The Photograph

When her grandfather died in the spring, at the age of eighty-six, Elena offered to clear out his attic. Her mother couldn't face it, and Elena, who was a history student at a university in Boston, was curious. Her grandfather, Thomas Bell, had been a quiet man who loved crosswords and baseball and who never talked much about his past.

The attic was hot and dusty. There were boxes of old magazines, a broken lamp, an army uniform and a suitcase full of letters. At the bottom of the suitcase, inside a book, Elena found a black-and-white photograph. It showed a young man and a young woman sitting at a table outside a cafe. Behind them there was a white church and a sign that Elena couldn't quite read.

The young man was definitely her grandfather. He must have been about twenty-five, and he was laughing at something. But the woman wasn't her grandmother. Grandma had had blond hair and light blue eyes, and this woman had thick dark hair and dark eyes. She was holding his arm as if she knew him very well.

Elena turned the photo over. On the back, someone had written: "Seville, 1964. Rosa and Tomas." She frowned. Tomas? Everyone had always called him Thomas, or Tom. And Seville? As far as she knew, he had never been to Spain. The photo must have been taken there, she thought. He might have studied there for a year, or he might have worked there. And Rosa might have been his first love.

She took the photo downstairs and showed it to her mother. "That can't be Dad," her mother said at first. "He never spoke a word of Spanish. He couldn't even order in a Mexican restaurant." But then she looked more closely and went quiet. "He has the same smile," she said slowly. "And the same ears. It's him."

That night, Elena read the letters in the suitcase. Most were in Spanish, which she had studied at school, and slowly the story came together. Her grandfather hadn't been born in Boston at all. He had been born Tomas Campos, in Seville, in 1939. At the age of nine, he had moved to the United States with his father, while his mother and his little sister had stayed in Spain. There had been a family argument, and after a few years everyone had stopped writing. Rosa wasn't his girlfriend. She was his sister. In 1964, he had gone back to Seville to find her. The last letter, from 1965, ended with words that Elena translated slowly: "Write soon, brother. Don't disappear again."

Why had he kept it a secret for sixty years? Elena would never know for sure. Maybe he had wanted to be completely American. Maybe it had been too painful. But there was an address on the envelope, so she sat down and wrote a letter, in her best Spanish, to anyone from the Campos family who still lived there. Three weeks later, an email arrived from a woman called Lucia Campos. "My grandmother Rosa always talked about her brother in America," she wrote. "She kept this same photo on her wall all her life. We have been looking for him for years." Elena looked at the photo again. Now she understood why her grandfather was laughing.