Letter to my grandmotherSometimes I wonder what you would say if you could hear some of the things being said today. The other day I was walking near the Sagrada Familia, that immense church designed by Antoni Gaudí, a man almost of your time. It's a marvel, Grandma. Every day thousands of people from all over the world enter. They pay thirty-six euros to visit it. You didn't know the euro, but so you understand me: with that money you would have filled the pantry for more than two weeks.
As I walked, I heard some young people say that life was better under Franco. And in my head I heard your voice, calm and tired at the same time, saying:
—They are young... They don't know what they're saying.
But this morning I went to the retirement home to play a game of dominoes. A place provided by the City Council so that those of us who have worked all our lives have a place to meet, play cards, play billiards, chat, and pass the time. We all have our allowance, our pension. It's not wealth, but it's dignity.
And there I heard two men, born in 1946, say the same thing: that life was better under Franco. Then I no longer thought about the young people who don't know: I thought about you. Because I do know what life was like. I saw it with my own eyes.
I remember your house. Or rather, that room where nine of us slept in three beds. Three families under the same roof. There was no toilet. To relieve ourselves, we went down to the stable. In winter, the cold crept everywhere and got into your bones. In summer, the heat seemed to get trapped between the walls.
I don't remember ever seeing you rest. Always dressed in black. Your long dress, worn by the years. Your bun neatly tied and a scarf on your head. You worked in the fields from sunrise to sunset. And when spring arrived, you went to whitewash the houses of the rich and left their walls clean and shiny, while yours remained cracked all over.
You returned exhausted, but you still had to prepare the meal in that small pot. The kitchen was barely illuminated by an oil lamp and the embers of roots that produced thick smoke. The walls were black, blacker than coal. And we breathed that smoke as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
You used to wash clothes on your knees in a pitcher with well water. In winter the water was icy, but your hands didn't complain. When you washed us, you scrubbed our bodies with old raffia sponges. Then you'd pick the lice out with a comb. I remember the tugs on my hair, the itching. And you sitting on that rush chair. Before sitting down, you'd hit it to make the bedbugs fall off.
That was our life, our normality.
And now, Grandma, I hear them say that life was better. And I ask myself: better for whom? For you, who raised four children alone without anyone's help? For those who couldn't read or write because they never went to school? For the women who had no rights of their own? For the men who worked until their backs broke without protection or rest?
Today there are problems, of course. Life has never been perfect. But today a worker has rights. Today a woman can decide for herself. Today we elders have a pension. Today we can speak without lowering our voices.
That's why I'm writing you this letter. Because when I hear these phrases, I feel like your effort is being erased. That the smoke from your kitchen, the cold from the stable, the pain of your hands cracked by water and work, disappears. I don't argue with hatred. I just explain what I saw. What I lived with you.
Perhaps this is what I should tell them: that one cannot speak of an era from comfortable nostalgia, but must speak from the memory of those who suffered it.
Well, Grandma… I'll let you rest now. But rest assured. As long as I live, no one will say those years were better without me remembering your truth.
Your grandson,
Luis Carmona MoralesBarcelona