Inheriting Our Names
An Imagined True Memoir of Spain’s Pact of Forgetting
By C. Vargas McPherson
Inheriting Our Names tells of the author’s search for her mother’s, and her grandmother’s, history and begins with the author sitting at the feet of the statue of the Virgin in the Basilica de la Macarena in Seville, fingering her grandmother’s rosary beads and attempting to say the cycle of the Seven Sorrows of Mary.
'I am trying to learn how to use the Seven Sorrows as a map, some kind of chart where I can pinpoint the few facts I know and follow the paths towards some understanding, some meaning from this family legacy of unspoken grief… I am seeking all my grandmother buried, all my mother rejected, all that Spain has silenced since its brutal civil war.'
McPherson goes on to tell the history of Sevilla at the time of the civil war and the fascist dictatorship and to reconstruct the story of her mother and her grandparents.
Her grandmother has a special relationship with the Virgin of the Macarena.
'But as soon as she sees the Virgin she knows. La Macarena is looking right at her. Her eyes are steady, penetrating, as though seeing something important in Aurora. And she winks. There is no mistake.'
A holy statue that winks? And that’s the least of it. Aurora starts daydreaming about helping to carry the heavy statue in a procession.
‘ …what she would give to be able to carry La Macarena. “ You carry me in your heart. That is where it counts.” It’s a voice Aurora hasn’t heard in months. The Virgin is laughing as she climbs off the altar and over the velvet ropes. “Besides, I’m too heavy! These robes!...Aurora takes La Macarena’s arm so She doesn’t trip over the stanchions…”Be careful.” '
The Virgin becomes part of Aurora’s life. Like a good neighbor, she lends a hand and dispenses advice, sometimes unwanted. Aurora’s piety becomes concrete. Something you can relate to.
In 1936, four years after the establishment of the second Spanish republic, Aurora and Manuel are a young married couple with two children. An election has just returned a coalition of left-wing parties to power. It is a time of hope for the working poor, but not one of improvement. Churches are being burned and members of the former ruling classes and priests are being murdered by factions that want to provoke both the end of the religious establishment and of private ownership of resources. Capital flight has plunged the country into economic turmoil.
Times are hard and they are about to get harder. In July 1936 the Francoist general Quiepo de Llano exercises a swift and efficient coup, taking Seville for the self-styled Nationalists before Franco even lands his troops in Spain. In a brief show of resistance by workers flooding into the streets a fellow employee at the iron foundry dies in Manuel’s arms.
Artillery and troops are sent into the Macarena district. Quiepo de Llano makes nightly radio broadcasts.
“Your strikes are futile. You are futile without leaders. Return to work. If you do not, you will be shot. God’s army is merciful, but Spain will be bled if necessary.”
Over the following months suspected ‘reds’ are dragged from their beds and shot against the wall of the cemetery before being tipped into a common grave. Quiepo de Llano exults, “If your man is missing for a day or two, don’t worry. Rest assured, he’s been shot like the dog he is.”
The tale goes on, through personal tragedy, hunger and fear, and all the while La Macarena is on hand for Aurora. But she is not there for Dolores, McPherson’s mother. When the story moves into Dolores’s tale the reason for the sense of disconnection that has affected McPherson and prompted her journey to Seville is fully revealed.
Manuel has a story too, a powerful one. Guilt-ridden because he has a job at the iron foundry that makes ammunition for Franco, because he survived when friends didn’t and because he designed and built the iron railings put up to seal off the chapels in the cathedral from the poor who might steal the gold, Manuel steals scraps of iron from his workplace. He eventually collects enough to make a cross, which he erects in the cemetery where his friends and neighbors were slaughtered. It became known as The Cross with no Name. Manuel told no-one about his cross, until, on his deathbed, he told his eldest son, Manolo. For years Manolo also told no-one. Such are the silenced stories of Seville's Civil War.
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