The sergeant appeared in the hallway. Two of his men were hauling my father off. His face, nearly purple, was covered with blood, his eyes swollen. He groaned in pain. My little sisters ran to him, but the sergeant shoved them back. Moving forward with the rest of the group, he called out, “Grab the brat!” But before the other guards could reach for me, I opened the door to the hallway and tore down the stairs.
The last thing I heard as I raced away was the voice of one of the policemen and my mother’s screams as they flooded the entry stairway. Her voice swelled like thunder and lightning until it broke into muffled sobbing. Pain seared my chest as I raced down the street. I did not stop until I reached the Plaza Mayor, where the street cleaners were hosing off the cobblestones. I leaned against one of the columns in the plaza and wept bitterly.
The war started a long time before 1936. By then it was already coursing deep in the blood of the entire nation. That day I understood that people can be right and still lose, that courage is not enough to defeat evil, and that the strength of weapons destroys the soul of humanity.
Chapter 2
María Zapata
Madrid
November 14, 1934
I don’t remember how long I walked. I was cold, but I hadn’t even noticed I was wearing my pajamas and some old canvas shoes. I felt like I was in a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from. The scenes I had just witnessed at home repeated themselves endlessly before my eyes: my mother screaming, my sisters clinging to her nightgown and crying, my father’s lip split open, the blood dripping down his stubbled chin. I couldn’t shake from my mind the image of the policemen with their nightsticks and the sergeant who threatened to take us to an orphanage. When I neared University City, I finally noticed where I was. It was my first time in the northwest corner of Madrid, but I had heard about the redbrick buildings and well-tended lawns. I raised my eyes and studied the snowcapped mountains in the distance. They seemed close enough to reach out and touch, yet somehow so far away, like the peace that had reigned in my home until that morning. I slumped down beneath a statue of a horse. My head dropped to the side, and I fell fast asleep.
I have no idea how much time passed like that before a female voice and a soft hand woke me. “What are you doing here? Are you all right? Are you lost?”
Just inches from my dirty, tearstained frame, a girl with green eyes and a lovely oval face was smiling. I had no idea how to respond. Of course I was not all right. I was terrified and half crazed, but at my age it wasn’t easy to express my feelings, much less explain them.
“Do you want me to walk you home?” she asked. “Where do you live?”
A group of girls was waiting for her a few yards away. A couple of them told her to come back and to leave me alone. “Sorry, I can’t just leave him here,” she called back to them. Her waist was barely covered by a short purple jacket, and her loose hair streamed around her face but could not hide her beauty. “I’m Rosa,” she said. “Rosa Chamorro. What’s your name?”
I looked up at her and started to cry. It felt like a cowardly thing to do, just like it was cowardly to run away and leave my family in the hands of the savage police, but I couldn’t help it. Tears are sometimes a child’s only option for relief. As we grow up, crying becomes taboo. We’re told not to show our weaknesses but, instead, to endure pain, loss, and sadness without letting tears wash through our hearts and clear away whatever is constricting our souls.
The girl helped me up with her left hand. In her right, she carried a notebook and a pair of black gloves. Her friends went on, exasperated with her, and she and I walked a mile or so back toward central Madrid.
“I’ll get your trolley ticket, but you have to tell me where you live. Your parents are probably worried about you.”
The pain in my chest intensified at the mention of my parents, but I held myself together. In a voice raspy from crying, I told her I lived in La Latina neighborhood, near the San Ildefonso school.
She nodded. “I live . . . well, not close to there, but it’s not out of the way.”
We waited at the busy stop crawling with college students. In my neighborhood there were no college students. Laborers’ children learned a trade, and at twelve, thirteen, or fourteen we were apprenticed out to start helping support the family.
As I looked at the law textbook pressed against the girl’s notebook, someone approached. He wore a striped suit, like a gangster in the movies, with his hair greased back and a short little mustache that contrasted with his childish facial features.
“What are you doing with this rapscallion?” he asked, nodding to me. “I didn’t know you were babysitting vagabonds these days.”
“He’s not a vagabond. He’s a lost child.”
We got on the trolley, and the guy turned his nose up at me as if he were dealing with a pest. He positioned himself next to Rosa and continued, “He’ll be the son of some red, I just know it. The police are flushing out everyone who participated in the strike last month. These people are destroying Spain. They’re like rats. We’ve got to get rid of them before they become a plague.”
The girl pursed her lips. “It’s none of your business, Fernandito,” she said. Fernandito was one of her older brother’s friends. A diehard Falangist, he was repeating his first-year classes for the third time.
“Hey, but you’re my friend’s sister, and I’ve got to protect you from riffraff. It’s not a good idea for you to be traveling alone on the trolley. It’ll be dark before long, and Madrid is crawling with crooks and criminals.”
Rosa sniffed. “I can watch out for myself. I don’t need you to protect me from anything.”
Fernandito rolled his eyes. “Girls these days think they’re so independent. You can go to college and wear your little miniskirts, but things are about to change. This sacrilegious, atheistic Republic won’t last long,” he said, regurgitating what he had learned in meetings with José Antonio Primo de Rivera, a silver spoon Andalusian who tried to copy Benito Mussolini’s fascist ideas but had been upstaged by a certain Austrian named Adolf Hitler.
My father would tell me about all of these things after listening to the radio in the afternoons after work. I loved listening to him. Huddled up next to him on the rug, it was the only time in the day when we were alone together. Then he would stretch out in our one shabby recliner and motion for me to crawl up next to him. I loved resting my head on his chest and hearing his heartbeat while the radio played songs by Gardel, one of my dad’s favorites. My mother listened to the radio in the mornings, but she preferred Imperio Argentina.
Fernandito gave me a shove right as we rounded a curve, and I nearly fell out of the trolley.
“Leave him alone!” Rosa snapped.
A man in a worker’s uniform turned and pierced Fernandito with a cold stare. “This guy bothering you?” he asked Rosa.
Fernandito dropped his thuggish posture and skulked away to another part of the trolley.
The trolley reached Plaza de España and then kept going along Gran Vía to Plaza del Callao.
“I know my way from here,” I told the girl when the trolley paused in front of the Callao theater.