She doesn’t like me to use my laptop while she’s speaking, let alone record, so I fidget notes onto a pad with one hand. She winces when she sees me doing this. “My life; my story — it’s nothing; look at what’s happening today.” Language gets in the way. Spanish is her mother tongue. Next came French. Then Italian, then Arabic. Her fifth language was English, acquired in her 40s, so a bit imprecise. Her story spans countries, conflicts, wars, and decades. The chronology isn’t the most important thing. Nor is the geography. The facts are blurred to begin with.
What’s important is what remains. What triumphed. Her name is Encarnation Bayon.
Mother of two, grandmother to three.
Her life includes the most astonishing events: the Spanish Civil War and life in an orphanage; bigamy — hers; forbidden cross-cultural love; assassination of her prominent Jewish husband in Lebanon; fleeing, penniless with her children to Vancouver to start life over again.
Encarna’s daughter, Marie Khouri, is a Canadian artist of considerable renown. She has just returned from an installation at the Crillon Hotel in Paris. Her work is largely informed by her mother’s remarkable story and intergenerational trauma.
This story is about how, when we look at our mothers, all we see is the apron, when many of their lives conceal epics like Encarna’s.
Survivor of some of the 20th century’s most catastrophic upheavals, she is a woman with a singular gift for living.
“My mother had a big garden. I remember everyone outside, crying. We must have just had the news about my father,” says Encarna, whose father was one of the Republican dead, killed by Franco’s men in the waning days of the Spanish Civil War. He left behind a wife and nine children. “This is the way, the last moment, I remember of my family; crying.” Encarna is a compact woman with a taste for simplicity. She favours well-cut black clothing and bold pieces of jewellery. Her complexion is the colour of toast but the texture of velvet.
When I look up, she turns her face to me, a puzzled smile tracing across it. It’s as if she’s tossed me a ball, so lightly, so casually. I’ve caught the ball but the ball has turned out to be surprisingly heavy. I see now that she understands I don’t know how to play this game; that few people know how to play this game with her: The game of unexpected gravity. She is an expert at living; I’m an amateur.
“How do you feed nine children in a war?” Her words are like captions to Robert Capa’s incredible photographs of the Spanish Civil War: Aproned women stranded in wreckage, children eerily alone in bombed out streets.
How do you feed nine children in a war?
Encarna was four when she was separated from her family during the bombings in Madrid. Soon, she found herself on a train to Cadiz. Nuns collected up what they presumed were orphans and hied them away to relative safety. She remembers being given an orange on the two-day trip. She was sick; tuberculosis, it turned out.
Encarna would spend the next 12 years in a sanitorium for orphans with varying degrees of infection. There would be no birthdays, no Christmas presents, no photos, barely any instruction; just cod liver oil and isolation. “The room I lived in was maybe ten kids. You get up in the morning and one of the kids is gone; you go to bed at night, and one kid is missing.”
By 1950, Encarna is ageing out of care. While being transferred to a facility near Madrid, a nun remarks, “I have a girl here named Isabelle Bayon. I say, ‘That is my sister’.” Isabelle, however, refuses to believe this skinny stranger is her sister.
Through word of mouth, they’re reunited with their family. With the exception of the father, everyone had survived. But a dozen years of familiarity is not easily replaced: “Everybody cried when they touched us. We wanted to go back to our school.”
——
We’ve been talking for hours. The topic has exhausted Encarna.
“Come”, she says, leading me to the kitchen, and donning an apron.
Soon, I’m peeling fresh ginger.
Encarna is peeling elephant garlic.
She’s going to run it through the mini food prep machine.
This combination, she tells me, is the secret to long life.
She adds the pulverized mix to soups, pastas and meat dishes. She swears it’s what’s kept her healthy all these years. She’s magnificent at 83.
The next time we meet, Encarna tells me she was sick after I left.
The past is not a country she likes to visit.
—–
Encarna had promised herself while watching ships from the windows of the orphanage that she would one day take a boat trip. She takes a clerical job with the foreign ministry and goes to Cairo. Almost immediately, she falls in love with an Egyptian, Clement Khoury, a wealthy Jew. His parents forbid him from marrying the poor Spanish Catholic. Without papers, when her job concludes she returns to Madrid and swiftly marries Paco, a boy from the neighbourhood.
The newlyweds find work in Paris. Paco comes to understand that Encarna loves Clement. He returns to Madrid but Encarna remains, finding work as an au pair. While Paco waits for Encarna to come to her senses, she attends the salons that Picasso routinely holds for Spanish ex-pats. In her apartment today, there are only two pieces of art: a large black and white reproduction of Guernica and a framed photo of Notre Dame.
Clement arrives in Paris. Spain makes no provision for divorce. Encarna and Clement exhaust all avenues to annul the marriage and decide to return to Egypt.
Eventually, as her passport still indicates she’s an unwed woman, the Spanish Ambassador to Egypt grants Encarna and Clement a civil marriage. And with that, on May 1, 1958, Encarna officially becomes a bigamist, a crime that would have resulted in jail time. Despite all this, Paco and Encarna will remain devoted friends all their lives.
The Khourys settle down to a domestic life in Cairo, welcoming a daughter along the way. Nasser’s socialist government knocks on their door one day and nationalizes Clement’s successful travel business. Given the general political climate, the Khourys decide to relocate. They put as much rolled currency as they can into empty toothpaste tubes and leave. They settle on Beirut. It is 1965.
For about a decade, life in Beirut is grand: maids and cooks and private clubs. While holidaying in the mountains, Encarna gets a call from Clement advising her to delay her return as fighting has erupted in the city streets. It is spring of 1975,the beginning of what will be a 16-year civil war.
“That’s how quickly it started,” Encarna exclaims, “within a weekend!”
For the next two years, the family lives without electricity, without water, with the schools shut down. One night an unexploded bomb lands on their balcony.
The Khourys are warned that their neighbourhood in Ras Beirut is slated for a massacre the next day. They are given the opportunity to escape that night by tank. Encarna wraps duct tape around her young son’s mouth, as the snipers will shoot at any sound. That night, tanks carrying a total of 36 people make three sorties to a safe neighbourhood. The next morning they are able to get on a British airlift to Jordan.
Clement remains behind in order to make arrangements for his ageing parents. He is to meet the family in Madrid.
Hoping to salvage something, Clement returns to the apartment with a cook named Paulo. Even the carpets are gone, the soldiers having cut it away from around a heavy sideboard. The family’s photo albums have been defecated upon.
Clement and the cook are captured. Paulo is released. Clement, held for ransom, is tortured and killed.
Encarna is back at the family home in Madrid when she receives the telegram. Once more, people are crying in the garden over a war-time death.
—
Much of Marie’s work is untitled. A mere sparrow of a thing, she works in monumental proportions at extremes of a spectrum, aching evocations of despair against soaring depictions of hope. All of her work derives from her family’s experiences with conflict and dislocation.
After her husband’s murder, Encarna determines to go to Canada where she has relatives. It’s the late 1970s when Encarna sets up her family in a one-bedroom apartment in Vancouver. She finds work as a waitress, and in time, owns the restaurant. The children flourish. Robby goes on to become software engineer and Marie becomes a significant presence in the art scene.
When I say it must have been hard raising a family in a one-bedroom apartment, that shimmer of incomprehension returns to Encarnation’s face.
“No,” she says, shaking her head, “After a war, everything is easy.”
Her gaze shifts to her view of the skyline of Vancouver and the mountains beyond.
“My life is a success as my kids are okay.”
“This is my victory.”
Like all mothers, she wanted to give her children the tools for living. In spite of everything, that’s exactly what she accomplished.
