Childhood in Spain, 1980s, by Andreu C.

From MemoryArchive

Who: Andreu C
What: Childhood in Spain
When: 1980s?
Where: Sagàs

I remember, when I was very little, spending the summer with my parents, my grandmother, my aunts and uncles and six cousins in a little farming municipality called Sagàs. My father’s family owns a massive old farmhouse there where we would go and spend weeks at a time, playing all day and gathering around a long wooden table for meals. The house is made all of stone, tile, and thick wooden beams. It sits on top of a hill, sharing a little dirt plaza with one of the town’s four Romanesque churches and another, boarded-up house whose most distinguishing feature is three wide crumbling arches outside it’s oak double doors. Wide stone steps lead down from the plaza to the bottom of the hill, but when I was little I rarely got to the bottom because of the scores and scores of snails that were always painting lines across the lichen and stone of the steps. Acres and acres of fields fringed by woods skirt the foot of the hill, and other stone houses sit perched on top of rocky knobs or nestled between twisting pine trees. Everything is very dry and rocky. The sound of insects humming never stops, and you can smell wild herbs everywhere. Our house is dark and cool all the time, because the walls—at the thinnest—are two and three feet thick. Looking down on the front door, there are two thin arrow loops, from the time when every house was fortified. Following that tradition, all our windows on the first floor are covered in black iron bars. Usually, though, all the doors are open, covered only with bead curtains to keep the flies out. We have plenty of home videos from when I was younger where my father would follow me and my cousins around the house, watching us play—half the time you can only catch fleeting glimpses of our features lit up by shafts of light streaming in between the strands of the bead doors, and can make out the squat outlines of dusty antiques. Then we’ll chase each other outside, my father following with the camera, filming the bright rectangle of a door and then bursting through it into blinding Mediterranean sun while the focus struggles to keep up.

I have a really distinctive memory of playing in the walled-in garden wearing short pants and with a plastic sword buckled around my little-kid potbelly. One of my aunts was calling for my cousin Sergi, but she couldn’t find him—so me and my other cousins set out to try and find him. I think I remember that we walked out of the door in the wall that surrounds the garden and up between the houses into the plaza—but my other cousins weren’t as excited by our mission as I was. They probably got distracted by a snail while I marched off to look. The door of the church was open, so I went in there to see if Sergi was there. Beyond the marble floor, the church is a lot like our house inside—but instead of square rooms it has thick stone columns holding up an arched roof. The church—and our house—were built on top of an old Roman graveyard, and in one back corner of the church the marble floor is replaced with a thick glass plate, so you can look down at a skeleton squeezed between the foundations of the church and the footprints of older walls. I think the priest’s sister came over, smiling, and talked to me about the skeleton. My family never goes to mass, and the half-deaf old priest has scolded my aunts and uncles before: “You come to see the church when it’s closed, but never during services!” But the priest, the patron of his church and me all have the same name—Andreu.

In Catalan, we say we’re Tocaios—and as a result the priest is always nice to me. Sergi wasn’t there, and the skeleton wasn’t moving, so I went back to the garden to see what was going on there. My aunt was doing needlework by the door, but when she saw me she barked at me: “Where were you?” I told her sheepishly that I had gone to the church, and my cousin Meritxell said, laughing “Ha anat a caçar fantasmes a l’esglèsia amb l’espasa” (he went to go hunt ghosts in the church with his sword). I tried to explain that I had been trying to help by looking for Sergi, but I ended up with time-out for going off without telling anybody. God knows why this one memory is still so vivid, especially after all the time I spent there dressing in costumes and staging puppet shows and swimming in a plastic pool on the patio.