Barcelona, Never Truly Far Away

By Benny Arnas

I began this search not out of longing, but because there was a part of my family’s history that had never truly been given a place. Her name was Rosa. She appeared only as a fragment, a disconnected piece of story, an unfamiliar name that surfaced briefly and was then quickly closed off, as if dwelling on it too long might reopen an unwanted wound. When I turned forty-two, I felt the time to ask had finally arrived. Not to demand explanations, but to understand how a single encounter in Europe could alter the course of a man from Musi Rawas named Fitra, my grandfather.

The mathematical prodigy left for Zagreb in 1963. At the time, as promised, after earning his bachelor’s degree from the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Fitra intended to return to Musi Rawas and move his family to Java. “As the best graduate, the university has offered me a position as a lecturer,” he wrote in a letter. Yet his academic distinction eventually reached the ears of Sukarno, the nation’s highest leader, who seemed to have only then realized how essential mathematics, particularly in its applied forms, was to building a strong national defense for a country that had drawn international attention after successfully hosting the Asian Games in September 1962.

Fitra was overjoyed that his country still believed in knowledge as the foundation of its future. The state was sending its finest young minds to universities across Europe. “This is a good opportunity, Maimunah,” he said during a brief telephone call from the office of his uncle, a senior official at the railway company in Lubuklinggau. “But can’t you come home first? You have studied in Bandung for five years and returned only twice during Eid. Don’t you miss your family?” The line went dead before Fitra could answer.

Two weeks later, a letter from Fitra arrived. Declarations of love, longing, and remorse were crowded into a single sheet of paper, which Maimunah read while holding a toddler in her arms at their home in Muara Beliti. “God willing, I will provide rice and a little money for food,” Fitra wrote at the bottom of the page, before closing with a tender salutation and his signature, Fitra Muhammad. The name felt hollow in Maimunah’s heart.

Fitra was accepted as a doctoral student in mathematics at the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Science, in the field of pure mathematics, which at the time was often directed toward strategically applicable problems. There was no official nomenclature referring to defense, but everyone understood where such knowledge would ultimately be applied. At home, he left behind a wife and a young child. His departure was described as a duty to the state.

In truth, Fitra did not fully understand and felt a lingering unease. How was it possible to enter a doctoral program without first completing a master’s degree? Yet there was no room to ask too many questions. The Republic was being built, and knowledge was expected to submit to its grand needs. He believed Sukarno had arranged everything so that he could proceed directly into doctoral study.

What he had initially feared gradually faded. The awkwardness and anxiety about being exposed no longer haunted him. More than half of the doctoral students at his new university were, in fact, his contemporaries.

***

Zagreb in the early 1960s was an orderly, cold, and relatively quiet city. Old buildings stood firm, trams ran on schedule, and winter arrived with an almost mathematical discipline. The campus served as a place of work, while the small cafés around the faculty became spaces for breathing. It was there that foreign students gathered, each carrying their own accent, history, and unease. The Cold War was felt as a backdrop, not as an explosion. Ideology was discussed softly, amid curling cigarette smoke and cups of coffee growing cold.

At the beginning of 1965, winter felt longer than usual. In a small café near the campus, Fitra met Rosa María Albaladejo Ferrer, a young woman from Barcelona who believed that the world could not stand firmly without mathematics. Drawn by her overflowing passion, Fitra became curious about the land that had shaped her. For Rosa, Barcelona was not merely a city of origin, but a city that lived in the way she spoke, in the way she named the world, and in the way she regarded numbers. Barcelona, for her, was both light and wound. Sea and factories. Gaudí and the shadow of the Franco regime. She carried a Catalan spirit that never fully submitted, even when far from home. “I once fell in love, but forgot that my lover still carried Franco’s lineage.” The story should have been bitter, yet as Fitra noted in his journal, Rosa seemed already accustomed to bad news.

Their meeting unfolded without spectacle. There was no dramatization. The café was crowded because the cold drove people to seek warmth. They shared a table. The conversation began with academic complaints. About lecturers who were too rigid. About proofs that were elegant yet cold. Slowly, it widened. Rosa spoke about Barcelona, about the noisy Ramblas, about the university she had temporarily left behind, about how mathematical discussions were often more alive in cafés than in lecture halls. She told stories of her father hiding banned books, of a city that learned to speak in symbols because words were often watched.

For Rosa, mathematics was not merely a logical structure. It was a language that survived censorship. It was a way of thinking freely amid restrictions. Fitra listened attentively. Until then, he had regarded mathematics as a tool of precision. In Rosa’s presence, he began to see it as an ethical space. Their conversations moved toward the future of the world. About weapons. About power. About how knowledge is often forced to serve interests it never chose. Rosa spoke with the courage characteristic of Barcelona, a city accustomed to arguing with its own history.

They began to meet more frequently. In the same café, or in the nearly empty library when snow fell. Rosa carried notebooks filled with scribbles. Fitra brought neatly ordered formulas. Between them, an exchange took place that neither had planned. They discussed Gödel and incompleteness, then leapt to questions of love and responsibility. Rosa often slipped in stories about the sea of Barcelona, about how waves teach a rhythm that cannot be locked into numbers. Fitra, who came from a tropical land, felt that sea as a distant promise.

At this point, memories of home began to lose their sharpness. His wife and child in Indonesia appeared as a moral obligation that was never denied, yet never fully present. Letters were read quickly and answered as needed. Fitra convinced himself that this was only a phase. That he was learning, not escaping.

I love Maimunah and our child. But truly, Rosa is everything within this uncertainty.

Reading those two lines on page seventeen of my grandfather’s journal, I found myself imagining my grandmother instead. Fragile, lonely, waiting, yet full of love. Ah.

Yet the days moved on with a new rhythm. The rhythm of conversation. The rhythm of Rosa’s presence, bringing Barcelona into the cold of Zagreb.

I imagine that winter as an in-between space. A space in which Fitra slowly shifted. Not because of ill intent, but because he found something he had never had before. An equal dialogue. A worldview that did not demand absolute obedience. Mathematics descending from the blackboard to the café table, then touching real life. Barcelona, through Rosa, appeared as another possibility. A city that taught that thinking itself could be a form of quiet resistance.

And that, of course, could never be offered by a housewife like Maimunah, no matter how deeply she loved him.

In later years, my family would name Rosa as the cause. As a woman from Southern Europe who made Fitra forget to return home. But the farther I trace this story, the more I feel the matter is not so simple. Rosa was not a destructive storm. She was more like the sea wind of Barcelona, revealing a direction long ignored. What makes someone lose their way is not the wind, but the decision to follow it or to turn away.

At this stage of my search, I do not yet know how everything will end. I only know that his meeting with a woman from Barcelona, in the winter of 1965, became a turning point. From there, the line of Fitra’s life began to drift away from the plans of the state and toward the gray territory of history. And I, decades later, can only follow those faint traces, trying to understand how Barcelona, though geographically distant, could remain so close within the fate of my family.

***

News from Indonesia arrived not as an explosion, but as a small crack that slowly widened. At first there were only fragments. Telegrams with a stiff tone. Letters from ministries that arrived late. Then conversations in campus corridors that abruptly fell silent when Fitra passed by. The name Indonesia began to be spoken more softly. The year 1965 did not arrive with a fixed date. It seeped in.

In Zagreb, Indonesian students began to gather more often. Not to study, but to check who could still be contacted. Whose passport was still safe. Whose name had begun to disappear from scholarship lists. There were no official announcements. Only administrative emptiness. Frozen bank accounts. Letters of recommendation that no longer applied. Fitra, who had lived all his life among numbers, began to realize that politics worked without formulas.

When news of massacres and mass arrests reached Eastern Europe, the face of the republic he had long defended turned into something unfamiliar. The Indonesian government carried out purges against those deemed out of line. Students abroad fell into a gray zone. Neither recognized nor brought home, yet not protected either. Exile slowly found its meaning. Not as a concept, but as a fate.

Rosa understood faster than Fitra. She had grown up under a regime that trained its citizens to read small signs. She knew that when a state stopped answering letters, it was not negligence. It was a decision. One night, in the same café where they had first met, Rosa spoke without circling the point. Fitra had to leave. Zagreb was no longer safe. The name Indonesia was too heavy to carry in such a situation.

The decision to flee was not made with heroism. It was born of cold fear. Of the awareness that returning home meant a risk beyond calculation. Rosa helped Fitra vanish from the administrative pathways of the campus. No more student card. No more supervision schedule. Fitra shifted from a doctoral candidate into a body that needed saving. Zagreb, a city that had once felt orderly, now hid suspicion in every corner.

They left the city quietly. There was no formal farewell. No goodbye to blackboards and unfinished formulas. Only a small bag, a few books, and a haste that left no room for reflection. In flight, Rosa was no longer merely a partner in discussion. She became the one who determined direction. And Barcelona, her hometown, slowly changed from a story into a destination.

In Indonesia, Fitra’s family waited without news. A wife who did not know where to write. A child who grew up with questions that could not be answered. Fitra’s name was never spoken as that of a victim, yet it was not recorded as that of a survivor either. He vanished from the official narrative. Like many exiles, he was trapped between two countries that refused to acknowledge him.

I grew up with that absence. With a grandfather who existed as a shadow. With stories that always stopped short of 1965. Only when I became an adult did I realize that silence was a strategy for survival. That for many families, asking too much could be dangerous. My journey to Europe was an attempt to recover something that had been buried for too long.

Rosa’s traces led me south. To cities that recorded the arrival of political refugees without fanfare. Barcelona eventually became the clearest point. The city held archives, memories, and people still willing to speak. There, I found the final fragment of this story. Not a grand confession, but a small record. A carefully kept letter. Fitra’s name written without title, without status. Only as a human being who had once passed through.

***

Six years ago, I walked through Zagreb alone. The city did not greet me with drama, but with a cold sense of order. Its sidewalks were clean, its buildings calm, as if they had never witnessed people fleeing while glancing back over their shoulders. I did not come to indulge in nostalgia, but to confirm one thing: whether Rosa had truly existed in Fitra’s life, not merely as a family story passed down in half-whispered fragments.

The Museum of Broken Relationships became a point I did not seek deliberately, but discovered the way one finds an old address tucked into the pocket of a coat. Among objects left behind by failed loves, I read a letter displayed without a full name. It was written in clear, restrained Spanish. Rosa was writing to Fitra. Not in anger, nor in lament. It read more like an inward report from someone who had finally understood that love, too, has an age.

That letter was not evidence that Fitra wished to forget Rosa because his love had been in vain. Quite the opposite. It was an acknowledgment that their love had worked for too long, until it finally grew tired. Twenty years of life in exile, moving from one city to another, before settling in Barcelona. Fitra taught mathematics at a community school after struggling to understand that Catalan, rooted in southern France, was entirely different from Spanish, after learning to speak and think fluently in the Catalan way of Barcelona by the third year of his flight. He and Rosa built a simple life, almost quiet, far from Indonesia, which continued to haunt them through dreams.

Yet the letter mentioned something never spoken of in our family. A longing to return home. Not as a political desire, but as a yearning that could not be resolved by reason. Fitra began to feel that home was no longer a concept, but an open wound. He missed the wife and child he had left behind, missed his mother tongue, missed the life that had been permanently closed to him. Rosa wrote that at that point, their love lost its usefulness as support.

At the end of one of the letters, Rosa mentioned that she did not keep Fitra’s daily journals. She had entrusted them to a close friend named Mateo Álvarez, a librarian who lived in the Sant Andreu district, in a small, quiet village called Vallbona, on the outskirts of Barcelona. I wrote that name over and over in my notebook. Not as a definite clue, but as a possible direction.

In 2019, I managed to find Mateo’s former residence. Not as a gateway to every story, but as an incomplete archive. “If your grandfather hadn’t placed them on the archive shelf, we would have thrown them away long ago after his death twenty years ago,” Arnau said, after I struggled to convince him that I was the grandson from Fitra’s first marriage, before my grandfather married Rosa, Mateo’s close companion, whom they had already come to regard as part of their own family.

From that moment on, Barcelona changed from a destination into a waiting room. It became the place where I realized that my search would not end with Rosa’s letters and my grandfather’s journals, which I later struggled to understand because none of them were written in Indonesian. Some were in English, a small portion in Spanish, others in Catalan.

“Do you know where my grandfather is buried?” I asked at the time.

Arnau shrugged. “We have given you everything,” he said, his gaze fixed on the cardboard box of journals resting against my chest, supported by both my arms. “I think that stack of notes should help you.”

The box of journals felt far heavier than its contents. Not because of the aging paper, but because an entire life that failed to return home was folded inside it. In Zagreb, Fitra once believed that knowledge could save humanity from the cruelty of history. In Barcelona, he learned that history still demands victims, even from those who only wish to live quietly. Between those two cities stood Rosa, who loved without promises, accompanied without guarantees, and let go without resentment. I stood at the edge of a strange awareness: that my family was shaped not only by those who stayed, but also by those who left and never had the chance to explain why.

That afternoon, Barcelona felt quiet, even as traffic continued to flow. I held the box of journals the way one holds ashes, not yet knowing where they will be scattered. My search was not finished, perhaps it had only just begun. But I knew one thing for certain: Barcelona was never truly far away. It lived in the numbers Fitra wrote, in Rosa’s sentences that chose honesty over loyalty, and now, within me, as I learned to accept that family history does not always offer a tidy ending. Some stories are created to keep moving, and to keep moving.

Cairo–Lubuklinggau, 19–27 December 2025