Tia Conchita. Speaking of the Sender family, she said, “Well, for some years we had rented a villa in the summer colony of San Rafael — even before your parents met … The air is fresh there and the velvet green forests climb up to the sky. We always rented the same chalet, Villa Frutos, the last one on the road toward Avila.”

Ramoncito! Ramoncito! I used to take you for walks!

Ramón Sender Barayón was born in Madrid during “Red October” in 1934. When the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, he was twenty-one months old, his sister Andrea eight months, and his family was in San Rafael on a summer vacation.

His father, Ramón J. Sender, considered to be the greatest Spanish novelist of his generation, fought with the Republicans led by Enrique Lister against the Nationalists led by Francisco Franco. With the thought that his mother, Amparo Barayón, was safe, she returned with her two children to her home and family in Zamora.

When his father learned that his wife had been arrested and killed, he left the battlefield and found his children through the Red Cross in Biarritz in 1937. He lived with his children first in Pau, then in Louvie-Juzon, both towns in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques in France. In 1939 he booked passage on the USS Manhattan and brought his children to New York. He left his children with foster parents. He died in 1982.

Following his father’s death in 1982, Ramón Sender Barayón, with his sister, returned to Spain to follow a path of discovery and reacquaintance with his family, meeting people his mother knew and meeting people who cared for him as a child. In 1989, he published, in English, A Death in Zamora as an account of his and his sister’s search for an understanding of what happened to their mother Amparo Barayón.

He came to know by understanding the circumstances of the war. He learned that his mother had been imprisoned and killed in 1936 at the age of thirty two, in Zamora, in the early months of the war.

Helen Graham, in her book, The Ghosts of Change, puts it beautifully that A Death in Zamora “charts an extraordinary odyssey in time, space and memory” and that Ramón Sender Barayón, on his return to Spain in the 1980s, “discovers he has a whole extended Spanish family, which emerges like a lost continent, bearing with it the history, the traces, the unquiet ghost of his mother Amparo” and that “This book can, then, be read as a detective story …”

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A photo of Amparo dated June 21, 1929, inscribed “to my goddaughter with love, Amparito.” She was twenty-five years old. Courtesy of Antonio Arias.

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