A Cup of Chicken Tea

In our recent trip to Spain, my husband and I had a dual purpose. Exploration of Madrid and Southern Spain was an obvious one. But our second intent was deeply personal: to trace my mother-in-law’s life as a young woman growing up in Madrid. My husband wanted to show me the Spain he knew; we both wanted to uncover the aspects of my mother-in-law’s life that until recently were a mystery to us.

When she passed away in February, Pilar “Pili” left a 48-page document with details of her life from a little girl until her final years. As a writer who has always wanted to pen historical fiction, I could ask for no greater gift. My husband did the research necessary to identify the towns, buildings and monuments that were part of her story.

In the 1930s, as the Spanish Civil War grew in intensity and bombs fell on Madrid, Pili and her brother Victorino were sent away for their safety to the Atlantic coastal town of Chipiona. Five and six years old, they lived at a convent which is now the Colegio Divina Pastora. Living there for three years, they had only the vaguest memory of their parents when they returned home to Madrid.

The director of that school took interest in our pilgrimage and gave us a tour of the building. We saw the old wing, where Pili would have slept; we lingered in the dining room where she would have eaten, and we walked the center aisle of the small chapel where she and her brother took their First Communions 85 years ago. According to the director, much of it is unchanged. It took little to imagine the garden that is now an enclosed atrium, and if I stood very still, I could hear the shrill voices of little girls on the playground.

From the school, a narrow street leads all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. There sits the gothic Santuario Santa Maria de Regla. The imposing statue of the virgin in the sanctuary was the one under whose robes a trembling young Pili knelt and prayed—equal parts fear and awe.

We took the train to the Mediterranean coastal town of Malaga—the same trek on which Pili met and fell in love with my father-in-law, Fernando. We trod the beach where those young Spaniards strolled hand in hand. We found the site of their wedding and discovered the Madrid neighborhood and the very house where Pili lived before being sent away during the war.

Our internal history buffs were enamored with each discovery, and much of our time—especially in Chipiona—was spent in respectful silence. Perhaps we were lost in our own thoughts; maybe it was the emotion rising in our throats that quieted us. But also, at least for me, I sensed a third set of footsteps walking with us. I could hear Pili’s voice, and what an extraordinary experience to feel as if I was meeting Pili as a young woman.

Throughout our marriage, because she journeyed so far to see us and only came once a year, Pili’s visits lasted several months at a time. During those years she was a loving mother-in-law to me and fabulous grandmother to our daughters. I knew of her professional acclaim: that she had helped to found Asovela, an internationally recognized association for laryngectomy patients. I heard of the grateful patients, forever indebted to her therapeutic expertise which enabled them to speak again.

But until I read Pili’s words, until I went to Spain, I never felt I knew the woman.

It occurs to me that she would not have thought her own life noteworthy: her exodus during the Spanish Civil War, her journey as a young pregnant wife to Venezuela to tap the land of opportunity, her determination to fight for her rights as a professional woman and to rise in a society and healthcare field that was male-dominated. She would laugh and say that she was nothing special. But she endowed us with two gifts that can never be repaid. The first is Pili’s blessing to her son to follow his dream and move to the U.S. The second is her extraordinary story. Her blood that runs through my daughters’ veins is full of adventure and challenge and courage, and her life story is one that needs to be told.

I will tell it.

The book will be named after the street where Pili grew up: The House on Generosity Street. A fitting title, as generosity of spirit is an indelible part of Pili’s legacy.

Many years ago, during one of Pili’s first visits, it was around ten at night and I smelled a chicken stewing in our kitchen. Assuming she was prepping for a meal the next day, I went to the kitchen to tell Pili goodnight. To my surprise, there was no chicken on the stove.

“Where’s the chicken?” I asked. She looked at me with confusion. “Pollo,” I said.

“There is no pollo,” she said, surprised. “I just made a cup of tea.”

To this day I don’t know what was in those tea bags. For years we laughed about her pungent nightly cup of tea. She always offered me a cup and I always declined—choosing often to sit with her and have a glass of wine instead.

“Chicken tea is better for you,” she would laugh.

When Gabe and I were dating, the first time I visited their home in Venezuela, I caught a stomach flu and passed out in the hallway. Gabe was out with his father, so his brother carried me to bed and Pili hovered over me. What must she have thought of this gringa girlfriend in her care! I recall her nurse’s light touch on my forehead, remember waking from a feverish sleep and seeing her there. She made me practice calling out “Pili! Pili!” if I needed her.

I need her often; we all do. How I wish I could sit with her, in our comfy pajamas, and have a cup of chicken tea. To connect as females irrespective of borders, language, and culture. Hell, maybe I’d even take a sip of her tea. I’d love to tell her about what we saw and discovered—to tell her how many questions were answered and to ask her the millions of questions that remain.

But perhaps that is the beauty of family histories—without every detail explained, we can interpret them according to our own lives and needs. Maybe that’s why Pili wrote her story. Cups of tea, glasses of wine, conversations all evaporate. Grief waxes and wanes, fades over time.

Legacy remains.