Memory and emptiness | News from the Valencian Community

There is hidden within Borges’s Aleph an infinite world. One looks inside and can contemplate in it all the times merged: the past, the present, the future. See the All. Unlimited. Both.

There is an Aleph in Valencia and Antoni Tordera has told it. A stone building that has been a Muslim farmhouse, monastery, school, mendicants’ corner, pantheon of the vicereine of a forgotten kingdom, prison for common prisoners, prison for political prisoners, headquarters of an immense library with the most valuable letters and archives of this Earth: our paper arteries.

Sant Miquel dels Reis, sheltered behind the thick walls that separate it from a lofty orchard under the immense blue, has been all that and more. I will never forget the letter that Enrique Carreras Taurá wrote there in the winter of ’46, for his people. Enriquín, a twenty-year-old man with dark skin and strong arms, a postcard-perfect guerrilla who had fought as a volunteer in the war, who then took up arms against the Nazis in France, and who later participated in the romantic maqui invasion of the Aran Valley, under his last moon of freedom, before the slaps, the trial, the humiliations and the pissed pallet of the Sant Miquel dels Reis prison, from where he wrote that letter, dear parents, brothers and nephew, to tell you that here you learn a lot to understand, to hope, to hate and to love. That’s what he told them, locked up in the Aleph prison for having dreamed, on a Pyrenean night with a new moon, of freedom.

I cannot forget that letter that I saw one day nor can I dissociate it from the Renaissance mass of the Orriols neighborhood. But what Antoni Tordera has done in his book Mother stones and wounded memories (Publicacions Universitat de València) has been to fill the gaps in memory with literature. He wanted to imagine these voids, in the wake of Sebald or Berger, from some found objects and others imagined.

A clock stopped at a quarter to three that squeezed the wrist of prisoner 30496 in the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald.

The photo of a swarm of arms forced to point to the sky in the dark courtyard of a prison.

A temple with memories of atrocity that housed corpses killed in the war and living corpses forced to attend Sunday mass during the dictatorship.

In the previous word to this book – which will become an exhibition at La Nau starting December 16 – Tordera weaves a reflection that has made me think. He says that that courtyard, now erased, was one day inhabited by prisoners, guards and accomplices whom he does not know nor to whom he has any ties or kinship. And yet, something has pushed him to enter it to recognize all those strangers, already lost in other people’s memories.

What is it? What moves us to know those lives that are so foreign and already forgotten?

It has gone unnoticed, but the Didactic Classroom of Democratic Memory that the Generalitat created in 2022 in Sant Miquel dels Reis to recover and disseminate the memory of that place and that dictatorship has disappeared. They have left her to die in a sibylline way. More than three thousand students had passed through its stones in a year and a half, under the direction of the writer and historian of memory Esther López Barceló and the doctor in Archeology Joan Salazar Bonet. It’s not there anymore. It doesn’t exist. Nothing to reflect, rethink, divulge. Nothing to investigate. Or is that: nothingness.

It is beautiful when literature fills in the gaps in memory.

It is sinister when politics tries to erase the filling of memory. This policy is like Aleph: at a glance you can understand it all at once. Today, tomorrow, yesterday.