by Mary Gordon
But there is one thing she knows she understands: Ignacio is wrong, as wrong as everything else about him, as wrong as everything could possibly be. Her grandmother’s life was good and right. It was a life of meaning. A life that made sense.
And she knows now what she couldn’t tell him then for certain. But she is certain now: her grandmother is not afraid to die.
•
In the next weeks, Marian grows steadily weaker. Amelia spends most of her days sitting beside her grandmother’s bed, giving her sips of water, holding her hand.
It is early morning; not yet five. A few stars hang in the dim sky; the moon, a crescent, can still just be seen, and the sun, weak, silvery, seems unequal to the effort of providing warmth and light. Marian raises herself up to take a drink, puts her head back down, and takes Amelia’s hand.
“I’m dying. I know I’m dying, but I don’t know what that really means.”
Amelia puts her head on the pillow beside her grandmother’s.
“I don’t know what it will be like,” Marian says. “Sometimes I think it will be nothing, sometimes I think it will be like music, sometimes I think I’ll be with everyone I love who has died before me.”
“Oh, Meme, I will miss you so much.”
Marian’s head thrashes on the pillow. “You see, this is the kind of thing that steals my peace. I can’t tell you that I’ll miss you. I don’t know. Do the dead miss the living? Or are they only with the other dead, the living so far away that they can’t be remembered or believed in. Can the dead say ‘I miss you’? Can the dead say the word ‘I’? With what mouths could they form words? Or is it all just nothing?”
Marian begins to weep, and Amelia weeps too, fearing that she has troubled her grandmother, stolen more of her peace.
“I wish,” Marian says, “that I could say to you, believing I was speaking truth: I know that we’ll see each other once again.”
The tears gather more thickly now in Amelia’s eyes and the dim light turns everything indistinct. What she knows to be the furniture of her grandmother’s familiar room seems now not chairs, tables, a dresser with bottles—perfumes, medicines—but trees in a deep mist. She guesses only at their shapes. The most she can say is that some are taller than others, some more slender, some perhaps only bushes, squat, pressed low to the invisible ground.
Her eyes strain to distinguish them. And then she understands, they aren’t trees; they move toward each other, turn away, then toward each other, move farther back, then nearer. Can these be the beloved dead? Can one of them be her father? Is the empty space to his left the space for Meme? And on her father’s other side, another empty space, this one for her? Yes, this is possible, and so she will choose to believe that it is true.
She knows just what to say. She knows the words that will bring comfort to her grandmother, words they both can trust.
“One day, you know, Meme, I will be among the dead.”
Marian laughs. “Yes, I suppose you will. Somehow I’d never thought of that.”
“So it’s possible we’ll see each other again. You must admit it’s at least possible.”
“Yes,” Marian says. “It may be possible. Yes.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Like everyone who has even approached the rocky territory of the Spanish Civil War, I am indebted to the work of Hugh Thomas and Paul Preston. I am particularly grateful to Hugh Thomas for providing the authority for my suspicions about the reliability of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Paul Preston’s Doves of War, which traced the role of four women in the Spanish Civil War, was of particular use to me.
Angela Jackson’s groundbreaking work on British women in the war opened many doors, most especially her biography of Patience Darton, For Us It Was Heaven.
Peter Carroll’s work on the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and Anthony Beevor’s clearheaded historical writing widened my perspectives and the range of my understanding.
Julia Newman’s splendid film Into the Fire brought to life the stories of heroic women who were faceless names only.
Fredericka Morton’s archive in the Tamiment Library of New York University provided invaluable material, much of it firsthand accounts of American nurses.
Mary Bingham de Urquidi’s Mercy in Madrid was a treasury of particular information about the lives of nurses in the wartime hospitals.
For a writer, theft is the sincerest form of flattery, but it should not go undocumented. I want to acknowledge the use of some phrases and images from Josephine Herbst’s The Starched Blue Sky of Spain, and Dorothy Parker’s “Incredible, Fantastic…and True,” which were also invaluable sources.
My most particular thanks go to Professor Carme Manuel of the University of Valencia for her extraordinary generosity in opening the city for me…accompanying me on walks, introducing me to people with precious information, and pointing me in the right direction again and again.
My thanks to Isabel and Juan Antonio Yáñez, for their hospitality, the depth and breadth of their knowledge, and their generosity in sharing it with me.
My conversations with Angela Cassanova of Kovington, Kentucky, who lived through the Franco years as the daughter of a left-leaning mother, were an incredible treasure.
When I try to remember why I felt the urge to write this book, inevitably I return to the work and life of Simone Weil, her letter to Georges Bernanos, and his searing Diary of My Times.
Closer to home and no less dear to my heart are my translators, Mei Li Johnson and Adam Zapades, and my dear helpers, Rebecca Kelliher and Cecelia Lie, who civilize my feral typing.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mary Gordon is the author of seven novels, including Final Payments, Pearl, and The Love of My Youth; six works of nonfiction, including the memoirs The Shadow Man and Circling My Mother; and three collections of short fiction, including The Stories of Mary Gordon, which was awarded the Story Prize. She has received many other honors, including a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an Academy Award for Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches at Barnard College and lives in New York City.
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