Tell Me Who I Am

by Julia Navarro

  “The Fascists are winning,” Amelia said.

  We all looked at Albert James, waiting for him to corroborate what Amelia had said, and to tell us about the real situation.

  “Amelia is right, the Republic has lost the war. It will be over in a matter of weeks,” the journalist said.

  “What do you think is going to happen?” José María asked.

  “I don’t know, but it’s difficult to think that Franco will be generous toward those who fought for the Republic. The survivors on both sides will have to face up to a country that has been devastated, and will have to fight another battle, this time against hunger and poverty.”

  “And what about the European powers?” Aitor asked.

  “They have never thought that the Spanish war was their problem. France and Great Britain have recognized the Burgos government; Germany and Italy are on Franco’s side. No, don’t deceive yourselves, Spain is alone, it has been alone all the way through the war and will continue to be alone now. Nobody thinks of Spain as a priority,” James said.

  “Maybe we should change our plans, and Aitor should go home as soon as possible. We have friends, we have our people on the other side of the border, in France. We won’t have problems there, and maybe we’ll be able to organize some kind of resistance, or help get people across the border... ,” José María mused.

  We were flabbergasted by the blunt report that Albert James had given us. José María and Aitor were no fools, but both had been unable to avoid maintaining a tiny modicum of hope that they could free Spain from Franco, and save themselves.

  Over the next few days, Aitor and Amelia spent as much time together as they possibly could. José María was surprised to hear them talking in Basque. Nobody understood them, not even him. Back in those days Basque was a language that was spoken on farms, and not something that middle-class people spoke at all, in fact quite the opposite, which made it all the more strange that Amelia had learned it.

  “I see you haven’t forgotten it all,” Aitor said.

  “The truth is that I didn’t know that I could still speak it, until I got the opportunity...”

  “My mother said that you had a good ear for languages.”

  “Dear Amaya! Your mother was always so good and kind with me...”

  Tomás Jiménez closed his eyes and I was worried, thinking that something might have happened to him. But soon he opened them again.

  “Don’t get worried, Guillermo, don’t you worry, it’s just that if I close my eyes then I remember things better and I can see Amelia and my friends once again. Aitor and José María gave Amelia lots of telephone numbers and addresses for members of the PNV who had been able to take refuge in France. Aitor told Amelia that if he went back then he would look for her. I suppose that he did because he left two months later. José María stayed in Mexico and never returned to Spain. Unfortunately he died before Franco.”

  Doña Raquel said goodbye and made me promise to come and see them again before I left Mexico.

  I didn’t keep my promise, I was so caught up in the life of my great-grandmother that all I could think of doing was writing her story and having someone tell me how it continued. I called Victor Dupont, to ask if Pablo Soler and Charlotte were still in the French capital. But he told me that they had gone back to Barcelona. It was clear that the next step in my story would come from the historian, so once again my destination was Spain.

  “Why not come and have lunch with me tomorrow, and then we can talk all afternoon,” Soler suggested when I called him.

  I was on time for the meeting with the professor. I liked meeting with him, and he always gave me some surprising new revelation whenever I saw him. I told him about my trip to Mexico during the meal, and while we were waiting for dessert he told me what had happened when Albert James and Amelia had come back from Mexico...

  We were pleased to have Amelia back with us. Danielle Dupont had grown accustomed to the “little Spaniard,” and the house seemed empty without her. Monsieur Dupont said we had to celebrate as well. I think it was a relief for Josep to have her back, she was his guardian angel, his protector. Amelia wanted us to tell her everything that was happening in Spain.

  “In Madrid, General Casado, with Julián Besteiro helping him, has taken control of the situation and has abolished Negrín’s government. I think that Casado is negotiating with the government in Burgos to end the war, and that it’ll all be over in a couple of days,” Josep said in a faint little voice.

  It wasn’t even a couple of days. The very next day, March 28, 1939, the nacionales entered Madrid. For Josep and Amelia this was a hammerblow. Even though they expected the news, the truth is they weren’t ready for it.

  The worst was when Albert James came to the house on April 1 with a paper in his hand.

  “I’m sorry, I’ve just got this, the last part of the war.”

  “Read it,” Amelia asked.

  “‘Today, with the Red Army captive and disarmed, the National troops have attained their last military objectives. The war is over.” It’s signed by General Francisco Franco.”

  Amelia burst into sobs and Josep could not hold back his tears either. Even Madame Dupont, Victor, and I were caught up. Only Albert James remained dry-eyed.

  “I’m going to Spain,” James said to Amelia. “I’m going to ask for the necessary permissions to travel to Madrid.”

  “I will go with you,” Amelia said, drying her tears with the back of her hand.

  “I don’t think it would be very sensible, we don’t know what might happen,” Albert James said.

  “If I don’t go with you I will go alone, but I will go, I want to go to my house, and find out about my family. I have a son, I have parents, I have a husband... ,” she said between sobs.

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Albert James left, promising to return later with more news, and my father left as well, to hunt down some of his comrades and share information.

  We all ate supper at the Duponts’ house that night, and we spoke until dawn was breaking.

  Josep said he had no other option than to sign up to join the Foreign Legion; he did not want to go back to one of the refugee camps where thousands of Spaniards who had fled the war had ended up. He asked Amelia to take me to Spain so that I could try to find Lola.

  “He’ll be better off with his mother.”

  “But they might have arrested her, or maybe she’s escaped too,” Amelia argued.

  “She would have found us. I know Lola, I know that she would have stayed to fight to the end. It’s what she said to me. I’ve told you that I asked her to cross the frontier with us but that she refused. But the end is here and we have to do what’s best for our son. Even if you don’t find Lola, her mother can look after Pablo. She lives in Madrid, on the corner of the Plaza de la Paja. She’s a good woman and she’s never gotten mixed up in anything before, I don’t think the Fascists will interfere with her. She’ll look after Pablo.” From his tone it was clear that Josep saw the decision as having already been made.

  I said that I didn’t want to leave my father and go to live with my grandmother, and Danielle, who was a kind woman, offered to look after me until the situation in Spain was clearer, but Josep was immoveable. He knew that there was no future for us at that point in France. The news that reached us about the internment camps was terrible, the French were overwhelmed by the avalanche of refugees. They put the old in the camp at Bram; the soldiers, especially the Catalans, went to Agde and Rivesaltes; Septfonds, Le Vernet, and Gurs were where the workers and intellectuals were held.

  Albert James got permission to travel to Spain. It was dangerous because even though the war was over the Francoists were taking revenge on all who had fought on the Republican side. James was worried for Amelia, but she did not allow herself to be argued out of going. She told Danielle that if she was traveling with an American journalist then the Francoists wouldn’t do anything, but even Albert James was not entirely safe.
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  Amelia, Albert James, and I traveled to the border by car. Albert drove what was a good car for the time, but the journey from Paris seemed eternal.

  We arrived in Irún at eight o’clock in the morning on May 10. There were soldiers and policemen everywhere. Two members of the Guardia Civil’s border patrol told us to get out of the car. Albert James could only mumble a few words of Spanish, so Amelia took control of the situation.

  “Where are you going?” the officer asked.

  “To Madrid.”

  “And what are you going to do there?” the officer asked while his colleague looked at our passports.

  “Albert James is an American journalist, and he wants to write an article about Spain now that the war is over.”

  “Alright, that’s him, but what about you?”

  “I’m Señor James’s assistant and interpreter. I’ve told you already that he’s an American, you can see as much from his passport.”

  “And what about the kid? Why’s he traveling with you?”

  “Look, I’m a friend of his parents, and because I was living in Paris they sent him to stay with me so that he wouldn’t be too affected by the war; now I’m taking him back to his family, who we hope are still alive.”

  “Are his parents on our side?” the officer wanted to know.

  “They’re excellent people, honorable and hard-working, and they’ve fought for Spain just like everyone else.”

  “And where’s the paper that gives you custody over the child?” the officer asked.

  “What, you think that during the war people were thinking about papers? It was enough for them to send him to Paris so that he wouldn’t get shot.”

  The officers spoke among themselves for a good long while and in the end they must have reasoned that an American journalist, a young boy, and a woman couldn’t be all that dangerous, for they let us pass.

  Amelia, who had only recently taken up smoking, lit a cigarette as soon as we were back in the car.

  “You’re pretty good at evading direct questions,” Albert James said.

  “How do you know, if you don’t speak Spanish?”

  “Oh, I understand quite well enough, even though I don’t speak so well. You’ve got quite some nerve! But I already saw that in Moscow.”

  It took us almost twelve hours to get to Madrid, not just because of the state of the roads, but because there were troops everywhere, moving from one place to another.

  When we got to Madrid, Albert James took us to a hotel just off the Gran Vía, the Florida, which a friend had recommended. The Florida had been where the journalists who wrote about the war with the Republican forces had gathered. It had suffered during the war and was not in a very good state, so Albert James looked up another address, a pension where a friend of his, an American photographer, had lived out much of the conflict.

  The owner was a short little woman, so thin that she appeared malnourished. I remember that she met us with gratitude.

  “I don’t have a single guest, so you can choose your room. I can’t guarantee you that there’ll be food, because there’s nothing in the market, unless I go looking through unofficial channels. Oh, by the way, my name is Rosario.”

  The rooms were clean, and their balconies let onto the Gran Vía itself.

  Once Albert James had explained that we had come on a recommendation from another American journalist, Doña Rosario seemed to look at us with more sympathy.

  “You have to be careful who you let come into your house, and what you say, because you can end up in prison now just for saying nothing, the slightest thing.”

  Doña Rosario told us that her husband had been a civil servant in the Finance Ministry, and they had had all they needed right up until the war broke out.

  “We lived well, you can see for yourselves how nice this apartment is, but my husband joined the ranks and they killed him at the front, on the Guadarrama sierra. And you should see for yourselves, I had to live somehow during the war, so I took in lodgers. One of my cousins told me about this, she was putting up foreign journalists in two of her rooms and she sent me some clients, and thanks to that I survived the war.”

  “Were you on the side of the Republic?” Amelia asked.

  “Ah, who cares? We have to live with what we’ve got and there’s no point saying anything. You know that Franco passed the Law of Political Responsibilities even before the war ended, and now he’s putting lots of people in prison; they’re taking everyone they even suspect was on the other side. No one gets away.”

  It was about ten o’clock when Amelia said that she was going to her parents’ house.

  “I can’t wait for tomorrow, I won’t be able to sleep.”

  “But you can’t go out at this hour of the night,” Albert advised. “We still don’t know how things are; they could arrest you. It’s better for us to wait.”

  It was hard to convince her, but he managed in the end. Amelia didn’t sleep at all that night, and woke us at dawn.

  Albert James said that the first thing they should do was to get him registered as a journalist with the Francoist authorities. James wanted to know the kind of ground he was treading on, although he had no intention at all of having his work censored by the Francoist authorities. He wanted to see things and hear them, and then write about Spain after the war.

  He suggested that Amelia should come with him as he didn’t speak very good Spanish, and that then he would go to her parents’ house and then try to find Lola, but she resisted, was nervous and wanted to find out about her family as soon as possible. In the end he gave in and they agreed that I would go with her to her parents’ house while he went to get himself organized so that he could start reporting.

  I can still remember the impression that Madrid made on me back then. You could feel the misery and the desperation, as well as the euphoria of the victors.

  We walked down Gran Vía toward Cibeles and then up to Salamanca, where Amelia’s parents lived, as did her aunt and uncle.

  I remember how she trembled as she rang the doorbell to her parents’ apartment, but no one answered her impatient ringing.

  We walked down the stairs to look for the doorman, whom we hadn’t seen when we came in, but who was there in his little room.

  “Señorita Amelia! Good heavens, what a surprise!” The man looked at her open-mouthed.

  “Hello, Antonio, how are you? And your wife and children?”

  “Well, well, all well. We’ve survived and that’s good enough for us.”

  “Is there nobody in my house?”

  The doorman was nervous and wrung his hands before he answered.

  “Don’t you know?”

  “Know? Know what?”

  “Well, some things happened to your family,” the doorman replied uncomfortably.

  Amelia blushed, humiliated to have to beg for news about her own family.

  “Explain yourself, Antonio.”

  “Look, the best thing is to go to your uncle Don Armando’s house, and they’ll explain it all there.”

  “Where are my parents?” Amelia insisted.

  “They’ve gone, Señorita Amelia, they’ve gone. Your father... well, I’m not entirely sure, and your mother... I’m sorry, but Doña Teresa died. They buried her a few months ago.”

  Amelia’s shriek was heartrending. She bent double and I thought she was going to fall over. The doorman and I held her up. She hung there inert, trembling, and even though it wasn’t cold at all, her teeth were chattering.

  “Can’t you see why I didn’t want to tell you? It’s better to hear about these things from the family... ,” the doorman said, upset by Amelia’s state.

  “And my sister, where is she?”

  “Señorita Antonietta went to be with her uncle and aunt, I suppose she must be with them. She wasn’t well.”

  The man led us through to his room and offered Amelia a glass of water, although she seemed incapable of pulling herself together. She was so cold, so pale, she seemed
so helpless...

  We walked to her uncle and aunt’s house, a few blocks away. Amelia, who was still crying, led me by the hand, and I can still remember how strong her grip was.

  We hurried up the stairs. Amelia was desperate to know what had happened to her relatives. This time they opened the door at the first ring and we found ourselves face to face with Edurne, the daughter of Amaya, the woman who had looked after the Garayoa children from their earliest infancy. Edurne had been Amelia’s maid, her confidante and friend, and because of Lola’s influence had joined the Communist Party.

  The meeting of the two women was a powerfully emotional one. Amelia hugged Edurne, and Edurne, seeing her old friend, burst into tears.

  “Amelia! What joy! What joy! Thank goodness you’re back!”

  Amelia and Edurne’s voices alerted Doña Elena, who came immediately into the hall. Amelia’s aunt almost fainted to see her niece.

  “Amelia! But... you’re here! Good Lord! Good Lord! Laura, Antonietta, Jesús, come here!”

  Doña Elena took Amelia by the hand and led her into the salon. I followed them in a state of shock, I felt like an intruder.

  Antonietta came into the room followed by her cousins Laura and Jesús. Amelia tried to hug her sister but Antonietta did not let her.

  “No, don’t kiss me, I’m ill, I’ve had tuberculosis and I’m not yet better.”

  Amelia looked at her sister in horror, suddenly realizing the terrible state her sister was in.

  She was extremely thin. Her face was incredibly pale, and her eyes stood out of it, huge and bright. But Amelia being Amelia, it would take more than tuberculosis to stop her from hugging her sister. There was no separating them for a long time, she kissed Antonietta and stroked her hair without ever stopping crying. Laura came to her cousins’ side and hugged them both.

  “How you’ve grown, Jesús! And you’re still as serious as ever,” Amelia said to her cousin, who was the same age as me, more or less, and who seemed very shy.