Requests to remove search results Google received in 24 hours after an E.U. court established a “right to be forgotten” : 12,000 (Harper’s Index, August 2014)
I called Menchú from the Granada train station. Her number was disconnected. In Barcelona, I emailed her. For two summers now, we’d worked at the Sagrada Familia, ostensibly as tour guides putting our architectural studies to use, but in reality scrubbing toilets and directing foreigners to the Barri Gòtic. The second summer, we’d gone up to the Casa Milà rooftop at night, smoking cigarettes and sipping tempranillo. The chimney stacks, smooth stone columns which twisted organically out of the roof into shapes like giant knights’ helmets, unsettled me. Their hollow eyes looked deeper in the dark. Menchú, on the other hand, curled into their warm forms like she was worming into bed.
“They’re comforting,” she said. “They’re espanta bruixes. They scare witches away.”
Most of the other nights that summer were what they’d been before: drinking on the beach, dancing with French boys and losing their phone numbers, Menchú always, always getting me home to my aunt’s apartment, half-carrying me up the stairs and retreating so softly I forgot she’d been there. I never saw where she stayed during these summers.
By my first day back at work, I had still heard nothing from her and was afraid to enter the cathedral alone. I hovered by the entrance with the throngs of tourists, our necks craning upward to take in the towering, spiny minarets.
The first summer, the entire southern facade had been covered in tarps and cables and scaffolding. Menchú and I had practiced making hideous snarling faces at the construction workers who whistled at our asses. There were eight spires, but Gaudí had designed eighteen. Menchú was in love with the half-finished state of the cathedral and had joked that she didn’t want to live to see the next ten steeples built.
I was only a nominal Catholic, but on my first new day, I said a quick, half-articulated prayer in my head that Menchú would be waiting inside, that our third summer would be as good as the first two.
She wasn’t, and my inquiries about her were stopped short by the new director. I rushed through orientations, forgetting everyone’s names, spilling coffee, failing to think of witty insults for the construction workers. The second I was done, I tried searching for her on my phone. She’d never been on Facebook. Her Twitter was deleted. My battery died before I could try Google.
Early the first summer, I’d found her hovering near the basilica on her day off. We shared a cigarette and watched the last few latecomers rush to mass.
“I don’t attend mass anymore,” she said, “but I like that these people do. Is that weird?”
“No. People need rituals. They need ways of remembering themselves. Half of the locals still think some lost Argonauts founded Barcelona.”
“Really?” She ground the cigarette down under one heel. “I don’t know the story.”
“It’s something like, when Jason and Hercules were looking for the golden fleece, one of the ships wrecked onto the coast. Hercules later tracked down the crew and they’d started living here.”
“God,” she’d said.
When I returned to my aunt’s apartment, I tried every possible combination of her name in Google. Frantic, lost in the staggering number of pages the searches returned, I remembered a story she’d told me the second summer. We’d been lying on the cool floor of the nave, a little high because the director wasn’t coming that day, lost in the white tree-trunk columns that surrounded us, in the way their branches spiked and touched one another above our heads.
She said, “When I was seven, I was kidnapped.”
“No. What?” I breathed.
“Yeah. By my stepfather. They found me fast, though. I was only gone for eighteen hours.”
“Only?! Menchú, that’s insane.” I paused. “I don’t even know how to respond”
“It wasn’t so bad. I slept through most of it.”
We fell silent again. She was staring into the circular stained glass windows, like she’d forgotten I was there. Later that night I’d looked the incident up and found an article from an online newspaper in Oviedo. In the photograph, she wore a serene expression which didn’t match the pained, loving look in her mother’s face.
I searched “Menchú Escudero kidnapping Oviedo,” and nothing came back. I tried her name again. Nothing. Everything in me sank toward the ground.
Unable to close my eyes, I returned to Casa Milà. I let the gaping knights’ gazes settle over me and managed to find a sort of comfort in their presence. The cityscape sprawled around me on all sides: crumbling walls from gothic castles smashed up against glistening hospital windows, a Starbucks visible just to the left of the Jardins del Palau Robert. I watched the lights blinking beyond the horizon, all the people dancing and laughing in the warmth of the night, and I saw how one could be trapped by memory, how liberating it would feel to be forgotten.
Lauren Lavin is a writer of fiction who also practices poetry, songwriting, zine illustration, nonfiction and critical analysis. She graduated from California State University, Sacramento in 2015 magna cum laude with a BA in English. She’s previously been published by the Flash Fiction Offensive, The Suisun Valley Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and featured on fictiondaily.org. She lives in Sacramento, CA where she does screenprinting and illustration for Odd Petals.
–Foreground Photography by Jon Damaschke
–Background Photography by Ed Wojtaszek