The 15 members of a family of Hispanic-Argentine descendants of Spanish emigrants meet in Antoñán del Valle (León), with Marta García in the middle, carrying a cane. jAVIER CASARES
Marta García Carrillo clears her throat.
Historical phrases are not released just like that and less if you are 84 years old.
Her family respects the reverential silence that precedes the matriarch.
The woman from Rosario wipes away tears from her pale eyes before saying what her mother, Paula, said in 1905, when she was six years old and left Antoñán del Valle (León), along with her mother, Francisca, and her three brothers: “Goodbye, dear people, I will never see you again.”
The old woman bursts into tears in front of her clan, who have returned to León to see the land from which their own emigrated.
Together they make up a story of hardship, exodus and adventure with a special chapter for the great-great-grandfather Antonio Carrillo, who bet one of his children in a card game.
Antonio
the handsome
he lost, but he made the duffel bag and crossed the ocean to avoid it being snatched from him.
Behind him, his wife, Francisca, and his offspring.
Today, his successors have retraced the path.
The century that has passed since that transatlantic voyage has mixed the blood of the Garcias, the Carrillos, and the Serranos with Argentines, Italians, and British.
Most of the entourage comes from Rosario, an Argentine city of one million inhabitants, and has set foot for the first time in Antoñán, a town that depopulation has left in scarcely 150 residents.
In the church of El Salvador of the town, they have placed a commemorative plaque that reads: "Encounter of cousins 2022" and the three surnames of the dynasty.
It had been a long time since the crotoring of the bell tower storks had not been interrupted with accents other than Spanish.
To verify the story of the South Americans, you have to go to the local
encyclopedia
: María Luisa Antón, who celebrates her 86 years sitting on a bench in the sun, protected by a hat and assisted by crutches.
The woman, precisely, recounts with proverbs from her mother that at that time many people from León left for Argentina, which offered them riches in the face of national poverty.
A descendant of emigrants from León shows in Antoñán del Valle, on a mobile, the image of the ancestors of the Carrillo, García and Serrano family on a trip to Spain in 1984.jAVIER CASARES
The visit of the Argentineans has surprised the patrons of the bar, 15 men who compete in the mus and who, through Isidro Cantor, a 59-year-old honey producer and the youngest of the timba, celebrate that the foreigners remember their origin: "I hope they they stayed, Antoñán could use it”.
A bet on cards explains part of the journey of the Carrillo Serrano.
Grandma Marta narrates a puzzle of experiences, odysseys and war stories that her heirs complete.
Dori González, from the family branch that stayed in the province and whose homemade sausages the visitors have tasted, explains how Antonio Carrillo, a veteran of the Cuban War and in a difficult economic situation, left León after risking one of his sons , and lose him and his valuable hands to the field.
.
“[Antonio] promised [his wife] Francisca that he would send them tickets, but it took months to settle down” in Argentina, she says, saying that she was amazed by the courage of a woman who, not knowing anything about her husband, rode her children on a car to Astorga, also in León, from there he arrived by train to Vigo and boarded a ship to Buenos Aires.
“She was illiterate and they helped her with the ticket, they asked her to only go to the port with someone who picked up an equal piece of paper,” adds Marta García, with a crystal-clear memory of her family tree.
That happened many decades before the video calls, emails and other devices that have now allowed them to organize this displacement.
Family investments worked in Argentina.
The long-awaited prosperity arrived, a success that was almost cut short because Antonio was as handsome as he was stubborn.
The faces of the 13 Argentines and the two Spaniards gathered at the table show astonishment and some laughter when they hear that his ancestor found out that he was deceived in that bet that triggered his escape.
So, he returned to León to take revenge on the fraud and, despite stationing himself in the cornfields where the fraudster worked, he was unable to kill him.
"Luckily he came back, he would have ruined two families," his descendants sigh.
This 2022 trip brings together various branches of the saga, with some members who already knew León.
Jorge López, nephew of Argentina's Paula Carrillo, emotionally recalls that in 2008 he finished his chemotherapy treatment the same day he was given Spanish nationality.
The first thing he did, with his son Mariano, was to go to Antoñán without knowing that they would write another page in the family book, which would begin to rejoin after so much back and forth.
In the town, they met their very distant relatives Aquilino Serrano and Dori González, who have a daughter, Mónica.
And between Mónica and Mariano love arose.
They now live in Argentina and have closed a cycle that Antonio and Francisca began in León 100 years ago with many debts and a bet.
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