IF YOUR MOTHER HAD been here, of course, I would have told her about the letter, but we hadn’t moved to the barrio yet, and although I was already friendly with a few neighbor women I wouldn’t have wanted them to learn about my family’s past, not because I’m ashamed of it, don’t think that, but as a precaution, because we were still afraid in those days. Your mother, so distinguished, so young, I always remember her that way, not how she was at the end, although even when she was ill she never lost her elegance, but long before that, the first time I saw her, when your family came to the barrio and you were so small they still carried you in their arms or in the buggy. I remember the minute you arrived. I heard the sound of a car and I went out on the balcony and saw the big black automobile your father had then, the 1500, and when I saw all of you get out I was happy because there were so many of you, and there weren’t many people in the building or the barrio at that time. You children filed out of the car, bundles came out of the trunk, then your mother got out in a light-colored dress and stood on the sidewalk, maybe a little tired from the trip, and I didn’t get the impression she much liked what she saw, the open land with ditches and cranes and Madrid so far away, the broad streets and the trees like lamp poles. She took you in her arms and looked up, and I waved, so very pleased that she was pretty and young and moving into the apartment right above mine. She wasn’t sick yet, or at least she didn’t know it, paying no attention to the first symptoms, but I remember she was pale, more fragile than the other neighbors our age although she worked in her house and was kept busy with all of you, just like anyone else, and she wore that same smile of enjoying life that you have today. Often in the stairwell I would hear her singing as she worked in the kitchen or laughing out loud at something your father was saying in a low voice. I did tell her about my life and what happened to my mother at the end of the war, and even that La Pasionaria had held me in her lap and sung me a lullaby, and how afraid I’d been when the letter came from the German embassy, several months late, after being sent all over Madrid. I was afraid my husband would be angry if I showed it to him, but your mother laughed when I told her about it several years later: “My dear, why would he be angry, as good-natured as he is?” I didn’t dare hope that the letter would tell me my father was alive. As soon as my husband came home from work that evening, I closed the bedroom door and showed him the letter, and he calmed me down right away; it couldn’t be anything bad coming from a foreign government, because the only government we had to fear was our own. “It’s best, though, not to say anything to your mother until we know for sure what it’s all about.”
The next morning they got in the car, which still smelled brand-new, a delicious odor of plastic and metal and gasoline, and drove into Madrid like two tourists, she clutching in her lap the purse that contained the letter the whole time. Maybe they would tell her that her father was alive, that he lost his memory because of a head injury and that’s why he never came looking for his family, because she’d seen stories like that in the movies, but she also feared they would certify her father’s death, one more among the millions of nameless corpses thrown into the ditches and common graves of Europe during the time his last letter came from the German camp, a few lines and on the back the pencil drawing of a mountain village with bulbous bell towers and steep roofs. I usually walked holding my husband’s arm, but on that occasion he took mine, gave my name at the embassy office, and showed them the letter and my identity card. I was so frightened among those well-mannered people with blond hair and blue eyes who spoke with a strange accent and were so friendly, not like the Spanish officials who barked rather than spoke and were always in a foul humor. Finally we were taken to a gentleman in a room with a large table in the center, a man who spoke as if to calm me, like a doctor, so I worked up the courage to ask if my father was alive or dead, and he answered, “That’s what we’d like to know, because we’ve been looking for him for years to return his belongings to him.” Then he picked up a large cardboard box from the floor and set it in the middle of the table, a box tied with red tape and sealed with wax but battered, as if it had been shuffled around a lot. My husband and I looked at each other, not knowing what to do, and the man said, “It’s yours, you can take it; the things your father left behind the second time he escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany are in this box.” I looked at it without daring to touch it, and at my husband, who shrugged, nervous too, though later he didn’t want to admit it. They had me sign some papers. I picked up the box, at first expecting it to be heavy, then surprised it was so light. We went outside and walked down Castellana, I carrying the box as if it held something fragile, and my husband told me to give it to him. It was one of those cold, sunny days in Madrid. I couldn’t wait till we got home to open it, and besides, I didn’t want my mother to see it before I knew what was in it. It weighed little, and I could hear things loose inside. We sat down on a bench, and my husband opened it. My knees were shaking, and I was crying as he took things out, everything my father had owned in the camp. There were letters my mother sent him, letters she dictated to a neighbor, the ones my brother wrote him on lined paper from a school notebook, and also the letters I wrote when I was little, just learning to write, and the drawings my brother and I made for him, and snapshots of us, some with our names on the back, written in my clumsy writing. How poor we looked, with our starved and frightened little faces, and how had I forgotten all that in just a few years? There was a photograph of my father in uniform, holding a little girl in his arms, so small that I wasn’t sure it was me, and another of him, very thin, with a shaved head and huge ears and a number underneath, and also papers in French and German, all of them yellowed and so worn that they tore when we tried to unfold them, and lots of drawings on a piece of cardboard or the back of something printed in German, drawings of towns with church towers, trains, and mountains in the background, and portraits of people, men in striped uniforms, with shaved heads, and on a sheet of graph paper a large, pretty drawing of Red Square in Moscow, in color, that looked like a photograph. We closed the box, put it in the trunk of the car, and all the way home I cried as I hadn’t cried in years, like a fool, making everything blurry, and my husband took one hand from the wheel to pat my hand, and he said, “Look, woman, calm down, what are you going to tell your mother when she sees you’ve been crying, she’ll think it’s something I did.”
To make sure her mother wouldn’t see the box, she hid it in the back of her armoire. She lay awake nights trying to imagine what became of her father after his second escape from the German camp — in November 1944, they told her. Maybe his face was disfigured in an explosion and his body decomposed so no one could identify it, or maybe he drowned in a river as he attempted to cross it, or was crushed beneath the wheels of a train or the tread of a tank. Night after night she imagined different deaths for her father, with ghostly landscapes of the war, machine-gun fire, barking dogs. One morning she came home after shopping and was surprised not to find her mother. She felt a flash of alarm even before she ran to the bedroom and saw the doors of her armoire flung open. She ran through the apartment, then went out on the balcony. In the open field across from the building, where excavation was in progress for the foundation of a new structure, she saw her mother bent over, dressed in mourning. She remembered the times she watched her go out every dawn to the Del Este Cemetery. Now her mother was standing beside a fire, throwing things into it. When she heard her daughter call, she turned around but only for a moment, and kept on watching the fire. It was a cloudy, humid morning; the daughter cut across the field toward that solitary figure, her heels sinking into the mud. And as she came closer, she saw her mother was old. Her mother had started a fire with the cardboard of the box and was throwing papers, photographs, and drawings into it with an absorbed deliberation.