2023-12-28 05:24:10
Dumping ground for children, refuge for bastards, the never-never land of no return, the kingdom of those who have no parents… History rarely focuses on the darkest threshold of society: the place where minors end up without surnames, no name, no family, no childhood. In four centuries more than 650,000 boys and girlsthe calls ‘children of vice’, ended up abandoned in Madrid’s Inclusa, which was the name traditionally given to traditional orphanages and foster homes. It’s not that Herod persecuted them, it’s that they didn’t have parents to protect them from the monsters.
The novel ‘The seeds of silence: a story of people without history based on real events’ (Kailas) recovers the testimony of some of these abandoned bastards based on real documents and stories, including the story of a relative of the author. Soraya Romero Hernandez (Madrid, 1983), Spanish-Swiss journalist, has poured into this fiction all the research accumulated about her great-grandmother. Gerónima López de la Cruz and about the underworld of the late 19th century. “The majority of these bastard children were condemned to live in the most absolute helplessness, exploited by the families that adopted them and doomed to a miserable life, if not to death,” Romero points out at the beginning of his work.
These precarious orphanages took care of abandoned minors with industrial attention and dedicated themselves to finding accommodation for them in a family that wanted to make a profit from them, both for the money they received for their maintenance and for the possibility of employing them as servants or farmers. «The echoes of the Inclusa of Madrida now defunct institution that constitutes one of the main axes of this story, resonate more than ever today: the profit from fertility and infertility, the judgment and blaming of women for their different reproductive circumstances and the profound distinctions of class in access to motherhood or the decision to renounce it,” the historian explains in the book’s prologue. Carmen Maceiras Reywhose thesis on the subject served as a lighthouse for Soraya Romero Hernández to put together her novel.
The curious origin of the word
The fishermen of the Tiber already complained in Ancient Rome that when they gathered their nets they found numerous corpses of newborns thrown into its waters, while many appeared at the doors of the temples. Some institutions took on the task of saving, protecting and sheltering these children, who in the Middle Ages were considered the responsibility of the Church. In Spain he was especially known for this charitable work the Extremaduran monastery of Guadalupe which many localities tried to imitate.
In 1563 it was founded in Madrid next to Puerta del Sol the Brotherhood of Our Lady of Solitude and Anguisha convent dedicated to the collection of newborn children who were abandoned in the streets, churches or doorways of the capital. The convent of Victory It spread across a heterogeneous set of buildings, linked together by passageways, which functioned in a chaotic manner and always with more minors in charge than it could handle.
The origin of the word ‘even’ comes from the veneration of the Brotherhood of Our Lady of Solitude and Anguish by an image of the Virgin of Peace that Spanish soldiers brought from Flanders in the 16th century. After the capture of the city of Enkhuizen by Spanish troops, the image was found among the ruins of a church and given to Philip II, who in turn donated it to the aforementioned brotherhood. To Madrid’s ears, the difficult-to-pronounce foreign word Enkhuizen became Inclusa, becoming generalized over time to designate all the Spanish foster homes where foundlings were raised.
Detail of the cover of ‘The seeds of silence’. ABC
Although in its first year there is evidence that 74 children were collected, in the transition from the 18th to the 19th centuries it was reached the figure of 1500 a year. Such was the collapse of souls and tragedies that, in 1801, the conglomerate of buildings moved to another building located on Calle del Soldado, today calle Barbieri, which had previously been the Villa women’s prison, and three years later to the nearby Calle de la Libertad. Later, she would occupy a huge mansion at No. 66 Mesón de Paredes Street.
The first stop for the foundlings was the turnstile, the place where the baby was placed, maintaining anonymity and without needing to speak to anyone. A staff member stood permanent guard on the other side of the rudimentary device so that the minors would not wait too long without attention.
Having a strict record of income allowed, if necessary, that a repentant relative could find the abandoned baby.
It was quite common for a note to appear next to the child clarifying whether or not it was baptized, its name, if it had one; and some details about your family’s social class. Having a strict record of income allowed, if necessary, that a repentant relative could find the abandoned baby. It is the case of ‘The seeds of silence‘, whose author has been able to answer many questions about the past thanks to those files frozen in time.
The epicenter of the book is in a wealthy bourgeois family that experiences the scandalous pregnancy of its first-born daughter, which forces it to deploy, to prevent gossip, a web of lies with the aim that the resulting girl would not exist in the eyes of her society. According to the research of the author of ‘The seeds of silence’, her great-grandmother was abandoned in the Maternity House from the Real Inclusa of Madrid on December 5, 1874 and spent her childhood in the care of different foster mothers who were paid by the Inclusa. Due to different twists and turns in her life, Gerónima ended her days in Candeleda, a beautiful town on the edge of Gredos.
In addition, historical figures such as the founder of the Spanish Red Cross, Nicasio Landa; the former mayor of Madrid, José Osorio y Silva, and his wife, Sofia Troubetzkoy; the poet José Martí, the writer Emilia Pardo-Bazánthe pediatrician Mariano Benavente and the Swiss philanthropist Henry Dunant, are interspersed with other fictitious figures to complete this portrait of the Spain of the time and its people.
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