Nightmares Like These

Just as the stars are still in the sky during the day, so are dreams a part of our waking hours. During the summer of 2020, I dreamed I cut a baby open from its groin all the way to its throat with a pair of scissors. I did this to demonstrate something I had written. I cut the baby open, and there, neatly inside of him, all of his organs, but no blood. As I started to read from the manuscript, I realized it was horribly flawed and I would have to revise it and so, therefore, I had cut the baby open needlessly. Perhaps this is when I saw there was no blood or when I realized the baby would die without medical care. I tried to hold the baby together while my partner, a man, called the hospital. There was no help to be had. Not until the next morning would help arrive, so I had to hold the baby together, hoping that the two edges of skin would meld, form a scar. Oddly, the baby was very patient and seemed to feel no pain. I had to sleep holding him closed, curled around him, so he would not die.This was early in the pandemic. Many people were having nightmares where they couldn't see or where they needed to care for someone and couldn't or where their hands were falling off. But I don't think my nightmare was about the pandemic as much as it was about fascism and civil war, about living in a divided country.That morning, or maybe another, when I went to my daughter's house, I asked one of her children what he'd dreamed. I don't know why. How to make conversation with a three-and-a-half-year-old? He said, “I dreamed about a man who didn't have eyes. Peoples didn't have eyes. And I was alone, and I said, Mama! And I couldn't open my eyes, and Mama couldn't find me.”In the movie Pan's Labyrinth, which is about the Spanish Civil War, there is a character called the Pale Man who has no eyes. Or he has eyes on the palms of his hands. He eats children.My daughter told me that her son was sitting up in bed after he cried out. “I told him he could change the dream,” she said. And that's what I'd told her when she was a child and dreamed a man in a blue van was following her, watching her. “It's your dream,” I'd told her. “You can change it. You can shoot laser beams from your eyes and blind him.”A blind man is not terrifying, but a man with no eyes is. I realize now that the Pale Man must tap into the same primal fear as my grandson's dream. Although the character has no eyes, there are holes in his face where they must have once been and there are bloody sockets in the palms of his hands. He sits in a trance at the head of a long table. His eyeballs are on a plate in front of him. The table is spread with a lavish feast, but the food is there to entice hungry children. Guillermo del Toro, the Mexican filmmaker who created him, says the Pale Man represents the Catholic Church, specifically its role in the Spanish Civil War, and once I read that, I could see it: The room has a ceiling that reminds me of the long hallways leading to the Sistine Chapel, except that instead of paintings of cherubs, there are paintings of the Pale Man dangling babies by the leg before he devours them.For years, I'd been dreaming up itineraries: the Costa Brava, Santiago de Compostela, the museums in Madrid. Even though I'm not religious, I'd followed people on Instagram as they trekked the Pilgrim's Way. Now, during the pandemic, guidebooks lay open all over my apartment. Was it because I couldn't travel that I longed to? This is something I've noticed about myself. In times of duress, when my mother was dying, when my husband Fernando was dying, I always bought guidebooks and dreamed of escape. First the pandemic, then armed men protesting stay-at-home orders, then armed men surrounding the public health clinic where my daughter worked, then a president who cheered on white nationalists and encouraged insurrection, then fears of fascism, of a civil war—and I longed to escape to Spain.But what did I know of the Spanish Civil War before visiting over 20 years ago, before teaching del Toro's movie, before writing this essay? Not much. I remember when Franco died, 1975, because it was the year of my son's birth. It was also the year when the United States finally left Vietnam, and in the footage of helicopters leaving Saigon, South Vietnamese people who'd been loyal to the United States hang onto the skids as the helicopters lift off the rooftops, their bodies dangling in midair, then dropping. That was another civil war. In both cases, I sat on the floor cross-legged and watched the news on a small black-and-white television, my infant cradled in my lap. In the case of bodies falling from helicopters, I stood so suddenly, in my alarm and desire to flee history, that I dropped the baby.Before Fernando and I went to Spain in 2000, we asked his father if he knew what part of the country his ancestors came from. He shrugged. He thought it was the northwest. The name Alvarado means “dweller near a white hill,” and is from the Arabic “albarrada,” “wall of small stones.” Since our trip, I've read that Pedro de Alvarado, the ruthless conquistador, was from Badajoz, Castile, a town on the border of Spain and Portugal, but who knows if they could trace the family line back to him? (One hopes not, of course.) Fernando's father, who had been orphaned as a child in Mexico, told us only this: “If you see the King, tell him we want our gold back. It's ours. He stole it.”In Barcelona Fernando and I climbed narrow spiral staircases. The view stretched for miles, it seemed. This was from a spire of La Sagrada Família, Gaudi's cathedral, still unfinished. The next day, in Barri Gòtic, we walked the narrow winding streets. Inside the Catedral de la Santa Creu i Santa Eulàlia, it was cool, a refuge from the heat. There were flowers and green trees in the peaceful central courtyard. Eulàlia, from the Greek, means “sweetly spoken.” Eulàlia, the saint, was a 13-year-old girl when she was martyred during the Inquisition on an X-cross for speaking up. They tortured her and then burned her wounds, but the flames blew back on the torturers. Why do they tell these stories to children? A dove flew from her mouth when she died, and snow fell and covered her naked body. La Rambla, the wide walk in Barcelona down to the sea, reminded me of a tree-lined festival. Jugglers, mimes, beautiful people strolling, birds for sale. The many-storied market with its shelves and shelves of exotic fruit was called La Boqueria. Was the word derived from boca? Mouth? Rambla is from the Arabic for sand, because it was originally the bed of a stream that was dry most of the year. The bright light, the Mediterranean ambiance, the festive evenings, Gaudi's playful architecture—it all surprised me.It surprised me, Barcelona did, because in my imagination, Spain was dark. Maybe because of the Inquisition? Maybe the paintings by Goya? Or maybe my imagination was rooted in The Time of the Doves, a novel Mercè Rodoreda wrote in exile in 1962 and that I read in the late 1980s. Her protagonist seemed overwhelmed and unmoored even before the Civil War. Natalia is her name, although her husband renames her the moment they meet—which tells you everything you need to know about that. Colometa is alone. Alone, because her mother has died, because her husband joins the Republican resistance against Franco and the Nationalists and leaves her with two small children.One evening Colometa shares a rotten tomato and a sardine with her two children. She says if the “cat had still been alive, it wouldn't have gotten even the spine.” She lies between her children, listening to explosions, trying to sleep. She's already sold everything. There is no food. No hope for food. Her children's ribs are showing, their veins blue under their pale skin. If we are going to die, she decides, we'll die together. She imagines jumping with them from the balcony. Instead, she buys hydrochloric acid. She has just heard that her husband and his friends are all dead. Quimet is dead and Cintet is dead and Mateu has just been shot dead. “Yes, yes, you can believe it,” her neighbor tells her, “They're shooting them all in the middle of a square.”In 2000, when we were there, they were just starting to disinter the graves, although we did not know that then. We had no idea that Spain had more mass graves than any other country except Cambodia. No idea, of course, that in 2025, 50 years after Franco's death, they would still be unearthing remains. As we walked the wide streets of Barcelona, Fernando told me that the graffiti said “we don't bark like dogs.” He told me that in 1975, after Franco died, they were finally free to speak Catalan without persecution. Although the political divisions had existed for decades, in 1936 Spain had a democratically elected Republic, one that was making dramatic changes, including labor and agrarian reform, the separation of church and state, the depoliticization and reform of the army. Women had the right to divorce, to abortion, to work outside the home without permission. Franco and the generals—with help from Hitler and Mussolini—rebelled against these changes. Basically, Fernando said, it was a struggle between democracy and fascism. The war itself lasted only three years, but half a million Spaniards died and half a million went into exile. And then, afterward, for four decades, fascism. Franco became known as El Caudillo, the term for an authoritarian leader who is not constrained by law.Neither did we know this when we were there: When Franco died, Spaniards agreed to el Pacto del Olvido, the pact of forgetting, as well as amnesty for those involved in crimes during the years of the war and the decades of dictatorship afterwards. How else to move forward quickly and achieve democracy? But in some ways, the pact of forgetting led to a culture of silence and denial, not only about the war but also about the thousands of babies stolen from their birth mothers, about the camps in which nearly a million Spaniards were “re-educated” during Franco's regime.Not until 2007 did Spain pass the Law of Historical Memory, which encouraged research and publishing about the real events of the war and so ended el Pacto del Olvido. Memorials and museums were built on the sites of bomb shelters and Francoist concentration camps. Of course, there were controversy and dissension, but in 2020, the Democratic Memory Law required schools to teach about the dictatorship—even though Vox, the right-wing party, objected, calling these educational requirements “sectarian indoctrination.” Now, in 2025, when Clyde Moneyhun, who translates from Catalan, tells me of conversations with friends from Spain, he says that rarely a week goes by “without some reference to the war, some remembrance, some commemoration.”I wonder if in 2000 I could feel the heaviness of things not yet said. On our first morning in Madrid, Fernando and I were nearly the only visitors in the Museo Reina Sofia. We rounded a corner and there it was, “Guernica,” covering most of a wall. We sat on a bench before it and had time to let it wash through us. The painting, although Cubist, feels photographic—because of its geometry? Its black and white and aquatint? Its stark witness? In the painting, as was true in the town, bodies are torn apart, the result of a two-hour “practice” bombing run by the Germans and Italians in collusion with Franco's Nationalists. Guernica was a village of women and children on that day. A woman, her face turned, imploring the sky, holds the limp body of a child. The bull, impassive, impervious, looking away from the carnage, is a symbol of fascism, Picasso said. The horse, at the center, crying: a symbol of the people.“It was not the events themselves that were happening in Spain which awoke Picasso,” Gertrude Stein writes, “but the fact that they were happening in Spain . . . ” His mother's letters from Barcelona awakened him: her descriptions of fires, of the acrid smell of Barcelona burning, of the sound of gunshots. Picasso, in Paris, in exile, started a series of eighteen etchings to be sold as postcards to raise money for the Republicans fighting Franco. They were created before the bombing of Guernica in 1937, prelude to the painting, and were called Sueño y Mentira de Franco. In them, Franco is a grotesque, tumorous growth. Comical and terrifying. Less than human.A 2019 documentary about el Pacto del Olvido called The Silence of Others starts by panning large statues against a darkening sky. One of the few memorials in Spain dedicated to the victims of Franco's regime, they stand overlooking a valley. These human figures, nudes, are made of rough red stone or perhaps plaster. Names are into their or part of the I don't after they were someone shot at them, and the holes are still The said the holes the the Pale civil children. In the movie, when the the room and eats from the feast, the Pale Man He the eyeballs in the sockets in the palms of his hands that have very very black he holds his palms against his so he can see her. to escape him but the she not help her her her mother she her baby of his and with him into the Her the baby from her, and her in the her blood into the and as she his to see as is the most part of the times I've Pan's Labyrinth, even when I'm sitting in a by I up It's with the is believe that because for her she be to her father and her mother in a or an I I could believe that. Instead, like other I'm that the of her her and so are another I with the resistance who tried to who holds her in her and a one she to No can I think she is the one who that's what I not even know your she tells of his she is now it is the Fernando's and my room in was in an on a narrow near the a in the of that seemed and authoritarian to I at the that during the Inquisition the had been the of against The most was burned alive, which did If you they hang you or cut your throat before your body on the They you so that your would not those I in that I knew of this when I because my are not by the I do remember looking at all the what those in them had over the evening Fernando and I a few there, sitting at a table with a of A two men and one woman, up for A small of as their a as their were their their and the of the who reminded me, in his of a The two had and in their I could the of the Fernando and I were in the because we to to a by I but the didn't until When we walked down the winding it was and It and as we from the Fernando as if we were watched and so we around and went to our room where he was he a If true that our ancestors inside of I wonder now about by them, both by what have been to them and by what they have black-and-white of a Spanish have that same of In a la three children hang from while three stand watching their This of the is because it also so In other about children in In a is the children that to as or as In my there is a girl in front of the of a the and of the her, the sky and She is like a all in She but she not She is in of course, in the of the between the and she is or an she has no of are of in men in and that like so much me, an of the One of these could have been in or dry and a of men large They are in and and me of the in the Fernando and I to with our children at in I feel a when I at it. I to see instead of is the word for the and in the the The hold in their to the they are from their Even though the were their it to me, this this divided is Fernando did not like His father was from Spanish Fernando's father rarely of the having been orphaned at and left to be by his he not have known much more than he told us. On his mother's he have been from who had and yet Spain during the Fernando always thought so his name, was and she was from the part of where they But so long Fernando's mother had who were although she always said they were by not blood. in her she that her was half from another Mexican She and her were by their to this that is one of to not as the but also not as the course, I this because of my family can be back to the early when a who came to the to escape in the of what is now There are in the but I that he was the white in the and that his his in the they for the in the Civil War. But were they It to me that one of another And while I not be of the of my I from the they is a way that is in as much as we want to away from it. That Pedro de Alvarado was still burned in in was only one Fernando's father Not even to And us He up in the of the Mexican which was, a Civil War, one that left two and a half million people one million of them him, was the and I was help but see through a she She Spain, to the small and in the late during the pact of so in a time of silence and her outside of her do not They people who still in the of the a church that had with that had babies to be from their and was in and in the of children. was trying to a she knew was Maybe she it would of to some it one there is a on a narrow and all the in their are on On the bed all in A in white is on the left with a of in his man, in some of is over the I not he is going to the He is not by the on his No one their all in The body is His just the face of the infant to the I holding my child as an in the of my body against my can their baby on that could you to And what of the babies on the they remember or or fear the of a man over other my and I were looking at an I was to the the the the of inside the body. he said, his open against his me what people in be for decades, The Spanish Civil War have lasted for only three years, but for those who with the Republic, Franco's of and had only just I about of years of war, four decades of years of only years all that about my and I see in the of the of my I The Silence of Others as it the of those who want to the to for the and of their who want streets and statues is not to to a about that of the are to of course, when we at not our It was to this during the summer of and not see the between civil war and the of white to see the of those in Spain without also the of the Of course, everything that is can be tells “but can be until it is my went to the by in the the other my daughter told him he was is he told her, “but this is But because this is I could do