The Letter of Forgiveness – a powerful reading from Sarah Walton’s The Silk Pavilion

November 23, 2022

A clear highlight of our online launch of The Silk Pavilion was Sarah’s powerful reading of The Letter of Forgiveness. Lucy makes it her mission to translate this mysterious scrap of paper, written by the grandmother of Miguel.

Thanks to Keith Waithe, who’s composition for The Silk Pavilion begins and ends this clip. The extract is included in full below.

Content Warning: Sexual Assault.

12 July 1987, Villa Rosa

To those I forgive,

The others I forgave years ago, nameless faces, disembodied members. They saw only a leftist widow, a leftist whore. The enemy. You, I have struggled to forgive. I have tried many times to write this letter, but failed. Today is my 87th birthday. A decade since The Pact of Forgetting silenced Spain. But the inside of a human mind is never silenced. Marta Alma Llobet (may your sweet soul rest in peace) – I try to remember you prancing around the olive trees in the garden before the war – but I cannot push away the image of your face, a crushed paper ball of pain, hair pulled back and used like the reins of a horse as those men raped your sweet innocent soul, one by one, in the cellar that stormy night.

It was a night when the Sirocco had blown in with such hot fury and those Saharan winds snatched away our screams for help and pleas for mercy. But who would have come? Who remained to hear them? They’d taken the men. They, Franco’s men. And marched them to the mirador. We knew what fate awaited them. We knew that in the morning we would go with baskets like our neighbours had done, to collect what was left of them on the rocks. I secretly wished that if we women made it through the night alive that the sea would give their bodies a grave, so sick was I of the flesh.

When they arrived, I’d been with my husband, Mateo Julio Nadal. The house was different then. What is now the library was an attic and I told my daughter to hide there, shooed her up the ladder. We’d heard them in their truck pass the road by the house before they came down the lane. There was time to hide her. Up she went on her father’s strong shoulders.

Brave, they called him. Foolish, I’d said, when he refused to follow orders, spoke out against Franco’s bidding. A hero, some still say now. But where did his loyalty lie? With his politics or protecting his wife and child? I was angry too with you for many years, my dear, darling washed away husband. I forgive you. And although I raged at you for decades for speaking your truth, for standing up for all that is right in this god-forsaken country, for fearlessly facing those young, directionless fascist thugs that night, I would not respect you more than any man who has walked the earth if you had not. You spoke for me too, and for the millions too afraid to speak out against the Falange. I forgive you, my husband. May your soul rest in peace. For the peace of my own soul is why I write this letter. How my shoulders yearn for your strong arms around me, just once more as I sit on the floor of this cellar. Now a storage space for summer patio furniture, hats and the junk of our daughter’s young family. You would love Miguel, thoughtful, just like you.

This is my second attempt at this Letter of Forgiveness. The first time was the winter of 1977, just after The Pact of Forgetting was passed. Miguel was in his early twenties; he’d come down here into the cellar for something and disturbed me. But it was still too raw. Now the wound is old and callused over. Now I have the strength for it, dear, brave, foolish husband. I feel you by my side now as I hold this pen steady in my aged hand. How cheated I feel that we did not watch the wrinkles etch deeper year on year in each other’s faces. At least our daughter was spared. I could not have watched her as I was forced to watch Marta Alma Llobet (bless her soul). Here they come again, the tears. I thought there were none left. Maybe after I write this letter the old wound will heal once and for all. They had their fill with us, drank what wine they found down here, stole what food we had left for the winter and drove off singing,

He’s Franco, Franco, Franco
We have a leader
The passages of honour
We will deliver
With no fear of adventure
The mandates of your voice
Maker of our new history
He’s Franco, Franco, Franco

That song, the light tone of their slurred words (like school children singing Christmas carols) still wheels in my mind. At least your brother was not among them. Although I might have forgiven him sooner had he not hidden behind his words and come to take you to the mirador himself.

Franco, I forgive him for unleashing his monstrous shadow over our country. Fascism is the shadow-half of Spain’s broken heart, the soul of our nation split, itself splitting souls as the war wheels rolled away from Villa Rosa.

Marta and I did not dare move for what seemed like a very long time. I see the exact spot, there, by the pipes of the old cistern. I remember the flick, flick, flick of a soldier’s pocketknife by my right ear. I still hear it sometimes, always in my right ear, when the Sirocco blows in from Africa. The Pact of Forgetting could not silence that. I thought he was going to slit my throat with it. When he was finished, I silently begged him to as the next one took his place. And the next. I do not remember how many there were. Maybe The Pact has started to do its work on my memory, but the flick of the knife in my ear, the pain on Marta’s face as she scrunched up her eyes, her mouth, as they pissed on her. And the rest.

You should have gone into hiding, held your tongue after your refusal to send those prisoners of Can Mir to the firing squad. That sealed your fate. A soldier, no matter his military status, has no say. What difference that your brother condemned you a traitor? What difference? You should not have fought with words, dear husband, for those who lack the skill of arming themselves with words will use cruder weapons. Marta and I paid for your clever rhetoric that night. Your appeal for leniency, for a fair trial for those men and women, your pleas for justice to General Franco and his baby snatching doctors became our pleas for mercy. I forgive you, my husband. And I thank you. Maybe one day when the people of Palma tell me that you were a brave man, I will not want to scream at them: In his bravery, he abandoned his wife and daughter to a lifetime of torture. For she may have escaped rape, but she suffered through me. Forgive me, my daughter, for every dark look and every harsh word. They were not aimed at you, but came from my own shame, my own hatred of those singing fascists.

I forgive each one of you. As I sit here now I force my heart to send you, my rapists, love. For that is the only thing I have found in this long, torturous life of mine that can dissolve the pain and the raging beast within me.

And you, Juan Pablo Llobet. Finally, I come to you. You who knew me as well as my brothers, all rounded up in the night, all dead by then too. You, who had laughed and played with us in the summers, who’d eaten at our table when the winters were harsh. You, who I had kissed, just an innocent kiss, just once beneath the two twisted olive trees, the Lovers (followed by a giggle) we called them as children. You must have hated my husband when I returned with that rich, educated Palma man, but could you not find it in your heart to be happy for me? I stared you in the eye afterwards and you kicked me in the stomach and told me never to look you at you again. All these years I never have. All these years you pass through my land with your rake in your hand. Do you think I’m afraid of you, you little man? You killed me a very long time ago. It was only my daughter and now my grandson that gave me the will to live. Otherwise I would have thrown myself off the mirador onto the rocks like your sister Marta did and gone to a watery grave with my husband and best friend.

You took a piece of my soul. And now I want it back.

I forgive you, Juan Pablo Llobet, most of all. For it is you I have hated all these years and in doing so I have been diminished.

I, Sofia Valentina Nadal, forgive you for raping me, and your sister, that night in the cellar and again and again with your eyes every time you passed my house. There is no such thing as forgetting. I will not forget. I do not accept what you did as acceptable, even in war. It was evil. And I, Sofia Valentina Nadal forgive you Juan Pablo Llobet because I will not go to my grave with this hatred in my heart. After all these years, I want peace more than I want revenge.

I forgive the tears I was made to shed.
I forgive the pain and the humiliation.
I forgive the betrayal and the lies.
I forgive the slander and the shroud of shame, under which I was forced to walk the streets of Deià.
I forgive the hatred and the torture.
I forgive the violation of my home and my sense of safety.
I forgive the punches, the beating, the branding and the raping.
I forgive the terrorising and emotional abuse that continues to this day every time you glare at me and rape me with your eyes, and smile with that toothless smile of yours that opens my scar afresh, again and again.
I forgive the wrecked dreams.
I forgive the stillborn hope.
I forgive the lust, envy and jealousy.
I forgive the injustice carried out in the name of war.
I forgive the cruelty and the aggression,
I forgive the rage and the contempt,
I forgive the world and its sins – for they are many.
I forgive Spain, El Padre, for forsaking its people,
I forgive the theft of my husband,
I forgive the destruction of my friend,
I forgive the loss of the sons and daughters I might have had,
I forgive the theft of my soul – and today I take back what is mine.

With these words, with the power of the truth of an individual soul, for an emotional truth resides inside me that no jury, historian or god can deny. I forgive you.

Sofia Valentina Nadal

The Silk Pavilion expertly explores the nature of abuse, the power of victims and Jungian psychology, all while being totally unputdownable. Lean more about The Silk Pavilion here or grab a copy now here.