My Paradise Was Mostly Green
The early years in Northern Spain
We moved to paradise when I was about three years old, at least it was my paradise while I was young. Until then, my parents, joined by me two years after they married, had lived in what a visitor to this verdant land might describe as a very large tree house on skinny pyramid-shaped stone stilts. This one belonged to my father’s sister and her husband. People weren’t supposed to live in these structures that the locals called “paneras,” but my parents were poor and didn’t yet have a home of their own. Some paneras were hundreds of years old and were starting to outlast their original purpose: keeping grains, potatoes and other food stuffs dry and unreachable to four-legged creatures looking for an easy meal.
It was in this repurposed ancient wooden shelter, meant to protect a family’s seasonal crops, that I learned how to crawl, where my curiosity first got me in trouble. My earliest explorations were very short but still fairly impressive for a tiny human who couldn’t walk. I would somehow climb out of my crib, crawl across the entire floor space, open the bottom drawer of a large chest and relocated its contents — mostly my mother’s panties and bras — onto the floor. And I did this every single morning until I was able to walk and could expand my investigations to the much bigger world outside the panera, where playthings were sometimes interactive, like my Aunt Rosa’s tiny and fluffy chicks, all a bright yellow color, totally adorable and innocent.
But that would one day end in tragedy for a couple of the chicks and brand me a chick killer — not an intentional killer, but a killer nonetheless. My Aunt Rosa kept the chicks in a big box made of wood and chicken wire, with a heavy lid to prevent them from jumping out. One day, I walked up to the box and lifted the lid, I wanted to see the chicks up close, maybe pick one up; they were so irresistible as they waddled around on the cage floor, chirping excitedly and jumping up, trying to get out. Apparently, they were just as curious about the world and other creatures as I was.
A couple of them jumped high enough to get their heads over the top of the box, their tiny feet grasping the chicken wire, their little wings flapping wildly as they tried to get over the edge. I panicked. Afraid they would get out of the box, I dropped the lid, hard, on their fragile little necks. It was the first and last time I killed another living being, except for the occasional insect, like a bee that was about to sting me or a mosquito that had first feasted on my blood.
Even at that very young age, I understood something bad had happened. I heard a laugh in the distance and I looked up to see my Aunt Rosa standing by the house steps, maybe 50 yards away. She had seen. Why was she laughing? Then I noticed my mother walking up behind her and when she found out what happened, she started yelling at my aunt, mad that she had not done anything to stop me before it was too late.
The chick killing incident was retold many times throughout my childhood, which is how I “remember” all these details. The adults found it comical, the kind of unwitting mistake a 2-year-old could be forgiven for but each recounting added to my already substantial guilt. Was it my desire for redemption that turned me into such a passionate animal lover and rescuer? I would have loved animals just as much; the truth is that, for most of my life, I have felt a greater connection to other species than to my own. But maybe my need to save every injured and abandoned creature I came across might have been less compulsive had I not needed absolution for the chicks’ deaths.
About a year after the chick incident, we moved to our own home, about 2–3 miles from my Aunt Rosa’s. After five years of scrimping and saving what little money they earned and with a loan from a woman a couple of towns over, my parents bought that small piece of paradise and built us a real house. Our new home sat on top of a hill, the highest point on all sides but one and there was nothing but pastures on that higher hill.
When I walked out of my house every morning, I could spin around and see nothing but lush green fields in all directions. Those higher pastures would become my daily scouting grounds until school and house chores started interfering with my escapades. After breakfast, I would head for the fields looking for critters, flowers, wild berries, stones, anything that proved interesting to me, which was pretty much everything, including the crevices that sometimes swallowed something as big as a cow who wasn’t watching where she was stepping. My mother lived in fear that one day I would be lost in one of those bottomless fractures. I think just to prove her wrong, I managed to come back every day around dinner time and often with some critter “friend” I had managed to grab, typically one that was injured or near death that I intended to make all better.
The most memorable of these was the tiny bird I found lying on the ground, unable to get away from me, one of his wings obviously broken. I carefully picked him up and carried him home in my hand, using the other one to make a little tent so he couldn’t jump out. My mother found a shoe box and we set up his convalescent home in our tiled hallway with some hay, water and bread. Every morning, as soon as I got up, I would go check on my little bird, giving him more water and seeds to eat. Every day he got a little stronger; his wing was starting to heal.
Then one morning, when I went to check on him, I found an empty box. I started crying. Where was he? I went looking for my mother, sobbing inconsolably by the time I found her. When I told her the bird was gone, she tried to explain that he probably had flown away, that his wing had healed and so it was time for him to go. “But,” … I said … “he never said goodbye, how could he be so ungrateful?” At 4 years of age, I did not yet understand that flying away was the best possible way that little bird could have thanked me.
The closest visible homes faced the back of our house. They looked like tiny doll houses, separated from us by a couple miles of flat lands and reachable only by a path carved out by large wooden carts pulled by oxen used to transport mountains of hay. One of those doll houses was my Aunt Rosa’s, the Aunt I had been named after, the one we had lived with. And one of the hay carts travelling that path belonged to a couple of brothers who would regularly make the journey from where they lived, not far from my Aunt Rosa, to the fields they owned on that higher hill next to our house to cut down hay and haul it back home to feed their cattle.
On their way to the fields, they had to go past our house. If I was outside, they always stopped to talk to me. They thought I was a hoot because even at my young age, I had an abundance of opinions and often made comments adults found humorous. Like the time, shortly after my sister was born — I was four by then — when they asked me what I thought of the new baby and I went on about how “pissed off” my Dad was because he still didn’t have the son he so badly wanted.
It was on that same path, going back home with a cart full of hay a few years later, that one of the brothers would be crushed to death when the cart overturned while he tried to get the man-sized wheel free of the mud it was stuck on.
There was another town to the right of the one my Aunt Rosa lived in that was even further away and shielded from prying eyes by yet more hills. The shortest way to get to that town from our house was to walk down a very steep drop in the back of our property, preferably without falling and rolling down it, and then walking along the railroad tracks used to move long trains of coal hoppers from the mines most of my mother’s brothers worked in to all the “campesinos”* that needed it to cook their meals and heat their houses. Every few days, my mother and I walked the tracks and harvested the “free” coal that fell out of the hoppers. The hidden town was to the right of the big bend in the railroad tracks, about an hour’s walk away.
I started school three years after we moved, at the village schoolhouse, two rooms separated by a small landing at the top of wooden steps, to the left went the boys, to the right the girls. I did not last long there. Before my first year was done, it became a place to fear, so terrifying to me that I regularly threw up my breakfast of bread soaked in coffee and milk on my way to school. Over a half a century later, the smell of coffee with milk still makes me nauseous; I can only drink it black.
My mother did not believe me when I told her the reason I didn’t want to go to school. She figured I was making things up or at least exaggerating when I claimed the ruler that was an extension of the teacher’s hand was more often used to smack our hands and bottoms than to measure anything. She didn’t believe me when I told her we were made to kneel for hours on a hardwood floor, because we had looked up at the wrong time or spoken when we were not supposed to or even because our writing was not neat or perfectly shaped.
I wasn’t punished nearly as often as some of the other girls but just watching them being smacked, humiliated or kneeling at the front of the classroom was enough for tears to roll down my face and the nausea to threaten another round of vomiting. It took a couple of face-to-face meetings with the teacher and chats with a couple of the other parents before Mom finally believed me.
That’s how she came to find me the tutor who lived in that town near the big bend in the railroad tracks. Her name was Mercedes and she had known my paternal grandmother, Maria, the grandmother I never got to meet because she and my grandfather were both executed by Franco’s regime during the Spanish Civil War, 20 years before I was born. Mercedes’ home is where the rest of my school days in Northern Spain were spent, until I immigrated to the United States when I was 13. Mercedes nurtured my curiosity, my passion for learning and showed me that some teachers — unlike my first — are loving, compassionate and always supportive.
* Peasant farmers.
