Medardo Fraile: Things Look Different in the Light & Other Stories

In 1937, our apartment filled up with evacuees: an elderly lady from my mother’s village, a couple — friends of the family — and their three daughters, two of my father’s sisters, María and Nazaria, along with their husbands and sons, three of whom were intermittently sent off to fight on the government fronts in Talavera and Brihuega, at the battle of Brunete, and at Casa de Campo in Madrid. There were only three of us, but we managed to squeeze another seventeen people into our apartment.

It must have been one day in January 1938 when I came back from school to be informed by my father’s indolent new wife, whose usual indifference was made all the more exasperating by her inexactitudes and hesitations:

“A lady came with her son; she said he was a friend of yours.”

“Who?”

“Doleteche or Dorteche or something.”

“Do you mean Dornaleteche?”

“Yes, that sounds about right.”

“And?”

“Nothing. They just came to ask if we could help them.”

“Had something happened?”

“I don’t know. She said a son or her husband had been killed, or both, I’m not sure.”

“Why didn’t you ask?”

“Well, she was speaking really softly, almost crying, and because, at that point, your Aunt María came out into the corridor and told them: ‘We don’t want any fascists here!’”

“And what did they say?”

“What could they say? They left.”

I kept grimly pestering both my aunt and my stepmother all afternoon and learnt that Plácido — who had probably been the one who had persuaded his mother to come and ask his old schoolmate for help and who was normally a real chatterbox — didn’t say a word, that neither of them was wearing black and that the mother, whom I had never met, had greying hair and was nothing but skin and bone. My Aunt María, who occasionally fancied herself as another La Pasionaria, claimed she had said what she said because her sons—“Your cousins,” she screamed — were risking their lives at the front every day, but that didn’t mean — she added illogically — that she wished my friend and his mother ill, because God and the Holy Virgin knew that all she wanted was for the fascists to be defeated and for the war to end.

The war ended a year later, and most of us adolescents, for a longer or shorter period, wore the blue shirt, which no longer meant the same as the blue shirt for which my friend’s brother and possibly his father had died. For years, Spain’s tattered skin was an altar besieged by many funerals, although beneath the black trousers and the blue shirts and the red berets there seethed fierce passions — fear, ambition, guilt, revenge — passions that you could feel incubating in the icy silence of those endless masses for the dead.

And, when our time came, most of us students did our training for military service in the university militias, and it was in one of those long lines of tents, when a captain was doing the roll call, that I heard the name Plácido Dornaleteche, and, as soon as I could get away, I went to look for him, hoping we would be able to reminisce about those conversations in the street after school, our school being the Instituto Calderón de la Barca, a vast house that had originally belonged to the Jesuits until the republicans cleansed it by fire and changed it into a secular institution.

But he wasn’t there. Or, rather, Plácido was there in his tent, sitting on his kit bag, but he barely responded to my words and barely looked at me. And it was then that I felt the enormity of that day — which, at only twelve years old, I could have done nothing to avoid — when he and his mother came to my apartment asking for help. His tent was only thirty or forty metres from mine, and we saw and passed each other several times, but we never again spoke. Years before we were born, our French teacher had written a line of verse, saying that one of the two Spains would freeze our hearts.*

* A famous line by the great poet Antonio Machado, who died shortly after crossing the French border, as he fled Franco’s troops, along with his mother and his brother José and family. For a few years prior to the Civil War he taught French at the school mentioned in the story.

WHEN GRANDMA ANA came to live with us, she was wearing five skirts, one on top of the other, and in each skirt there was a pocket on the right-hand side, and in each pocket, in this order, from the outside in, she kept a rosary, the keys to her house in Villaboscosa, some loose change, a picture of San Francisco Solano and, in the deepest, most private of those pockets, the letter Grandpa wrote to her when they got engaged.

My mother gradually liberated Grandma from her skirts and placed the contents of their pockets, in the same order, in five small boxes: the rosary in box number one, the keys in box number two, and so on. My grandmother resisted at first, because, according to her, she was being stripped of all the things she always liked to have easily to hand, and, besides, despite the heating, she still felt cold; my mother bought her a handbag, which my grandmother rejected, and then some cotton petticoats and a woollen skirt, and, with that, she seemed finally to settle down.

On Sundays, she would open box number three and give me two ten- céntimo pieces or one real , which wasn’t much use to me, because you couldn’t buy anything for that price, but my parents always added a little something. Each night, before sleeping, alone in her bedroom, she said the rosary. The keys to her house in the village may have changed, because the house had been sold, but that was where my mother and my uncle had been born and where she had lived ever since she got married, and she always said that, regardless of whether the house had been sold or not, it was still hers, because she visited it every day in her memory and sometimes even rearranged the furniture. She would kiss San Francisco Solano before going to sleep and thank him for everything, and every Friday she would read my grandfather’s letter, because it had been on a Friday in May in 1896 that she’d received it.

She had a completely different way of naming the world to the rest of us. Spring was “the greening” or “the sweetness”; summer was “the great unbearable” or “the redness”; autumn was “fall time” or “the yellowing” and winter “hanky time” or “the greyness”. And, for her, the last day of life was “the last shout”.

“Nowadays,” she would say, “people know when the seasons start by the date on the calendar and often can’t tell the difference between the greening and fall time. Before, we used to feel it in our hearts, sense it in the smells and in the air. And who in the village knew when one was beginning and another ending? Possibly Don Emerio, the schoolmaster…”

Sometimes, she felt unwell, and Don Luis the doctor would come and see her. On some days, she would have backache or say she was too stiff with rheumatism to move, and yet she never stayed in bed. And if anyone came to visit or our neighbour Petra popped in for a chat, my grandmother would always give the same answer when asked:

“So how are things, Doña Ana? How are you today?”

“Much as you would expect. Waiting for the last shout.”

“Why don’t you go to bed? Wouldn’t you be more comfortable there than sitting in your armchair all day?”

“No, no, I’ve never been a lie-abed.”

That business about the last shout troubled me, because I could never work out if it was death that caused the shout or if the shout caused death, and from that point on I took great care never to shout, come what may.

I thought that all saints were born without a surname, and one day I asked my grandmother why she only kissed San Francisco Solano and not Santa Teresa, my namesake, or San Pedro, my father’s patron saint. And why he had a surname while others didn’t.