Isabel: Hello everyone. Hello to all of you. I’m Isabel Cadenas Cañón and you’re listening to De eso no se habla.

This episode is the B side of the previous episode, Consuelo. They work like the two sides of a record. They are two different parts, but they complement each other. So, if you want, you can go back and listen to Consuelo’s story first or you can listen directly to this story. Let’s get started with it.

[Music]

Loli: I wanted to know if everything I had in my head was true, if it had happened or if it was just something I had made up in in my imagination.

Isabel: For 24 years Loli, Dolores, lived without a past. She didn’t remember anything that had happened in the last years of her life, since she left an institution where single mothers were housed.

[Music]

Isabel: But it is very complicated to live without history.

Loli: People want to know where you come from, what you have been doing up to now.

Isabel: So Loli invented a past. Nothing very exceptional, nothing that could lead to more questions. Just enough to get by.

Loli: Mostly, I would say “I’ve been working as an intern in a house”. You know, it was almost always what I said. “I’ve been working as an intern in a house”.

Isabel: Sometimes Loli remembers names, faces, places.

But, like so many other people who have lived through traumatic events, she wants to confirm whether these memories are real or made up. And she wants to do it alone, of course, without anyone suspecting that she doesn’t know what has happened in her life for so many years. And then the Internet comes along.

Loli: I begin to realize that the Internet is a whole world. It has everything.

Isabel: She spends whole days looking for those names she remembers and, above all, a place.

Loli: I am going to check if it is true that Peña Grande exists, what is Peña Grande? Peña Grande. And I start looking for pages. Of course, first the town of Madrid pops up…

Isabel: One day, she finds a website.

Loli: It is called Madres Olvidadas (Forgotten Mothers). Then I saw that on that website there were testimonies of women who had been in Peña Grande.

Isabel: On that page Loli learns that she is not the only one trying to understand her past. Other women write things like: “After reading your testimonies, I realize that my experience, although traumatic, was not one of the worst,” writes CLV. But there are also testimonies of daughters and sons who had been there and were looking for their mothers, from whom they were separated right after birth and haven’t seen again. “Hello, my niece’s name is Monica and she was born in Peña Grande in 1975, she was taken from my sister Julia when she went out to buy food,” writes José. Things like that happened in that place, Peña Grande, the Franquist maternity ward for girls who had gone astray.

Loli: I identified some of the women who wrote there and I said: I’ve met her, it’s true. That means, I was there.

Isabel: Loli also writes her testimony on that page.

Loli: And a woman answered me and she asked me about the Patronato de Protección a la Mujer. I insisted that we had not met in Peña Grande.

[Theme]

Isabel: The woman had not been in Peña Grande, but she is interested in Loli because she has spent years looking for information about any woman who had been in any center from the Patronato de Protección a la Mujer. Peña Grande was part of the Patronato, that Franquist institution for what the regime considered fallen women or women at risk of falling.

And that woman was Consuelo, the protagonist of the previous episode, the A-side of this story.

Loli: And I wanted to know how much she knew so that she could help me. The only purpose I had was to look for my children.

Isabel: Consuelo helped her. So much so, that little by little, Loli managed to remember what she had lived in that place, and also how she got there and why.

Welcome to De eso no se habla.

Today’s episode is called Dolores.

[Theme]

Isabel: Vanessa Rousselot and I crafted this story with her. We want to warn you that today’s story is especially difficult to listen to, in particular if you have been a victim of sexual violence. So please take care when listening to it.

[Theme]

Isabel: Torrelavega, Cantabria. Late 70’s. When Franco dies Loli is 9 years old. She is 11 when the Constitution is approved.

Loli: In my house my father was not my father. In my house my father was the boss. We always called him that. We never called him dad, nor… No, that didn’t exist in my family. My father was the boss because he was the one in charge. “You do what I say and that’s it”. I am the seventh of nine siblings, we all functioned according to the boss’s voice.

I have always known my mother as a sick person, as long as I can remember she was always at the doctors, the hospitals, the…. When I came home from school and saw that my mother was not at home, I would run away, I would go away for two, three, four or five days, until I knew that my mother was home again.

I would go to the street. I slept in the abandoned trains of the Renfe station, in the waiting rooms of the hospitals, which were not like now, they were more open and it was a warm place.

I didn’t want to be at home because I knew what was waiting for me.

Isabel: It is still Torrelavega, Christmas 1981. The year of the 23 F, the year of Adolfo Suárez’s resignation, the year of the approval of the divorce law. Loli is 15 years old.

Loli: I remember when, when my mother saw that I didn’t have my period, she made me go to the doctor. She didn’t come, no one went with me. I went by myself. And it was the doctor who told me “You are pregnant”. And I remember it was raining a lot that day. And I went in through the, through the front door of the doctor’s office. But I left my umbrella on the bench next to it, I went into the office and the doctor told me: “Well, girl, you have to take the bull by the horns and go ahead”. Of course, as I was already crying, crying a lot, he made me leave through the back door. Of course, and I had to go all the way back to retrieve the umbrella I had left at the front door.

[Music]

Loli: And my father’s attitude was: let’s go to the Juvenile Court. He plants me there and says, “There she is, she’s pregnant. Let’s see what you do with her”. I remember that the girl there, the social worker, I imagine she was a social worker, her name was Beatriz, and from there they, the Juvenile Court, decided that I had to go to Peña Grande.

Never. No one, no one ever asked me whose child that was. No one. Never. Not in the Juvenile Court, nor in the school I went to afterwards, nor at home either. Nobody, never.

Loli: As to whether my father abused any of my sisters, the older ones, I think he did. In fact, they left home, all of them, as soon as they had the opportunity to get married, they got married and left. And the truth is that they didn’t come back home very often.

Maybe what happened to me was that it was too soon. I was too young.

The idea, at least my father’s idea, was that I would go to Peña Grande, give birth, leave the child there and come back.

[Music]

Isabel: Loli travels from Torrelavega to Madrid. She doesn’t remember if it was in February or March. It was 1982.

Loli: Two policemen take me there in a car. And we arrived and they put us in a room that was the visiting room, which I later got tired of cleaning. And from there they took me to… they took me to the maternity home. I was amazed. The number of women who were pregnant, all with big bellies, my goodness! Now, you’re not a freak anymore. You are no longer the ugly duckling in the story, but there are many ducklings like you. We taught each other. The little basket, as they call it now, we made it among ourselves, you know, because I didn’t have anything. What was I going to bring for a baby if I didn’t even know I could keep it.

[Silence]

Loli: That’s where they told me. No. No, if you want to keep him, you can keep him. That’s what the other interns said, not the nuns, the nuns didn’t tell you anything. Ah, so I said here I can stay with him and not go back home. It was like, okay. Here, yes, here I can stay. Because he won’t come here to hurt me. My child doesn’t have to go through the things I have gone through.

Isabel: Loli gives birth on June 29, 1982. Three months before her 16th birthday. Four months before the PSOE obtains an absolute majority in the general elections.

Loli: That’s where La Dolorosa (the painful one) was. We called that room that way. It was a cold room in which there was only an iron bed. I was assigned a midwife who we called “La Bisturí” (the scalpel). She was very fond of making cuts, she was like a butcher, that is, a mastodon of a woman.

I thought something was wrong. And then I call her and I tell her “it hurts so much”. She looked at me again and said, “Well, it’s going to hurt a lot more. And for your sake, let me sleep, because if not, when the time of delivery comes, if I’m sleepy, we’ll see how it goes.”

I imagine that it was a normal delivery, but I was 15 years old, I didn’t know anything about pregnancies, deliveries, or anything else. And not to me, specifically, they didn’t say that phrase to me, but the most normal phrase in that situation was “well, it didn’t hurt so much when you spread your legs.”

[Silence]

They take the child, they take them away. They stitch you up and take you to a room next to the delivery room.

I said: Where is my child? Because I didn’t even, I didn’t even know if it was a girl or a boy. They hadn’t told me anything. Only that it was very big. And I said, “I want to see my baby”. That’s when they said, “What do you mean, you want to see it? Are you going to keep it?” And she says, “Well, it’s a girl. And here she is.”

They brought her to me, and I had her with me for quite a while. Then they took her away again and that’s when the pressure started.

[Music]

Are you sure about what you’re doing? Are you sure you want to keep her? Are you sure you’re going to be able to take care of this child on your own? Well, you know there are other options. You know you can leave her without any problem. No one is going to say anything. We are here to help you. We are going to help you through the whole process. You know that there are families who will take good care of her, people who have everything.

But of course, for me, giving up the child at that moment meant going back home. I am going to suffer all my life for having left this child here to go back home to suffer the same thing. No, no. It was not something that was in my head because at that moment I felt that I could give my daughter everything that I didn’t have. Even if I was alone.

My daughter’s name is Nerea. It was a name that at that time I was told meant “my beloved”. And I was sure that she was my love at that moment.

[Music]

The next day I get out of bed, get your things ready, leave the maternity home, get your things to go to the mothers’ home. There were a lot of mothers’ homes, I think like eight or ten.

I was 15 years old, but there were quite a few younger girls who had also given birth. No, we couldn’t go out, we were minors and we weren’t allowed to go out.

Isabel: It is August 1982 and Loli and her colleagues from the mothers’ home are working in the workshop.

Loli: I remember the Pope’s famous visit to Spain. And I remember perfectly because there were some little souvenir bags. They were bags with a little flag, some stickers, a poster with a picture of the pope, a lot of nonsense like that stuffed inside a thermo-sealed bag, which was what we did. It was assembly line work. Each one of us would stuff what was right in front of us. In other words, we would arrive at the workshop at nine o’clock, our babies, all of them, would come back to eat at 12 o’clock, and we would feed them. There were a number of bags that you had to prepare from 9 to 12. If you didn’t prepare those bags from 9 to 12, you couldn’t breastfeed your child. And you knew there was no one to feed them. Nobody was going to feed them until you got there.

When you finished feeding the baby, you would go back to the workshop until 9:00 at night, at 9:00 at night we would go, wash, pick up the child from the nursery, feed him, go home and have dinner.

We were machines.

They would say to me: Do you miss your mother? Do you miss your father? Like saying: Do you want to go back home? If you want to go back home it’s very easy, you just have to leave your daughter here. And you can go home to your mother and your father. That pressure was constant.

[Music and silence]

Isabel: In 1983, Rumasa was expropriated, the 40-hour working day was decreed and abortion was partially decriminalized. It was also the first regional and municipal elections. And Loli receives a visit.

Loli: I remember that I gave birth in June and my mother died in December. And the following Easter my father came to see me. And I thought… I said, why is he coming?

The nuns told me: he’s going to take you out Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Saturday and Sunday, four days. (Silence) Now I realize that I couldn’t have gone out with my father. I should never have gone out with my father because I was under guardianship, but the nuns slipped it under their habit and let me go out. I left for the four days, with my nine-month-old daughter and my father to a hostel in Madrid.

He already had everything planned. There were two beds and in a bed against the wall slept the baby girl. And it was supposed to be for the baby and me. In the other one, my father slept. Of course.

[Silence]

First, we slept, we lay in the bed that was for my father. And when, when he finished doing his things, he sent me to the other bed to sleep with my daughter. My fear was that the child would fall out of bed, of course. Of course, after those four days with him, I got pregnant again.

[Silence]

And again, nobody asks who the father of that child is. For the same reason, because everybody knew who. Why would they ask you something they already know? I never left that center with anybody. Never. And you’re pregnant again. Who’s the father? The only person you’ve ever left here with, but without permission from the Juvenile Court. I had left this center without the authorization of my guardian, but with the authorization of the Evangelical Crusades, who were the ones who should be watching over me.

I really hoped that it would not be born. I hoped that for some reason or because of the injections they had given me, because nature was going to be wiser I was going to lose that baby. But no, I didn’t lose it, no. Even though we worked and we went up and down the stairs and tripped and fell. And no, no, no.

[Silence]

Isabel: In December of 1983, Loli is about to give birth.

Loli: There are no more deliveries in Peña Grande. The midwives are no longer there 24 hours a day. They tell us that when you go into labor, that you are going to give birth in La Paz, in the maternity ward of La Paz.

When I got to La Paz, I said to the doctor, “I don’t want to see the baby because I’m going to give it up for adoption”. And they told me, okay. I did indeed give birth. I did not see the child. I went up to the room. But then, in my head I have all the questions in the world. If I give up this child for adoption, how am I going to be able to live knowing that I have a child out there that I don’t know where he is? How am I going to tell my daughter that she has a brother and I don’t know where he is? How am I going to find him again? How am I going to know anything more about him? And after a day had passed, a whole day already. I already had milk in my breast, I said to the nurse: I want you to bring the baby. “Are you sure about what you’re going to do? Because so far you haven’t seen it. But once you see it, there’s no turning back.” I said, “Yes, yes, I’m sure.” They brought the child up to me. I had him with me and he stayed with me.

Oscar. Oscar, because the girl who was with me is called Nieves and her son’s name is Oscar. And my son is named Oscar after that child.

I don’t remember when I was discharged or how I got to Peña Grande, because I went back to Peña Grande, but I don’t remember. However, I do remember that after I was in the room, the girl moved to the bed with me, with the bed next to the wall. The child always on the side of the wall so that she would not fall, and on the other side, the crib for the newborn. I remember that perfectly well, yes, the girl on the side of the wall and Oscar in the crib.

[Music]

Isabel: A year later Peña Grande begins to be dismantled.

Loli: It is known that democracy did not reach that place (laughs), it arrived when it was closed. Many areas began to close because the Crusades were no longer all there, there were only a few, and the women began to leave. There were only, maybe, ten women left, I don’t think there were ten of us. Everything else, all that huge construction that was there, everything was already closed. The idea, I don’t know if it came from the management of the center, from the guardianship, from the Patronato, I don’t know where the brilliant idea came from, that all the women who had come from Peña Grande should go back to their homes with their families.

Of course, it was very clear to me that I could not go back home. So we went to Santander, which was where the Juvenile Court was.

The educator went into an office. I stayed in a small living room with the two children. Half an hour, 45 minutes. I don’t know, and she comes out and says to me: “Let’s see, Loli, there are two options. You can leave here with your two children but we don’t have anywhere to take you. We don’t have a way, there is no place we can take you”. She says, “The other option is for you to leave, leave the children and go by yourself. The kids stay in custody and you leave.”

In my head, at lightning speed, I start to think: “I can go hungry. I can be on the street. I have done it before. I can make it out. I’ve gotten out before. When I ran away from home, I survived. But I have no right to put my children through that.” They told me, “You have a month to think about it.” I didn’t know how, but I was grateful to them for the fact that they had given me a month. Then I realized why, at the time I didn’t think about it. I was 17 years old. I could not sign the adoption of my children because they would need the approval of the Juvenile Guardianship Court, or the Patronato or whoever it was, whoever had my guardianship. It was a month before my 18th birthday. I came back. I signed for my children to be placed for adoption. I set only one condition: that they both be adopted by the same family. Because I knew that if I went looking for them, I would find them together. Otherwise, it would be impossible to find them.

[Music]

Isabel: It’s 1984. Loli is alone in Santander. Those were the years of shock.

Loli: I came out of there and I don’t remember anything until almost a year later. I don’t know what became of my life, I don’t know what I did. I have a memory of being on the road from Santander to Torrelavega, it was raining a lot. And listening to a song by Los Chichos that said something like “you’re 18 years old and you’re tired of living”. I was getting soaked because it was pouring. I was on the road and with that song in my head. But I don’t even remember if that happened a day later, a week later, a month later. I don’t know. I have no idea.

[Silence]

Loli: The next thing I remember, what I’m aware of is that I was already living in Palencia. How did I get there? I don’t know. No, I have no idea. It’s that emptiness that has stayed with me.

[Music]

Loli: When I get there, I’m living with a lady in a house, I think I was working in that house. Yes, what happened is that when I met my husband, immediately, soon, two months or three months after I met him, I went to live with the woman who later became my mother-in-law.

For me, the best thing would have been not to have any more children. No, I didn’t want to in any way. But of course, the Spanish macho man, how could he not have children?

He never knew anything. And no, there was no one who knew anything about my other children. Only the doctor who delivered my baby, the midwife and a doctor who was there. They were the only ones who knew that I had given birth before, because of the scars I had. But no one else, not my husband’s family, not my husband, no one. No, no one. No, no, I didn’t tell anyone.

Then I got divorced. I assumed that I had to take care of my children and that was it.

Isabel: It is 2008, 24 years have passed and Loli is in Palencia.

Loli: I had my life made. With my children grown up, I was already living on my own, I had bought my own house. But always inside me, always wanting to know more. I wanted to know. Because I have never forgotten my children. So, I was always worried about knowing. I wanted to know more. I wanted to know if everything I had in my head was true, if it had happened or if it was just something I had invented, in my imagination.

And through the Internet I met Consuelo. She told me: I am going to help you find your children. We never met, we just talked to each other through social media. And she told me: “You can ask for the birth certificate of your children because you registered them as such and see what happens”. And to my surprise, they send them to me.

To my surprise, the margin of the birth certificate had all the information: what their names are now, where they live, what their parents’ names are and even the date when they asked for their birth certificate to get their ID cards. Everything. I explain it to Consuelo and she says, “okay, now, you know. If they know they are adopted, they have the same information you have on the birth certificate”. So, with all the information on the birth certificate, open a page on Facebook and put all the information, your name, your address, where you live, say that you have been in Peña Grande. And if they are looking for you, they will find you. And four months later I receive a message from a girl who tells me: “We have a pending conversation from 27 years ago”. I look at the girl’s profile. She doesn’t have a picture. But she has her name, her date of birth. Just by looking at the date of birth, I said, that’s my daughter. That’s her.

We gave each other our phone numbers, we started talking on WhatsApp. We talked about things like: where are you from, where were you born, where do you come from. Then we started talking on the phone and I explained to her. Because she needed to know and I needed her to know, because what I didn’t want was for them to think that they were abandoned children that nobody wanted. I explained to her what happened, I explained who their father was. She remembered things, her stroller, her carriage, a room. She didn’t know why she always wanted to sleep on the side of the wall. She couldn’t sleep on the side of the bedside table, but on the side of the wall.

She had memories and she didn’t know where they came from.

[Theme music]

She has tattooed on the back of her neck some chords of a music that she always had in her head and she didn’t know why. And I said to her: Well, tell me what music it is. When she gave me its chords, to this day, for me, that music, that music that for the rest of the mortals is very relaxing, for me, it gets on my nerves. It is Pachelbel’s Canon. Well, she has the first notes tattooed and that music was the one they used to play in Peña Grande to wake us up in the morning. She didn’t know why she remembered that.

[Theme music]

Isabel: The Peña Grande maternity hospital operated between 1960 and 1984. It belonged to the Patronato de Protección a la Mujer and was managed by the Evangelical Crusades.

When the journalist María Zuil tried to talk to them, they replied that “we no longer have anything to say about Peña Grande”.

Today the building is still standing and is a school. Until recently, the delivery room, la Dolorosa as they called it, was still there, with the bed and the basin, in the middle of blackboards, chalk, and kids running from one side to the other.

Even today, older people in the neighborhood remember seeing women leaning out of the gate, screaming for help. Many thought it was a madhouse.

[Music]

Loli: I discovered that what had happened to me was true when I went back into Peña Grande and saw the room where I had been with my children. There I collapsed, there I cried as much as I could cry, there I broke down, because I said to myself: “No, you didn’t dream it. You are not crazy.”

[Music: “You’re 18 years old and you’re tired of living”]

Isabel: Thank you for listening to this story.

If you want to know more about Peña Grande, next Sunday, journalist Ana María Pascual will publish a special article in Público.

In 2018, Ana María discovered a report that, long before 1984, recommended closing the center, but that the institutions ignored. She first talked about it in Interviú, but the magazine closed that same year and the article is hard to find. So next Sunday she will tell that story in the newspaper where she now works, Público.

That same year, in 2018, the journalist María Zuil was doing a piece on single mothers and someone told her about that place, Peña Grande. And she started to investigate. You can read the results of that investigation in El Confidencial. We have posted everything on our website.

If you like our work and can afford it, please support our second season at deesonosehabla.com/apoyanos. Thanks to your support our episodes will continue to be available openly to anyone and on any platform.

This episode was produced by Vanessa Rousselot and myself. Vanessa and I wrote the script and I edited it, and Paula Morais assisted in the editing. The original music for the episode was composed by Sara Muñiz. The sound design is by me and Marcos Salso. The final recording and mixing was done at Isolé División Sonora. The illustration of this episode is by Carmen Cáceres and the tune is the song Berlin by Alba Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto. The communication by Tais Álvarez.

Thanks to all the people who listened to this episode and helped us to improve it. And thanks to those who first listened to it live in the Sala Mirador, together with Loli and Consuelo. It was really beautiful.

If you want to know more about Loli’s story, about Peña Grande or about the Patronato, in the extra materials section of our website we have included articles from many colleagues who have researched this topic before us and from whom we have learned so much.

If you have a story about silences, talk to us. On our website deesonosehabla.com you can subscribe to our newsletter, listen to the rest of the episodes or check out ways to send us a text or voice message or email. We’re also on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, and we love to talk. And if you liked this episode, recommend it to your friends and subscribe to our channels. You can even leave us a rating.

After these Face A and Face B we’re taking a break between episodes and we’ll be back in two weeks. Thanks for being there.