My Mother, That Stranger by Concha Alborg

Author:Concha Alborg [Alborg, Concha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789760309
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Sussex Academic Press
Published: 2019-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

Exemplary Letters

In some ways this has been the most difficult chapter to write. After I finished writing the rest of the manuscript, I decided to read the complete letters one more time. It is a daunting task to commit to read over 800 letters again; if I read forty a day, it takes twenty days. I have lost track of how many times I have read them already. My intention has been to choose a few exemplary letters to give the reader as complete a narrative arc as possible, creating a similar feeling to reading the entire treasure-trove — an impossible goal, perhaps. The fact is that I dread the day when I will have to part with these letters and take them to the University of Málaga to join the rest of my father’s documents. There, digitized copies will be made available to my brother and me as well as the rest of the family, which is a good thing, but it will not be the same as having this pivotal and evocative part of my parents’ life with me, sharing the intimacy that the original letters have brought into my life.

The letters I have chosen are included in chronological order to show the fundamental change of my mother from an insecure young woman, writing in a school-girl calligraphy, to a mature woman ready to enter into marriage with my father. Likewise, he transformed himself from an adventurous student into a committed partner, ready to share his life and have children with her, despite the long separation and the indirect influence of Martin Arrowsmith. Hopefully, these letters will show how my parents mood evolved from frustration at the situation to the deep existential, pessimistic tone of the last months when they feared more than their own survival that they had wasted their youth, not knowing that the end of the war was around the corner.

Surprisingly, I enjoyed reading the letters even more this last time. It was as if I were saying good-bye to my parents, thanking them for saving these letters, aware of the immense gift I was fortuitously granted. I laughed and I cried again, sometimes at different situations than I had before. I laughed when my dad described that his legs were open like a compass after riding a mule for four hours (February 14, 1938) and I cried with him when he opened the hazelnuts my mother had sent him (January 27, 1938). I should add that on the final count, my mother won the marathon; she wrote 418 letters to my father’s 404, for whatever it is worth. I hope to write a Spanish edition of these letters and will revisit them anew. In the meantime, I have translated twelve letters included here in their complete form, without adding or substituting a single word and adhering to the original punctuation. I have left her “feísimos” (very ugly one) and his “chatísimas” (very pug-nose one). This is as close as the Anglophone reader can get to my parents’ story.

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