Remember Me
Page 16
I shrank a little in embarrassment. I didn’t want her, like most of the town’s inhabitants, to think I was like the troublemaking Republican kids. For many of the well-to-do townsfolk, even for some of the resident Spaniards, the Children of Morelia were little more than a nuisance.
I nodded. “And we also have Mexican classmates.”
The girl smiled at me, and I couldn’t help but feel intimidated. I’d never tried to woo a girl before. It was the first time I’d ever felt attracted.
“I suppose you do,” she answered, still smiling.
I took a deep breath to steady myself. “So, are you from Morelia?”
“Well, actually from Guadalajara, but my dad was transferred here for work. I’ve got to start a new school and make new friends, but this isn’t the first time.”
I hazarded a crucial question: “What’s your name?”
“María Soledad de la Cruz.”
The girl’s father shifted on the chaise longue, and I stepped back, prepared to run the moment he opened his eyes.
“Do you want to take a walk around with me?” I asked nervously. I wanted to get as far away as possible from that large man who might not take it kindly that I was talking to his daughter.
María Soledad got out of the water and put on a white cover-up and flip-flops. She looked toward her mother, who was also dozing peacefully, her chin sunk into the book she had been reading.
We walked in silence beneath the surrounding trees for a few minutes. Eventually I turned to María Soledad and said in earnest, “You’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever met.”
She threw her head back and laughed, saying, “You haven’t lived long! I’m sure you’ll meet prettier girls than me.”
I was dumbstruck, not having expected that response. The Mexican girls I had been around were much shyer than Spaniard girls, but they also seemed much more determined.
“Little Spaniard, take my hand,” she said.
I held out my hand and felt an electric shock when she touched me. Her fingers entwined in mine burned into my skin while I seemed to float in the air, hardly touching the ground.
We sat in an out-of-the-way corner and talked for almost an hour. Had we known each other forever? It was such a new and odd sensation, as if we’d been looking for each other our whole lives.
Ana appeared and smiled when she saw me sitting next to her friend. “María Soledad,” she said, “your dad’s looking for you. You’d better come back with me.”
The girl looked at me one last time and, before saying goodbye, gave me a quick kiss on the cheek.
“Where do you live?” I called after her. I was afraid of losing her forever and that our time together would turn out to be just a mirage.
“Don’t worry. We can see each other next Sunday at the noon Mass at St. John’s.”
I felt my heart being wrenched out of my chest with each step she took away from me. I started counting down the seconds until I could see her again.
A few days later, I put on my least dirty clothes, and my sisters and I went to church. The townsfolk raised their eyebrows and stared when they saw us come in, because the Spaniard children hardly ever went to church unless forced. A few of the Basques were religious, though they tried to hide it to avoid trouble with the rest of the students.
We sat in one of the pews at the back. As the service began and the parishioners followed the rituals, we tried fumblingly to copy them. My parents had never taken us to Mass, and the few times I’d stepped into a church had been to consider it more as a monument than as a sacred space.
As the priest recited the prayers and read the text from what I later learned was called the missal, I searched in desperation for a glimpse of María Soledad. Finally, I spotted her toward the front of the large crowd. She turned as if also looking for me, and our eyes met for the briefest of seconds, just long enough to send chills down my neck.
The service didn’t last much longer, and afterward, the crowd spilled out onto the plaza outside. Some went to the nearby cantinas, and the children drank something that looked like colored ice as their parents watched from a distance.
María Soledad was walking between two friends. They moved toward the grove of trees and sat down on a bench. When Isabel, Ana, and I approached them, María Soledad waved everyone else away.
“I didn’t expect you to actually come,” she said. Her sincerity took me aback.
“Why wouldn’t I come? I don’t care for Mass, but I wanted to see you.”
She lowered her head, and I leaned a little closer. “My father is strict, Marco. If he finds out you’re courting me, he won’t let me leave the house at all. We must be careful. My friends are trustworthy and won’t say anything, but we’ll only be able to see each other on Sundays after Mass so my father won’t suspect anything.”
From that day on, I spent every week waiting impatiently for the next Sunday to come. That young love helped me live out the rest of 1938 with something like hope and happiness, despite the fact that news coming from Spain was worse and worse and that my mother’s letters came further and further apart. I hadn’t yet learned that love was a force strong enough to transform the harshest and most difficult life into the most pleasant existence. I couldn’t explain it, but that girl from Guadalajara accomplished what school, parades, and speeches had failed to do: embed Mexico into my heart.
Chapter 27
News from Spain
Morelia
April 3, 1939
Bad news tends to spread quicker than good news, and we refused to believe one rumor in particular. Students were saying the war in Spain was over, but we were holding out until the newspapers came from the capital. It wouldn’t have been the first time false reports had spread. We did know that things were looking dire for the Republic. City after city had fallen into the hands of the rebels, and we knew that, of late, Republican resistance had been weak.
The director called everyone out to the main yard. We glanced at one another nervously. By then, fewer of the original Spaniard students were left at the school. If the rumors were true, we would no longer have a government to defend us. We would become stateless people.
“Students, companions, it is my duty to share news that is grievous to Spain and to the world. After a fratricidal war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, Franco’s army has taken control of the final Republican holdout, the port of Alicante. General Franco has declared the war to be over, and we don’t know what will happen from here. Some think he’ll restore the monarchy, and others believe Franco himself will rule as a dictator. But whatever the final result, the Republic is no more.”
A murmur ran through our well-ordered lines, and the younger children started to cry. We all knew how terrible Franco’s reprisals were against his enemies—thousands of people executed, tens of thousands imprisoned, not to mention the atrocities committed by Francoist troops amid their march through the land, especially the armies stationed in Africa.
Reyes Pérez continued, “At this point in time, we do not know what the future holds. Nor do we know what will happen to you students. As you know, President Cárdenas, whose term ends this year, has named you adopted children of Mexico, which secures you a degree of legal protection in this country should your home refuse to recognize you. Some of you will want to return to your homes now that the war is over. We will inform you of the procedures to follow. This is a sad day for liberty, but as you sing in one of your most well-known songs, ‘Liberty is our most prized possession; we must defend it with faith and courage.’ Viva Mexico! Viva Spain!”
We answered in unison through our tears. We felt again the familiar sensation of having lost our homeland, but this time it was for good. How could the children of reds return to a fascist Spain? We didn’t know what was in store for our parents, much less how we’d be received upon arrival.
We broke our formation but all remained outside in the yard talking in little groups and trying to make sense of the news.
I couldn’t speak at first, at a loss of how to form words I couldn’t even imagine saying. Anything that occurred to me to say sounded utterly stupid. Fear had paralyzed me.
“For now,” I struggled to get out, “I suppose we wait to see how things shake out. Hopefully Mom and Dad will be able to contact us.” After waiting so long for the war to end, I never pictured it would look or feel like this.
“We have to go back to Spain,” Ana demanded, as if the mere idea of staying any longer in Mexico was intolerable.
“Go back? Spain is ruled by the fascists now,” Isabel said.
“But I doubt they’d do anything to a few kids. Even fascists have children. Besides, our parents haven’t done anything wrong,” Ana insisted.
I shook my head. “For the Francoists, defending the Republic is bad enough for them to lock you up or worse.”
Ana crossed her arms and sulked. “I want to go home.”
One by one the other students drifted away from the yard, heads held low. The ones who didn’t understand the news, though, were upbeat and smiling. I requested permission to leave school for a little while. I wanted to see María Soledad and talk to her about what we’d learned.
She lived close to the school, and I arrived at her house ten minutes later. I expected to find her home right then, when her parents usually went out for an afternoon walk. The maid eyed me up and down with suspicion at first, but I hoped she would agree to let María Soledad know I was there so we could talk for a few minutes through the window that looked out onto the back alley. My desperation must have convinced her, because she turned and went to tell María Soledad where to find me.
A few minutes later, our fingers were entwined through the bars on the window.
“What happened?” she asked, worried.
“The Republic lost the war,” I choked out.
“So what will happen now?”
“I don’t know. The director has told us to sit and wait. In the meantime, I hope to get in touch with my parents.”
She started to cry. She knew this was the declaration that sooner or later we would be separated, though we had known from the very start that our love had little chance of lasting, given our circumstances.
“If I have to leave, I promise I’ll come back. I’ll never forget you.”
“Are you crazy? There’s no way you’ll come back, and that’s as it should be. Spain is your country, and my place is here, with my family.”
Sometimes the world is too dark. Suffering and misfortune hang over our heads, eager for the slightest opportunity. We live like classic Greek or Roman heroes, torn between the whims of gods and men; yet we also have a will that can push us to fight against destiny.
“I’ll come back,” I promised with all the certainty of youth, when I believed life was tame and could be controlled with a light hand—not knowing that sometimes the paths of lovers really do separate forever, leaving incomplete souls to wander through all eternity in search of their other half.
Chapter 28
White Rats
Morelia
December 1, 1939
One lesson we learn as adults is that, if things are going poorly, they can always get worse. Sometimes misfortunes get bundled together in a short period of time. The year of 1939 was one of the worst of my life. Without knowing it, our existence had gotten tangled up with the rest of humanity, as if we were all one giant living organism, a kind of mystically interconnected being. In September of that same year, Word War II broke out, which would bring unfathomable suffering to humanity. First Europe, and then the rest of the planet, was falling under the turbulent shadow of fascism. Hitler invaded Poland, and his troops could not be stopped. One could only wonder how long France and the rest of the continent would hold out. We’d had no communication from our parents, but from the press we knew that hundreds of thousands of Spaniards had escaped through the Pyrenees to neighboring France. Had our parents managed to escape with the other refugees? That’s what we hoped, but it unsettled us that, once there, they hadn’t tried to contact us.
We had no way of knowing that the French had locked the poor refugees away in concentration camps on the beach. We students who had lost our country a good while ago were all too familiar with the devastation of losing our homes in order to become strangers somewhere else. Mexico had welcomed us with open arms, but we no longer knew what we were.
The new dictatorship in Spain was not content to kill or imprison the tens of thousands of people inside the country, regardless of age or sex; its tentacles reached much farther than we could’ve imagined. One morning we learned that several Spaniard organizations in Mexico—most of which we’d never even heard of before and which had certainly never done anything to help the students of the Spain–Mexico School—now wanted to deport us back to Spain without our families’ knowledge. Those traitorous rats wanted all the children to go back home, but not because they wanted us to be cared for; rather, they wanted to make us bear all the rage and fury they couldn’t unleash on our progenitors.
I knew that returning under those conditions was a trap, though it might be the only chance we would ever get to see our parents again. I seriously doubted the Francoists would allow us to be reunited with them, at least not at first. Only the slightest chance existed that after a while things would calm down and provide us the opportunity to be a family again.
My sisters pressured me to take our application to the director. Rumors swirled that, when Lázaro Cárdenas left office, his successor would close the school. If so, perhaps it would be better to leave now instead of waiting for things to get even worse.
That morning two men and a woman showed up at the school. Apparently, they had come from the capital to make a list of the students to send back to Spain as soon as possible. They represented various organizations of Spanish immigrants. We knew they were fascists like Franco, but they’d kept quiet ’til the end of the war. Many of those worthless patriots were fugitives from Spanish law or had fled the country to escape military duty, which explained their desire to get on the new regime’s good side.
They lined up all the students and started to call roll. One by one we approached a table and gave all our personal information. Ana was one of the first to be called, and I was close enough to be able to hear the conversation.
“Your name, miss? And your city of origin?”
“My name is Ana Alcalde, from Madrid,” she said, her voice shaky with nerves. Though she was the more determined of my sisters, the committee of scoundrels intimidated her.
“Do you have brothers and sisters here among the students?” asked the woman, who wrote everything down in a notebook.
“Yes, my sister, Isabel, and my brother, Marco.”
“Are they older than you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Are your parents living?”
That question fell on Ana like the lash of a whip. We wanted to believe they were all right, but it had been months since we’d heard from them.
“I don’t know, but I think so.”
“Mark them down as orphans,” one of the men said.
“But why? My parents aren’t dead,” Ana said, the pitch of her voice rising in alarm.
“The capital was bombed heavily in the final months of the war. Like I said, mark them as orphans.”
Ana turned and started to walk away when the man grabbed her arm. I couldn’t stop myself: I broke formation and ran up to get between them.
“Who are you?” the man asked.
I studied his bony face, bald head, and mustache that covered thin lips.
“I ask myself the same thing, you fascist. You may have won the war, but here in Mexico we’re free. You’re not taking my sister anywhere. We’re not orphans. Our parents are alive.”
Isabel came up to us. Our Mexican caretakers didn’t
know whether to intervene. No one had told them how this situation was supposed to go.
The two Spaniards stepped forward, as if signaling that they were the ones in charge now that the Republic’s government had disappeared. The woman also stood up and said, “There’s no reason to make a scene. The Mexican government will be in charge of turning this red trash over to us. We’re just supposed to take note of the children who might still be saved. Their parents and teachers have raised them on atheism and revolution, but we might be able to reeducate most of them.”
The men neither spoke nor moved. We three slowly backed away and then hightailed it out of there, not returning to the school ’til dark. At supper, we saw for ourselves that not all the students had been as determined as we were. Many of the boys and girls, especially the youngest ones without older siblings, were no longer there.
Chapter 29
Missing
Morelia
December 24, 1939
The Spain–Mexico School never lost its military barracks feel, but as more and more students left, the workshops, classes, and dining hall felt emptier and sadder. The sounds of laughter, games, and songs dwindled away. Some of the Mexican students had also gone back to their homes, and the oldest Spaniard boys had been sent to the capital or had run away to make it on their own, with little hope of ever seeing their parents again.
Christmas Eve seemed like any other day at the school. A few students sang carols, and the cook made a meal that was a little better than our usual fare, but these gestures only deepened the reigning melancholy. That afternoon, my sisters and I were sitting near the campus gate when we saw the mailman. We were surprised to see him working on Christmas Eve and even more surprised when he came up to us.
“Good afternoon. I’ve come here just for you three. This letter arrived a few days ago, but I’ve been unable to get out here to bring it. It’s from France,” he said, taking a brown envelope out of his bag and handing it to Isabel.