by Scott Walker
Chapter 36
September 2012
Robert and Marlene decided to make his journey to Spain their annual vacation. Like most Germans, she could take thirty days off work each year. Robert managed with some difficulty to get two weeks free from his U.S. employer.
They would spend three days root-hunting in Barcelona— where Robert’s Aunt Pilar had told him Mercedes grew up—and three in Asturias—where she had said Antonio worked before going to America, and where he and Mercedes met. In between, Robert and Marlene would have a week of relaxation at the seaside Catalan village of Cadaqués, where Salvador Dali passed his summers. Antonio’s homeland of Galicia was one province too far for such a brief trip.
“You won’t believe what I just got!” Robert’s mother Brenda told him on the telephone two weeks before his departure for Spain. “A few days ago, I found Debbie’s sister on Facebook.” Debbie was the unresponsive cousin who visited Spain in the 1970s. “And she has the letter Debbie sent her then, talking about her trip and the relatives she met!”
Brenda was right. Robert could not believe what he was hearing.
“And,” she added with relish, “she emailed a copy to me today. I’ll forward it to you.”
“Oh, Mom, that’s extraordinary,” Robert said. “What does the letter say?”
“It’s crazy. Mercedes was not from Barcelona, as Aunt Pilar always said.”
“What?” Robert exclaimed. For thirty years, he had identified with the city. He learned everything he could about Barcelona and Catalan culture, believing that some of his roots lay there. He had even gotten a tattoo on his left shoulder of the seal of the medieval Catalan poetry contest called the Jocs Florals.
“No! She was from Asturias. That’s where the family farm is. Debbie wrote that it’s called Las Cepas, and it’s close to that town where you’re going. Debbie stayed in the same place.”
Robert had picked Avilés as their destination in Asturias because Lonely Planet said it had a nicely restored medieval quarter; it was the hometown of St. Augustine, Florida, founder Pedro Menéndez; and it was close to a beach. He had no idea, when he was planning the trip, where in Asturias Antonio had lived before he emigrated across the Atlantic. Robert was dumbfounded by his mother’s news.
“The letter even mentions the names of the three people she met, three old nieces of Mercedes,” Brenda added. “Maybe you can find them!”
Robert was excited by the discovery, but that seemed impossible. “It was forty years ago,” he said. “There’s no way they’re still alive.”
“Debbie says the farm is near some village called Naveces,” Brenda said, undeterred. “Maybe you could go there and ask somebody.”
“Oh, Mom,” Robert said. “It’s not like we can just go there and start knocking on doors.”
“I guess you’re right,” Brenda conceded reluctantly. “But it’s good, isn’t? That I found this information?”
“Oh, it’s great, Mom,” Robert said enthusiastically. He felt a little guilty about dashing her hopes of locating living relatives. “After all these years, it’s a little hard to get my head around the fact that Mercedes is from Asturias and not Barcelona. But it’s wonderful to know something concrete for a change. Thank you so much for tracking it down.”
As soon as they got off the phone, Robert looked up Naveces on Google Earth. It was five miles from Avilés and less than one from the Cantabrian Sea. He zoomed in on the satellite image as much as he could and examined the bird’s-eye view of the red-tile rooftops of houses and farms. One of them was his great-grandmother’s home.
* * *
For three centuries after receiving its royal charter in 1155, the footprint of Avilés changed little. A sixteenth-century expansion outside the medieval defensive walls brought buildings like the Palacio de Ferrera and the municipal hall, as well as shops and houses along Calle Rivero—the old royal road to the Asturian capital of Oviedo—and Calle Galiana, which ran up the hill past the old Franciscan monastery of San Nicolás de Bari to the livestock market at the Plaza de Carbayedo.
In the nineteenth century, the town boomed again and it grew by half, with the addition of the Plaza Nuevo, where Mercedes and her brother came to the Monday market and old men pitched wooden rings into the iron frog’s mouth at Café Colon. Shops and apartment buildings sprouted around the Parque de Muelle, on the filled-in old harbour, out Calle La Cámera, and between old Avilés and the medieval fishermen’s village of Sabugo.
Still, only about 10,000 people lived in the town Mercedes and Antonio knew. In the late-1950s and 1960s, the slowly evolving world of Avilés turned upside down. Its population exploded from 10,000 to 100,000 after the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco decreed that steel mills and chemical factories would be constructed for miles along the Alvares River. Unemployed Castilians and Andalusians streamed north for work.
Asturiana de Zinc, the successor to the Real Compañía de Minas for which Antonio Primero and Antonio Segundo had labored, built one of the largest zinc smelters in the world in the village of San Juan de Nieva, at the mouth of the estuary two miles from Avilés. Modern buildings, with the apartments sold at generous subsidies to the workers, rose to meet the needs of the rapidly-expanding population. Scores of acres of farmland around the city filled with new development.
After Franco died in 1975, the same global market forces which devastated such mighty centers of heavy industry as the Ohio Valley in the U.S. and the Ruhr Valley in Germany descended on Avilés with the same lack of mercy.
* * *
Barcelona was magnificent. The unsettling revelation that he had no family ties to the city did not diminish the ardor Robert felt for it as they prowled the streets of the ancient Mediterranean capital.
Cadaqués, with its white-plastered medieval buildings clustered tightly between high, arid hills and the bright blue sea, was impossibly beautiful and peaceful. Robert wished they could stay there for a month.
As they approached Avilés, fourteen hours and two days by car from Cadaqués, Robert was appalled. Despite the nascent work he had begun with Frau Frei, he lapsed severely back into a frustrationfueled rage.
“I should have known anything associated with my family would be shit!” he ranted as they drove down the highway. The river valley was an industrial wasteland. The few sprawling, soot covered factories not shuttered and rotting were belching flames and smoke into the overcast sky. “Jesus Christ, look at that!” he shouted, pointing to a steel mill that could have been transplanted from 1960s Pittsburgh. “We’ll have fucking cancer before we leave here.”
Marlene thought it pretty awful as well, but she knew from experience that Robert’s extreme reaction sprung from old issues. “It’s okay, Hase. We’re not here for the scenery, you know.” Unless they were arguing, she always used this German term of endearment for him: rabbit.
“Okay? Okay?” he yelled. “It’s a fucking nightmare. I’m so sorry I dragged you here on our vacation.”
“Hase, it’s fine,” Marlene said tenderly. “Really. And it’s only three days.”
“Three fucking days in this,” he muttered, gesturing to another smoke belching factory. At least he had stopped yelling. “It’s like spending a long weekend in Nitro, West Virginia.” Even as they approached the historic town center, most of the 1890s riverside buildings looked half-abandoned and were laden with decades of industrial grime.
When they turned up a narrow cobblestone street which led to the entrance of the subterranean municipal parking garage, Avilés became a different city. They passed brightly colored nineteenth-century apartment buildings and the richly carved seventeenth-century sandstone residential palace which housed the tourist information office. But Robert remained too agitated to notice the change.
Robert and Marlene dragged their suitcases from the rental car in the parking garage and took the elevator up to the hotel lobby. The doors opened, and they emerged into another world. Beige marble. Dark wood. High, painted ceilings. Regal r
ed carpets. The Palacio de Ferrera—home to generations of the Marquises de Ferra from its construction in the 1630s until the late 1990s—had been skillfully converted into a five-star hotel.
“Oh, this is nice,” Robert said. He felt immense relief and immediately snapped out of his frustration. Out the hotel’s plate glass front door, he glimpsed the neoclassical municipal hall, with its elevenarched arcade, pedimented clock face, and its central tower crowned with a fat bronze bell suspended in what looked like a Victorian iron birdcage. “Oh! Look at that,” he said to Marlene, pointing out across the Plaza de España. His cheerfulness and boyish sense of wonder had returned.
They dropped their suitcases in the sleek, fashionable room in the hotel’s modern wing and ventured out to explore the old quarter.
Robert was ashamed by his initial outburst. As he and Marlene meandered through the restored historic district, and the people they encountered were so pleasant and welcoming, he began to fall in love with the place. He could feel that his great-grandparents had walked these streets and seen these buildings, and the realization gave him a sense of belonging. He wished again, more intensely, that he could meet someone to whom he was related.
“Tomorrow,” he declared to Marlene as they sauntered down the medieval blacksmiths’ street of Calle La Ferrería, “I think … I know it’s probably useless … but I think we should drive out to Naveces and just start asking people if they know Marina, Covadonga or Sagrario.” They were the three nieces mentioned in the American cousin’s letter.
“That’s a great idea, Hase,” Marlene said. She gripped his hand a little tighter. “And you know how these European villages are. Everybody knows everybody else.”
“That’s true,” Robert said, though he had no confidence they would find anyone.
They went for dinner at Sidrería Tierra Astur, a festive cider bar across from the church of San Nicolás de Bari. They stuffed themselves with fabada, octopus, nutty Asturian ham and cold, acidic cider. Robert’s first taste of Asturias. He could not remember enjoying a meal as much.
* * *
Robert slid a piece of paper across the reception desk to the hotel clerk. “Would you mind translating these phrases into Spanish for me?” he asked. “We are going out to my great-grandmother’s village this afternoon, and I would like to ask around about my relatives.”
“Of course,” the raven-haired woman said.
Do you know Marina González Cueto? Conoce Marina González Cueto? My name is Robert Stevens, and my great-grandmother was Mercedes Gonzáles Conde. Me llamo Robert Stevens, y mi bisabuela era Mercedes González Conde. My great-grandmother was Marina’s aunt. Mi bisabuela era la tía de Marina.
“That is all you need?” the hotel clerk asked.
“That should do it,” Robert said, looking over what she had written. “Muchas gracias.”
The woman smiled. “De nada, Mr. Stevens.”
Robert ascended the Palacio’s grand marble and oak staircase and went to the room to collect Marlene. As they passed the reception desk on their way to the elevator down to the parking garage, he waved the piece of paper with the translated phrases and said in jest to the clerk: “We’re off to the village to find my family!”
* * *
Naveces was a fifteen-minute drive on the winding, rural road. The countryside was beautiful: sleepy villages and farmhouses, all plastered stone and red-tile roofs; steep hills covered in bright green pastures and capped by eucalyptus groves; sweeping vistas punctuated by glimpses of the Cantabrian Sea. Again, Robert was ashamed by his outburst the day before.
His heart swelled when they came around a bend in the road and he saw the simple black and white metal sign marking their arrival in Naveces. He insisted on stopping and having Marlene take a photo of him standing beside it. They drove a little farther, and he stopped the car beside the first commercial building he saw. An old woman was sitting in the sun on the tobacco shop’s narrow terrace a yard off the road, a sweating glass of red vermouth over ice on the wine-cask table beside her. Marlene waited in the car.
Robert walked up to the old woman, smiled nervously, and said: “Hola, buenos días.”
“Buenos días,” the woman said.
“Conoce Marina González Cueto?” Robert asked. He did not know why he had chosen that name from the three that morning when he went down to the hotel desk.
The woman eyed him warily. “Por qué?” Why?
“Uh,” Robert said, “uh, porque ella es la sobrina de mi bisabuela.” Because she is my great-grandmother’s niece. He had taken Spanish in high school, twenty-five years before, and the basics of it suddenly stirred in his brain.
“Pues, ciertamente se refiere a la hija Marina. La madre Marina es muerte,” the woman said. Well, certainly you mean the daughter Marina. The mother Marina is dead. Robert was surprised he comprehended her, but his mind felt oddly receptive to the language.
“Sí! Sí!” he said, with an enthusiasm that appeared to amuse the old woman. He could not believe that the first person he asked knew one of his relatives.
The old woman called to the attendant inside the tobacco shop and asked her to find the telephone number for the daughter Marina. She lived in Avilés.
Robert thanked the old woman and returned to Marlene in the car. “The woman … she knows the daughter, the daughter of Marina,” he gushed. “The shop clerk gave me her number!”
“Oh, god, Hase, that’s amazing! You have to call her, right now.”
“I will,” he said. “Oh, shit, I feel like I’m about to throw up. And what if she doesn’t speak English? How can I talk to her? I don’t speak any Spanish.”
Marlene took his hand and kissed it. “It will be okay, Hase. You talked to that old woman well enough. Just ring her.”
Robert entered the number in his cell phone. It rang four times.
“Digame,” said a woman’s voice on the phone. The standard Spanish telephone greeting: tell me.
“Hola,” Robert said.
“Hola,” the woman replied.
“Me llamo Robert Stevens y Mercedes González Conde era mi bisabuela y estoy en Naveces,” he managed to get out of his cotton-dry mouth.
Silence on the other end of the line. And then, “Sacramento!” Marina exclaimed.
She spoke not a word of English, but enough Spanish swam up into Robert’s consciousness that they arranged to meet at the Palacio de Ferrera. In an hour.
* * *
Robert and Marlene went down to the parlor off the hotel lobby fifteen minutes before Marina was to arrive. With its carved antique furniture, crystal chandelier, oil paintings and oak writing desk, it looked like the sort of room in which old-world diplomats would sign a treaty or conquistadors would unroll maps and plan their next campaign.
They sat on the hard, striped settee and waited. Robert was giddy and terrified. Overwhelmed. Completely unexpected events were unfolding at a bewildering pace.
When they had returned to the hotel, less than an hour after they left, Robert told the desk clerk: “I found them!”
“That certainly was quick,” she said.
“But I have a problem,” Robert told her. “My cousin speaks no English, and I have exhausted my Spanish already.”
The young woman thought about it and asked him to wait. She disappeared into a side room and reemerged with an older woman who greeted Robert in Spanish. “Mi jefa,” the young clerk began, “my, mmm, boss, says that you are welcome to use our intern for as long as you wish for translating. Her name is Fernanda. She is from Mexico and speaks English perfect. She is at lunch now but will be back soon and will come to you in the parlor.”
As the bell atop the municipal hall across the Plaza de España gonged two, the glass door to the hotel slid open. In stormed a fashionably dressed, diminutive woman of about sixty with short grey hair. A tanned, balding, portly man trailed behind her. She came directly into the parlor with her arms extended, embraced Robert tightly and kissed him once on each cheek. “I kne
w it was you as soon as I walked in,” Marina said in Spanish, and Fernanda translated. “You look like all the rest of us!”
Marina introduced them to her husband Arturo, and Robert introduced them to Marlene. They sat down on the nineteenth-century settee and flanking armchairs.
“How are you here?” Marina asked. “How did you find me?”
Robert recounted the events of the visit to Naveces and told her about the American cousin Debbie’s letter.
“Ahhh, yes, I remember now, but I had forgotten until this minute,” Marina said. “My mother told me then, back in the seventies, that she had met one of the North-American cousins briefly one afternoon when she came to see Las Cepas. Our house was just down the hill.”
The hotel entrance slid open again, and a professorial, balding man with a bundle of papers and folders under his arm came breezing in.
They all stood, and Marina said: “This is our cousin, Antonio.”
As he shook Robert’s hand firmly and disgorged the pile of papers on the coffee table, Marina quickly relayed to him what Robert already had told her.
“Incredible. Incredible,” Antonio said in Spanish, with Fernanda translating. He looked Robert up and down. “A hundred years we have waited for you, and you appear out of thin air!”
Antonio unrolled an extensively annotated family tree on the coffee table. “Bernardo and Casilda, your great-great grandparents,” he said, pointing to their names near the top of the tree. “Antonio González Conde,” he said, pointing at the name a rung lower flanked by the names Manuel, José, Ramón and Mercedes. Motioning toward Marina, he said: “Our grandfather, and the brother of your great-grandmother.” He continued down the chart, increasingly dense with names, telling Robert about the descendants of Antonio González Conde, three more generations to the young children of the present day.