I’ve been reading, and then re-reading, a very long novel in Spanish: Las Tres Bodas de Monolita by Almudena Grandes. I had to re-read it because there were so many intermingled stories that I wanted to get straight. The author told the same events several times over from different character’s points of view. Nothing is really recounted chronologically. An event is hinted at and the details gradually revealed in a time-shifting fashion. And yet it works extremely well.
Much of the narrative is woven around real people and real events, leading me to investigate some of them on the internet. Manolita’s three weddings refer to a system where a priest at the Porlier prison in Madrid, where republican prisoners were held in the post Civil War years, arranged for a quite large price for women to have conjugal visits with prisoners, conjugal visits in quite disgusting conditions! The priest was making a fortune from the misery of others. Manolita and other fictional characters are part of this system.
Manolita also regualrly took food parcels to her father, and later to her fisnce, in the prison. Wives, daughters, sisters of prisoners queued up to provide food parcels for men who would otherwise be severely undernourished. The same happened for Republican women held in the Ventas prison. A sense of community developed in the queues for delivering parcels and visit prisoners.
Manolita and her fiancé Silverio eventually lived together for some years in a “house” constructed by Silverio and his fellow prisoners in the Cuelgamuros valley where prisoners were building Franco’s monument to the soldiers who had died fighting on his side in the Civil War.
This was the Valle de los Caídos, the Valley of the Fallen, its name changed officially in 2022 to Valle de Cuelgamuros, changing it from a monument to fascism to a monument to all Spaniards who died in that conflict. Franco was initially buried there but later exhumed in 2019, in an attempt to prevent glorification of his dictorship.
Throughout the Civil War Silverio, a skilful engineer, worked in an underground munitions factory in the unfinished metro station Nuevos Ministerios. Because of the non-intervention pact the Republicans had great difficulty purchasing munitions but this underground factory helped keep up the defence of Madrid, albeit an eventually unsuccesdful defence. This was an aspect of the Civil War that I had never heard of before.
In her notes at the end of the novel, Almudena Grandes tells us of her meeting with the real Isabel Perales, the name given to the sister of Manolita in the novel. Under a system that I had again never heard of before, children of Republican prisoners were sent to be “educated” in boarding schools. The real life Isabel Perales was one such. The novel sends her, aged 14, to one such school in Bilbao, together with her much younger half-sister. The younger sister receives a good education, if indoctrination in good Catholic values and the belief that their parents were mistakenly bad, could be considered a good education. The older girls like Isabel, who had been excited at the prospect of learning to read and write and learning new things, were set to work in the school’s laundry. Like the real Isabel Perales, the fictional Isable has a severe allergic reaction to the soda used to wash sheets and tablecloths and clothing, and bore the scars for the rest of her life. But in real life, she went on to a career in the costume department of cinema and television.
Another real life character incorporated into the narrative is Roberto Conesa Escudero, one of Franco’s men, awarded honours for his work in capturing and extorting confessions from Republicans after the war. Throughout the novel the reader is aware that this supposed Republican, member of all the correct organisation during the Civil War, and an infiltrator on the post war years, is not to be trusted. The friends and comrades of his youth are undecided and he leads to the downfall of real and fictitious Republicans. Researching him on the internet I found he was crucial in the capture and execution of a group of young Republican women, whose story I had read years ago in Spain; Trece Rosas Rojas.
And so the circle goes around. So many things still to learn.
Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!
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