Parallel Lives: Marina and Caroline (I)
Marina Ginestà (1919-2014) was born in Toulouse into a family with a long leftist tradition. Her grandmother, Micaela Chalmeta, a feminist and pioneer of the Catalan cooperative movement, translated The Power of the Market Basket, by Honora Enfield. Her father, Bruno, was a trade unionist, and her mother, Empar, headed the Spanish delegation at the international congress of the women's movement in Moscow in 1935. Marina and her brother, Albert, belonged to the communist youth.
On that July 21st, 1936, she was simply passing by, and that chance encounter unwittingly propelled her into history. She was 17 years old. The German photographer Hans Gutmann saw her dressed as a militiawoman and, captivated by her innocent appearance, asked her to go up to the roof of the Hotel Colón. He placed a rifle on her shoulder and... Marina accidentally fired a shot and received a slap from the militiaman, who was nearly wounded.
When, much later, she recognized herself in that photograph, she admitted that, at that moment, she firmly believed that socialism was knocking on the doors of history and that she was helping to open them. The hotel's elite clientele had left, the owners had disappeared, and the facilities, the cellars, and the pantry were at the disposal of the young communists—a tasting menu of socialist paradise. A few days later, thanks to her fluency in French, she went to the front to accompany Mikhail Koltsov, the correspondent for the Soviet newspaper, as his translator. Pravda.
Koltsov dedicates short but moving passages to his Newspaper of the Spanish Civil WarSometimes, she tells us, she would turn her back and spend a long time in a corner facing the wall. "You," she would say to Koltsov, "are a Russian comrade, and I can speak frankly: we are all too sentimental here. It's a huge flaw. We are terribly sentimental." She, of course, was. Her comrades knew her as the Chimeric.
In exile, after a stint in the Dominican Republic, she settled in Caracas with her husband and son. She found work at the Belgian embassy, and her life intersected with that of the chargé d'affaires, Carl Werck. She fell in love. Her marriage languished amidst recriminations. When her husband invited his comrades from the Army of the Levant over, they would unfold maps of their former battlefields to relive their wartime experiences, especially the Battle of Guadalajara. These gatherings irritated Marina, who saw these men as false heroes of a war that was irretrievably lost.
In 1953, she was living with Carl Werck in the Netherlands. She was the wife of a diplomat. At times, however, she was overcome by fleeting nostalgia and longing for her youth. She would console herself by criticizing communist illusions and defending the excellence of bourgeois values.
In September 1960, after a very formal luncheon, while her husband and son were having coffee in the living room, she suddenly paled upon opening a magazine and finding a photograph of Ramón Mercader, who had just been released from a Mexican prison after serving twenty years. In her husband's presence, she said nothing more. But a few days later, taking advantage of a planned general strike and workers' demonstration in Brussels, after accompanying her husband to work, she asked her son to support the demonstration. During the march, she told him that she had met Ramón Mercader in Barcelona. In fact, she had been one of his girlfriends. They had even discussed marriage. But their plans were brutally thwarted by Caritat Mercader, who did not consider the Ginestà family suitable for her son.
When Marina was eighty-five years old, French television broadcast Losey's film. The assassination of TrotskyHer son remarked that Losey had gone too far in choosing such a handsome actor as Alain Delon for the lead role. She turned bright red and said in a trembling voice, "Ramón Mercader brought far more joy to the role than your vulgar Alain Delon!"
In 2008, a documentary filmmaker from the EFE news agency discovered the photograph of the Hotel Colón, and Marina saw it, unaware that her life was about to be captured in that image. She died shortly afterward, in 2014, in Paris. The Spanish press recognized the icon she had become.
It was her son, Manuel, who told me Caroline de Bendern's story in a restaurant on the Quai de la Loire. Since then, the names and images of these two women have been inseparable for me. I will talk about Caroline de Bendern in the next article.