Labyrinth of Memories: A Child in the Spanish Civil War

By Luis Martín

Luis Martins family was separated when he was a child during the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. He grew up hearing the stories of their separation and reconciliation recounted over and over. Combining his own childhood memories of those events with the remembered stories from his family members, he has written an engaging and thought-provoking Labyrinth of Memories: A Child in the Spanish Civil War. The circumstances of war take on new meaning when viewed through a childs eyes in this recounting, and the bonds of family are vivid and indelible.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 23, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499016482

Luis Martín

Luis Martín, Ph. D., is the Edmond and Louise Kahn Emeritus Professor of History, Southern Methodist University. He was born in Seville, Spain on October 6, 1927. He received a Ph.D. in Latin American History, Columbia University, 1966, an MA in philosophy, Recuerdo College, Madrid, Spain, and a BA in Classical Studies, San Luis College, Puerto de Santa Maria, Cadiz, Spain. He was selected Outstanding Educator in America in 1988 and was appointed to the Royal Order of Civic Merit by King Juan Carlos of Spain. He is the author of five books on the history of Latin America.

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Copyright © 2014 by Luís Martín.

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Rev. date: 08/02/2016

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Chapter I The Hill Country

Chapter II Early Years

Chapter III The Instituto Escuela

Chapter IV La Roda

Chapter V La Liberacion De La Roda

Chapter VI The Wisdom Of The Street

Chapter VII In Ictu Oculi

Chapter VIII Sanatorium of the Mind

Chapter IX The War Has Ended

Chapter X Spencer Tracy Made Me Do It

To my Son, Rafael

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

W ithout the encouragement and help of many, I would not have been able to complete this small gift of my heart to my son. After more than 20 years of slowly drafting the story of my childhood in the Spanish Civil War, I was ready to lay it aside, but my wife Sharon would not let me. Further, she engaged the assistance of one of our friends, Judith Garrett Segura, to read the draft and help me put the manuscript into publishable form. I wish to thank the two of them especially, but also my countless students, travel companions, and friends for their loyalty over the years in listening to my stories and for urging me to write them down.

FOREWORD

O ur Memories are a fragile spider web of the mind stretched from a past that is no more into a future that is not yet. Caught in the present, inside that spider web of memories, is the Self, a busy spider itself always spinning new threads of memories and rearranging the old ones into ever-changing patterns.

We are what we remember, and what we remember exists only in the hazy subjectivity of the Self. Miguel de Cervantes in the first chapter of his literary masterpiece Don Quixote wrote tongue-in-cheek, The reason of the unreason which my reason turns…. Perhaps I should be allowed to write a bit more seriously about the objectivity of my subjectivity: a subjectivity of memories, thoughts, emotions, and remembered places and events.

Those memories, clashing with each other through the years, have finally crystallized into the person that I am today. With a respectful bow to René Descartes, I would dare to say, I remember what I was, therefore I am what I am today.

As a professional historian, I have tried several times to catch and tame those memories in the hope of leading them orderly into the corral of historical objectivity. Luckily I have failed. To have succeeded would have been to mutilate and eventually kill the Self, like the collector of butterflies who pins them on the pages of a book only after they are dead and can fly no more.

This book, written for my son and his children with great love, is then not the history, but the foggy labyrinth of memories of a boy who grew up in the distant land of Spain and in the midst of its bloody civil war of 1936-1939. I hope that my son, others in the family, friends, and my students will recognize in the boy lost in that labyrinth the emerging profile of the man whom they have known over the last 45 years writing and teaching in Dallas, Texas.

CHAPTER I

The Hill Country

T he five of us stood in silence at the gate of the old village cemetery. Even the two children, who in the slow drive up the mountain roads had been talkative and restless, were now still and quiet. The cemetery, the corral of the dead as Miguel de Unamuno called it in a poem, was built halfway up a hill which goats and hogs had been stripping bare for centuries. Olive trees and oaks stood on the slope’s rocky soil, harsh, silent, and austere like monks in a cloister, just as they had since the days the Roman legions crossed these hills.

I could not take my eyes from my grandfather’s grave. It seemed like yesterday, although more than half a century had passed since they lowered him into the earth. The village men, their heads bowed and their hats in their hands, stood around the open grave while an old, country priest intoned in Latin "Memento, homo, quia pulvis est…. Remember, man, that thou are dust and into dust thou shall return."

Fifty years have passed and nothing has changed around the old cemetery. Time does not flow in these hills. It is dammed, and the past rests deeply inlaid in the present like my grandfather’s body in the side of that hill.

I did not look back from the gate, but I knew that behind us, beyond the ribbon of the village road at the foot of the hill, a mountain stream had softened the harshness of the landscape. A small forest of poplars, whose silver green leaves reminded me as a child of the sanctuary bells in the village church, ran along the banks of the stream.

In the hot summer afternoons of half a century ago, during our summer vacations in the village, we would run into the cool tunnel of poplars, wade noisily into the stream, and find our favorite water hole. We had dammed the stream with rocks, reeds, and mud to form a pond, and called it el charco de los galapagos, the pond of the turtles. I spent hours with my brothers and cousins splashing naked in the cold mountain water.

The shepherd boys, who at noon led their goats and sheep to the stream, joined our games. Those illiterate shepherd boys taught us what our school back in the city could never teach us: to milk goats, to set bird traps, to recognize the footprints of wolves, and to roast chestnuts and acorns in an open fire.

Grandfather owned an orchard and a vegetable garden along the stream, not far from the cemetery where he now rested. Early in the morning, as the sun rose over San Cristobal Mountain, we used to come with Uncle Gregorio into the orchard to pick brevas, the big, purple figs so ripe that you could easily squash them between your fingers.

The morning dew, pierced by the soft rays of an early sun, was still trembling on the leaves of the fig trees, a thousand shining, twinkling eyes. Nearby, inside the poplar grove, flocks of birds had already begun to tear the silence and stillness of dawn with the sharp clatter of their morning singing.

While we children climbed the fig trees, Uncle Gregorio held for us the big willow basket to be filled with brevas. The old country priest had told us in the confessional that it was a sin against charity, yet the temptation was impossible to resist. The large, soft figs were ideal projectiles, and Uncle Gregorio was an irresistible target. On those enchanting mornings of our summer vacations, purple figs and children’s laughter rained from the sky.

As we stood silent at the gate of the old cemetery, a powerful undertow of memories pulled me across half a century, back into a distant past. My friends, respecting my silence, did not break the spell of my memories. Finally, a whispering voice and a hand pressing lightly on my shoulder brought me back to the present.

The voice reaffirmed what I was already thinking, that there was a long, long road between that village graveyard and my endowed professorship in an American university, and that it had taken me a lifetime to journey along that road.

My friend was right. It had been a long road and a long journey. A few days before, I had attended the graduation ceremonies at the college where I taught in Texas, wearing the academic robes of my alma mater, Columbia University.

Now I stood in front of my grandfather’s grave: the man of today, a college professor in America, reaching down half a century trying desperately to touch the grandson of a Spanish peasant, the shoemaker of a hamlet of about 200 people. I had come back to Spain to hunt for memories.

Like a shepherd boy at sunset, gathering goats and sheep, I was in the hill country near Seville to round up my memories, some of them phantom memories, in the hope to corral them in this twilight of my career.

As we moved from the cemetery gate toward the waiting car, my thoughts began drifting again, this time towards the poplar leaves, silver bells in my child’s imagination. Could those leaves travel down the trunk of the poplars to touch the roots sunk deep into the moist soil around the mountain stream? The thought was so absurd, and yet tears welled up in my eyes.

I let my friends get into the car and turned for a last glance at the cemetery. I felt myself growing from that grave in the hillside, with my history flowing from it like a refreshing mountain stream.

Still halfway daydreaming, I drove my friends from Dallas, Texas, away from the cemetery, around the bend of the road to reach the hamlet of Los Romeros, where my mother was born in 1900 and where the family spent the summers during the Spanish Civil War of