The words to say it, or how Spanish and English are sent to try us

One of the things I like most about my occasional visits to my friend and neighbour Nacho is that, as we split a bottle of wine, our conversation ranges over any subject that catches our fancy. 

That’s a pretty wide field.

A well-lubricated conversation with Nacho

We generally speak Spanish because, while Nacho has mastered English, he feels he’s so out of practice that he can no longer express himself in it freely. Which is great for me, of course. Talking Spanish naturally gives me an unrivalled opportunity to display, yet again, how little progress I’ve made in the language over the four years we’ve lived in Spain.

To be fair to him, Nacho’s very nice about my command of his language. But then the Spanish generally are kind that way. “You speak excellent Spanish,” they assure me, giving me far more reason to doubt their sincerity than to take pride in any achievement of mine.

“The one thing you do keep getting wrong,” Nacho admitted, “is in the way you use ‘ser’ and ‘estar’.”

Well, yes. ‘Ser’ and ‘estar’. Ghastly verbs with absolutely no logical basis for deciding which to use in what context.

Just to be clear, both translate into English as ‘to be’. Now grammarians define ‘to be’ as a copulative verb, which sounds borderline obscene, but really only means that it couples a subject with its complement, its description. It doesn’t actually convey any meaning. In other words, to put it in technical terms, it’s pretty bloody useless. 

Speakers of Russian and, I believe, Arabic do without any such verb. “The house red” adequately conveys what we mean when we say “the house is red”. “Tatyana student” works the same way. Or “Putin reckless idiot”, I suppose. That, however, is not a safe sentence, though not for grammatical reasons.

Anyway, what this means is that perfectly sensible languages with a rich vocabulary and a fine literature can do without a verb ‘to be’ altogether. Then there are languages like English which has one. But Spanish, just to drive us all crazy, has two.

If you ask Spaniards what the heck the difference is, when you should use one rather than the other, they generally nod sagely and tell you, “ah, ‘estar’ is for things that are temporary – like you’re happy or sad and you may the opposite tomorrow – while ‘ser’ is for things that are essential or permanent – like you’re honest or courageous” (or a liar and a coward, I suppose).

I used to nod sagely back and take a mental note. But then I discovered that being dead uses ‘estar’. Now I have nothing against optimism, and I suppose there is an optimistic side to religion which suggests that death is only a temporary state, but so far no one, to my knowledge, has returned from it (if you exclude certain articles of faith rather than of evidence) and it strikes me as more sensible to regard it as permanent, for all practical purposes.

I suppose it’s a matter of wanting to use the same verb for being dead as for being alive. ‘Estar’, the temporary one, is used for being alive (estar vivo), which makes sense, so perhaps it feels better to use it for being dead too (estar muerto). But feelings aren’t logic and often they’re quite the reverse.

Even more striking is when you describe someone as, say, young. That uses ‘ser’ (ser joven) as though there’s something permanent about it. Now, that’s pushing optimism so far beyond the bounds of realism as to be completely nonsensical. 

Point out that kind of thing to a Spanish speaker, though, and they just nod their heads and look a little perplexed. Some time ago, and on a different point of Spanish grammar, a native speaker told me that they say things in a certain way because “it sounds better”. Well, OK. I can go along with that. Though it does mean we foreigners have to do a lot of work to learn which form is generally regarded as sounding better.

“Ah, but then there’s something absolutely horrible in English too,” Nacho remarked once we’d exhausted the subject of the copulative verbs, “and that’s your phrasal verbs. How on earth do you expect us to learn them?”

That set me back a bit. Because I’ve always thought highly of the phrasal verbs in English and, indeed, in other Germanic languages (such as the most Germanic of them all, German). They provide us with a huge range of additional terms to convey all sorts of subtle shades of meaning while still using perfectly ordinary, day-to-day words. That’s a verb and a small word, as often as not a preposition. Which is great.

On the other hand, I can see where Nacho’s coming from. After all, the meaning of the original verb often has only the very slightest of connections with the meaning of the phrasal version. 

So, for instance, ‘to run out’ shares practically no common meaning with ‘to run’. What if we ‘run something up’, say a flag on a flagpole? I appreciate that can be done a little quickly, at a bit of a run you might say, though only metaphorically. However, the phrasal verb is still ‘run up’ even if you do it in time to a dirge, with painful slowness. And what about ‘running someone through’ with a sword? Not a nice thing to do and we should resist the temptation, but in any case, the connection with running seems extremely tenuous. 

Yep. I do feel that it’s a great strength of the Germanic languages, a great enrichment of English, that we’re able to talk about ‘running out’, ‘running up’, ‘running through’, as well as ‘running down’, ‘running over’, not to mention ‘running off’, ‘running away’, ‘running into’, ‘running by’ and so on. But I agree it makes English as much of a pain for Nacho as ‘ser’ and ‘estar’ make Spanish for me.

From which I conclude that, invaluable though it is for helping us communicate, especially when lubricated by a bottle of wine, a language can be an absolute pain in the backside (which roughly translates as ‘es un coñazo’ though, this being a family blog, I’m not going to explain the root of the word ‘coñazo’).

Grandparenting: the Easter visit

Fully grasping the role of grandparents has taken me a while (I’m a slow learner). And in any case, it may just be the role of these grandparents. Or, if I’m strictly honest, perhaps only the role of this grandfather.

What I discovered, while the grandkids were with us (with their parents) over the Easter break, is that parents are there to establish standards of acceptable (and above all safe) living, and to inculcate some good, sensible habits in their children. My role, on the other hand, is to undermine all that systematically. Why systematically? Because in childcare, nothing matters so much as consistency.

Sheena, our daughter-in-law, has established the intelligent rule that bikes and scooters are not to be used indoors. I find it quite funny to see them zapping around the place, so on my watch that injunction is recognised but not observed. 

“In Mamama’s and Granddad’s house, there are no rules,” Sheena says. 

In case you’re wondering where ‘Mamama’ comes from, that’s the affectionate name for a Grandma in Danielle’s home region of Eastern France. 

Now, I wouldn’t go so far as to say that conditions in our place are quite as anarchic as Sheena suggests. Perhaps just a tad more chaotic than in their home. But a lot of fun, in my view.

One of the better bits of chaos, if I say so myself, and I say so myself because I’m far from convinced anyone else would say it, involved what we (grandparents and the grandkids) decided to call ‘rain’. I should make clear that what most people call rain, water falling out of the sky, has been absent from around here so long that it’s becoming little more than a fond memory. 

The rain we enjoyed with the kids came out of a hosepipe.

Matilda acting as rainmaker for Elliott and Mamama

The idea was born when Matilda decided that she wanted to play with an umbrella. One with a fine union jack design. It’s not clear why we have such a thing, particularly since for some years now I’ve been anything but proud of the behaviour of the nation to which I belong (and which I’ve left behind to live in Spain). What’s certain is that an umbrella, especially a proudly British umbrella, is incomplete without that essential British phenomenon, almost an icon of Britishness, rain.

Well, the specifically British type would be drizzle, but unfortunately our hose doesn’t have a ‘drizzle’ setting.

Elliott’s turn to be rainmaker for Matilda

In any case, we had a wonderful time, with the umbrella sheltering various people from the ‘rain’ at various times. When it comes to maverick grandparenting behaviour, I think that was one of the better manifestations of our maverickness. Or should that be maverickity?

We did plenty of other things, of course. 

We went to a great local playground. There’s one piece of equipment the kids particularly like, where they climb up high and then crawl through tunnels and up and down ramps. At the end, though, there’s a drop of a metre and a half or so. There’s a rope they can use but, at three, Matilda’s still just a tad young to handle it. It was a delight to see that some ‘big girls’ and at least one ‘big boy’ (‘big’ as in six or seven) were always on hand to help her.

Helping hand for Matilda

There were even two beach trips, this being Valencia, and the sea being just a twenty-minute drive away. They were fun too, even though it was just a tad cooler, in April, than we might have preferred. A beach visit, it seems to me, is only really a beach visit if the sand’s too hot to walk on. The kids eventually got cold.

Still, before that happened, they had plenty of time to enjoy themselves. Elliott, it turns out, is determined to get rid of the beach entirely, by carrying the sand, spadeful by spadeful, down to the sea and throwing it in. This time, in a reversal of the normal order, it was Matilda who followed his lead, and started doing the same thing as Elliott. 

Elliott removing the sand

Matilda throwing her weight into the effort

That made me think of Lewis Carroll, and The Walrus and the Carpenter poem from Through the Looking Glass, the second Alice book. You know the bit:

The Walrus and the Carpenter
      Were walking close at hand;
They wept like anything to see
      Such quantities of sand:
“If this were only cleared away,”
      They said, “it would be grand!”

“If seven maids with seven mops
      Swept it for half a year,
Do you suppose,” the Walrus said,
      “That they could get it clear?”
“I doubt it”, said the Carpenter,
      And shed a bitter tear.

I felt it would have been tactless to tell Elliott this, but I rather think that the Carpenter would have been justified in shedding a bitter tear over his efforts too. What seven maids couldn’t do in seven months, it quickly became clear he wasn’t going to be able to pull off in seven minutes. But that didn’t stop either of them having fun trying.

Fortunately, one of the advantages of there being so much sand is that they could get themselves buried in it. Matilda first, because she remembered how much fun that had been last year. 

Matilda pulling up the covers in her beach bed

And Elliott second, because he doesn’t like being left behind. 

Elliott fed up with this passive role

Incidentally, I put his rapid progress, first in walking (these days, running) and then in speech, down to his desire not to be left behind. That worked well for us back at home, too, when I decided to clean up some footprints on the sitting room floor, and found that Elliott wanted to do the mopping, with Matilda keen to assist.

Elliott helping Granddad

Teamwork

It was great to see Elliott being so helpful. It certainly added another aspect to his charm. Not, of course, that the charm is always on display. I remain bedazzled by his remarkable character, the strong silent one. Every now and then, though, when tired or hungry, he seems to let the strong bit grow while the silent part gets kicked into the long grass. Super-strong and super-audible, you’d have to say.

“He’s lovely,” I told Danielle, “except when he’s a real pain in the arse.”

“Yes,” said Danielle, “but where do you think he gets that from?”

“You’re not suggesting,” I wondered, “that his pain-in-the-arsery comes from his granddad, are you?”

Danielle’s a bit of a strong silent type too, so though she didn’t use any actual words, her reply was eloquent.

Elliott: a lot of charm, enhanced rather than limited 
by a touch of devilry

The suggestion that my genes communicated Elliott’s get-up-our-nosery to him strikes me as a little cruel. Though, I have to admit, it’s probably accurate. Especially when I look at my son Nicky, who no doubt transmitted them to him.

Anyway, both kids kept us well amused. Including in our seasonal celebration. Easter being Easter, a feast with about as much religious content left in it as Halloween, there had to be chocolate eggs and rabbits and, apparently, even toys. That was a fine opportunity for further undermining of parental good sense and discipline, this time as concerns excessive consumption of sweetmeats. Mamama did an impressive job of sabotaging all that.

She hid the chocolates and the toys in the woods, where the kids had to go hunting for them, watched by adults who, naturally, weren’t there to provide any help. Perhaps at most little hints, such as “I wonder whether that might be a path worth going up?” or “why don’t we have a look at the hole in that tree’s trunk?”

Triumph in the Easter Egg hunt

All the discoveries were quickly made, with as much delight as Christopher Columbus no doubt felt over his own, and with far less damage to the natives.

Satisfaction

The next day was the last of their stay, but it had its stock of incidents too. The best was a visit to our local playground with Martín, the son of some of our most-loved neighbours. He and Matilda have really hit it off.

Which has given me what I think is the perfect photo to end this post.

Friends

Condemned to death in a looking glass world

It’s when they get personal that historical events become most interesting. When they involve us or our families. That works too when it’s the family of friends.

Now my friend Conchi is English. As is her husband John. But they live, as we do, in the Spanish province of Valencia, and that name – Conchi – could hardly be more Spanish. It’s one of the traditional (and affectionate) shortenings of the name Concepción. That’s natural, since her parents were both Spanish, from the village of Cañete de las Torres in the province of Córdoba in Andalucía, southern Spain.

Her mother, whose family eventually moved to Valencia, now lives here again, after many years in England.

Since they moved to Spain, Conchi and John have spent some time investigating the background of her grandfather and great-uncle, José and Lorenzo Zurita Aguacil. Both were in agriculture at Cañete de las Torres. Both were active in left-wing politics.

José Zurita Alguacil
Conchi’s grandfather

Of the two, Lorenzo was the more militant. That got him into trouble again and again. That’s trouble that came to him from the left as well as from the right.

In December 1931, the king was forced off his throne and the second Spanish Republic was proclaimed. There wasn’t, however, just one movement behind that change. A host of parties and unions took part, ranging from liberals and centrists, through socialists and communists to the far left of the Trotskyists and anarchists.

The trade union most closely associated with the Anarchist organisation, the FAI or Iberian Anarchist Federation, was the National Confederation of Labour or CNT. Conchi’s great-uncle Lorenzo was a member. A member apparently prepared to take his rights as a unionist to considerable lengths. A Córdoba paper, Conchi and John discovered, records his release from gaol on 1 July 1933, to which he’d been sent after “the latest CNT strike”.

Release of Lorenzo

Prison didn’t teach him better manners, though. Just a few months later, on 28 January 1934, the then oldest paper of the province, the Diario de Córdoba, reports his sentencing to fourteen years in prison for holding explosives and committing crimes against the form of government. That’s the Republican government, led by men of the left. Not left enough, I presume, for Lorenzo.

Lorenzo gets sent back inside

Conchi and John tell me that, despite the sentence, family tradition is that Lorenzo didn’t actually serve any time. So he may have been out by July 1936, when events took the sharp turn that violently overthrew the way of life of both brothers and, indeed, of the rest of Spain.

On the 18th of that month, a bunch of senior army officers decided to mount a coup against the Republic. It failed and what followed was a bitter civil war lasting nearly three years. It ended with the rebels victorious and the Franco dictatorship established for another 36 years, while the Republic and those who fought for it, like the Zurita brothers, had been defeated.

Again, there’s only family tradition concerning what happened to Lorenzo. He apparently got out of Spain at the end of the war and made it into France, which was a smart move: with his record, all he could hope for in Spain was a firing squad. His smartness didn’t help him for long, though. The French government, no keener on refugees than today’s politicians in most countries, reacted badly to the arrival of nearly half a million from Spain. It didn’t help that many of them were battle-hardened soldiers from left-wing revolutionary parties. 

They were held in concentration camps (that’s not a slur, it was what they were officially called) although the word ‘camp’ is a heck of an overstatement for many of them. At the most notorious, Argelès-sur-Mer, inmates were simply held in a wired enclosure on the beach, with no shelter or latrines, and with little food or even water. Many thousands died and the family believes, though it can’t document the fact, that one of them was Conchi’s great-uncle Lorenzo.

Her grandfather José, on the other hand, stayed and was captured in Spain. The story in the family is that his brother-in-law denounced him. The in-laws were devout Catholics, and the Church was closely associated with the nationalist rebels’ cause. If that’s what happened to José, it’s a reflection of the kind of terrible split within families that civil wars always produce.

José was put on trial in a classic piece of what Orwell’s 1984 calls ‘doublethink’. The regime that emerged from a mutiny in the army and an attempted coup d’état applied a looking-glass logic. Those who had served the constitutional and elected government were tried by military tribunals set up by the rebels and faced a charge of rebellion.

Ministry of Defence papers Conchi and John obtained show that a military tribunal condemned José on 27 June 1940. Condemned to what? Why, to death, of course. 

However, unlike 700 of his inmates who were executed by firing squad over the next few years, and the 300 who died of disease or malnutrition, José was one of the lucky ones whose death sentence was commuted and who made it out alive. 

What was his sentence commuted to? Thirty years of what was called ‘major’ prison. That meant no leave from prison for any reason and strictly limited visiting. But at least he got to live. That, no doubt, the regime would have regarded as a generous and humanitarian act on its part. 

Nearly three years later, on 6 May 1943 his case was referred to a ‘Commission for the Revision of Sentences’. The record reveals some interesting information.

José, his death sentence and its commutation

Isn’t it striking how the capitalised, emboldened word ‘MUERTE’, ‘DEATH’, dominates the page? 

The next page gives more detail.

Report of the commission revising José’s sentence

José Zurita Alguacil, a married agricultural worker, from the village of Cañete, appeared before a military tribunal in his local town of Bujalance on 27 June 1940. He was tried in the ‘plaza’, which normally means square, but I imagined – when I first read this document – that it was just another way of referring to the town. Two of my neighbours, Nacho and Isabel, independently corrected me.

“Oh, no,” Isabel assured me, “it really means the main square of the town.”

The trial would have been held in public so that any other sympathisers with the ‘reds’ could see what fate awaited them if they failed to mend their ways.

Since the sentence was commuted to one of imprisonment, it was accompanied by ‘inhabilitación absoluta’, ‘absolute disqualification’. That meant the confiscation of any property but also a total ban from any paid employment. Conchi and John have been to see the fairly substantial farmhouse where José had lived with his family and, so they’ve heard, farmed a little land and owned a few horses. What happened to the property isn’t clear, but it does look as though José never got it back.

What’s more, there was no system of unemployment benefit at the time and, if there had been, he would certainly have been barred from receiving it. So José could look forward to a long prison term at the end of which he would be reduced to penury or whatever his wife could earn.

Nacho tells me that his grandfather spent 17 years disqualified. He and his wife were both teachers. She’d never joined a political party, so she was able to keep providing an income for the family. He gave private tuition, which stayed below the authorities’ radar, which allowed him to add a little to the family earnings, though far less than a full teacher’s pay.

His offence? He’d been a member of the Republican Left. That was the party of the President of the Republic, Manuel Azaña. Perhaps a reasonable modern equivalent would the Democratic Party in the US. For membership of a party of the moderate left, a party of the constitutional government, the rebels who overthrew it condemned him to seventeen years of virtual unemployment. 

Nacho was also amused when we read that the charge of rebellion against Conchi’s grandfather José had been backed by his having been a member of the UGT union, during the time the document calls the ‘red domination’. Funnily enough, Nacho once worked as an organiser of that same union, though by then, with the return to democracy, it was legal again.

In any case, José was more than a union member. He’d taken up arms under the direction of the local ‘revolutionary committee’. With a militia man, he’d taken a neighbour of theirs to a local building serving as a prison, from which he only emerged to be assassinated. These, claims the document, are PROVEN FACTS, using capital letters to underline the authority behind them.

Did José take part in the murder, if murder there was? The record doesn’t say. I suppose his judges felt that his action in detaining the victim was sufficient to make him an accomplice. 

So what happened to his sentence?

Well, the Commission recommended that it be commuted to six years in prison. That would have been a piece of luck, since the starting date for his sentence was set at 1 September 1939, a few months after the defeat of the Republic, and presumably the day of his arrest. When the decision over the revision of his sentence was taken, in the early summer of 1943, he would have been nearly two-thirds of the way through his sentence.

It wasn’t to be. The leading military authority of the region, the Captaincy General, decided that six years was far too little. It only reduced the sentence from thirty years to twenty. At least, though, it also replaced ‘major’ prison by ‘minor’, allowing more visits and occasional home leave for family reasons.

To be accurate, the sentence was reduced not to twenty years, but to twenty years and one day.

“That day mattered,” Nacho explained to me, “because it was specified nowhere when it would come. It wasn’t necessarily the day after the completion of your twenty years. You could be held indefinitely longer until the authorities decided you’d served the extra day.”

Fortunately, that wasn’t José’s fate. On 29 September 1945, the Official Bulletin, the journal which publishes government decisions, announced that the penalty of absolute disqualification inflicted on several condemned men, one of them our José, had been lifted. That meant he could work again.

End of disqualification for José

That rather suggests he was out of gaol. In which case he did, in the end, serve only just over six years, as the Commission had recommended. Perhaps the Captaincy General changed its mind. Perhaps the regime decided that by 1945, the year after the last attempt to overthrow it by armed force had failed in a Communist-led invasion of the Valley of Aran in the Pyrenees, it no longer had much to fear from such men as José.

Conchi’s grandmother, another Concepción like her granddaughter, had left her children with various convents so that she could travel to Burgos where her husband was imprisoned. It seems that it was nuns that saw to the prisoners’ being fed and, to make sure José was fed properly, she found it necessary to be among the nuns herself. Again, a family tradition is that she had to intervene several times, via the nuns, to stop José being taken out and executed. If that’s true, it shows that even commutation of a death sentence wasn’t a guarantee of survival.

As soon as José got out, he gathered up his family, his wife and four kids – Conchi’s mother had been born after he’d served a month of his sentence – and moved them a long way from his native Andalucian village, to the province of Valencia. Conchi’s mother lives there again today, as well as Conchi herself and John.

The extraordinary novelist Almudena Grandes points out that such a release only meant that he’d been freed, not that he was living in freedom. That would have to wait another thirty years, until the death of the dictator in 1975. It was the return to democracy that allowed Conchi and John to hunt down what documentation remains about José and Lorenzo. The information they found paints a saddening picture of what it means, within one family out of the millions affected, for a democracy to be overthrown and replaced by a dictatorship.

A great way to bring that lesson home, don’t you think?