By TINA VALLÈS
Translated by SAMANTHA MATEO
Whenever there’s any discussion of the hunger that marked the years following the Spanish Civil War, I’m reminded of the story about my paternal great-grandmother and the apple. My father says her name, halting at that g that separated her from all the other Annas. Maria Agna. No family dinner passed without mention of that apple. But, after so many years, I can’t quite remember if it’s an apple or a peach. My father always said the basket his grandmother carried back from the field emitted a potent scent, but I don’t think apples smell strongly enough that you could pick them out while driving in a truck a couple of meters away.
Maybe if you were starving you could smell apples no matter how far, or maybe the scent part was added later, as the memory evolved, giving the events a legendary element. In any case, I’m inclined to say it was an apple, because my grandfather worked on the same plot when I was little, and I don’t ever remember seeing him with a crate full of peaches. I did see him with apples. Small, red apples with a rather intense and sweet flavor that could maybe produce a strong enough aroma to be smelled from afar. Grandmother kept them in the darkness of the larder, and the fruit’s aroma was intense when you entered, which was impressive, given that it was also where the cured meats hung. Now I like to imagine that the apples I ate as a child came from the same apple tree—that I once ferociously chomped into an apple just like the one that killed my great-grandmother.
My father must have been nine years old when his grandmother died in her fifties, but he retains a vivid memory of her. She had red hair, blue eyes, freckled skin; she still looked young and took care of herself. My father’s face would soften and become sweet like a sponge cake: his eyes, also blue, would turn inward toward his memory and, in so doing, would invoke a love so strong it was visible. His memory of his grandmother was a mental oasis in those harsh postwar years in a small, cold, inland town. The family managed the only convenience store in town during a time of ration cards. They had a certain degree of power, but they too were starving. Luckily, they could rely on their field of fruit trees, mainly apple, almond, and hazelnut. They also grew potatoes that they sold later at the price of gold. I don’t know if my father and his two girl cousins, the three youngest of the family, ever tasted those potatoes. I know they gorged themselves on plates of grass peas, and my father gagged from the floury texture in his throat.
The story of Maria Agna and the apple must be understood in the context of the starvation and grass peas. If you’ve never starved, the story will never seem plausible, even as fiction. My father grew tired of explaining the starvation he experienced to me and my sister, but the image of our paternal grandparents eating bread alongside fruit and the Christmas dinner nougats confirmed it for us. “Is there no bread in this house?” is a question forever tied to my memory of the men in the family whenever they sat at the table and found no bread basket. You couldn’t even tell them that the dish didn’t require you to soak anything up. They wouldn’t eat without a slice of bread between their fingers. After the meal, my grandmother would lick her index finger and gather up all the crumbs scattered throughout the napkins, and my other grandmother would look at her in disgust, because she hadn’t starved as much. She would always eat the cluster of grapes with an end piece of bread, but it was because she liked the combination of flavors, she clarified, concealing her starvation.
Hunger can’t be explained. It’s always unbelievable, especially the hunger of a child. Imagining my father starving when he was younger than ten years old makes me want to time-travel back to my grandparents’ store and bluntly ask: Why did you let your son starve when you had a store full of food? Maria Agna’s story is a partial response.
We have to imagine a whole town of about five hundred residents with empty stomachs. Everyone is at home, and whatever can be eaten that day for dinner is on the stovetop. Potatoes and peas, bread and sardines, poor man’s soup. The options are few, with a small number of ingredients combined in all possible ways. Maria Agna returns from the plot with a basket of freshly harvested apples for the store. She crosses the highway at the height of the season just as a truck driver, a neighbor from town, slows down because he’s approaching home, and the midday silence of the town consumes everything. He recognizes Maria Agna; he’ll pass next to her, greet her with a nod, wish her a good day, and go on his way. She stops for a second, turns to see who it is—That Man from Cal Dallò, who must have just returned from delivering goods from the slaughterhouse. She can already smell the iron-tinged blood and guts. She continues walking, basket on her shoulder, her free hand on her hip, hunger in her throat, and the scent of apples like traces in the air, practically taking on color.
With the window open in the middle of summer, the truck driver catches the scent of the apples, and his stomach growls with sadness. As he passes by her, nodding his head to confirm that old Maria Agna is still nice to look at, especially when the midday sun sets flame to her hair and softens her freckles, he feels a hunger that comes from so deep within that he lets one hand go from the steering wheel, trusting the other, and reaches out the small window to grab a piece of fruit from the basket of the only redhead in Cal Ros. She guesses his intentions, but doesn’t quite know what to do to block his gesture, so she quickens her pace slightly and shifts the basket to distance it from the sweaty hand of the truck driver, who stretches his arm farther and leans his elbow onto the basket, causing her to lose her balance and fall toward the truck just as his other hand lets go of the wheel. All control is lost, and in a little more than an hour, the whole town knows that the Matriarch of Cal Ros is lying dead at the town entrance, with an empty basket and apples scattered around, forever stopping time for her under the burning sun. The red of her hair, the fruit, and the blood combine, while the truck driver begins to feel the weight of a guilt that will twist and turn inside him until he dies of old age.
I’ve had to fabricate all the details of this scene, because at home, the episode was summarized in two sentences: Maria Agna returned home with a basket full of apples, and the truck driver from Cal Dallò caught a whiff and, trying to grab one from the driver’s seat, fatally ran her over. The End. Then, all the adults in the house would begin to comment on how beautiful my great-grandmother was despite her age, forever young and red in the family memory, and all the questions my sister and I had about the details of the accident, about the days that followed, and how it affected the town and the relationship between the two families were forever left unanswered, scattered among the crumbs that my grandmother, Maria Agna’s daughter, collected with her index finger, wet from her saliva, after coffee and dessert, so that we understood that she’d starved in the postwar years.
We’ll never know all of the details—how exactly Maria Agna died. I’ll always imagine her disfigured, all her beauty forever scattered across the paved ground of the town’s entrance. Sometimes, when we drove by, my father would say, “Here. It was here.” And my sister and I would stick our heads out the window, searching for a trace.
Now I think that all places are places where people have died, and they stop being that when no one says “here,” like those dried bouquets of flowers on the side of the highway. Maybe my great-grandfather never passed that section of the road again without doubling over in pain; maybe my grandma thought about her mother every time she left the town. But as we grew older, my father stopped saying, “Here, it was here.” And now I must have made up the exact location where my grandmother spilled apples, blood, and life, forever red.
Tina Vallès is a writer, translator, and copyeditor. She has published numerous books and stories for children and young adult readers. Her short story collection The Longest Parenthesis won the 2013 Mercè Rodoreda Award, and in 2017 she received the Anagrama Prize for The Memory of the Tree.
Samantha Mateo is a translator from Chicago. She received an MA in humanities from the University of Chicago, specializing in Catalan and translation studies, and a BA in linguistics from Columbia University. She currently works in academic publishing. She was an ALTA Emerging Translator mentee in 2022 for Catalan.
