The Battle of the Ebro

If you don’t think about it carefully, my worst Christmas might not seem all that bad. If you do, on the other hand, give my story some thought, you’ll realize that it’s a horrible one. You might even wonder how I survived it, although it wasn’t quite that horrible and maybe I’ve just exaggerated a little bit. Yes, just a little. Maybe.

The real horror is the fact that I can’t forget that Christmas and relive it far too often, and what was originally there, the ones who were there, are a full-blown nightmare. Reality pales in the wake of an unpleasant event, twisting and turning itself into a little worm that burrows into a person and never comes out because it makes its nest in dirt and disgust.

Everything began with the roommate I had while studying and writing in Madrid. I might have known the language, but I didn’t have a good handle on the city’s geography. I simply arrived, very much on my own, spent a couple nights in a dark but cheap hostal in la Puerta del Sol, the very center of the city. I had gone there because it was what I remembered from a previous visit. The place was the definition of dingy and dreary, or at least what I thought of a dingy and dreary at the time. When I took a notice for a vacant bedroom elsewhere in Madrid, I virtually fled the hostal and headed to a barrio in the northern part of the city. It was a newer area, no personality yet, but people knew about the Barrio del Pilar, although nobody thought it was the best place to be. Far from the cultural sites, needed to take two buses to reach it, that sort of thing.

Still, the apartment was affordable, and my roommate Gloria seemed nice enough, although rougher around the edges than I was, even. Her friends weren’t rough around the edges; they were real fascists, singing the praises of Franco and raising their hands in his chosen salute, which was taken from a well-known Nazi leader who was his friend. I mean, I really should have known things could be problematic, but when they celebrated the Day of the Dead in ghoulish ritual, I cringed and thought it would be over soon. The friends were Galician, but their only use of the language was to sing (badly) some folk songs and laugh at the country bumpkins back where they had come from, like Franco.

Like I said, I might have been able to speak the language, but my cultural knowledge had a ways to go. Also, I was starved for company and would be until the next summer. Before that, however, there was Christmas to get through. I had my class and research to do, but no real friends, so Gloria took pity on me and invited me to spend the holiday with her family. Maybe if I’d known then that her friends had urged her to charge me twenty-five percent more than the real monthly rent and she did that for several months before her conscience made her confess, I wouldn’t have agreed to go to her family’s house. What would I want to celebrate with strangers and a conniving roommate?

But I didn’t know these things, didn’t know how fascist Gloria’s friends were, and so I set off with her one cold, dry morning from Madrid, heading by train to Miranda del Ebro. She always spoke of it fondly because it was her home, after all. For my part, the name sounded poetic and the Ebro River had a major spot in Spanish Civil War history, for the battle. I can’t say how far in kilometers the train took us, but it seems like it was around five hours an a hard, lumpy seat.

I tried to be excited, glad I wouldn’t spend the holidays alone. Arriving late afternoon, I found the weather was similar to that of Madrid. However, the city of Miranda was in the province of Burgos, which I later would learn is about the most conservative province, after Valladolid. The train only had to take us a distance of 170 miles, the weather was the same, the dry meseta was as wind-blown, but still we had dropped off the edge of something. Maybe it was the campo de concentración that was in Miranda from 1940 to 1947, when a prison like that under the now-dictator Franco was no walk in the park. The Batalla del Ebro, which had taken place during several long months in 1938, had ended horribly for the troops fighting for democracy and the Spanish Republic. They were battered by the soon-to-be dictator’s forces.

The spilled blood must have poisoned the land and done things to the residents of the area. That’s what I try to tell myself now, every time I think of going to Miranda. Hole-in-the-wall Miranda. Virgin Mary we worship thee and every other saint and honor the Catholics only regime that was established in 1939. A nightmare. Land of nightmares and assassins who were often civilians who wore pistols tucked in their belts. I learned all this later, in the years following that Christmas. Still, I sensed something. Something not at all right.

We arrived at Gloria’s house after walking at a fast clip from the station. This is where things blur and mushroom, where I remember nothing at all, not a single word, from the conversation. If I recall any faces at all, they’re like those of the two old men having soup in the famous painting by Velázquez, no wait, by Goya. Old faces shining with lumpy features in a jaundiced light, backed by black nothingness. Darkly threatened by cold, starvation, stupidity (the result of a terrible life). This is all I recall of the family: a live version of an 1820 painting the El Prado museum. The scene is far less frightening there than in Miranda.

Several hours after getting buses to the Madrid station, then being jostled by the old train, to end up in the home of a family named Fernández or Rodríguez or Sánchez. There might have been a mother there as well as a father. Maybe there was a sibling, but I really can’t be sure if the sibling was present physically or merely mentioned in the conversation. I know I felt dusty and sweaty, despite the cold in the house that was an apartment. I wanted the bathroom, a shower, something not being offered in the table conversation.

For the sleeping arrangement, I was offered a bed in an even darker room. It seemed like the only illumination came from leaving the door open to the kitchen and the bare bulb suspended over the table. What was worse, much worse, was the bedding. I don’t recall if I had to share a bed (with Gloria? that would’ve been all right) or not. All that comes to mind is the stench of humanity that permeated the sheets. Humanity and something more. Three coverlets that kept the smell wrapped around me but let the cold in. I don’t remember if there was any heat at all in the home.

It was even harder to ask for warm water to shower, so I didn’t. A change of clothes went on over the brushed-off grime and sweat of the day before, and maybe I accepted a cup of café con leche for breakfast in the morning and ran to the train. To be honest, I don’t remember what day it was, whether December 23, 24, 25, or some other date. It’s hard to know how long I’d been invited to stay, or if I never clarified that detail. I just ran. Made up some reason, and ran.

You’ve most likely noticed that there’s little exact information in my story and that I keep not remembering things like people, colors, a meal of some kind… no meal seems to have been served; just a very cheap wine. Don’t get me wrong: I am not a connoisseur of wine at all, but the red liquid was closer to vinegar than anything else. 

Over the years the faded images have pretty much remained constant: faded. Dingy. Dreary. All of these adjectives to the ultimate degree. Desperation. Dullness. Dread of becoming a mad figure in the painting by Goya. Determination to escape. Physically, I did escape, hence you are hearing my story. Mentally, things have gone quite differently, and those things are what force me to relive the one brief, depressing moment that could have been Christmas or a day before, or after. Except that home held nothing remotely like the holiday. Time has allowed the three down comforters to swell in size and smell, engulfing, drowning me. These may not be real memories, but they are the things I remember. The smell, the vinegar in a glass, the hunger of not having eaten, the starvation of having no fresh air, despite the winds whirling about outside. 

Over the years, as I have tried to explain, I’ve learned things I didn’t yet know, about the politics and economy of the region, the tragic history of the battle, the war, the concentration camp. Maybe I missed some important monuments or views of the landscape, but doubt very much I could get past the memories of so many people who tried to defeat fascism and those who were proud their side had won. Many lived in squalor, but victorious. At least it was their squalor. 

Now I must sit with the recollections of this Christmas-that-wasn’t in Miranda del Ebro, not sad at having been away from home, and every time the theme of that war comes up, I relive those hours. I feel guilty at having accepted the invitation to an infernal part of Spanish geography. I know now these people ate and smelled like they did because of how they thought, what they thought.

It’s like even today I need the shower I never took there, because the bedding and the tiny battle I fought not to drown in it, simply will not disappear. And won’t disappear, as long as the country retains the memory of a horrible period in its history. 

All I can say in my defense is that I have never returned to Miranda-of-the-beautiful-name nor will I. I refuse to sleep with the enemy ever again.