The Refugio (1937, Santander España)

  The sirens wailed. Into the refugio I ran, careening down the stairs, oh and
right into the arms of the woman I noticed the last time I was here. Against the
cement walls, we plastered ourselves. I craved her arms around me. Her eyes,
her glow, her steadiness would save me from the bombs rocking the
underground shelter relentlessly. It was her calm in the quaking that I fell in love
with, her piercing yet peaceful eyes in the face of extreme danger.
  At the time, my grandmother was still alive. She had brought a chair down
with her into the shelter, heavy though it was. She’d come to the refugio with our
neighbor and a chair. One of the rules was if the old wanted to sit in the refugio,
they must bring their own chairs. As we left, she took the chair back up the
stone stairs, almost tripping and falling. I grabbed it as soon as we reached the
street and she leaned on my other arm shakily. It was a cruel rule. Those who
need it most couldn’t, I mean, couldn’t easily use the refugio.
  Rubble everywhere, half cut buildings with people’s furniture and clothes
spilling onto the street, disheveled dollhouses, wartorn streets. What happened
to our beautiful Santander? My abuela was crying in utter despair. I wondered if
she wished for death sometimes.
  Once, as we were going back to our apartment abuela passed out; she broke
her hip on the apartment stairs,said the doctor in our building upon examining
her. We nursed her at home (my neighbor and I) because the hospitals were
impossibly crowded. We survived one bombing in our building without going to
the refugio. She couldn’t go, so I stayed with her.
  But then, my dear abuelita died. I was alone. I was only twenty-four.
  The next time there was a raid, I went to the refugio, and fell into that
beautiful woman’s arms, as if it was fate. Grieving my abuela, missing her, I was
lost in my thoughts. I wondered how I could have helped her more. Was I
wrong not to bring her to the hospital that time after her fall?
  Was it a pure fantasy when I fell into that woman’s arms? I tripped over my
own feet going down the stairs. People stumbled and those already in place
reached out to help. But my real helper was—I didn’t know her name then. The
sureness of her clutch, her eyes, as she looked at me. Would she stand near me
again the next time? This woman who I longed for, who caught me, was
uplifting my grief, changing my thoughts.
  Yes, she attached herself to me, after helping me. Once again we lined the
concrete wall. Side by side, we could not speak. It was the rule. We had to be
silent. I noticed an older woman with a chair reminding me of my abuelita. My
heart was pulled, it ached.
  The bombs shook us all the way to our cores. The noise was deafening. What
craziness is this? The Germans, the Nazis, I’d heard, were even helping the
enemy, the sublevados, our own Spanish people, to destroy us. A downed plane
was found with a German pilot dressed up in leather clothes and goggles. He
came from so far away to bomb us here in Santander? Someone said the Nazis
were practicing on Nuestra España! They battered Guernica for three days.
  A child began to cry nearby. His mother gently tried to hush him. I wondered
how many of the children kept quiet. The woman who caught me took my hand
secretly, comforting me. I looked at her, with pleading eyes, perhaps. She looked
down but kept my hand firmly in hers—not against the rules.
  I wanted so much to say something to her but I loved the quiet. Then our
wandering emotions were rudely interrupted by another rumble. We anticipated
the fierce crash and the earthquake-like feeling, but it was farther off this time.
The siren came on to signal we were free to file out, keeping silence.
  All of us in the refugio were women and children. Most of the men were off
fighting but if there were any, they normally got last preference for the shelters,
unless they were disabled. A few men were waiting outside, holding big rocks
ready to to block the entrance after we all went out so it could be camouflaged.
  My new friend turned toward me, with moist eyes, as we emerged from the
refugio and asked me a miraculous question—did I want to come to her place for
a coffee? I hadn’t had coffee in weeks and of course I wanted to be with her.
  “Yes,” I said quickly then looking down I blurted out:“My abuela, poor thing,
died a few days ago and my father and mother are off fighting. I have no one to
go home to.”
  It was the first time we spoke.
  She walked beside me, “And I too have no one. I am sorry about your abuela.”
  As we walked through big chunks of rock and debris, my ears felt plugged
up. People searched through the piles of stone and sand and smashed ruins. A
girl sobbed to herself a distance away from a pile while her mother searched for
something or someone. Was their apartment all spilled out, exposed to the
smokey air after the bombs? I recognized the mother and child from the shelter
and remembered her worried look.
  “What is your name?” I suddenly asked my companion.
  “Silvia,” she said softly.
  “Mine is Laura.” The crunch beneath our shoes grew louder as we walked up
the hill, alone, a solitary pair.
  “Why do you go to that refugio? Isn’t there one closer to you?” It seemed a
long way. Silvia didn’t answer.
  I said her name several times in my mind. I felt I had to contain my
excitement, but I sensed a sudden rush. I wondered if I was getting my period.
But I had just finished. It was my attraction, my excitement, a pull that I have
sensed before but not like this.
  Silvia was taller than me with long dark hair and a long smooth gait. There
was something both feminine and masculine about her, as if she didn’t care about
what people thought. I looked down a lot when I walked to avoid the rocks and
rubble.
  We went into an old building still intact. I longed to put my arm through hers
as we stepped upstairs. We got to the second, maybe third floor—I lost track.
Silvia opened the door and it gave a long creak. It smelled like flowers inside,
roses or magnolia, something sweet. She smiled as she ushered me inside a
tastefully arranged living room with a brocade couch and a built-in wooden
bookcase with books lining one wall. She went into the kitchen and soon the
aroma of coffee took over the apartment. I waited on the couch, a bit nervously,
suddenly aware of my body. She brought a tray with two cups of coffee and set
it on the round table.
  I held out my hands and tugged her to sit with me. She looked at me carefully
like she was admiring me. Then she came down toward the seat. I started to say
something. Suddenly, she kissed me on the lips. Her softness brought out more
wetness in me, her touch tender. I wrapped my arms around her and began
loving. I followed her lead, for it was my first time to be so passionate.
  I learned a lot about Silvia over the next few days. I had no need to go back
home. We could go to the refugio together, if need be. The cans of sardines, soup,
and other supplies dwindled. A few biscuits remained, a little rice.
  Something happened. The war stopped, but we never heard the signal again
after we came to her place. It was 1937, August 26 or 27, not sure of the date of
the end of the war in España. I stayed for a week with Silvia. We kissed much
and we’d stroke each other lying down. I’d never felt anything like this before.
We made love, as they say, and we talked a lot. Silvia’s touch was like honey and
my response was a fullness followed by a brimming over of excitement. Our love
let me let go. I was saying things and doing things like never before, making
sounds I never knew I could make. I loved Silvia and the sweet smell of her
stayed with me always, even in our separations.

2

  Silvia, I learned, was the daughter of one of the great cave explorers of Spain.
The caves were mystifying finds that showed evidence of inhabitants going back
tens of thousand of years, and even drawings and engravings of ancient animals,
like in the Altamira Cave. Who could have drawn them?
  An intelligent woman, Silvia said she was educated through books, by her
father and her travels. I didn’t really know how exactly, but she implied it was
more than just curiosity that made her this way.
  “My father had to stop his exploring because there was no more money, on
account of the war,” said Silvia, “yet I traveled with him to a few of the caves.
One of them is some kilometers south of Santander. I saw beautifully etched
drawings on the rock walls at the cave opening. They were destroyed by local
people using the cave as a refugio. They knocked entire walls down. And the
ancient paintings were lost forever.”
  We were lying on her bed. I listened as she moved her hands to draw in the
air what she described. Her fingers were slender and expressive.
  “Ancient artists used the curves in the cave to show horses in motion. The
cave walls were part of the painting. Horses and deer and even human figures. I
saw them. Tens of thousands of years old, my father says. It’s incredible. I wish
you could have seen them. Making the cave opening bigger, the people didn’t
know, by using it as a refugio, they were destroying precious art.”
  We talked about going to find more caves together, maybe in a few months or
years. Too dangerous, now. I liked making plans with Silvia. It was as if our
togetherness was now a fact. We could move forward and do things. The words
she uttered always felt intimate to me. Her whispers in my ear were somehow
urgent: “It was fate that we met.”
  “I want to show you the cave, and Asturias, and where I grew up, and so
many things. We’ll go where there is no war, where we can be ourselves and
look at the waves gently lap the shore.”
  She told me she once met a woman archaeologist at a cave. Her name was
Eva. She, it turned out, was her first love—much older, a gentle, loving person,
she said. They had camped out near that cave. Her father was staying in one tent
while Silvia and Eva slept in the other. I pictured Eva.
  Silvia said, “I was never so happy. Eva told me that women have always had
relationships. Love and sex between women is not unusual. It’s natural. The
repression of women in Spain was set up by men to control women and to force
them to get married and have children. Eva didn’t want anything to do with
marriage. Now she had a relationship with a woman in Oviedo, and she and her
lover believe in freedom in love.”
  It was hard for me to grasp all this. I asked Silvia to tell me stories about Eva
again and again. She did so in different ways. We kissed between stories, on the
couch, at the table, in bed. I wondered what my mother would think, and my
abuela. So much had changed because of the war, the separations, the
destruction. Everything seemed different, on edge. Beyond danger, or possible
danger, I don’t know what.
  With Silvia though, I felt something inside me give way to more and more
pleasure, an urge that came with an ache and then a trembling and finally a burst
of light and sound, and then a gliding into languor, a relaxed laziness.
  Silvia would lay her slender body on top of me and look at me with her dark
intense eyes. We’d kiss passionately and she’d push against me, as if she wanted
her own pleasure. She shivered then pressed me with such huge moans. I too
learned to make sounds. I felt her tremble in the core of my body. We touched
each other sweetly, and oh, it was such a tender touching. I can’t even begin to
tell.
  I cried often during these times, I don’t know why. I could see her tears too.
They would just flow. Was it because of the danger and death all around us or
something else?
  One time after our lovemaking, she said, “It was not long ago, that the poet
Federico Garcia Lorca died. You have heard of him? During this horrible war,
he was killed. He was a great poet but he died too young.”
  “Yes, I know,” I said, wondering why she thought of this after our
lovemaking.
  “You know he was a supporter of freedom for women? And he was a
homosexual, too. Some think he died because of this. The men who murdered
him were so angry that he loved men and probably that he was trying to help
women! It is a cruel world we are living in, especially cruel for us women and
for homosexuals.”
  Strange to me that she spoke of these things. That she spoke about
“homosexuals.” I had never heard anyone say this word before. Was that what
we were too?
  I was always in favor of the poor and the oppressed. I remember even talking
to my abuelita about this. She said that was why my parents went to fight in the
war—to help the poor and prevent the nacionalistas, the sublevados, to come to
power. El Caudillo was in power now, a terrible man.
  My abuela told me my parents were socialistas. Silvia said Lorca was, too. I
have not heard from my parents. Many people have died in this war. I wanted all
the fighting and bombing to stop. It was still going on in many places—now in
Asturias, I heard. I hoped my parents would come back.
  Silvia said she wanted to leave Santander, maybe for Asturias “because they
would stand up to Franco.” I did not want her to go. I could say I wanted to join
her. We were together now.
  “Why not just stay here? With me?” I said.
  “I can’t bear being under those horrible rightists—those evil people.”
  “Yes, you’re right. And do what?”
  I wanted to go with her, but I didn’t want to abandon my apartment in
Santander. She prepared to leave soon after that day she talked about Garcia
Lorca. I started to close up my place, the place where I grew up, the place my
parents would come back to.
  Why was I hesitating? I followed her.
  The war continued despite our wishes. I did meet Eva and her chica. It was a
new world, a new family for me. We didn’t want any part of politics, just our
community. My tender, woman-filled relationship with the beautiful, soulful
Silvia outlasted all wars.

.

Sonja Franeta is a writer, translator, educator, and activist, born in the Bronx, NY of immigrant parents from Yugoslavia. Captivated by Russian literary figures, she studied Russian at the university. She worked and gathered interviews of Russian LGBTQ people during the 1990s (perestroika) and published two books; Pink Flamingos: 10 Siberian Interviews (2004, 2017) and My Pink Road to Russia (2015). Freneta has published work in the U.S. and Russia. She loves to read, write, and travel. She and her partner divide their time between the U.S. and Spain.