk; the shoes, a leather soft as the kid leather of the gloves she once wore, once treasured.
For months they had prepared, Ignacio and his grandmother. Marian remembers her own preparation, which was equally ardent, Sister Trinitas drawing on the board the image of the soul (not exactly a heart, but close) and then coloring spots inside it in red chalk, wiping them out with the eraser to suggest the radical effects of confession. Marian had been serious about her first confession, although she had only one sin to confess: anger, fighting with her brothers, wishing her brothers harm. And then, on the day, her white dress, a simple drop-waist organdy, and a simple veil. A prayer book almost identical to Ignacio’s. Like his, white gloves, white shoes. And her terror that she would mistakenly eat or drink something after midnight and render herself unable to partake of the sacrament, and her fear, that if she did it, she would not admit to it. Refusing to brush her teeth for fear that toothpaste could be counted as food, spitting continually on the ground on the way to the church, in case some food had lodged in her teeth and she would inadvertently swallow it. The hymns, the incense, “Pange Lingua, Tantum Ergo” and she had felt a lightness that she treasured. She remembers her father telling her that Napoleon told people that his First Communion was the happiest day of his life, and her father saying that he hoped for the rest of her life, when she was asked the question, she would answer the same way as Bonaparte.
And yes, it was a happy day, a day of lightness. Why can she not feel some sense of kinship with her son, why does she not share some of these memories with him? But the question is a false one; she knows the answer too well. To say that there was anything of value in that part of her past would be to betray Johnny, to betray the thousands killed by the fascists in the name of God, the thousands imprisoned after the war to keep the nation pure, the jewel in the crown of the Catholic Church.
At the dinner table one night, Ignacio asks his grandmother (but not his mother) if he may have permission to wear the penitential knotted cord around his waist that the visiting Jesuit who has been educating them has spoken about as “the privilege for the person who wants to give his utmost for purity, the hero of God.” Pilar jumps up and kisses him. “I think we have the makings of a little saint here.” Marian is horrified, and only a bit relieved when Pilar says, “But no, such measures are not for you, you who have nothing to atone for. They are a way to God for those who have turned their faces from God. But you, my little one, have always lived with your eyes on God. Anyone can see it in your eyes: they are full of the light of the angels.”
Marian knows there is nothing she can say, particularly as, when she looks in her son’s eyes, she does not see light, but, too often, a self-satisfaction, a calculation. Does he know that suggesting that he wear the penitential cord would gain him favor with his grandmother, but that she would forbid it? Did he ever have the intention of wearing it, or was he just trying to be seen as a heroic penitent? Why could she not believe in her son’s innocence? Is it because she cannot believe that anything in this country at this time, anything touched by the finger of the Church, can be innocent?
It is not possible to separate the Church from the government of Franco; she sees she is right as she stands outside the church watching the First Communion procession, the priest in white vestments, holding aloft the gold monstrance containing the host; the banners, “Viva Cristo Rey!,” the favorite motto of Franco; the trumpets and drums of the Falangists in their blue setting the tone, left, right, left, right, for the marching children. And in the back of the church: a photograph of the pope blessing the kneeling Generalissimo, the slender Italian in his ascetic rimless glasses looking with admiration at the squat Spaniard with his epaulets and soldierly moustache.
Marian watches the children walk reverently into the church, their hands folded, their eyes downcast. The incense is particularly thick in the air today, and she finds it difficult to breathe. Everything seems too much: the girls’ dresses have too many petticoats, their veils have too much lace. Except for the large bows on their shoulders, the boys are spared this obvious excess. Some are wearing long pants, some shorts. She wishes Ignacio were wearing long pants, because when she looks at his legs she thinks of an oversweet pastry: the spongy outside, inside custard perhaps, yellowish, gelatinous. Her eyes fall on the backs of his knees and she thinks, I should love the knees of my son. I do not love my son’s knees. What is wrong with me, Ramón? I loved you above all telling. Why am I unable to love our son, who was conceived, I know better than anything, in great love?
The Jesuit who has been brought in to train the First Communion children gives the sermon. He speaks of their duty to do something extraordinary, for God and for Spain. With no connection Marian can imagine, he then launches into a discussion of the perfidy of the miners during the Asturian strike a decade earlier: the miners enjoyed huge salaries and had no real reason to complain, but they became revolutionaries because “they lacked morality”; while their wives and children cried from hunger at home, the miners would complete their shifts and immediately rent taxis to take them to the cities of Oviedo and Gijón, where they stayed at the best hotels a
nd ordered champagne.
He hunches over the pulpit, his voice grows high and urgent: “What does it matter, a new distribution of wealth, while consciences remain deformed? The solution to economic problems is, before anything else, the solution to moral problems, and this is only possible in the name of God and through Christian religious education. And this Christian education must not be neglected because these little angels have now made First Communion, or even later when they are confirmed. No, parents, and you, my children, you must pledge yourselves to the pursuit of knowledge of the Truth, the Truth of Mother Church, the breasts from which you may drink and drink, and take your fill so you may be nourished for your great work, defenders of the Church and of the honor of Spain. Clothe yourselves in the armor of God so that you may be, boy and girl alike, knights in the service of the great Lord Jesus and our beloved Caudillo.”
It is unseasonably warm for the middle of May, and Marian is afraid she will faint, but she would prefer to faint than to run out into the street for air and risk the accusation of disrespect for the Church of God. There are only five children making First Communion—she wonders what has happened to the children of the poor, whose parents cannot afford petticoats and leather shoes. What is their First Communion? Does it take place without pomp, without celebration, in the secure knowledge that nothing more is owed to them? She thinks of Lucia’s cousins, eating boiled grass, eating carob pods.
This is all she can think of at the home of Pilar’s brother, when course after course is offered in honor of Ignacio and Fernanda. The children are presented with boxes wrapped in white and gold paper with a gold ribbon. Fernanda opens hers first; she presents it to the family, and the women ooh and aah as if it were a real baby, being introduced for the first time.
The famous doll. In every newspaper, stories about the doll Mariquita, symbol of the economic miracle of the New Spain.
In 1939, a young mother married to a member of Franco’s cabinet, won a prize in a raffle. The prize was a German doll, a perfect little Aryan, with golden ringlets. The mother devoted herself to making a wardrobe for the precious doll, and the women in her circle coveted it, ordered their own from Germany, and it became the prized First Communion gift. The mother, seeing the possibilities, created a new doll that would look like her daughter. Fashionable Madrileños spent fortunes on these dolls and their endless outfits, and a brother is provided for Mariquita, Juanín, so that little boys may have this doll as their First Communion gifts as well.
Fernanda and Ignacio are posed together on the couch, for pictures, the dolls in their laps, holding hands like a honeymoon couple.
This is too much; she cannot stay another minute. She says she is feeling unwell, she must go home. The blond child Fernanda and her child, Ignacio, cradling the blond dolls, relics of a Nazi past that she knows is mourned by too many of those around her. The doll costs more than what a poor family has to spend for six months of food, and this sickens her, as the excessive food here on the table sickens her, perhaps in part because she has eaten more today than she has in a very long time, and maybe this is why she is feeling suddenly sick. She runs down the street, glad to feel the cold rain that has broken the unseasonable heat.
She is wearing high heels, which she rarely wears, but Pilar has told her she must dress up in honor of the great occasion. So she is wearing heels and unlovely cotton stockings, a shapeless grey skirt, a violet blouse with a mannish collar. The stones are slippery from the rain, and she feels unsure of her footing. But she feels the compulsion to run, to be as far away from the spectacle of what she believes is an evil excess, far from her son, on what she is sure will be forever the happiest day of his life.
Her heel catches in a crack between two of the cobblestones. Her head strikes the wet stones; she hears a snap; her leg bends in a way she knows must be the source of this blinding pain. The white houses appear before her eyes and disappear; the noise of the rain drums, then goes silent. She hears, but distantly, the words of two women who bend over her.
“It’s the American. The daughter-in-law of Pilar.”
“Don’t move her. You must not move,” she hears them say. She supposes they are talking to her.
I haven’t the slightest intention of moving, she wants to say. No movement has been possible for me for as long as I can remember.
“No one knows anything about her,” one woman says to the other. “No one knows who she really is.”
Marian wants to laugh, because it does seem comic, her escape into the open air, her pratfall in the middle of the street, the attention of curious strangers. Everything is growing dark now, and she stops herself from saying what she would like to say: You’re right. You’re perfectly right. No one knows who I really am. Including me. Particularly me. You must understand, she stops herself saying to the woman who stays after her friend has gone to get more help, you must understand, I have no idea who I am.
AVONDALE, RHODE ISLAND, 2009
I DON’T KNOW who you are.
Your past.
I want it now.
—
My past.
Who am I?
—
When had it begun, that she had become a person who would not allow the past a place in her mind? Its proper place, some might say. For the first time, she’s being called on to be one of those people she’s always disliked, dredging up the past, taking it out like the family’s old tarnished silver, or a moth-eaten ball gown, real silk, you know, you’d never see anything like it now. Designed for a great-aunt, half a century dead.
What’s the use of it, what’s the use of it, it’s of no use. Move on, get on with the thing, keep going forward. Always, there is something that must be left, fled, run from. Her family home. The war: Valencia. Then Spain itself: a whole life there. And if you were going to flee, and the flight was to be real, you had to travel light. You couldn’t be carrying the weight of the past in a pack on your shoulders. You had to believe that the leave-taking was for good, or it wouldn’t have been a real leave-taking. You couldn’t be holding in your mind a contingency plan for going back. A complete refusal was necessary, if you were going to get away from the thing that seemed like death, or a real death, or a series of them. Or something of which people would say, “That’s a fate worse than death.”
But now that she is actually dying, she understands (perhaps she has always understood, but now the understanding is more immediate) that there are many fates worse than death. Because, of course, death is the fate of all the living, and a fate seems unbearable if you feel that you have been unfairly singled out, disproportionately punished. And was there just one fate, or a series of fates? Now, death was not only her next fate, but her only one; there would be no others intervening. Of all fates, perhaps the kindest: to die at ninety-two, cared for by those she loves, who love her.
Cared for by Amelia. The lovely face, always with a hint of puzzlement or surprise, like an animal lifting its head after drinking in a stream, startled, confused by the arrival of a stranger. But who is this person who has spoken with such authority, in such a clear, demanding tone?
I don’t know who you are.
Your past.
I want it now.
If there is any point to it, to speaking of the past, it must be that it will be of use. Something like a cloak, a protection from a certain category of mistakes. The ones that have been made before. But why? So that the young will have the luxury of a fresh crop of mistakes?
What is the way to speak of the past so that it might be of use?
She can’t create anything of the past that might be called a story. Starting with “Once upon a time…,” finishing with “THE END.” What does it even mean: Once upon a time? How could you be upon a time? Is it like a mountain that can be climbed or sat on? And what does it mean: THE END? Nothing is ever really finished, and it seems unlikely that anything of any importance happened only once. Birth, perhaps, is the exception. And then, death. But birth and death are not a story
.
The past doesn’t come to her in a line, or even a series of images that can fit together to make a satisfying whole. Each image comes to her separately, like the bubbles in a pan of boiling water. You can’t “tell” a series of images. Telling presupposes connection. Therefore, meaning. Impossible. For every word, there are a thousand images, too quick, too darting, minnows in a stream that a child might try to catch in her hands, but, of course, that would be impossible. Soon the child would give it up. But standing there, so still, not moving at all, not darting, is Amelia, wanting to know. And does Marian owe it to the past that it should not die with her?
Is it possible to speak truthfully? Is it possible to believe you will be understood? To provide a backdrop, a whole set of references and associations incomprehensible to someone who’s been deliberately—and, in no small measure, by her—kept from the resonance and pull of just those associations?
And what’s the point of it? What’s the good? She has kept silent for just this reason: she hasn’t believed that people’s knowing would do any good. And how could you speak about a kind of horror that caused your mind to shut down, to shatter first, and then turn to stone?
She looks at Amelia, whom she thinks of as still a child. The person she loves most in the world. Standing with the dish towel in her hands, just having dried a glass, an ordinary position, as if the words she has just said were ordinary. Different now, with a new hardness. Has she, against all odds, inherited something of the Taylor family hardness? How odd, Marian thinks, I am afraid of her.
“I don’t know where to start. I don’t know what to say to you, Amelia. I don’t know what should be said. I want to be of use to you, and I don’t know what to say that would be of use.”