Nora was close to her parents, but she had completely struck out on her own and eschewed the expected life choices. She had always been pretty, but instead of marrying the captain of the football team she had played bass in a band after college. Now she was an artist and made a living working in the art world. She had just bought her place in Brooklyn and was in a relationship with a painter.
Unlike many of our classmates, or people I had met since, she meandered and got where she was going obliquely. Her approach to life was a great relief to me.
Running into her that night reminded me of the power of kismet. It revived our friendship.
17
IT IS HARD TO MOVE to another country, even if it is your parents’—although I only knew one of those parents—even if it is where you spent time growing up. Because I have a Spanish name and was brought up speaking Spanish, my survival instinct drove me to try and fit in there, but very often I felt like a misfit who stood out like a sore thumb.
Being raised bilingual and studying and teaching language and literature had made me hyperaware of accents, rhythm, and intonation. Over the phone everyone assumed I was Spanish, but in person people always asked where I was from. “But were you born here?”
I was happy to lie in response to this obnoxious line of social questioning. It simplified things, and the question was simply too stupid to engage with honestly. I would not give them the satisfaction of letting them know I was born in the United States. I resisted at all costs their theory that this meant I was not really Spanish. Would I look more Spanish if I had been born in Madrid? I didn’t look the way I did because of where I was born. Nationalism and logic had nothing to with one another. The other prize annoying question was what language I dreamed in. Some people feel really smart when they ask that one, and won’t let it go until you’ve given them some definitive answer. The truth is, when you’re bicultural (or tri, or beyond, as is more and more common) you can be very annoying to monocultural people. You can tell them you’re either-or till you’re blue in the face, but they will remain convinced you’re neither-nor. It’s all or nothing for many people.
Sometimes, I got a bit bored of Madrileños and their exclusionist attitudes, so eager to categorize everybody. I was frustrated that my perceived otherness was frustrating to them.
I still wanted to know more about my family’s past. I had known since my teens that my mother raised me alone because she had to, and that my father had disappeared. They were together so briefly. Still, here I was, and I wanted more answers.
One day I went to visit Feli, our former cook, for lunch. She was in her eighties. The visit had been my idea. Part of me wanted to see her. Part of me didn’t want to at all. The meeting took place at her modest apartment in Carabanchel. The minute I saw her in her black dress and apron as she opened the door, I burst into tears. I was reduced to being three years old again. I just looked at her, and tasted an overwhelming emotion. I couldn’t believe I’d be expected to eat, but I had to because she was the cook and she had spent all morning preparing this meal for me. The feelings she sparked in me climbed up my throat and came out in endless tears. It was a strong force, and it came from her. It caught me by surprise. It was love, mixed with the irretrievable past, and secrets that could never be spoken. She had lived at my grandfather’s house for forty years, so she had seen and heard everything. But she would never tell me anything. It was just her way. My mother and aunt growing up, my mother leaving and then returning with me and no husband. The past was so sad. I wouldn’t press her. I respected her silence and dignity. But I wasn’t quite ready to put it to rest yet. I had to dig a bit deeper, even if it had to be on my own.
The more I rummaged around in the boxes at my mother’s, the more I discovered how tragic my family’s story was, on both sides. The Spanish Civil War was responsible for nearly all of it. Everyone had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Decades of weirdness followed. The Cold War era was a secretive one, and I had been raised on those secrets. Not that I had any political significance, but the repression had deeply curtailed social freedom, and combined with the Catholic franquismo of Spain, my origins were slightly taboo. Or had been. Weren’t things better now? Spain had been a democracy for over three decades. I had been educated to believe that I lived in a better time than my parents. If I at least tried to understand my past, would I be able to move forward?
Who was my father? I couldn’t turn to my own memory. For me, he was an absence. I had been able to ask a few, very few, people some things about him, and now I was digging around in archives. I was aware that I had spent my life doing research about other people’s lives, but for the longest time I had assiduously avoided looking into his.
One day at the archives I took a deep breath, and for the first time in my life I finally looked up his name in the historical archives I had access to. Once I got home, I stayed up late grilling my mother about him. I fell asleep looking for traces of him and his family on the internet.
I eventually learned that his father was originally from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and that he had been an art dealer who started his career in Paris, but ended up in Madrid after the war of 1898 selling Spanish treasures to American millionaires. I liked the ring of that Austro-Hungarian Empire and decided to give this element a firm place in my identity. My father’s mother was also originally from Eastern Europe, but her family had immigrated to United States. She was a stage actress, and they met in New York, and he brought her back to Spain, where he had a thriving business. I make a note that I had an American grandmother. He was close to many of the prominent Jewish families that had settled in Madrid after the Rothschilds began to invest in Spain in the late 19th century. Here things became a bit confusing. It seems that after my father was born in 1917, his mother ran off to England with a Shakespearean actor. She never came back. His father’s young secretary moved in. They lived in the same neighborhood as my maternal, Spanish, Catholic grandparents. Just a few blocks away.
My father, from what I could tell, never saw his mother again. His father and step-mother had no more children. I don’t know what he thought of the step-mother. My father was a talented pianist. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, he was already an established young musician, and living a bohemian life. He said he had been part of the theatrical troupe started by Federico García Lorca. I read that once when the actors were preparing to put on a play my father had been cast in a lead role. Lorca had wanted the role for himself, but decided he wasn’t tall or slim enough. Then he realized, on closer inspection, that my father wasn’t either. The part was given to a more slender fellow. This disappointment aside, my father had a precociously thriving musical career during the years of the Spanish Republic. Looking into his past hit home how much older he had been than my mother. My research was spanning nearly three centuries and suddenly I myself felt ancient.
My father was nineteen when Franco’s military coup overthrew the Republican government, launching Spain into three years of bloody war. He was drafted to fight for the Republic, and was arrested and sentenced to death. His sentence was commuted, and he served a four-year term in various prisons.
Hitler was a close ally of Franco’s, and the Nazis had a significant role in the devastation of the Spanish Republic. Picasso’s Guernica, immortalizing the destruction of a peaceful Basque village on market day by bombs dropped by the German Condor Legion, is perhaps the most famous reference to their alliance. During World War II, Franco’s government was officially neutral, but the dictator was willing to do almost anything for his powerful German friend. Franco had complied with an order issued by Himmler that the Spanish government compile a list with names, professions, and addresses of Spaniards of Jewish origin. In May 1941, all the civil governors of Spain were asked to identify the Jews in their communities. The final list identified 6,000 people. Among them was my father’s father. Though Franco did not, in the end, abandon his official neutrality. The 6,000 Spanish Jews were not deported
to German camps, but they were contacted and had to register with the Spanish authorities, and the threat of being reported loomed large.
Because there were no official race laws in Spain, many Jews were officially charged as freemasons—part of the evil anti-Spain triumvirate along with Bolsheviks and Jews—detained, and sent to Spanish concentration camps. For my paternal grandfather, it was too much. If he was arrested he would lose his livelihood, already threatened by the war, and he feared deportation to a German camp. There were already several non-Jews in the wings eager to take over his share of the art market. He shot himself. His young secretary, who was Catholic and had already disappointed her family by going to live with a married man with a son, was unable to cope with the shame of suicide, and vanished. Someone had heard that she joined a convent in Avila and was never seen again. I went from having no paternal grandfather that I knew of to having one who killed himself because of the Nazi threat.
My mother had, tucked away, a photo of my father and André Malraux at an anti-Fascist rally in Valencia. Just the two of them, their left fists defiantly in the air. My father was so young. I also found an article about him from a Republican newspaper during the middle of the war, days before my mother was born. It praised his bravery and said that he had been wounded in the defense of a mountain pass. He was described as a valuable military officer and a conscientious anti-Fascist. I wished he had been a conscientious husband and father.
His prison term was served in several places. When he was finally released in 1943, he could no longer perform in Spain and his musical career was over. He was blacklisted, and for years he eked out a living. For a while he tutored wealthy children, like James Joyce in Trieste. The parents who hired him turned a blind eye to his political past. He also translated some books from English and German, his parents’ languages. He made his way to the England where he could make a bit more money, and he eventually completed a PhD in Spanish Literature at Cambridge. I suspect that my father began to work for the Americans at some point, in the early 1960s. The CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom had set up many initiatives in Europe, in Francoist Spain, and also in Latin America. But who really knows? From what I understand he was like a Zelig. One minute he was on Mexican television with Borges, another he was teaching at top American universities, next he was doing business in London and corresponding with Lord Bertrand Russell. I never found out where he was buried. I don’t know why he ended up in Cuba. Everything that happened after my mother was of no interest to me.
How could I write a novel based on crumbs of information? How to structure it? Could a family history be built on the disparate rubble surrounding two people, my parents, who had barely made it, like drifting debris, floating out of the apocalypse of 1930s Europe? Who wanted to know about them, or about their daughter, or the decades of difficult survival left in the wake of their ill-fated marriage? Who was I to write about a father I never knew? Did I really know any more or less about him than about my long-dead great-grandparents? But how could I write about anything else?
At the same time, the notion that I, Lola, had a personal connection to all this long-ago war, death, destruction, sin, and punishment made me see myself in a new way. I had always felt deracinated and fragile, but now I sensed I was hardy, like a tumbleweed hovering and blowing over the ground, bouncing year after year around the streets of a ghost town. I might just have time to write the story before the next big threat came along, which undoubtedly it would. I was in the business of recovering and preserving the past. My mother and I were both still alive. We had made it together across borders. As an immigrant to the United States, my mother had had to start from scratch and protect me, and she had succeeded against tough odds. We had kept so many secrets, and been quiet about so many things, that simply knowing more about the past and being able to acknowledge it was changing me.
I was eager to get back to New England and tackle the contents of the Samsonite suitcase I had in storage. For the first time I was immensely relieved I had all those letters. And after months of worrying about where to live back in Sheldon, I had found out online that the little red house was once again for sale. I’d made an appointment to see it the day after my return. It was simple, small but pretty, on a brook, with a fireplace, within walking distance of my office, the tiny main street that was “downtown,” and the museum that I walked to when I wanted to take my mind off things. There was a small barn on the property too. I didn’t want to believe the house might be mine yet, but I had a good feeling about it. The idea of living there, teaching, and continuing to write in my spare time was appealing. One day I would make space for my Catalan grandparents’ china.
18
IN JANUARY, I STARTED TO get ready to leave Spain for what seemed like the millionth time. I had put an enormous amount of energy into our small holiday preparations. I had done the shopping for food and presents, including an irresistible pair of pale gray silk pajamas with red piping I bought for myself. But the relief I’d hoped to feel after Christmas and New Year’s was overtaken by a state of emptiness and sadness. The woman who took care of my mother had been gone for the holidays, and I had been in charge. Although that had made me anxious, the time alone had also brought my mother and me closer.
My eyes kept welling up with tears as I started to pack quietly in my room one morning before taking my mother her breakfast. We didn’t speak of my departure. Why did I live so far away?
I put a cup of tea on her bedside table and warned her, in Spanish, “Cuidado. Está caliente.”
She smiled and said, in English, “Happiness is my daughter bringing me a cup of tea in her silk pajamas.” She sighed, and once again told me, “You know, the day you were born it was snowing. I saw big fat flakes coming down through the hospital window, and it was only October.”
**
A year later I was living in my very own red house. I was back to teaching. I was still writing my novel. And I was still seeing James off and on, long distance. I missed him.
One day as I was walking along the pretty trails in the woods near campus, I called my mother. We had transatlantic rambling conversations now, very much like the ones we had when we had walked everywhere together when I was little. I asked if she remembered the name of the couple she used to tell me about, the exiles who had lived in the shoebox-like house. Of course, she said, he was a very famous grammarian and librarian, Tomás Navarro Tomás. I realized it was the name of the library I used during my sabbatical in Madrid. I was also aware that nobody on earth at this particular moment but me probably cared to know who this man had been. I could already imagine an editor’s pen crossing his name out in my manuscript with a query: “Relevance?”
I thought of all the institutions and streets named after someone of note we walk by every day without wondering or knowing who the person was. I thought of Tomás and his wife in their house in Northampton, Massachusetts, so close to where I now lived, and how I never connected him with the library in Madrid, even with all of those overdue book reminders.
That evening I looked him up on the internet. He was born in La Roda, Albacete, in 1884, and died in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1979. Anyone could see that Albacete and Northampton don’t go together. I remembered my mother saying how he wanted to be buried in Spain, but I assumed he was not. I wanted to find out.
It turned out Tomás Navarro Tomás was a major intellectual, a Republican, and that he ran the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War. He managed to somehow protect all its treasures from the Francoist bombings. He was a renowned phonologist and had written dozens of classic studies about the pronunciation of the Spanish language. After the war, he was forced to go into exile. In Spain in the 1940s, he was purged, like my father, which meant he was unemployable, and his name was removed from his own publications. In exile he taught at Columbia University until his retirement. He and his wife must have moved to Northampton to be near their daughter, Joaquina, who chaired the Spanish department a
t Smith College. I looked her up as well, and was dismayed to see that she had died only a few months before, having lived to be 100. I could have spoken to her a few years ago. It was too late. It made me very sad. They seemed so much like us. Maybe we just had to believe we weren’t exiles to survive. I found an obituary notice Joaquina wrote when her father died:
My father passed away on September 16, 1979, at 6:00 a.m. at Cooley Dickinson Hospital in Northampton, where we had taken him a few hours before, fearing that he was having a heart attack. It was actually a pulmonary problem, but it was just as fatal for the heart. Until then, he had stuck to his daily routine. He had even gone out to sit in the gallery every morning, from where he could see the garden. He loved the plants and the birds, and would talk about them enthusiastically. His magnificent memory was fully intact, as was his endless curiosity about everything. Every day he was grateful for the comfort and simplicity that New England offered, and for a life that was serene and pleasant.1
Here I was. Still in New England. Still somehow the living legacy of those post-Spanish Civil War exiled generations that my parents belonged to. Would I also age in situ, peacefully admiring my garden until I died?
A few days later, on August 17, I received an unexpected email from my mother. Though I often wrote to her, it was hard for her to type, and I had an unsettling feeling when I saw a message from her in my inbox:
Madrid Again Page 11