Final score: 4 to 1, much emotion, Catalonian, restrained at the start of the playoffs. A sigh.
A little bit of a breather for Barcelona.
Joy in the transported neighborhood of Sant Gervasi in Mexico City.
On September 15, as Khrushchev[7] was flying to the United States and the world debated the truth regarding the Soviet rocket’s moon landing, international legislation sought to establish rights to the moon to avoid old conflicts, Mexico was celebrating its national holidays, and a two hundred — kilo tusk from some prehistoric animal was discovered in the Olive Valley in Chihuahua.
An intact souvenir from a disappeared world.
Two days after the national holidays[8] and the subsequent hangovers, on September 18, 1959, Khrushchev condemned capitalism “but tasted and enjoyed it,” 1,500 candidates for parliamentary office presented themselves in Great Britain, and typhoon Sara left behind “a wake of death and destruction” on American shores.
Nothing happened in Barcelona because there, or here, the world was turning more and more into a place like any other.
And abroad, in spite of the Republican efforts to take Barcelona and Catalonia in a journey to exile, everything was being transformed.
The world was lying in wait.
And on the following day, September 19, 1959[9], as Khrushchev proposed retiring all the world’s armies in four years and Mexico debuted a new system to light public areas in the capital, Barcelona continued slowly darkening. It was turning into something opaque, hermetic, authoritarian, and fascist that was getting harder to move away from by the minute. It was harder to feel safe. It was more unimaginable to flee, to fly, to escape.
Francoism had been in power twenty years, which is why one Barcelona remained living there and another had left. And this story[10] is about a famous crime in Catalonian high society, abroad. The one in the other Barcelona, in the other Sant Gervasi, so cozy and pleasant, which had needed to escape.
But then, on September 20, 1959[11], in the Mexican newspaper El Universal, a woman named Amalia published her recipes for pastries to accompany tea: marion cookies, nut pastries, almond croissants, and tropical bread. A woman named Amalia published a breath of fresh air in the midst of all that reality and alienation.
A pause. A cookie + a hot sip.
Slurp. Napkin. Thanks.
Just as the press confirmed that field mice were devouring babies in Mexican towns, it also reported that in Santa Cruz de Juventino, Guanajuato, a little girl named Elsa Medina Huerta had died: Elsita.
Amen.
Amen for this world, and for that time in which Mercedes Cassola died; she was born long before Francoism, long before the war, long before the republic, exile, the frozen world in which both of us were born that was what Sant Gervasi had become, and which she took with her ten thousand kilometers away.
Amen for Mercedes Cassola, who had to leave the sunny city in which she was born.
Twice as close to me.
And amen for this world, and for that time in which Mercedes Cassola died so far from home and from how things might have been. Amen at last for Mercedes Cassola, far from History and from the inertia of the Barcelona neighborhood in which she grew up, and in which she lived through the war, and from which she escaped when they locked her in and she realized that she had to leave because she wouldn’t be able to do so later. Everything would turn into Mary Nothing-Going-on-Here Poppins. Instantly, her world would be closed off. Asphyxiating. Claustrophobic. Constantly the same. Repetitive. The environs kept purifying itself until it turned into the placid neighborhood it had been before, and which it wanted to be after the war, and even later: today. A peaceful and quiet neighborhood in which its inhabitants took refuge when Barcelona was under siege. Even though today, again, the wind whistles between streets, parks, balconies, houses, one-story buildings.
I was born in this neighborhood. And these continue to be our streets, our parks, our balconies, our homes, our onestory buildings.
Not so before. Before me, fifty years ago, Sant Gervasi was an immovable place in which those who stayed wanted to believe in the feeling that they were safe. A beautiful Mary Poppins world in which things had only one meaning which defined their context, a world into which I was born eleven years later.
Then 1959 arrived.
That’s when the Cuban Revolution triumphed and the first photos were taken of the dark side of the moon. Then — still 1959 — Francoist forces celebrated twenty years in power, the United Nations declared the Rights of Children, the Inter-American Development Bank was established, and Sukarno[12] installed a dictatorship in Indonesia.
Boris Vian, Camilo Cienfuegos, Buddy Holly, and Lou Costello died.
But Robert Smith, Rigoberta Menchú, Jeanette Winterson, and Evo Morales were born.
In this world, at that time, Mercedes Cassola[13] died far from her home, from her past, and from the simple world that she’d left behind so as not to suffer within it. A world she’d wanted to take with her when she left Sant Gervasi: leaving Barcelona.
This was ten years before the murder of Roman Polanski’s wife in California[14].
In that world, and at that time, things happened this way: On September 13, 1959, Mercedes Cassola was killed in Mexico City in an eminently Republican neighborhood that could have reminded her of her hometown of Juárez in Mexico — “eighteen stab wounds made by a slender knife plunged from the tip to the bottom of the blade.”[15] She lived in a house she owned on Lucerna Street, number 84-A[16], which would have reminded us of a building in her native Sant Gervasi, our Sant Gervasi, a solid and safe neighborhood that managed to be flexible enough to imagine itself in America, flexible enough to imagine itself in Mexico. Far from that broken neighborhood in Barcelona in which Mercedes Cassola got the impression that people were too much alike, more and more so all the time, and a feeling that Francoism was going to bury them up to their necks.
Especially before.
Because before, when Mercedes Cassola was born, before the war, before the dictatorship, and before exile, Sant Gervasi — especially Sant Gervasi — was a kind of “old neighborhood” that in Barcelona is referred to as a barrio-desiempre, a forever kind of place: peaceful streets, families with familiar surnames, similar lives, parks with playgrounds, small hills that are really centuries-old private gardens, low buildings, open skies, guards keeping watch, solid steel fountains, trees. Kids.
A pleasant place. A peaceful world. Safe, pretty.
Time passed the same as always, because it was the only way everyone knew to feel safe. That we knew. Because what’s certain is that we, all of us, aliens in a devastated Barcelona, were a little safer. A little farther away from that city depressed by the impunity of the fascist authorities which surrounded it with big, invisible eyes spying on everyone all the time.
Huge Eyes Watching Everyone.
But not Mercedes Cassola. She was able to leave at the right moment, to flee barefoot until she was found many years later by one of her two servants — María Luisa Monroy — when she went to wake her on the morning of September 14, 1959:
7
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev was born April 15, 1894, in the mining village of Kalinovka, and died September 11, 1971, in Moscow. At twenty-three, he had joined the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. And from that point on, he fought with the Red Army during the Civil War (1918–1920), had a political career in the Ukraine, was first secretary for the Moscow region and the Ukraine, tried to suppress Ukrainian nationalists, directed resistance against the Germans during World War II (1939–1945), and was elected prime minister of the U.S.S.R. He used his power to reconcile with Tito’s Yugoslavia, to break with Mao Zedong’s China, to settle Siberia, and to aid the Hungarian government against an anticommunist uprising. In 1962, he was accused of encouraging a cult of personality, just as had happened with Stalin, and he was expelled from the Communist Party and forced to resign from his post.
8
Since 1825, September 16 has been officially celebrated as the beginning of Mexican independence:
9
Twenty-six years later, in 1985, an earthquake shook Mexico City, killing between ten thousand and forty thousand people.
10
Lolita Bosch: “In This World, and at the Time Mercedes Died” (“En este mundo y en aquel tiempo en el que murió Mercedes”).
11
Ten years before Argentina had satellite communications, and twenty years before Bokassa I was defeated in what is today the Central African Republic.
12
Ahmet Sukarno (Surabaya, 1901–Jakarta, 1970) founded the National Indonesian Party. As punishment for his nationalist audacity, the Dutch colonial authorities detained him and he spent two years in prison. In 1939, he was exiled to the island of Sumatra, where he was liberated by the Japanese in 1942, during one of the battles of World War II. When the conflict was over, he declared Indonesia’s independence on August 17, 1945. And thus began a war against the “low countries” that wouldn’t end until 1949, when Indonesian independence was finally recognized. In 1956, Sukarno suppressed all political parties, and he established a dictatorship in 1959 which he called
14
On an August night in 1968, Sharon Tate, wife of film director Roman Polanski, was having a party at her home with her friends Abigail Folger, Jay Sebring, and Wojciech Frykowski. All were brutally murdered by followers of Charles Manson; they called themselves
15
From here on, unless noted otherwise, the material in quotations continues to refer to
16
The house where Mercedes Cassola was killed was among those that collapsed during the earthquake that flattened Mexico City at 7:19 on the morning of September 19, 1985. In the place where it once stood, there’s now a public parking lot, where it costs about twenty-five pesos an hour to park, or about two and a half dollars.