I was greeted by Concha, who looked after my mother and was from Extremadura, who gave me kisses and a big smile. She was in her early sixties, and had been a beauty in her time. She was still impeccably turned out, even to come work at our house. She looked a hundred times better than most of the señoras she had worked for. And she had raised three children on her own. Yet the most amazing thing about her—which I remembered each time I arrived from the States and then forgot as I got used to Spain and its paradoxes—was that she was illiterate. How she managed, I had no idea. She’d only confirmed this twice. The first time when we tried to give her a shopping list, and the second while lamenting that she had no man in her life and that internet dating was off-limits to her because she couldn’t read or write. She left her husband years ago for the owner of bar, but then he had left her, and her husband wouldn’t have her back.
Concha stepped aside and there was my mother, waiting. She had a debilitating neuromuscular disease, which had appeared out of the blue when she was sixty and forced her to retire early. She was physically fragile now, but ever beautiful with her dark hair and sparkling eyes, and her mind was sharper than ever. I embraced her and we both began to cry, and then to laugh at the fact that we were crying. Here she was, the same woman who had been an independent young mother in New England and who played with me in the snow. This was the body that went with the voice I spoke to every day long distance. Here she was with her books, and her friendships from her youth recovered. Clearly she was very much at home again in Madrid, but what about me? Where was I supposed to live in the long term?
I was to stay at my mother’s during my sabbatical. In my old room, in my old neighborhood. I hadn’t really thought this through, but I wanted to go home, somehow, and this was it.
My room was full of storage boxes, and I barely had space for my ridiculously huge American suitcases. I slept for a couple of days and started to work on what would become a biography of Consuelo Marqués, an incredible woman who had taken part in the anti-Fascist fight during the Spanish Civil War. I was professionally based, through the fellowship, at a research center on the outskirts of the city. It was a haul on the metro to get there, but I got along well with one or two colleagues, and they had a great library. It was called the Tomás Navarro Tomás library, and as I often had overdue books, the palindromic name popped up in my inbox with frequent and annoying reminders. I had zero curiosity about the library’s name, even though I knew it was familiar. I just couldn’t be bothered to place it.
Living in Spain full-time again, for the first time since I was fifteen, overwhelmed me with cultural changes, facts and names and contexts that had seemed dim and distant to me from the United States. A colleague had just sent me a fascinating new book on the brutal Franco repression in Sevilla. The campaign there against the Republicans had been led by a fearsome general, Queipo de Llano. I left this book on the big marble table in my mother’s living room, thinking she might be curious about it. There was a photograph of the Queipo on the cover. But when I pointed it out to her, thinking she would be interested in a new Spanish Civil War book, she simply turned the book over so that the photo faced downward.
Was it the subject of the war that she was tired of? Was it Sevilla and the war? After all, the book hit on the time and place of her birth. I hadn’t thought of that. The subjects I studied and taught were the life she had experienced, but we had never spoken about these things. I realized that the book had stirred up difficult memories for her.
“Why were you born in Sevilla?” I asked her one day, realizing how one can go through years of life without knowing the most basic things about one’s background. Though my grandfather was originally from Mallorca, and my grandmother from Barcelona, our family had lived in Madrid for over half a century before her birth. Sevilla was in far off Andalucía. “Because of the war,” she said. How little I knew about fundamental parts of her life. She had taught the Spanish Civil War in her classes at Middleton in the United States, and her bookshelves were crammed with volumes on the subject, in French, Spanish, and English. When I was little the subject of the war was amazingly well concealed in my family. Nobody in my grandfather’s house ever brought it up. I never associated the grim history with my family members. With her reaction to the book with Queipo de Llano on its cover, I realized how much information I was missing. In fact, almost everything was missing. I had heard her say she was born in a boardinghouse, but both her parents were from well off families. They had grown up in splendid homes in Madrid and Barcelona. Why were they displaced and homeless, in makeshift housing in Sevilla in December 1937? Geographically, this made no sense. It was clearly a political itinerary.
I needed to know. How could I be a specialist in twentieth-century Spain when I didn’t even know my own history? What had really become of my mother’s family, or my father’s? How would I ever figure out who I was without knowing my family’s past? Was I an integral part of this Spanish history, or some kind of postmodern American observer? Why so much secrecy? How bad could it all be?
It took no small degree of coaxing to get her to talk about it, but I kept insisting, until one day she called me into her room and told me all she could remember about those years. About her life. She was sitting up in her beautiful nineteenth-century French bed with inlaid marquetry of pastoral scenes: damsels and gentlemen walking in the countryside under the shade of luscious trees. Fairytale images, so far from what I was about to hear. I was perched on a tiny, equally old but newly reupholstered toile chair.
Her mother, my grandmother Marieta, died decades before I was born. She had been beautiful. She studied at the Sacré Coeur in Paris and attended a finishing school in Switzerland. She was the only daughter of a Galician aristocrat and a family of Catalan industrialists with headquarters in Barcelona and England. She had two brothers who died tragically. She met my grandfather, who was fifteen years older, at a society wedding in Barcelona. What he didn’t know when they married was that she was already very ill. She had tuberculosis of the kidneys and had spent long, secret periods at sanatoriums. Her parents, who cherished their only girl, never told her just how serious it was, though the pain and weakness it caused must have given her an idea.
My grandfather was part of a political family. His father’s brother was a longstanding leader, and my grandfather launched his own career during the Republic in the early 1930s. Their wedding took place in Barcelona, they spent their honeymoon in Morocco, and then they moved into their large Madrid apartment. But the war soon interrupted their lives.
My grandparents were in Barcelona when the Civil War broke out. In the chaos of the early days, my grandfather and one of his young brothers-in-law were out walking when they were detained by anarchists who had taken control of the streets in response to the military uprising. The two men were taken to a prison and interrogated. My grandfather explained that he was an anti-uprising Republican, but they didn’t believe him, dressed in his posh clothes with his wealthy industrialist brother-in-law in tow. They were held overnight, and the next morning a young anarchist shoeshine boy, who knew my grandfather and had heard about the arrests, went to the prison to beg that they release him. He swore to the guards that my grandfather was “on our side.” One of the guards reluctantly told my grandfather he could go, and my grandfather said he would only leave if his brother-in-law, sitting right next to him, was released as well. The guard smiled, and asked my grandfather to hand over a small gun he was carrying for safety. The guard played with it for a few seconds, then held it to my great-uncle’s head and shot him point blank. He pointed the gun at my grandfather and said, “Get out of here, now. You are free, but this will teach you to think more carefully about who you hang out with.” I don’t know how my grandfather broke the news to his young bride that her brother had just been executed with his own gun. The body, along with many others, was removed from the prison and dumped in a ditch off a main road. My great-grandmother searched for her son’s body night and day. The
re was an article—we have the yellowed newspaper clipping in a folder—written about her tireless mission to find him. She was finally able to bury her son.
The arrest and the execution had been warnings, and my grandfather no longer felt safe. He hid out at my grandmother’s dressmaker’s for as long as he could. He was finally able to buy a ticket on a boat going to Genoa. He was turned away at the Italian port and was forced to go back to Spain, penniless and barefoot. By then he learned that his wife, Marieta, was pregnant with their first daughter, my mother, Odilia. This is when he also discovered just how sick she was. He had to find a way to protect her. Through family connections, he managed to be sent to Sevilla.
My pregnant grandmother joined him there, where they lived in a boardinghouse. There were other prominent Catalan families taking refuge there, including one of my grandfather’s closest friends. In the meantime, their beautiful apartment in Madrid, where they had barely lived a moment together, was ransacked. Everything had been stolen or destroyed, jewels taken and hocked, furniture axed to bits for firewood. Thus it was that my mother was born in the rented room in Sevilla on a winter’s day during the war. She was three months premature, and the doctor left her for dead out of my grandmother’s sight, until her infant screams and wails proved him wrong. My grandmother’s health deteriorated as the war progressed, yet she became pregnant again right after the war’s end. In 1940, my aunt Inés was born. Less than a year later, my grandmother was dead at the age of thirty-three. Her surviving brother had fought with the military rebels, in part to avenge his brother’s murder. He was shot in action, and after an operation was given large amounts of morphine. He became an addict, spending the few remaining years of his short life in and out of hospitals. Because of the war, my maternal great-grand-parents lost all three of their children within five years of each other.
They had their doorman hide all their china in the water tower of their apartment building in Barcelona, and to this day my mother and I have copious sets of French china, with settings for fifty people, that survived the war without a chink. We don’t use them, but we can’t let them go. They were last used for my grandparents’ wedding lunch and are now all packed in recycled boxes from El Corte Inglés. They are in my bedroom now, because our storage unit has some kind of unsolvable humidity issue. Though she can barely use her hands or write anymore, my mother repacked all of the china carefully and labeled the boxes. LIMOGES. BLUE LIMOGES. CHAMPAGNE. PORCELAIN, TIGERS, AND NYMPHS. Nearly a hundred years later we are still guarding the china and the champagne and cordial glasses. It’s all that’s left of the splendor my grandmother and her family had known in Barcelona—those objects, and photos of my grandmother, especially one on which she had written to her daughters, “A mis nenas, Mamá.”
After she died, my mother and her sister grew up with my grandfather in the looted Madrid apartment under the care of a succession of nannies.
I thought of my mother and her baby sister as motherless orphans with an aging father in the bleak postwar. My mother’s earliest memories are of her mother being very ill. She remembers flying alone to Barcelona with her in 1940 so that she could have an operation. My mother was nearly three years old, and was very excited about being on a plane and that the stewardesses passed out glasses of water. During her recovery from surgery, my grandmother taught my mother songs, and was still very beautiful. She chain-smoked, using a long cigarette holder. She died on November 2, 1941.
My mother was sent, almost immediately, to the British school in Madrid. It was a small coed school, with about eighty students. It was exceptional. It wasn’t Catholic, and there were no uniforms. The children played, learned English, and had their own orchestra, which was directed by a little boy. They put on plays, and my grandfather went to see the performances. The two years she spent there were a happy time for my mother, but my grandfather’s stern sisters soon intervened, and she was forced to transfer to an all-girls Catholic nun’s school. This was when she really started to miss her mother the most.
Once a year, my mother and Inés’s grandparents visited from Barcelona. They lived to see their only granddaughters, the vital connection to their deceased daughter. Their visits were brief and far between because my grandfather never forgave them for “hiding” their daughter’s illness from him. They stayed at the Palace Hotel. The two girls loved riding up and down in the elevator, spotting glamorous guests, and trying on all their grandmother’s jewels, hats, and nightgowns. When they were older they traveled to Barcelona often, especially Odilia.
My grandfather was seldom around. He went to work and the girls went to school, six days a week, including Saturdays. He spent his weekends in the countryside, or on archeological digs. Thousands of people adjusted their politics during the war in order to survive, but because of his family name it was harder for him to live under the radar. He had been a high-profile conservative Republican before the war, and because of this he was kept down in the repressive postwar years. As late as the1970s there were stores on the Calle Serrano in Madrid that he would not go to, because in the 1940s the shopkeepers had called him a “rojo.” I could think of few things more ridiculous than my grandfather being a political extremist, but the war had polarized people and baseless judgements lived on. The more I learned about my family, the better I understood why there had been so much silence, and so much bitterness, and so many secrets.
In June my research project took me to Sevilla. After a day of poring over archives and having dinner in the Barrio Santa Cruz, I called my mother to ask her for the name of the boardinghouse where she had been born over seven decades before. I wasn’t confident she would remember. But of course she did. “Otte. Pensión Otte,” she said immediately. The last thing I expected was that the boardinghouse would have a German name.
I looked at old newspapers online and found some ads for the defunct pensión and a postcard. The postcard showed a beautiful sevillana villa. Lush trees shaded the building. The ad proclaimed, “Comfortable hotel. Excellent food. Modest prices.” The neighborhood was auspiciously called “El Porvenir,” “The Future,” although another way of translating it that conveys an additional resonance would be “What Is to Come.”
I looked into it further and discovered that the owner was a woman, and it turned out she was Jewish, and had married a non-Jewish German. By the mid-1930s she was a widow, and had clearly been able to pass as a German in the Spain of that era, hence the success of her pensión in the heart of a German neighborhood in the middle of the Spanish Civil War in a city that was controlled by Franco with his Nazi and Italian allies.
Her son, Enrique Otte, as an adolescent may have shared meals with my grandfather, or remarked what a cute baby my mother was. Though, of course, these are my own musings. He had an intriguing, wandering life worthy of a W. G. Sebald novel. Born in Madrid in 1923, he went to study in Germany and managed to survive there between 1939 and 1944. He was never suspected of being part Jewish and was, in fact, drafted by the German army in 1944. He escaped this fate thanks to his Spanish nationality, which he had adopted when he was twenty-one. He returned to postwar Spain briefly, but soon left for England, where he spent two years, then went back to Germany, where he studied philosophy for another two. He eventually came back to the barrio, “El Porvenir” in Sevilla, in 1948.
His mother’s Pensión Otte continued to thrive throughout the postwar years, and many famous guests stayed there: the writers Marguerite Yourcenar and Henry Miller, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper. Enrique Otte, who had studied history, was unable to find a job in Spain and finally went back to Berlin again in 1966, where he secured a professorship in Latin American history at the Free University. He was a brilliant historian and spent the remaining forty years of his life writing about the economic, banking, and historical ties between Spain and the Caribbean in the sixteenth century. He did pioneering research in the Archivo de Indias in Sevilla and published many studies, including a volume of collected letters sent by Spaniards who had
sought their fortune in the New World to their families back in Spain. The letters show an intimate side of history, revealing the loneliness and homesickness of the travelers. Distances were immense in the 1500s, the voyages were often one-way, and transatlantic correspondence among people who could not read or write was a challenge. The uniform style of the letters suggests a professional writer was on hand for the illiterate or semi-literate émigrés, yet the missives differ in the personal details and situations of their authors. This one, from Juan de Escobar to his daughter Ana de Escobar, is addressed to “My desired daughter, in the passageway of San Pablo, in the parish of the Magdalena, in Sevilla.”
Jamaica, 1. IV. 1567
Desired daughter:
Many days have passed since I wrote you many letters sent by many means, as I have also written to relatives and friends to see if you are dead or alive. About a year ago, a clergyman left this island, and when said clergyman arrived in Spain he knew you were alive, and he sent me a message to that effect by way of Santo Domingo. I implore you, if you are married and your husband is inclined to bring you to these parts, please come because all I have will be for you and your husband, because I do not dare travel to Spain as I am always ill, and I don’t want to die on the sea, and if God brought you here I would be greatly consoled by the sight of you, and I might even regain my health. I would pay whoever brought you for all the expenses and costs you might incur on the journey, wherever you might land. May our Lord give you the health that I wish I had myself. The date on the island of Jamaica is the first of April in 1567. I await your orders.
Juan de Escobar
The Pensión Otte, Enrique Otte, and the letters from abroad all made a strong impression on me. They represented a history of transience, displacement, and the struggle for stability and home. I was surprised to find myself sympathetic to the plight of a colonial adventurer.
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