Homage to Ana
by John McGroarty
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: A tale of three Barcelonian outcasts.
Swearwords: None.
Description: A tale of three Barcelonian outcasts.
I am writing this as therapy. As an attempted cure for something. The writing cure I call it. The cure from inside me. I need to get down a positive thing. A positive thought. An idea. I need to show that we can make a difference. Despite everything. That we can still do it. You see I have been having these dreams. Terrifying dreams. Night after night. In them I am always having a little picnic on the beach and the sun is shining and the world is bright and the people are carefree and happy. Then from up out of the sea emerges a monster. My own personal Godzilla. This one is put together of metal pipes. Like the tin man. We all start to panic and try to escape, fleeing blindly down side streets and alleyways. Then I wake up. I know the meaning. It’s my deepest fear made flesh. Or metal in this case. Or dream fabrication. The beast has finally shown itself. And I think that when you see the enemy coming up out of the deep that means that it can be defeated. I now believe in Freud. Though maybe I did before and that’s why I have these dreams. I don’t know but I do know I have to tell a positive tale and fill my mind with positive thoughts. With belief. True beliefs once again. Not to give in to despair. To turn and face down the monster. To believe that every story I tell will bring me closer to freedom.
All of this is just by way of a preamble and is perhaps self-indulgent. I know. What I really want to do is to tell you about Ana. Ana is a hundred years old and is still fit, feisty, and compos mentis. And she is my friend. I have learnt so much from her and her experience of such a long life that I will never be able to repay it. Even if I live to be a hundred too and she to a hundred and fifty. Which I sincerely hope she does. Ana is a Christian and has a simple faith. A faith she has refused to abandon despite all the horrors she has seen. She often tells me that it is the real Christians they fear most. The ones who truly have Christ in their hearts. Who will always stand watch with Him. And never sleep the Apostolic sleep. When I think about her I think of Job. Where shall we find wisdom? And where is that place of understanding? About true testing and faith and grace in this life. She has always lived in the same neighbourhood of Barcelona. In Poble Nou. The Catalan Manchester. Except for the twenty years she spent in Toulouse after the war. When they murdered her brother. The fascists. When she walked for endless days on the trail of tears and broken dreams with her mother and father. Up and out of her country. Through the mountains. She was born in 1918. The year that peace came to Europe and the end of the boom to Spain. It was the same year my father was born. The father I never knew. And have been searching for all my life. When she was a young girl she was training to be a teacher in the new schools of the Republic. The true government of Spain, the one to which she has always remained loyal in her heart. Next to her bookcase she has the flag of the Republic tacked to the wall. In her house and in her head those values have never been lost. She says that even when she dies they can’t be lost. For they are the same as the sermon on the mount. Eternal. The same as Socrates, her other hero. For it is impossible, she always says, for bad men to do harm to the good, to damage the souls of the good. The evil that they do only blackens their own souls. Darkens the world but never puts out the light.
I must say now that I am not an unhappy hopeless man. I wouldn’t want you to think that. That would hurt me greatly. I have depth. I have resilience. I am, deep down, an optimist. There is a part of me that still holds to the old dreams that we once had. The ones that Ana lives and breathes in this here and now and kept close by her all through her tribulations. That our fathers and grandparents and our common ancestors must have had too. It’s pure logic. If you know yourself, you know the desires and fears and great loves of all the human beings of the past and of the present and of the future. I feel that sometimes. Don’t you? That we are all somehow vinculated. All of the human beings who have ever lived and those who will live when we are gone. But I am getting off the subject of Ana. And the good that she did. Not only in never betraying her ideals but in her actions. So I shall tell you of one of her good acts.
I remember the boy. That’s what I want to tell you about. About that boy. And about Ana. And about Amando. He was dirty blonde and filthy and spoke no Spanish. He slept on a bench in the swing park behind Can Felipa. He had a big silent dog that kept him company and was always asleep. He was an outcast and a traveller and a stranger in this paradise. Like Ana had been. Like I have always felt myself to be deep down. He was only sixteen and had left Russia when his mother died. He had lived on a sink estate in some suburb of Moscow. He just kept walking west. Like a phantom, like a ghost, crossing cities and countries and borders. No one stopped him. This was before the whiff of the old enemy could be smelt in the European wind. One day coming back from mass, Ana saw the boy sitting like an angel in the park. When Ana spoke to him she said he looked through her and seemed to see nothing. A blind boy. Deaf and dumb. A lost child. She gave him her baguette which she had just bought at the baker’s and he said one word. Spasiba. He said it very low. Imperceptibly. Under his breath. Like a whisper from long ago. That was enough for Ana to go and get Josep María who had been in exile in the Soviet Union for thirty years and had almost forgotten Spanish and spoke Catalan with a heavy Russian accent. He spoke to the boy and got his whole broken story of a life. Ana took him home. She fed him. She clothed him. Gave him a roof. And a bed. She taught him Spanish. She taught him about Christ. About history. About the great Spanish Republic that would never die in the heart of the people. About mathematics. About grammar and books. She taught him to live again. To come back to life. To be her own Lazarus. And the boy was a clever one. He learned all quickly. Ana bought him a bike and I still see him almost every day whizzing happily through the streets of the neighbourhood. She took him down to Amando. Down to his workshop. To his carpenter’s den. And this great Italian craftsman of wood took the boy on. Made him his apprentice. Gave him the means to live his life with dignity. Taught him to sculpt and to sand and to dovetail. To make beautiful forms from the trees of Spain. When I see this boy passing me on his bike, running some errand for Amando, the sight fills me with hope and belief that we can build it all up again. And I am filled with joy and sadness at the same time. And I know in my heart that all can be borne and all can be overcome and that Ana is right when she says that despair is a sin against God and His creation.
Before I finish, I must tell you another thing about Ana which puts all her good acts at the level of sainthood. When she came back from Toulouse to Barcelona in 1955 she was almost forty. She was unable to teach as she had been associated with the schools of the Republic and her family were republicans. She was one of the other Spaniards. The defeated but undefeated in their hearts. She managed to get a secretarial post in a small office. She met a man. One of the good ones. And they had a child. A little boy. Ana couldn’t say his name to me. The first time she spoke about it she couldn’t finish the story and had to stop. Two months later she finished it. Unemotionally this time. As old people often do. As if it was something from her beloved Greek history from ancient times or from the Victor Hugo books she’s always reading. She told me how at that time she lived with her new family in a flat on the Calle Pujades. Up old rickety stairs on the fourth floor. It was Easter and the baby boy was just under a year old. A procession passed under the window and Ana couldn’t resist opening up the windows and looking down onto the street. She watched the swaying crowds for half an hour and then, coming to her senses and suddenly noticing how cold it was quickly closed the window. The spring had been a bitter one and the Pascua early. The air icy and the crop in danger from frost. She tried to put negative thoughts out of her mind and went to bed. During the night the baby started to cough. He had caught a pulmonia and in three weeks was dead. The baby had always been weak. No one blamed Ana but she tortured herself day and night until she developed a bad neurosis and her husband left. She blamed herself for everything. For her negligence, and for her happiness. Yes, for her happiness. Above all for her happiness after all that had happened. She took it as a sign from God. A punishment. Ana broke off and the darkness in her eyes cast shadows on the floor. Then, breathing in from some other wind, she rose and moved across the room to her bookcase. She took a book down from the shelf and turned to me and smiled. She held out the book. It was in Catalan by a writer called Xavier Benguerel. Els Vençuts. He was from Poble Nou, you know, she said. I said that I knew, thanked her, and put the book in my bag. As I left Ana called out to me in her old woman’s voice. I stopped at the door. That was what really happened to us, to all of us, she said, we just wanted a better life, and they took it from us.
I lost touch with Ana. She taught me Catalan and then l learned too much and moved on. I still see the boy around the town. He’s almost a man now. He has a little wispy moustache and whiskers and goes everywhere on his bike. I like to think he has found a home and a life and sometimes in the night I pray for him and for Ana and for the values of Christ and for the Republic. That they will come back in to our hearts. When I am really bad I think of Ana and of Amando and Josep María and I know that as long as there are good people and determined people and people with faith and hope and love in their hearts that all will be well under our sun and that the better life that was taken will one day come. But most of all I pray for myself. My indulgence. That I will be able to keep despair at bay. That I will have the courage to face down the beast from my dreams. That I will be given the inspiration to fulfil whatever purpose my life may have. That someday I will be permitted to write a truly great human story. That we shall not all despair and that we shall find a way to once more make the future of our great continent the promised land that it once was. It’s a simple thought and an idealistic thought, but maybe it’s all we have.
All of this is just by way of a preamble and is perhaps self-indulgent. I know. What I really want to do is to tell you about Ana. Ana is a hundred years old and is still fit, feisty, and compos mentis. And she is my friend. I have learnt so much from her and her experience of such a long life that I will never be able to repay it. Even if I live to be a hundred too and she to a hundred and fifty. Which I sincerely hope she does. Ana is a Christian and has a simple faith. A faith she has refused to abandon despite all the horrors she has seen. She often tells me that it is the real Christians they fear most. The ones who truly have Christ in their hearts. Who will always stand watch with Him. And never sleep the Apostolic sleep. When I think about her I think of Job. Where shall we find wisdom? And where is that place of understanding? About true testing and faith and grace in this life. She has always lived in the same neighbourhood of Barcelona. In Poble Nou. The Catalan Manchester. Except for the twenty years she spent in Toulouse after the war. When they murdered her brother. The fascists. When she walked for endless days on the trail of tears and broken dreams with her mother and father. Up and out of her country. Through the mountains. She was born in 1918. The year that peace came to Europe and the end of the boom to Spain. It was the same year my father was born. The father I never knew. And have been searching for all my life. When she was a young girl she was training to be a teacher in the new schools of the Republic. The true government of Spain, the one to which she has always remained loyal in her heart. Next to her bookcase she has the flag of the Republic tacked to the wall. In her house and in her head those values have never been lost. She says that even when she dies they can’t be lost. For they are the same as the sermon on the mount. Eternal. The same as Socrates, her other hero. For it is impossible, she always says, for bad men to do harm to the good, to damage the souls of the good. The evil that they do only blackens their own souls. Darkens the world but never puts out the light.
I must say now that I am not an unhappy hopeless man. I wouldn’t want you to think that. That would hurt me greatly. I have depth. I have resilience. I am, deep down, an optimist. There is a part of me that still holds to the old dreams that we once had. The ones that Ana lives and breathes in this here and now and kept close by her all through her tribulations. That our fathers and grandparents and our common ancestors must have had too. It’s pure logic. If you know yourself, you know the desires and fears and great loves of all the human beings of the past and of the present and of the future. I feel that sometimes. Don’t you? That we are all somehow vinculated. All of the human beings who have ever lived and those who will live when we are gone. But I am getting off the subject of Ana. And the good that she did. Not only in never betraying her ideals but in her actions. So I shall tell you of one of her good acts.
I remember the boy. That’s what I want to tell you about. About that boy. And about Ana. And about Amando. He was dirty blonde and filthy and spoke no Spanish. He slept on a bench in the swing park behind Can Felipa. He had a big silent dog that kept him company and was always asleep. He was an outcast and a traveller and a stranger in this paradise. Like Ana had been. Like I have always felt myself to be deep down. He was only sixteen and had left Russia when his mother died. He had lived on a sink estate in some suburb of Moscow. He just kept walking west. Like a phantom, like a ghost, crossing cities and countries and borders. No one stopped him. This was before the whiff of the old enemy could be smelt in the European wind. One day coming back from mass, Ana saw the boy sitting like an angel in the park. When Ana spoke to him she said he looked through her and seemed to see nothing. A blind boy. Deaf and dumb. A lost child. She gave him her baguette which she had just bought at the baker’s and he said one word. Spasiba. He said it very low. Imperceptibly. Under his breath. Like a whisper from long ago. That was enough for Ana to go and get Josep María who had been in exile in the Soviet Union for thirty years and had almost forgotten Spanish and spoke Catalan with a heavy Russian accent. He spoke to the boy and got his whole broken story of a life. Ana took him home. She fed him. She clothed him. Gave him a roof. And a bed. She taught him Spanish. She taught him about Christ. About history. About the great Spanish Republic that would never die in the heart of the people. About mathematics. About grammar and books. She taught him to live again. To come back to life. To be her own Lazarus. And the boy was a clever one. He learned all quickly. Ana bought him a bike and I still see him almost every day whizzing happily through the streets of the neighbourhood. She took him down to Amando. Down to his workshop. To his carpenter’s den. And this great Italian craftsman of wood took the boy on. Made him his apprentice. Gave him the means to live his life with dignity. Taught him to sculpt and to sand and to dovetail. To make beautiful forms from the trees of Spain. When I see this boy passing me on his bike, running some errand for Amando, the sight fills me with hope and belief that we can build it all up again. And I am filled with joy and sadness at the same time. And I know in my heart that all can be borne and all can be overcome and that Ana is right when she says that despair is a sin against God and His creation.
Before I finish, I must tell you another thing about Ana which puts all her good acts at the level of sainthood. When she came back from Toulouse to Barcelona in 1955 she was almost forty. She was unable to teach as she had been associated with the schools of the Republic and her family were republicans. She was one of the other Spaniards. The defeated but undefeated in their hearts. She managed to get a secretarial post in a small office. She met a man. One of the good ones. And they had a child. A little boy. Ana couldn’t say his name to me. The first time she spoke about it she couldn’t finish the story and had to stop. Two months later she finished it. Unemotionally this time. As old people often do. As if it was something from her beloved Greek history from ancient times or from the Victor Hugo books she’s always reading. She told me how at that time she lived with her new family in a flat on the Calle Pujades. Up old rickety stairs on the fourth floor. It was Easter and the baby boy was just under a year old. A procession passed under the window and Ana couldn’t resist opening up the windows and looking down onto the street. She watched the swaying crowds for half an hour and then, coming to her senses and suddenly noticing how cold it was quickly closed the window. The spring had been a bitter one and the Pascua early. The air icy and the crop in danger from frost. She tried to put negative thoughts out of her mind and went to bed. During the night the baby started to cough. He had caught a pulmonia and in three weeks was dead. The baby had always been weak. No one blamed Ana but she tortured herself day and night until she developed a bad neurosis and her husband left. She blamed herself for everything. For her negligence, and for her happiness. Yes, for her happiness. Above all for her happiness after all that had happened. She took it as a sign from God. A punishment. Ana broke off and the darkness in her eyes cast shadows on the floor. Then, breathing in from some other wind, she rose and moved across the room to her bookcase. She took a book down from the shelf and turned to me and smiled. She held out the book. It was in Catalan by a writer called Xavier Benguerel. Els Vençuts. He was from Poble Nou, you know, she said. I said that I knew, thanked her, and put the book in my bag. As I left Ana called out to me in her old woman’s voice. I stopped at the door. That was what really happened to us, to all of us, she said, we just wanted a better life, and they took it from us.
I lost touch with Ana. She taught me Catalan and then l learned too much and moved on. I still see the boy around the town. He’s almost a man now. He has a little wispy moustache and whiskers and goes everywhere on his bike. I like to think he has found a home and a life and sometimes in the night I pray for him and for Ana and for the values of Christ and for the Republic. That they will come back in to our hearts. When I am really bad I think of Ana and of Amando and Josep María and I know that as long as there are good people and determined people and people with faith and hope and love in their hearts that all will be well under our sun and that the better life that was taken will one day come. But most of all I pray for myself. My indulgence. That I will be able to keep despair at bay. That I will have the courage to face down the beast from my dreams. That I will be given the inspiration to fulfil whatever purpose my life may have. That someday I will be permitted to write a truly great human story. That we shall not all despair and that we shall find a way to once more make the future of our great continent the promised land that it once was. It’s a simple thought and an idealistic thought, but maybe it’s all we have.
About the Author
John McGroarty was born in Glasgow and now lives in Barcelona, where he works as an English teacher. He has been writing short stories for many years. His long short story, Rainbow, his novel, The Tower, and his two short fiction collections, Everywhere and Homo Sacer, are all McStorytellers publications.
You can read John's full profile at McVoices.
You can read John's full profile at McVoices.