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.
