On The Tracks Of A Shadow E-Book

Carlos Usín

• Herausgeber: Tektime
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 137

Beschreibung

On The Tracks Of A Shadow

Leseprobe

On the Tracks of a Shadow

Carlos Usín

Copyright © 2018 Carlos Usín

All rights reserved.

Intellectual Property Register: M-000559/2021

Cover design: Marta Fernández García

Translator: Philip Walker

Dedication

To my father

Prologue

History is not about big battles or great names, it is not even written by the victors. They have, at most, the opportunity to try to twist it. History is written with the sum of the experiences of the anonymous people who lived it, who suffered it and of whom one almost never hears anything. This sum of experiences is what really makes us understand what happened and how it affected ordinary people, who are the majority.

A clear example is this book by Carlos who, in an effort to understand his almost unknown father a little better, discovered surprising things not only about his life but also about the civil war that Spain suffered. And I do mean suffered, because whoever wins, a war is always a collection of sorrows for the majority of its participants.

Sometimes, I used to watch amazed at how people kept trying to find out in which mass grave their ancestor was buried or discover a detail of what happened in some remote part of Spain. I always wondered if it wouldn’t be better to let sleeping dogs lie and move on. But, in the end, I have had to banish that selfish idea held by those who do not remember having lost anything. Who am I to judge how others deal with their grief, their suffering?

There were a great many injustices on both sides, much misery and much pain. The winners, obviously, had more and better opportunities to demonstrate how far some people’s depravity can go given the chance. But, in a conflict of this scale, there are opportunities for all sorts of sadness to come to light. Not just among those who by their nature were already miserable but also those whom circumstances, in this case almost always geographical, obliged to take part, even on the side they would not have chosen had they had the choice.

This is the story of Enrique Usín, Carlos’s father, who coming from a family close to the Falange1 with ideas on the right and being brought up with those beliefs, finds himself obliged, through the mere fact that he lives in Madrid, a Republican zone, to enlist on the opposite side to the one he would have chosen had he been able to (and wanted to) and, although dedicating himself to medicine in the army and not to active combat, has to pay, and how, those who in theory could have been his allies. At least, ideologically. Under rules that the victors adjusted continually according to their needs and which they tried to portray as legitimate to the world at large, especially within Spain, Enrique has to endure a long journey of agony, flogged over and over again by the twists of fate.

This is a clear example of how in war there are neither winners nor losers. At least among ordinary people. And that real history resides in the lives of people like Enrique who suffered it and whose story can be told thanks to the perseverance of his son Carlos.

All that remains now is to accompany Enrique through what is also our own past.

Javier Salazar, author of “Ndura: Son of the Forest”.

Chosen as best young adult fiction novel of 2014 by the Spanish newspaper “El Economista”.

Acknowledgements

My sincerest thanks to the following organisations and institutions:

The General Military Archive of Segovia

The General Military Archive of Madrid

The General Military Archive of Ávila

The Spanish Ministry of Defence

The General and Historical Defence Archive in Madrid, for allowing me access in the reading room to the files on the emergency summary trial against Enrique.

All the above, one way or another, helped me at different times by providing the information requested or, in its absence, pointing me in the direction where perhaps I should keep looking and giving me appropriate contact details.

A special mention for Dª. Ana Rocasolano Díez of the Complutense University of Madrid who, against all my expectations, surprised me by sending me Enrique’s entire academic file by e-mail, conveniently scanned. It is worth saying that the information we are talking about dates from the 1930s and the aforementioned Ana Rocasolano responded within a month of my request.

This information was crucial to being able to understand and piece together many situations and details in the puzzle of Enrique’s life.

I would also like to make a special mention of the General Military Archive of Guadalajara. The provision of the requested information was crucial to being able to know, even if it was in fragments, Enrique’s vicissitudes and his troubles.

I would also like to make a very special mention of D. José Luis Hernández Luis, senior archivist at the Documentation Centre of Historical Memory, situated at number 2, calle (Street) Gibraltar, in Salamanca.

Without his help and selfless collaboration, it would not have been possible for a layman in the field like me to be able to tackle and make progress through the morass of archives and different sources in which the information I was looking for was spread. His guidance on where I could continue my investigations was key to not coming to a dead end on more than one occasion.

Likewise, I want to include in this section a very special person who was also key when it came to disentangling many of the apparent contradictions in Enrique’s life. This person is “MENCEY”, the alias of an unknown member of the “Gran Capitán” (“Great Captain”) forum whose interventions in aid of my questions could constitute a real masterclass in history with a wealth of facts, examples, names and specific dates. Not only did they reply to my questions but it was a joy to read them for their ability to teach, summarise and explain, as well as for their deep knowledge of the Spanish Civil War.

Contents

1.The box

2.The challenge

3.Mobilised

4.Fate

5.Promotion to lieutenant

6.The end of the beginning

7.The war ends. The repression begins.

8.The summary trial

9.The Via Crucis Begins

10.The false happy ending

Epilogue

The box

The doorbell surprised him, as it always did. He was not expecting visitors at that time of day and he certainly did not expect to receive any parcels that he had not ordered. Marina had not mentioned anything arriving by courier either.

At first, he feared the worst. Several possibilities crossed his mind. First place was occupied by those bastards from the tax office. The next candidates were the Madrid city hall and the traffic department. All cut from the same cloth. Doomsayers, bloodsuckers at the end of the day, whom you only heard from to receive disastrous news that generally ended up with a raid on your bank account. And all of it legal, which made it hurt all the more.

When he opened the door, the courier greeted him almost like a friend and enquired, “Mr Carlos Usín, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Show me your ID again and sign here please,” he said while Carlos tried to make a scrawl on the electronic device he gave him.

So surprised was he to receive the large parcel that he looked and checked the address in case it was a mistake. The courier, a kind and friendly man he recognised from his many visits to his home, asked him intrigued, “Is there a problem, sir?”

“No. It’s just that I’m surprised and I was checking the details are right.”

“There’s no doubt. It says here Mr Carlos Usín. That’s you, isn’t it?”

“Yes. What I don’t know is what is inside, nor who has sent it to me.”

“You’ll find out soon enough. As soon as you open it,” said the man with a broad smile as he said goodbye. “See you soon.”

“See you soon. Have a good day.”

The parcel was a considerable size. More than a shoe box, Carlos thought that in his day it would have been used to keep a pair of boots in. Anyway, it came thoroughly sealed up and it was quite heavy.

He began undoing the parcel – or rather, destroying it – and setting about trying to discover what was inside and who had sent it. The latter continued to be a mystery although the contents of the box themselves plunged him even further into a state of deep unease.

Photos. Photos and documents. Jumbled up, decades old, as witnessed by the faded state of some of the pictures and the dust that covered most of them, as though they had been forgotten for a century, perhaps hidden, tucked away somewhere and had emerged, as if by magic (or maybe during a house move), destined for his flat.

Black and white photos with jagged edges, some of them with writing on the back indicating dates, places and occasionally the names of the people who appeared in them. Notes made in an unmistakeably female handwriting style. He recognised his mother’s handwriting immediately, so identical to that of his two sisters - all of them dead now – that it would pose a challenge to an expert calligraphist to distinguish one from the others.

In the photos he recognised a man who seemed older because of his receding hairline but who could not have been more than about twenty, dressed in a Republican uniform with medical insignia. His father.

He remembered seeing some of these photos as a child. He recognised a young, slim, smiling woman, brunette with dark eyes. The same woman who lost all that – especially her smile – the day Carlos became an orphan and she was widowed.

He recognised his father, before and after the surgical operation that involved the removal of a tumour weighing over three kilos from the rectus femoris in his left leg resulting in the use of a prothesis. Ghosts of the past that for some strange reason had ended up in his hands.

Documents that had suffered from the passage of time and that contained information unknown to him and the confirmation of some stories Carlos had heard talk of as a child.

He recognised the people presented there. But he was also conscious that he did not know them. Yes, they were his parents, his uncles and aunts, but in reality he did not know them. He did not know how they had been affected by everything that formed part of their history. There had never been a good moment to talk about their feelings about the war, who their friends were, who became an enemy or who turned traitor. There had never been a good moment for them to tell him the story, part of which belonged to him.

It was all one big puzzle without any sort of order other than the dates on the documents, the photocopies of which – some of them – had been made half-heartedly since their content was barely visible. In other cases, the text was even more illegible because it had been written by hand by someone for whom writing was not, shall we say, their strong suit.

There, in his hands – though he did not know to whom or what he owed it – he had his parents’ lives. Or at least, partly. He had to sort out that muddle of documents, photos, handwritten notes and memories.

He also recognised in the photos a little boy who always had a ball. Playing on the esplanade in front of Madrid’s Almudena cathedral, for so many years waiting to be finished. Or in the Casa de Campo park, at a typical picnic with a Seat 600 car, some potato omelette and a checked blanket on the ground as a makeshift tablecloth. Or sat around the tablecloth, in the Boca del Asno recreational area in the mountains near Madrid, a place the family often escaped to on Sundays seeking refuge from the heat of the capital in summer. Or playing in the Vistillas gardens next to an elderly lady, his grandmother. And in Foz, at the beach, where his skills as a budding footballer brought out all the nearby holidaymakers to see him play at four or five years old, ‘partnered’ by the then coach of Lugo Football Club.

It was then that the penny dropped that, in reality, his parents were strangers to him. It was then that he became aware that he did not have the slightest idea of how, where or when they had met. What was their courtship like, or their engagement party (if indeed there was one) or their wedding ceremony? It was then that he wondered where his father had been born. Because his death, he remembered very well.

Opening the box full of memories he discovered that inside, hidden among the pieces of the puzzle, part of his own past was also hidden, spread among dozens of photos without dates on the back or the names of the places where they were taken, mostly in black and white but also some in colour, faded by the passage of time.

When he took the lid off the box he discovered there was a part of his life he had not been told about, either as a precaution, for the sake of discretion or to keep a young child away from matters that one day would hit him suddenly, as though he were knocked sideways by a tsunami.

Such was the impact on him of receiving all this that finding out who the sender was ceased to hold any interest for him. He probably shared with the anonymous courier his interest in finding out what the contents of the box were, not who had been the temporary possessor of these fragments of life.

He had a challenge ahead of him. To discover the untold story of the man who was his father. This stranger, always cheerful and cracking jokes, whom cancer – in its metastatic stage and after more than nine surgical operations in a year and a half – claimed when Carlos was eight years old.

In the absence of any other starting point, he began by trying to put the material he had received from the anonymous sender in chronological order. Later, he would see how he would manage to reconstruct the life of a human being who had passed away over fifty years previously. He would have to confirm many facts, many details. He had in front of him months, perhaps years of research, of collating information and of contrasting what he thought he knew with what reality showed him. He was facing an arduous task, harder emotionally than physically.

Each photo he looked at, each document he held in his hands, stirred up dozens of unknowns for him. Questions piled up one on top of the other in his mind in the same untidy manner the box and its contents were in when they arrived. That was how at that moment he took the decision to unpick bit by bit, without rushing, all the issues that he had stored in the depths of his memory. That was how he started to partially reconstruct his father’s life. A life so much the same and yet so different from so many others that had to suffer the same or similar hardships.

The challenge

When Marina, arriving home from work, came through the door, she found Carlos completely surrounded by papers, photos and documents, laid out on the glass table opposite the sofa, supposedly in some sort of order.

“What’s all this?” she asked, naturally intrigued by such a display.

Carlos tried to summarise briefly what had happened that morning while she had been out, working for a client. The facts were much simpler to explain than the feelings the episode had awoken in him. He was still reeling from the emotional shock, both from the surprise of receiving the parcel and, especially, from its contents. If he had been told that as a baby he had been found under a gypsy trailer and that his parents were Romanies, he would not have been more surprised.

“And who sent it to you? Were you expecting anything?” asked Marina who was also rather intrigued by the mysterious sender.