The Burden of Silence

By Ramón Barbuzano Morales

Ramón Barbuzano Morales was born in the Canary Islands on June 4, 1916.
He spent his childhood in the town of San Andrés on the island of El Hierro which is the smallest of the seven islands. In January of 1936 he married Agustina Guadalupe González Quintero who would be his wife for 77 years.
In May of the same

• Language: English
• Publisher: ibukku, LLC
• Release date: Jul 11, 2019
• ISBN: 9781640863774

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THE BURDEN OF SILENCE

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Ramón Barbuzano Morales

No part of this book may be reproduced or redistributed in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author or the publishers.

The content of this work is the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.

Published by Ibukku.

www.Ibukku.com

Graphic design: Índigo Estudio Gráfico

Copyright © 2019 Ramón Barbuzano Morales

Translated by Elizabeth Powell de Barbuzano

Original Title: El Precio del Silencio

All rights reserved.

ISBN Paperback: 978-1-64086-376-7

ISBN eBook: 978-1-64086-377-4

CONTENT

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

MAPS

PART ONE

MEMORIES

Chapter 1

My Inheritance Was Waiting

Chapter 2

Innocence Lost

Chapter 3

The Island in the Dark

Chapter 4

The Sin of Being Poor

Chapter 5

Barriers to Love

Chapter 6

The Spanish Civil War

Chapter 7

What Was the War For?

Chapter 8

Escape by Sailboat

Chapter 9

The Trunk of the Devil

Chapter 10

Venezuela, Land of Hope

Chapter 11

The Son Leaves Home

Chapter 12

Returning Home

Chapter 13

Years of Joy, Years of Despair

Chapter 14

Shedding of the Lies

Chapter 15

Peace and Disappointment

PART TWO

REFLECTIONS

Chapter 16

The Truth Will Set You Free

Chapter 17

Truth and Pain Go Hand in Hand

SPECIAL THANKS

The Burden of Silence

Memoirs of Ramón Barbuzano Morales who wanted to break his years of silence

Edited by Enrique Barbuzano González who wanted to fulfill his Dad’s last wish

Translated by Elizabeth Powell de Barbuzano, with affection and great poetic license, trying to capture the feelings, not just the words.

Ramón Barbuzano Morales and Agustina Guadalupe González Quintero were my in-laws. At more than 95 years old he decided to write his memoirs about the good, the bad, and the ugly of his life. A little before his passing at 98 he turned over all of his notes for his fourth and final book to his son with the promise that his offspring would publish his words after his death. He was afraid of the consequences of telling the truth about his experiences and accordingly lived as a hypocrite all of his life. He became a pussycat among tigers in order to survive. The son agreed to be his voice from the grave and to let the cat roar at last.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Rocky, Ramón’s best friend

No amount of thanks is sufficient for the following people who showed great consideration for Ramón and Guadalupe in the absence of their son who lives in The United States. He came often and stayed for months at a time, but couldn’t remain permanently. The individuals named below gave freely of their help and company to two elderly folks in their waning years. They afforded them with many moments of pleasure and peace of mind, and the son and the daughter-in-law are forever grateful.

Special thanks to:

JUAN PADRON AMARO and his wife BLANCA RIOS who often checked in to see if they needed anything.

RITA BEATRIZ MACHIN GONZALEZ director of the assisted living facility who treated them with respect and affection beyond her professional obligations.

RAMON GARCIA PEREZ with whom Ramón spent many enjoyable hours arguing and laughing and reminiscing. Sadly he never saw this, his friend’s book, due to his own deteriorating health.

PEDRO MARTIN GONZALEZ a friend of the son who accompanied him one day to visit Mr. Barbuzano and from that day forward he went every day to chat with the old man as if he were his own father.

FRANCISCO ACOSTA an uncle by marriage who dropped in frequently in spite of the objections of the other relatives who clung to the family feuds of old.

FERNANDO ESPINOSA QUINTERO who by pure chance recorded Guadalupe’s voice while she was in the hospital being treated for cancer. He captured this remarkable 95 year old woman in the year 2013 reciting from memory a poem composed for her by her husband in 1936 while he was waiting for the orders that would ship him to the front lines of the fighting in the Spanish Civil War.

THE PERSONNEL OF THE ASSISTED LIVING FACILITY for their care and dedication, towards Ramon who was very lucid, and Guadalupe who didn’t want to be a burden to anyone.

THE MYSTERY WOMAN who asked if Enrique were the son and when he said yes, she burst into tears and hugged him saying what an honor it was to have known his parents. He doesn’t know who she was or where she is, but what an epitaph she bestowed!

P.S. After the book appeared on the market in Spanish not one of the people mentioned above said a word! They abruptly or eventually disappeared never to be heard from again. This behavior seems to indicate that the islanders solve all their problems with silence and until that time cloak themselves in hypocrisy. We, the editors, are glad that the author did not live to see the last of his friendships wither away.

MAPS

Location of the island of El Hierro in the Canary Islands

PART ONE

MEMORIES

The houses that Ramon built with his own hands

Chapter 1

My Inheritance Was Waiting

Eleuterio Barbuzano Marcelino González

My father hated me even before I was born. When I came into this world, his rejection was waiting for me, and I would become the instrument of his revenge. The abuse was frequent and he would never accept the unwanted son, since in his mind I served as a constant reminder of his wife’s supposed infidelity.

When he got angry with me, which he did on many occasions, he would call me bastard. In my innocence as a child I did not understand the meaning of the word. I assumed it was a nickname, perhaps a name in honor of being the first born son. Another comment that I would hear frequently spew from his lips was, You are not and never will be a seed of my loins.

I am writing these pages from the assisted living facility in the town of Frontera on the island of El Hierro, Canary Islands, Spain. I am more than 96 years old. I feel a great fatigue from the long and arduous journey that has been my life. Although the end is near I still have the time to reminisce. My mind is sharp even though my body is wearing out.

The days and the nights seem unending and a profound loneliness permeates my being. I observe my wife lying silently enveloped in her consuming illness awaiting the relief that death will bring her. I do not have any friends that come to visit and my son and his family are in a far away land. Here I feel completely forgotten by my family and in-laws albeit for different reasons, but the result is the same, abandonment.

I am here in the company of others who like me are in the twilight of their lives. Time to think is excessive, more time than life itself. During the long nights when the aches and pains of age prevent me from sleeping, I sit in front of my old friend, an ancient manual typewriter. I write of my sorrows and pleasures and watch the deep black ribbon imprint my thoughts on the pristine white page. It is as if my memories are spilling out like tea leaves to be read, not to predict the future, but to bring to light the past.

Only the repeated clicking of the keyboard resounds in the stillness of the midnight hours when everyone else is asleep. A muffled groan comes from the bedridden silhouette of my wife cushioned by the morphine that calms her constant pain from the cancer within. I stop writing for a moment to memorize her features, and then return to my notes in order to occupy my mind in other things.

Of the several books that I have written this is the most important to me. I am not looking for recognition or fame from its publication. My only objective is to present my story, to share my memories and experiences. I didn’t have the courage to tell of the people that I have encountered or of the events that have unfolded before me while alive, but now I hope to empty my heart of the lesions that have been an irritant for so long.

I asked my son to promise to publish this manuscript after my death to avoid any repercussions from those who might disagree with its content. It won’t be easy for him run interference on my behalf, but I finally want to tell the truth after decades of denial. I wish to break the silence without the fear of reprisals. My conscience demands that I be honest at last with the people I have known, with my son, and most of all with myself. I desire to truly rest in peace. The opinions of others, whether good or bad, no longer have merit for me.

I fervently hope that this book might reach the young people of today so that they will know of how hard their great-grandparents and grandparents worked. They strove to give their children a better life, and with each following generation the quality of life rose and rose to the present level of designer clothes and mobile phones. The youth of today should be aware of the degree of comfort that they enjoy would never had been reached, if it hadn’t been for the sacrifices of the those who left and immigrated to the Americas. Some risked their lives to cross the ocean and most scrimped to save money to send back to their families. Thanks to these efforts the social and economic conditions of the Canary Islands improved tremendously.

It seems impossible, and something that I will never know, but I would like this book to also reach beyond the borders of Spain. There are men and women like me who continue to immigrate with the expectation of finding a decent life for their families. They want to break away from the chains of the indifference of their governments, the abuse of the rich, and perhaps the negligence of family members. Possibly these pages will give them the strength to attempt to do so.

I begin my story with describing the island of El Hierro and what life was like in the old days at the very beginning of the twentieth century. El Hierro was also known as the Isla de Meridiano, because the original navigational line of zero meridian passed right by the island. It is the smallest of the seven Canary Islands which are located in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Africa. It is the furthest west of all of them which made it the last vestige of land that Christopher Columbus saw before sailing into the unknown.

When I was born in 1916, we didn’t have electricity, nor running water, and we wouldn’t benefit from these luxuries until the1980’s. We subsisted by means of agriculture and the raising of certain animals which afforded us milk and meat. Very few products were brought from the outside. Consequently, sugar and rice were among the items that were rationed because of their scarcity. We sometimes did not have the money to buy our assigned ration. We survived by not depending on any product that was not native to our island. We poor Herreños shared willingly with each other because of mutual necessity.

The roads were made of dirt and there were no vehicles, except for an ancient truck that brought the cargo from the port, and a rusty old bus that distributed the mail from town to town. In times of bad weather the truck and the bus didn’t appear, because the boat had been unable to dock in the rough seas. Passengers and cargo had to be transported to the cement pier by rowboat which was at the least time consuming and at the worst impossible.

On mail delivery day the people would gather in town to wait for the bus even into the late hours of the night with their kerosene lanterns. They wanted to be there for the canto de las cartas. The mailman would sing out the names of the recipients in a loud voice. Many of the letters were then read aloud since most of the correspondence came from those who had immigrated. Perhaps there was news of a loved one in another’s letter. The reading of these epistles was quite a social event. Even if the mail were late or didn’t arrive at all, the locals enjoyed a bit of rest and gossip after a long day of working in the fields.

Cooking was done on an open fire and we lived in houses with roofs of straw and floors of dried cow manure. To take care of the basic necessities we had to go outside to the outhouse. This structure was a septic tank dug at a distance from the living quarters. It consisted of a simple hole in the ground surrounded by walls of stones which were in abundance in the volcanic landscape. It didn’t have a door or a roof and it was extremely uncomfortable to use. Since there was no mortar between the stones, it was especially tortuous in the cold and windy winter months. Even though the island is located in a tropical zone, my native village is at an altitude of over four thousand feet.

Without indoor plumbing in order to take a bath we had to use any kind of bucket and pour the water over our heads and then twist and turn to catch the precious liquid as it slipped quickly to our feet. Personal hygiene suffered in the winter because the water would be cold and, of course, the ritual did not occur in the protection of the house. In this land of poverty soap and toothpaste were unknown. There wasn’t any toilet paper so we had to invent and utilize what was available, which were stones (ouch!) and leaves (watch out for thistles!)

The people of the towns would look for a place to sit that would protect them from the elements especially in my town of San Andrés high in the mountains. It was and is often enveloped by the clouds coming through the mountain passes. Every village had a little place called una gorona which was