Truth is in the stories we tell each other, according to a quote by Luandino Vieira that opens the book. It is also in what is left unsaid, in silence and understatement. The book takes the form of a family saga. We gradually learn about the different family members, who played different roles in the Spanish Civil War, but we learn not from facts so much as what we hear about them. A particularly emphatic role is given to the ‘chorus’, as in a Greek tragedy, where the chorus comments on events and provides some sort of closure.
In the first fragment, we learn that ‘stories are always being constructed’. The narrator’s parents were born after the Civil War ended, in 1949 and 1952, but the war is always there. The narrator hears stories from Grandma Glória or from Aunt Ubaldina by the mouth of her daughter, Casilda. The narrator comes ‘from a family built on longing’, that used to have a big house in Portaris. The only family photograph kept by her grandmother shows her grandmother’s family, in which the prominent figure is her grandmother’s older brother, Uncle Manuel, who is dressed in a white suit. The others look like servants next to him. Every week, there would be at least two priests sitting at the table for lunch. The property had one field for every day of the year and at least thirty tenant farmers. Memories are slippery like fish, it is difficult to pin them down. Uncle Manuel is permanently ill, Grandma Glória remarks at lunchtime, he might not make it past Christmas, but he never actually dies. He may have become mean because of a failed relationship.
The narrator relates a case of resistance by the peasant farmers, who in 1915 refused to sell their produce in town because they were required to pay more taxes than the large landowners. ‘lives are lives when they’re mentioned and talked about and noted […] and that’s why memory is important. it provides a space for names and faces.’ But there are those who ‘didn’t want to have a life, they didn’t want to be remembered’. We write about them ‘because they don’t deserve to be anonymous […] their lives were the suffering of others’. The narrator feels sorry for the oxen hauling carts laden with produce. Only the two youngest children were born in Portaris: Grandma Glória, and Aunt Ubaldina, whom the narrator’s father loved like a mother. Aunt Ubaldina was also famous for having a garden with cucumbers.
Uncle Manuel managed to diddle his brothers and sisters out of their inheritance. Only two sisters succeeded in collecting their share: Aunt Carmem, who was a nun, and Aunt Ubaldina, whose husband, Uncle José, stood up for her and got the better of Uncle Manuel. The chorus then comments ‘if that’s how badly he treated his sisters and brothers, imagine how he treated people who weren’t his family…’ Uncle Manuel was mayor of his town for a few years. The narrator imagines Uncle Manuel maltreating his father as he dragged the plough over his fields. In her mind, the suffering endured by the oxen and her great-grandfather are one and the same. The narrator’s father reminds her that in the family photograph Uncle Manuel was dressed in a dark suit, not a white suit. This is the eel of memory slipping through her fingers.
It was Grandma Glória who looked after her father when he was dying. That was why the narrator’s father and his brothers and sisters spent so much time at Aunt Ubaldina’s house in Lois. Before the Civil War broke out, there were meetings to discuss agrarian issues. An agronomist, Cruz Gallástegui, experimented with hybrid corn and crossed types of livestock to improve their productivity. He also founded a union of seed producers. Uncle Manuel’s son was so appalled by his father’s treatment of his mother that he fled to Argentina and never returned. The six surviving brothers and sisters laughed at Uncle Manuel’s funeral when the priest praised his good life and Christian spirit, but at least his death had brought them together.
In an aside, the narrator writes, ‘trees have an advantage over us. they don’t have a voice, and because they don’t have a voice, storytelling doesn’t happen with them. and when there’s no storytelling, there go memory and history, which are pretty much the same thing […] that’s why trees live so long. they live through generations we can’t even imagine simply because they’re not dragging along the baggage that shortens our lives.’ Both the narrator’s grandfather and Uncle José loved trees because they represented a future investment. Shade and fruit were just the short-term benefits. Grandpa Ramiro planted a walnut tree for the narrator and her sisters so they would be able to eat walnuts, to teach them sustainability. Meanwhile, Uncle Manuel got so into debt the big house in Portaris was repossessed and the land turned back into a forest.
The narrator had an uncle called Pepe who emigrated to Madrid and had a chain of hardware stores, from which he made a lot of money. He was the spitting image of Uncle Manuel, and the narrator didn’t like him, because he used to feed his pet dog sirloin steaks while the children had to gnaw away at spare ribs. Uncle Pepe fled to Madrid to get away from Uncle Manuel and his cruelty. Atrocities come about because of the way the system is organized, and also because it brings out the bad in people. The narrator writes despite the private pain she might cause her relatives because of Uncle Manuel and his unnamed perversity. She continues to write in the hope that it will encourage other voices to speak. Grandpa Ramiro was labelled a thief by Uncle Manuel and the local priest and went to prison when in fact it was they who had broken into a lady’s house and stolen things. Uncle Manuel prevented the stonecutter from providing stone for Aunt Ubaldina’s house by threatening him with a pistol. Uncle Ramom was also a Falangist, but he was one of the good ones. Grandma Glória had a difficult time surviving with her husband in prison and opened a tavern to make ends meet.
