Chapter Two—DIEGO’S MEMORIES OF GUERNICA (Spain, 1937)
It was that time of day all children await in suspense. It played out the exact same way in 1930s Spain as it had back in Mexico when Diego was a kid. For some, the anticipation itched like the thrilling prospect of a trip to the caramel store; while for others, it stung like a dreaded yet unavoidable visit to the dentist. La hora del patio, or recess, is a time for snacks and bathroom trips—in the eyes of teachers. In a child’s mind, however, it is anything but a time for bodily functions like eating or peeing.
Recess is a daily ritual that determines whether your life will be a living hell, or not.
The clock ticked.
9:48 a.m.
From the back of the class, Diego watched his daughter's friend, Solita—a gangly girl with blond hair as thin as her glasses were thick—adjusting her bodice awkwardly. Already branded a geek at the age of seven, Solita was the kind of kid no one wanted on their sports team and may well have become the target of other bullies had it not been for the arrival of Diego’s daughter Gracia.
Solita slipped into a pair of fancy, white shoes from a box hidden underneath her desk. The shoes looked like pearls, and were at least two sizes larger than the girl’s own feet. What was the girl up to?
Diego’s reputation as a celebrity artist had brought him as a special guest for art class before. During his first visit, the children were being punished, and so they all sat in silence, staring alternately from the clock to the doorknob, waiting for salvation.
The day of the wedding, however, marked the last time Diego would be invited to art class. The next morning the newspaper headlines made a splash: Diego Rivera es un hombre que comeria cojones de toros solo para alardearse. [Loosely translated: “Diego Rivera is a man who would eat bull testicles just for the bragging rights.”] The article exposed his relations with the town women and hinted at a scandal with one of the nuns at the convent.
Oh Spain. Ever since the French Revolution, neighbours to the north were diligently fostering the virtues of liberty, fraternity, and equality in the hearts and minds of children. Meanwhile, well over a century later, quite the opposite was being rooted in Spanish classrooms.
At 9:53 a.m., Solita plucked out a lacy veil from the shoebox and clutched it in her sweaty palms.
The norms in this dogmatic classroom mirrored General Franco’s craving for sheep. A peer of Hitler and Mussolini, Spain’s dictator Franco justified his heinous actions with a crap philosophy penned years later—that “all men were equal, but some were more equal than others”. Sown amongst these lesser beings were artists, gypsies, journalists, and others, including the children born into families that Franco considered vulgar and expendable weeds.
The school’s ‘program' played a role in Franco’s plan to rid the country of inferior languages like Basque and Catalan, and force all Spanish children to speak Castilian Spanish, the purest tongue in the land.
Ironically, the school was located immediately to the left of the sacred oak Guernica Tree. Spanish monarchs had pilgrimaged to kneel before the tree’s symbolic grandeur, paying respect to the autonomy of the Basque People. This separate identity enraged Franco. And so, Franco went on his merry, disgusting way separating the sheep from the goats. . .
For these unfortunate souls, there were three available recourses. They could fight back, flee, or conform. Or, as some opted, feign to conform—which a true revolutionary could argue fell under the same category as conforming.
Solita kept playing peek-a-boo with the ticking clock.
9:55 a.m.
Five more minutes before THE WEDDING.
Franco reminded Diego of his own country’s dictator, Porfirio Díaz. Diego blamed Diaz for the coma that life and art was experiencing in Mexico. Franco and Diaz were like the monsters in Beowulf and Grendel that Diego’s father had taught him to recite: “He was of a race of monsters.” These monsters, despite being killed over and over, would rise again like Jesus.
It was upon facing this very sort of rhyme not reason that Solita, Carlos, Gracia, and their misguided Canadian teacher, Bella—all outcasts in one way or another—met and forged a bond that would tie them together, as decades, oceans and wars would rage on either side of them. It was the fifth Friday in the elementary Primavera Program in Guernica.
Gernika, as it was then known to the Basques, was described by one of Diego’s poet pals as “a sleepy village in Northern Spain yawning with tumbling stone houses curled against lush green hills.” When Diego first cocked his eye on the red roofs of Guernica it dredged up a memory of the mountains of the Sierra where he’d farted around as a kid, tormenting his Indian nurse, Antonia.
Before today, Solita and Carlos had seen each other, of course, but their relationship hinged on the occasional buenos días in the morning and buenas tardes in the afternoon.
9:56 a.m.
Tick. Tock.
Solita looked over to where her future husband sat and noticed a glimmer of compassion before he turned away shyly. Carlos was average in every way except for his nationality. Carlos, like his teacher, was Canadian. He was two years older than Solita and Grace, which explained why they only shared a classroom during art and music hour. Today they were painting scenes from nature, and Carlos couldn’t fathom why the teacher had chosen to do this assignment inside rather than out. For that matter, neither could Diego. The teacher had instructed the children to gaze out the windows, and then paint what the feeling evoked for them.
Carlos painted a bird balanced on a wire inside a cage. The bird looked like a transformed monarch butterfly. Brilliant, Diego thought, and spat the juice from his chewing tobacco onto the gleaming tiles.
The teacher (a nun), no surprise, was brainwashed at injecting religion, not evaluating or appreciating art. She gave Carlos an “F” for failing to understand the nature of the exercise.
Much later, in the principal’s office, Diego pieced together that the idea of a wedding had all started during that first week of April when Gracia, who became Solita’s instant best friend upon arriving in Guernica, had divined a plan to become the village matchmaker.
The boys in the small Basque village had made their lack of interest in Gracia obvious because, for starters, she was Mexican, and therefore, considered beneath them. The combination of such a large body with an especially oversized head (which she’d inherited from Diego) and her habit of walking with a tough swagger to disguise her twisted limp managed only to magnify Gracia’s outsider stripes.
Those boys were ignorant of many things, including Diego’s celebrated stature. While some journalists claimed he was causing a stir in Spanish intellectual and artistic circles, others gossiped about Diego’s reputation with the women of Guernica, confirming his mother’s long-held suspicion that he’d inherited his grandfather, Don Anastasio’s adulturous vigour and virility. Diego’s mother had wasted too many years worrying that her husband had inherited this lustful and promiscuous manhood. What she failed to recognize early enough was that it had skipped a generation.
Diego’s mother—like the boys in Guernica—was caught with her pants down (or her skirts flapping up) by life’s unexpected turns and blows.
As for Gracia, she reacted to those boys and their spurned advances by adopting a strategy well known to some world leaders; pre-empting any further rejection, she assumed the role of the schoolyard bully. The angle she chose to show off her domination first was to coerce an unsuspecting boy to marry Solita, the one girl who had welcomed her to Spain.
It was during one of their shared art classes that Gracia managed to get away with two large pieces of paper instead of the allotted one per student. Upon this second piece of paper she wrote a question and drew three circles underneath. The respondent could check off the first circle under the word yes, maybe in the second, or no in the third one.
Gracia held up the card to give it her final approval when she divined her omission. She put the paper down again and added lines radiating from each circle so that they looked like rays of sunshine. After all, in Spanish, her best friend Solita’s name meant sun.
When Carlos received the mysterious card during recess, a look of constipation crossed his face. Diego had pocketed his chewing tobacco and was enjoying a long drag from his cigarillo. He watched as Carlos read the question a second time:
¿Quieres casarte con Solita un día? Do you want to marry Solita one day?
Solita and Gracia were standing by the swings in the play area. Although all the girls in the third grade surrounded them, it was the few boys who had joined them and were looking over menacingly that concerned Carlos. One of them was Solita’s stepbrother, Juan, an older, more experienced bully than Gracia.
Rumour had it that Juan was once a meek kid that everyone called la tortuga, the turtle. Others gossiped about his rumoured ties to French royalty, and in Spain, you could bet your last peseta that any hint of royal blood guaranteed the bullies would mark a bull’s eye on your behind. Judging by his stride, Juan had risen—like a king—to a position of reverence in the schoolyard.
Children learn early that there’s no worse bully than a former victim who’s turned the tables on his tormentors.
Later, Carlos explained how he made his decision about Solita. Seeds of talent aside, Diego befriended Carlos because he reminded Diego of his dead twin brother, also named Carlos. The kid also shocked Diego with his explanation of the bird he’d painted in the cage. “The bird is me,” he said. “Forced to sit in rows in a stupid classroom painting the outdoors! Birds in a cage don’t sing; they cry.”
Or die, Diego thought.
“So Amigo, what are you gonna do about that note?” Diego asked him.
Carlos said he’d eliminated one choice immediately. It was obvious to him that checking off the circle “no” would invite the wrath of those boys. They would defend the honour of Solita if for no other reason than because she was a native Basque, and therefore they had to stick together. Carlos, like Gracia and the nun who presided over them, was a foreigner.
Carlos, born Charles LaFleur, came from Canada with his parents who’d traveled to Spain (on the same ship as Bella the nun) to assist Dr. Norman Bethune in organizing a mobile blood transfusion service for the casualties of the Spanish civil war. Carlos’ parents were responsible for the collection of blood spanning the area from San Sebastian, a Belle Époque seaside town, all the way to Bilbao. Once settled in Guernica, about 30 kilometres east of Bilbao—a zone considered safer because of its proximity to the French border— they took the nun's advice and enrolled their son in the Spanish immersion program.
Diego had more selfish reasons for enrolling Gracia.He’d traveled to Spain to create propaganda to fight Franco's propaganda. Diego despised Franco whom he nicknamed “Toro Franco”.
Besides, what would Diego have done with a young daughter at his heels all day?
He was also there to drink himself into a stupor, hence stamping out all thoughts of his wife Frida whoring around with his so-called friend, Leon Trotsky. Frida never knew her place, which was part of the reason Diego lusted after her. She drove Diego to madness. He exacted his revenge by painting voraciously (and therefore ravaging) the most hot-blooded women in Guernica.
In other words, Diego was a hypocrite.
But, back to the note.
Did Carlos want to marry Solita? Sweat began to pour down the boy’s neck. Another option equally unavailable to him was “yes.” This would surely invite mocking from his classmates. And so, Carlos checked off the only possible circle, or sun. “Maybe.”
Not a second elapsed after his pencil left the paper and Gracia lunged over as fast as her club foot allowed, grabbed the paper from his hands, and clumped back to the crowd that was growing larger by the minute. Carlos later confided that the long pause that ensued reminded him of a morning back in Canada where he’d waited for what seemed like an eternity for his grandfather’s pregnant cow to give birth.
Finally, one of the boys sent him a look of begrudging respect. Carlos had passed the test. Now, instead of being an unwanted stranger, Carlos had transformed into a clever and worthy opponent. And this, in a Basque schoolyard, was apparently more tolerable.
In the few minutes left during la hora del patio, Gracia and her followers began plotting their next move. Carlos noticed that Solita didn’t appear terribly engrossed in the planning. She turned her body slightly away from the others and rolled her eyes so that only Carlos would see.
And it was at that exact moment: Carlos fell in love with Solita. In another time, in another place, he would have checked off the circle (or sun) below the word “sí”.
The bell pealed out from the direction of the doorway. Maestra Bella, who shook the bell brusquely, stood with her hands on her hips, wearing the look of a suspicious mother. The teacher's frown left tracks on her face that later inspired Carlos to paint his grandfather’s plowed fields back in Canada.
The nun inspired Diego as well, but in other, more carnal ways.
As Carlos brushed past Solita that morning, she smiled at him for the first time.
His knees buckled. He returned a nervous grin that Gracia happened upon and intercepted.
“Mira el plan,” Gracia commanded.
According to this plan, Carlos would marry Solita the following Friday at la hora del patio or he’d regret the day he’d stepped onto Spanish soil. Carlos mumbled something in response that Gracia took to be compliance.
It was thus the wedding plans began in earnest.
During all the preparations, Carlos exacted his revenge by gesturing toward Gracia one day and slipping out the words culo de Grasa, or lard-ass, to a fellow classmate. The expression was whispered amongst even the most devout of Gracia’s followers.
The name-calling eventually surfaced and came to a head with a “Fuck you, Fatso!” event—an event that brought Diego to the school yet again to discuss an appropriate punishment for his daughter’s fighting back.
Carlos, however, wouldn’t be around to witness the bloody noses during la hora del patio of the “Fatso” episode.
Tick. Tock.
9:59 a.m.
One more minute before the ceremony.
Carlos checked his pocket anxiously, relaxing when he felt the smooth metal of the ring. Gracia had delivered it the night before. It was a gift she’d been treasuring. Some tourist had given it to her back in the Mexican plaza where she sold calla lilies to earn extra money. What Carlos understood was that he’d be in big trouble if he dared to lose it.
The bell rang.
It all happened so fast. Vows were exchanged, songs were belted out with heartfelt gusto (if slightly off tempo), and priestess Gracia was convincingly pontifical in her role.
Carlos’ problems began a few moments after the vows, when the priestess ordered the groom to kiss his bride. It was at this point Carlos began to wheeze. The pipes connecting his throat to his lungs seemed to be shrinking as if a snake had reached inside his chest, wrapped its body around the pipes, and squeezed out the air.
The groom bolted.
Everyone assumed that Carlos was faking an illness to save him from returning to school for the final two weeks. At home in bed, the boy was forced to accept the company of what his mother announced as well-wishers. Sadly, quite the opposite of showing up to lend support to a friend, these were the “lawyers” appointed by Gracia, classmates from drama class. They brought with them mounds of documents they called divorce papers that they bullied him into signing.
Since Carlos was unfamiliar with all the legal jargon, he had no idea that he agreed to hand over his prized art collection, including the butterfly-bird in the cage with the red fat “F” telling its own story for all the world to see in the upper right-hand corner.
The divorcees wouldn’t see each other again for nearly two decades. During that time, Carlos wondered occasionally whether Solita had survived the Spanish civil war.
Three days after the elementary program ended on April 26, 1937—it was a Monday, and Monday in Guernica was market day—the bells of Santa Maria tolled in warning. Overhead, the German Condor Legion flew by and bombed the sleepy village, killing more than one quarter of its villagers.
It was the initial test of a Nazi strategy called blitzkrieg. Hitler used Guernica as a testing ground for the military campaign he was about to unleash onto the rest of Europe.
One of Diego’s amigos, Pablo Picasso, immortalized the day with a famous triptych painting that carries the same name as the village. Stark blacks and shadows of grey; you fill in the bloody hues to the carnage of bodies.
The image still singes eyeballs and souls that gaze upon it.
In the years that followed, in different times and different places Diego, Bella, Gracia and likely many others would find themselves staring vacantly in the middle of some animated conversation, imagining those red-roofed houses of Guernica on the night they’d fled; rooftops, burning into a brutal, dismembered night, like Christmas candles incinerating the hillside. Only it was spring, primavera, but instead of celebrating birth, this day solemnized death.
Those who survived Guernica were stained forever. Like all injustice, this stain would spread, and the children’s wounds would creep over decades and continents.
As their story unfolds, it may seem obvious to some that Diego was to blame for bringing Solita and Carlos together again after their first failed wedding in Guernica. One could argue that it was his hand, or that of his daughter Gracia, responsible for both of their weddings. Others may prefer to gaze to the stars and the heavens for an answer.
But, regardless of whose hand dealt the cards, Solita and Carlos did reunite in post-war Paris, a place where their childhood would surely come back to haunt them. And others.
Childhood, like history, is immortal. And memories, even unconscious ones, follow us like shadows.
It was that time of day all children await in suspense. It played out the exact same way in 1930s Spain as it had back in Mexico when Diego was a kid. For some, the anticipation itched like the thrilling prospect of a trip to the caramel store; while for others, it stung like a dreaded yet unavoidable visit to the dentist. La hora del patio, or recess, is a time for snacks and bathroom trips—in the eyes of teachers. In a child’s mind, however, it is anything but a time for bodily functions like eating or peeing.
Recess is a daily ritual that determines whether your life will be a living hell, or not.
The clock ticked.
9:48 a.m.
From the back of the class, Diego watched his daughter's friend, Solita—a gangly girl with blond hair as thin as her glasses were thick—adjusting her bodice awkwardly. Already branded a geek at the age of seven, Solita was the kind of kid no one wanted on their sports team and may well have become the target of other bullies had it not been for the arrival of Diego’s daughter Gracia.
Solita slipped into a pair of fancy, white shoes from a box hidden underneath her desk. The shoes looked like pearls, and were at least two sizes larger than the girl’s own feet. What was the girl up to?
Diego’s reputation as a celebrity artist had brought him as a special guest for art class before. During his first visit, the children were being punished, and so they all sat in silence, staring alternately from the clock to the doorknob, waiting for salvation.
The day of the wedding, however, marked the last time Diego would be invited to art class. The next morning the newspaper headlines made a splash: Diego Rivera es un hombre que comeria cojones de toros solo para alardearse. [Loosely translated: “Diego Rivera is a man who would eat bull testicles just for the bragging rights.”] The article exposed his relations with the town women and hinted at a scandal with one of the nuns at the convent.
Oh Spain. Ever since the French Revolution, neighbours to the north were diligently fostering the virtues of liberty, fraternity, and equality in the hearts and minds of children. Meanwhile, well over a century later, quite the opposite was being rooted in Spanish classrooms.
At 9:53 a.m., Solita plucked out a lacy veil from the shoebox and clutched it in her sweaty palms.
The norms in this dogmatic classroom mirrored General Franco’s craving for sheep. A peer of Hitler and Mussolini, Spain’s dictator Franco justified his heinous actions with a crap philosophy penned years later—that “all men were equal, but some were more equal than others”. Sown amongst these lesser beings were artists, gypsies, journalists, and others, including the children born into families that Franco considered vulgar and expendable weeds.
The school’s ‘program' played a role in Franco’s plan to rid the country of inferior languages like Basque and Catalan, and force all Spanish children to speak Castilian Spanish, the purest tongue in the land.
Ironically, the school was located immediately to the left of the sacred oak Guernica Tree. Spanish monarchs had pilgrimaged to kneel before the tree’s symbolic grandeur, paying respect to the autonomy of the Basque People. This separate identity enraged Franco. And so, Franco went on his merry, disgusting way separating the sheep from the goats. . .
For these unfortunate souls, there were three available recourses. They could fight back, flee, or conform. Or, as some opted, feign to conform—which a true revolutionary could argue fell under the same category as conforming.
Solita kept playing peek-a-boo with the ticking clock.
9:55 a.m.
Five more minutes before THE WEDDING.
Franco reminded Diego of his own country’s dictator, Porfirio Díaz. Diego blamed Diaz for the coma that life and art was experiencing in Mexico. Franco and Diaz were like the monsters in Beowulf and Grendel that Diego’s father had taught him to recite: “He was of a race of monsters.” These monsters, despite being killed over and over, would rise again like Jesus.
It was upon facing this very sort of rhyme not reason that Solita, Carlos, Gracia, and their misguided Canadian teacher, Bella—all outcasts in one way or another—met and forged a bond that would tie them together, as decades, oceans and wars would rage on either side of them. It was the fifth Friday in the elementary Primavera Program in Guernica.
Gernika, as it was then known to the Basques, was described by one of Diego’s poet pals as “a sleepy village in Northern Spain yawning with tumbling stone houses curled against lush green hills.” When Diego first cocked his eye on the red roofs of Guernica it dredged up a memory of the mountains of the Sierra where he’d farted around as a kid, tormenting his Indian nurse, Antonia.
Before today, Solita and Carlos had seen each other, of course, but their relationship hinged on the occasional buenos días in the morning and buenas tardes in the afternoon.
9:56 a.m.
Tick. Tock.
Solita looked over to where her future husband sat and noticed a glimmer of compassion before he turned away shyly. Carlos was average in every way except for his nationality. Carlos, like his teacher, was Canadian. He was two years older than Solita and Grace, which explained why they only shared a classroom during art and music hour. Today they were painting scenes from nature, and Carlos couldn’t fathom why the teacher had chosen to do this assignment inside rather than out. For that matter, neither could Diego. The teacher had instructed the children to gaze out the windows, and then paint what the feeling evoked for them.
Carlos painted a bird balanced on a wire inside a cage. The bird looked like a transformed monarch butterfly. Brilliant, Diego thought, and spat the juice from his chewing tobacco onto the gleaming tiles.
The teacher (a nun), no surprise, was brainwashed at injecting religion, not evaluating or appreciating art. She gave Carlos an “F” for failing to understand the nature of the exercise.
Much later, in the principal’s office, Diego pieced together that the idea of a wedding had all started during that first week of April when Gracia, who became Solita’s instant best friend upon arriving in Guernica, had divined a plan to become the village matchmaker.
The boys in the small Basque village had made their lack of interest in Gracia obvious because, for starters, she was Mexican, and therefore, considered beneath them. The combination of such a large body with an especially oversized head (which she’d inherited from Diego) and her habit of walking with a tough swagger to disguise her twisted limp managed only to magnify Gracia’s outsider stripes.
Those boys were ignorant of many things, including Diego’s celebrated stature. While some journalists claimed he was causing a stir in Spanish intellectual and artistic circles, others gossiped about Diego’s reputation with the women of Guernica, confirming his mother’s long-held suspicion that he’d inherited his grandfather, Don Anastasio’s adulturous vigour and virility. Diego’s mother had wasted too many years worrying that her husband had inherited this lustful and promiscuous manhood. What she failed to recognize early enough was that it had skipped a generation.
Diego’s mother—like the boys in Guernica—was caught with her pants down (or her skirts flapping up) by life’s unexpected turns and blows.
As for Gracia, she reacted to those boys and their spurned advances by adopting a strategy well known to some world leaders; pre-empting any further rejection, she assumed the role of the schoolyard bully. The angle she chose to show off her domination first was to coerce an unsuspecting boy to marry Solita, the one girl who had welcomed her to Spain.
It was during one of their shared art classes that Gracia managed to get away with two large pieces of paper instead of the allotted one per student. Upon this second piece of paper she wrote a question and drew three circles underneath. The respondent could check off the first circle under the word yes, maybe in the second, or no in the third one.
Gracia held up the card to give it her final approval when she divined her omission. She put the paper down again and added lines radiating from each circle so that they looked like rays of sunshine. After all, in Spanish, her best friend Solita’s name meant sun.
When Carlos received the mysterious card during recess, a look of constipation crossed his face. Diego had pocketed his chewing tobacco and was enjoying a long drag from his cigarillo. He watched as Carlos read the question a second time:
¿Quieres casarte con Solita un día? Do you want to marry Solita one day?
Solita and Gracia were standing by the swings in the play area. Although all the girls in the third grade surrounded them, it was the few boys who had joined them and were looking over menacingly that concerned Carlos. One of them was Solita’s stepbrother, Juan, an older, more experienced bully than Gracia.
Rumour had it that Juan was once a meek kid that everyone called la tortuga, the turtle. Others gossiped about his rumoured ties to French royalty, and in Spain, you could bet your last peseta that any hint of royal blood guaranteed the bullies would mark a bull’s eye on your behind. Judging by his stride, Juan had risen—like a king—to a position of reverence in the schoolyard.
Children learn early that there’s no worse bully than a former victim who’s turned the tables on his tormentors.
Later, Carlos explained how he made his decision about Solita. Seeds of talent aside, Diego befriended Carlos because he reminded Diego of his dead twin brother, also named Carlos. The kid also shocked Diego with his explanation of the bird he’d painted in the cage. “The bird is me,” he said. “Forced to sit in rows in a stupid classroom painting the outdoors! Birds in a cage don’t sing; they cry.”
Or die, Diego thought.
“So Amigo, what are you gonna do about that note?” Diego asked him.
Carlos said he’d eliminated one choice immediately. It was obvious to him that checking off the circle “no” would invite the wrath of those boys. They would defend the honour of Solita if for no other reason than because she was a native Basque, and therefore they had to stick together. Carlos, like Gracia and the nun who presided over them, was a foreigner.
Carlos, born Charles LaFleur, came from Canada with his parents who’d traveled to Spain (on the same ship as Bella the nun) to assist Dr. Norman Bethune in organizing a mobile blood transfusion service for the casualties of the Spanish civil war. Carlos’ parents were responsible for the collection of blood spanning the area from San Sebastian, a Belle Époque seaside town, all the way to Bilbao. Once settled in Guernica, about 30 kilometres east of Bilbao—a zone considered safer because of its proximity to the French border— they took the nun's advice and enrolled their son in the Spanish immersion program.
Diego had more selfish reasons for enrolling Gracia.He’d traveled to Spain to create propaganda to fight Franco's propaganda. Diego despised Franco whom he nicknamed “Toro Franco”.
Besides, what would Diego have done with a young daughter at his heels all day?
He was also there to drink himself into a stupor, hence stamping out all thoughts of his wife Frida whoring around with his so-called friend, Leon Trotsky. Frida never knew her place, which was part of the reason Diego lusted after her. She drove Diego to madness. He exacted his revenge by painting voraciously (and therefore ravaging) the most hot-blooded women in Guernica.
In other words, Diego was a hypocrite.
But, back to the note.
Did Carlos want to marry Solita? Sweat began to pour down the boy’s neck. Another option equally unavailable to him was “yes.” This would surely invite mocking from his classmates. And so, Carlos checked off the only possible circle, or sun. “Maybe.”
Not a second elapsed after his pencil left the paper and Gracia lunged over as fast as her club foot allowed, grabbed the paper from his hands, and clumped back to the crowd that was growing larger by the minute. Carlos later confided that the long pause that ensued reminded him of a morning back in Canada where he’d waited for what seemed like an eternity for his grandfather’s pregnant cow to give birth.
Finally, one of the boys sent him a look of begrudging respect. Carlos had passed the test. Now, instead of being an unwanted stranger, Carlos had transformed into a clever and worthy opponent. And this, in a Basque schoolyard, was apparently more tolerable.
In the few minutes left during la hora del patio, Gracia and her followers began plotting their next move. Carlos noticed that Solita didn’t appear terribly engrossed in the planning. She turned her body slightly away from the others and rolled her eyes so that only Carlos would see.
And it was at that exact moment: Carlos fell in love with Solita. In another time, in another place, he would have checked off the circle (or sun) below the word “sí”.
The bell pealed out from the direction of the doorway. Maestra Bella, who shook the bell brusquely, stood with her hands on her hips, wearing the look of a suspicious mother. The teacher's frown left tracks on her face that later inspired Carlos to paint his grandfather’s plowed fields back in Canada.
The nun inspired Diego as well, but in other, more carnal ways.
As Carlos brushed past Solita that morning, she smiled at him for the first time.
His knees buckled. He returned a nervous grin that Gracia happened upon and intercepted.
“Mira el plan,” Gracia commanded.
According to this plan, Carlos would marry Solita the following Friday at la hora del patio or he’d regret the day he’d stepped onto Spanish soil. Carlos mumbled something in response that Gracia took to be compliance.
It was thus the wedding plans began in earnest.
During all the preparations, Carlos exacted his revenge by gesturing toward Gracia one day and slipping out the words culo de Grasa, or lard-ass, to a fellow classmate. The expression was whispered amongst even the most devout of Gracia’s followers.
The name-calling eventually surfaced and came to a head with a “Fuck you, Fatso!” event—an event that brought Diego to the school yet again to discuss an appropriate punishment for his daughter’s fighting back.
Carlos, however, wouldn’t be around to witness the bloody noses during la hora del patio of the “Fatso” episode.
Tick. Tock.
9:59 a.m.
One more minute before the ceremony.
Carlos checked his pocket anxiously, relaxing when he felt the smooth metal of the ring. Gracia had delivered it the night before. It was a gift she’d been treasuring. Some tourist had given it to her back in the Mexican plaza where she sold calla lilies to earn extra money. What Carlos understood was that he’d be in big trouble if he dared to lose it.
The bell rang.
It all happened so fast. Vows were exchanged, songs were belted out with heartfelt gusto (if slightly off tempo), and priestess Gracia was convincingly pontifical in her role.
Carlos’ problems began a few moments after the vows, when the priestess ordered the groom to kiss his bride. It was at this point Carlos began to wheeze. The pipes connecting his throat to his lungs seemed to be shrinking as if a snake had reached inside his chest, wrapped its body around the pipes, and squeezed out the air.
The groom bolted.
Everyone assumed that Carlos was faking an illness to save him from returning to school for the final two weeks. At home in bed, the boy was forced to accept the company of what his mother announced as well-wishers. Sadly, quite the opposite of showing up to lend support to a friend, these were the “lawyers” appointed by Gracia, classmates from drama class. They brought with them mounds of documents they called divorce papers that they bullied him into signing.
Since Carlos was unfamiliar with all the legal jargon, he had no idea that he agreed to hand over his prized art collection, including the butterfly-bird in the cage with the red fat “F” telling its own story for all the world to see in the upper right-hand corner.
The divorcees wouldn’t see each other again for nearly two decades. During that time, Carlos wondered occasionally whether Solita had survived the Spanish civil war.
Three days after the elementary program ended on April 26, 1937—it was a Monday, and Monday in Guernica was market day—the bells of Santa Maria tolled in warning. Overhead, the German Condor Legion flew by and bombed the sleepy village, killing more than one quarter of its villagers.
It was the initial test of a Nazi strategy called blitzkrieg. Hitler used Guernica as a testing ground for the military campaign he was about to unleash onto the rest of Europe.
One of Diego’s amigos, Pablo Picasso, immortalized the day with a famous triptych painting that carries the same name as the village. Stark blacks and shadows of grey; you fill in the bloody hues to the carnage of bodies.
The image still singes eyeballs and souls that gaze upon it.
In the years that followed, in different times and different places Diego, Bella, Gracia and likely many others would find themselves staring vacantly in the middle of some animated conversation, imagining those red-roofed houses of Guernica on the night they’d fled; rooftops, burning into a brutal, dismembered night, like Christmas candles incinerating the hillside. Only it was spring, primavera, but instead of celebrating birth, this day solemnized death.
Those who survived Guernica were stained forever. Like all injustice, this stain would spread, and the children’s wounds would creep over decades and continents.
As their story unfolds, it may seem obvious to some that Diego was to blame for bringing Solita and Carlos together again after their first failed wedding in Guernica. One could argue that it was his hand, or that of his daughter Gracia, responsible for both of their weddings. Others may prefer to gaze to the stars and the heavens for an answer.
But, regardless of whose hand dealt the cards, Solita and Carlos did reunite in post-war Paris, a place where their childhood would surely come back to haunt them. And others.
Childhood, like history, is immortal. And memories, even unconscious ones, follow us like shadows.