And Thus We Lost the Generation that Changed Spain
They grew up during the harshness of the civil war and the postwar period. They cemented democracy. Many spent their final days alone. What failed in order for us to fail them? This story is a tribute to the 37,000 people over the age of seventy who left us due, either directly or indirectly, to the pandemic.
To those who suffered through the war, those who starved during the tubercular postwar period, those who lived through the long stony night of the regime of ¡Franco! ¡Franco! Franco!, those who were forced to emigrate before returning and those who saw people leave and never come back, those who were forced from childhood to believe in God, those who went to Mass reluctantly and those who went happily, those men who worked and worked and worked and those women who raised families… and also worked and worked and worked, those who promoted developmentalism and were able to buy their first car (a Simca 1200, a Renault 6, a Seat 850) and enjoy it, take care of it, revere it, those women who needed permission from their parents to leave home before the age of twenty-five, permission from a husband to have a job, and those who, after all of that, could finally wear a bikini, those who nurtured the trade union movement, as well as those who did not, those who heard “Spaniards, Franco has died” and those who heard “I can promise, and I do promise…”, those who couldn’t attend school and yet one day saw their children and grandchildren grow up to become lawyers, doctors, architects, engineers, teachers, scientists, and so many other things that filled them with such pride, those who voted for the Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party and those who voted for the People’s Party, those who came to buy a second home on the coast, those who, after a life of so much travailing, were able to soak their feet in the waters of Benidorm’s beaches, those who, after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, cracked open their piggy banks in order to support their children, their families, and the national economy, those who spent their later years at home and those who did so in retirement communities, to the thousands, thousands, thousands, and thousands of seniors who swallowed the coronavirus snowball: rest in peace.
Chapter 1
Everything Will Be All Right.
In Alcoy (Alicante) there sits a 19th century building that’s become the subject of many legends ever since, during a renovation, a security guard working the night shift said he saw a woman in a white coat who appeared and then immediately vanished, having passed directly through a stone wall.
Today, that building is managed by the multinational DomusVi, which operates the largest network of nursing homes in Spain. Alcoy is also the home of Josefa Sala Vañó, a woman born in 1936, at the start of the civil war, and who was breastfed by a neighbor because her own mother spent the day in a factory that made clothes for Republican soldiers. As a child she was obliged to study tailoring, says Jorge, her sweet and haggard-looking son, and as a teenager she began working at a dressmaker’s shop. Later she married Miguel, an employee of Hidroeléctrica Española.
A homemaker and devotee of Mary Help of Christians, she enjoyed spending summers at the beach with her husband, two children, and other residents of Alcoy. In 1969 they bought their first car, a Seat 850, and in 1980 they bought their last apartment. Josefa moved into the nursing home four years ago. “How deep can these closets get?” Jorge signs, rummaging around here and there. “I even found an axe in the back of one of them. What could my father have wanted with an axe?”
In an abandoned family home, any object can seem like an enigma, as if unfathomable truths were hidden behind its trivial façade. A Philips iron. A bottle of Veterano brandy. The framed degree in Electoral Engineering belonging to her eldest son, Miguel Ángel, and which was granted by King Juan Carlos. A pack of Iberia stain removers. A letter from the Ministry of Social Security addressing Josefa as “Dear Pensioner” and informing her that the public pension system “is based on an extraordinarily solid foundation.” A box filled with cards, and another larger container that says “My First Real Microscope.” The same wooden table where the four of them have eaten all their lives still stands in the living room. Josefa often prepared Valencian stew, rice stuffed peppers, and borretas: a concoction of cod with swiss chard and potatoes.
Jorge has kept a record of what he was able to learn about his mother through the retirement center. He says it was “practically impossible to find out what was going on in there.” March 26: “Video call. My mother is lying down and not looking so good. Just a few minutes.” March 27: “12:00. The doctor tells me my mother has suffered some sort of crisis. I’m waiting for an update. When they don’t call back, and I start to worry that she might be dying, I decided to do it myself. Every time I call they tell me they’ll pass my message along to the doctor.” March 28: “2:10. Since it seems the doctor isn’t planning on contacting me, and since I need to know what’s going on, I send them a text message with an image of Law 41/2002 establishing the rights of the patient and the right to information. They call me back at 2:30. But it’s not the doctor. When I ask for a video call, they tell me that’s no longer possible because my mother has been sedated. It took them 26 hours to tell me this.” Final entry, March 30: “They tell me my mother has passed away in the strictest of solitude.”
During the most critical weeks, 73 of DomusVi’s 139 residents there in Alcoy died, according to the company’s own reports. It’s just one example of the catastrophe that plagued nursing homes. According to data from independent communities collected by this newspaper, at least 19,613 people with the virus or with related symptoms died in public health centers, most of which were elderly care facilities. And many of these are included in the official number of fatalities who tested positive for the coronavirus: 28,330 people in total. Others weren’t, so the final number of senior citizens who lost their lives either directly or indirectly due to the pandemic could be much higher. In fact, from the beginning of the health crisis in March through June, the death toll among people over the age of seventy was over 37,000.
Relatives of the deceased have already gone to court. By June fifteenth, the Public Prosecutor’s Office had recorded 224 official complaints. Roughly thirty family members from the city of Alcoy alone have come together to assess their legal options. “We need to know how this whole tragedy began,” they say in a statement. DomusVi’s Director of Care and Welfare, Fini Pérez, argues that it was a situation for which “neither the administration nor the nursing homes were prepared,” linking the Alcoy disaster to the high average age of local residents and pointing to the fact that the Valencian Community was the site of one of the earliest outbreaks of the crisis.
By mid-May, the noble, 19th-century building where a guard saw a specter one night had closed its doors. Out on the sidewalk, two neighbors were talking about people they knew who had died inside: “One of my husband’s aunts. Two, right? No, one was infected and the other died. But nobody knows if it was from that or not, because they didn’t run the tests. Yes, yes, they did. Ah, and Lola’s mother too. And my friend Amparo’s mother as well. Yes, she went two or three times a day. Wow, she didn’t stop, she never stopped!” On one of the doors to the nursing home, a blanket had been hung. In multicolored lettering, it read: We won’t give up. Everything will be fine. Muchas gracias.
Chapter 2
Fourteen hours and forty minutes
At two in the afternoon, on Thursday, March 19th, in Basauri, near Bilpao, Alfonso Alaiz Baños is transferred from his house to the hospital. He’s eighty years old. He’s healthy. After eight hours of waiting, he’s told that he’s tested positive for the virus. “Bilateral interstitial pneumonia,” he hears them say.
The next day he calls his daughter from the hospital. She has a hard time understanding him, though she can hear in his voice that he’s very tired. His oxygen mask is making sounds.
“Take care of Ama,” he says.
Ama means mother in Basque.
Alfonso was born in Calzada de los Molinos, in Palencia. His father died young and he had to dedicate himself to working the land. He served in the military in Portugalete. And there was a memory of a particular episode from that period of time that he held on to tightly. He’d gotten lost during a survival exercise in the mountains. After several anguishing hours, he finally came across a Romani family that was camping there. They explained to him how to get back on track, but first they asked him to be their guest and have supper with him. They had prepared a tasty chicken stew. When they finished and saw Alfonso so satisfied, they laughed and told him that it wasn’t chicken after all but a water rat, a type of aquatic vole—completely unrelated to sewer rats—which only occupy clean streams and which Miguel Delibes dignified in his 1962 novel Las Ratas. “Fried up with a drop of vinegar and they’re finer than quail,” says one of the characters. He liked telling that story, Alfonso did, almost as much as the story of how he met his wife. One day he walked into a photography shop to get his portrait taken to send to his girlfriend. While he waited there, he passed the time by chatting with the girl at the counter. The photo never reached Calzada de los Molinos.
The girl at the counter, Mártires Carrasco Martínez, liked the boy right from the start. She was also Castilian, from Hontanas, in Burgos, where she was born in 1939. In the sixties, when there was no work to be done other than in the fields, she moved to the Basque Country.
Mártires had three children with Alfonso and dedicated herself to the role of housewife. If Spanish culture had always relegated women to the home, Francoism, by its ideological convictions and its reaction to republican egalitarianism, tightened that screw even more and gave new, systemic momentum to the idea of confining women to a domestic and maternal life, with the Church and the Sección Femenina (the women’s branch of the Falange political movement) leading the way. In 1960, according to data from the Workers’ Commissions, women made up only 18% of the workforce. Today, that number is 46%.
Alfonso worked at the Firestone tire factory, and on the weekends he served as a wedding, baptism, and communion photographer, with Mártires as his production assistant. He did this up until the eighties, when he was even going to nightclubs at the end of the year to very politely offer quality portraits to half-baked kids. After retiring early, the two of them began to travel. Upon returning from a trip to Imserso, they made an announcement to their children: “We bought a flat in Benidorm.” They loved it there. They’d saved so much money that they could afford both the apartment and their top priority, which was giving their children an education. Alfonso would tell them, “Study! If I could have done that instead of making tires, I’d be better off,” his daughter Marisol recalls, sitting in the living room of her parents’ apartment in Basauri. She was the source of much of their irritation when she decided to turn punk. On the nightstand is a fan, a notepad with the emergency phone number, a thermometer, and a blonde porcelain maiden.
On Tuesday, March 24th, five days after her husband, Mártires, who suffered from dementia and had always been cared for by him, was admitted to the same hospital with the same diagnosis: bilateral interstitial pneumonia. The doctors decided against putting them in a room together. Alfonso’s condition had already deteriorated significantly.
On Wednesday morning, Marisol received a call.
“I’m so sorry, but your father might not make it through the day.”
Alfonso died at seven thirty that evening.
The next day, Marisol received another call.
“The doctor was crying,” she said. “He apologized to me because they hadn’t had the time to even let us know it was time to go and say goodbye to Ama.”
Mártires had died at ten past ten that morning.
“It’s very hard to say this, but I’m glad it happened that way. My Ama couldn’t have lived without my Aita,” she says. Aita means father in Basque.
Mártires and Alfonso were married in 1965 and were together until the day they died, fifty-five years later, fourteen hours and forty minutes apart.
Chapter 3
Serapia
Serapia Ugalde Úriz was 106 years and seven months old, and she had a specific formula for longevity: “Not getting married, not having children, and lots of suffering.” There are nearly 12,000 centenarians like her, who lived through the civil war as adults. And they make up the fasting growing group of Spaniards—the number has multiplied twentyfold over the past forty years—who occupy the top level of seniority in the pyramid of the aging population. One of every five inhabitants of this country—over nine million people in all—is over sixty-five years old. In 1970, that number was only ten percent.
Serapia was born in Erro, Navarra, in 1913, five years before the so-called Spanish Flu. On Monday, March 9th, she received a visit from Jesús, her favorite nephew about whom she bragged to all her friends at the retirement community because of how well he painted her nails. “In bright pink,” specifies Jesús, a sixty-two-year old former police officer. They went for a walk and later listened to some music in her room. Jesús looked up a few songs on YouTube and together they sang along with them. That particular day included tracks by Los Panchos, Calvelitos, and the famous 1922 Spanish operetta “La Montería,” whose chorus includes the line “You have to see / You have to see / You have to see / The clothes women wore last century!” After a while, as had been happening over the past few months, she began to show some signs of greater cognitive impairment. She lost interest in her nephew and YouTube and began to recite, absentmindedly, the Latin hymns she’d learned decades ago in church.
While the centennial Serapia drifted off, in her mind, to an extinct world, there in the nursing home in Pamplona, the director, María Loperena, was trying to limit family visits as much as possible and hurrying with her colleagues to “get the hydrogels in the bag,” to tell the grandparents to be constantly washing their hands and disinfecting everything they possibly can with bleach. Outside, on the Amavir Mutilva assisted living facility patio, María recounted the anguish they experienced during the worst days of the crisis, when eleven of their 184 residents died after having been diagnosed with the virus. On March 9th, those responsible for running these facilities met with Navarra government officials to ask that access to family members be immediately prohibited, but local authorities took no action until the central government declared a state of emergency on the 14th. “That would have been a crucial week for us,” Loperena laments.
At Serapia’s nephew’s home they keep, among other memories of her, two porcelain tigers she was absolutely crazy about, along with the second-place trophy she won at the nursing home bowling championships. There were also the last three books she read there: The Time in Between by María Dueñas, Toward the Sea of Freedom by Sarah Lark, and Women Travelers: A Century of Trailblazing Adventures 1850-1950 by Alexandra Lapierre.
Serapia was a woman born with the virtue of curiosity and a thirst for knowledge, although it didn’t happen in the best of places or during the best of times for her to develop these interests as much as she wanted. At the age of twelve she left her schooling behind. She would have liked to become a teacher. The town doctor told her father that Serapia indeed had what it takes and recommended that he educate her, but the man refused and instead set her about helping her mother in the home. In the 1960s she emigrated to Paris: one of more than three million Spaniards who went to work in more industrialized countries like France, Germany, and Switzerland between the mid-1950s and the mid-1970s.
She worked many years there for a family of aristocrats who had complete confidence in her ability to run the household. When Serapia returned home from shopping, she would hand over the receipts for what she’d bought, and the monsieur would tear them up in front of her without even so much as glancing at them. Sunday was her day off. She’d visit the home of her compatriot Resurrección, and together the two of them would turn on the radio and dance alone to French songs. She saved everything she earned, and when she returned to Spain, she bought an apartment in Pamplona that she turned into a hostel for students. She had it during the years leading up to and after Spain’s transition to democracy, and she took advantage of her young guests’ political excitement, spending hours at night chatting with them. She was cultured, she had a way with words, and was even a bit anticlerical, having once told her father that “those priests can eat away at your head.” Ultimately, she was a self-taught person who, between living in Paris and lodging students, gave rise to her own Enlightenment.
Serapia tested positive for covid-19 on Sunday, April 5th. She would pass away ten days later in her sleep. That afternoon, her nephew came in to bid her his final farewells. He sat next to her on her bed. She wasn’t conscious. Barely even breathing. Jesús simply caressed her feet.
Chapter 4
Sacred Oils
“They’re saying Tomasa, the priest’s mother, died of grief,” Carmen says in her daughter Sandra’s store. It’s one of those masterful little neighborhood shops where you can buy anything from a block of cheese to a light bulb socket to a copy of Hola!
“Sandra,” she says. “Call the priest so he can come and tell you himself.”
Vinuesa is a town with an attractive mix of big, rambling houses and popular Sorian architecture. The facility where the priest’s mother died was originally a 17th century palace. On Pocito Street sits the home of another woman who died from coronavirus, Benita de la Orden Molina, eighty-nine years of age. She’d had been left alone ever since her brother Niceto passed away in January. Their parents, Nicanor and Práxedes, died young, and Niceto and Benita, both single and with no children, had always lived together. “The two of them used to spend their summer afternoons here, those poor folks,” Sandra says in the courtyard of that house, which has already been overrun by tall weeds, forming a fresh, wavy mane.
Benita caught the virus on April 11th, Holy Saturday, at the nearby Benilde de El Burgo de Osma nursing home. She’d arrived there in March, already in a state of concern, having just been in a hospital in Soria recovering from hip surgery. The director of the facility at which she arrived, Javier Gómez, asked the hospital if they were certain Benita had not been infected. They said yes. A few days later, Benita tested positive there at the nursing home, before becoming one of their nineteen fatalities during March and April… most of whom hadn’t been diagnosed. Gómez doesn’t know whether Benita was already carrying the virus when she arrived or whether she contracted at the facility, but what he can say from experiencing what happened is that it was all “a major disaster.” As an example, he points to another nursing home in his group to which an elderly man was sent upon being discharged from a hospital that also asserted he wasn’t positive for Covid-19. Just days later, they received a call from the same hospital saying that, in fact, he did. “Our souls just dropped into our feet,” says Gómez, himself seventy-four years of age, protected by an FFP2 mask with a 95% filtration capacity. The director says the only instructions they received from the health care system was to treat the elderly “with acetaminophen” and to keep them “calm and isolated.” “We’ve been abandoned,” he laments.
Descending a cobblestone street in Vinuesa, Padre José Antonio Ines Barrios finally appears. He carries an umbrella and a bag containing two sets of Tupperware. The priest lost his mother and father within a span of two weeks. His father, Cayo, who was in the same nursing home as his mother, Tomasa, died on March 24th in a hospital of an intestinal obstruction. She passed on April 6th at the facility. Not from grief, as Carmen had said in the shop, but from coronavirus. At the parsonage, where he lived with his parents, José Antonio starts to look through the photos and reliquaries left by his mother, and is visibly moved. Later, at the church, he regains his spirits, recounting the details of the altarpiece until he realizes he’s been carrying on a bit. “Excuse me. It’s been quite some time since anyone has come in.”
On Palm Sunday, José Antonio received the final notice from the nursing home. He went to be with Tomasa “to perform the Anointing of the Sick in her room with the sacred oils, and to pray with her for her soul.” He did it while equipped with gloves, a mask, and a gown draped over his cassock. From the foot of the bed, watching his mother die, he thought of all the many people on the verge of departing and he repeated the words of Jesus on the cross: “My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?” Then he stood up, saw Tomasa crying, made the sign of the cross on her forehead, and left the room.
Twenty minutes after midnight, Tomasa Barrios Peña died at the age of ninety-three. “I don’t know how I still have any bones left,” she would often say during the past few years after a lifetime of work dating back to when she was little. As a child, she was already letting the sheep out to pasture. When she was a teenager, she spent her summers bringing in the harvest and the winters working at the home of the local doctor in El Burgo de Osma. The hard thing about the winter was that the surface of the river froze and they had to break through the ice to wash their clothes. Later she would go on to tend to a house in Zaragoza. After she married Cayo, they moved to Barcelona for a while, but they soon returned to the country, to herding cattle and cultivating grapevines, wheat, rye, oats, and barley. Tomasa worked alongside Cayo in the fields and took care of the home. “Women still worked more than the men in town because they had more than one thing that had to be done,” says her son. In the summer, worn out by the pounding sun after mowing all morning, Cayo would lie down to rest for a bit at noon, but Tomasa had to go back to the house—a little over a mile from their fields—to fix lunch before returning with the food and a jug of water. Her son describes her as “a tough and cheerful woman.” When José Antonio was studying to enter the priesthood, she would travel over twelve miles round trip from the town to the seminary to bring him a bag of clean clothes and return with the dirty laundry.
Chapter 5
Who was Fraga?
Eduardo Cierco Sánchez was born in 1931 to a wealthy family in Valencia. An attorney by profession, specializing in commercial law, he was an intellectual committed to the political discourse that was needed in order to get out from under Franco’s regime.
“That’s what we’re lacking now, that capacity for dialogue,” says his eighteen-year old grandson, Fabián, at his parents’ house. “Today it’s all black and white. There’s no consensus. And as young people we aren’t learning to do what they did, to talk for hours face to face. We’re the generation of two second attention spans and one sided opinions.”
Fabián was his right hand man. Eduardo had suffered from Parkinson’s and hadn’t been able to type for himself on his old Hermes International for quite some time. To facilitate his daily care, he lived in a nursing home just fifty yards from his house, which was still occupied by his wife Ana and his son Juan, Fabián’s father.
Other times Fabián was called upon to look up information online. Eduardo used this material to prepare the lectures he offered to his fellow nursing home residents. Fabián recalls that he once gave a talk relating Eve’s creation myth to the discovery of Lucy the Australopithecus, as well as another one contrasting Trump and Obama. But what Fabián liked most was talking politics with him. They both loved Bernie Sanders. In February of 2020, problems at the Democratic caucus delayed results for several hours. Eduardo, growing impatient, pressed his son.
“Hey, haven’t the Iowa results come in yet?”
“No, grandpa, there’s been a problem.”
Cierco was part of the group of intellectuals who, in the early sixties, brought about the monthly cultural magazine Cuadernos para el Diálogo: a platform for ideas—from the moderate to the socialist—that converged around the objective of democratizing Spain. He started out as a rather progressive member of the conservative Christian Democratic movement, and over the years, after the Transition, he began adopting a more Social Democratic approach. Although he wasn’t considered radical, Eduardo’s intense political activities during the Franco regime resulted in retaliation against him—as was the case for so many others, and with varying degrees of harshness—from workers, students, liberal professionals, thinkers, artists, and concerned citizens of all sorts who took the dangerous step forward of standing up to the dictatorship. According to Juan, his father always said it was Fraga who sent him to the Carabanchel Prison, and less than a week later it was Fraga again who released him at the request of Joaquín Ruiz-Giménez, Franco’s Minister of Education who later founded Cuadernos para el Diálogo. A fine mess from half a century ago that strikes the grandson as ancient history.
“Do you know who Fraga was?”
“Uf… I’d have to leave that question blank. You see, we were just about to study the Transition next semester, but then the virus came and everything got cancelled.”
Eduardo’s books are on the table in the house. In Ortega y Gasset’s Complete Works, he penciled in things like “Adopting an abstract point of view is an impossible dream” and “Such cute and precious metaphors.” In his dictionary of quotations, he underlined many, including Churchill’s “No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism” and Horace’s “I strive to be brief but I become obscure.”
Eduardo Cierco tested positive for coronavirus and was admitted to a clinic with low lung capacity on April 5th. He died six days later, on Holy Saturday.
During the second half of his life, his thinking changed, and he ended up distancing himself from religion.
“He lost faith,” says his son.
“In the Church? Or in a more metaphysical sense?”
“I don’t know. I never discussed it with him in depth. Now I regret that.”
Chapter 6
Mariage d’amour
In the mid-seventies, José Merino Merino and Mari Luz Teillet Quintana bought their first car, a Simca 1200, which was named 1975’s Car of the Year in Spain. It would be the first and last vehicle they ever owned, because in the eighties José developed a case of retinitis pigmentosa that would end up leaving him blind.
José, a lathe operator by trade, was a Stakhanovite sort of man. His personal motto was “Never put your hands in your pockets in front of someone who’s working.” He saw losing his sight as becoming useless, unproductive, inactive: his worst nightmare. His spirit suffered, but at ONCE, Spain’s National Organization of the Blind, he found a solution. They taught him to use a cane, to read Braille, and encouraged him to return to his old love of music. José ended up buying a piano and poured his energy into learning musical scores.
Their children—Alejandro, Mari Luz, and Conchi—say that their parents were two very vibrant people: a trait which allowed them to reinvent themselves late in life despite the setbacks they suffered. The elder Mari Luz, a homemaker, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s syndrome in 2012, resulting in loss of both speech and mobility. She started taking art classes and was so pleased with the result that she has left behind a collection which her son Alejandro describes as “around twenty-five paintings ranging from landscapes to still lifes and character studies.” In his house he has his mother’s rendition of Paul Gauguin’s 1892 painting “Arearea (The Red Dog)”: a worthy achievement for someone who was in her eighties when she started dabbling in the art, not to mention a serious disease of the nervous system.
“For her, that class was a little lifeline that let her express her emotions,” says her son.
Mari Luz y José started dating in Villaumbrales, Palencia. He was training as a lathe operator at the Palencia Arms Factory Apprenticeship School. In the 1950s, he moved to Madrid, where he was hired as a master craftsman by Marconi, an electronics manufacturer. Once he took that job, he went back to town and asked Mari Luz to marry him and move to the capital. His generation is responsible for the boom that was the rural exodus and which took place over a quarter of a century—from 1950 to 1975—wherein, looking to escape hardships and feed into developmentalism, ten million Spaniards moved to other parts of the country, particularly Catalonia, the Basque Country, Madrid, and tourist locations. Mari Luz and José settled into one of the new apartments that Marconi offered its workers in the so-called Colonia Marconi. Later, José emigrated to Germany for a year to perfect his skills with the lathe. Upon his return, he opened his own machine shop and spent years working Monday through Sunday. On the weekends, Mari Luz would go with the children to bring him lunch.
She began to show the first symptoms of the coronavirus on Saturday, March 28th. Two days later, José had them as well. By Thursday, April 2nd, Mari Luz was already nearing the end. The children believe that José, without actually having said so, chose to step aside to make it easier for their daughter, the younger Mari Luz, to care for his wife. An ambulance transferred him to a hospital at 3:30 in the afternoon. At 5:30, exactly 120 minutes after her spouse of sixty-four years walked out the door, Mari Luz passed away at the age of eighty-four. José, who was eighty-nine, would die two days later. “The two of them spent their entire lives together, and in the end they left together, which is exactly what they said they wanted time and time again,” Alejandro says. He last visited them on Thursday, March 26th, not knowing that he would never see them again. His mother was having tea and his father was playing the piano. He was rehearsing his final piece: a lyrical and melancholic composition by the French composer Paul de Senneville titled Mariage d’amour.
Chapter 7
It Still Smells Like Her
Saturday, March 7th, was a lovely day in Igualada. Isabel asked Jesús, “Are we going to the dance?” Jesús wasn’t feeling like it. Isabel insisted. At six that afternoon they arrived at the Can Papasseit civic center. They stayed until nine. A girl was singing. A guy was on the keyboards. Salsa, bachata, and pasodobles. “Music for retirees,” Jesús says at the apartment where he lived with his wife. The room, unembellished and bright, is as neat and tidy as it was the day after they bought it new, thirty years ago, for eight million pesetas—48,000 euros—and the diaphanous space, now without her presence, only highlights his desolation: shoulders slumped, hands in his pockets, the slippers on his feet, the widowed look on his face, his lips sewn together with sorrow. He thinks that’s where they caught the virus.
On Thursday, March 12th, the Government of Catalonia ordered the lockdown of 70,000 people inhabiting region that includes the municipality of Igualada. The virus exploded in this area, which would become one of the epicenters of the pandemic in Europe. The region of Anoia, where the towns affected by the closure are located, had the highest mortality rate in all of Catalonia: forty-two deaths per 10,000 inhabitants, almost double that of Madrid (22.7). More, even, than Italy’s darkest point: the Lombardy region, at 16.4.
That Thursday, Jesús said to Isabel:
“Isabel, I don’t think I’m feeling very well.”
She called the local clinic.
“It must be the flu,” they replied.
The night of Friday the 20th, Isabel got up to go to the bathroom and fainted. Jesús, himself also weakened, got her back in bed as best he could. The next morning, when she got up, the first thing she did was call the primary care center.
“You fainted,” they told her.
A day later, Isabel Lorenzo Luis was rushed to the Igualada hospital. Since the facility was already oversaturated, she was transferred to a private hospital in San Cugat del Vallés, where 180 beds had been set up specifically for coronavirus patients. Isabel was admitted at the age of seventy-one with a full medical history. She had always taken care of herself. She learned to swim at the age of fifty-seven, overcoming her childhood fear of submerging herself in the water. She’d been born inland, in a town in Portugal on the border with Extremadura, and she grew up across the border, in the town of Moraleja, in Cáceres, where Jesús, who was two years her elder, also lived. When she turned eighteen, they started dating. One night found them chatting outside her house. Jesús, “very nervous,” leaned in and kissed her on the lips.
On Tuesday the 24th, the day after Isabel was admitted, Jesús was alone, confined to his home, with a cough and a fever. He called the local clinic, which sent an ambulance over. After waiting for hours in the overwhelmed emergency room in Igualada, he was referred to the same clinic where his wife had been hospitalized. She was on the second floor. José was on the fourth.
Jesús worked hard from the time he was a child until the day he retired, but nothing was as difficult, as raw, as the final days of his wife’s life. On Saturday, March 28th, the hospital nurses, knowing that Isabel was dying, took his tray to her room so they could have dinner together. They spent an hour close to one another: he in a chair and she in her bed in silence. A couple of times, Jesús tried to put his arm around her. She rejected him. “Don’t touch me, don’t touch me,” she would say, afraid of infecting him. “I was born into poverty, but this has been the worst thing that’s ever happened to me in my life,” affirms Jesús. Isabel Lorenzo Luis would die two days later. “We’ll always wonder if they really did everything that was possible for her, or if they just let things progress without giving her the opportunity of being treated in the ICU because she was over the age of seventy,” her daughter Ana says.
Isabel was an industrious woman. Between the various shops and her own home, she stitched and sewed a prodigious amount of clothing. The last item she made was for her seven-year-old grandson: a crocheted doll a green ball cap turned backwards, like a rapper. She never had the chance to give it to him in person. Already ill, she showed it to him on video calls during the days of quarantine before she was finally admitted. When her daughter Ana reentered her parents’ apartment after Isabel’s death, she picked up the doll. The boy, upon seeing his mother holding it in her arms, devastated, said: “I want you to have it.” Since then, Ana has kept it on her dresser. “Not a day goes by without me kissing it and smelling it. It still smells like her.”
Chapter 8
150 Cannellonis
David searches Google every time his father tells him the name of one of the herbs his grandmother used to eat during the postwar period. Tagarninas, a type of wild Spanish thistle. Jaramagos, an invasive plant with rough, wrinkled leaves commonly found growing among rubble. And collejas, also known as the bladder campion or maidenstears, which pop up in uncultivated lands.
“Your grandma lived a damn hard life,” Antonio tells him.
Carmen Cano Aguilera died on April 15th, at the age of eighty-nine, at the Amavir nursing home in Vilanova del Camí, a town near to Igualada and which was included in the tragic confinement zone. According to the Government of Catalonia, in this 180-bed nursing home alone, fifty-five elderly people lost their lives during the crisis. In an email, this company, which operates forty-three nursing homes across Spain, considers it “very unfair that the data is being used to blame the facilities of the deceased, because we have had to confront this pandemic without medical resources, without proper testing, and with many challenges (and sometimes impossibilities) when it came to the elderly in our care.” Carmen’s son doesn’t blame the facility for what happened—“nobody was expecting something like this”—but he believes that management hasn’t been “transparent” with families. On his cell phone, he plays a voice mail from the retirement home back when they were still saying, “everything’s fine.”
During the last month of her life, Antonio could only see his mother via a couple of video calls and recordings. He shows me one in particular send by one of the caregivers who was asking her to send a greeting to her family. Carmen, sitting in a chair and looking utterly worn out, is barely able to bring her hand to her mouth and blow a feeble kiss. During those final, agonizing days, she lost the will to eat. “She dies from the virus and from not being able to see us,” her son says.
On the table in the living room sit Antonio and David’s cigarette packs, along with Carmen’s death certificate. “Immediate cause: Acute resp. failure. Initial or fundamental cause: positive covid-19.” She died at five in the morning. Antonio found himself with a dead mother, with no body to say goodbye to, and with a guy from a funeral home sending him pics of coffins to choose from on WhatsApp.
Carmen was born in Almedinilla, Córdoba, to a poor family. She was a child during the Spanish civil war and a teenager during the postwar period. She married a man who “was a good person, but just too overbearing.” She had seven sons. Along with her family, she emigrated from Andalusia to Catalonia so her children could find work. In 2015, in a span of just two months, her husband passed away from a stroke, as did one of her sons from cancer. She was left alone, devastated, in the house. A few months later, she entered the Vilanova del Camí retirement center.
“What were some of her hobbies?”
“I don’t know,” David says, looking to his father. “I don’t think she really had any.”
“She liked dancing,” Antonio says, “but my father never took her out.”
Since she had very little money, on Easter Sunday, instead of giving David a chocolate egg, she made him pestiños—honey-coated fritters—and apologized to her grandson that she wasn’t able to buy him something else. She just couldn’t afford an Easter egg for each of her seventeen grandchildren, but what she lacked financially she made up for with her ability to work. During the holidays, so many of them would come to her house that she had the menu planned out in advance: always making 150 cannellonis. David, out of work, remembers those cannellonis while smoking another cigarette out on the patio. He points to the streetcorner, where an employment agency is located, and says, “Look Randstad is already open.”
There’s a flag hanging from the front of the building. “Liberate Political Prisoners,” it reads in Catalan.
Chapter 9
“Bohemian Rhapsody”
Juan Antonio misses Laura, especially at night, when he reaches over to her side of the bed and finds nothing but her absence. He was always the first to lay down, and Laura would ask him to warm up the bed because her hands were often cold. She stayed up later, watching TV. When she came to bed, Juanito would say, “Give me your hands, I’ll warm them up.” Sometimes she’d have already warmed them up, much to his surprise. “Your hands are so warm, Lauri.” “Yes,” she replied. “Tonight I’ve got them nice and toasty.”
He was the first to fall ill towards the end of March. One day his fever shot up to nearly 104 degrees. Isabel, Laura’s daughter, called the emergency number. They told her he might have the coronavirus. To give him some acetaminophen. The fever went away in a day, but he still completed the full, two-week quarantine without leaving the home. He stayed in the bedroom, Laura moved into Isabel’s, and Isabel moved to the couch. She was the next to show symptoms. For a few days she lost her sense of taste and smell. In mid-April, Laura started having stomach aches. Isabel called the emergency number again. They told her it was probably gas. A few days later, with the conditions unchanged, they told her it could be an intestinal blockage. That afternoon she took a painkiller and had a good dinner—a French omelette and a pear—but later that night Isabel noticed her mother’s tongue was purple.
The apartment is in Meco, Madrid. The living room is filled with souvenirs that Laura Caballero Marcial brought home from the trips she took—“burning through her retirement dough,” as her daughter laughingly says—sometimes with Juan Antonio and other times “just doing her own thing.” A blue mosque in Istanbul, the leaning tower of Pisa, a Venetian mask, and a few other items offered up by Juan Antonio, such as a figurine of Saint Gabriel the Archangel or a frightening chained dragon.
The morning after her daughter saw her purple tongue, Laura got up, but when she tried to walk “she felt limp as a dishrag.” Her doctor came to see her and determined that she needed to be hospitalized. She’s admitted and they run an X-ray: severe pneumonia is the diagnosis. Two days go by and she takes a turn for the worse. The doctor calls Isabel in for a visit with her mother. When Laura sees her arrive with Juan Antonio, she exclaims:
“What a nice surprise! How did you manage to get in?”
“I hooked up with the doctor,” her daughter jokes.
Not long after midnight they get a call at the house telling them Laura has died. Isabel was still awake. “I was still holding out hope that she’d get over it, the same way she’d overcome so many things in her life,” she says, reflecting bitterly on the pulverizing effect this crisis has had on the elderly. “It hurts because we’ve failed them so utterly. We’ve always depended on them for everything, and now it’s like we’re just letting them go, like it’s just a matter of natural selection.”
Laura was born in 1932 in Madrid. She told her daughter that, during the war, she and other children would go to a Nationalist camp and steal potato peels from distracted guards which they would then take home and use for making soup. In the 1950s she emigrated to England where she worked at a bed and breakfast owned by an Irishman by the name of Ernest O’Connor. Over time, she and Ernest, twenty-three years her elder and separated from another woman, began a relationship. Laura got pregnant. O’Connor told her she should get an abortion, but Laura refused, later giving birth to a girl whom she named May Elizabeth. The very same May Elizabeth—or, rather, María Isabel—who is now telling me the story of her mother at her house in Meco, her hair dyed blonde and dressed in a T-shirt featuring a Gustav Klimt painting. Her account of Laura’s life and personality outlines a courageous Spaniard of an Almodovarian nature. If there was one thing she absolutely disliked more than any other, it was movies about the civil war. And if there was one thing she truly did enjoy, it was the music of British rock stars, like “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Freddie Mercury, and “Rocket Man” by Elton John. Laura Caballero Marcial had a libertarian mindset that wasn’t very common among women of her generation. When she and Juanito would go to Torrevieja, she’d tell Isabel, her only daughter and the one person she had always lived with, “Take advantage and bring somebody over.”
Juan Antonio, protected with a mask, says barely a word while Isabel speaks. He simply sits on the sofa in his cotton robe. Around his neck hang several chains: one of Jesús de Medinaceli, one of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, a cross with a Christ, and one with a silver pendant in the shape of a tear that holds Laura’s ashes.
Chapter 10
New Year’s Eve
Jesús González and Isabel Lorenzo had dinner at their daughter Ana’s house in Igualada. Isabel helped Ana wash the dishes because otherwise she’d never be able to fall asleep. Carmen Cano Aguilera left the nursing home to visit her son, José, who also lived in Igualada. She went to sleep after eating the grapes. Tomasa Barrios Peña had dinner at the residence in Vinuesa with her husband, Cayo, and her son, José Antonio. Appetizers of ham and cheese, of prawns and fish. All quite good. They applauded the chef. In Madrid, Eduardo Cierco went to bed before the clock struck midnight. He’d already shared a meal with his wife, Ana, at the nursing home. Serapia, the centennial, stayed at her facility in Pamplona, as Josefa Sala Vañó did at hers in Alcoy. Alfonso Alaiz and Mártires Carrasco returned from their Benidorm paradise to spend the night in Basauri at the home of their daughter Marisol and their granddaughter Aïcha. They saw Cristina Pedroche pass out the grapes, and then they went out on the balcony with a few sparklers. Laura Caballero, Juan Antonio, and Isabel spent the end of the year in Torrevieja. He’d prepared an infused pineapple, as he always did. This time with rum, because he didn’t have Cointreau. As they did on every New Year’s Eve, Laura and Isabel dropped a gold ring into the glass to bring them good luck.
That day, December 31st, 2019, China notified the World Health Organization of the existence of a new type of coronavirus, likely originating at a fish and seafood market in the city of Wuhan, located over 6,000 miles away from Torrevieja, from Basauri, from Alcoi, from Pamplona, from Madrid, from Vinuesa, and from Igualada.
