A Woman Unknown: Voices From a Spanish Life by Lucia Graves

Author:Lucia Graves [GRAVES, LUCIA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9781405527286
Google: iW7AAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2014-02-27T23:58:55.312236+00:00

Conchita looked up at the window. I wondered whether she had written the letter that had provoked that answer. Just to break the tedium. Fortunata trying to impose herself on Jacinta.

Remembering this episode, I looked up from the table in the classroom. Could all this world of Madrid be encompassed in an Oxford translation class?

Certainly, my linguistic explorations enabled me to describe the tedium of Spanish life, to express my views on a repressed society which I had observed as a spy – for I was really an outsider there, but one with the necessary inside information to form a creditable opinion. Oxford was giving me an education and shaping my instruments of expression, but would such an education help me to feel at ease within that society when I returned to live there? Did I really know the Spain I was about to enter as an adult? The essays I wrote and the texts I translated were only a partial preparation. I wrote about the passions portrayed by Lorca, the contained but powerful expressions of sensuality in nineteenth-century novels, the photographic realism of Galdós, the importance of personal honour in Golden Age drama, the deep Catholic piety of some authors and the anticlericalism of others, the colours, the tragedy, the closeness to death everywhere. From Manrique’s mournful Coplas to the sharp humour of Cervantes, from the beauty of Garcilaso’s poetry to the metaphysical words of the saints and mystics, I learned to see Spain as a country of brilliant minds, of originality that fed on the warmth of a tightknit society. And yet, although these sentiments could be analysed and discussed, they were not truly lived and experienced. They were only words on paper.

One sentiment I shared with Spaniards of the 1960s was an ingrained fear of the authorities, and perhaps, being a foreigner, I felt this even more keenly than they did. For they had never known anything else, and were used to the fact that there were certain things one just did not say over the phone, whoever you were speaking to, because tapping was a normal procedure; that there were certain comments one simply never made to strangers; that one did not discuss one’s political opinions in a public place. The only way they could voice their protest was through the jokes that went from mouth to mouth like wildfire as reactions to the latest political event or scandal. During the year I spent in Madrid I first became aware of this fear. Being a foreigner did not mean I could make fun of the regime or criticise it openly. Spain was my home. And when, in May 1962, the English girl with whom I shared the flat in Calle Ferraz offered it as a hiding place to some university students who were in deep trouble with the police, I packed my bags and went back to Majorca. I admired her act of solidarity, but she had nothing to lose – at most, she would be asked to leave the country – whereas I could not afford to have my name on a blacklist.

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