The notebooks, tied with a bow, spent a lifetime in the dining room cupboard.
One day, she tried to explain to them how, in the Great War, she saw the Parisians suffer. "The thing seemed so incredible to us that we laughed at it with the shamelessness of children who think they know much more than their grandparents - says his grandson Josep Vila-. I guess that after that day he didn't feel like explaining anything anymore."
To explain what? To explain the life we miss as young people when we ignore the people who have already lived it.
They didn't listen to her, but she had everything written down and Josep has now untied the knot: he has embroidered a selection of his grandmother's personal diary – Els quaderns oblidats – which will be published by Ediciones Carena. The reflections of the Catalan Cecilia González Carreras (1891-1982) when, under the turbulent sky of that Paris, she served as lady-in-waiting to Isabel Ugarte Vernal, a Peruvian of Spanish descent.
Cecilia arrived one night in 1915 in a Paris immersed in "terrifying darkness". The Germans bombed with zeppelins – later with megacannons and Gotha planes – and fined those who had their lights on.
"The windows were straining and it seemed that even the furniture wanted to go out of place", he wrote down a day of great intensity. "The noise of the cannons is so loud that it seems the end of the world has arrived", he wrote another day. And laziness before the Apocalypse: "What I like is to stay in bed and wait for my fate, good or bad."
He made bets with Mrs. Isabel – who treated Cecilia like a daughter – on whether every noise they heard in the sky was from the German zeppelins or not, and was surprised to find all the neighbors in the shelter "playing cards very quietly".
He detected an undeniable fascination for the war: with the anti-aircraft alarms he saw the Parisians, instead of running, stop in the street to "get a better look at the French planes that were attacking the Germans". She, on a night with a full moon and bombs, went out on the balcony because "she was very curious to see if she could make out anything in the air".
The sirens warned of danger and, when it had already passed, it was announced by the tolling of all the bells in Paris. "It looks like the day of the Resurrection".
The police did not let him approach the bombed buildings. "Ma'am, don't ask me anything, it's forbidden to give any details", a waiter told her. "According to the newspapers - she wrote - there are few bombs that are thrown in Paris and very few victims. And according to people, it's the other way around, lots of wreckage and lots of deaths."
His notes sometimes have the air of Kafka's legendary entry in his personal diary on August 2, 1914: "Germany has declared war on Russia. In the afternoon, swimming class", pointed out the novelist. "We had lunch at the Printemps restaurant. Then we went to the cinema", she wrote after watching a large cannon taken from the Germans. "Miss Isabel wanted to go to the cinema to distract her a little from the great impression", he wrote after a night of bombings.
The celluloid to escape from fear, or delve into it. One day he sees projected "the well-charred corpses" of the pilots of a downed German zeppelin, and another day he sees "stunned" a film of the carnival in Barcelona... "organizing parties without thinking that while they are enjoying themselves there are so many millions that they suffer". Cinema halls full, on occasion, of soldiers "sick of the eyes from the asphyxiating gases".
It is the remnant of the belle époque mixed with the mutilated and compassion. Cecilia used to accompany Mrs. Isabel to distribute money among the needy and wounded soldiers. "One of them only had his left arm," he wrote. When I gave him the five francs, the nurse said to him: 'Thank this young lady who is so good', and he didn't have the strength to open his eyes or even to look at the ticket."
Another day I was walking through the Bois de Boulogne, "full to overflowing, it looked very luxurious, it seems impossible that there is a war".
When he traveled by train he would give up his seat to the exhausted United States soldiers who were traveling on their right foot, and he was indignant at the French, officers included, for not doing so. If it weren't for those Yankees, "the Germans would already be in Paris".
Cecilia went to mass, she was a believer, and she believed that, instead of praying for the victims of the war - "a waste of time" - it was necessary to "work to prepare a home for them".
Her diary has cadences very Ravel, very Pavana for a deceased infanta. He describes the Rue de Rivoli with the broken glass. His compassion towards German prisoners insulted by the French. The afternoon a Russian soldier wanted to tie her up. The night he wished it would snow non-stop so that "this tremendous fight" would collapse. Or a marathon, despite the siege, to go around Paris. "They were running like desperate people".
And the day came – exactly 105 years ago today – when the armistice and euphoria broke out, and she ran to the Louvre department store to buy flags of the allied countries. "People disputed the flags as if they were precious stones".
With pipes in the background, one afternoon the anti-aircraft sirens sounded and all the bells in Paris tolled at the same time: they announced that Berlin was accepting the terms of the peace treaty. "When I heard the siren I got a big shake. Not because it scared me, like in dangerous times. It's just that I was very impressed to think that there would be no more war!".
She couldn't even imagine it, just like we can't even imagine what will happen to us, but those bells were ringing to death: in just two decades, Europe would be even more of a corpse. The world was coming out of madness gone mad. Cecilia went to some shops to see the fashion of the first summer in peace: "I thought it was very strange".
Life was returning and, with it, the usual human attraction towards perdition. "Paris is so big that there are people of all kinds of religions and everyone continues with their ideas without worrying about what others are doing - he noted -. And the most curious thing is that everyone believes that their religion is the best and that the others are crazy or bad".
It is today's International section summarized by a companion in the mirage of 1919.
