Tell Me Who I Am

  “I’m sorry, but I’ve got a flaw: I don’t shut up, and the bosses don’t like that.”

  “And why don’t your Socialist friends give you a hand? In the election campaign they said they wanted independent journalists.”

  “And you believed them? Come on, Mom, don’t be naïve! Politicians hate people who are independent; anything that doesn’t serve their interests gets pushed to one side. The right and the left are the same in this, and because I attack both sides, you see what happens.”

  Arguments with my mother always seem useless to me. She takes at face value everything the politicians say on television, and she can’t believe that they’d say one thing and do another.

  The best thing about my mother is the confidence she has in human nature.

  I called Doña Laura to tell her that I was back in Madrid. She told me that she would call me to tell me what the next thing to do was, so I took these free hours to go see my girlfriend Ruth, to swing by the office of the newspaper, to have a drink with some friends, and to have another argument with my beloved mother. It was a week before Doña Laura called me.

  “You need to call Professor Soler. He’ll tell you what to do.”

  When I heard his voice on the other end of the line, I had the impression that I was talking to an old friend.

  “Doña Laura has asked me to keep on showing you the way forward with your investigation. It won’t be easy, but between what I know and some things you told me I think I can carry on telling you where to go, without you giving me any more information. You have to go to Paris. You should speak to an old friend, Victor Dupont; he knew Amelia when he was an adolescent a little older than I was.”

  “Who is he?”

  “The son of an activist, a Communist. Our parents were friends, and we lived in his house in Paris for a while after the Civil War ended.”

  “You lived in Paris?”

  “Yes, with my father.”

  “And your mother?”

  “I don’t know what became of her, maybe the Francoists shot her. She didn’t want to go to France; she was prepared to carry on fighting even after Franco had won the war. My father fled to France with me.”

  “And what might Monsieur Dupont know about Amelia Garayoa?”

  “More than you might imagine; he knew her and Albert James and Jean Deuville as well.”

  “You think he might remember what happened back then?”

  “Of course. Also, Victor is a documentalist, his father was a journalist and when he died he left Victor all his papers. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself. Go to Paris, Victor Dupont will see you whenever you get there.”

  It was raining in Paris, which didn’t surprise me because it was not often that I had been to the French capital without getting caught in some downpour. But it smelled of spring and that cheered me up.

  I had booked a hotel room on the Left Bank, near Victor Dupont’s home.

  I was surprised when I met him. He was very old, but he still emanated vigor and energy.

  A documentalist and archivist by profession, Monsieur Dupont seemed like a wise old bird, not fading at all.

  I could tell that he must have been handsome when he was younger; he was tall, with blue eyes, and now had the white hair and upright bearing of an aging gallant.

  “So you’re investigating your great-grandmother’s history? You don’t have any idea what you’re caught up in!” Monsieur Dupont said as he poured out two glasses of Burgundy to accompany a plate of cheese.

  “That’s what my mother says, I’m in a tricky situation.”

  “There are things it’s maybe better not to stir up, especially in a family. But it’s your funeral. I’ll help you as much as I can because my good friend Pablo asked me to. Where should we start?”

  “Well, as far as I know, Amelia Garayoa came back to Paris at the beginning of October 1938, accompanied by Jean Deuville and Albert James. They were coming back from a congress of intellectuals in Moscow.”

  “Yes, a congress organized for the greater glory of Soviet propaganda, which was fairly effective in its moment.”

  I didn’t dare ask if he was a Communist, given that his father had been and that he was a friend of Pablo Soler’s father, who had also been one, but Dupont must have read my mind.

  “I was a Communist, and you can’t imagine how committed I was. The Communists have done terrible things, but they’ve also done a lot of good. They have numbered among their ranks people who have been modest and believing, as good as saints, dedicated uniquely to helping others. I stopped being a party member years ago, which has allowed me to analyze my own life with a sincerity and sense of perspective that would not have been possible had I continued as a Communist. But it’s not me we’re here to talk about. Did you know that your grandmother lived in my house?”

  I was dumbfounded, although I should have realized by this stage that nothing ought to surprise me. Dupont carried on with his story...

  Jean Deuville was a friend of André Dupont, my father. He called to ask if my father would rent a friend of his a room, because he knew that we had a spare room, as we lived in my grandmother’s house, which was big. And besides, my grandmother had died a few months earlier.

  My mother, Danielle, made the decision to accept Amelia, because it meant a little extra money each month. Until a few months earlier my mother had worked in a paper shop, but the owner died and his children closed the business, so a few francs for the rent would come in very handy for us.

  We all benefited from the deal, because Amelia had been in a hotel since her arrival in Paris and she didn’t want to waste what little money she had, so renting a room was more economical for her as well.

  I was fifteen years old then, and I must admit that I fell in love with Amelia the moment I saw her. She seemed unreal, she was very thin and ethereal.

  My mother wanted to know how long she’d be staying, but Amelia told her she still didn’t know what she was going to do.

  “Madame Dupont, I want to go back to Spain, but I don’t know if that will be possible, and if it isn’t then I will need to find a job.”

  “But you cannot go to Spain!” my mother exclaimed.

  “The legitimate Republican government still holds Madrid, Catalonia, Valencia... but I don’t think I can afford to be optimistic. General Rojo managed to break Franco’s hold on the Ebro in July, but he hasn’t been able to maintain that advantage. I don’t think you can go to Spain,” my father added.

  Amelia shrugged. She appeared resigned to doing whatever was possible even if she couldn’t defy fate.

  Although she was very reserved and smiled very little, she was very patient with me and also helped my mother around the house. You know, washing dishes, and ironing, and sewing...

  I listened to her conversations with my parents, and the ones she had with other comrades such as Jean Deuville.

  Jean had told my parents what had happened in Moscow. It was such a shock for him that it destroyed his faith in Communism. He did not dare leave the party, but he had lost his ideological virginity in Moscow, as well as losing Pierre, his best friend.

  It was not easy for Jean Deuville or Amelia to tell Pierre’s parents that their son had died. The day after they arrived in Paris, Albert James, Jean, and Amelia went to Pierre’s parents’ house. As far as I know, the scene was something like this:

  Olga, Pierre’s mother, opened the door and when she saw that Amelia was alone she screamed and asked where her son was. Jean tried to hold Olga in his arms to offer sympathy and explain what had happened, but she pushed him away.

  “Where is Pierre? What have you done to him?” she asked Amelia.

  Albert James had to hold Amelia upright because she was trembling so much, and he thought that she could not deal with the situation. It was Albert James who controlled the situation, as both Amelia and Jean were too upset.

  Pierre’s father came out into the hall, summoned by his wife’s cries.

  “But wh
at’s going on here? What are you doing? And you, Amelia... ? Where’s Pierre?”

  “Amelia told them what had happened. She didn’t hide anything. Not that Pierre had been a Soviet agent, not the details of their life in Buenos Aires, the order to travel to Moscow, the months they had spent in the Soviet capital, Pierre’s disappearance, his stay in the Lubyanka, the torture they had inflicted on him and her conviction that he had been murdered. The only thing she didn’t tell them, and which she had kept from Albert James and jean Deuville as well, was that she had found out about Pierre’s arrest from Ivan Vasiliev. She didn’t want to put that man into danger; at least he had helped her to find out where Pierre was.

  Olga cried uncontrollably as she listened to Amelia’s story, and Pierre’s father grew visibly older as he found out about the horrors his son had faced.

  “It’s your fault! You and you damned ideas about Communism that you put in our son’s head! You wouldn’t listen to me and now our son is dead. You killed him too!” Olga shouted at her husband.

  “Madame Comte, calm down, please!” Albert James begged.

  But there was no way to control Olga’s anger and pain, or to find words to console Pierre’s father. Jean Deuville was no help either, as he too could not hold back tears.

  Olga threw them out of the house, cursing Amelia, whom she said she never wanted to see again.

  Jean Deuville and Albert James took charge of Amelia. They seemed to feel responsible for her. Édouard Daladier was in charge of France at that time and foreigners, especially Spaniards, were starting to have trouble residing legally in the country. The flood of exiled Spaniards fleeing the war had overwhelmed the French administration, and Paris began to legislate against foreigners.

  So it was that Jean Deuville and Albert James had to pull all the strings they could to get Amelia her residence papers. Nobody was surprised that Albert James would employ her as his secretary. He had not needed a secretary up to that point, but this was a way to help her without offending her. As for Jean, he turned into her shadow; he would go and pick her up from her house and force her to go for walks, to go to the theater, to go to concerts. Amelia allowed herself to be led around, and appeared to be an automaton, as if nothing that happened around her meant anything at all to her.

  My parents wondered why a journalist like Albert James would look after Amelia as he did. Jean Deuville’s case was different, he had been Pierre’s best friend and they were Communist Party comrades, but this was not the case with Albert James, who did not know that much about Amelia either. But he helped her as much as he could.

  Albert James worked with certain magazines and journals in America, as well as a few British newspapers. He was extremely independent for my parents’ tastes. They thought that the era they lived in was one that demanded participation. James’s objectivity irritated them, and they argued with him to his face. Albert James refused to be a “fellow traveler” of the party, an attitude that made him a difficult person to pigeonhole. They respected him, of course; he was extremely influential and his articles were taken into account by the French and British governments as well as the American.

  His report on the Moscow congress of intellectuals was a disappointment to his Soviet hosts. James claimed that the farms and factories he had visited seemed designed to give foreigners a rosy idea of the Soviet Union, and that they had never been allowed to leave their programmed itinerary or to travel freely. In one of his articles he claimed that there was no freedom in the country. His criticisms were like a bath of cold water for the Soviet authorities, although they were of course balanced by more favorable ones provided by other European intellectuals.

  Amelia went to James’s office early every morning and dealt with his correspondence, sorted out his filing, prepared his schedule, wrote fair copies of his articles, and kept his accounts.

  Perhaps the greatest joy they had in those days in Paris was the appearance of Carla Alessandrini. She was to spend a fortnight in the city singing in La Traviata at the Opera Garnier. Her arrival was a great event.

  Jean Deuville arranged to take Amelia to the opera to hear Carla sing.

  I still remember her on the night of the performance. Amelia was naturally elegant, and even though she did not have a large wardrobe at that time, she still looked like a princess in her plain black dress.

  Carla Alessandrini was magnificent; she was given a standing ovation that lasted around twenty minutes. As far as Jean told us, Amelia cried with emotion and at the end of the performance she went to Carla Alessandrini’s dressing-room, convinced that they would let her through to see the diva, but the Opera had put a guard at the door to make sure that no one not expressly invited by la gran Carla could go through to the dressing-room.

  “Tell her that her friend Amelia Garayoa is here,” she told the skeptical little man who stopped her from going through to the dressing-rooms.

  He was surprised when the go-ahead was given and a few minutes later Vittorio Leonardi, the diva’s husband, came out to meet Amelia.

  Vittorio seized Amelia in his arms, scolded her for being so thin, grasped Jean’s hand as if they were lifelong friends, and led the way to the dressing-room.

  The two women fell into an interminable embrace. It was clear that Carla truly felt affection for Amelia, she thought of her as a daughter.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were in Paris! You don’t know how worried I’ve been. Gloria and Martin Hertz told me that you were going on a trip for a couple of months with Pierre, but that not only had you not come back, but they didn’t know anything about where you were. Let me look at you... You’re far too thin, and... I don’t know... there’s something different about you. Where is Pierre?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Dead? I didn’t know he was ill... ,” Carla said.

  “He wasn’t. They killed him.”

  Carla and her husband Vittorio were upset by Amelia’s announcement. The diva held onto her as if she were a mother embracing her daughter to protect her.

  “You have to tell me everything!”

  Amelia introduced them to Jean Deuville, who had remained silent, observing the scene. He was struck by the friendship between the two women. Carla Alessandrini was, however you looked at it, a world-famous figure, one of the most desired women of her time.

  While Carla was in Paris, she saw Amelia every day. My parents and I went to the opera for the first time at la Alessandrini’s invitation, and it was a great event for us to be there, mixing with the rich and the bourgeois people who seemed to live with their backs to the real world, drinking champagne as if nothing that happened in the normal run of things could ever affect them.

  Amelia would visit Carla in her hotel, or else Carla would invite her to the dinners and luncheons at which she was presented to distinguished people; one day Carla even came to have lunch at our house. I hid behind the door and spied on them, not because I cared what they talked about, but because I was truly fascinated by Carla, who had taken Amelia’s place in my adolescent dreams.

  “You have to decide what you are going to do, my girl, and I’d like you to think about maybe coming with us. I don’t think that you have much of a future in France, things are getting so bad here for foreigners. I’ve spoken with Vittorio and he thinks that the best thing would be for you to come with us.”

  “I want to go back to Spain, I know that I can’t at the moment because of the war, but the war will be over someday. I need to know about my family, I want to be with my son.”

  “I understand, but do you think your husband will allow it?”

  “I don’t know, but I need to ask for his forgiveness and I’ll beg him to let me see Javier. He can’t refuse me, it is my son we’re talking about.”

  Carla said nothing. She thought that it would be difficult for a Spanish husband to pardon his wife after she had run away with her lover. But she didn’t want to crush Amelia’s hopes, and she knew that her friend must be feeling especially fragile after
the nightmare of Moscow.

  “I know that you want to go back to Spain, but as you say yourself it’s not possible at the moment, so why not stay with us and we’ll send you back to Madrid when the right moment presents itself.”

  “You and Vittorio are very generous, but I have a job here and I’m working to support myself, and I don’t know what I would do if I went with you.”

  “Nothing, you don’t have to do anything apart from the travel with us. You don’t need to work, just accompany us.”

  But Amelia was proud, and not for anything would she accept being dependent on others, not earning her own keep. She tried to find a way to tell Carla this without offending her.

  “I wouldn’t feel comfortable, seeing you working and me not doing anything.”

  “Well, you could be Vittorio’s secretary.”

  “But you don’t need another secretary!”

  They spoke for a while, and Carla made her promise that if she were ever in trouble then she would think of her.

  When la Alessandrini left Paris, she left a great hole in all of our lives, not just in Amelia’s soul.

  One day Amelia came back home in tears. My mother tried to console her.

  “I... I... had a great aunt who lived in Paris, Aunt Lily. I plucked up my courage to go and see her today to ask her for news of my family, but the porter told me she died a few months ago.”

  She wanted to find out about her family, and I told my mother to pray that they would forgive her.

  She missed her parents, her son, her cousins, even her husband.

  “I was so bad to him! Santiago did not deserve what I did to him,” she said, regretfully.