TWO POSSIBLE BEGINNINGS - 1) CHRONOLOGICAL

It is dawn. The sun is slowly rising in the misty sky of an early April morning. The snow peak of Pinajarro is looking at Hervás from the distance, contemplating the town as a mother contemplates her baby. The early morning silence is interrupted from a distant chant of a cockerel. The narrow and sinuous streets of the lower part of the town are tranquil and dormant. In number 12 Rabileros Street the early morning silence is broken by the sound of a baby crying.

In the interior of the small house two people are looking at the new born baby. The mother’s face is gleaming with joy forgetting for a moment that this is her seventh child. The midwife is also smiling while holding the scissors used to cut the umbilical cord to deliver the baby. Both women look at each other thinking that the effort has been worth it. The new born girl is beautiful, her body is warm; her face is red and yellow like an apple and her nose gentle and soft like a rose petal.

“Have you already thought of a name for her, Sra. Dorotea?” asks the midwife.

“Yes, she will be called Trinidad like the Saint”, Dorotea says.

Dorotea’s household is small and dark with hardly any light or ventilation. Number 12 is tacked away at the end of the street, on the right hand side, hidden by large flower pots hanging from the balconies next door. The street remains as it was in the XV century, when the Jews lived here. Looking at its houses with their medieval aspect it is easy to imagine the story foretold by the town dwellers. The legend talks of a Christian boy meeting a Jewish girl and falling in love and both disappearing in the shadows of Rabilero Street to a tragic death.

The family’s living quarters downstairs comprised two small rooms including the kitchen; a large bedroom upstairs where all the family members sleep, and a tiny cellar where the animals are kept. The family’s poverty is getting worse with each additional child and the prospects of Sr. Martin getting any work seem to be fading away rapidly after the textile factory, where he worked, burned down. Dorotea and her husband often lay down in bed thinking how they would manage to raise a large growing family with very little money and resources.

A month after Trinidad’s birth the family leaves the town of Hervás to live in the country. One of Trinidad’s aunts, who is better off, offers her family a small land holding with a small farm house about 3 miles away. On a sunny morning in May 1907, as the family leaves the town, one neighbour looks at the baby and says.

“Dorotea, where are you taking your little baby? Don’t you know that it is dangerous to live in the country with a small baby?”

“Yes, I know but we will have to manage, won’t we?, replies Dorotea.