Unfinished Depositions

GRUPO FAMILIA ARRIETA

Nuria Arrieta Moreno, Tomás Arrieta Moreno, Inés Arrieta Moreno

WhatsApp group created 14 March 2024

Nuria — 11:07

[Photograph: an open drawer in a walnut secretary desk. The drawer is lined with yellowed newspaper — La Vanguardia, dateline visible: 12 October 1975. Inside, a manila folder, open, showing the top edge of several documents. The paper is cream-colored, foxed at the margins. A red wax seal is partially visible.]

Inés — 11:09

What is that?

Tomás — 11:09

Don’t touch anything.

Nuria — 11:10

I already touched it. I opened the drawer.

Tomás — 11:11

Don’t touch the papers inside. Use cotton gloves if you have them.

Nuria — 11:11

Tomás. I work at the Archivo Histórico Nacional. I have gloves.

DOCUMENT 1 OF 11

As catalogued by Nuria Arrieta Moreno, paper conservator, Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid

Judicial order. Juzgado de Instrucción No. 2, Calamocha, Province of Teruel. Dated 14 March 1943.

Paper: laid stock, moderate weight, chain lines at approximately 26mm intervals. Watermark present — the Francoist eagle above the yoke-and-arrows device, partially obscured by foxing along the left margin. Paper has yellowed uniformly, indicating storage in a low-humidity environment with no direct light exposure. Moderate brittleness at the edges. No evidence of water damage. No evidence of insect activity.

Typeface: produced on a Hispano-Olivetti Lexikon 80, identifiable by the squared-off lowercase a and the slightly elevated comma. The ribbon was moderately worn — several characters show incomplete transfer, particularly the lowercase e in line four and the uppercase J in the heading. This is consistent with a machine in regular institutional use without frequent ribbon replacement.

Ink: the typed text is in standard black carbon ribbon ink, stable and unfaded. The signature, however, is in iron gall ink — dark brown, nearly black at the heaviest strokes, with the characteristic warm undertone. Early-stage ink corrosion is visible at three points where the pen pressed hardest: the downstroke of the initial E, the loop of the G, and the terminal flourish. At these points the ink has begun to penetrate the cellulose matrix. Under raking light, the paper shows thinning. In perhaps ten to fifteen years, the signature will produce holes — the ink dissolving the paper that carries it.

The signature reads: Esteban Arrieta Goicoechea.

It is steady. The letterforms are consistent with a practiced hand, not hurried. The pen — a medium-nib fountain pen, likely a Montblanc 244 or comparable model of the period — was held at a conventional angle. The pressure was firm and even. This is the signature of a man who signed many documents.

Below the signature, printed in the same Olivetti typeface:

Sentencia de muerte, confirmada y ejecutada. Reo: Ángel Pascual Ferrer, natural de Calamocha. Delito: auxilio a la rebelión.

Sentence of death, confirmed and executed.

Tomás — 11:34

How many are there?

Nuria — 11:35

Eleven orders. Different dates. 1941 through 1951.

Tomás — 11:35

All signed by him?

Nuria — 11:36

All signed by him.

Inés — 11:38

Abuela kept these. In the drawer. For how long?

Nuria — 11:39

The newspaper lining the drawer is from October 1975. Two weeks before Franco died. That’s the earliest possible date for when she put them there.

Inés — 11:41

Or when she moved them there.

Nuria — 11:41

Yes. Or when she moved them there.

Tomás — 11:58

Abuelo was a gentle man. He grew tomatoes. He let me water the garden with the hose even though I always flooded it.

Nuria — 11:59

I know.

Tomás — 12:01

Those two things don’t cancel each other out. I know that. I’m just saying them both at the same time because that’s what I’m doing.

Inés — 12:03

Is there anything else in the drawer?

Nuria — 12:06

A folder. Newspaper clippings. And three notebooks.

Inés — 12:07

Notebooks?

Nuria — 12:08

Handwritten. Different dates. I think they’re abuela’s.

Tomás — 12:09

Her writing?

Nuria — 12:09

Her handwriting, yes. I haven’t read them. I’ve been looking at the judicial papers. I needed to assess the condition first.

Inés — 12:12

You assessed the condition before reading what they said.

Nuria — 12:13

I’m a conservator. That’s what I do first.

Tomás — 12:15

How’s Lucía? Did you leave her with Javi?

Inés — 12:16

She’s at school. Tomás, don’t change the subject.

Tomás — 12:16

I’m not changing the subject. I’m asking about your daughter.

Inés — 12:17

She’s six. She’s fine. She doesn’t know about any of this.

Tomás — 12:18

Obviously she doesn’t know. That wasn’t what I was asking.

CONSUELO GOICOECHEA DE ARRIETA

Memoir, first attempt — 1978

Handwritten. Blue ink on lined notebook paper (Enri brand, 80g, A4). Five pages. The handwriting employs the old-style Spanish cursive taught in schools during the 1930s: the reversed-direction capital letters, the elongated loops, the ‘t’ crossings that extend fully over the following letter. The ink is ballpoint, standard blue, and has not faded appreciably. Pages are not numbered. On the first page, the opening line has been crossed out and restarted twice. The crossed-out beginnings read: “I want to set down what I” and “The house in which we lived for.” The third beginning, which continues for the remaining five pages, is the text that follows.

The house in Teruel was not a large house but it was a house that knew how to hold things. The walls were thick — nearly half a meter of stone and plaster — and when you closed the front door the sound the street made was immediately reduced to something you could set aside, the way you set aside a newspaper after reading only the first paragraph, knowing you would not return to it. The kitchen was at the back, facing the corral where Esteban kept the garden, and it was the kitchen I want to describe, though describing a kitchen is harder than describing a person because a kitchen does not have a face and therefore does not give you the entry point a face provides, the arrangement of features from which you construct everything else. A kitchen gives you surfaces and light and the smell of whatever was last cooked, and from these you must build something, though what you are building I am not yet sure.

The light in the kitchen at four in the afternoon came through the window that faced the corral and it was not golden, as people who write about light are always saying, but something closer to the color of weak tea, the kind of light that in Teruel at that hour in October is neither warm nor cold but simply present, filling the room in the way that water fills a basin, from the bottom up, and it was in this light that Esteban would come home from the court and wash his hands at the kitchen sink, always his hands first and then his face, and he washed them slowly and thoroughly as though the water were a kind of boundary between the place he had just been and the place he was now, and he dried them on the linen cloth I kept beside the faucet, the same cloth every day because I replaced it every evening, and he would sit at the table and I would put his plate in front of him and neither of us spoke during the meal, not because we had nothing to say but because we had arrived, through the years, at an understanding about what the silence at the table was for, and what it was not for, and it was not for comfort exactly and not for avoidance either, it was more that the silence was a room we both entered and which neither of us wished to furnish, because to furnish it would have been to acknowledge that it was empty, and that what should have filled it was the thing I am trying to write about now, which is to say not the silence itself but what the silence was standing in the place of, which was — and I have begun this sentence knowing that I may not be able to finish it — which was the fact that I knew, not because Esteban told me and not because I saw anything directly but because you cannot live in a house with a man for that many years without the house itself acquiring a kind of knowledge, the walls and the furniture and the particular way the front door sounded when he came home at certain hours, and what I knew was not a single thing but an accumulation, a sediment, and I have been trying to think of the right word for what it was like to know something without having been told it and the word I keep returning to is geological, because it was not a sudden knowing but a knowing that had been deposited over years, layer by layer, the way the river deposits clay on its banks in spring, and this deposited knowledge was the foundation of the house we lived in, the real foundation, deeper than the stone, and the thing about the years between the war and the—

The text ends here. No period. No cross-out. The sentence stops as though the pen were simply lifted from the paper.

DOCUMENT 4 OF 11

Sentencing record. Juzgado de Instrucción No. 2, Calamocha. Dated 22 June 1944.

Paper: same stock as the 1943 order. The foxing pattern is heavier, concentrated along the bottom edge — consistent with the document having been stored at the bottom of a stack for an extended period, in contact with whatever surface the stack rested on. A faint ring stain in the upper left corner, approximately four centimeters in diameter. Coffee or tea. Someone set a cup on this document, or on a document that rested on top of this one. Someone was drinking while working.

Sentencia de muerte, confirmada y ejecutada. Reo: Julio Gimeno Ortiz, natural de Used. Delito: adhesión a la rebelión.

The signature is unhurried. The same steady hand. The coffee ring lies outside the text block, as though the cup were placed carefully, away from the words. A small consideration.

DOCUMENT 7 OF 11

Sentencing record. Juzgado de Instrucción No. 2, Calamocha. Dated 9 February 1946.

Same paper stock as the 1943 order but from a different batch — the watermark is positioned lower, and the chain lines are marginally wider, suggesting a shift in the mill’s production between the two dates. Same typewriter, but the ribbon is newer; characters are crisp and fully formed. The institutional seal has been applied with more pressure than on the 1943 document, leaving a deeper impression in the paper.

Sentencia: reclusión mayor (30 años). Reo: Dolores Mateo Sancho, natural de Montalbán. Delito: auxilio a la rebelión.

The signature on this document is identical in form to the 1943 order. The pen pressure, the angle, the terminal flourish. This is not a signature that changed over three years. It is a signature that belonged to its owner the way a key belongs to a lock — functional, consistent, without variation. It did its work. It did its work eleven times across eleven years that we know of, and perhaps more times than that, in documents that were not kept in this drawer or in any other drawer accessible to the family of the man whose hand made them.

CONSUELO GOICOECHEA DE ARRIETA

Memoir, second attempt — 1995

Typed on a modern electric typewriter (likely a Brother AX-250 or similar consumer model, identifiable by the proportional spacing). A4 white paper, 80g, standard copier stock. Three pages, double-spaced. Paginated in the upper right corner: 1, 2, 3. Tucked between pages 2 and 3, without explanation or annotation: four sheets of spirit-duplicated paper bearing what appear to be classroom attendance records.

There was a night in January of 1946, the exact date I cannot give because I did not write it down and because at the time writing things down would have been its own kind of danger, but it was January and the cold was the cold of Teruel which is a cold that other provinces do not understand and do not believe when you describe it, and I was in bed but not asleep because the cold kept me at the surface of sleep without letting me sink into it, and I heard Esteban on the telephone in the hallway. The telephone was on a small table beside the coat rack. He spoke in the formal register — the usted he used only for the court, never for family, never for neighbors — and I understood, not from the words, which I could not hear clearly through the closed bedroom door and through the particular thickness of the hallway walls in that house, but from the register itself, from the way his voice occupied a different architecture when he spoke in that register, I understood that something was being decided. That he was being asked to decide it. Or that the decision had already been made and his voice was the instrument of its formalization, the way a notary’s stamp is not the decision but the confirmation, the final gesture that transforms an intention into a fact. I did not get out of bed. I did not open the door. I lay in the cold and listened to the register and knew, without knowing the specifics, that someone’s outcome was being settled. Whether that meant a sentence or a confirmation of a sentence or simply a procedural step I cannot say. I only know that the register told me everything the words did not.

In the morning Esteban came to breakfast and washed his hands and we did not speak of it. This was not remarkable. We did not speak of it the way we did not speak of the weather when the weather was ordinary — it was not that we chose silence but that speech would have required a kind of effort that the morning did not call for. I put his coffee on the table. He drank it. The cup was the white one with the chip on the rim that I should have thrown away years before. I did not throw it away because it was his cup, because he reached for it each morning without looking, the way you reach for something that has always been there, and to remove it would have been to introduce an absence he would have noticed, and I did not want him to notice absences, because noticing absences was my work, not his, and I had been doing that work for so long that it had become indistinguishable from the rest of the household.

[Spirit-duplicated records, inserted between pages 2 and 3]

Four sheets. Aniline purple ink, heavily faded — the leftmost column (student names) is legible with effort; the rightmost columns (attendance marks) have faded to a pale lavender wash, nearly invisible. Header reads:

Escuela Nacional de Niñas, Calamocha Curso 1944–1945 Maestra: Consuelo Goicoechea de Arrieta

Thirty-one names, handwritten by the teacher onto the hectograph master. The copies are approximately twentieth-generation — the ink saturation suggests they are far from the first pull. Some names are fully legible:

Pilar Mateo Sancho Amelia Pascual Ferrer Concha Gimeno Ortiz Rosario López Herrero […]

Other names are partially illegible, the purple having retreated to ghosts of letterforms. The records were never explained in the memoir. They were never referenced. They were simply placed between the pages, the way a reader places a receipt or a bus ticket in a book — not as a bookmark, not as an annotation, but as a residue of the life that was being lived while the reading was happening.

Inés — 14:17

Have you read all three of her attempts?

Tomás — 14:18

I’ve read the first two. Can’t find the third.

Nuria — 14:19

It’s on her phone. A voice memo, transcribed by Maribel.

Tomás — 14:20

The home aide?

Nuria — 14:20

Yes. 2018. One paragraph. I found it when we were clearing the phone data last month.

Inés — 14:22

Why didn’t you tell us?

Nuria — 14:24

I’m telling you now.

CONSUELO GOICOECHEA DE ARRIETA

Memoir, third attempt — 2018

Audio recording, transcribed by Maribel Ruiz Cortés (home aide, employed by the family from 2016 to 2023). Transcription contains minor errors consistent with dictation to a non-professional transcriber. One word is marked as inaudible. The recording was made on Consuelo’s mobile phone (a Samsung Galaxy J3, the only phone she would use because “the buttons are large enough for a human being”) and saved in the voice memo application under no title.

Esteban signed them because they were put in front of him, and he did not sign them because he was cruel, and he did not sign them because he was a coward, and I cannot tell you why he signed them because in sixty years of marriage I never asked, and not asking was the thing that held every other thing in place, the way the keystone of an arch is not the strongest stone but the one whose removal would bring the [inaudible] down, and I kept the papers not to preserve them and not to punish him and not for the children because what could the children do with such a thing, but because destrying them seemed to me like doing it again, like the names would be gone twice, once when the order was carried out and once when the paper was burned, and so I kept them in the drawer and the drawer kept them and we all of us kept what we kept.

Transcriber’s note: “destrying” is as spoken. Señora Arrieta paused for approximately fifteen seconds after “carried out” before continuing. The recording ends abruptly after “kept what we kept” — it is unclear whether she intended to continue.

Tomás — 15:41

We have an obligation.

Nuria — 15:42

To whom?

Tomás — 15:43

To the names on those papers.

Tomás — 15:44

https://www.boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-2022-17099 Democratic Memory Law, 2022. Article 15 — right of victims and their descendants to truth, justice, and reparation.

Tomás — 15:45

https://memoriahistorica.org.es/ Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica. They have protocols for exactly this.

Nuria — 15:48

I know what the ARMH does.

Tomás — 15:49

Then you know we can’t just keep these in a drawer for another fifty years.

Nuria — 15:53

Abuela kept them for fifty years. You’ve known about them for four hours.

Tomás — 15:54

That’s not an argument. That’s a description of a problem.

Nuria — 15:55

It’s a description of a decision someone already made. Someone who knew more about this than any of us.

Tomás — 15:56

She also started three memoirs and finished none of them. That’s not a decision. That’s paralysis. I teach this period to sixteen-year-olds. I know what silence does.

Inés — 15:59

The ink on the March 1943 order is eating through the paper. In ten years the signature won’t exist. The document is destroying itself.

Tomás — 16:00

Which is exactly why we need to act now.

Nuria — 16:01

Or it’s exactly why we don’t.

Inés — 16:03

I’m going back to Barcelona tomorrow. Lucía has school. I need to think about this without standing in abuela’s apartment.

Tomás — 16:04

Thinking is not acting, Inés.

Inés — 16:05

I know.

NOTES APP — INÉS ARRIETA MORENO

iPhone, 15 March 2024, 22:47. Saved under “No title.”

The apartment smells like her soap. Heno de Pravia. I found three bars of it in the bathroom cabinet, still wrapped. She must have bought them in bulk. The soap and the execution orders in the same apartment, in the same life, and I keep thinking that the soap is the more impossible object, because the soap assumes a future — you buy soap in bulk because you expect to need it — and the execution orders don’t assume anything. They just sit there.

Lucía asked me on the phone tonight why I was at abuela’s house and I said we were cleaning and she asked if we found anything good and I said we found some old papers and she said are they treasure and I said I don’t know yet.

She is six. She will ask again.

EMAIL — DRAFT

From: tomas.arrieta.m@gmail.com To: l.garciamolina@elpais.com Subject: Possible story — Franco-era judicial documents found in family home Date saved: 16 March 2024 Status: Draft. Never sent. Deleted from drafts on 4 April 2024. Recovered from trash folder by Inés Arrieta Moreno on 12 April 2024.

Estimada Sra. García Molina,

I am writing to you because your reporting on the Democratic Memory Law and on the work of the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica has been, in my view, the most rigorous and the most humane journalism on this subject currently being published in Spain. I use both words deliberately. Rigorous because you work from documents. Humane because you understand that documents are not the same as the people they describe.

My name is Tomás Arrieta Moreno. I am a secondary school history teacher in Zaragoza. Last week, while clearing the apartment of our recently deceased grandmother, my siblings and I discovered a collection of eleven judicial documents — execution orders and sentencing records — from the Juzgado de Instrucción No. 2 in Calamocha, Province of Teruel, dating from 1941 to 1951. All are signed by our grandfather, Esteban Arrieta Goicoechea, who served as a municipal judge in Calamocha during the postwar repression.

I want to be transparent about my position. I believe these documents belong in the public record. I believe the descendants of the people named in these orders — Ángel Pascual Ferrer, Dolores Mateo Sancho, and nine others whose names I can provide — have a right to know that the records of their family members’ sentences exist and have been preserved, however accidentally, by the family of the man who signed them. I believe this is a matter of historical justice.

I also want to be transparent about the fact that my siblings do not share this position, or do not share it yet, or share it in ways that do not lead them to the same conclusion. One of my siblings is a paper conservator and views the documents as objects to be preserved rather than stories to be told. The other has said very little, which is her way of saying a great deal, and I am not yet sure what she is saying.

I should be honest: I know that writing to you is itself a kind of act — that I am placing myself on the side of disclosure rather than silence, and that there is a satisfaction in that placement which I have not fully examined. My sister Nuria would say I am performing a moral position. She might be right. But the documents exist regardless of my performance, and the names on them belong to people whose descendants are alive in Teruel and Zaragoza, and whatever my motives are, the documents don’t care about my motives.

What I can tell you is this: eleven documents. Eleven names. 1941 to 1951. A municipal judge in a small town in Teruel who signed what was put in front of him, if my grandmother’s own account is to be believed, and who grew tomatoes and let his grandson flood the garden and died in 1987 without ever being asked why, because no one in the family had the language to ask or the stomach for the answer.

I am available to meet at your convenience. I can bring the documents, or photographs of the documents, or I can simply tell you where they are and let you determine whether they are newsworthy. Whatever is most appropriate.

Atentamente, Tomás Arrieta Moreno

Inés — 01:47

Are you awake?

Inés — 01:48

I can’t sleep. I’ve been going through the 1995 memoir again.

Inés — 01:52

The school records. The spirit-duplicated ones tucked between the pages.

Inés — 01:53

She was their teacher. She was the maestra at the Escuela Nacional de Niñas in Calamocha. The records are from 1944-1945.

Inés — 02:04

I’ve been cross-referencing.

Inés — 02:11

Pilar Mateo Sancho. The 1946 sentencing record is for Dolores Mateo Sancho. Reclusión mayor. Mother and daughter.

Inés — 02:19

Amelia Pascual Ferrer. The 1943 execution order. Ángel Pascual Ferrer. Sentenced to death.

Inés — 02:27

Concha Gimeno Ortiz. I found a Gimeno Ortiz on the 1944 order. Julio.

Inés — 02:38

Rosario López Herrero. The 1948 sentencing record. Tomás López Herrero. Same surname, same patronymic.

Inés — 02:41

Four names. At least four.

Inés — 02:42

She taught their children. After.

Inés — 02:58

[Four photographs: the spirit-duplicated attendance record with Pilar, Amelia, Concha, and Rosario’s names circled in pencil. Beside each photograph, a second photograph of the corresponding judicial document with the matching family surname visible. No caption. No annotation.]

Tomás — 03:04

Jesus.

Inés — 03:08

She taught them. Every morning she opened the schoolroom and the children of the men he’d sentenced came in and sat at their desks and she called their names from the register.

Inés — 03:09

She kept the register.

Inés — 03:14

Why would you keep the register?

Inés — 03:19

Pilar Mateo Sancho would have been eight or nine. The same age as Lucía in two years. Her mother was sentenced to thirty years. Her father? I don’t know. Maybe dead. Maybe fled. Maybe in the same prison. And the girl came to school every day and her teacher was Consuelo Goicoechea de Arrieta and Consuelo’s husband had signed the paper.

Inés — 03:22

I keep trying to imagine what the classroom looked like. Whether the children sat in alphabetical order. Whether Pilar sat near the front or the back. Whether abuela looked at her differently or whether looking at her the same was the harder thing.

Nuria — 07:15

I already knew. I noticed when I first catalogued the papers.

Inés — 07:16

When was that?

Nuria — 07:17

Tuesday. When I opened the drawer.

Inés — 07:17

You’ve known since Tuesday.

Nuria — 07:18

I’ve known since Tuesday.

Inés — 07:18

And you didn’t say anything.

Nuria — 07:19

No.

Inés — 07:20

Why?

Nuria — 07:23

Because I needed to assess the condition of the documents before anything else happened to them. Because once you say a thing out loud in a family it becomes the thing you said and not the thing itself. And because I am forty-five years old and I have spent my career handling paper that outlasted the people who made it and I wanted a few days where the paper was just paper.

Inés — 07:24

That’s the longest thing you’ve ever written in this chat.

Nuria — 07:25

Yes.

Tomás — 07:31

I’m catching a train from Zaragoza. I’ll be in Madrid by noon.

[No further messages in this thread for fourteen hours.]

LETTER

Nuria Arrieta Moreno Departamento de Conservación Archivo Histórico Nacional Calle de Serrano 115 28006 Madrid

17 April 2024

Servicio de Conservación y Restauración de Documentos Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte Plaza del Rey 1 28004 Madrid

Estimados señores:

I write to request a formal conservation assessment for a collection of documents recently identified in a private estate. The collection consists of:

— Eleven (11) judicial documents, dated 1941–1951, originating from the Juzgado de Instrucción No. 2, Calamocha, Province of Teruel. Various paper stocks, predominantly laid paper of moderate weight with period-appropriate watermarks. Iron gall ink throughout (signatures). Carbon ribbon typed text. Moderate foxing on all items. Early-stage iron gall ink corrosion identified on three (3) items, concentrated at points of maximum pen pressure in the signature area.

— Four (4) spirit-duplicated attendance records on standard copier paper, aniline purple ink, severely faded. Estimated generation: 18th–22nd pull. Paper in acceptable condition; ink approaching the threshold of legibility.

— Five (5) pages of handwritten manuscript on Enri-brand A4 lined notebook paper, blue ballpoint ink. Three (3) pages of typed manuscript on standard A4 copier stock, proportional-spacing typewriter. One (1) digital transcription of an audio recording, printed on standard inkjet paper.

I am particularly concerned with the iron gall ink corrosion on the three affected judicial documents. The corrosion is currently at Stage 2 on the Reissland classification scale — visible browning of the paper substrate with initial thinning but no perforation. Left untreated, progression to Stage 3 (perforation and text loss) is expected within ten to fifteen years, given current storage conditions.

I would like to discuss deacidification treatment options (aqueous vs. non-aqueous) for the judicial documents, with specific attention to the viability of phytate treatment for the iron gall ink corrosion sites. I would also welcome an assessment of the spirit-duplicated records, as the aniline ink presents different conservation challenges — I am aware that some consolidation treatments may accelerate rather than retard the fading process.

Finally, I would like to discuss digitization. High-resolution scanning at 600 dpi with raking-light supplementary images for the corrosion sites would be appropriate, but I want to ensure that the handling required for digitization does not compromise the originals, particularly the three documents with active ink corrosion.

The collection is currently stored in acid-free tissue within a climate-controlled cabinet at my place of employment, pending your assessment. I can transport the materials to your facility at your convenience, in archival-grade enclosures.

Please note that this is a private collection, not an institutional holding. The conservation assessment is requested and funded by the family. Questions regarding provenance, historical significance, or potential transfer to a public archive should be directed to me.

I look forward to your response.

Atentamente,

Nuria Arrieta Moreno Conservadora de documentos gráficos Archivo Histórico Nacional

[Note: The following message was typed in the GRUPO FAMILIA ARRIETA thread by Inés Arrieta Moreno at 23:38 on 18 April 2024 and deleted at 23:42. It was not sent. The text was recovered from a local device backup performed by Nuria Arrieta Moreno on 3 May 2024, during a routine data transfer. Whether Nuria read this deleted message is not recorded.]

Inés — 23:38 [DELETED 23:42]

She taught their children. Every day. Pilar Mateo Sancho sat in the second row or the third row and raised her hand and the woman at the blackboard was married to the man who signed the paper. And the girl came to school because there was one school and you went to it.

I keep trying to write something about this that holds together. The calling of the name from the register and the signing of the order. Both done by hand. Both written down. I’ve started four drafts and none of them work because the two facts won’t sit next to each other in a sentence, they collapse the sentence.

Tomás wants to act. Nuria wants to preserve. I don’t know what I want. I keep looking at the attendance records and thinking about the purple ink, how it was already fading when she pulled the copies, twentieth-generation duplicates, barely legible. She made copies she knew would disappear. She put them between the pages of a memoir she couldn’t finish. And I don’t know if that was keeping or letting go or if those were different things for her or the same thing and I don’t know what Lucía will ask when she’s old enough to ask and I don’t know what I’ll