The Sacred Beasts (37 page)

The next woman to tell her mother’s story was a member of the
lawyer’s group, and she spoke in a voice of great gravity that could rise
spectacularly in a courtroom but was soft and gentle here. “My mother was born
in a small Andalusian village to a family of bakers and stone masons. During
the Spanish Civil War, she and my future father joined the Communist youth
group when they were fourteen years old and fought in the resistance. In 1936,
a junta formed that was headed by a traitor, Colonel Casada, who sold out his
followers to Franco. Among them was my mother, who told me everything that
happened to her, and when you hear it, you will know why I could never forget
it. She was taken away by Franco’s mercenaries, Africans who were covered with
stench and scabies. They took a train to the terrible prison at Guadalajara,
and she was placed in what was called the ‘scabies room,’ where everyone was
initially held since all had caught scabies from the mercenaries. This was a
room big enough to hold ten people, but at least sixty women were placed there.
No one could move unless everyone else moved, and it was a stark reminder of
how interdependent their fates were. Instantly, the women became very
protective of one another. This was the system they followed: during the day,
they gave bedding and space to the women with children since they needed to
feed them and rest from their special exertions. The other women stood. The
nighttime was so cramped that a woman even slept on the toilet bowl in spite of
all the interruptions to her sleep.

“Eventually, they were moved into a patio that was larger, but
their living conditions remained terrible. They received no more than a glass
of water every three days, and they were given only sulfur to clean themselves.
They were always hungry since they could eat nothing more than a bowl of soup
every day. In it was an onion alternating occasionally with lentils, but the
soup was also full of bugs and stones. My mother and the other communists had
their heads shaved and the letters UPB, for Union of Proletarian Brothers,
smeared on their scalps with tar. Everyone was close to starvation, of course,
and many did die, particularly the children.

“The women who had been clandestine agents were horribly beaten
and kicked in their kidneys to make them name their contacts and comrades. My
mother was proud to have given them only one name, and it was a man already
known to them. The response of the children to their mothers after torture was
utterly pathetic, since the women were thrown out of the torture rooms like
bags bent over double. For hours, they could only creep while bent double
because of the kicking, and some children couldn’t recognize them. One woman
had two young sons—a three-year-old and an eight-year-old. The younger child
cried and said this woman was not his mother, but the older son could make out
her features and said it was their mother. All three held one another and
cried.

“My mother, who eventually got a thirty-year sentence, went to
prisons all over Spain and knew women prisoners of all kinds. Convents, schools
and any other large public buildings were confiscated by Franco and used as
prisons. There were thousands of women in the prison at Durango. Some prisons
officials—including nuns and priests—were sadistic and others compassionate.
The latter gave more food to the women and saved many lives. When women were
slated for execution by firing squad at midnight, they intervened at the last
minute by formally verifying that no trial had been held, thus preventing the
execution on legal grounds. Among the lives saved by this method was my
mother’s.

“Nonetheless, the women’s stories were heart-breaking. Even old
women of eighty-five and girls of nine and ten were imprisoned as members of
the resistance. Many were not clandestine agents at all. Some had done nothing
more than cooking a meal for a soldier who knocked on their doors or doing a
laundry for a few of them. Some women prisoners had brothers who were
resistance fighters and had no other relationship to the resistance than that.
Some had done nothing more than curse when bombs fell on their villages and
were denounced by their neighbors.

“One woman was beaten twice a day for three months and went mad.
She spent the rest of her life in bed, nursed by her husband. One old woman in
her eighties was the grandmother of three resistance fighters. The Falangists
found her, beat her donkey to death in front of her, and dragged her to prison,
where she was given castor oil until her intestines were permanently damaged.
My mother had been an eldest born and was very close to her father. He moved
whenever she was transferred to another prison, since he felt that he had to be
near her. When he heard the length of her sentence, he had a stroke and had to
be hospitalized. He said her name over and over and asked about her until he
died.

“My mother also told me stories about the kindness of villagers
who lived around the prisons. They sent food in to the women and, when so many
children began to die, raised them in their homes so that they could survive
close to their mothers and visit them. There was horror, sadism, courage,
selflessness and compassion everywhere my mother went. Strangely enough, there
was inspiration, too. My mother, who was so young, played pranks and pulled off
stunts to raise the morale of the older women and distract them from their
worries. She would conduct mock trials of Franco in which women played the roles
of judges who handed down the most chillingly horrific sentences they could
imagine. Every May 1, they celebrated the anniversary of the Republic of Spain,
even though it had been defeated. My mother led women who marched around the
prison walls, one carrying an old broom with a red sweater hanging from it for
a flag. A young girl composed their anthem, which they sang in their loudest
voices, causing a roar that terrified their jailers. When women were
transferred to another prison, the villagers sang this anthem to them, again
showing their solidarity with them.

“My mother always said that her story was the story of so many
women, imprisoned together and giving one another the strength and resilience
to survive. She said that was the only meaning of life she could still believe
in after what had happened to her. Many years after Franco, in the 1980s, she
occasionally went out to dinner with two women who had been imprisoned with her
and had become close friends over the years. They met at a restaurant right
here in Barcelona. They had been through everything together—torture that had
ruined their spines and stays at a prison called the Cemetery of the Living
because the officials there tried to starve women to death.

“Yet there they were, together at a Barcelona restaurant, having
dinner long after Franco’s death. Everyone around them saw three bent old
crones, one with a walker, another with crutches; all with sparse hair, bent
frames and false teeth. The other diners could not know that they were looking
at the three most courageous women in Spain, who kept women alive when so many
died; who did not name their comrades when all others did; who believed in the
freedom of Spain when all was lost. That’s who those bent old crones were, the
greatest unknown heroes of the Spanish Civil War, and I am proud to say that
one of them was my mother.”

The room was silent again, but for women who were crying and those
trying not to. It would be difficult to tell another story that night, they
thought, yet they deeply wanted this revelatory process to continue.

The next woman to tell her story was a senior
from the writer’s group, a novelist of some renown. “My mother, my sister and I
lived in a small village outside of Madrid. My mother was of the same
generation as the heroic women resistance fighters of the Spanish Civil War,
but she was never a part of this. Still, she could be considered a kind of
clandestine agent, handling dangerous secrets for a living. When I was young,
all I knew about her profession was that it happened at night, and she left
with several pairs of her huge collection of gloves, all kept bleached and
spotlessly white. Years later, my aunt told me that she was a pajillera, a
woman who jerks men off in dark corners of nightclubs for money, though I did
not know this until I was an adult. Such women often sing a folk song while
jerking the man off for an extra bit of money. I find the thought of this so
bizarre that it may truly be unique to Spain. She left us at eleven pm, then
slept at home from four am to nine am, when we woke up, allowing herself a nap
in the afternoon as well as a fresh bleaching of her gloves.

“She was tall and willowy, slightly anorexic, with hugely dark
romantic eyes, a pale porcelain complexion and a mouth that never smiled, all
of which might have been useful to her in her work. She looked exquisitely
delicate and intense rather than sensually beautiful, and might have allowed
men the uniquely Spanish erotic fantasy that they were copulating in the
presence of the Virgin Mary, who forgave them their sin while carefully
retaining her virginity. My mother was always full of imagination and
contradiction which, not knowing their source, I loved in a kind of childish
delirium. My sister and I were told the most marvelous of bedtime stories. I
never found another daughter who heard such splendid tales as she reserved for
us.

“She knew all of the Spanish legends and bits of folklore and told
us the ones that particularly highlighted the virtuous actions of girls and
women. My mother said that Spain was once matriarchal, and there were remnants
left of it in its legends. We heard tales from all over Spain. She told us the
story of a Medieval Andalusian woman warrior who was sent into battle as a
knight and saved the life of a prince, who she later married. We heard a tale
from Aragon about another noblewoman whose father was captured in battle and
who rescued him from his captors through an ingenious stratagem.

“Women were also heroic in defending Spain’s
most honored values. A legend from Valencia involved a king’s daughter who
saved Christian prisoners from the tyrannical wrath of her Moorish father. We
heard stories from Seville in which old women were crime-fighters alongside of
kings as well as other legends in which traditional ‘women’s work’ was
eliminated by supernatural spirits. Another legendary noblewoman from Madrid
split her fortune with her maid because of the latter’s distinct probity and
honesty. Still another set the highest standards for her honor like a knight.
Even the Medieval College for Noble Young Women in the once-distinguished
University of Salamanca was given a folkloric origin. In my mother’s tale, some
of its first students were the daughters of a shoemaker, who were ennobled by
his good deeds and could be educated there. We grew up thinking all the legends
of Spain were about heroic women.

“So, she left us every night in her spotless gloves, to dream of
the heroism of women, while she went to her work of quiet desperation in the
darkest and most sordid corners of Madrid. She also wrote poetry, which she
never showed us. I once found it, however, hidden beneath her bedroom rug,
imperceptible to anyone but a child whose world is so circumscribed and
domestic that it alone can see the tiny rise on the edge of a rug that conceals
a secret. I found her poems very beautiful, all concerning a countryside
arcadia that was probably completely imaginary.

“As an adult, I have often meditated upon the stark division
within her deepest self or spirit, creating visions of nature and folkloric
women heroes when her own life was so obviously the reverse. How can a life
create such insurmountable gulfs and then maintain them, I wondered. Why must
we do such things? It may be the most profound question of our lives since, in
its largest terms, it recreates the very division of good and evil that is the
core of our religions and many philosophies as well.

“When I was twelve years old, I committed the terrible youthful
indiscretion of trying to find out her secret. I followed her out one night,
all the way to the bars, parks and squares on the edges of Madrid where she did
her nightly work. As she lurked in the shadows and peripheries of those dens of
red neon and orange globes that lit the night, so did I. It was not difficult
for me to hide myself, since the principle of such shadowy corners is that
their contents will never be seen or revealed. I was as invisible as she and
her patrons were.

“I followed her like a spy or a lover and saw what she did without
any understanding of what it meant, since my grasp of adult sex was virtually
non-existent. I felt the romance of the shadows, the clandestine, the whispers,
mumbled needs and muffled cries of satisfaction, the secrets at the heart of
the night, whether lit by stars or neon; without truly understanding anything I
was witnessing. I followed her for two nights and then, on the second night
when I was hiding behind a decorative pillar in one of the bars she frequented,
I stared for the last time at her interaction with a man at a dark, far table.
For, in the next minute, I was face-to-face with my mother, who had seen me!
Her face was very dark in the shadows and so it remained as she took me home in
a silent fury. After she closed our door, she cried and screamed at me for
doing what had always been forbidden.

“I had no excuse for myself and so, irrelevantly, I told her that
I had found her poems and believed them to be so beautiful, so very beautiful!
I had followed her to understand their beauty, and now I was crying and
screaming, too, as I told her how wonderful her words were. This made her all
the more horrified and frenzied, and she tore up all the poems in front of me
and said they were, in their falseness, as sordid as everything I had seen.
Since I didn’t understand what I had seen and was so innocent as not to
recognize sordidness, I cried even louder that the poems were wondrous
transformations of the world; they were my sisters and brothers, my aunts and
uncles, my cousins, my grandparents, my entire family, my cats and dogs and all
the kittens and puppies they could produce, all the children I would ever have
and all the tales I would tell them, and surely! Surely they were all the
legendary noblewomen of Spain she had told me of! A cornucopia of real and
imaginary life flooded out of me. Her poetry was all I had, the best of her,
the best that she had ever thought and put down into words, and now it had been
destroyed in front of me!