This piece was written in October 2020. Today, my grandmother is experiencing the effects of the early stages of Alzheimer’s; fortunately, she still recognizes all of us and loves us even more than before. My grandfather takes care of her with the help of my parents. His memory is also beginning to falter. My grandfather always wanted me to pursue a respectable profession, but my path has been a different one. I hope that in this life or the next, he will fully understand what I am striving for and feel proud of me. I fear that my grandparents may pass away while I remain far away. To honor them, I am republishing this piece.
The scar on my grandfather’s finger has been with him since he was nine years old, the result of a wound he sustained while cutting wheat. My grandmother also bears an injured finger with pride: the tip of her left index finger is flattened, as though it had been crushed. She says it happened in Oropesa. The family was there because Grandpa Basilio had been conscripted, though he never made it to the front. My grandmother, a little girl of about five, had hidden herself in a pantry. Her older brother shut the pantry door, catching her finger. He mistook her cries for fear, not pain.
Until the age of nine, my grandfather attended some school. Later, he took a few night classes with Uncle Paco—one of the smartest men in the village—and studied from a textbook titled The Adventurous Duckling. Reading, writing, basic arithmetic, and a bit of geography. Just enough, so that when he served his 15 months of military service in Madrid, he knew where his fellow recruits hailed from and was able to present himself as an extremeño from a small village in Cáceres (one of the two main cities of Extremadura, a region in the south east of Spain, bordering Portugal).
My grandmother sings to her village
A village: Deleitosa, photographed and featured in Life, the American magazine, sometime in the 1950s. Among the images captured by Mr. Eugene Smith (whose work is extraordinary), one would have been worth including: a man, stumbling and with his trousers around his ankles, fleeing what he believed to be a patrol of the Guardia Civil (Civil Guard, some sort of elite nationwide police with strong presencne in rural areas) unusually concerned with the decorum and cleanliness of a grimy corner he, an unwitting malefactor, had chosen as his makeshift latrine—possibly during a festival night. It was unusual for the Guardia Civil to bother with such things, but one did not question their criteria; one simply obeyed or fled. And he fled, to the amusement of those who had pretended to be members of the Civil Guard.
The prank was celebrated in the village as a fitting mockery of a man who, seeking relief in that corner on that particular night, claimed he no longer felt himself to be an extremeño, much less a native of Deleitosa, but Basque.
During his military service, my grandfather—who was, is, and will always be a proud deleitoseño from that Extremadura that hasn’t caught a break since local nobles and the Portuguese tore it apart in their quarrels—worked 24-hour shifts in a telecommunications unit, followed by 48 hours of leave. Afterward, he would put in ten hours at a foundry on the outskirts of Madrid; as a soldier, he earned five duros (25 pesetas, the then local currency) an hour. It was just enough to explore the city by metro (sometimes without even leaving the station, as riding such an invention was entertainment enough); to attend the baile de la bombilla (“the Light bulb Ball”) at the Northern Station, where he danced with domestic workers all dressed in white (nicknamed marmotillas, “little marmots”); and, once, to watch Antonio Molina perform at the Calderón Theatre—though his and his friends’ seats were in the last rows, they enjoyed themselves all the same.
During long leaves, my grandfather would return to the village. His visits often coincided with the season of matanzas (pig slaughter). His future father-in-law, a skilled farmer, was especially adept at bleeding the pigs.
Amid fried pork rinds, sausages, bacon, and black pudding—and with some unfortunate pig imploring its gods for salvation—Uncle Paco, the former teacher, and a few others would reminisce about the events of the war. Uncle Paco had two brothers, both lieutenants, who died at the front on the Republican side. They didn’t go into much detail, but it was clear that terrible things had happened and that some in the village carried a heavy burden of sorrow and resentment from those violent days, when the azules held power in Deleitosa (los azules, ”the blues”, the soldiers fighting under Franco’s command, also called the Nationalists or the sublevados, the rebel revolters).
There was the story of that young man who was forced to transport certain neighbors in his truck to the outskirts of the village, where they were executed. Without knowing it, he once transported his own father. From that moment on, his relationship with himself, with others, and with trucks became a torment. Years later, on a trip to Madrid to pick up a shipment of El Águila beer—”The Eagle”, a fine brand relaunched in 2019—he vowed to bring his son back to the village. His son had secretly decided to drive the infamous fish trucks in the capital, known as the “death trucks,” and died the very same day behind the wheel of one. His girlfriend in the village was considered one of the most beautiful.
There was also the story of that woman who, for sheltering a few militiamen, ended up slapped and with her head shaved. And then there were the stories of some of those militiamen who, after the war, hid in the wild, waiting for tempers to cool. The militiamen spent a long time in the mountains, from where they would watch the Civil Guard patrols, neither side daring to do much. Once, when my grandfather was ten years old, he spotted one of them crouching in a clearing and told his uncle, who advised him to leave the rojo alone since he wasn’t doing any harm (los rojos, ”the reds” were those fighting on the Republic side, whatever their real ideological allegiances, or lack thereof)
Those rojos would sometimes come down to the village seeking charity, rarely causing trouble, though there was an instance where they demanded a ransom. Fortunately, no one was hurt, though the experience left people shaken. In the end, one of them fell ill and had to surrender; the others fled, and two villagers who had been providing them with medicine spent a few months in a Cáceres jail.
Many years later, my grandfather met one of those rojos from the mountains of Deleitosa in France—an Andalusian who, like my grandfather, ended up as an efficient laborer north of the Pyrenees.
From what was said during the matanzas, my grandfather knew terrible things had happened in the village, but he never thought much about it; he was more focused on finishing his military service and laughing at the misadventures of Hilario, also from the village, who was assigned to a cavalry unit at thee Conde Duque station (the Count-Duke of Olivares, Seventeenth-century King Philip IV’s strongman). At the baile de la bombilla, Hilario had no success with the ladies—he smelled of horses. That young man would tell how a horse once killed three soldiers at the Conde Duque barracks. The animal wasn’t put down because it was lucky not to have killed one more: four soldiers were the minimum required for a death sentence.
You don’t kill a beast without good reason, especially if the beast provides some kind of service, however grudgingly. In the village, there was a bad-tempered animal—a so-called “false” mule, dishonest, ungrateful, and conniving. In the mornings, it would kick as soon as the saddle was placed on its back. To punish it, they made it carry three men, but the beast endured. It was likely a poor purchase made from some gypsies. The gypsies would buy unruly mules cheaply and tame them by getting them drunk, pouring wine up their noses, to calm them down before showing the goods to some unsuspecting buyer… an easy sale.
In the village, there were gypsies. There was also a priest, Don Fermín (out of respect for him, we will withhold his real name), who was three years older than my grandfather and had come to replace the previous parish priest, widely regarded as a good shepherd. Don Fermín was an outsider and officiated mass for the devout who could afford not to work on Sundays (very few: landowners, the doctor, civil servants, and the families of the Civil Guard). For the rest of the faithful, he reserved the rosary prayer on Saturday evenings, zealously insisting during his rounds through bars and squares that they attend—especially the young people who stole kisses in the dehesas, the fields surrounding the village. Despite his efforts, the obstinate Don Fermín wasn’t very successful.
Don Fermín was not well-liked in the village. Once, he was seen loading the church’s candelabras into the trunk of his car. He sold everything: the statues of the saints and Blessed Mary, the silver, and the bronze. He even tried to lay his hands on the Cristo del Desamparo—the Christ of Abandonment, a central component of the religious parades which brought the rain when the merciless sun scorched the ungrateful land day after day—but the Hermanos del Cristo (Borthers of Chris), eight men, stepped in. Among them was Uncle Antolín, the healer. He set bones, eased inflammations; his tongue was marked with symbols. Once, he healed the doctor’s son, who had previously been his sworn enemy.
Uncle Antolín’s grace was not for himself: he could heal the ailments of his neighbors but not his own. He saved many lives and, with the help of the rest of the Hermanos del Cristo, also saved the village’s Christ from Don Fermín’s attempted plundering.
Grandfather returned to the village after his military service. Perhaps he could have stayed in Madrid, but fear, like for so many others, held him back. He went back to the village and to his father’s house.
His father: the youngest of four brothers; unlike them, he was arrogant, selfish, and at times cruel. He worked as a caretaker of some lands, carried a five-shot rifle, and was both feared and comfortably situated—a life of leisure at the expense of his wife and four children until a change in land ownership stripped him of the rifle.
One night (another in a long string), he returned home drunk; that night (another like so many before), he wanted to strike his wife. But that night, Grandfather couldn’t take it anymore: he confronted him, knocking him to the ground. From that moment on, they hated each other.
Grandfather got married, and then it was time to face fear. One summer, an acquaintance came back to Deleitosa to rest. When the vacation ended, the man returned to the neighboring country, taking Grandfather with him. France was frightening too, but Grandfather marched forward with a certain assurance: the acquaintance had lined up work for him.
Years later, he wouldn’t want to return to Spain. But, in the end, he did.
One day in 2020, with his generation decimated by a virus that had arrived from the Chinese city of Wuhan, Grandfather prepared meatballs for his grandson, who bombarded him with questions. Grandfather reminisced much during that meal, entertaining his grandson greatly. The young man began to think once more about the importance of ensuring that the hills of Deleitosa and rural and urban landscapes of every kind, present and future, survive alongside their stories, their grandparents, and their memories, so that in this way they become the legacy of a never-ending cycle.
As they digested those wonderful meatballs, Grandfather spoke at length, the grandson asked many questions, and Grandmother smiled often. On her face, the expression of a little girl began to surface once again.
