Over a Cup of Coffee: This Is the Story of My Life, but It Could Be That of Any Other Woman.

Over a Cup of Coffee

This is the story of my life, but it could be that of any other woman.

Amparo Calvo Echeverría

Translated from Spanish by Christine Wate

Copyright © 2010 by Amparo Calvo Echeverría.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2010913384

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4535-7428-7

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4535-7427-0

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4535-7429-4

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The front cover photo Bound for Venezuela 1953

The painting on the back cover Portrait by Gino Hollander

Xlibris Corporation

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Contents

1

Requiem

2

Alicia’s Book

3

And Alicia Appeared

4

Ana’s Book

5

I Was Born During the Republic

6

Stalingrad

7

Puente de Toledo

8

My Years at Girod

9

Witold’s Book

10

Igor’s Book

11

Lilla Edet

12

On the Costa

13

The Book of My Children . . . The Boys

14

That Difficult Time . . . Adolescence

15

And Jan Appeared

16

Aunt Po

For my children.

For my grandchildren.

1

Requiem

Now that my time is running out, now that passions seem to have gone to sleep and anger has calmed down, now that so very many wounds have healed over, now that peace closes in on me, now . . . I want to write, to explain, to speak, for my children, for those friends who could so easily have been my daughters and who have filled my days and my life. Now is when I want to thank them for their friendship, their cheer, for sharing . . .

I want to tell this story for myself, for those who want to read it, for my children, for those who are close to me and those who are not, for the ones who were snatched from me. I want to speak out, shout, to be able to go in peace.

I felt tranquil, at peace. You had left my life and your own, fighting without a sign of a truce; and now, in that tiny bare room you were lying there in a white shroud with some flowers, you and I, face-to-face . . . you looked so tiny. Why do dead people shrink so much? And I still could not understand . . . I could not understand you.

You gave birth to me so that I could be a servant to you and yours. A Mediterranean woman. I kissed your cold cheek and felt sorry for you, for your terrible inability to love, for your harshness, for your lack of generosity, for your obstinacy in forcing me to bear your blame. Why? Because I am a woman?

I who have had to pay such a high price for my freedom, who am like a bird, who could so easily have been born of a cabbage, who more than once have made a joke about just that. When I lose my parents, I’ll take a big photo of two cabbages, green and leafy, and I’ll put it in a frame and write at the bottom: these are who I would have liked to have had as my ancestors. Like in that beautiful Italian movie Three Girls from Rome (Le ragazze di Piazza di Spagna), I think, which I saw as a girl, and where a boy asks his mother, Where do babies come from? and she replies, From cabbages. And one day while playing in the street, a truck loaded with vegetables drives by and a cabbage falls off, and the boy picks it up and runs after the vehicle. Stop, stop! You’ve lost a baby!

Pain drowns me. My flesh and innards hurt. And I am powerless to separate others from her coldness, her indifference, or perhaps, from her blindness.

If I were at home, at my home in the South, with the same pain, it would not be the same with that sky and that sea, the bougainvilleas, my hydrangeas, the jasmine on my little terrace with its wooden benches, and those beautiful tiles I brought back from Iznik; the pain would be bearable because I could shout, cry to exhaustion, and beat the walls. But here, in this little room that presses in on me, what? Is there no light, no Sun, no love? I am lying on the same bed where my father lost his energy and faded away a little each day before moving to the hospital finally to die . . .

A number of years have gone by since then. On the bed are the same old blankets, heavy, which hardly let me move my feet. I cannot stop shivering; and the sky, which I imagine rather than see through that rickety window—that Madrid sky—sometimes so well loved, other times so hated.

I could not convince you then, Mother, to paint the walls of what was your room too, to throw away some knickknacks, hang some new curtains—no, everything remained the same as it was the last time my father left, never to return. The walls hung with photographs yellowed by the passing of time, some old calendar pictures; and on the bed, a Mariquita Pérez doll dressed as a schoolgirl, which my father gave you when you were sixty years old because you had never had such a pretty doll before. But you, you moved to the room next door to be more comfortable, you said, and left me this one for the short visits I paid you. After all, it’s only a couple of days.

I lived through my father’s last days. He had been tired for months, exhausted, even talking was a huge effort. My brother, the eldest, had arrived three months earlier already all dressed in black.

My aunt rang me, alarmed. You’d better come, your elder brother’s taking it out on your younger brother who is taking it out on your mother. Elder . . . younger . . . all of us were over fifty. It’s very awkward, both of them drink. And one day, there is going to be a serious problem. Your father’s wasting away. He has no strength. He’s asking for you . . .

So I got in my car, but I was too late. My father had just been admitted to the Military Hospital. Twenty-four hours later, I had to return to the Costa for work; and hours later, I was driving to Madrid again. I had traveled this road so many times over the last few years! Some, just to arrive at dusk and spend some time with him on the balcony or sitting at the table, sleep a few hours, and get back in the car at dawn.

Until then, I had never been with anyone in the last days of their life, and it was hard. He was distressed as though death had come to surprise him midlife, totally unprepared, without having packed his luggage. What’s going to happen to my family? he kept asking in anguish. His family . . . his family consisted only of his wife and younger son, and not even then could I lie to him. Patiently, trying not to hurt him, I said, You know, you have always known that your son can’t live on his own, that he is ill or mad. Military residences are more than acceptable places. My mother, she can count on me for your sake. I will do that for you, but I will not look after him. I will not take him home with me.

And that look. I only have to close my eyes to feel the look you gave me, to sense the hate behind the reproach.

But I could not promise you that, not even at your deathbed, because I would have had to keep that promise and you knew that. It was a duel.

My sons traveled overnight by train just to say good-bye to you. They arrived with their rucksacks, exhausted. At the reception, the soldiers checked carefully through all their belongings, inspected their papers, called the room to confirm their identity, and finally, let them through. It was a difficult time. The army had suffered a terrorist attack a few days previously, and all possible precautions were being taken. They spoke briefly to their grandfather, overcome. It was not like seeing a young, good-looking soldier dying in a war movie. They returned home some hours later on the night train.

You were the eldest of all the family, a kind of patriarch, and all of the older members who were still alive and other younger ones, all of them came to give you a last embrace.

I begged the doctors not to make you suffer in vain, that you were surrounded by your loved ones, that they should let you go in peace.

You had sent the chaplain away, you did not need him, and we were alone. You had oxygen to help you breathe, then you reached out and put your hands round my neck. For a moment, I thought you wanted to hold on to me in desperation. But no, I was terrified. You were trying to strangle me, and I could not get your hands away. Thin, wasted, where did you get the strength from? I could not say if that struggle lasted ten seconds or ten minutes. It felt eternal, and only when I managed to break free did I ring the bell and stand flat up against the wall opposite your bed in anguish.

I tried to explain to the nurse what had happened, and she looked at me for a moment and asked, Did you talk to him about money?

Even before you left us, you said farewell to your wife with loving words; you were always in love with her.

You removed your gold teeth and your watch. You wanted to leave this life as you had arrived. Naked.

I shivered with your last breath; and I would like to think, for your good, that that scene between us had never existed, that it was a hallucination, that you did not know what you were doing, but the memory of it has haunted me for a long time.

You were there, Mother, and he was staring at me without blinking. Yes, you had heard it; but you did not move a single muscle in your face as if you were made of stone, as if you were dead, like now, because even when you were alive you were already dead.

Yes, I have a family that is not yours. My loving family in the South. You have always been chasing me, cornering me. Yes, I have two daughters who were taken from me at gunpoint because people did not like me, because I had a lover, because I loved life and laughter, because I thought that life was a wonderful thing, but also because . . . And you all closed your eyes as if it were nothing to do with you. Also because my father was a red, a republican, an atheist, and read Voltaire and Rousseau when reading here was by decree. And he was in jail, of course! And I was proud to be his daughter.

Ah, and for another reason and one that I am ashamed of, not proud of, because of that son of yours who is looking at me now like a stone effigy; like Doris Lessing’s fifth child, although he is the third. We got him out of jail in South America where he had ended up accused of rape of a minor. And he would have been sent to the San Juan de los Morros jail. Why did we get him out? And you swore it was a lie, and you keep swearing with your false morality.

It is true that you dared to insult me when you found out, on my own admission, that I was pregnant. I who had worked since I was a child, who had gone to South America with three dollars in my pocket and bravery in my heart . . . or was I just naive? Like those North Africans who cross the Strait of Gibraltar in open boats, more and more of them, and they either never make it or are washed up dead.

You insulted me. I who was earning my own living, who was living far from home, and who did not need you for shit.

Never, over all these years have you shown the slightest sign of humility and said you were sorry; you have kept cornering me, despite the distance, and know nothing or very little of my life, forcing me to accept that gem of a son of yours who used to touch little girls’ bottoms.

Why do you insist? Why have you all insisted on leaving me this legacy? Because you are, we are, all Mediterranean women? Well, you are a northern woman, and I am a voluntarily adopted southerner, like I heard that fantastic Iñaki Gabilondo saying one day: that Seville had made him sensual.

I have insisted all these years that I do not have tickets for this draw, and even so, all of you decided that I should accept the prize. Women, prisoners of their fate . . . this is for me, that is for you.

No, no. I accept the burden of blame for my own errors, for my grief, for my happiness, and there has been plenty. Those of others, no, do you love me so ill? And that terrible lack of respect for my own will, for my moral and physical integrity.

And I am still looking at you as if it were still possible to make you hear my voice. And on the other side of the glass, the whole family observes my calm with a critical attitude. My lips, yes, they want to know what I am saying to you. Perhaps they expect a miracle, that I will turn to them in repentance and say, Yes, I will take my brother home with me, to my home, and I will look after him.

No, Mother, we have talked about this so many times and over so many years. I’m fed up!

When you die, I’ll come, I’ll bury you, and then I’ll leave.

And here I am.

And I am going home, to the South, to live my life; and when my time comes, my death.

2

Alicia’s Book

You came to South America with me, without a ticket, in my belly.

We knew little of that land. Little? We did know that it was hot although I didn’t notice it. My life had undergone a turnaround, and my courage, or rather my recklessness, my irresponsibility, which I can analyze now from the perspective of time. When I see those men on the way to Bolonia, Baelo Claudia, El Chaparral, as the Sun rises. Those men of all colors walking among the trees, frightened, hiding, tricked, often by their own countrymen and also often stopped by the Civil Guard and sent home—as if they had a home!—rather to their lack of liberty, to their poverty. That is how I arrived. But no one could send me back; I had paid for my ticket, my papers were in order, and yes, I was running away from the lack of light and joy in our homeland at that time—so sad, so dark.

Then, South America was a long way away. Now you just get on board one of those marvelous airplanes, read a newspaper, flick through a couple of magazines, you have a glass or two of wine, sleep a while—and bang!—there you are.

We put into every port, and I became drunk with the Sun and the new horizons! I could shower every day, any time . . . a dream come true. You know, ever since I was a little girl, I had dreamed that when I wasn’t poor anymore I would take a shower every day and change the sheets on my bed every day too; and suddenly on that beautiful little ship, Virginia de Churruca, in a cabin with four bunks and a porthole that separated me from the ocean with some travelers who were going to South America for the first time in search of fortune and others who had already been . . . I could spend hours in the shower, wonderful!

I have to say that I have been true to that simple, lovely pleasure with only the odd exception: on the occasional trip to an oasis in an Arab country, during those very short hospital stays to give birth rather than anything else, I have showered every day, once, twice, three times . . .

And my other wish has also become routine. On hot days in summer, I put my sheets in the washing machine early in the morning and hang them out to dry in the fresh air. And at night, without ironing, I spread them on the mattress and enjoy the smell of the Sun and perhaps because of these little indulgences I have never again felt poor. I have felt destroyed, exhausted, cornered, full of obligations without a cent more than for absolute necessities, but poor? Not poor. I have learned to take enjoyment from small pleasures and big ones too.

The dolphins played at the bows of the ship and I felt free.

In Puerto Rico, I watched, amazed, as the stevedores at the port worked the lifting gear and unloaded goods with gloves on. A black man moved among those enormous bales, wearing a cap and yellow gloves. Incredible, I was in a country where workers protected their hands with gloves!

My father had told me that as a lad he had worked in Pau at a slaughterhouse and that French people went to work by bicycle and wore shoes even if it wasn’t Sunday. And they only had one or at most two children. My love affair with France started right there. I wanted to be French, just as later, when sailing the Caribbean, I decided that from then on I wanted to be a citizen of the world.

I found it difficult to get used to the idea of being a mother—raped, full of anger, I didn’t want to have you for a time . . . a long time. It was difficult, at least for me, and I was so confident, so unwary . . . all I found was a French doctor who traveled from Trinidad at the beginning of each month to free women from unwanted children. He might not even have been a doctor; and finally, with my hand in my pocket, clutching my money, I was waiting. I don’t know if I was frightened or tired, and there were these two brown-skinned women, young and beautiful, painted faces, with their jewels and their low necklines, laughing. And suddenly, they started whispering and talking about our doctor—they were waiting too—that he had been in Guyana, in the bagne, that he had run away to Caracas when a woman was found dead in his surgery and that he only came in secret when he had patients.

I don’t think I even stopped to think. I got up, feeling the banknotes in my clenched fist, and walked down the stairs. It was a small building, and the stairs led straight to the street in one of those little colonial squares, which at that time were so common in Caracas.

The nurse came running out after me, but there was nothing more to say, and I kept walking. She followed, saying I should not be afraid and asking what I was going to do as a single woman with a baby. A single woman? According to the press, 60 percent of children here are born out of wedlock!

So I sat on a bench in the beautiful, welcoming Morelos square.

And I made peace with my body and my breasts, which had hardly dared to grow, as frightened as I.

And I let the days go by, enjoying that country, so full of light, which had welcomed me without thinking.

And I worked and was well paid. Work has always been a blessing in my life, a gift. It has been within reach. I haven’t even had to look; there it was waiting for me.

I started to work at a very early age, like almost all kids in those days, and since that day when I began sewing buttons and sweeping the floor in that raincoat workshop until today, work has always occupied an important part of my life; and I knew straight away that the only thing that could offer me the independence I desired was work, and I still think the same way. Work, and much later, the pill . . . little more . . . perhaps, jeans, which have allowed women to travel the world over in that sort of personal, comfortable uniform. In jeans, woman can travel through international airports, through Africa, European museums, have a coffee at the Ritz, and at times, even go to the parties at the Marbella Club.

On a visit to my mother’s home and talking of my first jobs, with a needle in her hand, she said, For all you earned!

I had other jobs, always modest ones, like working as a trouser maker. And each afternoon I would go from the Puente de Toledo to Atocha in the tram, which went up to Embajadores to deliver, it was said, two pairs of pressed trousers covered with a white cloth. And I was an apprentice in one of those districts built hastily after the war with corrugated roofs and earthen floors and squat toilets in an outhouse, one for each two houses; and in the middle of the rows of homes is a wide street with standpipes in the middle. At one end, on a raised area was a miniscule church where the priest came on Sundays to say mass, and he would stand at the door in order to be seen by all the neighbors who would fill that wide street around the standpipes listening in silence. The district was called Comillas, and the streets bore the names of Falangist heroes fallen in the war for God and for Spain; and it was said that in this area, during the Republic, Manuel Azaña had spoken for hours at a political rally.

There with her sisters and parents, all crowded together but all very clean, Aurora, the seamstress, had her little workshop with two sewing machines and five or six of us girls. She had a boyfriend in the Spanish Legion with long sideburns and a fierce, attractive face who got her pregnant; and they married, he in his uniform and she in a black dress embroidered with sequins and a tiny hat. She was kind and very sweet. And the day her baby was born, she sent her sister to tell me that work would start again the following day.

There she was telling us that Aurora’s baby was very big, that the birth had been difficult, that the midwife was very experienced, that the baby would not come, that its head was all purple, that Aurora had screamed a lot, that she had wanted to die. And I was standing with my back against the wall, and I gradually slid down until I fainted. And the neighbors laughed and my mother said, What did you think? That it was easy? You won’t be able to have children. And I looked at her angrily.

Our best customers were the prostitutes from Ave María street and surroundings. They are the only people who used satin underwear and dressed in silk and blouses with low lace necklines, and they would joke among themselves that one knew that another was lousy in bed. And they showed us their cards, which the surgery stamped each week so that men would know that they were not sick.

At the entrance to the Progreso metro station, some girls would shout: Señoritas for a peseta! Señoritas for a peseta! And I was confused and talked to Aurora about it, and she calmed my fears. (Translator’s note: señorita means a young lady but was also a brand of a small cigar.)

And other more difficult jobs, the factory by the river run by the Portuguese women where we wrapped sweets eight hours a day without a break, and I got paid less than the others because I wasn’t yet fourteen. And on Saturdays, we climbed ladders to clean the boilers of fat and remains of sugar until they shone.

The woman in charge would get angry with me because my bucket of sweets, beautifully wrapped in three different papers, weighed less than those of the other more skilled girls.

Sometimes, after work, I would take a towel and soap and go to wash away all the dirt at the public baths on Embajadores.

The occasional Christmas I temped at Sepu and studied at night; I learned to type without looking at the keyboard and to take shorthand with a teacher in La Pasa street, and I would read until my eyelids drooped by the light of a fifteen-watt bulb. I devoured anything I could get my hands on, and some books truly left their mark, like Out of the Night by Jan Valtin, We the Living by Ayn Rand, Les Misérables by Victor Hugo and The Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas, or the works of Voltaire, Ortega y Gasset, Unamuno.

Between dreams and reality, I would cry inconsolably over the romantic heroines and scream with rage at the injustice I read about and sensed. Much later, I would cry bitterly, once again, on reading the story of Gervasia in L’Assommoir by Émile Zola.

And I continued to dream—it is my favorite pastime—years later, when after working for five as a typist at Girod, I could board that ship and leave for South America.

Yes, I was well paid. I didn’t feel like a stranger. I had arrived at a hostel in the colonial quarter, on the corner of Rosalía if I remember rightly, with more than thirty young men, the cook, her daughter, and myself. They improvised a little room on the terrace by the laundry room just for me, and the boys hung a curtain across the windowless space.

In the kitchen, we would sit at a long table to eat in two shifts, plenty of food and large dishes full of tropical fruit, which I had never seen before; and the lads would rush to secure a place facing the television set, placed on a shelf high on the opposite wall, like an absolute god.

On Sundays, they would fight to take me out dancing, and I would write long letters for them to their girlfriends and families in Galicia or Asturias. There was the occasional one from Madrid as well, but they would write their own letters. One, who was chauffeur to an important gentleman, sometimes gave me a lift to the office in his twenty-foot-long blue Oldsmobile.

I moved as soon as I could to a recently refurbished apartment with large windows, spacious and empty—empty because I didn’t have anything to put in it—a mattress on the floor, that wool-filled mattress, which my mother had insisted I take with me on the journey much to my embarrassment, a little kerosene stove—and joy of joys!—a washing machine, which I bought in installments with my first wages, what luxury! I have never since washed anything by hand, and I was expecting a baby.

And you arrived. What did I know about babies? I had never had a baby in my arms in my life before, and my skinny body didn’t even help me come to terms with the idea that something important was about to happen.

A book, I had a book of forty-eight pages that I still keep as a relic. Nociones de Puericultura by Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las J.O.N.S., Sección Femenina (An Introduction to Childcare by Spanish Traditionalist Falange of the Assemblies of National-Syndicalist Offensive), left over from my Social Service, that sort of military service that