Tell Me Who I Am

by Julia Navarro

  But to go back to that dinner... They sang carols, they ate and drank all those things that never end up on the tables of the poor, although those of us who served in this house couldn’t complain: We always ate and drank what our employers did.

  I still remember that we ate turkey with chestnuts... And as always happened when the two families met, people spoke about and argued about politics.

  “It seems that Alcalá Zamora is ready for a new government to be formed by Manuel Portela Valladares,” Don Juan commented.

  “What he needs to do is call elections,” Santiago replied.

  “How impatient you young people are!” Armando Garayoa responded. “Don Niceto Alcalá Zamora doesn’t want to give power to the CEDA; he doesn’t trust Gil Robles.”

  “And right he is!” said Don Juan.

  “I don’t see a way out of this situation... I don’t think that the elections will solve anything, because if the left wins, Lord help us!” Don Manuel Carranza, Santiago’s father, lamented.

  “What do you want? That these right-wingers, incapable of solving Spain’s problems, end up in government?” Amelia looked angrily at her father-in-law.

  “Amelia, dear, don’t get cross!” Amelia’s mother tried to intervene.

  “It’s just that I’m furious that there are still people who believe that the CEDA can do any good. People are not going to put up with this situation much longer,” Amelia continued.

  “Well, I’m afraid of a left-wing government,” Don Manuel insisted.

  “And I’m afraid of a right-wing one,” replied Amelia.

  “There needs to be authority. Do you think that the country can move forward if there are strikes all the time?” Don Manuel asked his daughter-in-law.

  “What I think is that people have a right to eat and not have a terrible life, which is what happens here,” Amelia replied.

  Santiago always supported Amelia, even though he felt the need to qualify her political positions. He, as I’ve said before, was an Azañist, he didn’t believe in revolution even though he didn’t support the right wing either.

  Apart from Amelia, who said that she was tired and who stayed with her son Javier, who was sleeping calmly in Águeda’s arms, at midnight the family went to the church to hear Mass.

  4

  President Alcalá Zamora was unable to deal with the situation of conflict between the left and the right, and general malaise was increasing throughout Spain, so he had no option other than to call a general election for February 16, 1936. None of us could imagine what would happen next...

  From the PSOE, Prieto insisted on the necessity of forming a grand coalition of the Left, while Largo Caballero fought for a united front with the Communists, but he didn’t know how to get his opinion heard; also, I don’t know if you know, but the Communist Party was advised from Moscow to ally itself with the bourgeoisie on the Left against the right-wingers and Fascists. This was a much more realistic position. And so the Popular Front was born.

  “Amelia, Amelia! They’ve formed a Popular Front!”

  Santiago came joyfully home on January 15, 1936, knowing that his wife would be extremely happy with the news. Santiago also thought that the fact that the Republican Left would be in this grouping with the Communists and the Socialists would bring him closer to his wife, who was ever more infused with the ideology of her friends Lola and Josep.

  “Great! That is good news. And what do you think they’ll do if they win the elections?”

  “Some friends from the Republican left have told me that they’ll try to bring back the policies they implemented in ’31 and ’33.”

  “That’s not enough!”

  “What are you saying, Amelia? It’s the right thing to go down that path. I don’t like to go against you, but I am worried by the ideas that Lola and Josep are putting in your head. Do you really think that Spain’s problems can be solved by a revolution? Do you want us to kill each other? I can’t believe that you could be so thoughtless...”

  “Look, Santiago, I know that it upsets you that I don’t agree with your ideas, but you should at least respect mine. I’m sorry, it just doesn’t seem fair that we should have everything and others... Sometimes I think about Lola’s son, Pablo. What sort of a future can he look forward to? Javier will never lack for anything, and I feel comforted by that, but it’s not fair. No, it’s not fair.”

  The discussion was interrupted by Águeda, who was worried by Javier’s nonstop crying.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with the child, but he doesn’t want to eat, and he won’t stop crying,” the nurse explained.

  “How long has he been like this?” Santiago asked.

  “He had a bad night, but he started crying this morning and I think he’s got a fever.”

  Santiago and Amelia went immediately to the child’s room. Javier was crying inconsolably in his crib, and his forehead was burning.

  “Amelia, call Dr. Martínez, something’s wrong with Javier, or else, no, we’d better go to the hospital, they’ll treat him better there.”

  Amelia wrapped Javier in a shawl and went to the hospital with Santiago, holding the baby tight.

  It was nothing serious. Javier had otitis, and the pain in his ears was what made him cry. But the fright had its effect on Amelia, who had been unconcerned about Javier until this point, and had let Águeda do everything, from bathing him to feeding him.

  “Edurne, I am a bad mother,” Amelia confessed to me, sobbing, that night, while she looked at her child in the crib.

  “Don’t say that...”

  “It’s true, I’ve realized that sometimes I am more worried about what’s happening to Pablo, Lola’s son, than I am about Javier.”

  “It’s normal, you know that your son wants for nothing, while Pablo, the poor mite, doesn’t have a thing.”

  “But he has something more important: his mother’s continual love and attention.” It was Santiago’s voice.

  We started. He had come into the room so slowly that neither of us had realized.

  Amelia looked at Santiago desperately. What her husband had just said had wounded her deeply, above all because she thought he was right.

  She left the room in tears. Santiago came to his son’s crib and sat down next to it, ready to spend the night in vigil over his son. I offered to stay up with Águeda looking after Javier, but Santiago did not want us to, so we both went to bed.

  “A sick child needs his parents; anyway, I wouldn’t be calm enough to stay away; I couldn’t sleep thinking that the boy was crying because he was in pain.”

  I went to sleep, but the next day I discovered that Águeda had got up in the middle of the night to be by Javier’s side. Santiago and her had watched over the boy in silence, listening to him breathe.

  Amelia woke up with her eyes red and swollen with so much crying, and she cried even more when she realized that her husband and Águeda had stayed up all night by the child’s crib.

  “Don’t you see that I’m a bad mother, Edurne?”

  “Come on, don’t blame yourself...”

  “Santiago was up the whole night with our son, and so was Águeda, who has nothing to do with... She’s... she’s just...”

  I know that she was going to say that Águeda was just a maid, but she held back because she knew that to say so would have compromised her revolutionary ideals.

  “Águeda is the child’s nurse,” I consoled her, “and it’s her duty to look after Javier.”

  “No, Edurne, it’s not her duty to look after the child when he’s ill, it’s the mother’s duty. What is wrong with me? Why can’t I give the best of myself to my husband and my son?”

  Amelia was right. Her behavior was extraordinary: With strangers she would go out of her way to be of use to them, and she paid less and less attention to Santiago and Javier, her son, a newborn child.

  I didn’t dare ask her if she still loved Santiago, but at this moment I thought that Amelia was crying for just this reason, because
she didn’t feel capable of loving her husband or of feeling the tenderness that a mother should feel toward her children. But I did not judge her because at that time I too was filled with revolutionary ideas, and thought that what happened to her or to me was nothing compared to what would happen to the whole of mankind, and the important thing to do was to build a new world, of the kind that Josep told us was being built in the Soviet Union.

  “The child is better. I fed him this morning and he didn’t reject it. He’s not vomiting anymore and he is much calmer.”

  Amelia looked at Águeda as she put Javier to bed. It was clear that the woman loved this child and that she was using him to make up for the loss of her own son.

  On February 16 the Popular Front won the elections, although by a smaller margin than expected over the CEDA and the other right-wing forces. It was the PNV, Alcalá Zamora’s centrist party, and the Lliga Catalana that won the rest of the votes.

  With results like this, it was difficult for Manuel Azaña to restore the calm that the country needed so much.

  People were sick and tired of living badly, of being exploited, and the rural workers began to occupy farms in Andalusia and Extremadura; there were strikes that put pressure on the new government, and as if that weren’t enough, people from the newly created Falange dedicated themselves to trying to destabilize the Popular Front.

  Azaña reestablished the autonomy of Catalonia, and Lluís Companys became its president. And then there was an attempt to expel Alcalá Zamora... And the Socialists, well, Largo Caballero’s group, vetoed Prieto to stop him joining the government... It was a mistake... No... They didn’t do things well, but we can say this now that time has passed; we were living through it back then, and we didn’t have a moment to think about want we were doing, much less about its possible consequences. Do you know something, young man? No, we didn’t do things well, all of us who had our high ideals, who were in favor of progress, who were always right, we also didn’t do things well.

  “I think that you should go with the child to your grandmother’s house for a while,” Santiago suggested to Amelia. I don’t like how things are, and you will be much calmer in Biarritz. Why don’t you ask your sister Antonietta to go with you?”

  “I’d rather stay. What are you scared of?”

  “I’m not scared, Amelia, but there are things I hear that I don’t like and I’d prefer it if Javier and you were away for a while. You’ve told me that when you were a girl you always waited for the summer so you could go and stay with your grandmother Margot.”

  “That’s true, but things are different now, I’d rather stay, I don’t want to miss what’s going on.”

  “It just means bringing your holidays forward a little, nothing more, and I’ll come and meet you when I can. I’m worried, things aren’t going well, and your father’s business is also not working out as he planned. The imports from the United States are extremely expensive, and we cannot keep on helping him to bring machinery and spare parts from there, it’s too expensive.”

  “You’re going to stop being in business with Papa?” Amelia asked in alarm.

  “It’s not about stopping the business, we just have to close down this channel of imports. It’s not worth it.”

  “This comes from your father! You know very well that my father had to close his businesses in Germany, and for all the sales he made there, the Nazis took everything... and your father’s only interested in money.”

  “That’s enough, Amelia! Stop accusing my father of all the wrongs of the world. My family loves you, and we’ve shown our affection to you and yours in spades, but we can’t keep on losing money, things aren’t going well for us either.”

  “So, just now, when the Popular Front is in charge and things are going to get sorted out, just now is when you give up on my father...”

  “No, Amelia, it does not look like the Popular Front is going to be able to sort things out. You know how much I admire Don Manuel Azaña; I know that if it depended on him alone... But things are never how we like them to be, and Azaña has lots of problems to face up to. The strikes are bleeding us dry...”

  “The workers are right!” Amelia protested.

  “They’re right about some things, but in others... In any case, you can’t sort out in a few months problems that have been building up over centuries, and this is what’s happening, what with impatience on one side and the boycott on the other, we’re heading toward an impossible situation.”

  “You’re always so calm!” Amelia said angrily.

  “I try to see things as they are, realistically.” There was a tone in Santiago’s voice, a tone of tiredness with these constant arguments with Amelia.

  “My place is here, Santiago, with my family.”

  “Do you really want to stay here because of us?”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “You spend more time with your Communist friends than you do at home... Ever since you met Josep you have changed. If we were really so important to you, if you really were only thinking about Javier, then you’d agree to go for a while and be with your grandmother Margot.”

  “How dare you tell me that I don’t care about my son?”

  “I dare because the truth is that Águeda spends more time with him than you do.”

  “She’s his nurse! Do you think I love him less because I go to political meetings? What I want is to build a new world where Javier will never face any injustice. Is that such a bad thing that you need to scold me for it?”

  These arguments exhausted both Amelia and Santiago, and were driving them apart. It must be acknowledged that Santiago had the worst of it, because he suffered due to the situation he lived in, while Amelia was living her own life through politics. Santiago was making superhuman efforts to save their marriage.

  Their arguments were ever more frequent, and the Garayoas and the Carranzas were both aware of the deterioration of the relationship between their children.

  Doña Teresa reproved Amelia, saying that she wasn’t behaving like a good wife, but Amelia said that her mother was “old-fashioned” and did not understand that the world was changing and that women no longer had to be submissive.

  The Carranzas, Don Manuel as much as Doña Elena, tried not to interfere in the problems of the marriage, but they suffered in seeing their son so worried.

  One of the ever rarer occasions when the two families gathered together to eat was on March 7. I remember because Don Juan arrived late and Amelia was upset to have to delay the meal.

  When he finally arrived, he came with news that seemed to have particularly upset him.

  “Germany has invaded the Rhineland,” he said in a tired voice.

  “Yes, we heard on the radio,” Don Manuel replied.

  “I’ve been trying to speak to Helmut Keller all day and I finally managed to... He’s in despair, and ashamed by what’s happening. You know that Helmut is a rational person, a good man...”

  Don Juan talked incoherently. His luck had gone sour the day Hitler came into power, and since then he had followed events in Germany as if it were his own country. He was also desperate to get Herr Itzhak out of Germany, but Itzhak kept on saying that this was his country and that he wouldn’t leave his homeland for anything.

  “Hitler has broken the Treaty of Versailles,” Santiago said.

  “And the Treaty of Locarno,” Don Manuel added.

  “But what does he care about international treaties? One day the powers that be will regret not having stopped him earlier,” Don Juan complained.

  The day after that meal, March 8, Santiago went away again without telling anyone. He did not come back for several days, apparently he had been to Barcelona to talk with the business’ Catalan partners.

  Amelia got extremely annoyed, and on the second day of Santiago’s absence she decided that she no longer needed to obey any social conventions.

  “If he can come and go whenever he wants, I’ll do the same. So get ready, Edurne, beca
use we are going to Lola’s house this evening, there’s a meeting and some of Josep’s comrades will be there.”

  I was about to tell her that we should not go, that Santiago would be furious, but I held my peace. Santiago was not there, and by the time he found out it would be some days later.

  Amelia went to Javier’s room to give him a kiss before we left.

  “Look after him, Águeda, he’s my most precious treasure.”

  “Don’t worry, Madam, you know he’s fine with me.”

  “I know, you look after him better than I could.”

  “Don’t say that! I just try to give him all he needs.”

  Águeda was right: She gave Javier everything he needed, especially the love and constant presence that Amelia did not provide. I don’t think I’m judging her, she just did what she thought best. We were all convinced that we had to do whatever we could, however small, to make the world a better place. We were very young and very inexperienced, and we were convinced of the worth of our ideals.

  There were more people than usual in Lola’s house that night. And he was there, Pierre.

  We were not expecting Josep to be there, because he had left a fortnight ago, but apparently it was urgent that his employer return to Madrid.

  “Come in, come in... Amelia, I’d like you to meet Pierre,” Josep said, as always extremely deferential toward Amelia.

  At that time, Pierre must have been about thirty-five years old. He was not very tall, but he had dirty golden hair and steel-gray eyes that seemed to be able to read your innermost thoughts.

  Josep introduced him to us as a half-French comrade, a bookseller by trade, in Madrid on business.

  I would be lying if I said that I didn’t notice the immediate attraction between the pair of them, Amelia as much as Pierre. Although Pierre was giving a talk that evening on the situation in the Soviet Union, and the reason why European intellectuals were supporting the revolution in ever greater numbers, he did not stop seeking Amelia with his eyes, as she listened to him in fascination.