Three women visit Barcelona for the first time and gawk at everything in their path. They have never set foot in the city before, or taken a train, or worn heels, but the occasion deserves it. The year is 1952 and the Eucharistic Congress, the celebration of the Catholic faith par excellence, is going to take place. The celebrations are the perfect excuse for the girls to forget the plain of their Aragonese town for a few days. But, no matter how much they deny it, the true interest of the trip is not so much the Church, but a doctor, Elena Francis, and her office, which at that time was broadcast on Radio Barcelona and became a mass phenomenon. . On this day, 73 years ago, the public heard that enigmatic voice for the first time.
This is the plot of A Question for Elena (Destino), the new book by Marga Durá (Barcelona, ??1971), which has this mythical character and his program as its background. “I was clear that she wanted to talk about the postwar period but she didn’t want to do it from the same perspective as always. I didn’t live through that time and people who did had already written much more interesting things than I could do. Then Elena Francis came to my mind and I thought that talking about her time through what she raised would make me feel more comfortable,” she confesses to La Vanguardia in the living room of her house, where a transistor that evokes past eras looks majestic. .
He took a look at what had been written before and, to his surprise, “the topic had not been addressed much in fiction. What there were were documentaries that spoke about the figure of the mysterious announcer, such as the recent Elena Francis, the first influencer, and magnificent essays, such as The Letters of Elena Francis —by Armand Balsebre and Rosario Fontova, published by Cátedra in 2018 —, or the one that Soto Viñolo wrote after confessing that the famous announcer did not really exist and that it was he and his team who were in charge of writing the scripts,” he says while showing this latest volume in his library.
Durá admits to having wondered many times how no one realized that “a lady who started giving advice in 1947 and who was supposedly older, was still doing so in 1984. What was she, ninety years old? He was suspicious.” Although he admits that “it was the time when everything the radio said was true. The regime itself cunningly orchestrated a plan to end the image of republican women. From that moment on, a good wife had to be at home, be religious, be at the service of her husband and her children and have no opinions. The new concept of beauty was discretion, and hence the horrible phrase of “shut up, you are prettier.”
The Barcelona writer and journalist admits that “it is easy to see the evidence with today’s eyes, but then there was an atmosphere of totality of the system. Furthermore, even if Francis had really existed and really wanted to help his listeners, she would not have been able to give any advice since it would not have passed the censorship. He was a product of his time and a spokesperson for the dictatorship and National Catholicism. It must be understood that the war ended in 1939 and that by the 1950s there was already a whole generation of young people for whom the freedoms of the Republic were very far away. Some sociological studies explain that even the way girls walked changed.”
To the regret of many and the fortune of others, the clinic was a success. There were many women who wrote daily to the specialist to shed some light on her doubts and fears. “The majority signed with original pseudonyms, such as ‘a broken aquarium’, or ‘a desperate one’, because they did not want to be discovered, although their address later appeared on the sender of the letter. Others were more clever and put addresses for a post office box to avoid any suspicion.”
The author of The Prodigy of Breadcrumbs doubts whether society could trust propaganda like this so much again. “We cannot take anything for granted. On the one hand, we have more information than ever and we are no longer such a virgin viewer or listener. On the other hand, we are seeing many steps backwards lately, such as the decline of the right to abortion in the United States. So yes, as much as I regret it, a program like Francis’s could return, apparently innocent, but ultimately truculent,” she concludes.
