Alegria’s Kitchen, Sopelana, Basque Country, Spain
Circa 1986
My grandmother, ‘amoma’ in my ’second’ mother tongue, was many things. She was not just the force of evil that made me take a tablespoon of liver oil every time I went over to her house. She was also the one who brushed my hair back so tight with her pearl hand brush that my ears ached. Eventually, I discovered her other life and I forgave all the vile dollops and the brushing of my curls.
On Fridays after school, the youngest of the family, my cousin Mikel and I were summoned to her house, her kitchen in fact. She put us to work helping with dinner. Mikel seating at the kitchen table reading the quantities out loud and ‘Zipi y Zape’ comics simultaneously and me dangerously close to the hob wanting to smell and taste every sauce of everything. Being 8 years old, I used to hide her reading glasses in her apron just to see her going crazy looking for them… only to leave them in the fridge, where I knew she would find them. She then turned the radio even louder and sang along and gave us treats to celebrate the discovery. Life was a carnival whenever possible and I wish I had paid attention to her ways instead of staring in disbelief.
She always dressed in black and if I mentioned it, her reply was always “Death does not do you part”. I was too young to understand her strong sense of mourning, especially as she was so vain with her red lipstick and silver hair. Beautiful until we said goodbye, she was not one to apologise for it. Every morning she tapped her eyelids and lashes with a little drop of extra virgin olive oil, she made her own glycerin soap and she never trusted a moisturiser.
Her immense kitchen was the place where we plotted our boarding school escapades, she half listened smiling, insisting we got our hands dirty and get amassing to the bottom of the pan instead. Mikel refused to get involved unless we made burgers so it became a Friday custom. Her simple recipe involved marinating the minced beef in dry white wine with a mix of sage and ‘romero’ herbs, she added rosemary to everything. Seasoning, onion and garlic and the juice of a big tomato was added and it all came together. While it settled in the fridge we played Star Wars vs. Marvel and she tried to peel and wedge potatoes around us, whisking the egg batter and preparing the flour to dip the meat patties in before the frying.
I never knew what was in those potatoes and I have never been able to find the same taste. My mom insists it was just paprika and seasoning, and the fact that she deep fried them in olive oil until golden.
Playtime was up as soon as we broke something or each other, so she would tirade in her thick Southern accent and Mikel would give me the last nudge leaving me ever so confused trying to decipher what was all the shouting about. Her expressions were from such a faraway land to me that they never failed to amuse me. Even 15 years later she would still come up with new ones, I always wondered where she got them from as she only spoke with her cousin about twice a month and visited her birthplace only once a year. My godmother, her older child, never lost her accent either and they were a dialectic bomb together. It is the sweetest and funniest accent, and I still find you could get away with murder apologising in that mellow tone.
She was extraordinary, and I never told her, with her crazy ways and loud mouth, I never even took her seriously.
Nobody was ever allowed to go through her collections of all sorts while she was alive, so when my dad and I were clearing out her house, we found a wooden box with rolls of fabric inside. These notes from the Republic made my ‘amoma’ a stranger to me. She was not just a daft soul who loved dressing up in frills and dancing ‘Sevillanas’. All of a sudden I knew why I found her in her veranda crying sometimes. I understood that any Flamenco hands clapping made her skin crawl because raw emotion took over. I understood her solitude and her black dresses, her sometimes distant gaze and her temper. I understood her outbursts of laughing and crying when I was home one hour late on her watch. It all came slowly rolling my way.
Why had she not shaken me and made me realise it was a miracle I existed at all? Realising of her coping mechanism was a blow below the belt.
A dozen historical questions spilled out of my mouth. I had studied both Spanish Republics and reluctantly learned about Franco. At a family level, all I knew was that my grandfather had been a communist and sentenced to death for seven years, held as a political prisoner. My dad and I took a break and in that big table in her kitchen he drew diagrams and time frames and the untold story of my humble ‘amoma’.
Born into a noble family, heiress to half of the village land, she married at 17. My grandfather was the youngest ever Major of the town, blond, blue eyed and as good in economics as he was playing the clarinet. He was also a General for the Republican side, which proved to be the less popular, (oh the irony!). These politics got my ‘amoma’ into a lot of danger. Her first daughter, my godmother, was almost 3 years old when the Civil War was declared, acquiring a brother half way through it. In only a year, from 1939 to 1940, they lost everything, the land, the orange tree fields, their businesses of confectionery and ‘peinetas’, their ‘cortijo’ and everything in it. All my ‘amoma’ had time to do was grabbing her two kids, aged 6 and 2, and run for hiding. Her husband had been betrayed, small towns are the same everywhere, and the ‘nacionales’ knew where he was and how to get there fast.
She was informed of his imprisonment by neighbours, and continued to know of his whereabouts only via third hand information for the 11 years he lived as a political prisoner, the first 7, sentenced to death. That sentence meant they were called at random from the over populated common jails and were escorted to a patio in the middle of the building for everyone to see how they were shot. She lived not knowing when the final news would be whispered. She traveled the South following any thread of information she was given, from one prison town to the next, with two children grasping her skirt and not even a suitcase. Due to the ‘overbooking’ of the jails with so many political prisoners, it was difficult to follow Franco’s commands of keeping them separate or isolated so they were moved constantly, or killed, depending on how many new arrivals were expected. Luck was on their side in the sense that his last name was pretty unique and his hair so fair, that he was recognised in any listing, which made her inquiries a lot easier.
They traveled by foot, sleeping in farmlands and joining the gypsies’ wagons whenever lucky. Year after year, making friends along the way and cooking in houses in exchange of a mattress, food and a bath. Her twenties doomed, all across Spain, all the way to the North, where they finally met again. Two strangers who never gave up on each other.
Eleven years had passed since they had spoken. Eleven years since she had heard his goodbye in the form of “be by the river tomorrow at dusk, we will be driven closer to the Portuguese border”. My Nan knew those words would be honoured as a promise.
The currency we found in the box was all the money they had kept secret away from the banks when the Civil War started. She hid it inside her girdle all throughout Spain and refused to exchange it for Franco’s money. She could not comprehend there would be a country where Franco would be allowed to rule sovereign. It was a bad dream that simply could not turn reality.
She never spoke about the horrors of the war or how they got out of it. Their third kid was born 2 years after the “monarchy” was re-established and the prisons were aired. She was 36 years old, away from what she knew and with a shadow for a husband. She was also far from the only woman in black walking around Spain.
That day I also understood why she used to say “En el amor y en la guerra, no hay héroes, solo tontos.”
“No heroes in love or war, only idiots.”
Rhéa Nielsen (c) 2008