Ephemera (two sisters)

Abstract

Exhumations of mass graves are emblematic of memory work in Spain and constitute a major focus of anthropological research. As a complement and a counterpoint to that work, I ask: What form does the work of memory take when the Franco regime's specters are glimpsed through more ephemeral encounters with the past: stories, memories, and rumors? This poem has emerged from my efforts to address that question. It conjures Maruxa and Coralia Fandiño Ricart, sisters in an anarcho-syndicalist family who lived in Santiago de Compostela, who were brutalized by the Falange during the Spanish Civil War and shunned. Wearing bright clothing and mask-like makeup, they took daily strolls through the city from the 1940s until shortly before their deaths in the early 1980s. Their presence evoked fear and fascination. Since the 1990s, artists, feminists, and others have worked to compile memories of the sisters in an effort to bring to light the brutal practices of the Franco regime and to bear witness to the sisters' spectacular form of defiance. I envision the poem as partaking of a fragmented archive of imagistic, sensory, and contradictory impressions that comprise the work of memory and conjure a necessarily partial picture of the sisters.