Nacre's Promise

Dedication

In tribute to Vincente-Marie,

to Jesus her son

and to Tomas her husband too soon disappeared

whom I did not know

and although this is not their story ...

This is the first volume in a series called "White Lands of Catalonia" and which should contain three.

Here's what inspired this story:

My grandmother when she was 90, had an operation one day which forced her to stay with my parents for several months (femoral neck fracture).

I was 24, and although I saw her quite often, we never had the chance to talk about her life and suddenly we took advantage of it despite the language barrier.

Indeed, she speak only spanish and there were many differences between her local Spanish dialect and the Spanish I had learned at school. On the other hand, she understood  perfectly my words and I was able to ask her all the questions that came to me at the time. His answers were sometimes difficult for me to understand but we still got there because I consulted my father to translate difficult passages for me.

When I was a child, I understood everything, it's weird, isn't it? However, after going through college and learning Castilian (very easily, by the way!) The local dialect had disappeared from my memory and it was difficult especially in terms of vocabulary.

Still in great shape, she had never seen a doctor until this operation and she recovered dramatically. Mistress woman, lively and alert despite her great age, she walked again or rather galloped in a few weeks.

And, as she also wanted to return home very quickly and she died a few years later, it was necessary to fill in the blanks and make a story of it because it is not an autobiography.

So I integrated into an invented framework, all the snippets of the life of my Spanish family. My grandmother had told me many details of her life. I wanted, in a way, to pay tribute to him through this story while retracing the period before the civil war which is very little documented. This story is therefore a fiction but full of small plots of land, characters and history of Catalonia.

This is not therefore entirely her story because we do not summarize a life in a few months, and which I was unfortunately only able to know the broad outlines ... but in this first Volume, here is the story of Isabel .