Tell Me Who I Am by Julia Navarro
“Hello, how are you?”
“Mom, couldn’t you call me some other time?”
“But it’s two o’clock. You weren’t asleep?”
“Yes, I was, I worked late. They told me a lot of things about great-grandmother yesterday and I didn’t want to forget any of them.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Look, Guillermo, I’m worried about you. I think you’re taking Aunt Marta’s job too seriously, and you’re letting the professional side of things slip. I know that your aunt’s paying you generously; it’s alright to write about great-grandmother for fun, but I don’t want you to get sidetracked and stop looking for real work.”
My head felt like it was stuffed with cotton wool, but I knew that nothing would stop my mother from delivering a sermon, so I decided in advance to give in.
“I’d love to get a good job. Do you think I’m not looking everywhere for one? But there’s no job’s going, Mom. The right doesn’t trust me because they think I’m a red, the left doesn’t trust me either because I don’t support them uncritically, so I don’t have many options.”
“Come on, Guillermo, it can’t be as bad as all that. You’re a good journalist, you’ve got perfect English and French, and your German’s quite good as well, it’s impossible that they’re not offering jobs to a gem like you.”
“Mama, I might be a gem for you, but they don’t look at it like that.”
“But the news agencies don’t belong to the politicians.”
“No, but it’s as if they do; some support one side, others support the other. Don’t you listen to the radio? Don’t you watch TV?”
“Guillermo, stop being stubborn and listen to me!”
“I am listening to you! I know that it’s tough for you to understand how bad the journalism business is, but trust me, that’s how it is.”
“Promise me you’ll carry on looking for a job.”
“I promise.”
“Good. When are you coming to see me?”
“I don’t know, let me get up and get sorted, and then I’ll call you, okay?”
Once I’d got through the conversation with my mother, I got into the shower to wake myself up. My temples were throbbing, and I felt a knot in my stomach. The whisky had done its work.
I looked into the fridge and found a carton of juice and a yogurt. It was enough to give me a bit of energy back before I called Pablo Soler. Of course, I went online to look up things about him, and found to my surprise that Professor Soler was a reputable historian, who had taught at Princeton and who had come back, laden with honors, in ’82. He had published more than twenty books and was considered an authority on the Civil War.
I looked for the phone number that Doña Laura had given me.
“Don Pablo Soler?”
“Speaking.”
“Don Pablo, my name is Guillermo Albi Carranza. Doña Laura Garayoa gave me this number, I think she’s spoken to you about the research I’m doing.”
“That’s right.”
The man didn’t seem very talkative, so I carried on speaking.
“If it’s no trouble, I would like to meet you to clear up some things about Amelia Garayoa, I don’t know if Doña Laura told you, but she was my great-grandmother.”
“She told me, yes.”
“Right, well, when can I come and see you?”
“Tomorrow at eight sharp.”
“Eight p.m.?”
“No, eight a.m.”
“Ah! Well... alright... If you give me your address I’ll be there.”
I cursed my luck. I would have liked to have gotten over the lack of sleep and the whisky, but there was nothing to do except put a couple of items in a bag and to go to the airport to get the next flight to Barcelona. A good thing that Aunt Marta wasn’t scrimping on the extras, because I would have to sleep there, and in the state I was in, nothing less than a four-star hotel would do.
Pablo Soler was a tall old man, thin, very upright for his age, which was over eighty, although he was still surprisingly agile. He himself opened the door to his top-floor apartment in a residential area of Barcelona.
“Some Communist!” I thought as I went into the large and elegantly decorated apartment. I recognized a Mompó, two drawings by Alberti, a Miró... Anyway, doing the place up must have cost a mint.
“Are you interested in painting?” he asked me, seeing my eyes returning to the pictures.
“Yes. I trained as a journalist, but I was wondering about whether to study fine arts.”
“And why didn’t you?”
“I didn’t want to starve. I know I don’t have the talent to produce a great work, although journalism isn’t going so well for me either at the moment.”
Pablo Soler led me to his office, which was lined from floor to ceiling with bookshelves. A portrait occupied the only free space on the walls. My attention was drawn to it; it was a portrait of a young black woman.
“My wife,” he said.
“Ah!” was what I came up with.
“Well, let’s get started. Speak.”
“Doña Laura has told you...”
“Yes, yes,” he interrupted, “I know, you’re trying to find out about Amelia’s life.”
“Yes, that’s the idea. She was my great-grandmother, but my family doesn’t know anything about her, she has always been a forbidden topic. Look, I’ve brought a copy of an old photograph with me. Do you recognize her?”
Pablo Soler looked slowly at the picture.
“She was a very beautiful woman,” he murmured.
He picked up a little bell and rang it. A Filipina maid, perfectly dressed, came in at once. I had taken him for a revolutionary, and was surprised. He asked her to bring us coffee, which I was grateful for: Eight a.m. is not my best moment of the day.
“Where would you like us to begin?” he asked without further ado.
“I thought I’d ask you if you saw Amelia here, in Barcelona, when she ran away with Pierre. From what Doña Laura told me, it was at exactly that time that your mother brought you to live here. And, well, if you could tell me who Pierre really was...”
“Pierre Comte was an agent of the INO.”
“What’s that?” I had never heard that acronym.
“The Foreign Department, a branch of the NKVD, which itself evolved from the Cheka, which Felix Dzerzhinsky founded in 1917. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
Pablo Soler looked at me curiously, as his revelation had left me gobsmacked. I had just discovered that my great-grandmother had run off, lightly, just like that, with a Soviet agent.
“I know who Dzerzhinsky was, a Pole who was in charge of Lenin’s security service, and who ended up founding the Cheka, which was a police force designed to root out counterrevolutionaries.”
“Well, if you want to put it like that... The Cheka went on getting stronger and taking on more responsibilities, and it turned into the GPU, the State Police Directorate, and then the OGPU, the Unified State Police Directorate. And then it was incorporated into the NKVD in 1934. But the KGB will be a more familiar name for you, which is what the force was called after ’54. The NKVD was organized like a ministry, everything depended on it: The political police, the border guards, the external spy service, the gulags, and the INO were inside the NKVD, a shadow army that acted all over the world. Their agents were formidable.”
“And my great-grandmother got mixed up in all this?”
“When Amelia ran off with Pierre, she had no idea that this was what he did. Neither Josep nor Lola had told her anything about him, apart from the fact that he was a bookseller in Paris, and a Communist; they didn’t know that Pierre was a Soviet agent. And Josep and Lola were also committed Communists, ready to do whatever the party asked.”
“I thought your mother was a Socialist.”
“She was, to begin with, but she ended up joining the Communists; she didn’t like to do things by halves. Lola had a very strong character.”
“I’m su
“It’s always good to try to put some distance when you are talking about historical facts, but I started to think of them as Josep and Lola when I reached adolescence. And they were committed Communists, nothing and no one could make them change their convictions. They were formidable. I have never stopped admiring them for their faith in the cause, for their honorableness, for their sense of loyalty and sacrifice, but I’ve also never stopped reproaching them for their blindness.”
“I’m sorry, professor, I’m going to ask you what may seem an impertinent question. Are you a Communist?”
“Do you think I could have given classes at Princeton if I had been? I had enough with my parents... No, I am not a Communist, I never was one of them, it’s a puerile idea of paradise. I rebelled against my parents like children are supposed to do; in my case it was for personal reasons, above all my relationship with my mother, but back then I was a child who adored his father and who felt a limitless admiration for him. If you want to know what I think, I can summarize it as follows: I abhor all ‘isms.’ Communism, Socialism, Nationalism, Fascism... Anything that carries the germ of totalitarianism within itself.”
“But you must have some ideological position...”
“I am a democrat who believes in people, in their initiative and their capacity to progress without being led by politics or religion.”
“So your parents must have been bummed out...”
“I’m sorry?”
“It’s a colloquial expression. I suppose children must always disappoint their parents, we’re never what they dreamed we would be.”
“In my case I can guarantee that to be the truth.”
“I’m sorry, I won’t interrupt you again.”
Pablo began to speak.
Josep admired Pierre. I think that, although he did not know about Pierre’s being a Soviet agent, he realized that because of his comings and goings and his collaboration with the Communist International, Pierre must be important, especially because he was engaged in information gathering. He was interested in everything, from how the Spanish Communists were organized, to the Trotskyite movements or the strength of the CNT, to the Socialists, to Azaña’s government. Sometimes he would let slip in conversation that he had spoken to some left-wing politician, or had dined with an important journalist.
Pierre’s alibi was ideal: a bookseller, specializing in rare and antique books. His bookshop in Paris was an important point of reference for anyone looking for a rare volume, an incunabulum, or a banned book. This allowed him to travel the world and to meet people connected with culture, who are always nervous and open to new experiences, including new ideologies. So nobody was surprised when this bookseller turned up in Spain, and moved between Barcelona and Madrid, as well as visiting other provincial capitals.
I was a child when I met him. I thought it was funny that he spoke Spanish with a French accent; he spoke English and Russian as well. His mother was a Russian who had married a Frenchman. Pierre’s father shared his son’s ideological positions, but his mother thanked God that she had escaped the revolution, because many of her family members had disappeared without a trace as a result of Stalin’s repressive policies.
This was Pierre, a man who was irresistible to women because of his gallantry, and above all because he listened to them, which was something rare in a time when men, even revolutionaries, were not as sophisticated as they are today. But Pierre had made listening to people into an art, there was nothing that he found uninteresting, nothing that was a tale of minor importance. It seemed that he found a use for everything that he was told, he kept it in his brain and waited for it to come in handy. Sometimes my mother chided Josep for not being able to listen to her as Pierre did, and my father was actually a good listener, something that had enabled him to convince Amelia of the benefits of the revolution.
Amelia fell in love with Pierre without wanting to. He was very handsome, and he was different. He dressed carelessly but always with elegance; he was always sympathetic and in a good mood, and he was very well educated, without being pedantic.
And you were right, I did meet Amelia and Pierre in Barcelona at the beginning of April 1936. My mother and I arrived two days after they did.
My father had decided that we should go live with him. He had found a job for my mother as a seamstress in his employer’s house.
My father’s attic was much more spacious than the one in which we had lived in Madrid. It had three rooms and a kitchen, it even had a little room with a sink, which was a luxury in those days. It was on the top floor of the house of my father’s employer; he had made it available to my father in order to have him always at hand at day and at night, in case he had to go out suddenly or take his wife somewhere. Before he had been given so much space, my father had slept in an attic room with the butler, but my father explained to his employer that he would like to live with his family and he needed space for them, without which he would have to leave his job and look for another.
His employer gave them the attic, but asked my father not to tell his wife that he was not married, that Lola, my mother, was not his lawfully wedded wife, because it could cause problems for the pair of them. He himself did not mind about my parents’ civil situation; he was a pragmatic businessman who enjoyed having his chauffeur available twenty-four hours a day, especially as my father was a discreet man, who drove his employer every Thursday afternoon to a certain house where a young woman lived, whom my father’s employer kept. There were occasions, when they traveled to Madrid on business, that this woman would journey with them. They reached an agreement: the large attic, but a smaller wage.
A few days after arriving in Barcelona I went to Doña Anita’s house with Lola. Amelia was there. Doña Anita was the widow of a bookseller from whom she had inherited his bookshop and his Communist convictions, and it may have been that he got them from him. Doña Anita, before people began to call her “Doña,” had taken on ironing, and the bookseller’s family members were among her clients. Back then she already worked with the Communists. She was a clever girl and managed to get the son of the family to fall for her, and then she married him, but his health was fragile and he died young from a heart attack. She fought tooth and nail with her in-laws to remain in charge of the bookshop that had been her husband’s, and in the end was victorious. She started to organize what she called “literary evenings,” and managed to gather together a great number of intellectuals, aspiring writers, journalists, and left-wing politicians. In one of my books, on Alexander Orlov and the Soviet presence in Spain in the years before the Civil War, I mentioned Doña Anita’s bookshop: It was a place where people left messages, shared information, and even organized clandestine meetings between agents and their controllers.
Doña Anita’s bookshop had an interior staircase that led up to her home, on the second floor of a building near the Plaza de San Jaime. That is where we met Amelia.
“Lola, Pablo, what a pleasure to see you!” Amelia seemed happy to see us.
“How are you? Is everything going well?” Lola asked.
“Yes, yes, I’m very happy, but I can’t stop thinking about my son and...”
“Don’t speak! You’ve made the right decision. You and Pierre have a mission to complete, and... you love each other. Amelia, you have decided to be a revolutionary, and you need to revolutionize your silly bourgeois life as well.”
Lola did not stand on ceremony where Amelia was concerned. Over time I have realized that she felt a secret envy for her. Amelia was beautiful, elegant, pleasant, cultured, and had the air of someone who has grown up surrounded by beautiful things: books, pictures, furniture... Lola had been a skivvy and then had done ironing and sewing, and that is what she was: a proletarian full of illusions, convinced that the hour had come for people like her who had nothing.
“I can’t help it! I love Javier so much! I hope that one day my little boy will understand what I have
Amelia wanted to fool herself, but Lola would not let her.
“Your son won’t lack for anything, like your cousin Jesús, who’s the same age as my Pablo and... There are millions of children who will never have half what your child has; you need to sacrifice yourself for these children. Forget about yourself and your petty bourgeois egotism.”
There were not many people at Doña Anita’s house that evening, and Doña Anita herself made a face when she saw me. For all that I was the son of Lola and Josep, she did not like children, and she made no bones about saying so.
“There’s no room for the kid.”
“I don’t have anywhere to leave him and Josep said that he should come here to meet us.”
Lola recognized Doña Anita for the proletarian she had been, in spite of her well-made dress and silk blouse, her pearl earrings and well-groomed hair. A woman like Doña Anita did not impress her.
“Important people are coming to see Pierre this evening and I don’t want anything to disturb him,” Doña Anita insisted.
“Pablo won’t disturb him, my son’s been a Communist since the day he was born, and he’s used to political meetings. Anyway, he knows Pierre well. Tell him yourself, Amelia.”
“Don’t worry, Doña Anita, the child is very good and won’t be a nuisance.”
Josep occupied an important position among the Catalan Communists; he was not a boss, but he was the confidant of bosses. He worked as a “postman,” thanks to his job as a chauffeur and his frequent journeys to Madrid.
For a child, this was not a fun afternoon. Sitting on a chair, not allowed to move, I could do nothing but observe what was happening. When Pierre arrived, Amelia went anxiously up to him.