Such as It Is

I am sharing a sandwich with a friend, and when we are done, I smooth my hand across the picnic table to wipe the crumbs onto the ground. My friend smiles at the action, then tells me about his grandmother. When a meal was over, she would put her fingertip to her tongue to moisten it and then, one by one, pick up every crumb of bread remaining on the table, no matter how small, and put each speck into her mouth. You can imagine the hunger such a habit was born of, my friend said. Every crumb from every meal was consumed. Not a morsel of food went to waste. She was a diminutive woman. She wore black for the last 30 years of her life, after her husband’s death. She died at 98 with all of her teeth.

This grandmother, my friend continued, often chided him for talking at the table. Quien come y habla, juicio le falta,  she would say, meaning it’s not smart to talk while you eat. Was this because food might fall out when you open your mouth to talk? I asked. No, my friend said. Because you waste time speaking instead of eating. Another of her sayings in the same vein was, Quien come y habla pierda bocao, meaning if you talk while you eat, you’ll lose a bite.

The context for these sayings was—in addition to extreme hunger during the Spanish Civil War and the hard times that followed—the common custom of putting a plate of food in the middle of the table for everyone to share. Every time you slowed to speak, someone else was spearing a forkful of food and the quantity in the pot was shrinking. The same message is in the saying Oveja que bala, bocado que pierde, meaning a bleating sheep can’t eat. Or more generally, you can’t do two things at once. Do the important one.

During the civil war, my friend’s grandmother had a family of eight to feed. Food was so scarce that she would feel the bellies of her children at suppertime to determine who had already scavenged food during the day—a piece of fruit from a tree, a hunk of bread from a neighbor—and the family’s scant supply of food went to the others. So yes, hardship was a fact of life for the family. But none of the members was lost fighting in the war, and none of them was murdered in betrayals and violent reprisals, as many people were, though my friend reported that his grandfather was almost assassinated when Franco’s troops came through the village, looking for anyone they labeled a traitor or malingerer: any able-bodied man. The grandfather had the luck to be rounded up with the patriarch of the town’s richest family, who on the way to the field to be shot bribed the soldiers to let them all go.

“No one was conscripted?”

Not for the civil war, but an uncle-by-marriage served in World War Two, rounded up by Franco’s troops and sent to Germany in answer to Hitler’s request for soldiers.

“Tell me about it.”

He was a young man who lived in Saelices el Chico, the village in Salamanca where my friend’s mother grew up, about eight miles from the town of Ciudad Rodrigo, near the border with Portugal. A patrol, looking for men to conscript, would go into a village and ask the local priest which families had men, and in Saelices, the priest obliged with a list. The soldiers knocked on the doors and commanded the men to gather a knapsack, and off they were marched some 360 miles to the French border. The border is a six-hour drive on the throughway today, but for a company on foot 80 years ago, the trip would have taken two weeks. Where did they sleep? Where did they rest? What did they eat? Once in France, the conscripts were put on a train to Germany, where they were outfitted with gear and a rifle, and sent on to Russia.

“What happened there?”

They were supposed to fight. The uncle, telling the story later, said he had no reason to kill anybody, and he did not fire his gun while there, but spent his time in the trenches trying to avoid getting shot.

Eventually he was wounded by shrapnel from an exploding bomb and sent to a hospital in Germany for an operation. After he recovered, he was put on a train and sent back to Spain with his rifle and other gear, a medal for valor, and some money for his service. At the border between France and Spain, where the railroad ended, he got off the train and walked into Spain. The Spanish border guards relieved him of his weapon and his money, and told him he was free. Back he walked the 360 miles to his village.

“What was that trip like? How did he survive? What were his feelings?”

He’d have done what was done at the time, begged and foraged.

The uncle was a big, strapping man. He recovered fully from the shrapnel wounds. Soon he married an older sister of my friend’s mother. In the village, it was impossible to make a living by farming as their forebears had, so the couple emigrated to Bilbao. People all over Spain were leaving the countryside to look for work in the cities, and another of my friend’s uncles had already gone to Bilbao, in the Basque Country, where industry was essentially intact after the civil war. Both the conscript and his brother-in-law found jobs as metalworkers in Alto Hornos de Vizcaya, then the largest company in Spain, employing some 40,000 workers. The uncle now lived in the same region he had twice walked through—first as a conscript, then as a returning veteran.

“What was that like?”

My friend shook his head. He didn’t know because his uncle hadn’t talked about that. No record exists of his feelings on returning to an area he had first seen as a young man forced into a war he wanted nothing to do with.

“But I can imagine,” you might say, and you can—you can imagine. Would your imaginings, though, match his experiences? With no record of his reactions, a guess is just a guess. The reality he lived is now just a story, and the telling details—the weight of the rifle, the fear or the hope, the confusion of languages, the flashes of light and the cold glint of steel, the dark railway stations, the cold rain and colder snow—the details are added color. One detail, though, my friend remembers very well: his uncle’s scar. It was two inches wide and ran the length of his uncle’s backbone, where doctors dug out the shrapnel and stitched together the flesh. Just as the uncle stitched together his life, “such as it was and what there was of it,” as an old woman that I once knew was wont to say. What event in her life at what moment gave rise to that oft-repeated phrase? Her name was Clifford, a surprising name for a woman. She was born in the United States and died there after 101 years. No medals for valor, no forced marches, but she too had a long life now remembered chiefly by grandchildren and friends who recount snippets of it. But if you tried to imagine anything more, you’d find that her life is a mystery, as would be any life pieced together from its vestiges. The details we rely on to flesh things out clarify no more than old clothes draped over bones. You add shape, not heart.

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