This isn’t autobiography.
Every Thursday, my father has lunch with l’abuela at her house in Palma.
We bought a roast chicken and l'abuela explained that, a long time ago, chickens were fed on fishmeal, that’s why they’d taste like fish, and why the eggs would taste fishy, too. And years before that they’d deliver live chickens straight from the farm, from Felanitx.
Once, one of l'abuela’s kids told her there was another animal in the basket, but she didn’t pay it any mind. She left the large basket on the porch for two days until the stench became unbearable. Only then did she go take a look, and, sure enough, there alongside the chickens was a dead rabbit swarmed by flies. They’d deliver them dead like that because, if not, they’d piss all over. The household hated rabbit from that day on.
“Not just that, you also had to boil the meat to make sure it was still good. Back then you boiled everything just in case,” my father said.
“In those days, entonses, they said it wasn’t good to eat the chicken skin, it’d give you some kind of sickness, a terrible stomachache or something like that,” l'abuela explained.
And my father added: “They’d say you’d turn into a maricón.”
*
L’abuela had heard tell that when her father—a strong man with long legs—was a cadet, he carried Franco’s backpack for him because Franco was too scrawny to haul it himself. Born in Ferrol, on the Galician coast, Franco had wanted to enter the Marines but they wouldn’t admit him. According to his official biographies, the Generalísimo was first in his class, but that’s not the truth. In my great-grandfather’s Infantry Academy yearbook—he was an officer in the same year—Franco was ranked in the hundred-somethings. Even my great-grandfather was ahead of him.
*
My father and l'abuela argued a while over politics.
“Your friends,” my father says.
She says: “They aren’t my friends. When I was younger I thought politicians were missionaries fighting for the good of society—that they wanted to help us.”
“That’s their strategy,” my father said, “to soft-soap the Army and Church so people like you vote for them and think they’re doing good. They’ve gotten to you. They’re worse than Franco.”
“And now what’s Franco got to do with it?”
I whisper: “Papà. . . ”
“They’re bringing back the dictatorship, the oppression, like during the war. They’re a bunch of fascists!”
“Papà . . . if you say fascists you’ll discredit your argument. . . ”
“What?!”
“Fascism is something else.”
“Germans, Italians, Spaniards, they were all fascists. And they killed anyone who didn’t think like them.”
“Do you know what they did to the nuns during the war?” l'abuela asks.
“And do you know what they did to anyone who had ideas of their own? Do you know what they did to the leftists?”
“But there were people that first went one way and then the other without ever really thinking anything about it. Plus, your father was with the Nationalists,” I say. “Are you saying he was a Fascist?”
“Mumpare didn’t kill anyone.”
“You can’t reduce an entire civil war down to a clash between the good guys and the bad. There were good and bad people on both sides.”
“My father was twenty and my mother thirteen during the war, they didn’t decide a thing. But there were people to blame, people who launched a coup because they couldn’t bear that the democratic left had won. And those same sons-of-bitches are returning to power now because mother dearest voted for them.”
When he speaks about the left, he does it in first-person plural; when referring to the Right, he does so in second-person plural, implicating both l'abuela and me.
“Left and right are antiquated concepts,” I attempt to argue.
“And capitalists like you, sweetheart, can’t see the difference between the Left and Right, that’s where we are at this point. That’s the problem, we live in a society of savage consumption.”
“Because Franco was a huge capitalist, right?”
“He’s the only Fascist that the Americans protected, and not for nothing.”
“And better a Stalin than a Bush?”
“Better a Lenin!”
“Papà, being against one thing doesn’t mean you’re in favor of another! Even the socialists have blood on their hands.”
“And what’s worse? A Fascist newspaper accusing socialists of murder without any proof or that Prime Minister Aznar killed thousands of innocent people in the Iraq War? How many people are dying of hunger under our current president? At the moment, you don’t have a job either.”
“Thanks for reminding me.”
L’abuela says: “That a girl as qualified as you, with all her studies, after so many years of work in Barcelona, has to return to home to live with her parents . . .”
Father says: “Mumareta, do me a favor and don’t fan the fire, it’s all your fault anyway.”
“My fault, and why is that?” l'abuela asks.
“Because you voted for them.”
“And how do you know I voted for them anyway? Voting is anonymous!”
My father’s a believer. He still has faith in the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, the PSOE, despite the fact that it’s no longer a socialist party, if it even was to begin with. He thinks that grandmother’s “friends” are Evil, and so they go on like that for a while, provoking one another.
“Milagro!” cries l'abuela when my father mentions Aznar, Matas, or the People’s Party.
“What’s a miracle?”
“That we’ve been talking nearly an hour and you’ve yet to mention them by name, I was beginning to worry that something had come over you.”
“Mumareta, I don’t know why you have to say those kinds of things. If you and your friends want to destroy Mallorca, go right ahead.”
“It’s awful, that conference center they’ve built.”
“It’s just what we deserve: a mammoth of a thing to welcome everyone to the city. They’d have to tear it down. Put a bomb inside, like in Corsica. We’d have to become terrorists.”
“But it must have cost a lot of money. They shouldn’t have built it in the first place. Now that it’s already there. . . . ”
“Now that it’s there, we’ll have to keep paying for them to finish it and keep up its maintenance on it. Bombs away!”
L’abuela: “I don’t know why they’d build a convention center so close to the sea. Or in Mallorca in the first place. We don’t need so many people coming here. And I’m not quite sure but I thought I heard something about them wanting to bring in trash from abroad to burn here.”
“Well of course, because it’s a giant landfill! Sometimes it seems like you have no memory of anything at all. Every time these mafia sons-of-bitches win, they destroy our island.”
“Sons-of-a-gun, huh? What a mouth on this one!”
“That’s what they are. Corrupt sons-of-bitches, criminals.”
“But they’re against abortion,” grandmother sighs.
“So what?”
“I can’t vote for a party that defends the murder of innocent children.”
Arguments in our house clear up like summer storms. Everything calms, there’s no undertow, the air’s cool and pleasant and the sky’s so bright that no one would guess it had rained minutes beforehand.
Since retiring, my father has spent a lot of time scanning old family photos, photos that his his uncle took. After we had lunch, he showed me several of them while my grandmother fell asleep on the couch with her mouth wide open.
*
L’abuela lives with a parakeet that’s in love with a mirror hanging in its cage, and a canary that needs its nails clipped by hand.
We’ve been looking at black and white photos of places that no longer exist and of children who are no longer children. In one of them l’abuela’s father appears, the man who carried Franco’s pack for him and the first person to own a car in Felanitx. He was a military man and would have liked to join the Calvary because he was good with horses. He was a Lieutenant Colonel and spent long periods in Africa with Franco’s troops. During the Second Republic he was in the reserves and re-enlisted with the Nationalists when the war broke out. His wife, strong and not the nurturing type, who had once lived on the Almudaina port and with whom he had had many long conversations through the window when they were courting, had gone to see him a few times. She traveled alone. She would have never shed a tear for a man.
L’abuela’s oldest brother was a pilot. She always talks about how he went flying over Felanitx port. She explains that he’d fly right up to the balcony to wave at her. The harbor is called Portocolom, but for us it’s just the Port. My father remembers when l'abuela’s older brother guided the plane through the masts of several boats lurching at bay, and afterward threw candy onto their balcony, but I don’t believe him.
My father also remembers when a bolt of lightning entered through the garage and traveled through a hole in the stairs, turning into a ball of fire. It burned up the walls and went through the kitchen window. He and his siblings got so scared that they hid under the bed; on top of it all, one of my uncles peed his pants. I don’t believe all of that either. The story of the lightning bolt, I mean; that my uncle pissed himself, sure.
L’abuela’s older brother drove much like he flew and died in a motorcycle accident. During the war, the Nationalists suspected that the Republicans would attack from the sea, and expected they’d dock in Portocolom. And then something occurred to them: at night, the few people who owned vehicles would drive out to the lighthouse with their headlights on. Afterward they would make their way back with the headlights off only to return once more with the lights shining bright in an infinite procession. That way it seemed—from the sea—that they were many.
The Republicans landed at Porto Cristo.
El tio Joan had a Fiat. The few people who owned cars in Felanitx had to take the others to the warfront at Manacor. The frontlines frightened el tio Tomeu, Joan’s brother-in-law, and so he offered to accompany him on those trips instead. On the ride there he’d stand on the door railing so that no one would complain about him taking up a free seat; on the way back, he’d sit next to el tio Joan, who drove. During one of the trips to Manacor, a plane passed right over their heads. El tio Tomeu got spooked and jumped off to take cover, falling into the bushes. He found himself covered in blood and all scratched up. When he came back to Felanitx, everyone asked if he’d been wounded at war.
*
We had our coffee. I said I had to get going and kissed them both goodbye. L’abuela has sunken cheeks. She told me that, even though it's because of work-related problems, she's happy to have me back in Mallorca, she feels closer to me that way. And what good was it living among the Catalans, anyway?
And my father asked l’abuela: “Do you remember when we’d weave chairs out of twine?”