by Martin Sheen
When Catch-22 finished filming in Mexico, we packed up the duplex in San Carlos and boarded a train to Hermosillo, Mexico. From there we took another train to Nogales, where we walked across the border checkpoint. My almost seven years in New York and another four months in Mexico had been reduced to the single suitcase I dragged out of Mexico and into the United States. Among the six of us, we carried everything we now owned.
Just on the other side of customs, in Nogales, Arizona, my father rented a car to drive us all the way to Los Angeles. This would have been a good plan if he had actually known how to drive on an interstate. All of his driving hours to that point had been logged in small towns where turn signals were optional and fast lanes nonexistent. The 550 miles from Nogales to Los Angeles in June of 1969 have etched themselves into family memory as one of the most uncomfortable, disastrous family road trips we ever made. My father didn’t know what high beams were or how to pass another car so we plodded along in the right lane the whole way. We weren’t allowed to turn on the air-conditioning because he was afraid it would make the car overheat or explode. Exit? Merge? Not a chance. What should have been an eight-and-a-half-hour trip through western Arizona and southeastern California took more like twelve. With four kids crammed in the backseat it felt more like twenty.
“Dad, we need a bathroom.”
“Don’t talk to me. I have to focus on the road!”
“Martin, the kids are hungry.”
“Don’t talk to me. I have to focus on the road!”
We must have driven straight through the night. I don’t remember stopping at a motel. As the traffic thickened and the buildings of downtown Los Angeles appeared in the distance against the backdrop of the purple San Gabriel Mountains it was already midmorning. Charlie, Ramon, Renée, and I lay sprawled across the backseat and floor—this was still years before seat belt laws—while my mother spread the map of L.A. across the dashboard and directed my father to the Vermont Avenue exit. He gripped the steering wheel tightly, braved the turn signal, and glided us off the freeway.
After the vast expanses of the Mexico and Arizona deserts, the cinderblocks and concrete of Los Angeles were disconcerting. I’d been out of New York for only four months, but it hadn’t taken long for me to get accustomed to Sonora’s panoramic mountain vistas and fine white sand. There were beaches in California too, I knew, but when I looked out the window all I saw were stretches of asphalt, cars, used car lots, and liquor stores. I felt sudden pangs of nostalgia for Riverside Park and San Carlos Bay.
My father pointed the rental car north on Vermont Avenue. A motel room was waiting for us ten miles up the freeway but Dad had a more immediate goal.
First stop: 3400 Wilshire Boulevard.
Destination: the Ambassador Hotel.
It says something important about my father that, when he relocated his family to Los Angeles, the first place he took us was not the Pacific Ocean or the Hollywood sign or any number of tourist or natural attractions that draw visitors every day. Instead he took us to the place where Robert Kennedy had been shot so we could bear witness together. As we walked into the lobby of the five-hundred-room hotel and saw the square gilded columns and the shallow alabaster fountain, my mother held Renée and my father grasped Charlie’s hand. Ramon and I trailed along behind.
Outside, we’d seen the entrance to the Cocoanut Grove nightclub, where Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, and Barbra Streisand had all performed. Two years before our visit, the hotel lobby had been used in The Graduate as the site of the rendezvous between Benjamin Braddock and Mrs. Robinson, played by Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft. For a hotel built in 1921 on the site of a former dairy farm, the place packed some serious history. The ornate architecture and the way the thick brown-and-pink carpet muted conversation told me we were someplace solemn and it would be in my best interest to behave. Fresh from four months in rural Mexico we must have looked like quintessential hippies to the out-of-town guests and tourists hoping for a fading glimpse of Hollywood splendor. They sure didn’t find it in us.
My father led us to the Embassy Ballroom, where Bobby Kennedy had delivered his final victory speech. It was the largest indoor room I’d ever seen, bigger even than the gym at PS 166. Cavernous. The ceiling arched above us, with coffered panels that looked like rows of squares had been cut into the sky. On our right was the podium area where Kennedy had stood in front of five hundred supporters just after midnight on June 5, 1968, after winning the California primary. “We are a great country,” he’d said that night, “an unselfish country, and a compassionate country, and I intend to make that my basis for running.”
Behind the podium was the door to the pantry where Bobby was escorted after his speech, and where the fatal shots were fired. I remembered waking up that morning in Ohio and turning on the television in my grandmother’s living room. I’d known to run upstairs to wake my father because the newscasters were saying something he’d want to hear, even though I didn’t understand the full meaning of the message. In the ballroom that day, I didn’t understand all the implications, either, but I could sense that coming to this place was an important pilgrimage for my father. I stood quietly by his side.
He looked at the empty wall with what seemed like a blend of sadness and reverence.
“Kids,” he said. “A great man, Bobby Kennedy, once spoke here.”
He had been a great man. I was beginning to understand that was a noble goal, and not an easy one to achieve. We stood there together for a few more seconds, thinking about it all.
And that’s how our life as a family in California began.
Pico Boulevard is a busy main thoroughfare slicing right through West L.A. When you turn off Pico onto Castello Avenue, you enter a sudden, quiet lull. Low cement-and-stone houses, empty sidewalks, sumac trees that drop red berries every fall lining both sides of the street—this was where my mother found us a furnished house to rent just one block from where the Museum of Tolerance now stands. The house had a small front yard and a grassy spot in back where we could play. With rosebushes, manicured lawns, and the sweet scent of night-blooming jasmine before we went to bed, it was a small suburban pocket in the middle of a city. All we needed to add were two sets of bunk beds that my father set up in the second bedroom. Ramon and I, as the oldest and most agile, immediately claimed the top beds.
I finished the first grade at Canfield Elementary School less than a mile from our house, and then it was summer and we had months to spare. The Catch-22 set was moving to Rome for a few weeks to film the characters’ R&R break on the mainland. My father was needed for just a few scenes, mainly one at an outdoor café on the Piazza Navona with Alan Arkin and Art Garfunkel. He wouldn’t need to spend much time on the set, but Nichols wanted him in Rome the whole time. My mother didn’t want to uproot the family again for such a short shoot, so my father decided to take just Ramon and me to Rome. Through an American actor who lived there, he arranged a short-term furnished apartment for us in the Gianicolo neighborhood and a housekeeper who’d watch Ramon and me during the days. There would be one week when my father wouldn’t be needed on the set at all, and he decided he would take us on a side trip to his father’s village in Spain to visit the family we’d never met.
My father had a Kodak Brownie camera, and on that trip he took more than two hundred snapshots, more photos in those three weeks than I think he’s taken in the forty years since. For some reason he got the idea of running ahead of us and then spinning around and catching Ramon and me in motion as we raced toward him. My sister Renée has been working alongside my mother organizing all our family photos, and, when I look at the ones they’ve archived from Rome in 1969, I see black-and-white shot after shot of two little boys running through the streets of Rome in their jeans and striped shirts, chasing each other up flights of marble stairs, sitting on a concrete wall eating ice cream on a stick from Café Gelate nearby.
The apartment we rented was large and stuffy. The furniture had gold tassels hanging from th
e upholstery, floor-to-ceiling curtains, and floor-length tablecloths on all the tables. Every evening you could trace your name onto any exposed wooden surfaces in just that day’s dust.
My memories of visiting the sights that summer are sketchy. Goofing around at the Fontana di Trevi. Standing at the foot of Michelangelo’s Pietà in the Basilica of St. Peter at the Vatican and staring up at the body of Jesus lying sprawled across his mother’s lap. And then the flight to Spain and the long, long train ride from Madrid to the Galician city of Tui, the nearest railroad stop to Parderrubias and the Estevez family home.
We had left Madrid midmorning for the nine-hour trip. At lunchtime my father brought us into the dining car, which looked like an elegant restaurant in New York: white tablecloths, cloth napkins, china plates. A big, heavyset Spaniard with dark hair and a beard sat down alone at the table across from ours. He picked up his napkin, shook it out, and tucked it into his collar. When his food arrived he ate carefully and slowly, relishing each bite. He held the stem of his wineglass between his thumb and forefinger and swirled its contents before drinking. I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. In northern Spain it wasn’t, and still isn’t, uncommon to sit down at the table at 2:00 p.m. and not get up until 5:00, but I’d never seen evidence of this kind of luxuriousness at the table before. Until that point, food had never been more than basic, practical nourishment to me, something you had to put in your body three times a day to keep from being hungry. To watch the Spaniard treat his meal as if it were a celebration was completely new to me and stirred something deep inside. One day I’d be growing my own food and sitting down to a meal from my own garden with the same reverence I observed in the Spaniard.
We arrived at my grandfather’s village late at night in a light rain. Galicia is famous for its constant drizzle: Parderrubias gets an average of more than 60 inches of precipitation and upward of one hundred rainy days each year. Through the taxi window, all I could see was darkness—there were no streetlights—and the rain dripping against the glass. When I tilted my face up, I saw a perfect, glowing full moon.
The taxi dropped us off in front of a high wall made of tall granite slabs that were connected by thick vertical stripes of cement. This was where our relatives lived? This was where my grandfather came from? It looked more like the ruins we’d seen in Rome.
My father banged on a wooden gate. He waited for a minute or two with his hands shoved in his pockets and then pounded on the gate again. We stood in the rain and hoped someone heard us. Where would we go for the night if no one was home? No one was expecting us because they hadn’t known we were coming. Without telephone or electricity, there would have been no easy way to alert them.
It was difficult to imagine my grandfather Francisco, who lived in a regular house in Dayton, ever living in a place like this. When we visited him in Dayton he rushed around in his modern kitchen and liked to spend evenings in front of the TV. Still, I thought of him as mostly strict, serious, and humorless. His accent was so thick I could barely understand a word he said. He regarded us with curiosity and sometimes with a puzzled confusion. My parents were raising Ramon, Charlie, Renée, and me in a very progressive atmosphere, where sexuality was considered normal and body parts were not taboo. “It’s just a body part,” my mother would say. “Stop being so silly about it!” When I was about four and just becoming aware of what made a boy a boy and a girl a girl, we went to visit my grandfather in Dayton. One afternoon I was sitting on his lap in his house and was suddenly overcome by a great need to know if men as old as he was had parts similar to mine.
“Grandpa, do you have a penis?” I asked him matter-of-factly.
He stared at me with a funny expression on his face but didn’t say anything in response. So I asked again.
“Grandpa, do you have a penis?”
“No, Emilio,” he finally said. “I donna to have inny peanuts.”
That night in Spain, his brother Matias answered the gate and greeted us exuberantly when he realized who we were. Matias lived in the family compound with his wife Juaquina and his brother Lorenzo, three old folks who could still have been living in the nineteenth century by American standards. Juaquina cooked over an open fire and carried buckets of water into the house from a well in the courtyard. Out in the pasture the family had a single cow for milk and cheese. Whatever Spanish I’d picked up in Mexico was useless here, where everyone spoke Galician. We got by with nodding and pointing and smiling.
It was summer, but cold. I knew cold from winters in New York and the Roses tour stop in Chicago, but I’d never known true bone-chilling cold until I spent a night in a cottage with stone walls and stone floors in the mountains of Galicia. We could see our breath inside the house. At night my father, brother, and I slept in our clothes in the bed where my grandfather had been born, curled up together like kittens against the chill.
The family’s land was a child’s paradise. Ramon and I were allowed to run freely through the garden and the pasture. We chased the chickens that ran through the courtyard and poked at the cow when she was brought back at the end of the day. I was fascinated by the garden and all the vegetables that were bursting through the soil. I’d never given much thought to where vegetables came from before. In New York you got them from the supermarket, and in Mexico you found them in large mounds on tables at the weekly farmer’s market. June in Galicia meant nearly everything was ready to harvest. My father had also brought a little Super 8 movie camera along on the trip, and he filmed my aunt Juaquina and uncle Matias digging potatoes out of the ground. Potatoes, beans, tomatoes, onions—between the vegetables they grew, the chickens they raised for slaughter, and the cow that produced milk for drinking and for cheese, the family was nearly self-sufficient on just two acres of land.
They also cultivated a small vineyard to make their own wine. Of the many photos my father took that week is one of me standing in the family vineyard, wearing a pair of muddy Converse gym shoes, jeans worn and faded at the knees, and a long-sleeved, striped polo shirt. At seven I was still very blond and I was standing almost in profile, midstep, casting a sideways glance in my father’s direction as if I were looking for permission to step into the vineyard. Behind me, neat rows of grapevines planted by the family extend to the edges of the photograph, and beyond.
My partner Sonja and I use that photo now on the home page of our own vineyard’s website, CasaDumetzWines.com and on the labels of our new vintages of 2010 Syrah and Grenache. I like knowing that, even at age seven, among all the options on the family farm in Spain, at that moment the vineyard was where I chose to be. But what always strikes me most about that photo is how tall the grapevines are behind me. Or rather, how little I am in comparison. I remember the woodsy, smoky smells of wet earth and open fires when that photo was taken, and the slight, damp chill in the air, and the way my father shouted, “Emilio! Over here!” as he positioned the Brownie camera in front of his face. I remember all of that. I just don’t remember ever being that small in the world.
CHAPTER FOUR
MARTIN
Pontevedra Province, Spain 1969
At the railroad station in Tui, the taxi driver who picked us up looked at the piece of paper with the address my father had given me and then stared me in the eye. I’d hoped it would be self-explanatory, because my Spanish wasn’t going to get us very far and my Galician was nonexistent.
Fortunately, the cab driver knew some English.
“Estevez?” he said, looking again from the paper to me. “Is Paco?”
Paco is a common nickname for Francisco in Latin culture and was my father’s boyhood name. Was the driver confusing me with my father?
“I’m the son of Paco,” I said. “From America.”
“Ah, Paco!” His rugged face broke into a friendly grin. “Your father, I know him when I was a boy.”
As he pulled out of the train station and headed up into the mountains, the driver told us he had also grown up in Parderrubias, which is one of seven parishes
in the municipality of Salceda de Caselas, in the province of Pontevedra. Each of those names means something specific to the residents of each area. It’s like saying I live in the city of Malibu, which is part of metro Los Angeles, which is in Los Angeles County. About 8,000 people live in Salceda today, where the parishes have expanded until they all run into one another, but when we visited in 1969 they were still isolated villages that had been clinging to mountainsides for centuries. Parderrubias and my father’s family’s house were out in the wilderness and the roads were rough and few. You couldn’t even rightly call them roads. They were more like wide paths that frequently washed out in the rain. You really had to know your way around to find my family’s place. It was a remarkable stroke of luck to find a driver who not only remembered my father from fifty years ago but also knew exactly how to find the family’s home.
After a half hour’s drive on pitch-dark back roads, the cab pulled up in front of a tall stone fence with a plain, locked wooden door. “Here,” the driver said. The boys and I walked up to the gate. It was close to 10:00 p.m. The comforting smell of wood smoke filled the air and a bright full moon made the granite slabs glow a ghostly gray. This area of Galicia was known for its wine and stone. A rock quarry in nearby Budiño supplied the village with granite blocks to build houses and fences, and to support the grapevines in the vineyards.
I banged hard on the gate.
No answer.
I banged again.
My father had sent a letter in advance of our trip telling the relatives we might come in the next month or two, but there was no telling when or if it had arrived. If the roads were any indicator of the postal service’s speed, the letter was probably still halfway back to Madrid. And now it was getting close to midnight and the boys needed a place to sleep.
I pounded on the door again.
“¡Ola! ¿Quen é?” A muffled voice came from the other side.