Remember Me

by Mario Escobar

  “My help?” His brows knit together in confusion. “Don’t think that just because I work here I know people who can pull strings.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I need to find some of the people my dad helped. You know he didn’t support the massacre of the fifth column.”

  Sebas furtively glanced all around. “This isn’t the best place to talk. Tell me how to find you, and I’ll bring you a list.”

  I hesitated for a moment, then gave him the address of the warehouse in Lavapiés before returning to the elevator. Sebas went back to one of the tables and started talking with a journalist.

  I left the building and walked down the streets that were now quite crowded. My heart soared as I went along Gran Vía toward Plaza de España. For a mere moment I let myself cherish the place. I dusted off the dregs of memory of what it was like to wander aimlessly through the streets for the sheer pleasure of the hustle and bustle of a big city, losing myself to the invisibility of being in a crowd.

  Chapter 40

  Split Up

  Madrid

  December 24, 1940

  Our past few Christmases had been more bitter than sweet: far from home and from our parents, surrounded by strangers, and heavy with the galling sensation that we would never be reunited as a family. As I walked back to the clothing warehouse, for the first time in years I let myself dream about future Christmases. I saw the five of us sitting around a table eating a good meal and opening presents on Three Kings Day. Little by little the streets were emptying. People were rushing home to celebrate with their families. I walked to the warehouse building and pulled out the key, but the door was ajar. Fear prickled up my spine. It was dark inside, and the suits and costumes seemed like ominous ghosts as I walked to our room at the back. I jumped when I saw two men wearing gray raincoats. I looked all around but didn’t see Isabel or Ana.

  “Marco Alcalde, I believe? Looking for your sisters? Don’t worry, they’re safe. Tonight they’ll sleep in a nearby convent with the nuns and tomorrow will go to an orphanage.”

  My blood froze at those words. How had they found us?

  “Why did you take them? They’re not orphans. They’re under my care.”

  One of the men stood, and I took a step back.

  “Your parents, blasted reds, sent you three to Mexico in 1937. You’re some of the Morelia children. Some have already returned, and more are on their way back. But you three left Mexico and reentered the country illegally. We found your false passports here. Do you know how serious a crime that is?”

  “We had no choice,” I said, gasping. My mouth was dry. I wanted to bolt, but my legs had turned into stiff boards.

  “How old are you, sixteen? For now we’ll take you to an orphanage, but next year, if you don’t behave, you’ll end up in jail. Now, let’s cut the chatter or we’ll miss our Christmas Eve supper.”

  I turned and ran, but before I got to the door someone else stepped out and blocked my way.

  “Sebas?” I cried out in disbelief. “How could you?”

  My father’s former assistant looked at me with the disdain one might save for a sewer rat. “Times have changed, kid. It’s nothing personal. These people don’t care if your dad saved a few priests or rich guys from Salamanca. He’s a dangerous red and there’s no place for people like him in the new Spain.”

  I looked at him with contempt, knowing his reporting us had probably secured him some sort of promotion or benefit. My dad had done everything for him: taught him a trade, treated him like family in our house—but human loyalty is conditional.

  “You’re despicable!” I screamed, spitting in his face.

  The policemen grabbed my arms and dragged me out of the building. It had started to snow, and I could hear the music of Christmas carols in the distance. I thought about my poor sisters, our worst fears coming to fruition on a holiday that should have been a celebration. I envisioned my mother locked in a cell of the women’s prison at Bilbao, at her wit’s end for not knowing where we were; and I imagined my father bowed over in Miranda de Ebro, utterly incapable of protecting the family he’d lost.

  We walked to a car parked in front of the warehouse. They shoved me into the backseat, and the car headed for Puerta del Sol. They locked me in a cell at the General Security Administration until I could be transferred to one of the regime’s orphanages. I looked out the partially frosted window. My family was spread throughout the country, and within days we would all be locked up far away from one another. I tried not to descend into despair. I said a short prayer, regardless of whether or not anyone would hear it. I simply begged to be together with my family again. Then I thought about the millions of people that night who would be missing loved ones around their table: husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, friends, or even acquaintances who would never again celebrate Christmas with them. I barely felt the tears pouring down my frigid cheeks. My chest hurt as if I’d been stabbed, and I wanted to give up right then and there, let fate have its way with my stubborn will. But hope was all I had. It was the only thing I could hold on to—the same hope that lived in the hearts of invalids whose lives hung by a thread, the hope that fluttered in the hearts of parents who received a letter from children feared dead, the hope that nourished those who would have nothing to eat that night, the hope that remained for the prisoners in jail hearing the shots of the nearby firing squad. At that moment I understood that, in the winter of 1940, the lives of millions and millions of people were dangling from the thin, fraying thread of hope.

  Part 5

  The Layers of Loneliness

  Chapter 41

  Paracuellos

  Paracuellos

  December 26, 1940

  After two nights in a cold, dirty cell, being released was a Christmas gift. The whole time I’d been tortured by thoughts of what had become of my sisters. If the Francoists had set up over a hundred concentration camps for adults, I figured they must have something similar for children. Besides the thousands of orphans, tens of thousands more children had parents who were locked up or in exile. The state had taken charge of them, and what could have been considered an act of charity was exactly the opposite.

  A couple of police officers took me to a small van parked in the alley behind the building where I’d been held prisoner, and they sat me down next to four other teenage boys, slamming the door before I was fully settled. We wound through Madrid’s snow-covered streets heading toward the road to Aragon and less than an hour later arrived at a town on the outskirts of Madrid. The vehicle pulled into an area surrounded by a high brick wall and parked in front of a dirty, run-down building.

  “Come on, you filthy reds!” one of the policemen yelled as he dragged us out of the car. Four guards in Falangist uniforms were waiting for us at the door.

  The director was named Juan Rufián—an “old shirt,” as the Falangists called the veteran fascists who hadn’t signed up with the party just because of the benefits it provided under the new state. The original Falangists, despite having been combined by Franco with other parties into one umbrella party called the Falange de las JONS, maintained their fascist principles and believed that Spain could become like Italy or Germany. Most of Franco’s ministers, many of them military monarchists, looked askance at the fascists, but the dictatorship needed Hitler’s support and therefore gave them a bit of leeway to show the world that there was true ideology behind the cruel, foolish civil war.

  Juan Rufián looked each of us up and down, inspecting our teeth, arms, and pupils. “They’ll do for work,” he said. “Many of the reds are pure trash. As Antonio Vallejo-Nájera makes very clear in his writings, Marxism is a sign of mental illness.” Several of his comrades chuckled at that.

  A priest wearing a cassock walked up, the Falangist symbol of the yoke and arrows on his lapel. Father Onésimo Sánchez was charged with indoctrinating us and turning us into good Catholics. Though hardly any red children had been baptized, the mere fact that we wer
e Spaniards automatically made us Catholic in his mind.

  They pushed and shoved us to the infirmary, where we were ordered to undress for a doctor to examine us. For all of the boys I’d been grouped with, it was painfully embarrassing to strip naked before all of those men, especially the priest.

  “Have you had breakfast?” the director asked.

  We shook our heads, none of us daring to speak.

  “Well, too bad, because we don’t fatten up reds here. Fermín, shave their heads and show them to their palace suites. Here you’ll work for your food. The new Spain we’re building isn’t going to give your lazy tails a free ride.”

  The one called Fermín was a working-class Falangist, chief servant, and errand boy. He was like a useful pet to the Falangists. He could’ve left the orphanage the year before, but they kept him around to do the dirty work.

  He led us to a filthy, cockroach-infested room that would be our living quarters. Then he ordered us toward the workshop, despite our empty stomachs. In the workshop, a cramped and squalid little hut, we were to make rope. The workshop boss assigned us various jobs, and we worked in silence until lunchtime.

  That wretched orphanage was nothing like the school in Morelia. Even though the first director of the Spain–Mexico School had hated us and the second treated us like we were in the military, the orphanage in Paracuellos was a prison of the worst kind. I came to learn firsthand how fanaticism drives humans to commit unimaginable atrocities.

  At lunch, I sat beside one of the youngest boys, who couldn’t have been more than nine years old. People called him Blondie.

  “Did you just get here?” he whispered.

  “Yes. What is this place?”

  “It’s hell. Social Aid set up centers like this all over the country. The fascists call them ‘homes for war orphans.’ But I’m not an orphan. My mom’s alive, in jail. We were there together for a few months. I thought that was bad, but . . .” He shook his head. “This is a million times worse.”

  “Who’s talking?” Fermín said menacingly.

  Terrified, we stopped our conversation. After the meal, we went back to work until dinnertime. They allowed us to wash up and then we were to go to bed. In whispered spurts throughout the afternoon, I had learned from Blondie that we were forbidden from speaking, playing, singing, gathering in groups, or doing any spontaneous activity. Life was organized around work from the moment we awoke to the moment we laid down at night. Only on Sundays would we have a modicum of free time, when we were allowed to be outside in the yard after the obligatory Mass.

  After washing my face, we had thirty minutes before lights out when all noise would be forbidden. Blondie came up to my bed.

  “What is going on in this place?” I asked, bewildered.

  “They say it’s an orphanage, but it’s really one big torture chamber. I can’t remember anything from before the war. That’s as far back as my memories go. I lived in the Vallecas neighborhood with my parents, who were anarchists. Toward the end, anarchists were hunted down in Madrid. The communists shot my dad, and my mom and I were all alone. There was nothing to eat, but at least we were together. When the Francoists invaded Madrid, some of our neighbors reported us, and they took us to Ventas, the women’s prison. Mothers and their children were crammed into the cells together without water and barely any food. Babies were crying constantly, and the mothers weren’t given diapers to change them. The stench was unbearable. Once a week the women could wash clothes, but they weren’t allowed to dry them outside. They’d try to dry their babies’ clothes with their own body warmth. Every day some were taken out to be shot, and the kids were just left there, dirty and alone. Other women would take care of them until the Falangists would come and cart them off. After a few months, they began taking the children away, starting with the youngest ones. The officers would rip the kids out of their mothers’ arms, screaming at the women and beating them back. Eventually they took the rest of us away too. I’m too old for anybody to want to adopt me, but the younger kids were given to regime families.”

  I gawked at him in silence, unable to believe what I’d just heard. What kind of people would commit such atrocities? It was one thing to punish the parents, even though the only thing they’d done wrong was to support the democratic government of the Republic. It was something else entirely to steal their children.

  “Go to sleep!” Fermín barked, slamming off the lights.

  “Where are you from?” Blondie asked me. “You’ve got a funny accent.”

  “From Mexico,” I said, my voice barely audible.

  “Mexico? Where’s that?”

  “In the Americas.”

  “What? Why did you come to Spain? There’s nothing here. It’s one big tomb, and we’re all just a bunch of walking dead.”

  It took me a very long time to fall asleep that first night. I hated myself for insisting we leave Mexico, especially when I thought about how my sisters would be going through something just as horrible as my fate, or worse. I had to get out of there any way I could. After everything that had happened, I wasn’t going to stand there with my arms crossed while my family was completely destroyed.

  They woke us up by shouting at us. We had to rush to get dressed before eating a meager breakfast. Then we had an hour or so of elementary school classes, because the Falangists deemed our education was complete so long as we knew the basic mathematic functions and how to read. The rest of the day was spent in the workshop.

  “This Sunday, one of the big bosses is coming,” a boy named Rubio whispered to me at lunch. I was twirling my spoon through the worms and chickpeas mixed together in my bowl, but sooner or later I would have to eat it because we were required to eat everything served to us. We were told often how good and magnanimous Franco was; out of pure Christian love he fed the children of his enemies.

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “Depends on how you look at it. They’ll give us better food and clean clothes, but our prison guards will be all uptight. If anyone steps out of line, they’ll have his head. Know what I mean? The government gives this place money for each kid under their roof, but the director of course buys the cheapest stuff possible so he can keep the profit. Thus the dawn of the new Spain . . .” Rubio trailed off, paraphrasing one of the common Francoist slogans.

  Just then, the priest came into the dining hall. “Confession is this afternoon. Come one by one, in order of your class roll. Understood?” he said.

  Blondie started to shake—so much so that I asked what was going on.

  “Just be careful of Father Onésimo. Besides being a cruel, fanatic Falangist, he’s dangerous.”

  That warning scared me. I was seventeen years old and had seen a lot, but the people in that orphanage truly terrified me.

  That afternoon, the workshop boss ordered me to take some samples up to the director, and I seized my chance to study the campus. The wall was really high, at least thirteen feet, and topped by barbed wire, except for one part where a mound of dirt piled at the base put the wall at about ten feet. Regardless, it looked impossible to climb, and the gate was always locked. The main building looked like it had once been a monastery. There was a fountain with dirty water, a large yard with both the Francoist flag and the Falangist flag, a chapel, a soccer field ruined by countless holes, and a garden where some of the boys worked instead of in the workshop. I went into the main building. I had hardly seen the first floor because our dormitories were upstairs. Of what was on the main floor, we were only allowed into the dining hall and, a precious few times a month, into the gymnasium.

  The director’s office was in the nicer part of the building. The walls were wood-paneled, making it feel much warmer than our bare brick walls, and the floors were carpeted. Portraits of Falangist leaders hung from the walls beside paintings depicting heroic scenes from Spain’s history. The director had a secretary, and she and a couple of nuns who worked as nurses were the only females on the premises.

  “What do you wa
nt?” the secretary snapped. She was mean-looking with thick glasses, greasy skin, and an ill-fitting Falangist uniform.

  I cleared my throat and said, “The workshop boss sent me to show some samples to the director. He said he doesn’t want to make any mistakes.”

  “Hang on,” she said, standing with an exasperated sigh. She knocked at the director’s door. “There’s a kid out here with some samples,” she called.

  “Let him in,” came the reply.

  I was trembling as I stepped forward. More than respect, I felt pure terror for the man. I stood waiting by his desk while he read a newspaper.

  “Give them here,” he said, holding out his hand. I passed him the samples, and he examined them, wrote a short note, and handed me the piece of paper. “Sit down,” he ordered. When I obeyed, he stood up and started walking around the office. It was decorated in a pretentious, almost ridiculous way, as if a lowly director of a charitable institution were considered one of the great leaders of the regime.

  “I’ve read your file,” he began. “Finally, they brought me someone interesting, not just your everyday starving red scum who can’t tell his tail from his elbow. In 1937 you went to Mexico. You’re one of those little Morelia brats. It seems you studied hard and finished primary school, then started high school in Mexico City. You’re a smart kid. Vallejo-Nájera would say we might be able to save you. Maybe your brain hasn’t rotted from the red virus. So why did you come back to Spain? Surely you were nostalgic. Nowhere else on earth is as beautiful as Spain.”

  I had no idea how to answer. Anything I said would likely be misinterpreted. “Well,” I stuttered, “I did miss Spain a lot, but mainly I missed my family. I didn’t know what had happened to them.”

  Juan Rufián perched at the edge of his desk and drummed his fingers on his chin. “Mmm, good answer. Family is an important value, though in your case it’s been a bad influence. Your father is a socialist and a union man; he had an important role among printers in Madrid and was one of the assassins of our comrades at the assault on the Montaña Barracks.”