Grandmother

A Spanish tale of changing times.

 

Grandmother

 

 

  She told me that true hunger was when you had nothing to eat one day and didn't know if you would eat the next.

  “I would have thought that not eating but knowing you were going to eat the next day would be bad enough,” I said as I watched her stir the potato, chickpea and lamb stew.

  “That's not good either, but it's not so bad after the first few times. It's when you don't know ...”

  “Is that why you stuff us so full of food, Grandma?”

  “You're growing.”

  “I'm twenty-two.”

  “You still have to fill out a bit yet. Fetch your plate.”

 

   Spain in the forties and fifties wasn't a pleasant place to be poor in and my grandparents had started their married life by building a makeshift house on her parents' plot of land. During the olive harvest, the garlic harvest, and the cotton harvest there was paid work and the rest of the time they worked the plot and tried to store up enough potatoes, onions and garlic to see them through the winter. Times were so hard that they only had four children.

   In the sixties, when Franco opened the doors to the godless sun-worshippers and even something resembling industry reached this far south, there was general prosperity for the first time in Spanish history. Those most accustomed to want, shunned ostentation and bought property and land; above all, land. Land meant security, land meant food, land was life. My grandparents secured this for their four children and their four children built on it, albeit metaphorically, from the cities where they went to prosper; to the civil service in Madrid, to practice medicine in Seville, to teach in Cordoba and to sell property in Malaga. They cemented their bourgeois status and rarely returned home, except to buy more land, a habit they loathed to break.

   All four married and produced five children between them. Grandmother had hoped for more grandchildren and was puzzled by the citing of high school fees as an explanation. She still considered being able to go to school at all as something of a luxury.

 

   “Do you want a little more?”

  “No thanks, Grandma, I'm stuffed. Mum thinks I'm mad to want to come back here to live after all I've studied. What do you think?”

  “It depends on what you want. We've enough land now to feed half the province. Twenty families could have lived off what's coming to you alone.”

  “Could have?”

  “Before.”

  “I think I'll farm it.”

  “Farm it then, but you'll struggle to find any of today's women willing to share that sort of life.”

  “I'll find a woman like you,” I said, laughing. “The gene pool can't have changed all that much in fifty years.”

  “I suppose not. Scratch below the surface and see what you find.”

  “Yes, I'll try doing that. I'll scratch below the surface.”

  “A few stewed pears to finish off?”

  “From our trees?”

  “Of course.”

  “Go on then, Grandma.”