by Martin Sheen
“Hello! It’s Ramon!” I shouted back. I wasn’t sure if he could hear or understand me. “The son of Francisco! I’m here with my boys for a visit!”
Then came the sound of a heavy lock scraping against wood and the door swung open.
My uncle Matias, my father’s younger brother, stood before us in the moonlight. I recognized him right away from the photos my father had shown me as a boy. Oh, my God, I thought. I’d never met a member of my father’s family before and Tio Matias looked so much like my father it was startling: small, thin, with a gently rounded face just like my father’s, and bald on top like him, too. Except Matias’s head seemed to be two-toned, shiny and white on top and brown from the forehead down. He blinked hard at us. From his nightclothes and his expression, I could tell we’d woken him up.
“¿Quen . . .?” he said, as he looked from me to the boys. A slow recognition crept over his face. “¿Do meu irmán . . . Paco. . .?”
I showed him the letter of introduction my father had written but Matias didn’t need it. He’d seen photos of me, too. He just hadn’t expected me to show up on his doorstep near midnight on a random June night in the rain with two small boys hanging from my legs.
“¡Ay yi!” he shouted as he motioned us through the gate and hugged me. He let loose with a stream of Galician I couldn’t understand, but it didn’t matter. His joy upon meeting us was palpable and didn’t need words to express.
In 1969, Spain had been in the authoritarian grip of General Francisco Franco—also a Galician—for thirty-three years. As I would later learn, the uncle standing before me in his nightclothes was a liberal who’d taken part in an uprising against Franco in a heavily conservative region of Spain. He paid dearly for his heroic actions with a year of imprisonment in a concentration camp on an island off the coast and then three more years in Franco’s mountaintop jail outside of Pamplona.
Matias led us across a dirt courtyard and into the family’s stone house, where his wife Juaquina came into the kitchen to check on the commotion. Well fed, with ruddy cheeks and a long graying braid, she fussed over the children and insisted on making us a meal. While we sat in the kitchen she went into the courtyard, chased a chicken around, brought it back to the kitchen, and broke its neck in front of us. Then she plucked it, threw it into some boiling water, and cooked it. All this while she kept chattering at us and saying who knew what in Galician. The boys stared at her, astonished. That was surely something we hadn’t seen in New York, or even in Mexico, for that matter.
Juaquina’s stove was a large stone about the width of a single bed and six feet long, with an open fire and a chimney that led up and out of the house. She cooked with a tripod, putting the pot on top and constantly feeding little sticks into the fire beneath it to keep it burning. Her ruddy cheeks came from spending so much time each day leaning over an open fire. Electricity had come to Parderrubias only a few months earlier and the house’s single, naked lightbulb hung from the center of the kitchen ceiling. The walls of the kitchen were black from decades of accumulated soot from the cooking fire. A running joke in that region of Galicia was that, once electricity arrived, everyone saw how badly their houses needed indoor paint jobs.
Juaquina talked over her shoulder to everyone as she cooked, as effortlessly as if she were working on a modern range. I loved listening to her voice and I adored her from the moment we met. I could tell right away that she had a strong, generous character.
Within an hour after our arrival, we were eating the chicken and some vegetables from the family’s garden. I tried to explain about filming in Rome, to send regards from my father and brothers, to explain that my wife and two other children were back in California, but we were limited to smiles and nods, gestures, and the few words of Spanish the boys and I had picked up in Mexico.
Past midnight, Juaquina led us by candlelight down a corridor to a bedroom where the bed, if I understood her correctly, was the one in which my father was born. It was so cold that night the boys and I slept in our clothing, huddled together for warmth. It was an extraordinary feeling, to know that I was lying with my two boys in the bed where my father had come into the world, as if three generations of us were sharing the space together.
In the morning, I woke before the boys and looked around the room. I hadn’t been able to see much of it at night. Sunlight shone in through the windows and cast bright squares on the stone walls and floor. And then, directly across from the bed, I saw the poster from The Subject Was Roses hanging on the wall. I’d given it to my father when he’d visited us in New York in 1964. The image of Jack Albertson, Irene Dailey, and me smiling out from the bedroom wall in Parderrubias hit me right between the eyes. I’d forgotten that my father had taken it with him when he’d sailed to Spain, thinking he was going home to stay. I thought back to the night he’d paced back and forth across our living room floor, and the way he’d looked at me as if he were seeing me for the first time.
In this bedroom in Galicia, an entire ocean away from Eighty-Sixth Street, this poster would have been the first thing my father saw every morning when he woke. He had never mentioned hanging it here but I understood what its presence meant. It was his way of showing he was proud of me, even if he couldn’t bring himself to say it out loud.
The neighborhood where I grew up in Dayton had been populated mostly by Italian, Polish, and Irish immigrants, and as a result I always had felt most connected to the Irish side of my heritage. Spain had existed only in photos and intermittent stories, as vague to me as a twenty-nine-year-old father as it had been when I was a twelve-year-old boy. But that morning on the Estevez family’s farm, my Spanish heritage suddenly came alive in vivid, four-color, living detail. Chickens squawked across the dirt courtyard. A mild-mannered cow chewed its cud and slowly ambled along as Juaquina untethered it from a post and led it out to pasture. The ripe scents of wet earth and fresh wood smoke hung in the air. The homestead was simple and rustic, constructed from stone blocks and wood.
My childhood daydreams of Spain had involved kings and castles and galleons, explorer’s maps and royal decrees, not suppers cooked on open fires and chickens pecking at my shoes. My father had tried to tell me what to expect before I arrived. “Donna to expect the conveniences,” he’d said. “There issa no toaster. No TV. You’ll do the walking to go places and the rain, itta rains a lot. But you will enjoy. Therra good people. And you’ll-a be well fed.” He was right, but his descriptions couldn’t come close to standing in the middle of the genuine article. The village was much more basic and rural than I could possibly have imagined, almost like traveling back in time a hundred years. I felt as if I’d stepped into a scene from Fiddler on the Roof, minus all the daughters and the tsar. I could see why my father had loved his home so much but also why, after forty-eight years in America, it had been impossible for him to return for good.
I breathed in deeply. My lungs loved the sweet, fresh air. The air in this part of Galicia was so clean, free of the pollution and diesel exhaust that permeated the big European cities at the time. All the smells in Parderrubias—cooking smoke, animal droppings, vegetation wet from recent rain—were created because they were necessary for daily existence. And it was so quiet here compared to anyplace I’d ever lived. There were no cars on the road, no motorcycles revving by, no noise from automatic anything. Occasionally a bird would call out or the cow would moo, and the chickens were constantly complaining about something, but these were all natural noises that blended seamlessly into the background of a rural existence. I could have spent the better part of that morning standing in that courtyard breathing that clean air into my lungs, exhaling, and doing it all over again.
“Good morning!” Matias said, joining me in the courtyard. He clutched a mug of strong coffee against his chest. A black beret fit snugly on top of his head and I realized why his skin had looked two-tone the night before. The beret lined up perfectly with his tan line. He must have worn it all day, every day, out in the fields.
&nbs
p; When I started going to Central America in the 1980s I was reminded of Galicia in the 1960s. Parderrubias in 1969 was third world for all intents and purposes. Our family there were, for the most part, subsistence farmers who lived off their own patch of land. This wasn’t unusual for the place or time. The whole community was similarly struggling along.
To them, the boys and I looked like creatures of plenty. Back in America, we were still living hand-to-mouth financially, but nonetheless we had modern appliances in our rental house, running water in our bathrooms, and electrical outlets in every room. I sensed a slight discomfort from the relatives as they showed us our sleeping quarters and fed us meals, as if they were embarrassed by their poverty and ashamed they couldn’t offer us better.
“I’m sorry,” Juaquina said as she served us breakfast.
“It isn’t much,” Matias apologized as we walked through the garden.
I suspect this was especially pronounced because my father had sent them photos and magazine articles about me, which made me a celebrity of sorts in their eyes. Even though I hardly thought of myself this way, I was moved by their humility and by their pure generosity and integrity. Compared to many families I knew in the States, my relatives in Spain were the fortunate ones. They had family, community, tradition, a sense of humor, graciousness, hospitality, humanity, joyfulness, and a natural spirituality. They were the rich ones, not us.
“I’m sorry,” Juaquina said again when she served us a delicious lunch of rice and chicken.
“Are you kidding? I’m delighted to be here,” I said. I hoped they could understand my passion if not my words. I wanted them to know that I would sleep anywhere, and eat anything, without complaint, just for the simple joy of being in their presence.
That first day in Parderrubias we also met Tio Lorenzo, another of my father’s brothers who lived there with Matias and Juaquina. Like the family I grew up in, my father’s had been a gang of brothers with a single sister—Maximillian, Alfonso, Francisco, Matias, Lorenzo, and Dolores. Lorenzo had also left Spain for the New World, settling in Argentina, where he worked as an embassy cook before returning home after his retirement. A lifelong bachelor, Lorenzo still dressed like a South American gentleman even in a rural setting, in shirtsleeves and a sweater vest. Like all the men I saw that day, Lorenzo also wore a black beret and carried an umbrella wherever he went. Everyone was always expecting rain.
Shoe leather was the main mode of transportation in Parderru-bias. I don’t think I even saw a bicycle while we were there. To go on an outing that afternoon—I wanted to get a gift for the family to show my gratitude—I needed to get a ride from my cousin Camilo, who had access to a car. My cousin took us back to Tui, the small city where we’d gotten off the train. Tui sits on a gentle hill along the River Miño, just on the Spanish side of the border with Portugal. On the other side of the river is the Portuguese city of Valença, connected to Tui by an international bridge whose construction was overseen by Gustave Eiffel of Eiffel Tower fame.
My cousin led us through the narrow stone streets of the medieval old city and up to the very top of the hill to see Tui’s source of architectural pride, its castle cathedral. The presence of a cathedral, rather than a basilica, gave Tui its “city” status. Like most of the ancient towns in Spain, or anywhere really, the tallest structure was always the church. Nobody dared build anything taller than a monument to God. In our modern-day cities, the tallest buildings are the skyscrapers owned by banks and insurance companies, the false deities of our era. It’s a pleasure to step back in time in a town like Tui, where the narrow cobblestone streets and squat medieval buildings retain a simple, practical charm.
Tui’s cathedral was consecrated in 1225 during the reign of King Alfonso IX and took more than a century to build. The carvings inside the portico—which were the first example of Gothic art in Spain—were magnificent. Representations of Saint John the Baptist, Saint Peter, Isaiah, and Moses were perched on pedestals, and above them were elaborately carved representations of the adoration of the Magi and the birth of Christ. Inside the courtyard, the vaulted cloisters were a testament to precise proportion. A small adjoining chapel built in the sixteenth century housed the relics of Peter Gonzalez, also known as San Telmo or St. Elmo, the patron saint of Spanish and Portuguese sailors and fisherman and also patron of Tui.
The boys ran joyously through the cloisters and I marveled at all the man hours and manpower that went into creating such a monument to faith. Only a week ago, I might have been in awe of the grandeur and beauty, but, after meeting my Spanish relatives, I now also thought about the construction itself. A hundred years of labor. Had any of my ancestors cut the stone or lifted the blocks to build the cathedral? Carved the reliefs in the portico? Had they considered it their duty to God or to their king? It was impossible to know, but I still felt a sense of pride in being descended—not from royalty, as I’d fantasized as a child—but from the good, honest, hardworking folks of the region. Were they not royalty in their own way? They were my people, and I was theirs.
Earlier that morning I’d noticed Matias and Juaquina owned a single, treasured radio that was battered and old. In the newer section of Tui, I found a modern model for them with enough batteries to last for a few months. This way if the electricity went off, as it often did in Parderrubias, my aunt and uncles could still listen to the radio. At the cash register, I waited while my cousin bought a lottery ticket. The state lottery was a big event in this region, a source of both hope and entertainment, which was why the radio was so important to the family. It was how everyone learned about the winning lottery numbers. I added a handful of lottery tickets to my purchase and gave them to Juaquina as a special gift. Maybe I’d bring her some luck.
After the dusty apartment in Rome and the crowded train up from Madrid, the boys were thrilled to have open space to play in and ran through the wet grass all afternoon. The small farm was a perfect place to let boys be boys, where nature was both accommodating and forgiving. Juaquina and Matias’s daughter was already grown and they seemed pleased to have the voices and energy of young children back on their land.
In the village, Juaquina was regarded with a combination of respect and scorn. She was the local matchmaker, the bruja, the seer. In Galicia, the local term for witch is meiga, and that’s what she was known as. Galicians have an ambivalent relationship with their witches, who have been part of the fabric of their culture for centuries. A popular local saying is “Eu non creo nas meigas, pero habelas hainas,” which roughly translates to “I don’t believe in witches, but they exist.” That pretty much captures the contradiction. I never saw evidence of Juaquina’s mystical powers during our short time there unless you include getting the boys to eat food they’d never tried before. Juaquina appeared to be a hardworking, loving, strong-willed farmer’s wife who enjoyed cooking and feeding guests. My father had been right. We did eat well.
Every day, for breakfast and dinner, I helped Juaquina spread the red-checkered tablecloth across the top of the wooden table. Then we positioned bottles of wine and orujo on top. “Orujo” roughly translates to “remains of the grapes” and is a popular strong liqueur Galicians have been making since the 1600s. Every family has its own secret recipe. The orujo maker takes the residue left over from winemaking—the stems, skins, and seeds—and ferments it all in a vat, then distills it in a copper pot heated over an open fire. The result is a clear liquid that makes you gasp for breath. The first swig I took of Matias’s orujo made my eyes sting. It was nearly 50 proof alcohol but the relatives seemed immune to its effects.
Food staples at the farm were rice, chicken, vegetables, eggs, fruit, and meat. Flour, sugar, and coffee had to be purchased in town and were literally kept under lock and key. Before every meal Juaquina reached into her apron pocket, took out a large, antique key, and unlocked a high cabinet in the kitchen where she kept the family’s most precious possessions. In our honor, she would take down the good silverware and china plates. Then she took
the sugar and flour from the same cabinet. I tried to understand what this meant. My aunt and uncles never seemed to lock their doors and didn’t exhibit any distrust. They were very gracious to one another and seemed to share everything. Yet they locked up their flour and sugar? Maybe there was a baking thief in the neighborhood. Truly, I didn’t know.
Before we sat down for dinner one evening I asked the relatives to pose for a photo. The three of them lined up in front of the table, each one holding a different piece of tableware: a china plate, a coffeepot, a silver serving spoon. As I lifted the Brownie camera to my eye they displayed their articles of finery and aimed broad smiles at the camera. They were posing with the family treasures, perhaps to impress the relatives in America they still had yet to meet. They didn’t understand that possessions didn’t matter a bit to Janet or me. She would have been as thrilled as I was just to be in their presence.
On our last day in Parderrubias, Matias walked us over to the nearby cemetery so I could pay respect to the ancestors. Most of the names were familiar to me. As I walked through the rows of aging gravestones, I could see how synonymous our family had been with the community, and for how long. There was the grave of Manuel Estevez, my father’s father, my grandfather. Next to him, Dolores Martinez, my father’s mother, my grandmother. I sank down to my knees in the wet dirt in front of my grandmother’s grave, suddenly overwhelmed by emotion. This was the woman who had birthed the son who had given life to me, so that I could give it to my four children, whom I loved more than I had ever thought possible. If not for my grandmother Dolores and my grandfather Manuel, put to rest in this earth beneath me, my children and I would not exist.
Everywhere I looked in the cemetery, there was an Estevez. A Martinez. Estevez. Estevez. Martinez. Estevez. At Calvary Cemetery in Dayton only two graves bore the name Estevez: one for my mother and one for my brother Manuel. My father’s generation had dispersed from Parderrubias to the New World, settling in South America, Cuba, and the United States. Some of them had returned to the ancestral homeland, but others had stayed overseas. And the next generation, my siblings and cousins and I, were scattered across America and the rest of the globe.