Erica: What time, 10:30 or 11? Which is better for you?

Luis: 10:30.

Erica: Alright, 10:30 then.

Luis: Yes, because my mom is an early bird.

Erica: Okay.

Luis: Like the hens.

Erica: Okay.

Isabel Cadenas Cañón: In the previous episode, Erica and Andrea started an investigation almost without knowing each other. They wanted to find information about Loli, Erica’s grandmother, a woman who left her home in Madrid one day without telling anyone. And when she returned, 20 years later, she gave no explanation.

The truth is that no one asked her for explanations either. Although there was always suspicion about her: the abandoner, the bad mother, the lunatic, the prostitute. The woman whose absence marked an entire family.

Voices: But what happened to her? Do you remember her?

Why did she leave? Did she abandon them? Did she have to go away? And in the background, always, the question that nobody asks but that always hovers in the background: did she not love them?

Voices: Yes, and where can we find her? And is that man alive? And does this woman look familiar to you? I am very emotional too…

Welcome to Lunáticas, a series by De eso no se habla and Producciones del KO about the search for those answers.

Voices: Lunatic. Lunatic. Lunatics.

This is episode 2: La madre que la parió.

Erica has once again traveled to Bilbao. She and Andrea are waiting for a man who saw one of the posters we put up in his neighborhood, wrote down the phone number and called Erica to tell her that his mother, Vera, had met her grandmother Loli.

It’s the first time someone says they know something about Loli, something other than a rumor, a ’sounds familiar’. Erica and Andrea are so nervous that they don’t even turn on the recorder before the man arrives.

So, in the absence of audio, imagine this encounter: two women in their thirties waiting for a man in his sixties, in a cold Bilbao, in the morning, with almost empty streets. They are at the door of Píkara Magazine, the feminist magazine for which Andrea works. The man arrives on time, but without his mother. Andrea and Erica don’t speak or ask but they look disappointed. They check if she’s behind him, but she’s not. And while they greet each other, the man tells them that his mother, Vera, was not feeling well that morning and that she has chosen to stay at home. We are going to call this man Luis. Luis is not his real name, but we have changed many of the names in this story; either because they have asked us to do so, or because they are relatives of those who have asked us to do so and we do not want them to be identified.

So the three of them, Luis, Erica and Andrea, enter the magazine’s headquarters.

Erica: Look, if you want, we can sit down over here…

At first, Luis takes a look at the space.

Erica: From here?

Luis: Yes, Bilbao.

He and Erica talk about anything and everything.

Erica: So… And you’re from here, from this neighborhood?

Luis: All my life.

Erica: All your life.

Luis: I was born here and I will die here.

And from the beginning, even though they are 30 years apart and don’t know each other, they speak with a certain familiarity, as if they knew each other. After all, his mother and her grandmother had been friends, or at least acquaintances.

Erica: And how did your mother and my grandmother meet?

Luis: In the streets.

Erica: Working.

Luis: Yes, in the streets. There was a street there called La Laguna. And it’s full of bars.

Erica: Ah, right. Because they worked there?

Andrea: And what was the name of the bar?

Luis: The owner was called El Chato.

Erica: El Chato.

Now, in the place where Chato’s bar used to be, they have built a red building with square windows.

Erica: And does your mother remember what my grandmother was like?

Luis: In character?

Erica: Yes.

Luis: Well, I imagine she had to be very nice because otherwise my mother wouldn’t (laughs…).

On the phone, Luis had told Erica that he had pictures of her grandmother. And he brought one: Loli sitting with another woman in a bar. It has wood-paneled walls and reddish leather sofas. On her legs she holds a three-year-old boy with her arms around him. He’s Luis’ brother.

Luis: Well, my brother is now 46 years old and look at the photo. He must have been three years old, so it was 43 years ago…

Erica looks at the photo. Finally some evidence, a trace, a proof that her grandmother was really there. And that someone knew her.

Luis: I mean, in order to have these photos, the relationship had to be… If not, she wouldn’t have these photos.

In the photo Loli has tired eyes. It’s from ’78 or ’79. Conchi, Erica’s mother, was about 12 years old at the time.

Luis remembers perfectly what the neighborhood was like in those years.

Luis: It was a lot, it was bars, bars, bars… And at night you could stand at one end of the street and it looked like New York, Broadway and the neon lights, all that. That’s how it was.

He remembers it with the eyes of a teenager, as if fascinated.

Luis: The best clothing and shoe stores in Bilbao were there, in San Francisco. El Paraíso, Calzado La Palma… On the street there were three cinemas: the Liceo, the Vizcaya and the Colón. There were several discotheques. It was great.

And he says much of that money ended up in the same businesses: in the meublés.

Luis: The whole building was a meublé, nobody lived there. It was just rooms, like a hotel, all of it. And they were huge places. You can’t even imagine.

Erica: On the ground floor was like the commercial space, and then the upper floors…

Luis: That was where… The rooms were where the girls would go to…

‘The rooms were where the girls went to…’ Luis says.

Luis: We’re talking about the New York, it might have had 70 women, 80.

Erica: Holy shit.

Luis: The Harlem, maybe 40, 50.

He also says they were huge, luxurious places.

Luis: Downstairs at the JB there was a bar twice as big as this place. Some boxes… It was unbelievable and all that disappeared, all of it. The last one was the Bataclan. The Bataclan and the one going up, the Papillon. Those were the last ones to finish. Those were the ones that ended it and then the drugs started, they started to bring in a lot of drugs and it was over.

At that moment in the interview, Luis’ voice changes.

Luis: I’m not hooked on drugs because I’m afraid of needles.

Erica: Yeah, otherwise…

Luis: Because my gang, I’ll be honest, there are only three of us left. And we were 50 or so.

Erica: Wow.

Luis: Here it was a massacre. It was a massacre.

Erica has let out a nervous laugh. It happens to her many times in moments of tension. And no wonder. Suddenly, the whole conversation has changed. It is almost the only moment in more than an hour of talking where there is a long silence. Andrea takes advantage of this silence to keep investigating.

Andrea: You said they met working in a place and you mentioned the name of the owner, but which place was it?

Luis: El Chato. I don’t know the name of the place. Wait, I’ll tell you now.

Luis takes out his cell phone.

Luis: Mom!

It’s Vera, of course.

Luis: Tell me, where did Loli stop in La Laguna, at Chato’s?

(Vera’s voice on the phone)

Luis: She used to stop at the Harlem. In front of my house, the Harlem. The owner’s name was José el Bobo, wasn’t it? Yes, yes, I know, I remember. Well, here I am with Loli’s granddaughter.

Erica: Give her a kiss for me.

Luis: Wait, wait, I’ll put her on, she wants to talk to you.

Erica: How are you? Oh, it’s a pity we haven’t been able to see each other.

Vera: We’ll see each other, sweetie, don’t worry.

Erica: Okay.

‘We’ll see each other, sweetie, don’t worry’

Vera: Let’s see if you have any luck and find out what…

Let’s see if you have any luck and find out what…

Erica: Okay. Well, thank you very much. I send you a big kiss.

Vera: You too. Good luck to you.

Erica: Thank you. Kisses. Goodbye.

Luis: Alright, kisses, alright, bye.

Maybe Luis thought that this was going to be a brief talk, that the information Vera gives them would be enough. But no: Erica and Andrea have much more to ask him.

Erica: And you remember her?

Andrea: Does this woman look familiar?

Luis: It’s like finding a needle in a haystack.

Andrea: What do you know about the Harlem? Maybe your mother remembers…

Erica: Is that man still alive?

Luis: I don’t know, I can’t tell you.

Andrea: And where can we find him?

So, when they have been talking for an hour and a half, Luis says he has to leave.

Luis: I have to go, I have the girl upstairs. Me, I come here and lose track of time… And I have to give her breakfast.

And while he is gathering his things, he looks at Erica as if with pride.

Luis: The Madrileña, look at her, lifting the carpet in Bilbao.

Erica: Let’s see…

Luis: They won’t know much there.

Erica: No, that’s it. They don’t know.

Luis: Of course, they don’t know much there.

Erica: I think it’s a mix between not knowing…

Luis: They don’t want to talk, they don’t want to stir.

Erica: It is a mix.

Luis: They don’t want to stir up, the past is the past and that’s it.

Erica: Yes, I think it’s a mixture of not knowing much and not knowing…

Luis: The past is the past and they don’t want to touch it…

It was a massacre, Luis said about what happened with heroin in Bilbao and its surrounding towns. It really was a massacre.

I was born in 1982, so I didn’t live through the hardest years, the 80s, as an adult. But I do remember perfectly well seeing people in the street, in my town, injecting themselves. I also remember that older people used to say that in all the gangs there was someone missing, always someone dead because of drugs. And I also remember that you had to be careful in some areas, as the older people would say, because you could pierce yourself. There are even movies about that.

Man: Your mother told me you gave her an injection.

Young man: Yes, she was in a lot of pain.

Man: But you only gave her one, right?

Young man: Sure.

Man: It’s just weird, there are five vials missing. What’s wrong with your arm?

Young man: I could make up any excuse, but what’s the point? Sooner or later you have to find out.

Man: What do I have to find out?

This is El pico, a movie from 1983. Luis mentioned it to Erica at one point during the interview. It tells the story of two kids from Bilbao who get hooked on heroin, and how their lives change almost overnight.

Man: Why are you here? What the hell do you want?

Boy: We’ve come to beat you up and take all the horse you’ve got.

Man: Oh, yeah?

I think about it now and I really believe it was a trauma. A trauma that, as happens with traumas, we’re still processing. And, as Luis said, almost anyone who lived in San Francisco in the 80’s has heroin deaths to count. And built-up resentment.

Man: Okay, kiddo. Chill out. Easy.

Loli had been in Bilbao during those hard drug years. Erica knew that was why she had been in jail, for selling drugs. Her mother told her only once, when she asked about the ID card. But she never, ever heard it in the family. And she knew no more.

One day, her mother talked to a cousin who told her about a woman who had known her grandmother in Bilbao. Let’s call this woman Sara, although that is not her real name either. Sara had been a friend of her grandmother Loli in Bilbao. In fact, Loli had worked and even lived with her family. And Erica knew she had to look for her.

Isabel: What’s going on?

Erica: Well, we know that when my grandmother was here in the last few years she had a relationship with the family and well, we know a name that is [beep]. So I thought I had told this to Andrea, but it turns out I hadn’t.

Isabel: Wow.

As soon as she told her, Andrea started to investigate: to send messages to some people, to call others, to pull all possible strings.

Erica: And then Andrea has started to get the machinery moving and it seems she found her number and it’s possible that she’s here in the neighborhood.

Andrea: I’m telling you, wow, wow.

Isabel: Andrea is excited.

Andrea: I’m so fucking nervous, of course.

And there we were, three women in a doorway, holding their breath, glued to a phone.

Andrea: 17, 98.

[Phone ringing]

Sara: Yes?

Erica: Hi, this is Erica. I’m the granddaughter of a woman who lived here in Bilbao for a long time, her name is Loli Martín Quijada.

Sara: Oh, yes, and who are you?

Erica: I’m her granddaughter. Yes.

Sara: But what happened to her? Are you the daughter…?

Erica: Conchi’s.

Sara: I’m so excited to hear from you.

Erica: I am very emotional too.

Sara: And what happened to Loli? Did something happen to her?

Erica: Well, my grandmother passed away in 2012.

Sara: What? Don’t tell me that.

Erica: Yes.

Erica told Sara what little she knew about her grandmother Loli’s life in Bilbao.

Erica: Well, I didn’t get to know much about her and her life. So, what I received was like a memory, a little bit… A little bit dark, you know?

Sara: Dark, why?

Erica: Well, because they talked about her like she had abandoned my mother and did whatever she wanted…

Sara: That’s a lie. She never forgot her daughter, because everything she earned was for her daughter and her mother. What do you think?

Erica: Sure, something like that…

Sara: So that’s a lie.

Erica: Sure. I could imagine something like that.

Erica listened to Sara almost without breathing. And so did we.

Sara: They loved her daughter with adoration, believe me. She sent her daughter… When she went, she brought her suitcases… My God, it was incredible, she adored you as much as her daughter. That she abandoned her is a lie. Obviously she was in Bilbao doing things that she didn’t want her family to know about…

‘She was in Bilbao doing things she didn’t want her family to know about.’

Sara: And her family knew what she was doing. I don’t know, they must have taken something. They knew where she got the money. And it wasn’t prostitution, scratch that.

‘And they knew where she got the money, and it wasn’t prostitution.’

[Music]

Sara didn’t tell her more details in that call, she told her that at that time you had to make a living, especially if you had children…

Sara: Indeed.

She repeated Loli’s adoration for the family.

Sara: But no, it was adoration. And I’m not telling you that just to be nice.

And she also told him that one day, overnight, Loli disappeared. Once again.

Sara: In fact we didn’t know anything about her, one day she went to Madrid and didn’t come back. There was no call or anything. We thought something had happened.

It had been many, many years since Sara had known anything about Loli and Erica was beginning to see a part of her grandmother that she didn’t know. They both wanted to know more. So they decided to meet the next day, in person.

Sara: Well, I’ll see you tomorrow, honey.

Erica: I’ll see you tomorrow at 1:00 then.

Sara: God willing, okay. Take care, honey.

Erica: Kisses. Bye.

Sara: You too, bye.

Erica: Bye.

Erica: Oh my God, unbelievable.

After the talk, we started speculating in the doorway. What did Sara mean exactly when she talked about the money? That ‘they knew where she got the money, and it wasn’t prostitution.’

Andrea: Sure, maybe she dedicated herself more to trafficking than prostitution.

Erica: Right, I don’t know.

‘Maybe she dedicated herself more to trafficking than prostitution,’ says Andrea. ‘I don’t know,’ says Erica. But that conversation makes her think about that, about selling drugs, something she had never given importance to in her grandmother’s biography.

Erica: Eh… You build the story from what you have not been told, so you get an idea of what is there, so what has always been repeated is that my mother had to be grateful to her grandparents, to my great-grandparents, because they had taken care of her…

It would have been easy to ask Sara. But the next day, she and Erica didn’t meet. Nor the next day. There was always some excuse, some problem, some last-minute unforeseen event. It wouldn’t be the only time that happened in this investigation.

As it didn’t seem that Erica was going to meet Sara again, we started looking in the press archive. One day, Lucía, who at the time worked as an intern at Producciones del KO, found this news story from November 1989. The headline read: ‘Police arrest 14 members of a female-led drug trafficking network in Bilbao’. The article says that, in an apartment in La Laguna street, the police found 10 heroin papers, 10 cocaine papers and several objects for weighing and handling drugs. Among those arrested in the operation were Manuela, 43, arrested in a bingo hall, and Pepi, 26, who was arrested in another apartment in the neighborhood, very close by, and where they found almost a million pesetas in cash and lots of stolen jewelry. Manuela, of course, is Loli. And Pepi, her partner, is Sara’s sister. And no, Pepi is not her real name either.

[Music]

So the next task was to find Pepi’s number. Andrea started looking. She found it on Facebook: Pepi was selling a humidifier, and Andrea copied her number.

[Phone]

The paths of Andrea’s searches are unfathomable. But they always end in success.

Pepi: Yes?

Erica: Hello, good afternoon.

Pepi: Yes.

Erica: Hi, I’m Erica… I’m the granddaughter of Manuela Martín Quijada…

Pepi: Ah, yes.

Pepi and Loli worked together for years and had even been in jail together in the late 1980s.

One day, Erica met her at her house. They saw photos together, more new photos of her grandmother. Pepi told her that she didn’t remember Loli as a happy woman. She told her that she had a sad face, and that whenever she came back from Madrid, she always came back with a sour face.

Pepi told Erica that, at their best, she and Loli earned between 3 and 4 million pesetas a day, about 50,000 euros today. She also told her that they invested part of that money in lawyers, bribes to policemen and in the very expensive rents of the apartments where they operated. And that, after all those expenses, they still had quite a lot of money left, and that the part of that money that corresponded to Loli ended up, or so Pepi believed, in Madrid.

The talk, Erica told me, was very revealing: no one had ever given her so much information about her grandmother. Erica and Pepi were going to meet another day for Pepi to tell her all this again, but this time in front of a recorder. But Pepi stopped answering Erica’s messages.

Erica: Hi, what’s up? Well, I’m not so good here. I’m a bit unmotivated because, well, I was supposed to have the interview this morning. Yesterday she wrote and told me that it would be better in the afternoon because she had some work commitments and so on. And today, an hour and a bit before the time we were supposed to meet…

And she never answered us again. Not to Erica, not to Andrea, not to me.

And while Erica was losing hope on some sides, she was gaining it on others. One day, shortly after the conversation with Pepi, Erica and Andrea went for a drink with one of Andrea’s friends. And when they told her what they were investigating, she said, ‘You have to see the story that Línea 900 did on the neighborhood’.

As soon as they got home, they ran to the computer to find it.

[Music]

Presenter: Tonight the report takes us to a very special neighborhood: San Francisco, in Bilbao, a typical neighborhood of urban metropolis where, among other things, unemployment, drugs and marginalization coexist.

And when they started to watch it…

Journalist: The dealing takes place at all hours and in the middle of the street, in full view of the neighbors.

They couldn’t believe it.

Journalist: The neighborhood is a distribution point mainly for heroin.

Suddenly Erica saw someone familiar.

Erica: Here, here…

Reporter: A lot of the sales are made at the door of the bars.

Erica: And that’s my grandmother… Oh, my God…

Journalist: If you pay attention, you can see suspicious movements like these that we were able to record with our camera.

Erica: It’s just so crazy…

Despite the pixelation on her face, Loli’s blonde hairstyle makes her unmistakable.

In the scene, Erica’s grandmother approaches a woman who has just left a bar.

The woman hands her something small. Loli takes it, walks exactly two steps, sits down in a doorway, next to a man, and gives him what she was holding.

Loli, dealing drugs, broadcasted on television for all of Spain.

Erica and Andrea sent us a message to the group while they were watching it. I called them right away.

Erica: Isa?

Isabel: Erica, how are you?

Erica: I’m freaking out. We stopped the show, like… Hello? Is this really happening? It’s crazy. As soon as my grandmother showed up, we knew it was her. I mean… It’s mind-blowing.

Isabel: It is mind-blowing.

The video not only shows Loli dealing. It also proves something that neither Erica nor her mother knew.

Isabel: When did your grandmother leave Bilbao?

Erica: At first I thought it was after she got out of jail, but no, then she came back….

Erica knew that Loli had left prison in 1990.

Erica: But of course, this show was recorded in 1995… I mean, it’s crazy. I mean, it’s mind-blowing.

Isa: Have you shown it to your mother?

Erica: No, no, I’ll tell my mother about it when I go to Madrid, calmly, in person.

That was the first thing Erica did when she got back to Madrid, show her the video.

Erica: Well, after that we were having dinner, we went for a drink with some of Andrea’s friends and so on and she said ‘Oh, you have to see the Linea 900 Bilbao documentary’. Now it’s not going to come out, oh, I want to show you a video…

Conchi: Is this…?

Erica: This was published in 95. I mean, it was broadcasted… Here it is, in 95. We think it’s from 95.

Journalist: Many of the sales are made at the door of the bars. As soon as you pay attention, you can see suspicious movements…

Conchi: Grandma Loli!

Journalist: … like these that we were able to record with our camera.

Erica: What do you think?

Conchi: Play it again… What the hell?

In case you didn’t hear it right, Conchi said “what the hell”.

Journalist: If you pay attention, you can see suspicious movements…

Conchi: What the hell..

As the months went by, and as her daughter’s investigation progressed, Conchi also lost her fear of remembering.

Conchi: I was thinking, dear, I don’t know if grandma Loli came to my wedding, huh? I have to ask my aunt….

And sometimes she even put herself in Loli’s place.

Conchi: It has been a hard, difficult, complicated life, and in the end it’s been fucked up. Her life has been very difficult, very hard and then it ended badly.

And that also made her value her daughter’s research more and more.

Conchi: Lots of kisses dear, I am very proud of you, really. And she would be too. That you care about what her life has been like and the things she has gone through… She would be very proud. I’m sure of it.

In the next episode, Erica and her mother try to get her grandmother’s police file…

Conchi: And if they ask me why I want it?

Erica: If they ask you why you want it, ‘well, because my daughter and I are reconstructing the family history.’

Conchi: Okay.

Erica: It’s for family interest.

And Erica finally dares to go to the most difficult place for her.

Woman: So how is it going? Are you asking me questions?

Erica: Yes.

Woman: Well. I have to get closer, right? As if we were on the radio.

[Music]