On 22 April 1984, a sandy-haired, ringleted two-year-old girl named Elvira was driven with her brothers, Ricard and Ramón, aged four and five, to a grand railway terminus in Barcelona. The children, dressed in designer clothes, rode in a white Mercedes-Benz driven by their father’s French friend Denis. He parked near the modernist Estación de Francia and walked them into the hangar-like hall, which had shiny, patterned marble floors and was topped by two glass domes. Once there, he told the children to wait while he bought sweets.
The three siblings waited, but Denis did not return. Eventually, Elvira started crying. A railway worker asked what was wrong and Ramón, who spoke French and Spanish, explained. The police were called, but when they asked the children their parents’ names, they did not know. Nor could the children give their own surnames, or say where they lived – except that, until recently, it had been Paris.
Five-year-olds usually know such basic things, but the police were not overly concerned. Children are not generally abandoned without explanation, especially in groups of three. Authorities expected that very soon, someone – a relative, friend or schoolteacher – would report them missing and the mystery would be solved. They made no attempt to alert the press or appeal to the public for help.
That evening, police took them to an orphanage in Barcelona. Three days later, they were moved to a care home for vulnerable children in the centre of the city. The mid-1980s was an age of faxes, telegrams and hand-delivered mail, so international communication was slow, but police in France and across Europe were now informed of the three missing children in Barcelona.
Days turned into weeks, but no one came looking. Care home staff noticed that when the conversation turned to their parents or the past, the well-behaved children either had nothing to say or walked away. According to one of their reports, staff decided not to push back against what they saw as “a psychological block”.
A few weeks later, in May, an educational psychologist named Marisa Manera saw a photograph of Elvira and her brothers pinned to a board in a district office of Barcelona’s social services. “We are seeking information on these three children,” read an accompanying note. A business card with the care home’s number was pinned to it. Marisa and her husband, a teacher named Lluís Moral, had fostered children before, and they offered the three siblings a temporary home. The children moved in at the end of June.
That summer, the five of them went on a camping trip, staying on the sandy delta of the River Ebro, 120 miles south of Barcelona. The children did not know their father’s name, but they remembered his spectacular cars: a black Porsche, a grey-green Jaguar and another white Mercedes-Benz. When, during that holiday, they saw a white Mercedes, two-year-old Elvira pointed and said: “Look, papa’s car!” as if her parents had arrived.
Months became years. In 1986, Marisa and Lluís formally adopted Elvira and her brothers, giving them the surnames Moral Manera (Spaniards receive one from each parent). “They got the three-kid family they had always wanted,” Elvira, now a slender 41-year-old woman with dark eyes, dyed silver hair and a chevron tattoo on one knuckle, told me. This was shared good fortune, since the children enjoyed a happy, loving childhood. “We won the jackpot,” as Elvira put it. The siblings became a tight gang, living a middle-class existence in an apartment overlooking a greyhound track in Barcelona.
Growing up, Elvira sometimes puzzled over why her biological parents abandoned them, but it did not weigh on her. The adoption was never a taboo subject. Occasionally, Elvira imagined her parents ringing the doorbell and greeting her with a breezy “Bonjour!” Sometimes, at the end of nights out partying as teenagers or young adults, Elvira would ask her brothers to revisit memories of their previous life. The few they had were located in Paris and the French countryside, or on journeys to snowy Switzerland or Belgium. They involved road trips in their father’s cars, a jumble of places and a grandmother figure dressed in black who forced them to drink milk when they stayed with her. But although Elvira liked to hear about their early childhood, she had no desire to search for her biological parents.
As an adult, Elvira learned sign language and began teaching children with hearing difficulties. She was following in the footsteps of Lluís, who had taught children with special educational needs. (Lluís died before Elvira’s 18th birthday.) She held firm to a conviction that when it comes to the way character is formed, nurture overwhelmingly trumps nature.
In 2014, Elvira had a son with her partner, Marco, an Italian eyeglasses designer based in Barcelona. During her pregnancy, as her body changed, Elvira started to feel unsettled by how little she knew about her biological family. What if her parents had some sort of hereditary disease? After her son was born, her curiosity increased – and increased further with the birth of a second son in 2017. (That same year, Elvira and Marco married and bought a flat a few minutes from where Elvira had grown up.) Looking down at a breastfeeding child, Elvira wondered whether her mother had breastfed her, and what other rituals they had shared during the brief time they had together. Elvira’s sons were so obviously, heart-wrenchingly precious to her that she imagined only a life-shattering event could have driven her mother to abandon her children. As Elvira’s sons grew older, she realised something else was seriously amiss. “What five-year-old can’t name their parents?” she asked herself.
In December 2020, she gave herself a MyHeritage DNA test as a Christmas present. She hoped the company’s vast DNA database might turn up a blood relative. To her surprise, it found only a small number of matches in France, and many more in southern Spain. “That was a shock. We were convinced we were French,” she told me. But the results were vague. At best, they showed just 1 or 2% of shared DNA with others on the database, and those Elvira contacted either ignored her or had no information to offer. “That’s it. We’ll never find them,” she thought. Even so, she wasn’t ready to give up. Her quest had begun.
* * *
Elvira told her brothers and Marisa that she had started to try to trace her birth family. Two days later, Marisa called Elvira and Ramón to her apartment for a family meeting. (Ricard was not in Barcelona.) She had something to show them: a few faded newspaper cuttings that she had filed away in July 1984, shortly after the children moved in.
The articles were about a Frenchman called Raymond Vaccarizzi. He was a mafia boss from Lyon who moved to the Spanish coastal village of L’Escala, 85 miles north of Barcelona, in the early 1980s, as gang wars escalated and French police closed in on him. Vaccarizzi ran a prostitution ring and protection rackets, and he was notoriously violent. Late in 1983, he was arrested for murder and sent to La Modelo, a 19th-century stone and brick Barcelona jail squeezed into a densely populated residential district. From the upper gallery of one wing, inmates regularly held shouted conversations with friends and family down in the street.
On 14 July 1984, Vaccarizzi arranged to talk from the gallery with his wife, Antoinette, a French former sex worker. As he shouted down through the window grilles, a man with a rifle, positioned on the roof of a six-storey apartment block across the street, took aim. Two-high velocity rounds struck Vaccarizzi’s head. It was a spectacular and highly professional hit, widely covered in the local press. Rumours circulated that the sniper had dressed as a priest, or used an elephant gun, or been trained by an elite French army unit. Nobody wept at Vaccarizzi’s death. Nicknamed “the Devil”, he had personally meted out vicious beatings and murdered three rivals. After his death, his wife disappeared from Spain. Their teenage son, abandoned in L’Escala, was taken in by a rival mafia family.
Marisa explained to Elvira and Ramón why she had kept the newspaper cuttings all these years. Vaccarizzi was French and shared a first name (or its French version) with Ramón. Some stories the children told – of fast cars and sudden trips – suggested that their parents might have been involved in crime. “Our theory was that you might be his children,” she told them.
“That blew my mind,” Elvira told me, remembering seeing the Vaccarizzi cuttings for the first time. “But anything seemed possible.” When I visited Marisa, a small, neat 74-year-old woman with short, coppery hair, at the apartment where she raised the children – and where her three grandchildren were enjoying an afternoon hangout – she told me that they had even worried that gangsters might be secretly tracking the children.
But Ramón, who is now 44 and lives near Elvira with his partner and infant daughter, dismissed the Vaccarizzi theory. He retained a clear image of their father as a man with “the air of a winner” and whitish hair. As a child, Ramón had once startled the family by blurting out that a pale-haired man on their television “looks just like our father”. The dark-haired Vaccarizzi was very different. Although 38 years had passed, everyone accepted Ramón’s judgment. His memories were Elvira’s main source of clues.
Apart from the cuttings and Ramón’s memories, all Elvira had were the brief official papers registering her abandonment, in which doctors and carers describe her as a normal, healthy two-year-old whose only oddity was a desire to sleep lying crosswise in her bed. These documents created further confusion about whether their origins lay in France or Spain – with Ricard’s name appearing first as Richard (in French) and in later documents as both Ricardo (Spanish) and Ricard (Catalan). The official papers said the children and their father had lived with Denis, Denis’s wife and their children before being abandoned. They had not seen their mother for a while and told care workers that their father had claimed she “no longer loved them”.
Even though the siblings agreed that Vaccarizzi could not have been their father, Marisa’s instincts that the children’s biological parents may have been connected to the criminal underworld seemed plausible, fitting with some of the children’s other memories. When I visited Ramón in a small penthouse apartment in Barcelona, he recalled once finding a pistol in a house where they were staying. He and Ricard started playing with it on an outdoor staircase. Ramón pointed the pistol at his brother, then turned away and pulled the trigger. The gun recoiled as he fired a real bullet. He explained with photographic exactitude the shape of the staircase, the white outside wall and a garden below. “My father was furious,” he told me.
He remembers, too, his father driving them to a beachside restaurant and leaving the engine running while he went inside. They waited a few minutes before he reappeared, bleeding from a badly beaten face. “I recall the tension in the car as we drove off,” Ramón said. Ricard’s memories are fewer, but also vivid: his father parking the black Porsche above a vertiginous cliff; a wood-lined Paris apartment with a view of the Eiffel Tower; visiting his father in a hospital room. They seemed like scenes from a French noir gangster movie.
Her brothers’ memories, pointing as they did towards her parents’ involvement in illicit activities, started to make Elvira nervous. How do you peer into a world so far removed from your own stable, unremarkable middle-class existence? Despite her nervousness, she discussed with Ramón using hypnosis to dig deeper into his memory. But when she consulted psychologists, they told her that hypnosis might produce false memories or kill off real ones. Elvira felt as if she had hit a dead end, a feeling that would return repeatedly over the coming months as she continued her search.
In March 2021, a friend put Elvira in contact with Catalan radio station, RAC-1, and she recorded an interview for an early-evening talkshow, Islàndia. Afterwards, she felt abashed and remorseful. Who would want to listen to her story? Did she really want strangers to know? She asked the show to drop the segment, but they reassured her and sent a digital copy. “I couldn’t even listen to it,” she told me. Nor did she turn on the radio when, at 7pm on 21 March 2021, the broadcast began.
* * *
On air, Elvira told her story straight. She explained the darker theories about her father’s criminal past and asked for help. Even though Ramón was now involved, she felt lost and alone. “I don’t know what to do,” she said. Elvira insisted she was not angry with her birth parents. Rather, she felt sad for them and wanted to uncover the mysterious tragedy that, she suspected, had made them abandon their children.
She did not realise that more than 150,000 people in Catalonia listen to Islàndia. While the interview was still playing, her phone started pinging crazily. People from her past, her work and seemingly everywhere messaged her to express amazement, or ask why she had never told them. Others offered help. She felt overwhelmed and exposed. (Marisa told me she, too, was inundated by calls from friends who were listening. Her blood pressure shot up, requiring an urgent visit to the doctor.)
Many people in Barcelona know the Estación de Francia, where Elvira and her brothers were abandoned. Listeners were touched by the image of the three young children left alone in its cavernous hall, and they wanted to help. In the weeks that followed the broadcast, Elvira’s private quest became crowd-sourced. Volunteers set up a Facebook page in Spanish and French, which attracted amateur sleuths and genealogists. Tips poured in. People approached Elvira with wild theories and false leads. (A former French prison officer, for example, claimed to have stopped off at a bar with her father to drink champagne during his transfer between Parisian jails.) Yet Elvira’s story was already so dramatic that even the most bizarre theories seemed possible. Again and again, her hopes were raised and then dashed.
It was a frantic, difficult period for Elvira. Since it was hard to judge who was trustworthy and who was not, she came to rely on a new friend, Montse Del Río, a 51-year-old forensic doctor who had heard her story on the radio. Del Río had experience as a volunteer tracking down relatives of newly discovered victims of death squads from the Spanish civil war. Elvira’s story struck a chord with her, and she became a tireless ally and adviser, travelling with Elvira to quiz relatives and reassuring her when she felt frustrated or let down. “She always tells me this is a long journey,” said Elvira.
Another volunteer, a French-speaking 54-year-old amateur criminologist called Carmen Pastor, made the first breakthrough two months after the radio broadcast, in May 2021. Elvira’s was her first missing persons case (there have been more since), and it consumed her for up to 14 hours a day. She asked Elvira for the DNA results, doggedly chasing down distant matches and their relatives. Eventually, a distant relative of a woman who showed a 1.4% match to Elvira, and shares great-great-grandparents with her, told Carmen that the story of the three missing children sounded familiar. The woman promised to find out more from some of her relatives and get back to her.
On 15 May, Carmen called Elvira with news. It was early in the morning, and Elvira was celebrating a friend’s 40th birthday at a house in the country. “I think we’ve found [some of] your family,” Elvira recalls Carmen saying. Carmen was waiting for a final call that would confirm it, she said. Elvira remembers this day as one of the tensest of her life. “I’m in shock,” she messaged Carmen. “Can it really be them?” Carmen herself spent the day nailing down details. “It was a heart attack day for me, emotionally charged, full of nerves,” she told me.
By the evening, Carmen had the information she needed. “I’ve just spoken to your second cousin. She explained that there were three missing children, and that the eldest was called Ramón,” Elvira remembers Carmen telling her on the phone. If the tip was correct, her father was also called Ramón and her mother Rosario. They were Spaniards, from Seville and Madrid respectively. Elvira found it hard to trust this information fully – she had, after all, always thought her parents were French.
That night Elvira received a call from a potential second cousin called Lorena. If she and Elvira were truly related, Lorena said, there were many more cousins, aunts and uncles who wanted to meet her. Could she do a video call with some of them? Elvira burst into tears. She called Ramón and told him to prepare for a video chat. (She could not make contact with Ricard, who leads an alternative lifestyle in the Catalan countryside and shuns mobile phones.) Night had fallen when Elvira stared into her phone screen at a potential first cousin called Mari, who was sitting with her mother, Felisa, a potential maternal aunt. They were 380 miles away, living in a working-class Madrid suburb, and belonged to a once-itinerant and marginalised tinker group called the mercheros.
The conversation was dizzying. As Elvira struggled for something concrete to hold on to, Mari placed photographs in front of the camera. Soon Elvira was staring at herself as a baby and her brothers as small children. Then a photograph of an elderly woman was held up. “That’s the old lady with the milk!” exclaimed Ramón. It was their grandmother Inés, who had died in 2013. Most striking were the man and woman who, in other photos, pushed them in prams, cuddled them, threw them in the air, fed them, and sat with them on balconies and beaches, and in parks and cars, including in the grey-green Jaguar the boys had remembered. For the first time since she was a toddler, Elvira was looking at her parents.
Their names were Ramón Martos Sánchez and Rosario Cuetos Cruz. Ramón was elegant, with a broad smile and a thick shock of greying hair swept backwards. Rosario was a striking, dark-haired woman, with long hair parted down the centre and strong, evenly sculpted features. They had been 34 and 35 when the children were abandoned.
On the call, there were tears, warmth and joy. Elvira and Ramón agreed to come to Madrid with Ricard the following weekend to meet their new family. They had solved the first part of the mystery: they knew who their biological parents were. The next question was clear: where were they now?
Elvira had hoped her new relatives might know, but they, like her, had no clue. Nobody had heard from them since 1983.
* * *
The day after the video call with Madrid, Elvira spoke for the first time to relatives of her father in Seville. Her father had been one of seven siblings, only one of whom was still alive: Elvira’s aunt Luisa. She was old and very sick, and she died before Elvira could meet her, just two days after discovering that her nephews and niece had been found. “She was the matriarch. She could have told us so much,” Elvira said.
The next weekend, Elvira and her brothers went to meet her mother’s family in Madrid. During the visit, and in conversations with the Seville family, Elvira assembled some of the puzzle pieces of her past. Her father, like one of his brothers, had become a burglar. (Elvira later found their mugshots in a newspaper, after their arrest in 1973.) In 1978, he fled to France with Rosario after a police shootout. At first, Ramón and Rosario stayed with some of his relatives in Paris, but after Rosario argued with them, the couple moved into their own place. Nobody could recall their address.
Elvira’s new relatives remembered her father, Ramón, as clever, charming, fun-loving. His extrovert Seville family said he grew up in an atmosphere immortalised by a film genre called “cine quinqui” in which young 1970s chancers battle poverty, only to end up dead, in jail, or addicted to heroin. In France, Elvira’s father climbed to a higher rank of criminality, apparently dealing in counterfeit money, jewels and other high-end, high-risk goods. The early 80s was a period of spectacular bank heists in Paris, and it didn’t seem impossible that Elvira’s father had been involved in some of them. Her brothers had memories of a box filled with glittering precious stones, a jar of coins and their father boasting their home was like the Fábrica de la Moneda y Timbre, Spain’s national mint.
Elvira’s biological parents’ first attempts at having children failed. A soothsayer told Rosario not to worry, that babies would come, and they would come in a rush. In France, she duly gave birth three times in three-and-a-half years. Relatives were adamant that Rosario had loved Ramón, Ricard and Elvira intensely. She and her husband kept up constant contact with relatives in Spain, through letters, postcards, photographs and phone calls, and the children were occasionally sent to Madrid to stay with grandmother Inés. But in May 1983, almost a year before the children were abandoned, communication with both sides of the family stopped. Occasionally, a French woman called Madrid, shouting “Rosario” and “Ramón” down the line, but nobody spoke French and the calls dried up. The families considered reporting them missing, but they didn’t trust the police. What if Ramón and Rosario, and their children, were running from the law? The Madrid family consulted another soothsayer, who said the children were OK but the parents were in “a dark place”.
When I met Elvira’s new aunt Felisa for a coffee in Madrid recently, she was delighted to have found her niece and nephews, but bemused about what had happened to her sister Rosario. During their final phone conversation in May 1983, Rosario, who used to ring her sister from French pay phones, had explained that Ramón Sr was very ill, which matches reports from other relatives who told Elvira he spent time in a tuberculosis clinic near Paris. For a long time, Felisa had worried that he might have died, sparking a wider tragedy that engulfed Rosario and their children. “I thought maybe she lost her mind as a result,” Felisa said.
For decades, Elvira had felt comfortable as an adopted child. Yet, she told me, there had always been a part of her that had questions. “Was I older or younger than I thought? Even something as silly as: what is my real zodiac sign?” In the absence of birth certificates, the children’s ages had been estimated, and their births registered in Spain on the closest saint’s day – 25 January 1982 for Saint Elvira. But with their parents’ names now known, volunteer genealogists in France found Elvira’s birth certificate. She had been born in Paris on 29 December 1981. Elvira was delighted, not least because the siblings planned to visit a tattoo artist together and have the Eiffel Tower inked on their sides. If they had been born elsewhere, that would be a terrible mistake. “I told them don’t worry! We’re from Paris!” The Eiffel Tower was inked in triplicate. The other two birth certificates arrived soon after, confirming all three had been born in Paris, though with different home addresses. Ricard had to add seven months to his age, and Ramón 12 weeks. “Finding out the real date moved me to tears,” Ramón told me.
Elvira knows she had a better life with Maria and Lluís than she could have expected with her birth parents. “I would have grown up differently, developing a different personality and values, if I’d been with them,” she said. Rosario had a dark, hard side to her. Someone had said she rarely laughed. “I think she had a tough life, made harder by being always on the lookout or on the run,” Elvira said. She didn’t see Rosario as one of those stay-at-home mafia wives distanced from their husband’s criminal enterprises. When Elvira imagines finding her parents, she pictures herself talking to her mother. “I’d still like to ask her: what was my birth like for you?” she said. “Other people know those things.”
Her father seemed easy-going and popular, but he too had a darker side. His own brother had disowned him because he beat Rosario. He was also a womaniser. Elvira’s brother Ramón recalls playing a game of dare with Ricard, after being left outside a door where their father was ensconced with more than one woman. Which of the boys would be bold enough to knock?
Elvira’s biological parents were not always easy to admire, according to the codes by which she was raised. “To me, my mother is the person who brought me up,” she said. “But there is also something else important, something genetic, a blood link like I have with my brothers.” She still wanted to know why she and her brothers had been abandoned. The photographs depict a close, happy family. What had gone wrong? Elvira hoped that her parents had been protecting them from a greater danger. Before he disappeared, her father had told a cousin he was close to pulling off a major heist or deal. Had he been out of his depth? Or perhaps he and Rosario had reconciled, seen the danger and fled far away?
There were other, more distressing scenarios. Ramón might have killed Rosario. The couple may have been murdered by a rival gang, or died in an accident during a job and been secretly buried. There were many ways her father’s clever, imaginative mind – always looking for the next trick – could have landed him in trouble.
Paris was the last place Elvira knew her parents had lived. It seemed the logical place to continue her search. In March 2022 she and Marco spent a weekend there, and I joined them.
* * *
We had first met in Barcelona a few days earlier, when Elvira told me that some elderly Spanish bar owners in Paris, having been shown photographs of her father by French volunteers, claimed to recognise him. When we met in Paris, she was giddy from talking to them, since they had confirmed that they recognised her father. But when I talked to both bar owners the following day, I left convinced that their memories were false or unreliable. “I might have seen the father on the street yesterday,” shrugged 71-year-old Arturo Sánchez, as we sipped coffee in the wicker chairs of a cafe.
Elvira’s curse, I realised, is that people desperately want to help, even when they have nothing to offer. She carried around a photograph taken shortly after they were abandoned, and the three innocent-looking children, staring up at a camera, melted hearts. Her eagerness for answers, and her anxiety about what those answers might reveal, spurred people to offer hope.
Elvira and Marco had to fly back to Barcelona before they could visit the address on her birth certificate, in the north of the city. I went to look for it, taking with me a 1982 photograph of Rosario in bell-bottom trousers and a turban-like headscarf, standing in an alleyway with baby Elvira. Local people pointed me to a warren of alleys where bijoux homes now sport security cameras. Ramón had recalled playing in front of a fountain that spurted water out of a wall, round the corner from where they lived. A man sweeping his yard at the end of one alley pointed at a house opposite. “They had a wall fountain in the garden,” he said. “But it has been rebuilt, and the fountain has gone.” The find seemed to confirm Ramón’s laser-like memory. It was exactly where he remembered.
In the absence of other clues, Elvira and Ramón could not shake off the thought that the Catalan beach town of L’Escala, with its past as a hideaway for French gangsters like Vaccarizzi, formed part of their story – even if Vaccarizzi himself did not. Had their father worked with the gangs? Was this where Denis had lived when he took them to Barcelona and dumped them? (They had no other clues about Denis, but Ramón recalls he was very close to his father and suspects that he is the man, dripping in gold chains and bracelets, pictured opposite Ramón senior in photographs from a holiday in Belgium.) Ramón also thought L’Escala was the sort of sunny, Mediterranean seaside place where the childhood pistol incident had happened.
In mid-September, I was guided around the town by Jordi Jacas, a local hotel owner. Among the frail, white-haired men and women drinking a late morning aperitif or coffee in the pavement terraces, he pointed out former smugglers, hitmen and call girls. I spoke with, or passed messages on to, four former gangsters, who rang old colleagues now living in Lyon, where many French mobsters had moved. People either did not know, did not remember or did not want to say if they had known Elvira’s father or Denis. Some reactions were indignant, especially if they thought they were being accused of harming three small children.
Three weeks later, I returned to L’Escala with Elvira and Ramón to meet the daughter of a former French mafia boss. The siblings wanted to know if their story rang any bells. It didn’t, but the woman felt huge sympathy for Elvira and her brothers. “I know what it’s like to grow up in that kind of family,” she said. Her panicked father had once hurriedly sent her away from L’Escala with her brother after hearing rumours that a rival gang planned to kidnap them. Before we left, Ramón insisted again that the place felt familiar. “It’s the houses,” he said, pointing to the handsome two-storey villas.
In late October, I drove Elvira from Seville, where she had been seeing her new family, to Tarifa, Spain’s southernmost point. This is where Elvira’s father’s 90-year-old aunt, Manola, lives, along with one of her adult granddaughters and a small, yappy dog, in part of a converted farmhouse overlooking the strait of Gibraltar, with clear views of the coastline of Morocco, just a dozen miles away. This was Elvira’s first time meeting her great-aunt, and it was a moving encounter. Manola wept as she exclaimed how much Elvira looked like one of her father Ramón’s deceased sisters, and she told tales of his spirited nature and how he once escaped from a police cell. Sometimes the conversation paused as great-aunt and great-niece held hands.
“Your mother hit me once,” Manola said suddenly. Elvira had heard about Rosario’s fierce temper and high-handed manner. “I’ve heard her called a bad woman,” she admitted, citing other relatives on her father’s side. When I asked later if she worried that her biological parents were wicked, Elvira was protective. “I’ve asked myself that, but then I look at photos of my father playing with us and think – a real son-of-a-bitch doesn’t do that, rolling around on the grass with the kids.” Good people, she felt, end up doing bad things for many reasons. “You can be a pickpocket, and a wonderful person at the same time.”
* * *
Elvira’s quest has changed her. Early insecurities have given way to a firm resolve to keep digging. “One thing this has taught me is to be patient,” she told me. “I’m not usually good at waiting.” At the same time, she does wonder if she has sometimes been too caught up in her search. “I’ve got a job, family, friends. You can’t just ignore all that and devote yourself only to this.” She said that one of her own sons, hearing the stories about his mother’s childhood, had begun to fret about abandonment. “I tell him this is something unique that happened to me and won’t happen to him,” she said.
At dinner in Seville, the night before her meeting with Manola, I was struck by how well she fitted into this branch of her newly extended family. Rosa-Mari and Ana, two second cousins about the same age as Elvira, with careers as a teacher and a social worker, were there with their children, as was Elvira’s first cousin Manoli, a 55-year-old flamenco dancer. Over the summer, Elvira had holidayed with this family in Seville, taking her children. She had become close with Rosa-Mari, Ana and Manoli, and the four women now occasionally chat together on video calls. Elvira recently told me she was heartbroken to hear that Manoli planned to leave Spain to teach dance in Japan, where flamenco is popular.
The sense of ease and connection Elvira experienced as she spent time with her family in Seville suggested to her that, in the battle with nurture, nature was stronger than she had thought. Why had she always liked flamenco, something so alien to Catalan friends and family? Why was Ramón enamoured of any kind of dance with percussive footwork – whether it was tap or the thunderous heel-and-toe of flamenco? “Your father loved flamenco. He always had it on the car radio,” Aunt Felisa had explained.
The 600-mile gap separating south-western Seville from north-eastern Barcelona is more than geographical. According to the – often exaggerated – stereotype, Catalans are serious and business-minded while Andalusians are happy-go-lucky, festive and superstitious. Elvira felt at home in her biological father’s outgoing, garrulous, affectionate family, and in Seville, even though she found the lisping Andalusian accent hard to understand. None of this changed her tight relationship with her family in Catalonia, but her new relatives and discovery of her biological roots filled an empty space she had not known existed. “I feel more complete,” she told me.
Elvira still longs to know what happened to her birth parents. Ramón Sr and Rosario would now be in their mid-70s. If they were alive, surely they would scour the internet for their children? Elvira knows that the fact that they have never made contact means that they are probably dead – perhaps killed by gangsters skilled at making people disappear. But it doesn’t stop her fantasising that they are out there, she told me.
When Elvira was small and asked Marisa about her birth parents, she always received an answer along the lines of: “You are fortunate. You have two mothers, two fathers and two families, in Paris and Barcelona.” If her biological parents ever appeared, Marisa said, they would all get along. It was a good way to calm an anxious child, but it has also turned out to be close to the truth. Elvira really does get along with her biological family. Her horizons have broadened as she has travelled to spend time with them. And since her father had six siblings and her mother had eight, there are cousins Elvira is yet to meet, though money for trips is tight. “I may have to do this little by little while the kids are growing up, and launch myself fully at it afterwards,” she told me.
Some lines of investigation remain to be explored. Attempts to obtain police files about their abandonment and their father’s criminal past have so far failed, though Montse del Rio thinks Elvira will gain access to them soon. And Elvira continues to be buoyed up by the success she has had from crowdsourcing her search, and by the volunteers who have been eager to help. The kindness of strangers, especially of her adoptive parents, has always played a crucial role in her life. The last two years have validated her faith in such kindness, which she hopes may yet help her solve the final riddle of what happened to her parents.
When I last saw Elvira, at Marisa’s apartment in early March, she and Ramón were preparing to visit L’Escala again. They planned to speak to more people who lived through the town’s gangster period. “You never know when something is going to drop,” said Elvira. “It’s happened before, and it can happen again.”
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