What’s Hidden
“Have you looked at that old map?” she would ask me. “Go up to it.”
For her sake, I would do so, though I knew it intimately by now, the cartoonish loops, the pairs of hills, the little chapels.
“It’s probably a copy,” she would continue, “but we bought it in Spain. Do you think I should have it authenticated? The Spanish in the legend is antique, hard for me to read. But that’s easily faked, I suppose. Particularly since I can’t read it very well!” And she would chuckle at her little joke. As she always did, as she would do again, probably, a little later that day. Or maybe in a few minutes. “I think it’s the early seventeenth century. Do you see all the little chapels?”
Each time, for my mother’s sake, I would walk over and pretend to peer at the map framed on the wall, no longer seeing the outlines, the hills, the discreet little chapels. Voltaire once wrote, “To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth.” Out of respect and love I had come to stay with her in order to begin the process of getting her house and affairs in order, to see for myself whether her decline was accelerating, and what needed to be done. If anything.
She was losing weight. Her short-term memory had long been erratic, but now older memories seemed to be fading, too, like photographs on a shelf that gets too much sunlight.
Frustrated at her inability to remember simple things, at her constant repetition, I accused myself bitterly of vaguely defined filial ingratitude. And so I would stare through that map, not seeing it, seething at being robbed of my mother a little at a time. In such moments, I’d wonder again about the tension between respect and truth, about what children truly owed to their parents, and Voltaire hadn’t said what the living owed to the dying.
“It’s probably a fake,” she would repeat, as I stood pondering anything but the map. “Still, the fact it’s an antique map of central Mexico that we found in Spain makes me curious. Doesn’t it make you curious?”
There was often an odd curl to her question that gave me pause. But curious? Maybe once, but no longer. “Mmmm,” I would respond as though pondering.
The only variable in the stories my mother told during those days in that quiet house was determined by where she sat. If in the rocker by the picture window, she would begin discussing the accumulated “stuff” in the house that she felt needed to be dealt with, along with which grandchild should get it (“but don’t worry, I know you want the Kitchen Queen,” she’d say with a wink.)
If sitting on the sofa, she’d relate the tale of the faux Persian carpet under her slippered feet and its procurement (“They were changing over from natural dyes to chemical dyes and practically giving them away...”). If in the armchair, it was the story of the matching cabinet and buffet from Spain (“In Ronda! I don’t think they had any electricity in the factory. Everything was done by hand.”)
Whatever was in her field of vision impelled her down these well-trodden paths. Prompts from me regarding other moments, other trips, old friends lead nowhere. She no longer remembered details about our old house, or the age of the cat when he died. Sometimes, she would pause and listen to the house and wonder aloud why Ronald wasn’t up yet, sleeping so late just wasn’t like him; and I would delicately remind her that my father had been dead these three years.
Before she got up one day I tried angling the rocking chair differently, hoping a slightly different view might prompt a different story, but she just sat there silently, pleasantly blinking at me out of that lovely, wan face. Until she moved her head and saw the map on the wall. Everything circled back to the probably-a-copy map of central Mexico.
The things regarded as “stuff” were anything she had gathered that didn’t have a good story. Or at least not one she remembered. So, I set myself to winnowing these accumulated things—from closets, the spare room, cupboards. I hoped it would ease her mind, make her less confused.
Most nights she’d go to bed much earlier than I, and in the stillness of that house, during the hours when she slept, I’d give myself over to sullen ruminating on obligations to memory as I sifted “stuff” and made decisions about what was going and what was staying. I tried to be respectful of memories she no longer carried, as though, like the carpets, the “Spanish” bureau and chest, the Kitchen Queen, they would be passed along to me to hold.
One night, I started clearing out the contents of the Spanish buffet in the dining room. Four drawers over two sets of doors. Like the large cabinet, bought at the same time, the buffet was a sturdy, rustic medieval design, dark mesquite wood, with hard-wearing, hand-forged iron hinges and pulls. The dark wood face was studded with black iron clavos.
Taken together they were smart, functional, unique. And—most important—she’d gotten a deal on them. I’d lived with them my whole life. As I had heard countless times, my mother and father had bought the two pieces in Ronda while on holiday in Spain, at a furniture factory where everything was made by hand. My mother speaks fluent Spanish and conducted the price negotiations on behalf of the menfolk.
I can picture her as she must have been then, all of 26 years old, pregnant with me, sitting pertly forward in the chair, wearing her pale blonde hair pulled back in a braid, a style I’ve only seen in pictures, the scent of a bargain flaring her nostrils; my father next to her, concurring with the numbers she rattled off with blazing speed and trying his best to keep up while she haggled in Spanish, taking care, for the agent’s benefit, to maintain the fiction that her role was merely that of an assistant, translating her husband’s wishes and counter-offers (this was Franco’s Spain, 1968).
The deal done, the two pieces had been shipped across the Atlantic and down the St. Lawrence seaway, coming ashore in Detroit before being trucked to our former house in Iowa. More than fifty years on, the wood inside still carried a heady scent of pepper. As a child, I had often wondered if the whole factory smelled of it.
As I dumped the contents of the first two drawers into a waiting recycling bin — Sudoku books, shreds of crossword puzzles, paper napkins kept from long-past family events — I felt a nebulous remorse for “stuff” I wasn’t going to take the time to examine. But the third drawer from the left wouldn’t open.
I tried prying my fingers into the top of the drawer, reaching for whatever might be holding it back inside, but my fingers didn’t feel anything. I opened the cabinet doors below the drawers and peered up. There was something taped to the bottom of the drawer, and a corner of it had come loose, blocking it from sliding open. Carefully, I pulled it loose. It was a thick, over-sized manila folder grayed with age, and covered in a silty, gritty dust, itself redolent with the sharp, black pepper smell of the wood.
The grit stained my fingertips and palms a putty gray as I turned the envelope over in my hands. I wiped it off with one of the paper napkins I’d just dumped out and sat at the dining room table to remove the contents. There were five old maps, four of them clearly antiques. The sides of two of them had curled and their edges looked like they might have been cut from a book with a razorblade.
One of the maps depicted what I took to be seventeenth century Peru. Three of the maps looked very much like the one on the wall, each depicting what first appeared to be slightly different parts of New Spain; that is, Mexico, but which on closer inspection all focused on the “Anahuac,” the Valley of Mexico, and the Laguna Tezcoco where the Aztecs had built Tenochtitlan on an island inside the lake.
I was eminently familiar with the map on the wall. And like it, the scale of the antique maps was idiosyncratic, the topographic features cartoonish. Hills were represented by two, linked bumps, taller or shorter depending on the height of the hills they depicted. Presumably. Actual mountains looked like they could be sketches of the real thing. Rivers were thicker or inked in more heavily depending upon their size, or perhaps their importance. Each had the same little chapels as the one on the wall, too — darkened squares topped by a cross. Similar archaic Spanish in the cartouche, too.
It was fascinating, but why were they here?
In contemporary Spanish, someone had written in pencil on the reverse side of one: “The map is from 1570 approximately, and is either by Alphonse de Santa Cruz (certainly his style) or possibly Juan Lopez de Valasco.” The fifth map was altogether different and had nothing to do with the New World. It was a detail of the Malaga province around Ronda, in Spain. It was old, but not antique. In a bottom corner it noted that it was “edición 1950.” Oddly, given its relative youth, it was in the worst shape. Creases, water stains, dark stains and greasy spots made deciphering it difficult. It had been scribbled on, too, but the writing was very faint. Like the others, it indicated churches, with little crosses denoting their locations in one particular area near what appeared to be mountains.
On the map of Spain, someone had circled a large compound labeled “Residencia de Estudiantes,” a boarding school. I could just make out that the same hand which had written the 1570 note on the back of the other map had scratched “militar” next to it. This newer map had been wrapped around the outside of the other maps, perhaps to disguise them, to make it appear that the bunch was just a loose collection of valueless, weather-beaten old maps.
#
My mother awoke early, and after an Ensure breakfast at the kitchen table, I walked her into the dining room and drew her attention to the maps on the table.
“Yes,” she began, as if this were something that had been on her mind. “Lo que se oculte. . . what’s hidden.” She stared off into the distance. Her dark eyes, deep and searching, clouded over, and I thought maybe she would leave me again in silence.
But a moment later she seemed to return. “Lo que está oculto será revelado,” she said. What’s hidden will be revealed. As she looked back at me, her eyes had grown red, and she pursed her lips tartly before going on:
“I’ve forgotten so many things. People make those ‘senior moment’ jokes, like, how would you know if you’ve forgotten something? But you do know. It’s like going to a cupboard or drawer to get something and not finding it there. You feel that it’s gone, even if you don’t know what it is anymore. I wish those papers were like that.”
“What are they, Mom? Why do you have them?”
“It’s hard to keep it all straight,” she faltered. “To remember. But the man. . . the salesman or agent in Ronda. . . while we were negotiating for the chest and bureau, the man proposed a further deal. He asked us if he could store some papers—valuable maps—in the buffet when they shipped it.”
“Store some papers?”
“Hide them, then,” she allowed impatiently, as though I were quibbling.
“Smuggle, you mean!” I felt like I’d dived too deep into dark water and might not make it back to the surface before my air ran out. The idea of her as an international smuggler was impossible to reconcile with the image of the woman I thought I’d known: assistant soccer coach, founding member of the Perennials Garden Club.
My mother shrugged. “He stressed that they weren’t stolen, but were”—she struggled to find the word—“. . . reliquias. . . heirlooms that his. . . was it a nephew? Anyway. That someone in his family would have to pay a lot of tax on. He was hoping to avoid the papeleo—there in Spain or abroad. Red tape,” she added for my benefit, though my Spanish was almost as good as hers. “And they already had a buyer lined up here in the States.”
She caught my look and added: “I didn’t believe him. Of course they were stolen. But he was offering to pay the freight to the United States. Which was considerable. He said that if los papeles, as he euphemistically called them, were discovered, we could easily plead ignorance.”
“Okay,” I said uncertainly.
“Then, once the furniture was delivered to us...” she stared off into the distance. “At the old house in Iowa. Then, some representative of his would call on us at the house. They’d pretend it was a. . .oh, you know. . . like a factory inspection to make sure that the pieces come through the voyage unharmed. That person would then remove the papeles, and that would be that.”
I gaped at her, didn’t even know where to begin with questions.
“Your father and I discussed it at length. In fact, now I remember that we took so long over whether to agree that the. . . Senior Alvarez—that was his name!—that he decided he needed to sweeten the deal. He unrolled that map up there and offered it to us. He said it, too, was very valuable. Which is why I think it’s a fake. Maybe they all are.”
“I’ve had a look at them,” I said, “and two seem to have been cut from a book. Four of them date to the 1570s, I think, based on notes I saw.”
“Yes?” she said. The glint of the old bargain hunter instantly erased years from her face.
“You haven’t looked at them?” I asked.
“Never,” she said. “I wanted complete deniability. And I’d put the thing out of my mind. Until now.”
“I’m no criminal mastermind,” I began (‘unlike you, Mother,’ I resisted adding), “but the plan sounds reasonable. Why do you still have them?”
“That’s just it,” she said. “No factory rep, no Alvarez ‘nephew,’ ever showed up.”
I shook my head, incredulous, speechless.
“Yes,” she said, “now, I grant, it looks foolish, greedy. But back then, well. . .” She stared at me before adding, “yes, it was foolish and greedy then, too. Your father was against it.”
“Did you try to get in touch with anyone? Later, I mean.”
Her eyelids fluttered, and a cloudiness drifted across her face as though she were suddenly very tired. “Do you see where this side panel cracked that first winter?” she asked, moving away from the buffet and toward the larger cabinet. “That part of Spain is arid, but it’s got nothing on a dry, Iowa winter. You remember when it cracked? How it just popped in the middle of the night? Sounded like a gunshot.”
“I’d have been a newborn, mom.”
“Ah. Yes,” she said and looked into my face, her gaze registering me, but seeming to look past me. She tousled my hair. “You came with a full head of dark, dark brown hair.” She frowned playfully as she gave my hair another ruffle. “Not this gray,” she added with a bit of a pout. She twisted a lock between her fingers and her gaze turned inward. She withdrew the hand as though she had touched a stranger by accident.
I would get no more that day, and over the next week I picked my times, just a few minutes or so each day, to get more of the story.
It was unclear who was to have been the contact in the U.S., and months later when no one had showed up, she had sent a letter to Sr. Alvarez at the factory. It was returned, saying there was no one there by that name. She had never authenticated the map on the wall, she said, because if it was genuine it meant that it was likely part of the theft, and it would draw attention to her.
“Is there something you’d like me to do with them now?” I asked. She stared at me, not seeing me, as though she were working out a difficult Sudoku problem in her head. But she said nothing.
In between times, I googled “Alvarez+Ronda+furniture,” or “Alvarez+Ronda+map,” and other searches but with no luck. I needed to understand it all better before trying to do something with them. Finally, I found a news story from 1969 about a theft of rare books and maps. It read like what it was, a Francoist propaganda piece.
Two deginerates, it seemed, had been arrested for stealing Spain’s patrimonio from a museum, the Palacio del Marqués de Salvatierra in Ronda. The names of the map thieves were not given, which in Franco’s Spain was never a good sign. Further newspaper accounts I found spoke of an investigation by the SVA, the Customs Surveillance Service.
The investigation grew, and subsequent stories I found also noted the cooperation of “los grises,” the Armed Police working under the ambit of the Brigada Político-Social. No wonder the factory wouldn’t admit that Sr. Alvarez had worked there. He’d likely been executed. In Franco’s Spait, to even remember that he’d existed was dangerous. He had become a non-entity, disappeared.
I’d pore over the maps looking for clues to their authenticity and provenance, trying to figure out if there was anything important about them beyond their age. Why these particular maps? I wondered. News accounts deploring the theft were rife with jingoistic vitriol over the pillage and deshonra of Spain’s place in history. Because (though never stated explicitly) this theft struck at the heart of Francoist revanchist sensibilities, part of their catalogued, curated memory of former glory and dominion. From one point of view.
I was able to put them in a kind of date order based on the size and position of Laguna Tezcoco. Inadvertently, the maps described and recorded the pillage of New Spain. In the earliest, the lake and its tributaries spread across the valley, connecting and intertwining like a robust neural network. In another, the lake was diminished, but it still dominated the landscape. In the third, it was almost entirely gone.
I learned through my reading that Spanish efforts to control flooding had led to most of the lake draining away. The map I had decided was second in date order had the words levantamiento catastral in the cartouche, a cadastral survey, and it seemed that in trying to make the land into valuable (and taxable) parcels, the Spanish had destroyed the landscape. In the third map, barely an outline of the lake remained, and the place names on the maps had become españolizado, or changed outright.
As I delved more and more into the maps, the story they told across a landscape and a people came to feel like what was happening within my mother, a trickling away; of knowing there was something to remember, but forgetting what it was; and not only memory lost but erasing what had been there. With no precise dates for the maps, I wondered how long the removal had taken. Today, the dry lake basin is almost completely occupied by Mexico City.
Of the maps that first day, she had said, “lo que se oculte. . .what’s hidden,” and not “se pierde,” what’s lost. Even now, my mother was precise in her choice of words. It often took a while, and she “bounced” at words like someone with a stutter trying to get a pronounceable substitute. And she occasionally came up with a Spanish word first. But it was always the right word.
Why hidden, and not lost?
Something tugged at me as I looked across these maps, spread out on the dining table night after night. Something hidden. Or missed. Late one night as I began straightening them all up I found myself looking at the 1950 map for the first time in days. The group of little hand-drawn crosses leapt out at me, massed near some steep foothills five miles south of the town and about three miles from the boarding school.
Why had someone written militar next to it? A quick search of some of my mother’s books about the regions of Spain showed me that the boarding school had become a military police training facility in 1960. And while there were eleven churches, monasteries or convents in the area, all of them were located within Ronda, miles away. Were these church ruins? I wondered. But nothing I could find suggested that they were.
Then it struck me: crosses by themselves denoted cemeteries, burial sites.
But I could find no cemeteries in the area. The nearest was eight or nine miles away. In fact there was no development of any kind anywhere in that foothills area—no farmhouses, no factories, no warehouses. Just fields. Online, there was no “Streetview” option available for that area, though the area was crossed by two major roads.
My hands trembled as I pushed the antique maps to one side and drew the 1950 map closer. What if the antique maps of Mexico and Peru, the seemingly valuable patrimonio hidden inside a junky map, were the distraction? What if the 1950 map was the point? And it pointed to a mass grave hidden in those foothills? Whoever Sr. Alvarez was, he may have died to keep the map of its location safe. He’d gotten it out, away, to somewhere Franco’s regime couldn’t find it, so that one day the truth would be revealed. But he’d almost been undone, the truth dying with him.
Until that moment I’d been concerned with how to return the antique maps to the museum where they’d been stolen without implicating my mother. If I was right, those efforts now seemed petty and small. I wondered at what it had taken to find that site, what bravery to document it. And what it must have taken not to reveal it when captured. But was I right?
#
When my mother awoke next morning, she found me at the dining table.
“Have you been up all night?” she asked.
I nodded. “It may be that these maps are fakes,” I said. “In any case, this top map is the real treasure.”
She made a face as she looked at its creased and wrinkled condition. “How?” she wanted to know.
I explained what I thought had happened, and what I thought the map meant.
“Lo que está oculto será revelado,” she said again. What’s hidden will be revealed. “That’s what the man said, when we shook hands on the deal to bring the papeles out of the country.”
“Senior Alvarez?”
She paused, uncertain. “Was that his name?”
“Yes, that’s what you told me his name was.”
“Of course,” she said and nodded. “It seemed an odd thing for him to say. But I thought he just meant that they’d retrieve the hidden maps. How do we get it back to him?”
“I doubt we can. . .to him. I expect he was one of the unnamed thieves who died not long after you two cut the deal.”
“Disappeared,” she said distantly. “Franco’s long gone, too. Isn’t he?” she added searching my face. “Yes,” she said brightly. “Of course. They even disinterred him from that obscene memorial site. But you’ll still have to be very careful.”
“I don’t think they can get you for the map smuggling at this late date, mom. Particularly if you’re returning them.”
“I don’t care about that. Let them try to put an 82-year-old woman in jail.” She smiled at the thought. “No, I mean the pacto del olvido, the ‘pact of forgetting.’”
“Yes,” I said.
“After Franco died back in 1975 the new government was eager to move on, and equally unenthusiastic about having its own past collaboration revealed. The pacto gave a kind of amnesty. It barred prosecutions related to Franco-era crimes. But in practice it effectively elided 36 years of history. Facts and dates, and those responsible, faded. . . faded like—”
“—like old photographs of the missing dead.”
She nodded.
Or like memories held in trust for those who can’t carry them any longer, I thought sadly, but I said: “We’re not pointing the finger at anyone, Mom. We’re restoring a map of what might be the site of a mass grave.”
“I doubt you’d be able to count on the government to act,” she said.
“Which is why I’ve sent an email to the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica.” I stood up and seated her at my chair. “It’s already late afternoon in Spain, and I’ve had a response.” I called up the email and moved the laptop screen so she could see it:
[from the Spanish]
<<Sir, we thank you for contacting us. There have long been rumors of such a map in my family, but we feared it was lost like so much else—and with it the location of the 1947 mass grave. One of more than 2,300 such sites that we know of.
A colleague passed me your message because he knew I had a particular interest. We will publicly respect your anonymity, and that of your mother. With its return, she honors and reanimates the memory of the people who died to make and conceal it. Their truth can now be revealed. We owe it to them.
One of my colleagues will contact you about somewhere in Mexico and Peru where you might donate the other maps. They are not forgeries.
Sincerely, Javier Alvarez>>
James McCrone is the author of the Faithless Elector series—Faithless Elector, Dark Network, and Emergency Powers—“taut” and “gripping” political thrillers about a stolen presidency. Bastard Verdict, his fourth novel, is about a conspiracy surrounding a second Scottish Independence referendum. To get the details right for the new thriller, he drew on his boyhood in Scotland and scouted locations for scenes in the book while attending Bloody Scotland.
He’s a member of MWA, Int’l Assoc. of Crime Writers, and he’s the new president of the Delaware Valley Sisters in Crime chapter. He lives in Philadelphia.
You can learn more at his website: JamesMcCrone.com
