When We Were Poor Before

By Almudena Grandes Hernández

From: The New York Times (2013)

MADRID — On cold winter mornings when I was a child in Madrid, maids never walked. I remember
them always running, their arms crossed over their chests to try to stay warm inside their thin wool
jackets.

I also remember dark-skinned men walking slowly, with their collars raised, carrying cardboard
suitcases. I used to watch them, admiring their resilience, and wondered whether they, too, were
cold. But I kept my questions to myself.

In the 1960s, curiosity was a dangerous vice for Spanish children. We were surrounded by
photographs — sometimes framed and placed on a shelf, other times buried in the back of a dresser
drawer — of young smiling people we’d never met. Who is he? They were uncles, cousins, siblings,
grandparents or family friends, and they were dead.

And how did they die? A long time ago. But how, why, what happened? During the war or after the
war, but it’s a story so sad, so terrible, we children were told, it’s better not to talk about unpleasant
subjects.

To us children, the war was the mysterious conflict nobody dared speak of, though its memories
haunted the eyes of the adults, like an open wound that’s become infected by fear or guilt.
Mentioning it ended the conversation.

We children learned not to ask, even before we read the terrible and poignant verses by Jaime Gil de
Biedma: “Of all the stories in history, the saddest is undoubtedly Spain’s, because it has an unhappy
ending.”

Even today, Spaniards don’t want to remember.

We lived in a poor country, but we were used to that. We’d always been poor, even when the kings
of Spain were the masters of the world, when the gold of the Americas traveled across the peninsula,
leaving behind nothing more than the dust raised by the wagons that transported it to Flanders, to
pay the Crown’s debts. In the Madrid of my childhood, where a warm coat was an out-of-reach
luxury for maids and day laborers waited for trains to take them to the French wine harvest or a
German factory, poverty was our shared destiny, the only heirloom many parents could bequeath
their children. But there was something else in that legacy, something of value we Spaniards have
lost.

I remember and can conjure all those images in my mind: the cold, the beggars, the silence, the
uneasiness of adults whenever they saw a policeman on the street, an old habit that was hard to
break. In those days, if we dropped a piece of bread on the floor, they made us pick it up and kiss it
before putting it back on the table, so much hunger had they known in our homes back when the
loved ones nobody wanted to talk about had died. But no matter how hard I try, I don’t recall any
sadness.

Anger, yes, and the clenched jaws of some men and women who in one life had suffered enough
misfortune for six people, but nonetheless kept going. Thirty years ago, in Spain, children inherited
from their parents poverty, but also dignity, a way of being poor that was never undignified. We
learned to never stop fighting for a better future, to never give up. Not even Franco, in his 36 years of
dictatorship that the vile war gave birth to, could prevent his enemies from prospering, from falling
in love, from having children and being happy. In the Spain of my childhood, happiness was a way to
resist.

Later they told us we had to forget, that to build a democracy it was essential to look forward, to
pretend nothing had happened. And by forgetting the bad, we also erased the good. That didn’t
seem to matter because all of a sudden, we were attractive, we were modern, we were fashionable.
Why remember the war, the hunger, the misery and the hundreds of thousands of dead people?

By turning our backs on the maids with the thin coats, the men with the cardboard suitcases and the
habit of kissing the bread, we lost touch with our tradition, with the values that now could help us
overcome this new poverty. This deprivation has been foisted on us from the very heart of that
Europe that was supposed to make us rich, and has stolen from us a treasure that cannot be bought
with money. Today, Spaniards are not just broke; we are lost, stunned and confused, as disoriented
as a spoiled child whose toys have been taken away. That child does not know how to make his voice
heard, claim what was his, denounce the robbery or stop the thieves.

If our grandparents saw us, they would die laughing, then die of shame. For them, our economic slide
would be a mere inconvenience, not a crisis. Because Spaniards, who for centuries knew how to be
poor with dignity, never knew how to be docile.

Never. Until now.

Almudena Grandes Hernández, a novelist, is the author of a trilogy on the Spanish Civil War.