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On my birth certificate, Christobal Garcia-Ferrea is listed as a painter and decorator, though his occupation has never struck me as the most compelling thing about him. I’ve not seen my father since I was eight, and now – despite my name – there’s little about me that betrays the Spanish heritage I supposedly inherited from him.
Christobal moved to Britain from Spain in the early 1990s. He had it OK here, at first. He was lively, handsome and often enthusiastically in pursuit of a good time, as men in their early 20s often are. Never too far from song, or heroic all-night drinking sessions. He’d met my mum in La Línea, a little coastal city on the Spanish side of the Gibraltar border, though they were back in London before too long. Christobal’s English wasn’t great and work was hard to come by. Things started to slip. His drinking worsened and grew to long periods of absence. And then, in 1999, he made an abrupt return to Spain after my mother’s death from breast cancer.
I find myself thinking about him often these days, in thoughts that range from the grand to the steadfastly mundane. What kind of life he’s led since and how much of him is in me, aside from the obvious facial resemblance. Whether I’d have devoted myself to learning the language had it not been for the discomfort of his memory. And more solidly, how the years since the EU referendum have made the idea of reaching out to claim the Spanish citizenship “owed” to me by birthright more attractive than it ever seemed before.
Sure, I’ve reasoned, it would be nice to fashion the tangles of the past to my own advantage. Every so often in the past few years, I’ve come across stories of people gleefully mining their family trees for long-forgotten Irish grandparents who might be able to confer the benefits of an EU passport. This is perfectly within their rights, even if some recipients are more unbearably smug about it than others. It’s a choice that is often made to seem simple: an easy entitlement, right there for the taking. But for me, the decision isn’t just about interminable paperwork or the prospect of an application fee, but a lifetime’s worth of confusion.
I don’t have the expertise to speak for anyone else, and I can only write assuredly about my own identity. It still feels strange to even consider my “Spanish heritage” as a series of forms to be filed and bureaucracies to be vanquished. The application process boils my and my parents’ histories down to a series of useful coincidences, but it could never give dignity to all the chaos and inconsistency within them. And whatever else is wrapped up with it, the idea of claiming Spanishness can still often feel like a farce. For one thing, my grasp of the language isn’t just shaky, it’s non-existent. In September last year, for the first time in two decades, I visited Andalucía on a work trip. Just being there made me realise how home would always be somewhere else, no matter how much I might occasionally wish otherwise.
Perhaps it’s not quite that simple. To be able to turn back and rectify the mistakes of the past is a common enough fantasy: the chance to do right instead of wrong, or flip indecision into some obscure personal glory. If only the moment of his departure would come again, how clear and easy it all might be. But would learning Spanish or achieving the neat administrative victory of a new passport really solve the confusions about my own heritage, or correct the mistakes of Christobal’s life? It would be useful, no doubt, to retain the privileges of free European movement and the enduring fantasy of perhaps one day spending a year in Madrid if money and circumstances ever aligned. But it couldn’t change any of the things that have already occurred.
I’ve never taken much consolation or pride in the abstract idea of being “European” (just as “Englishness” has never appealed, with its often sour insularity). Since June 2016 it’s been impossible to ignore how rapidly people’s feelings on the subject have intensified. There have been the mass marches and mostly aborted campaigns for further referendums that would annul or overturn the results of the first. This isn’t a treatise on the rights and wrongs of Brexit, a subject of equally epic importance and tedium. But there is something about the hardened core of the remainer cause that has put me even further off the idea of claiming my Spanish citizenship: its blind devotion to a palpably flawed institution, as well as a discomfort in how talk of loving immigration too often hinges on utility alone.
I’ve no idea whether Christobal felt like a “European”, or whether he lived his years here as a sufficiently enthusiastic assimilator to British life. It doesn’t really matter now, as it shouldn’t have done then. I suspect he lived his life as what he was; a slightly overawed, lovesick boy who grew into a drunk, baffled by the chain of circumstances that had led to a new existence on a strange little island under an alien tongue. It’s doubtful whether he was anyone’s idea of a particularly indispensable, or even useful, immigrant. If one really believes in any kind of freedom of movement, then that shouldn’t matter either.
One evening in mid-September, I sat feeling faintly sorry for myself outside a bar in Seville. I’d been in this unfamiliar city for a day or so, at the beginning of my visit to Andalucía. As the evening drew in, more people had arrived, young and old, families and singletons talking in a language I couldn’t understand. It made explicit what I suppose I’d always really known. That it would take more than a new passport to feel as if my Spanish half made sense.
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Francisco Garcia is a London-based writer and journalist, and author of If You Were There: Missing People and the Marks They Leave Behind, to be published in May
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