Mercedita´s Daughters

This is the story of the natural balance that exists between Toñi and Reme, two sisters from Elda who revisit a childhood marked by the rigors of the postwar years.

In their memory, Elda is not just a place. It is the neighborhood where everyone knew each other’s name, the house of endless storage, the dinners with neighbors who would drop by, and Toñi’s long confinement caused by typhoid fever. It was there that the story of these sisters grew, a story that began with a woman named Merceditas—their mother.

Merceditas was not one for caresses or sweet words. Life had taught her that affection was shown differently: with a hot meal on the table, and by storing away anything that might serve her greatest purpose—that her loved ones should never lack for anything. She turned her firmness into an act of dignity. “She wasn’t the mother who embraced; she was the mother who held us up,” Toñi recalls.

Merceditas was born in 1915, and by the time the war began, she was 21 and had already spent seven years helping her father run his leather goods warehouse. She grew up and moved within a man’s world, armed with firm determination and an innate gift for the art of exchange. Reme remembers: “…the war was always present in conversations. My mother often told us what she had to do while my father was at the front, in Benidorm. Pregnant and all, she would climb onto a large truck loaded with shoe soles and trade them for food. She was a fighter; she endured so much and struggled so we would never lack anything…but love, tenderness, and communication—those were with my father.”

The sisters soon learned that helping others was not an extraordinary gesture but an everyday habit. Through her example, their mother taught them that the value of life is not in what you keep, but in what you share.

“It was a time of great need and hunger, and everyone who came to our door ate. Back then, it was common to go and ask for help… I don’t remember anyone ever leaving our home empty-handed.”

Over the years, each sister followed her own path, but Merceditas’ voice remained like a constant echo: “What you have, share it; what you know, teach it; what you can, do it.”

These were not words offered as advice, but silent orders transmitted in every gesture.

Today, when they look back, they do not recall so much the harshness as the clarity.

Merceditas did not give them the tenderest of childhoods, but she left them with a compass that never failed them. Thanks to her, they understand that mutual help is an inheritance as valuable as any wealth, and that in hard times, the little one gives may mean everything to the one who receives it.

Reme remembers: “When I got married in the 1970s, the war had long ended in 1939, and my mother gave me a suitcase full of bars of soap and told me, ‘If you have soap, you’ll never go hungry!’ That way of seeing life stayed with me forever.”

The story of Merceditas and her daughters is also the story of an entire generation that learned to endure without luxuries, to survive without losing the sense of community. In a world that now runs faster and looks more inward than outward, listening to these voices is a reminder that the social fabric is strengthened through simple, steady gestures. Life may have changed, but the value of sharing in times of scarcity remains an urgent lesson for any age.

CFC