THE AUGUST HEAT was melting the starch. The inside of my collar had become a damp, sticky rag, the outer tissue kept its stiffness, the edge chafed my sweaty skin. As I pushed my handkerchief between neck and collar to get relief, I suddenly saw before me my Uncle José, sliding a neatly folded silk kerchief between his strong throat and starched collar, while we waited for the coach to Brunete, thirty years ago.
I hated waiting in the heat.
Many people and many things die in thirty years. One feels hemmed in by ghosts, a ghost oneself. The little boy who waited on this spot thirty years ago was myself; but that boy no longer existed.
The old inn of San Andrés was the same: there was the shadowy gateway, the courtyard with the chickens pecking between the cobbles, the little taproom where they still sold wine from a goatskin. I checked the inventory of my memory, and the outlines were identical. But I myself was a little dazed and blunted—or maybe things looked flatter and bleaker in this harsh glare. I used to delight in the shops of this street. The street was unchanged, the same old taverns, the same old shops brimming over with farming tools, coarse cloth, sticky sweets and gaudy color prints for the customers from the villages of Castile and Toledo.
I knew that by the rules of geography Toledo belongs to Castile. Never mind: Toledo is different. It has always been an island in the old map of Spain. It bears the imprint of Roman legions, of the flower of Arab invaders, of knights-in-armor and of Cardinals, royal bastards, who left their Mass for the sword; of generation after generation of Moorish and Jewish craftsmen who hammered their steel, tempered it in the waters of the Tajo and inlaid it with wire of gold.
I had to go there, soon, if I could make myself free to go.
The bus was here at last. Not so very different from the old diligence.
The passengers were taking it by assault as they had done when I was that little boy. It was as easy as then to disentangle the two opposite worlds of the villages of Castile and Toledo. Here were the lean, gaunt men from the meager wheat lands, from Brunete, and their thin, bony wives with bodies exhausted from childbirths and faces made taut by sun and frost. There were the people of the vale of Toledo, from the wine lands of Méntrida, the men a little pot-bellied and hearty, with fair skin under the tan, their women generously plump and noisily gay. I felt a pleasure, which I knew to be childish, in thinking that I was a crossbreed, my father Castilian, my mother Toledan. Nobody could label me, nobody was able to range me within one of these two groups. I looked different from both.
I was out of place. Just as my stiff collar and town suit were out of place among the country clothes of the others. My fleeting pleasure turned sour. The live people around me made me feel a stranger among my own kindred, and the dead who crowded my memory were ghosts.
I took my seat beside the driver. Antonio wore a laborer’s jacket, and when the brakes screeched he cursed like a carter. He was out of place at the steering wheel. He should have been handling the long whip which reaches to the ears of the leading mule.
People sorted themselves out while we coasted downhill. They shouted across the bus—family news, shopping news—and the street outside was full of noises. But when the car changed gear to climb the long slope of El Campamento, the drone of the engine, the sun, the dust, and the acrid smell of petrol enforced silence. When we reached the dun-colored plain of Alcorcón, with its dry harvested fields and dried clay houses, the passengers were dozing or chewing the cud of their thoughts.
So we passed Navalcarnero and Valmojado, and followed the boundary between Toledo and Castile, until we left the main road at Santa Cruz de Retamar, turning east. Now we were on Toledan soil. It is an ancient highway. When Madrid was nothing but a famous castle, this was the great artery linking Toledo with Avila. Along this road people fought and traded. Moorish warriors descended from the Toledo mountains into the valley of the Alberche, to scale the Sierra and reach the Castilian uplands. And from the high tablelands of Avila and Burgos, knights streamed down to cross the river plains and to wrest Toledo, City of Stone, from the Moors.
I knew that I was showing color prints of history to myself. But why not? It was a diverting game.
Now the highway was asleep. Nobody used it but the people from the villages along it, with their carts and their donkeys, and sometimes a lorry with local produce. The road led nowhere in these days. It was merely a link between a few forgotten villages.
On this old warrior route, between Santa Cruz de Retamar and Torrijos, lay Novés. I was on my way to Novés now, and I wondered why.
Of course I knew why. I had rented a house for my family in Novés, and this was the first week-end I was going to spend there, at my “country house.” What had possessed me to take a house at the back of beyond?
I had long wanted a house in the country near Madrid. Two years before, in 1933, we had spent almost a year in the foothills of the Sierra, in Villalba; but I had disliked the shoddy tourist atmosphere. I had wanted a real village for my week-ends. Novés was a real village.
But this was not the real reason why I chose it.
I had no wish to disentangle once more the complicated reasons which I had so often set out to myself. They were not pleasant, but inescapable. Some time ago I had resumed the joint household with my wife, after a separation of nearly a year. It was because of the children, and it did not work. A house in the country at some distance from Madrid meant regaining my liberty to some extent; it would avoid our having to live together. It was also a decent excuse—or what people call decent—in the eyes of others, while it circumvented a new separation which would have smacked of the ridiculous. And it would be good for the health of the children; and for Aurelia, who had been ailing ever since her last childbed. And the weekly rest and change would do me good. I could afford it after all.
Very good and correct reasons. But I would not deceive myself by repeating them over again, even though they were true as far as they went. The worst of introspection is that one cannot stop it at will.
The country outside was drab and monotonous and I was a stranger to the other passengers. There was no escape into contemplation or conversation.
I wondered whether Novés was not simply another defeat of mine, a flight from myself.
There was Maria. Our affair had lasted six years, which was not bad. But I had hoped to shape her to my measure, as I had hoped with Aurelia, a very long time ago. And Maria had developed in her own way. I had failed. Perhaps I was wrong. One cannot force companionship. It was certainly not her fault. But the worst of it was that she was very much in love with me and that she had become possessive. She wanted to absorb me. And that made it so clear that I was not in love with her. The house in Novés meant that I would be able to avoid the inevitable Saturday afternoons and Sundays with Maria.
It would give me a chance to escape from my wife during the week and from my mistress during the week-ends. A most satisfactory state of affairs!
But it was not the problem of the two women alone. Going to Novés meant that I could get away from my weekday isolation into another isolation. The change would be a relief; my isolation in normal life was making me restless. In theory I had resigned myself to a nice bourgeois existence, keeping up the appearances as far as my wife and my household was concerned, spending agreeable hours with Maria, and indulging in my private taste and whims. The truth was that I was tired of both women and had to force myself to play up to them. Money was not really important to me, it never had been. And my ambitions had long been buried—that to be an engineer as well as that to be a writer. When the Republic was young I had cherished political hopes and illusions while I worked hard to organize the Clerical Workers’ Union. But I must have lacked the flexibility one needs to became part and parcel of a political organization and to make a political career. And it was sheer ingenuousness to believe that good will was sufficient to do good work.
Yet I could not seriously give up any of my ideals. I could not settle down to be a contented bourgeois.
I still believed that somewhere there existed a woman with whom I might have a contact beyond the physical, with whom I would have a complete life of mutual give and take. I was still unable to keep my fingers off any piece of mechanism in need of repair. I still plunged for months into difficult technical problems which arose in the course of my work, but in reality had nothing to do with it. I disliked the cheap writing which flooded the Spanish book market and continued to believe that I had more to say than many others. I was still a Socialist.
But I had to carry on the life in which I was caught, or which I had made for myself.
I could feel that I was in an intellectual and even physical deadlock. I knew I broke out in spasmodic explosions, in violent disputes and bursts of rage against all around me. It was because I was impotent before the facts of my own life, and my country’s.
Novés was a flight from all this. It was my total defeat, because it meant declaring myself an egoist in cold blood.
I did not like this label.
It meant declaring myself disillusioned, hopeless and in need of a refuge. That was it.
We were still in the plain, but the ribbon of the road before us lost itself in a horizon of hills.
Antonio nudged me:
“There’s Novés—over there!”
I only saw the line of the road, topped by a gilded ball and cross.
“That’s the church tower.”
The bus dived into a gully and lurched through a village street until it came to a stop in the market square before an inn. The shadows were already lengthening, but the sun was still burning fiercely. Aurelia and my eldest daughter were waiting for me; the family had traveled to Novés with the lorry which moved our furniture.
“Well, how far have you got with the house?” I asked.
“Nowhere, we’ve been waiting for you. The children leave one no time for anything.”
“Papa, our house is very big, you’ll see.”
“I’ve seen it, silly. Do you like it?”
“Yes, but it frightens me just a little. Because it’s empty, you see, and ever so big.”
The men had piled up our furniture along the walls by the entrance, a big heap of bedding, suitcases, trunks, and boxes in the middle. The three children were tumbling about, getting under everybody’s feet.
“Children or no children, you’ll have to lend me a hand.”
“Well, there’s a woman of the village who wants to come and be our maid-of-all-work. You must talk to her. I told her to come along as soon as she heard the bus hooting.”
There she was, flanked by a girl of about sixteen, and a man in his forties. The three stood stock-still in the wide doorway looking at me. The man took off his cap and the woman spoke up for them:
“Good evening. My name’s Dominga and this here’s my girl and my husband. Now you just tell us what you want done, sir.”
“Don’t stand there in the doorway, come in. Now, what do you want?”
“Well, the lady will have explained. As she said to Don Ramón—that’s the one that keeps the stores—you’ll be wanting a daily woman so I’ve come, sir. So if it’s all right with you, here we are.”
“How much do you want, then?”
Peasant fashion, she avoided a direct answer:
“Well, the girl would come and help, and between the two of us, never you fear, we’ll have the house shining like a new medal.”
“But, frankly, I don’t need two people here.”
“No, sir, the girl would just come to help me, it wouldn’t cost you a thing. Of course, if you wanted her to eat here she could, for as I always say, where three eat, four can eat as well. But for everything else there’d only be me. I was in service in Madrid before I married, and I know what the gentry like. And we’re honest, you can ask anyone in the village…”
“What wages do you want, then?”
“We can start at once, that’s what Mariano’s come along for, just to lend a hand, as he’s out of work.”
“Yes, but now do tell me what wages you’re wanting.”
“Well, if it suits you, twenty-five pesetas* a month and my meals. Don’t worry about beds, we’ll be sleeping at home, just round the corner, and if you ever want me to stay a night, you just say so, sir.”
That seemed to be that. The taciturn husband, Mariano, helped me to put up beds and shove furniture about, while the women took care of the children, the supper, and the clothes. The house was a vast old single-storied farm building of no less than seventeen rooms, some of them enormous. In what was to be our dining room, the table seemed a little island in the middle and the sideboard a forlorn ornament against the wall, wherever we put it.
Night was falling. We lit three candles and stuck them in the necks of empty wine bottles. They made three pools of light on the table, while all around them was penumbra, alive with black shadows.
“The best thing would be to light a fire, even if it is August,” said Dominga, and so we did. There was a huge open fireplace, bell-shaped, as large as one of the smaller rooms in our Madrid flat. Mariano heaped dry broom on the hearthstone, and the flames leapt up to man’s height, drenching the room in dusky red and drowning the puny flicker of the candles.
Even when we had distributed all our furniture, the house was empty and our footsteps sounded hollow. Those rooms would have needed heavy old oaken chests, sideboards with three tiers, canopied beds with four heaped-up mattresses, such as our grandparents had. We soon went to bed, in weary silence, but my two Alsatians howled outside in the courtyard for many hours.
I got up early the next morning. Outside the door, I found Dominga, her daughter, and her husband, waiting. The women scurried off into the house, but the man kept standing there and twisting his cap round and round.
“I believe there’s nothing more for you to do, Mariano,” I said to him. I thought he was hoping for a tip such as he had been given the night before.
“Well, it’s like this, sir. I haven’t got a job, so I said to myself: ‘Let’s go there.’ So now you just tell me what to do.” He gave me a look and added quickly: “Of course, I don’t ask for anything. But some day, if you feel like giving me anything, well, then you’ll give what you like, and if not, well, that’s all right too. After all, I can always help the women sawing wood and fetching water.”
There was a cobbled farmyard at the back of the house, with room for half a dozen carts and their mule teams. The mangers were ranged along the walls. I took Mariano there.
“Let’s see if we can’t do something here. Get rid of the cobbles and we’ll try to make a garden with a few flowers.”
So I had acquired a family of retainers. At midday I went to see my village.
Novés lies at the bottom of a ravine scooped out of the plain, and is built on the pattern of a fish’s spine. There is a very wide main street, through the middle of which flows a stream blackened by the refuse of the whole village. On both sides, short alleys like ribs lead up the steep, rough slopes. When it rains, the bottom of the ravine becomes the bed of a torrent which sluices away the heaped-up muck. Then people are forced to use the bridges which span the whole width of the street at intervals. One of them is high, humpbacked, made of fitted stones; it is Roman. Another is of concrete and the road passes over it. Most of the houses are built of sun-baked clay with a thick coat of whitewash. They all look alike and they all implacably reflect the glare of the sun. There is a square with a few small trees, the church, the apothecary, the casino, and the Town Hall. And that is all there is of Novés: some two hundred houses.
I followed the dirty brook downstream, because I had nothing else to do. After the last small houses, the ravine opened into a valley sheltered from the winds of the plain and gently green even in August. On both sides of the stream were market gardens with fruit trees, flowers, and vegetable plots. Each garden had its own well and chain pump. A slight murmur of water and clanking of iron was in the air all the time. A mile further on the valley folded up and the little river ran again through a barren ravine sunk into the arid, dusty plain. This was the whole wealth of Novés. Walking back, I noted that most of the chain pumps were silent, and remembered that it was Sunday. But then I began to see more. Many of the garden plots lay abandoned or badly neglected. There were a few small beds of melons which had been cared for, but the big market-gardens looked as though nobody had worked there for months. The earth was baked in hard lumps. I looked down a well-shaft by the wayside. The chain with the buckets was rusty, green weeds floated on the water. Nobody had used the pump for a very long time. Back at my house, I talked to Mariano about it. His answer was to the point.
“It’s a sin against God, that’s what it is. The men without work, and the land abandoned. You won’t believe it, but something’s going to happen here, something nasty. It’s been like this for the last three years, almost as long as we’ve had the Republic.”
“But how’s that? I know the big landowners are refusing to employ labor nowadays, but here in the village, I didn’t think there were any big landowners.”
“We’ve only got four rich men in the village. Things wouldn’t go so badly if it weren’t for Heliodoro. The others aren’t really bad. But Heliodoro has got them all where he wants them, and there’s a war on all the time.”
He was no longer taciturn, and his gray eyes came alive in his heavy face.
“I’ll tell you something of what’s going on here. Before the Republic came, some of our young people joined the Socialists and some joined the Anarchists, well, less than a dozen in all. I don’t know how they had the guts to do it, because the Civil Guards were after them all the time and beat them up often enough. But of course, when the Republic came, the Corporal of the Civil Guard had to lie low at first, and a lot of us joined. Nearly the whole village is with the Socialists or Anarchists now. But Heliodoro has always been the boss here and managed the elections for the deputy of Torrijos. And so now he’s doing what he’s always done, because before the Republic he was sometimes a Liberal and sometimes a Conservative, but never on the wrong side. And when the Republic came, well, then he joined Lerroux’s crowd and now, because the Right’s been getting strong after what happened in Asturias, he’s become one of Gil Robles’ crowd. And when our lads asked for decent wages Heliodoro got the four rich men of the village together and said to them: ‘Those rascals must be taught a lesson.’ So then they started chucking people out and only giving work to the ones who swallowed the old conditions. Because there are some like that, too. And then, you know how things happen in a village, most of us have a bit of land and there’s always something the matter with the wife, or the garden gets flooded by the rains, and so lots of people owe Heliodoro money. And because he’s the man whose word goes in the village, he got hold of the Municipal Secretary and the Mayor and took out papers against everyone so that he could keep their land. And so things are getting ugly. They were ugly two years ago. People went and messed up the gardens. But now it’s worse, because now it’s the other side that has the power.”
“And the young people, what about them?”
“What d’you suppose they could do? Keep their mouths shut and tighten their belts. When things happened in Asturias† two or three of them were taken away, and now nobody dares to say a word. But something will happen some fine day. Heliodoro won’t die in his bed.”
“Have you got trade unions here, then?”
“We’ve got nothing. The men meet at Eliseo’s. He’s got a tavern and he’s turned it into a Workers’ Casino, and there they talk. Eliseo went and joined the Anarchists out there in the Argentine.”
“I suppose you’ve got a club secretary, or something of the kind?”
“We haven’t got a thing. What the men do is to meet and talk. Because nobody wants trouble with the Corporal.”
“I must go and have a look at your casino.”
“You can’t go there, sir. It’s only for the poor. You’ve got a casino in the market square, that’s for the gentry.”
“I’ll go there, too.”
“Well, then, they’ll chuck you out of one or the other, sir, to be sure.”
“And what are you a member of, Mariano?”
“I hope you won’t get annoyed, but it’s like this: when the Republic came, the same thing happened to me as to the others, we were all for it, and I joined the trade union—the U.G.T. But there, you see, it hasn’t helped us much, to tell you the truth.”
“I’m a member of the U.G.T., too.”
“The devil you are.” Mariano stared at me with great seriousness. “What a mess! Well, you’ve got yourself into a tight spot here!”
“We shall see. I don’t expect the Corporal will beat me up.”
“You never know.”
In the afternoon, Mariano and I went to the “Poor Men’s Casino,” as he called it. The place was a former stable, a huge room with crossbeams, a billiard table in the middle, a small bar at the back, and a score of scratched tables along the bare walls. An ancient radio set built on sham Gothic lines stood in a corner. The billiard table fascinated me; I could not imagine how it ever landed in Novés. It had eight elephantine legs, and eight men could have slept comfortably on its top. The cloth was riddled with tears drawn together with twine. Apparently the table was used for everything, even for an occasional game of billiards; a match was just going on, in which the twine and chance directed the balls. Mariano led me to the bar.
“Give us something to drink, Eliseo.”
The man behind the bar filled two glasses with wine without saying a word. There were about forty people in the room. Suddenly I tumbled to the fact that they had all fallen silent and were watching us. Eliseo stared straight into my eyes. At the first glance, his face gave you a shock. An ulcer had gnawed away one of his nostrils, and a few hairs were sticking out between the livid, greenish seams of the wound. It looked like a biblical, a medieval sore. But the curious thing was that the man was so detached from his blemish that he provoked neither pity nor physical revulsion. Eliseo was in his mid-forties, short and squat, dark, suntanned, with quick, shrewd eyes and a sensual mouth. The way in which he looked me up and down while he drank a sip of wine was a provocation. When I set down my empty glass, he said:
“And you, why have you come here? This is the Workers’ Casino, and if you hadn’t been with Mariano, I wouldn’t have served you.”
Mariano intervened:
“Don Arturo is one of us, he belongs to the U.G.T.”
“Is that true?”
I handed Eliseo the membership card of my trade union. He scanned every page and then called out:
“Boys, Don Arturo is a comrade!” He turned to me: “When we heard you were coming here we all said: ‘Another son of a bitch, as if we hadn’t enough of them anyhow!’”
He left his corner behind the bar to join me, and in the center of the clustering men I had to report on events in Madrid: how the Right was organizing and how the Left was coming to life again after the “Black Year” of repression. The wine was cheap, the drinks were on me and they began to talk. There were great hopes and great plans. The Left would come back into the Government and things would be different this time. The rich would have to choose between paying decent wages and giving up their land so that the others could work it. Novés would have a big communal market garden with a lorry of its own, which would carry greens and fruit to Madrid every morning. And they would finish the school building.
“The scoundrels!” said Eliseo. “Have you seen our school? The Republic put up the money for it and they sent us a beautiful drawing from Madrid of a house with big windows and a garden. But Heliodoro and his gang convinced the Madrid gentlemen that the school should be built out in the plain, above the valley. And there they started building. Heliodoro got a lot of money for the site, which was his, of course, and up there in the dust you can see the four unfinished walls.”
“Next time we’ll build it ourselves, down in the orchards. They’re so beautiful, it’s a real blessing from God,” said another.
“You can’t imagine, Don Arturo,” said Eliseo, “how glad I am that you’re one of us. Now we’ll show them that we aren’t just a few poor yokels. But you’ll have to look out. They’ll try to get you.”
That evening I went to the “Rich Men’s Casino.”
There was the obligatory big saloon with marble-topped tables and men drinking coffee or coffee-and-brandy, a billiard table, and a tobacco-laden atmosphere, and behind it a smaller room crowded with card players. A plump little man, womanish in voice, skin, and gestures, made a beeline for me:
“Good evening, Don Arturo, that’s right, you’ve come to join us, haven’t you? You already know our Heliodoro, don’t you?” I knew the tight-lipped man to whose table I was gently propelled. He was my landlord. The plump little man babbled on: “Excuse me for a tiny little moment, I’ve got to get the coffee ready, you know, but I won’t be long.” Everything was arranged for me. Heliodoro introduced me to the two black-coated men at his table—“Our two doctors, Don Julián and Don Anselmo”—and asked me the obvious questions: had I settled down, had the move been difficult, and so forth. I have never been good at small talk, and this was as boring as any. The effeminate little man brought coffee and asked me the same questions all over again, until one of the doctors cut him short:
“José, enter Don Arturo in the list.”
José produced a fat leather-bound notebook and thumbed it, giving me a glimpse of pages filled with columns of figures and headed by names.
“Now, let’s see. How many are there in your family?”
“But surely I won’t have to enter all my children as members of the casino!”
“Oh, this hasn’t anything to do with the casino. This is our local Medical Aid Association. I put you on the list and it gives you a right to medical assistance whenever you need it.”
“But I’ve got a doctor in Madrid.”
Don Julián grunted:
“All right, if you don’t want it, we won’t put you down. But I warn you, if you’ve an urgent case in your family and you aren’t a subscriber, my colleague here will send you a nice little bill. If you’ve a splinter in your thumb and he lances it, he’ll put it down as ‘for a surgical operation, two hundred pesetas.’”
“And if I call you in?”
“It’s he who makes out the bills in any case. It would come to the same thing.”
“All right, then, put me down. My wife, four children, and myself. Six in all.”
“In what category, please, Don Julián?”
“Don’t ask obvious questions, José. In our category, of course.”
“Five pesetas per month, Don Arturo. And what about your servant?”
“Isn’t she a member of your Association already?”
“Well, yes, she’s on our list, but she doesn’t pay. So she’s been struck off. And if she has an accident at work, you’ll have to pay.”
Don Julián sniggered:
“Say she burns her hand on the frying-pan. For a surgical operation and treatment, two hundred pesetas.”
“Put the servant down, then.”
“Two pesetas. D’you want to pay now? I’m the cashier. It won’t take me a second to make out the receipts.”
José pocketed the seven pesetas and tripped away, to reappear with a pack of cards.
“One hundred pesetas in the bank, this deal.”
He went straight into the back room and sat down on a high chair behind the biggest table.
“One hundred pesetas, boys, if nobody stakes more.”
Baccarat. The customers flocked to his table, the most important looking monopolizing the chairs. José was still shuffling the cards when a haggard man in mourning called out: “Banco!” and put a hundred-peseta bill on the table. He seemed to be the local gambler, for people murmured behind his back and nodded sagely when José dealt and raked in the stakes. A large-boned old man muttered behind the loser: “A bad start, Valentín.”
“Just the usual thing, Uncle Juán. Anything to avoid a change.”
The old man said no more, and the man called Valentín went on staking against the bank and losing. The others rarely played more than two pesetas; they were following the duel between the bank and Valentín. “The same as every night,” said someone near me. People began to play against Valentín, who after an hour announced that he had used up all his cash. José asked for a continuation. The gambler protested:
“That’s not fair.”
“But, my dear Valentín, it isn’t my fault if you’ve run out of cash.”
“Heliodoro, give me a hundred pesetas.”
They went quickly.
“Heliodoro, I’ll sell you my mule.”
“I’ll give you five hundred pesetas for her.”
“Let’s have them.”
Heliodoro was pushing the five banknotes along the table, when the old man who had spoken to Valentín before interposed his hand:
“Don’t sell your mule, Valentín.”
“I’ve a right to do as I like.”
“All right, then, I’ll give you one thousand for her.”
“When? Now, at once?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“I don’t need them tomorrow.” Valentín took the five bills and Heliodoro scribbled a few lines on a piece of paper.
“Here, sign the receipt, Valentín.”
The luck changed. Valentín heaped up bills in front of him and José had to restock the bank with cash again and again. Suddenly somebody opened the door from the street and shouted:
“Good evening!”
José gathered in the cards and his money, the others grabbed theirs, and in an instant all were sitting at the marble-topped tables and chatting boisterously. Horses’ hoofs sounded on the cobbles and stopped outside the casino. A pair of Civil Guards entered, a corporal followed by a constable.
“Good evening, gentlemen!”
José contorted himself, bowing and scraping. The Civil Guards kindly accepted a coffee each. Drinking his cup, the Corporal suddenly lifted his head and stared at me:
“You’re the stranger, eh? I know already that you went to Eliseo’s this afternoon.” He waxed avuncular: “I’ll give you some good advice—no one here will interfere with you, you can do as you like. But no meetings, eh? I want no gentlemen Communists here.”
Carefully he wiped his mustache with a handkerchief, rose and walked out, followed by his silent henchman. I was dumbfounded. José sidled up to me.
“Better be careful with the Corporal, Don Arturo, he’s got a foul temper.”
“As long as I commit no offense, I’m no business of his.”
“It’s not for me to say anything, but it isn’t right for you to frequent Eliseo’s. Nobody goes there except the rabble from the village, and that’s God’s own truth. But of course, you don’t know the people yet.”
Heliodoro said nothing; he listened.
The man Valentín joined us with a shining face and a fistful of bank notes.
“You’ve cleaned up today,” said Heliodoro.
“Enough to make up for this evening, and for yesterday, and if the Guards hadn’t turned up, blast them, I’d have taken the shirt off little José’s back.”
He thumped José’s plump shoulder.
“You wait till tomorrow,” said José.
“Here are your six hundred pesetas, Heliodoro, and thanks.”
“What’s this?”
“Your six hundred pesetas.”
“You don’t owe me anything—well, yes, the hundred pesetas I gave you a while ago. The five hundred were for the mule.”
“But d’you think I’d give you my mule for five hundred? She’s worth two thousand at least!”
“You won’t give her? You have given her. Have you sold me your mule, or not? Yes or no? Here are witnesses, and I’ve got your receipt in my pocket. So there’s nothing more to discuss.”
Valentín leaned forward:
“You son of a bitch—”
Heliodoro laid his hand on his hip pocket and smiled. He was a quiet, inconspicuous man, with taut lips.
“Look here,” he said, “let’s keep things straight and quiet. If you don’t want to lose, don’t gamble. Good night, gentlemen.”
He walked off with dignity, without looking back, but a man I had not noted before stepped up, watching Valentín’s every movement. Old Uncle Juán tried to steer the gambler away.
“Now, you keep quiet, and no foolishness! You’ve sold your mule and you can’t alter it. If only it would teach you a lesson.”
“But that son of a bitch—” Valentín’s eyes were watering with rage—“here’s his tame gunman to cover him, too—”
José went round with a tray full of glasses of brandy.
“Now then, now then, let’s have peace. After all, I’ve lost more than anyone.”
But the game did not start again. Soon afterwards we all went out into the moonlit night. Old Juán joined me.
“We’re going the same way. What do you think of our village?”
“I don’t know what to say. There’s food enough for thought in one day!”
“We’ve been discussing your visit to Eliseo’s in the casino. I think the Corporal only came to have a look at you.”
“But there is no Civil Guard post in this place, is there?”
“No, they’ve come over from Santa Cruz. But news spreads quickly. I must say, I for one don’t think it’s wrong to have done what you did, and so I told the others. But if you don’t take a firm stand, you’ll find life difficult in our village.”
“Now look here, I’ve no intention of getting mixed up with things in this place. After all, I’m only coming here on two days a week, and then I need a rest. But if I want to drink a glass of wine wherever I like, no one’s going to prevent me.”
I knew I was skirting problems, and I felt in my bones that I would not be able to skirt them for long, as I listened to the calm voice of the old man telling me a story I seemed to have heard hundreds of times, only to hate it more each time. Heliodoro was the lord and master of the township. His position as political boss was inherited from his father and grandfather who had been the usurers and caciques‡ of the place. Half the ground and the houses were his, and the few men who still worked their own land were dependent on him. At the coming of the Republic, people had hoped for a decent way of living. A few of the independent landowners had dared to pay higher wages. Heliodoro had proclaimed that people had to work for him at the old terms or not at all; his own living was not dependent on the land. Two years ago, the men had become desperate and destroyed trees and fields on Heliodoro’s property. From that time on, he employed no labor at all, and since his latest political patrons had come to power, he gave no peace to the other proprietors.
“He fixed us with his lorries, mainly. He has got two, and so he used to carry our grain and fruit to Madrid. Most of us sold our produce direct to him. Then he refused to buy any more and our people tried to hire his lorries from him. He said no. They hired lorries in Torrijos, but because the Deputy comes from there and needs Heliodoro, the hire of the lorries was stopped. Then they hired lorries in Madrid, which was much more expensive. They had to pay double, but still, they sold their stuff in town. Then Heliodoro went to Madrid himself.”
Old Juán explained how the fruit and vegetable market in Madrid was worked. A group of agents called asentadores, allocators, had a monopoly on the market sites. They received all produce, fixed the price according to quality and the daily market rates, and allotted the goods to the various stalls. They undertook to sell on behalf of the producer and to pay him the proceeds minus their commission.
“Well, and then, after Heliodoro’s visit to Madrid, Paco, who’s one of our biggest and wealthiest market gardeners, went with a lorry full of big red pimentos to market, and they were a sight for sore eyes too, and worth a lot of money. Pimentos were fetching two pesetas a dozen, and more, at that time. After three days, Paco came back from town in a fine stew and told us in the casino what had happened to him. One after another of the allocators had told him that there was no stall available for his pimentos, and that he would have to wait. The fruit had to stay in the lorry till the evening, and then Paco had to rent storing space. Next day, the allocators told him the same old story, and said that the market was flooded with pimentos, but they offered to take the lot off his hands at five hundred pesetas. He refused, naturally, and so another day passed. On the third day, the pimentos were squashed and dripping juice. Paco had to accept three hundred pesetas for the lot, and out of that to pay his storage, his stay at the inn, and the lorry. It was touch and go whether he would not have to pay more money out of his own pocket. When he’d finished telling the story—you can imagine in what a rage—Heliodoro laughed and said: ‘You people don’t understand business. No one in Novés can sell fruit in Madrid except me.’ And so it was. Now, of course, people have to bring him their stuff, take what he decides to pay and dance to his tune if they want to sell anything at all. So that’s why he lets his land lie fallow while the village is starving, and earns more money than he ever did from the few of us who still work. And that’s why the man you saw in the casino, and who was his father’s electoral agent, has to trail round with him as his bodyguard. Because one thing is certain: Heliodoro will get it in the neck one day. Well, here you are—good night, and come and see me in my mill. It’s still working.”
I waited, hand on the doorknob, listening to Old Juán’s footsteps dying away. They were the steps of a strong and healthy man, beautifully even. While I tried not to lose the sound, my car was caught by the noises of the night. Frogs were croaking in the pools of the dirty stream, cicadas were shrilling tirelessly in the gully. There were little splashes and jumps, and the thin whirring sound of nocturnal insects, and the sudden creaking of old beams in some house or barn. A moon of white metal cut the street into two bands, one deep black—where I stood—and the other aggressively white, gleaming on the smooth chalk walls and glinting on the sharp flint stones. The sleeping village was beautiful in this light, but I thought I could hear the heart-beat behind the white walls, a hidden force.
My house was asleep, too. The flames in the fireplace threw huge, fugitive shadows on the walls and the two slumbering dogs were black heaps rimmed with red. I sat down between my dogs and let myself be hypnotized by the twisting flames.
The house felt empty, as I did.
IN THE NORTHWEST CORNER of the Puerta del Sol, Madrid’s heart and center, begins the Calle de Alcalá, which is its most important street. The entrance is as narrow as an alley. In the peak hours, the two streams of passers-by are bottled up on strips of pavement hardly more than a yard wide. The middle of the street is a single compact mass of cars, broken up only when a tram cuts through; when two trams coming from opposite directions pass each other there, the whole street is blocked. You cannot escape and must let yourself drift with the slowly moving crowd. You are smothered in the smell of burning petrol from the cars, of hot metal from the trams, and of the human beings round you. You rub elbows with a porter and a demi-mondaine, and you have the smell of acrid sweat and cheap heliotrope in your nostrils.
Every time you pass the open door of one of the cafés, a thick gust of tobacco smoke and crowd hits you in the face, and further on you dive through the fumes of the frying-pan in which the tavern keeper of Number 5 fries his sardines under the doorway of his establishment. It is useless to cross over to the opposite pavement. There, too, are crowded cafés and another tavern with another frying-pan.
But the two frying-pans mark the end of your labors. Once you have come so far, the street and its pavements widen, you breathe more freely and can rest your ears. For while you are caught in the narrow thoroughfare you are deafened by tram bells and klaxons, by the cries of street hawkers, the whistles of traffic policemen, the high-pitched conversations, and by the patter of the crowds, the rattle of tram cars, the screech of brakes.
Then the street becomes aristocratic. On its gently sloping pavement twelve persons can walk abreast, the tram lines are lost somewhere in the middle, and on both sides cars can pass comfortably three at a time. The buildings are ample and solid, stone to the left in the palaces of the old Customs House and the Academy of San Fernando, steel and concrete to the right. This is a street of banks and big offices and fancy shops, sprinkled with smart clubs, bars, and cabarets, flashing with neon lights at night. At its bottom end the stone building of the Bank of Spain rises on one side, and the War Ministry, hidden in gardens, on the other. Between them is the wide expanse of a square, in its center a fountain where the goddess Cybele rides in a triumphal chariot drawn by lions and spouting jets of water: silver-gray pavement, white buildings, green trees, and a vast sky whose light drenches and obliterates the foolish architectural details. This length of street, no more than a quarter of an hour’s walk from the Puerta del Sol, is the Calle de Alcalá.
You may cross the Plaza de la Cibeles and follow for a further hour a street which bears the name Calle de Alcalá, but to the people of Madrid it is no longer the same street. It is an artificial appendix whose construction we watched at the beginning of this century. We call it “the other side of the Calle de Alcalá,” to make it clear that it is not our street.
In the winter, the winds of the Sierra de Guadarrama sweep down the street and people who have to pass through it walk rapidly. But in fine weather its pavements are turned into a promenade, and the owners of the cafés put their marble tables out in the open. At sunset an enormous, milling crowd moves slowly up and down between the Bank of Spain and the Calle de Sevilla on one side, and between the War Ministry and the Calle de Peligros on the other, without entering the bottleneck at the top. Gesticulating, noisy groups of well-known people sit at the café tables, and the strollers cluster round them to see the famous torero, or politician, or writer, and to listen to what they have to say. The newspaper boys cry out the evening papers until the street is full of their shouts, and people go on waiting for the later editions. Then they gradually disperse in search of their supper.
During the day everything is business; people hurry up and down the Calle de Alcalá and the revolving doors of the banks gyrate incessantly, their glass panes flashing. But by day and night the street has a population of its own, which seems to live on those pavements: toreros without engagement, musicians without orchestra, comedians without theater. They tell each other their difficulties and miseries and wait for a more fortunate colleague to arrive and solve the problem of a meal for them, for one more day. There are streetwalkers who come and go in the nearest bar, looking anxiously round to make sure that no policeman is near to stop them on their journey. There are flower sellers with their bunches of violets or tuberose buttonholes, assailing the customers of expensive bars and restaurants. There is the man without legs in his little wooden contraption which he propels with his hands; coins rain into his cap day after day, he has never missed a bullfight, good or bad, and Ministers and beggars greet him.
Much later, in the small hours of the night, something like a bundle of clothes lies in the porch of Calatrava Church. It is a woman with an infant in arms who sleep there, wrapped in the same huge shawl. You can see them in the same spot winter or summer. I have watched them during twenty-five years, and to me they were the greatest mystery of the Calle de Alcalá. Were they a phantom, that never grew older? Or was the place a fief passed on from generation to generation in the beggars’ guild?
It was in this bit of the Calle de Alcalá that I had my office.
My room was on the top of a tower in one of the highest business buildings. It was a cage of glass and iron, with only two walls of masonry, one which separated it from the other rooms of the office, and another which joined it to the next house. The ceiling was of glass, big, transparent glass slabs in a framework of steel girders. The floor was of glass, smaller, dim glass tiles fitted into a net of steel bars. Two walls, one facing the street, the other facing a wide roof terrace, were plate-glass sheets in steel frames. In winter two enormous radiators fought against the icebox atmosphere. In summer, the cage was shaded with canvas covers, the huge windows and the door to the roof terrace were opened, and the drafts battled against the torrid heat of the sun on glass and steel. I could see the endless, luminous sky dwarfing the white city buildings, and the insect-like crowds in the street below.
My office was a cage suspended over the city, but I called it my confessional. Here the inventors shut themselves up together with me. We discussed their affairs, lying back in the deep leather armchairs or leaning over the draftsman’s table, and it was often as though I were their confessor.
The humble, visionary inventor would arrive with his drawings in a leather briefcase bought especially for the purpose—he had never used a case of the kind himself and fumbled with the lock—and let himself drop into the armchair.
“Would you mind shutting the door?” he would ask.
I would turn round to Maria at her typewriter and say:
“All right, Señorita, please leave us alone for the moment. I’ll call for you later.”
She would shut the door carefully.
“Well now… I’ve come to see you because Don Julián—he’s an old client of yours, of course—told me I could trust you and speak freely.”
The man would entangle himself in his words, trying to evade the necessity of showing his drawings, for fear of being robbed of the millions surely awaiting him.
What a labor it was to convince people of the fact that their “invention” had been known to the world for years, or that their machine could not function because it was against the laws of mechanics. A few, a very few, saw it and left, bowed down under their knowledge, shattered. You had killed their spirit, and you felt compassion for them. But the great majority looked at you out of feverish eyes, pitying you greatly, and demanded that you should register a patent for them. You were unable to understand their genius. They had come to see you, not in order to convince you of their ideas, but simply to register their patent through you; then they would convince the whole world of their invention.
And since a Spanish patent is a document granted to whoever applies for it in the correct legal form and pays the fees to the State, you had to give in. The inventor was perfectly contented and invited you to lunch with him, and you had to listen to the story of how he had conceived the idea, of the calvary he had passed through, and of his extravagant hopes.
“Imagine,” he would say, “that one out of every thousand inhabitants of Spain buys my apparatus. At five pesetas. That makes one hundred thousand pesetas. And then we take it to America, with a market of millions and millions of people—it’ll be millions of dollars, you’ll see.”
Yet those were the innocents among the many who passed through my confessional. More frequently the deep leather chairs held great figures in industry and commerce who laid bare all their sense of power, all their cynicism: “Business is business, you know.”
A professor of chemistry at Madrid University discovered a process by which hitherto insoluble alkaline earth salts became soluble. His discovery implied a revolution in various industries, and the inventor knew it. There was a side to it which immediately affected the general public. In the process of extracting sugar from beet or cane molasses, only fourteen to seventeen per cent of the sugar content of the solution was obtainable, because insoluble alkaline earth salts obstructed the separation of the remainder. By the professor’s method, eighty-five to ninety-two per cent could be extracted. This meant that from the same quantity of raw material, five times as much sugar could be obtained as before, and that production costs would be reduced to a fifth.
While the patent was pending in several countries, the managing director of an alcohol distillery turned up in my confessional. His firm figured as Spanish, but German capital was behind it, and it possessed a virtual monopoly of industrial alcohol in Spain.
“Barea, I want to see a copy of that patent.”
“It’s still pending, and I can’t let you have it without an authorization from the inventor.”
He handed me a letter from the inventor, authorizing me to give him a copy of the patent and further detailed information. When he had read through the material, he asked:
“What’s your opinion of the patent?”
“I think it’s very interesting. England and Germany have granted it.”
“But do you believe the process will work?”
“He’s demonstrated it to me in his laboratory. I don’t know about its commercial exploitation, but in the laboratory it’s child’s play.”
“Hm. I want you to take action for an annulment of the patent.”
This man’s company was an old client of ours.
“I’m sorry, but we can’t undertake it. We are the inventor’s agents, after all.”
“I know that. What I want is that you should take charge of the affair, that’s to say, that you should handle it without figuring in public. The only one to figure will be the firm’s lawyer. But he doesn’t know the first thing about patent law, and so I want you to direct him.”
“But do you realize that an action wouldn’t have an earthly chance? The patent is solid, it’s genuine, and it can’t be declared null and void just like that.”
“I know all that, but… well, I’ll explain how things are. We buy all residues from molasses for our alcohol production from the Sugar Refinery. The inventor has signed a contract with the Sugar Refinery. That means that, in future, their molasses residues will contain about five per cent of sugar instead of eighty-five per cent. You will understand that we have a right to defend our business interests. As soon as we start proceedings against the patent, the Sugar Refinery must suspend the contract.”
“But that won’t give you the annulment of the patent.”
“Of course not. But the inventor is a university professor. And we have a capital of several millions. The case will go through all the stages of appeal and it will last years and years. The firm’s lawyer gets his fees from us anyhow, so that the only extra expenses will be your fees, and the cost of the action. We won’t get the patent annulled, but we’ll ruin the inventor.”
We did not accept that deal, but we undertook the defense of our client, the inventor. His contract with the Sugar Refinery was cancelled. The lawsuits consumed his private means, a family fortune of some two hundred thousand pesetas. His patent remained valid. But big business had the last laugh. For five years I had to handle that man’s affairs and follow his bitter experiences. A Dutch firm which produced sugar in the Dutch East Indies showed interest in the patent. When this firm had tested the process, it offered five thousand guilders for all patent rights. The inventor rejected the proposal with indignation. The answer was that they only wanted to acquire the patent in defense of their interests—for who would want to put it into practice, with a sugar surplus on the world market and the sugar business in a crisis owing to surplus production? A U.S. enterprise was even more brutally direct: “We don’t know what to do with the Cuban sugar, and you want us to pay cash for the right to produce five times more of a product we cannot sell?”
I felt no interest in the inventor as an individual. But I was fascinated by the economic problem the patent case represented. In Spain, sugar was one of the most expensive of all primary commodities. It was the unofficial monopoly of a trust which controlled the sugar-beet prices and had its strong tendrils in politics, so as to maintain prohibitive customs duties on imported sugar. The sugar-beet growers in Aragon were paid starvation prices for the raw material; the consumer, who had no other choice in buying, had to pay an exorbitant price for the finished product. To the Spanish poor, sugar was a luxury article, and had been ever since Spain lost Cuba. I remembered only too well the frugality with which my mother had measured the small spoonful of sugar for her beloved coffee.
And this was not an isolated case by any means. Through my confessional of glass and steel passed dozens of the big sharks, each with his own special, discreet recipe for multiplying his capital, whatever the cost. To my confessional came men who crossed Europe by air and signed fabulous contracts between the coming and going of a plane. Expensive agents of their masters who kept somewhere in the dim background, they arrived in impeccable clothes which did not always suit them, polished, suave, bland, convincing in their deals, often incredibly brutal and primitive in their enjoyments after business. I had to see them dressed to kill, and naked, in business and at play, for it was my job to be the agent of those agents.
I have met many sane businessmen and industrialists, honest within the limits of their human search for more money and greater scope, and I never believed they were evil just because they were businessmen. But there were those others, those who hadn’t names like Brown or Mueller or Durand or Perez, but who were called the “British,” the “Nederland,” the “Deutsche,” the “Ibérica,” with the impunity of the anonymous; who destroyed countries to increase that intangible, irresponsible power of theirs. Their agents and managers, the people someone like myself would meet, had only one standard: dividends. But to the trust or combine it was important that they should appear legally honest. If it was necessary to bribe a Minister, the firm gave the money, but its agent had to know how to do it in such a form that no one would ever be able to prove where the money had come from.
From my vantage point in the economic machinery I came to know those concerns which could afford to give free shares to impoverished or avaricious kings, and to make or unmake a Government, only to have laws passed of which not only the country at large but often even Deputies of the Chamber were ignorant.
But they were too powerful for mere words to reach them.
I knew who had paid two hundred thousand pesetas for the vote of the highest law court in Spain, in order to procure a decision in his favor in a lawsuit which determined whether Spain should have an aircraft industry of her own or not. I knew that the Catalan cloth manufacturers depended on the mercy of the chemical concern, Industrias Químicas y Lluch, which was nominally Spanish but in fact belonged to none other than the I.G. Farbenindustrie. I knew who had given and who had taken thousands of pesetas to procure a verdict which meant that the Spanish public would not be able to buy cheap radio sets. I knew the intricate story of how, thanks to the stupid blindness of Spain’s barrack-room dictator, an international firm assumed control of the whole Spanish milk industry, ruined thousands of small businessmen, ruined the dairy farmers of Asturias, and forced the public to pay dear for milk with reduced nutrition value.
But what could I do about it?
Those men and those things passed through my confessional. I was a very small cog in the machinery, but the driving power had to pass through me. And yet, I was given no right to think and see for myself; they considered me as complementary to them, as one man more who was starting on his career. And they confessed themselves to me.
At school I had found myself caught in the wheels of a hypocritical educational system which traded in the intelligence of its charity pupils, so as to attract as boarders the sons of wealthy mine-owners. In the army, I had found myself caught in the wheels of the war-makers, shackled by the Military Code and by a system which made it impossible to furnish proof of corruption, but easy to destroy a little Sergeant, had he tried to rebel. Now I found myself caught in yet another system of cogwheels, seemingly less brutal, but infinitely more subtle and effective. I could rebel—but how?
You might go to a judge and tell him that the manager of a certain alcohol distillery was attempting to rob an inventor of the fruits of his work, and a nation of cheap sugar. But the judge did not exist for such matters; he existed so as to prosecute you if you committed the offense of violating professional secrets. Those other things were not an offense, they were legitimate business. The company had the legal right to combat a patent it thought invalid; the inventor had the legal right to defend himself. If he was unable to do so, lacking the millions he would need to fight an anonymous concern during five years of law suits, that was not the fault of the judge or the law, but the inventor’s bad luck.
If I denounced the deal before a judge, he would laugh me out of his presence, and my boss would put me in the street. I would lose my name as a loyal intelligent worker and find all doors shut to me. I would starve, haunted by my family’s reproaches. They would call me an idiot. I might have to go to prison for slander. For slandering those who took the cream from the milk of Madrid’s children, who stole sugar from them, for slandering honorable and decent people who followed their legitimate business.
I thought of all this while I listened to the lawyer of the German Embassy, young Rodríguez Rodríguez. He was explaining the action by which we were to attack the patents for the manufacture of bearings for railway coaches. What was at stake was an order of the Northern Railway Company for several thousands of special bearings, an order which involved a million pesetas or so. The bearings the patents for which he wanted to attack were the speciality of a French company, and the competitor was the German Reichsbahngesellschaft.
Rodríguez Rodríguez was the prototype of a Madrid playboy. His father had for years been the lawyer of the Germany Embassy—and of many concerns of German heavy industry. He himself had succeeded his father, although he had nothing but the title and degree of a lawyer. He served the Germans in a double capacity. The lawsuits he undertook did not gain public attention, as those of greater forensic lights would have done; and he loaned himself to all kinds of machinations with an easy unconcern. Immensely vain of his position, he had come back dazzled from his last journey to Berlin. As soon as we had finished discussing the patent action he proposed, he poured forth praise of German doctors and hospitals as he had found them when he was treated for a broken arm. And then they had made him a member, not just of the National Socialist Party, but of the S.S. He showed me a photograph of young men in black shirts, he himself in the middle.
“Now, what do you think of that?”
“You look superb in uniform… Now, tell me frankly, Rodríguez, what the hell do you want out of this Nazi business? You’re Spanish.”
“Of course I am, and they wouldn’t have taken me if I hadn’t been a member of Falange. It’s an honor to become a member of the S.S., don’t you see? And besides, I’m convinced Hitler’s ideas are right. They’re what we Falangists want for Spain. We need the sort of thing here that Hitler’s done in Germany. Remember what the mob did in Asturias. If they hadn’t been made to feel a firm hand, we would now have a Spanish Lenin and be Russia’s colony.”
“I won’t discuss your ideas about the workers and the Republic, they’re your affair. But don’t you think you’re going to make us into Hitler’s colony, which surely means going to the other extreme?”
“So what? I should be delighted. That’s exactly what we need in Spain—a whiff of German civilization.”
“Now look here, friend Rodríguez—we’ve worked together for quite a few years—you know what’s happening in Germany better than I do. You know what we may expect from Junkers, and Schering-Kahlbaum, and the I.G. Farbenindustrie. You can’t deny to my face, after all we’ve seen, that they are the masters of Germany.”
“My dear Barea, in this world there are only two possible attitudes: either you get eaten yourself, or you eat the others. Of course I have to look after my future. And after my country’s too.”
“That’s why you put on a German uniform?”
“But I’m working for my country that way. It’s not a disguise. It simply means that we are working to make Spain into a strong nation.”
“Who’s working?”
“Our friends, the Germans, and a handful of good Spaniards like myself, who will have to put things into practice. Believe me, I’m not the only National Socialist in Spain.”
“No, I know there are quite a lot of them, unfortunately. I don’t know whether they all have their Party uniform, but they’re in it somehow.”
“Of course they won’t let just anyone put on their uniform, and they don’t make them members like me. But after all, in my position, I’m almost a German subject.”
“With the slight difference that you’re a Spaniard. I know they send you to Germany with a diplomatic passport, and a lot of errands and messages. But all the same, I don’t think it’s good business that you’ve let yourself in for.”
“Time will show. And you’ll change your mind, Barea. You’ll have to, you see.”
He left. I had my lunch and took the bus to Novés.
A little bridge rising in a steep hunchback over a damp, green gully lined with aromatic herbs and populated by thousands of frogs. All around, the dun earth of Castile, cut into parallel lines by plowed furrows. In front of the bridge, the gate of the flour mill, overhung by the grape vine on the wall. The big house a single splash of whitewash, made to look harder and whiter by the sunlight and the background of gray soil, by the gay frame of the vine and the green band of the gully which carries live blood through the dry fields.
I entered the flour mill and found myself in a cool gateway. Light, white dust floated in the air. In the corner gyrated two cone-shaped stones which crushed grain for fodder. The grain steamed under the pressure and a fine vapor arose, greedily inhaled by two patient donkeys at the door.
To the left, behind a wooden partition with a window, was Old Juán’s office. So he said with a flourish, but at the same time he laughed at the description, for he found it difficult to write with his knotty fingers. In his grandfather’s time accounts were cut on wooden slats with a knife, a notch for each sack of milled grain.
He chuckled and showed me a bundle of tallies, polished by the hands which had handled them for many years.
“I still keep the accounts for many people of my own age this way. But I have to keep those damned books as well!”
He led me through a narrow door into the mill proper, and it was as though we had come out of the land of sun into the land of snow. The roof of the hall was some fifty feet above our heads and had big, plate-glass windows. From the roof down stretched a thicket of beams and tubes, wheels and belts. But none of it was of iron, all was wood. And in the course of the years, the fine dust of milled grain had settled in the minutest cracks and crannies, and had clothed each piece in white velvet. It was like a snow-bound forest. Spiders had Spiders’ scaled the heights and hung their webs from rafter to rafter, from corner to corner. The white dust had lined them, and they were like pine branches laden with snow. The panes of the high, tall windows, powdered with impalpable dust, let through a pale winter sun which laid gray shadows on the machinery. The monotonous noise of the rocking cradle which sifted flour from bran was almost like the sound of a lumberman’s saw in the mountains.
“Here you see our whole wealth.”
“This is an old place, Uncle Juán.”
“My grandfather built the mill. He must have been a progressive man for his time, because he installed a steam engine. It’s still there.”
When I looked at the steam engine, I realized what people will think of our own notions of mechanics in a thousand years time. It was an ancient thing with a misshapen flywheel, half buried in the ground, red with the rust of half a century, fretted by wind, sand, and dripping water, chinky, cracked, crumpled. It stuck out of the ground like the skeleton of an antediluvian animal struggling to the surface, its rods the broken arms and its enormous piston the neck of a monster stricken and twisted by a cataclysm.
“I’ve had an electric engine for many years now.”
“And do you make money?”
“I used to make it. They brought wheat from Torrijos and Santa Cruz to my mill. At times even from Navalcarnero and Valmojado. Then Torrijos built a mill for itself, and so did Navalcarnero. It was Navalcarnero that did me most harm, because it’s on a railway line. But you know, what finished us off was politics. Since the time of the dictatorship, one’s had to live on the village, and must be grateful to live as it is. Well, I can’t complain. I’m nearing seventy-five, my sons have their living, and I’ll die here in peace.” He stopped and pondered. “If they let me…”
“I don’t think anyone will quarrel with you. And as you say, when one’s seventy-five, one doesn’t expect many more changes in one’s life.”
“I don’t know—really, I don’t know. We old people see many things, or we feel them. It may be just our inborn fear of dying. When in ’33 the lads went out to the fields and cut down my trees and killed my few heads of cattle and burned the ricks and destroyed the vegetable garden—believe me, it didn’t frighten me very much, because something like that had to come. But then things happened in Asturias and now it looks as if we were all going mad. Things will come to a bad end. To a very bad end. And very soon too, Don Arturo. The people are starving, and hunger is a bad counselor…
“There’s nothing but misery in the village. The half-dozen people who could give work to the others won’t do it, some out of anger and some out of fear of Heliodoro. The land lies fallow and the people haven’t got enough to eat. Don Ramón, God bless him—”
“Who’s Don Ramón?”
“He’s the village grocer. You must have seen his shop behind the casino. He’s a good, kind man, only he’s crazy about the Church, and it’s just as if they’d bewitched him. Don Ramón is one of the best—which doesn’t mean that he wouldn’t give you a few grammes under weight, though. Well, it used to be like this: every time anybody came to him and said: ‘Don Ramón, do let me have some beans, or a bit of dried cod, and bread, and I’ll pay you as soon as my husband starts working again,’ he let the woman have something and put it down in his books. If they paid him, it was all right, but they often didn’t or couldn’t. When people had some misfortune, or when somebody in their family died, he took his pencil and ran it through the account: ‘Don’t worry, woman, that’s settled. And may God forgive me, as He may forgive the one who’s dead.’ But then, between Heliodoro and Don Lucas—”
“Now, who’s your Don Lucas?”
“Our priest, and he’s one of the sharp kind. I was going to say, between the two of them, they’ve won him over, and now he doesn’t give a breadcrumb to the poor any more. Because Don Lucas told him it was a mortal sin to help the godless, and Heliodoro said it was necessary to get a tight grip on those rascals, and if Don Ramón wanted to help them, he—Heliodoro—would get a tight grip on Don Ramón.”
He made a long pause.
“The worst of it is that the people take it all in silence. In the morning they sit down in the plaza, on the stone wall along the road, and keep silent. In the evening they go to Eliseo’s Casino and keep silent there. In ’33 a few of them came near my mill, but they had some respect for me and knew they could always get a piece of bread in my house when they needed it, and so they went away again. But next time they come—and they will come—I don’t know… For they’ll come soon. You’ll see.”
Suddenly, Old Juán’s pride as a host swept away his pessimism. He took an old earthenware Talavera jug, ingenuous blue flowers on a milky ground, and led me to a huge wine jar stowed away in a small room.
“Let’s have a drink. You won’t get another like it in Madrid.”
Slowly we drank the cool, rough wine which frothed in purple bubbles against the glaze. We handed each other the jug and drank from the same side, as in an ancestral peace rite.
Aurelia was in a bad temper that day. After lunch we took the children for a walk in the orchards. She had prepared a snack which we went to eat by a stream at the bottom of the green gully. But her face did not change. In the end, she said:
“This village is so boring.”
“What’s the matter now?”
“Nothing. It’s just as if we belonged to a different race.”
“Well, what’s happened now?”
“Nothing has happened, exactly. But you must see that those people are boycotting us. Because of course the better families in the village know by now that you’re a Socialist and don’t go to Mass and are seen in Eliseo’s Casino. And naturally, all one gets in the street is a ‘Good morning,’ if that. And you must understand that I won’t make friends with the country people.”
“Why not? I should like you to.”
“You would. But I think you ought to preserve your standing and—”
“And what? Go to the parties of the Reverend Father and invite Heliodoro’s wife to our house? I’m sorry, but I won’t. You can do as you like, but I haven’t come here to go to parties.”
“Of course, you go away early on Mondays, and I stay here the whole week long.”
We grew sharp and bitter, both of us. The rest of Sunday passed in heavy boredom. When I left to catch my bus on Monday morning, the whole house was sleeping. I went away with a sense of liberation.
I WAS ABOUT TO FINISH SIGNING my bunch of letters. It was the pleasantest hour in the confessional. The sun had sunk behind the tall buildings on the top of the Calle de Alcalá. A cool breeze blew into my room and made the canvas curtains belly and crackle. In the street down below, people began to cluster for their daily stroll. The noise of the beehive came up as a dull drone punctuated by the cries of the newspaper boys selling the early evening papers, the shrill tinkle of tramway bells and the bark of klaxons. It was a noise we no longer heard, but which was there, day after day.
When a sudden silence fell, it was so strong and unexpected that I stopped writing. Maria interrupted her typing and turned her head. The typewriters in the outer office stopped. It lasted only an instant. Then a shot sounded, and it was followed by a deafening roar from the multitude. Amidst the shouts I caught the sound of people running in all directions and of iron shutters being pulled down with a clatter. Then came a few more shots and the musical note of breaking glass. We ran out on to the roof terrace.
A wide space in the street below was deserted. At the fringe of this sudden void, crowds of people were running madly. Opposite us, at the corner of the Phoenix Building, some half-dozen people were leaning over a bundle on the ground. It looked ludicrous from our height. We could see the street in its full length. At our feet it widened into a sort of square, where the Gran Vía and the Calle de Caballero de Gracia joined it. Some cars were standing, probably abandoned by their occupants, and a tram had stopped and was quite empty. From our altitude the men in the little group were soundless and small, they were gesticulating like puppets in a show. Two of them lifted a still smaller figure, doubled up at the waist. A stain was left on the gray asphalt of the pavement. It looked black. A heap of newspapers beside it flapped in the wind.
Shock Police§ arrived in an open lorry. The men clambered swiftly out, truncheon in hand, as though they intended to attack the lonely group. A taxi appeared in the still square. The wounded man and those who supported him boarded it, and the taxi sped up the street. The Shock Police hurried to the doors of the cafés. People again flooded into the street and formed groups which the police dispersed.
I finished my mail and we all went downstairs. But police stopped us on the first floor of the building. The Café La Granja had a door which opened on to our staircase, and there the police had been posted. They demanded identity papers and searched all of us. When we reached the front door, we found the wife of the concierge sitting on a chair and recovering from an attack of nerves under her husband’s care, while a police officer took notes. There was an intense smell of ether in the air. The woman was saying:
“I was just standing in the doorway and looking at the people walking past until the lads came who sell the Mundo Obrero. ‘Now there’ll be a row as usual,’ I said to myself. Because the young gentlemen of F.E. were already standing in the door of the café with their papers and their sticks. But nothing happened. The boys with the Mundo Obrero came running and crying out their paper just as they do every day, and then the young gentlemen started crying out their F.E., but nobody paid much attention. So it looked as if nothing was going to happen this time, until one of the lads of the Mundo Obrero stopped here at the corner with two of his friends. And then a group of four or five of the others came up at once and pulled away his papers, and they came to blows. The people all around ran away, and then one of the young gentlemen drew something out of his pocket and shot the lad with the papers. Then everyone ran away and the poor boy was left lying because he couldn’t get up.”
For weeks, it had been a daily occurrence that the Falangists waited for the Communist paper to appear in the streets, and then began to cry out their own review, F.E. The people who sold those papers were not professional newspaper vendors but volunteers from each party. After a few moments the two groups would be involved in a row which ended in faces being slapped, in an occasional broken head, and, inevitably, in soiled and trodden newspapers scattered all over the pavement. Timorous people would feel frightened and hurry off, but as a rule the passers-by considered these scenes a stimulating spectacle in which they themselves often felt moved to take a hand.
This time it was serious.
The next afternoon, signs of unrest became visible from half-past five onwards. Workers who had finished in their shops at five seemed to have agreed to meet in the Calle de Alcalá. You could see them arrive and walk up and down in little groups with their meal packets under their arm, exhibiting themselves provocatively between the tables on the terrace of the Aquarium, the smart café in which the bigwigs of Falange met. The number of police posts had been increased; people were made to pass on. You could see groups of Falangists passing groups of workers, exchanging looks and mumbling insults. The conflict was still to come.
When the first shouts of Mundo Obrero came, they were answered by shouts of F.E. For a few minutes, the cries filled the street with their challenge, and the supporters of each party flocked round their newspaper sellers to buy a copy. Suddenly one of the groups—from our altitude we could not see which—scattered; there was a scuffle, and at once the whole street became a battlefield. The Shock Police hit out with their truncheons at everyone within their reach.
Very soon the superior strength of the workers became clear, and a group of Falangists took refuge in the Aquarium. All the window panes in the door of the café were smashed. Glass showered on the pavement, and broken chairs and tables rolled on the ground. A carload of Shock Police fell upon the assailants. Once more the Calle de Alcalá was left deserted except for the Shock Police and a few passers-by who hurried through.
After supper I went to the People’s House. In the half-empty café I found a group of men I knew, discussing the events of the evening and the day before. When each one had made an excited speech, an elderly man said:
“The worst of it is that all these violent happenings are only cooking the stew for the benefit of the Communists.”
“So what—are you afraid of them?” said another mockingly.
“I’m not afraid, but what I see is that they’re getting into our own ranks. To the Falangists everyone is a Communist, and of course we’ll defend ourselves when they hit out at us. But at the same time we have to tell people to be patient, and so they go over to the Communists.”
“Well, you’re one of Besteiro’s reformists, aren’t you? You believe that things can be settled with velvet gloves. And that’s a mistake. The Right is united—and we pull in all directions, each group on its own, and what’s worse, each of us calls the others dirty dogs. The whole thing’s mucked up.”
The man who spoke banged a bundle of papers down on the table.
“Just read this, they’re all our papers, Left papers. And what’s in them? The Communists attacking the Anarchists, and the other way round. Largo Caballero together with Araquistain attacking Prieto, and the other way round. I’ll leave out Besteiro, because nobody listens to him any more, and anyhow he never talks about revolution in the streets. But all those others talk about it, each about his own brand of revolution. If we don’t get together quickly, the same thing will happen here as happened in Austria: Gil Robles and Calvo Sotelo dictators, and the Vatican dictating.”
“That won’t be so easy. The people will rise as they did in Asturias.”
“And the same thing will happen as happened then, or worse, don’t you see? Don’t think I’m talking of what might happen on the moon. That old ditherer, Chapaprieta, won’t be able to save his Government, and as soon as they’ve got him to resign—as they will—our dear Mr. President, old ‘Boots,’ will have to do one of two things, either make Gil Robles Premier, or dissolve the Cortes. And he won’t dare to dissolve the Cortes, because it would cost him his job, whether the others win the elections or we do.”
I did not take much part in the discussion, but I thought the pessimist was largely right. I was afraid he was right.
The then Premier, Chapaprieta, was clearly the head of a transition Government, intended to mark time. He was a man without the backing of a political party, without a majority in the Cortes, in office only to steer the Budgets through. Gil Robles, the leader of the Right, would not fail to exploit the opportunity of bringing things to a head.
It was the most favorable situation for the parties of the Spanish Right. The parties of the Left were utterly disunited. It was not so much a disagreement between Republicans pure and simple and Socialists or Anarchists, but the deep split which followed from the fight for the masses in which each Left party had staked its bid. Azaña, the leader of the Left Republicans, commanded a large section of the middle class and could hope to win over a considerable part of the workers. The Socialist trade unions of the U.G.T. controlled a million and a half workers, the Anarchist unions of the C.N.T. the same number or more. The number of adherents was difficult to establish exactly, and the boundaries of influence were shifting. And both fought for the decisive influence among the workers. But there was also a struggle within each of the organizations. Officially, the U.G.T. acknowledged the principles of the Socialist Party, the C.N.T. those of the Anarchist. The opinions among their members were not always governed by the official line. The Socialist Party itself, and with it the trade unions under its influence, were divided into a left wing under Largo Caballero, a center under Indalecio Prieto, and a right wing under Besteiro. The C.N.T. was split, less clearly but no less deeply, into the supporters of “direct action” and the supporters of “syndical action,” political Anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists. In both great trade union centers there was a group which favored, and a group which opposed, the fusion of both into a single trade-union association. On the whole, it was the left wing of the Socialists and the U.G.T. which worked for such a rapprochement. But to complicate matters, it was in this left wing that the influence of the Communists began to make itself felt, and there existed an open and ingrained hostility between Communists and Anarchists.
It is very Spanish to “let oneself be blinded only to rob a neighbor of his eye,” as the proverb says. So it could happen that Anarchists were pleased when Communists were attacked by Falange, and that Communists did their best to attack the Anarchists by means of official oppression, coming from a Government equally hostile to the Communists themselves.
I think all of us who did not belong to a party bureaucracy counted those divisions and subdivisions of the Left over and over again in mental despair. And yet it seems to me now that, in stressing the splits of the Spanish Left, we were and are falling into a grave error.
For all those paralyzing splits and fights obsessed only the political leaders of each group and their collaborators, or immediate supporters—a minority. The average man who belonged to the Left felt differently. Out of instinct, out of emotion, if you prefer it, and without theoretically marshaled arguments, the vast majority of the Spanish working class Left wanted a union which would wipe out the resentments and differences that had scarcely ever been real to them. Yet the experience of the result of union was very real: the Republic had been born out of an agreement between the organized Left parties. In the Asturias rising, the miners had fought under the slogan of U.H.P., “Union of Brother Workers.” And the longing for such a “union of brothers,” mystical and strong, was alive among the masses in that second half of 1935, when it was clear that without it the Right would assume absolute power and send many thousands more into the prisons, to rot with the political prisoners who had been there since Asturias.
It took a long time before the confused urge of the members and supporters was converted into measures of common self-defense by the leaders of the Left.
The united front of the Right, however, embracing leaders, members and sympathizers, impressed itself on me—and others like me—in daily incidents.
I saw it most clearly on the minute battlefield of Novés.
I like walking in the lonely, vast lands of Castile. There are no trees and no flowers, the earth is dry, hard and gray, you seldom see the outline of a house, and when you meet a laborer on his way, the greeting you exchange is accompanied by a distrustful glance, and a savage growl from the wayfarer’s dog who refrains from biting you only thanks to the harsh order of his master.
But under the sun of the dog days, this desolate landscape has majesty.
There are only three things, the sun, the sky, and the earth, and each is pitiless. The sun is a live flame above your head, the sky is a luminous dome of reverberating blue glass, the earth is a cracked plain scorching your feet There are no walls to give shade, no roofs to rest your eyes, no spring or brook to cool your throat. It is as though you were naked and inert in the hand of God. Either your brain grows drowsy and dulled, in passive resignation, or it gains its full creative power, for there is nothing to distract it and your self is an absolute self which appears to you clearer and more transparent than ever before.
A burning cigarette in the midst of the deserted plain assumes gigantic proportions, like a loud-spoken blasphemy in an empty church. The flame of the match disappears in this light and becomes less flame than ever. The blue smoke of the match mounts in slow spirals, gathers and thickens in the still air to a whitish little cloud and sinks down to your feet, grown cold and invisible. The earth swallows it. The air presses it down to the earth. The light dissolves its blue against the blue of the sky. When you throw away your cigarette stub, the white smoking patch seems more disgraceful than if you had thrown it on the richest carpet. There it stays to tell everyone that you have passed.
Sometimes I have felt so intensely like a criminal leaving a trail that I picked up the stub, crushed it out on the sole of my shoe and put it in my pocket. At other times, when I found a cigarette end lying in the field, I have picked it up out of sheer curiosity. If it was still damp, it meant that somebody was near. A cigarette rolled with coarse paper would indicate a farm worker, a machine-made cigarette a man from the town. Brittle edges and yellowing paper meant that the man had passed days or even months ago. When I saw those signs I would breathe more freely, for in the lonely plains of Castile an instinctive fear is reborn in you and you love solitude as a defense.
That morning I had gone for a solitary walk in the fields round Novés and come back with an active mind, my brain washed clean, but my body tired and parched. I sat down at one of the tables José had put before the entrance of the Rich Men’s Casino.
“Something very cool, José!”
He produced a bottle of beer covered with dew. He leaned over my table and asked, as they all asked:
“How do you like our place?”
“Well, I like it. I prefer villages which are not townified. Perhaps it’s because I’m fed up with the town.”
“If you had lived here all your life like me you would want to get away.”
“Of course…”
Opposite the casino the road dipped down and a low stone wall bordered it on the side of the gully. A dozen men were lined up along it. They were watching us in silence.
“What are they doing there, José?”
“They’re waiting for something to happen. For a windfall. But if the moon doesn’t fall… You see, Don Arturo, it’s customary for the men who are out of work to come here in the mornings and wait until somebody hires them for some small job or other.”
“But it’s almost noon, and Sunday into the bargain. Who the devil would hire them today?”
“Oh, they just come because they’re used to it. And then, on Sundays the gentry come here for their glass of vermouth, and sometimes one of them has an errand to be run, and that means a few coppers. And sometimes one of the men dares to beg a little money. The poor devils must do something after all. They deserve what they’ve got, though.”
“Do you mean they deserve to starve to death?”
“Goodness me, I don’t mean starve to death, as you put it, because one isn’t quite hard-hearted, after all. But it’s a good thing for them to learn their lesson. That’ll teach them not to get mixed up with Republics and things, and to go wanting to put the world in order. Because you’ve no idea, sir, what this place was like when the Republic came. They even let off rockets. And then they started at once demanding things, for instance, a school. There it is, up there, half finished. If they don’t put the money up themselves, their Republic won’t.”
On the road there emerged a horseman on a black horse covered with scars and sores. A gaunt figure encased in tight black trousers which molded his calves like the fashionable trousers of the nineteenth century, a black riding coat with rounded tails and a bowler which must have been black in its time, but now was the color of a fly’s wings. A Quixote in his late seventies, with few teeth left, but bushy brows over lively black eyes, a goatee and a few snow white tufts of hair sticking out from under his hat. He dismounted, threw the reins over the horse’s neck and beckoned one of the men sitting on the stone wall.
“Here, take him to my house.”
The man caught the reins and dragged the horse past the casino into a doorway beside the pharmacy, some ten yards from where I sat. The rider came towards me, beating a tattoo on his shin with his riding whip.
“How d’you do, I’ve been waiting to meet the Madrileño. Do you mind if I sit down here?” He did not wait for my assent but simply sat down. “What’s yours? Beer? José, two beers.” He paused and looked at me. “Possibly you don’t know who I am. Well now, I’m their accomplice”—he nodded towards the two village doctors who had just arrived and sat down at another table, hunting in pairs as usual—“that’s to say, I’m the apothecary, Alberto de Fonseca y Ontivares, Licentiate in Pharmaceutics, Bachelor of Science—Chemistry—landowner and starveling to boot. These people here never fall ill, and when they do fall ill, they haven’t any money, and farms produce nothing but lawsuits. Now tell me about yourself.”
He was amusing, and I gave him a brief sketch of myself and my work. When I explained my profession, he clutched my arm.
“My dear fellow, we must have a talk. Do you know anything about aluminum?”
“Yes, of course. But I don’t know exactly what interests you about aluminum and whether my kind of knowledge is likely to be any good to you.”
“Never mind, never mind, we must have a talk. I’ve made a most interesting discovery, and we must have a talk. You’ll have to give me advice.”
I was by no means pleased at the prospect of having one of those cranky inventors next door to me in the village, but it was impossible not to respond.
The man who had led away the horse came back, took off his cap and stood there, waiting, a couple of yards from us. Don Alberto gave him a stare.
“What are you waiting for? A tip, eh? All right, this is a red letter day—here you are—but don’t think it will happen every time. And what’s that you’ve got there in the pocket of your blouse?”
The man reddened and mumbled:
“Doña Emilia gave me a piece of bread for the kids.”
“All right, all right, may you enjoy it.”
I stood up. Don Alberto wanted to discuss his discovery, but I had not had my meal and I did not like looking at the silent men lined up along the wall.
We had our discussion later in the day, in the back room of the pharmacy. Doña Emilia listened, her knitting needles clicking. Her chubby hands moved swiftly. Otherwise, she consisted of tight rolls of fat in calm repose. Sometimes she looked at her husband over her spectacles. A sleepy cat in an old rep armchair opened its eyes, two green eyes with a vertical black slit, whenever its master raised his voice. The room was dark, not because of lack of light, for light entered freely through a wide window opening into the sunlit street, but because everything inside the room was dark: dark purple, almost black curtains and carpets, the four armchairs raisin-colored, darkened by age, the wall paper a blackish blue with tarnished gilt scrolls.
Don Alberto explained:
“As I told you this morning, I’m a landowner. May God give us good earth! I’ve got a big field rather like a graveyard, all studded with stone slabs, and four miserable cottages in the town. The tenants don’t pay rent, and the ground lies waste. But I have to pay the taxes every year, like clockwork. Thank goodness, we’ve got a bit of our own and this pharmacy to live on. As you saw, every day, no matter what weather God sends us, I saddle my horse and we go off for a ride in the fields. You can’t imagine how often I’ve taken a ride across my fields. Then, one day, I saw a fellow squatting on the ground there and digging little holes. I wondered what he was up to, so I accosted him and asked: ‘What are you doing, my good man?’ and he answered in poor Castilian: ‘Nothing, just pottering. Do you know who owns this land?’ ‘I do,’ said I. ‘It’s quite good soil, yes, isn’t it?’ he answered. ‘Not bad if you want to sow paving stones.’ He stared at me and changed the subject and started telling me that he was a German and liked Spain very much, and so on. He told me he thought of building a little house in the country. He found the landscape round here very pleasant, he said. Now, you see, you’ve got to have a very thick skin to say that without blushing. Because that landscape is as bare as my palm. I said yes to everything and thought: ‘Now what has this rogue got up his sleeve?’ When he was out of sight, I went back to my piece of land, collected a few lumps of the soil and shut myself up here in the back room. My dear friend”—Don Alberto said this very solemnly—“my soil is bauxite. Pure bauxite.”
He gave me no time to show my amazement, but changed from enthusiasm to rage with lightning speed.
“And that German is a scoundrel. That’s why I called you in.”
Doña Emilia dropped her knitting in her lap, raised her head, wagged it and said: “What’s your reason, Albertito?”
“Be quiet, woman, let us talk.”
The knitting needles resumed their monotonous seesaw, and the cat again shut its green eyes. Don Alberto went on:
“A few weeks ago he turned up here. He had decided to build himself a house in this marvelous spot, he said. He had liked my land so much. And as it wasn’t arable land, he assumed that I would be willing to sell it cheaply, because he wasn’t exactly rich. I couldn’t refrain from saying: ‘So it’s a little house in the country you’re wanting to build—a little house with big chimneys, eh?’ He showed himself most astonished. ‘Yes, yes, don’t play the innocent now. You think I don’t know what you’re after. Luckily, I haven’t quite forgotten my chemistry.’ My good German chuckled broadly and said: ‘Good, now we will understand one another better, yes? You must realize that I have to look after my business and if you hadn’t got wise to what’s in your soil it would have been more economical from my point of view. But never mind. How much do you want for your land?’ I said: ‘Fifty thousand duros—two hundred and fifty thousand pesetas.’ My German laughed loudly and said: ‘Now, don’t let us waste our time. The site has been registered in accordance with the Law of Mining Sites. So we have the right to expropriate your ground and the adjacent land. I offer you five thousand pesetas in cash and twenty thousand in free shares of the company we will set up. Think it over and you’ll see that it’s best for you.’ I told him to go to the devil. But now he’s sent me a summons to appear before the judge to settle the question of the expropriation of my land in amity. What would you advise me to do? Those scoundrels think they’ll get my land for a chunk of bread.”
What advice could I give to this village apothecary? If Germans were mixed up in the affair, the prospectors were doubtless financed by some important firm in Germany; and no one knew the power and the means at the disposal of those people better than I. Don Alberto had the choice between getting a handful of pesetas and entering on a law suit, with the result that the pesetas he might be paid in the end would not cover the costs of the brief. Obviously, they had him in a trap and there was no escape for him.
I explained the legal situation and advised him to try to hold out for the biggest possible sum, but not to involve himself in litigation.
He waxed indignant.
“So those rogues come from abroad and rob us of the fruits of our labor? That’s the whole history of Spain. Those people come here where no one wants them and take the best for themselves. There you have Rio Tinto and the Canadiense and the Telephones and the Petrol Monopoly and I don’t know what more. And in the meantime, we can starve! What we need is a strong Government. What we need is that the Chief should take the whole thing into his own hands.”
“The Chief? What Chief?”
I knew very well whom he meant. Gil Robles was being built up as the great Leader, the Jefe, and his name coupled with the title “Chief” was being dinned into our ears. But I did not feel like accepting this chieftainship unchallenged.
Don Alberto said: “There’s only one Chief. The man who’ll save Spain: José Maria Gil Robles. The man whom the whole nation backs.”
It had always been one of my incurable weaknesses, one which had earned me much enmity, that I tended to revert in the middle of a serious, polite conversation to the mode of expression of a Madrid street urchin and of a soldier in the African Army—to blurt out what I thought with the greatest directness and in the worst language.
I answered Don Alberto with a grin:
“Well, I don’t think that our country will be put in order by that church rat.”
Don Alberto turned a flaming red, more intensely red because of the white frame of his hair; he rose and flashed a wrathful glance at me. The knitting needles stopped short and the cat got to its feet, arched its back and clawed the rustling chair cover. Solemnly and melodramatically, Don Alberto pronounced judgment:
“You will realize, Don Arturo, that you and I cannot continue to exchange words.”
I had to leave, somewhat ashamed and annoyed with myself for having lost my sense of fitness, and yet rather amused by the attitude the good man had struck. But there came a sequel to that conversation, one week later.
I was standing before the church tower, figuring out its structure. Its foundations were Roman, and the brick walls built on the square hewn stones very many years later were doubtless Moorish work. It would have been pleasing to know the hardships the ancient tower had gone through at the time it was a fortress, or a watchtower, or whatever it might have been.
A fat voice spoke to me from under the porch:
“Sightseeing, eh? Haven’t you the courage to come into the church? We don’t devour anybody here.”
Don Lucas, the priest, was standing in the porch of the church and watching me with a slightly mocking glance.
“I was looking at the architectural muddle of this tower. But I would indeed like to have a look at the church, if its Cerberus has nothing against it.”
“Cerberus has nothing against it. This is God’s House, open to everyone. Of course, if it’s antiquities you’re after, there’ll be little for you to see. This is just a big barn of a building.”
The church deserved the term. Smooth walls, whitewash on mortar and stone, with half a dozen altars ranged along them, each with its saint in life size, made of papier-mâché and painted in gaudy colors. A wealth of embroidered altar cloths, stiff with starch, bronze candelabra and paper flowers smothered in dust. A confessional on each side of the High Altar. Behind the entrance a Christ on the Cross, the Holy Water stoup on one side and the font on the other. Two rows of benches down the middle, and a score of chairs with straw seats scattered here and there. The only pleasant thing was the coolness of the nave.
“It’s true that there isn’t much to see.”
“I’ll show you our treasure.”
He took me to the sacristy: two huge commodes with plated locks, presumably the most valuable stuff in the whole church, a vaulted niche with an old wooden carving of the Child Jesus, a pulpit, a bench along the wall, a monkish armchair, some church utensils laid out on the commodes. On the front wall the oil painting of a San Sebastian with a somewhat feminine body, a painting of the chromolithographic school of the late nineteenth century.
The priest—well filled and fleshy, rather like a pig with his very small eyes and thick, bristling hair and stubble on his chin, bristles on the broad, heavy hands, thick, red lips, altogether a peasant polished by the seminary—sat down in the armchair and invited me to take a seat on the bench beside the pulpit. He took out a leather cigarette case and we both rolled ourselves a cigarette. He puffed some smoke and then looked straight at me.
“I’ve noticed, of course, that you don’t go to church on Sundays. I know you’re one of those Socialists and have dealings with the low people of our village. I must tell you, when you set up house here and I saw your wife and children, I thought: ‘They seem the right kind of people. Pray God it be so.’ But—it seems I was mistaken.”
He did not say this in an insulting manner. When he made his little pause after the “but,” he did it with a mild, almost evangelical smile, as though he apologized for his daring. Then he stopped, looking at me, his two heavy hands on the table.
“Well now. It’s quite true that I have Socialist ideas, and that I don’t go to Mass on Sundays, nor my people either. And it’s also true that, if all that means being the wrong kind of people, well, then we are the wrong kind of people.”
“Don’t get bitter, Don Arturo. I didn’t want to molest you. But you see, I can understand it in a way if one of those yokels doesn’t believe in God and the Devil. But to find someone who appears to be an intelligent man thinking as they do…”
“The fact that I don’t go to Church doesn’t necessarily mean that I don’t believe in God.”
“Now don’t tell me that you’re one of those Protestant heretics—it would pain me greatly—but in that case I would not be able to tolerate your presence in this Sacred House for a single moment.”
“In this Sacred House which is the House of God and therefore open to everyone, isn’t it? Don’t be afraid. I’m no heretic. It didn’t occur to me to change the label. The trouble with me, I think, is that I’ve suffered from too much so-called religion all my life. You can rest assured, I’ve been brought up in the lap of Holy Mother Church.”
“But why don’t you go to church, then?”
“If I tell you the truth, we shall probably quarrel.”
“Just speak out. I prefer to be plain and to know where I am.”
“Well then, I don’t go to church because you clergy are in the Church, and we don’t get on together. I was taught a faith which by its doctrine was all love, forgiveness, and charity. Frankly, with very few exceptions, the ministers of the faith I have met possess all sorts of human qualities, but just not those three divine qualities.”
Don Lucas did not enter this field. He chose a tangent:
“What should we do then, in your opinion? For instance, what should I do? Or, to put it clearly, what would you do if you were in my place?”
“You’re pushing me into the personal sphere. It is possible that you yourself are one of those exceptional priests I’ve mentioned, and some of whom I have known and still know. But if you want to hear what I would do in your place if I were a priest, it’s quite simple; I would drop the post of Chairman of Catholic Action—that’s what you are, I think—so as to obey your Master’s Law ‘Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s,’ and that other Word which says that His reign is not of this world. And then I would use the pulpit for teaching the Word of Christ, not for political propaganda, and I would try to convince all people to live together in peace, so that the poor need no longer perish, lined up along the stone wall of the road waiting for a piece of bread as for a miracle, while the rich let the soil lie waste and each night gamble away enough money to wipe out all the hunger in Novés.”
It was now that the priest took offense. His lips went grayish white and quivered.
“I don’t think you can claim the right to teach me my duties. In this place there are a good many of the rabble who need one thing, and one only: the stick. I know you think our Chief is a ‘church rat.’ But whether or not it pleases your friends, the revolutionaries, who want to push Spain into the greatest misery—he is the man who will create a great Spain. I’m sorry to say that you and I can’t be friends. You’ve come to disturb the tranquillity of this place. We’ll each fight for his own side and God will help those who deserve it.”
I left the church in a pensive mood. This was a declaration of war in due form from the masters of the village, although I had not yet interfered in the village life.
It also gave me a practical demonstration of the unity within the right wing. Don Alberto was an old Monarchist. Don Lucas was a politicizing priest. Heliodoro was nothing but a ruthless usurer, exploiting the political game. The two doctors had not the slightest interest in the Church or in politics, so long as they had their racket. Valentín gambled his farm away. Others believed they had the bounden duty to stand against the workers, simply because they themselves belonged to the landed class. None of them had strong political or religious ideals, and yet they sallied forth as one man to defend a policy and an ideal. Was it precisely their lack of convictions which permitted them to unite? Was it the existence of ideals which made it difficult for us of the Left to be united?
The logical inference was that those men united to defend their property and their position. But why could not the leaders of the Left unite to defend what position and chance of position they had? Why was it that the men in the street, the common people, the workers, the farm laborers, and the miners, were always ready to get together—and not their leaders?
It was not I who asked this. In those days of the Indian summer of 1935 all Spain asked this question, even our enemies.
UNREST AND UNCERTAINTY made me seek for something unchanged and secure in human relationship. But my mother was dead.
My mother had died in harness, seventy-two years old, tirelessly working, however tired she may have felt, helping my sister Concha through her many pregnancies, taking over the care of the children and the housework, helping her by taking a post as concierge in a tenement house so that Concha and Agustín, her husband, should have free lodging, helping them with her own scanty earnings through the long periods when Agustín, a skilled cabinet maker, was out of work during the series of strikes in his trade.
There had been a hard time, before I myself had won through to comparative prosperity, when my mother and Concha had to accept the assistance of charitable institutions. There existed a Home for Washerwomen, founded by Queen Maria Christina; my mother applied, not for herself, but for children’s clothes on Concha’s behalf, and received help from the nuns who ran the home. There also existed a State institution called “Drop of Milk,” Gota de Leche, where mothers of small children could obtain free milk. Concha applied, and was granted a daily milk ration for which she waited in a queue, while our mother looked after the children. But they had to pay for this charity by figuring in the lists of those who regularly attended Mass, and by presenting the parish priest’s certificate to show that they had partaken of Holy Communion. This did not make it easier to accept charity.
My mother never grew bitter. She was proud of her usefulness and bore with the “things of life,” as she would say, with a cheerful resignation and skeptical hopefulness. But it made me bitter, and at times, when I felt least able to help, unjust towards my sister.
It was natural that my mother should go to help her daughter. But it hurt and irked me that my mother was so little part of my own home because she was unable to get on with Aurelia. Clearly as I realized the defeat and emptiness of my marriage, I could not bear strictures from others, not even from my mother, still less from my brother, my sister, my brother’s wife, and my sister’s husband, who all agreed in disliking the woman who was, after all, my wife.
My mother died in 1931. I had little inner contact with the rest of the family. But now, when the open failure of my marriage was an accepted fact and I felt the chill of a great change in my bones, I resumed a closer friendship with my brother and with my brother-in-law. We three had been much together when we were young boys. We knew a lot about each other, without having to explain anything. The women, my wife, my sister, and my sister-in-law, hated one another and met as little as possible. Agustín, short, square, slow to speak and slow but capable in his movements, with a hidden vein of shrewd satire and plenty of horse sense, placid and reliable, gave me a feeling of rest and safety, and when he spoke he was as infallible as Sancho Panza at his best. But it was difficult for him to go out and leave Concha with the nine children, harassed and overworked as she was.
Thus Rafael, my brother, thin, colorless, and acid, more restless and more skeptical than I, became more than ever my silent companion.
When I dissolved my home in Madrid and set up my family in Novés, he let me have a bedroom in his flat. Escaping from the stale, sour atmosphere and the shallow gossip of his wife, we would go out after supper to walk through the streets, to stay for a while in cafés or bars where we had friends, and then to walk on in heated and pointless discussion or in the familiar morose silence. And on some of the evenings I would go out with Maria.
But my relationship with Maria was also in a stage of restlessness.
When I first came to the office, Maria was the least attractive of the four typists. She was seventeen then, with black eyes and hair, angular and bony. Her olive skin looked dirty, her neck was long and thin, her chest flat. And she was highly strung and active, rapid of comprehension. She was not particularly well educated, but quick on the uptake and a good typist. I took her on as my secretary and we worked well together.
Maria’s face was pitted with pockmarks. This made her very unhappy and she was continually conscious of it. It gave her comfort when I began to tell her about the difficulties of my married life and my hopes of finding The Woman, because I tried to explain that I did not think so much of physical beauty as of mutual understanding, of harmony, of fusion. I was unaware at the time that I was seducing the young girl. Maria’s plain face denied her that homage which is freely given to attractive women in the Spanish streets. She had no other contact with men than myself. And I imagine that I had the kind of fascination for her which mature, experienced men so often have for very young women. In slow stages our intimacy grew. During those years the scrawny girl became a ripe woman with a harmonious body. We slid into a love affair, inevitably, since I wanted to find someone to whom I could give affection and who would understand my language. The community at work and her ardent will to please me were a substitute for love.
We were discreet in our relationship, but did not try to hide it. It was an open secret. In the true tradition of a Spanish marriage, in which the wife does not overmuch mind an affair of her husband’s, as long as it does not absorb him forever and as long as there are no illegitimate children, I had no great trouble with Aurelia. She did not feel her fundamental position threatened by Maria, and we had a few acrimonious discussions, but no more. There was no difficulty on the side of Maria’s family either. She lived with her mother, a brother, and a younger sister. The mother knew of our relationship, but ignored it in silence, I think because she regarded Maria as a girl who would never marry and therefore had the right to enjoy her life as best she could.
We had agreed that we would both remain completely free, but six years had created a very close intimacy between us. Even though I had never been in love with her, I had been content in those six years.
Now I was no longer content. Nor was she.
One Saturday morning Maria tackled me:
“Are you going to Novés this afternoon?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I’m fed up with this arrangement. Every Sunday I’m left alone, and I’m getting bored. My sister goes out with her girl friends and I can’t go with her.”
“I don’t see why not.”
“Most Sundays they go to a dance. If I go I must dance too, because they all know I love dancing, and I can’t pretend I don’t.”
“Well, what more do you want, then? If you feel like it, go to a dance and dance yourself, of course. You know I’m not jealous. But I can’t stay here on Sundays. We’re together all the week. Anyhow, we thrashed all this out in advance, and you agreed with me about it.”
But Maria insisted that I should stay in Madrid. She did not want me to stay every Sunday, only from time to time, and particularly this time. I sensed she had something definite in her mind and let them know in Novés that I would not come for the week-end.
On Saturday night we went to the theater together. Maria showed more interest in the details of life in Novés and in discussing my wife’s behavior than in the plan. On Sunday we made a day of it and went to El Escorial. When we were lying in the grass, before us the overpowering range of mountains which encircles the monastery, Maria suddenly said:
“Now, what do you intend to do?”
“What about?” The question had caught me by surprise and produced no mental association in me, although we had discussed my matrimonial affairs off and on during the day.
“About Aurelia.”
“You mean, what can I do? I can only get a divorce, and I can’t see why I should. It would be bad for the children, they would be much worse off without me, and it wouldn’t do me any good either. I’d have to stay alone and live in a boarding house, or stay for good in my brother’s flat. I’d live less comfortably and spend much more money. It would have been worth while if I’d found my woman.”
I did not mean to be cruel. I had been talking spontaneously, just as I had talked for years, about my own problems. Maria watched me, and her eyes were full of tears.
“I don’t mean anything to you, then…”
“But—child—our case is something quite different.”
“Of course it’s different. For you a pastime and for me a closed door.” She began to weep bitterly.
“But listen, what is it you want me to do? To get a divorce and live with you? Or to marry you?”
She wiped away her tears and smiled.
“Of course, you silly.”
“But don’t you see that it wouldn’t do? Now, everybody is tolerant about us and shuts both eyes. The moment we do what you want, they would all be against us, and particularly against you. Can’t you see? In the office they wouldn’t keep you on, probably neither of us, but certainly not you…”
“Once we lived together it wouldn’t matter. I would stay at home.”
“All right, granted. But you don’t see things as they are. If we lived together, they would treat you as an ordinary tart. If we married, they would treat you as the woman who has seduced a married man and destroyed a home. Even your family wouldn’t like it, I presume.”
“Never mind about all those things. I’m of age and can do as I like. If it’s only that—it doesn’t matter to me what people call me.”
“But it matters to me.”
“Look how little you love me!”
The conversation rang hollow and false, but we went on and on. From that excursion we came back in an antagonistic mood. I understood Maria’s attitude and hopes, but I had no intention of realizing them. A divorce followed by a joint household or marriage would have meant no more than an exchange of one woman for another, with the prospect of more children and the boredom of married life without love. Maria was in her own right while she worked with me as my secretary and listened to my personal worries and problems; she was in her own right as my comforter. She would lose all this in a marriage. I would lose the secretary and the comforting listener.
My attitude and line of action were coldly and pointedly selfish. I knew that. It gave me a chill feeling in the pit of my stomach. I did not like myself, and I did not like her. She had broken our pact. I knew she was right in her way, and I thought I was right in mine. It was not as though she just wanted to get her man; she was convinced that her affection for me would make me happy, that even if I was not in love, I was very fond of her, and that I had no hope of ever meeting the woman of whom I used to talk and think. After all, she knew very well that I was thirty-eight years old, an age at which a man begins to be a fatalist in matters of love, or a skeptic.
But I was not altogether a skeptic. And it was not that I wanted to get rid of her or to exploit her coldly. We had had our good times. But I knew that the imposition of a life together would destroy the friendship and fondness born out of loneliness and grown in loneliness.
Our discussion was closed, but it left a tension in the air. Maria did not repeat her demand, but she intensified her attentions to me, down to the smallest matters. She wanted to show me that she was a perfect woman not only as a lover but also as a housewife. Her tactics were wrong. I was not interested in living with a good housewife. She only made me feel irritated and bored. It amused but also annoyed me to see how Maria tended to behave as though we were a good bourgeois couple. We often went to a night club to dance, but now Maria began to tell me that we ought to behave more discreetly.
“If anyone saw us like this, he would think there was something behind it.”
“My dear girl, he would only think what’s true.”
“But I don’t want people to think I’m one of those women. I love you just as if you were my married husband.”
By the end of 1935, I was in a state of acute irritability and desperation. I avoided contact with both women, and I could not escape either.
At that time began the campaign for the impending elections. For several weeks the mass excitement and the knowledge of what was at stake swept all private problems from my mind.
When Premier Chapaprieta submitted the Budgets to the Cortes, the Right began a systematic obstruction. Chapaprieta had to resign. President Alcalá Zamora—“Boots”—was an old fox in politics, a cacique from Andalusia who during the Monarchy had kept himself in power by managing elections in his district, and who in the last stage of the Monarchy had turned himself into a Republican. Chapaprieta’s resignation involved the position of the President. Gil Robles held the majority in the Cortes, and the President would have to call upon him to form a Cabinet. Alcalá Zamora was not opposed to a right-wing and Catholic Government; he was a militant Catholic. But he preferred to become the Dollfuss of Spain himself, rather than to leave this role to Gil Robles. And Gil Robles had attempted to put pressure upon Alcalá Zamora, a fact which the old boss could not easily forget.
The President entrusted Portela Valladares, an independent Republican, with the formation of the Government. The idea was that he would use all the resources of governmental power to prepare elections in favor of the moderate Center, the group which Alcalá Zamora wanted to represent and which would then sway the votes of the Cortes in one or the other direction.
But the game was obsolete. It had been played with success in support of the Monarchy ever since 1860. But now the country was no longer politically indifferent; it was full of effervescence, deeply divided into two opposite camps. Alcalá Zamora’s game had no chance of success; it was never even properly started. As soon as Portela Valladares announced his Cabinet, it was attacked by both Right and Left. He resigned. In December 1935, Alcalá Zamora dissolved the Cortes and announced the 16th of February 1936 as the date for the new elections.
The constitutional rights of citizens were restored. The propaganda battle began. The Right hoisted the anti-Communist flag and frightened prospective voters with accounts of the great damage which a Left victory at the elections would do to the country. They predicted chaos, and gave color to their prediction by multiplying provocative street incidents. The parties of the Left formed an electoral bloc. Their list of candidates comprised all shades from Republicans to Anarchists; they focused their propaganda on the atrocities which had been committed against the political prisoners after the Asturias rising and on the demand for a general amnesty. Yet at the same time the dissension between the parties of the Left grew. The Left press devoted at least as much space to mutual attacks as to attacks against the Right. Everyone feared a Fascist coup d’état and voiced this fear, and proclaimed his particular brand of Revolution as the only way out. Largo Cabellero accepted the title of Spain’s Lenin and the support of the Communists. His group told the masses that a victory at the elections would not be the victory of a democratic bourgeois State but of a revolutionary State. The Anarchists also announced the coming victory of a revolutionary State, not after the pattern of Soviet Russia, but based on “libertarian” ideals. After the “Two Black Years” of oppression, it was like an intoxication. The lid was off. Every single individual was discussing the political situation and taking active part in the propaganda for his ideas.
I entered the fray in Novés.
Eliseo received me with a shout of welcome when I entered the Poor Men’s Casino:
“We’ve been waiting for you. We’ve decided to prepare for the elections here, and we want to set up an Electoral Committee.”
“A very good idea.”
“But we want you to organize the whole thing. We don’t know anything about anything here, and we do want to do things well. Heliodoro and his gang have got it all organized on their side. They’re promising the people everything under the sun, and at the same time they threaten them if they don’t behave. And hunger is a bad counsellor. Now, you’ve got friends in Madrid, so if you help us we’ll get meetings and make propaganda. Anyhow, you know what I mean.”
I had my roots in Madrid and not in Novés, but I could not refuse to take an active part in what I believed to be a decisive moment for Spain and for our Socialist hopes. These people needed someone who could not be intimidated by the Corporal of the Civil Guard or trapped by dubious maneuvers, someone who could save them from committing foolish or illegal acts and thus giving the other side a handle. It crossed my mind that it would give me satisfaction and diversion to plunge myself into the elections and that it would keep me aloof from the two women as well.
I saw instantly that a victory of the Right, and even perhaps a victory of the Left, would mean that I would have to leave the village at once. But Novés was drawing to an end for me anyhow.
I accepted the task.
The first thing I did was to seek contact with Carlos and Antonio.
Carlos Rubiera was an old member of the Socialist Youth Organization, whom the Party put forward as a candidate at the elections. We had worked closely together in 1931 to found the Clerical Workers’ Union in Madrid; our trade union had flourished and gained victories, Carlos was well away on his political career. He had often invited me to join the Socialist Party as a member or to become an official of the trade union; I had refused, because I felt unfit for a political career, but we had remained good friends. He was a very gifted orator and organizer.
Antonio was a Communist, and an old friend of mine. I knew exactly how honest, how poor, and how narrow-minded he was. He had been a little clerk who earned a pittance and had no prospects in life other than to go on earning a pittance and keep himself and his mother just above starvation level. In 1925, while Antonio was in a sanatorium with tuberculosis, his mother died in misery. When he reappeared in Madrid, cured, he earned just enough to live. It would not have been enough for any vice, but smoking and drinking had been cut out by his tuberculosis, and Antonio had become afraid of women since his illness. He became a Communist, one of the earliest Communists in Spain, and he followed his faith with the zeal of a fanatic. In 1936 he was a minor party official.
Rubiera and Antonio let me have propaganda material for Novés, gave me hints on organizing an electoral committee, and promised to send Left speakers to the village.
The next Saturday afternoon we set up the Electoral Center of the Popular Front in Novés.
That evening José called me aside and led me to his house, at the back of the Rich Men’s Casino. While his wife served coffee to the customers, José hauled out a bottle of cognac.
“You’ll excuse my inviting you here, but we must have a talk. I’ve got to give you some advice.”
“Oh, well, thanks. But I don’t remember having asked you.”
“Don’t get annoyed, Don Arturo. It’s a friend’s advice, because friends must show themselves when they’re most needed. I’ve a great respect for you and your family, and I can’t keep my mouth shut any longer. It’s not as if I had a personal interest in the question. I’m concerned with my business, and that’s all. But I know our village, and you’re a stranger here. You won’t change it.”
“And what exactly is your advice?”
“That you shouldn’t get mixed up in these elections. Let the people settle their own affairs, and don’t play Don Quixote. Of course—if you’ve got it into your head to go on working with Eliseo’s gang, you’ll have to get into the bus as soon as the elections are over, and never come back. If they let you go, that is…”
“You mean to say, if the Right wins the elections.”
“Or the Left. You believe things will change here if the Left wins, but that’s your mistake. Things will go on here as always. They won’t let their land go, one way or the other. And where there’s money there’s a way. You never know what’s going to happen. After all, we’re all mortal.”
“Good. That’s the message Heliodoro gave you for me?”
“If you want to take it that way… It’s true he told me that you ought really to be warned and that he couldn’t very well do it himself. But this is my own idea, because of my esteem for you.”
“Many thanks, José. But I don’t think I’ll change my mind. It may well be that you’re right and that I’ll have to pay for this by getting out of the village. But I have to stick to my people.”
“Well, think it over. And just in case—but this is really my own idea—don’t walk about too much at night when you’re alone. Our people here are very rough, and there’s been trouble at every election.”
When I reported this conversation in Eliseo’s Casino, it caused a great stir; whenever I went out at night afterwards, two hefty young men with cudgels accompanied me everywhere.
I went to Santa Cruz de Retamar to see the Corporal of the Civil Guard about the legal formalities. He received me with a surly face.
“And who ordered you to get mixed up in all this?”
“I’ve a right to do so, haven’t I? I’m a householder in Novés and have the right to take part in the village life.”
“All right. Here are your papers. I should stay quietly in my house, if I were you, because if I’m not very much mistaken, there’ll be trouble at the elections. For me the situation is quite simple. It’s my duty to maintain order, whomever it may affect. So you have been warned. Look out.”
Carlos Rubiera and Antonio kept their promise. Four speakers of the Popular Front were coming to Novés on Sunday: one of the Republican Left, one Socialist, one Communist, and one Anarchist. With the exception of the Republican, who was a middle-aged man, they were all young lads, completely unknown in politics. The news produced an upheaval at Eliseo’s.
“We need the ballroom!”
The ballroom belonged to the inn where the bus stopped and where the post office was installed. I went to see the owner.
“We should like to rent your ballroom for a meeting next Sunday.”
“You’ll have to ask Heliodoro, he’s booked it for the whole time until Election Day for meetings of the Right. I can do nothing for you.”
Heliodoro received me in his office with the pomp of a great man of affairs, entrenched behind a huge walnut table and surrounded by piles of paper. He answered with a frosty little smile:
“I’m extremely sorry, but I can’t help you. I need the room.”
Discouraged, I went back to Eliseo’s. We could not arrange an open-air meeting in the middle of January. But Eliseo hit upon the solution.
“They’re dirty rogues, those people. Heliodoro can’t rent the ballroom, because, you see, it is rented by the municipality. The Municipal Council pays Rufino”—the inn-keeper and postmaster—“so-and-so much per year, and the only right he’s got is to set up a buffet when there’s a dance. He just can’t sublet it.”
I returned to Heliodoro. He bridled.
“I’ve rented the ballroom, and I’ve got the receipt here. If you want to enter a legal action against Rufino and the Municipal Council, you’re welcome, but please leave me out of it…”
I went to the Corporal and explained the case. He shrugged his shoulders. There wasn’t anything he could do. I lost patience.
“Now listen. The other day you told me you were here to maintain order, whomever it might affect. The ballroom is here for the free use of the whole population. I won’t cancel the meeting, and the meeting will be held in the ballroom. You can settle it however you like, that’s to say, if you don’t want the thing to go beyond mere words. And I can tell you something: this won’t be a matter of a few village lads. Tomorrow I shall inform the parties which organize the meeting, and report the things that are going on here, and the responsibility will fall on you, because it’s your obligation to solve such questions without further trouble.”
The Corporal of the Civil Guard beat a retreat. There was unrest in the villages and towns of the province, which had suffered particularly severely from the vindictiveness of the landowners during the Two Black Years. The Corporal foresaw that it would come to an open conflict for which he would be made responsible in the end. That same night he spoke to Heliodoro. And Heliodoro conceded me the ballroom.
“This is a personal favor out of consideration for you and the Corporal. I don’t want trouble which would lead to a serious incident, any more than you. What we want is public order.”
During those weeks, I spent almost every evening in Novés and went back to Madrid early each morning. On one of those evenings, Aurelia handed me a letter:
“Here, José brought it for you. And he’s been telling me plenty of things. I can’t think why you’ve got to go and interfere in those elections.”
The letter was a communication from the Novés Farmers’ Circle—the official name of the Rich Men’s Casino—informing me that the General Assembly had decided unanimously to cancel my membership. We celebrated it at Eliseo’s that night. The Novés Workers’ Circle made me its honorary member. After that, we went out to stick the posters of the meeting on walls and hoardings.
It turned out a radiantly sunny day. The plain in which Novés is ensconced is one of the coldest spots of Spain in winter. The winds from the Sierra de Guadarrama which sweep it freeze the soil deep down. But the village in its gully is sheltered from the winds, and on sunny days people prefer to stay out in the open, so as to get away from their dismal houses. The place comes alive. The women sit on low stools outside their house doors and chat, and their children run round playing; the men stand in groups in the market square and the young people go for walks in the orchards, holding hands.
That Sunday the village looked alien. From the early morning onwards, people from the near-by villages arrived for the meeting of “those Madrid people.” The main street was filled with peasants and land workers accompanied by their wives and children, all shouting greetings at each other, all noisy and excited. The ballroom was hung with Popular Front posters and its door stood wide open. People went in and out in a continuous stream to show each other the new sight. At midday a number of women turned up with chairs which they planted along the walls, determined not to lose the spectacle or their seats, even if it meant waiting for hours.
The ballroom was an old stable converted into a place for entertainment by the simple expedient of putting up a wooden platform and framing it with draperies of red calico. A little side door led to this dais from the inn stableyard. A sheet hung between the two red draperies served as a screen for films or as a curtain for theatrical performances. When there was a dance, the band occupied the dais. At the other end of the room a sort of balcony had been fixed to the wall; it would be reached by a ladder with a cord for a railing, and was reserved for distinguished guests at theatrical functions, and for the film projector at other times. The floor was beaten earth, and some tiles were missing in the roof so that the sunbeams came through, or the rain, or the snow.
On the dais we had set up the table for the chairman, with a dozen chairs in a semicircle behind it, and a smaller table for the speakers, both covered with the tricolor of the Spanish Republic in calico. The meeting was to start at three in the afternoon and we had arranged that the speakers should first have a meal at my house. Some of the village lads went to the edge of the gully and lined up at the side of the road to warn us of the coming of the car. At noon the pair of Civil Guards arrived and took up their posts outside the ballroom door. They loaded their carbines with ostentatious care.
“Are you going to kill us, then?” an elderly woman asked with a smile.
The Corporal gave no answer, but looked at the woman out of lackluster eyes. A few of the men went at once to Eliseo’s and told me of the incident.
“You can’t imagine what his eyes were like when he looked at the poor woman. Do you think there will be trouble?”
Eliseo brought a pistol out of his house and stuck it under his belt, in the pouch of his blouse.
The car arrived at half-past twelve and was received by the cheers of hundreds of people. Heliodoro must have hated it. I had to shut the doors of my house to prevent an invasion.
The only one of the speakers who knew the village was the Socialist, a member of the Land Workers’ Union of Toledo. The three others were from Madrid. The Republican was a short little man who looked like a natty clerk. He spoke slowly and with great emphasis, and was unable to say a single sentence without mentioning Azaña. The Anarchist was a young waiter, bright and agile, who seemed to be rehearsing for the meeting by indulging in a stream of words whenever he said anything. He found his match in the Communist, a young metal worker who let loose a torrent of phrases sprinkled with quotations from Marx and Lenin. The four of them were a little nervous.
“Now tell me what the people in this place are like,” said the Communist.
“Just as in all the other villages. They’re above all interested in the land and the school.”
“That’s one of the things the Party will do first—we’re going to organize the Komsomols—I mean, the Kolkhoses—in Spain as they’ve done in Russia, with model farms and cattle and splendid dairies. In the Ukraine—”
I cut him short: “Listen, it seems to me that you won’t establish any dairies here, not even with goats. There are no more than two cows in the whole village, and I don’t think they’ve ever seen a pasture in their lives!”
“Well, what have they got here?”
“Excellent orchards, corn land, and a cacique who owns half the village.”
“All right, we’ll liquidate him.” He said it as simply as if he had destined a chicken for the oven.
“Democracy’s what we need, democracy and tolerance—a lot of tolerance,” said the Republican. “Don Manuel”—Azaña—“is right. Don Manuel said to me one day: those Spanish villages, those rotten boroughs, need schools, friend Martínez, schools and bread, and the elimination of their parasites.’”
“Don’t kid yourselves, we Spaniards are all Anarchists at heart. We can’t make do here with Socialism or Communism, and you”—the Anarchist addressed the Republican—“have nothing to lose here. What we need is a new society with the cornerstones—”
“Hear, hear! But first, I don’t want to have to listen to your speeches twice over, secondly, let’s leave our dirty linen at home, and thirdly, we’re going to eat now,” I said. I was not happy about the meeting, particularly when the conversation at table followed the same channels.
When we entered the platform from the side door, we saw before us a moving carpet of heads and a splash of motley gay color in the background. They had put the women in the “boxes” as a precaution, and their garish kerchiefs and blouses shone out. The men were standing; outside the entrance there were over two hundred people who had not found room in the ballroom. The doors stood wide open so that they should hear the speeches, and the men jostled each other and stretched their necks to see.
Teodomiro, the Mayor, a creature of Heliodoro’s, was sitting on one of the chairs behind the presidential table.
“Well, well, what are you doing here?” I asked him.
“I represent the authorities.”
There was nothing to be said against this. I opened the meeting. The Communist, as the youngest of the four speakers, took the first turn. He started by explaining the assets of a Popular Front. He spoke rather well, with a certain nervousness and big gestures, but with fluency and conviction. The public, well disposed in advance, lapped up his words and interrupted him from time to time with applause. Then he touched on the subject of the Asturian rising.
“…one of the great aims of this alliance of the Left is to free our prisoners. We all have a prisoner to set free, a murder to avenge. In the name of those who were assassinated at Oviedo…”
Applause interrupted him. The Mayor rose, waving his hands, then banged his fist on the table.
“Silence, silence!” A surprised silence fell. What was that fellow going to say? Teodomiro turned to the Communist: “If you mention Asturias once more, I’ll suspend the meeting. I represent the authorities here.”
I told the speaker in a whisper to limit himself to propaganda for the elections and to leave out Asturias, since this was better than to lose the meeting. But Teodomiro clearly had his instructions; he interrupted the speaker at every sentence after that. In the end the young man was thrown out of his stride. The Republican leaned over to me.
“Let me deal with this. I’m an old fox.”
I told the boy to come to an end in the best possible manner, and then Azaña’s little man faced the public.
“I wanted to speak to you and explain my personal opinions, which in very many points coincide with those of my friend, the previous speaker. But we must respect the authorities as represented by our friend the Mayor, and as I don’t wish him to interpret my words in an adverse way, I will speak to you in the words of Don Manuel Azaña, words which he pronounced at the public meeting of Comillas and to repeat which I do not believe his Worship the Mayor will refuse me the right.”
“Quite so, quite so,” said Teodomiro.
“Well then, at Comillas Don Manuel said…” and the little man, who must have had a fabulous memory, recited entire passages of the famous speech which had moved the whole of Spain, passages which denounced the policy of the Church, the oppression of Asturias, the tortures inflicted on political prisoners, the scandals of racketeering and corruption, the deeds of violence committed by Falange. The public roared applause and hardly let him finish. Teodomiro was purple in the face and took council with the Corporal. The Corporal shook his head. There was nothing to be done.
The Socialist followed, and he had learned his lesson. Slyly he asked Teodomiro:
“I suppose you’ve nothing against my quoting words of Largo Caballero?”
The struggle was won. The Socialist and the Anarchist spoke, and the public was delirious, just as much because “their” speakers had scored a victory over the local powers and had carried through the meeting, as because of what they said. Everyone felt that this was less a defeat of the Mayor’s little game than of his boss, Heliodoro, and the Corporal of the Civil Guard.
When at the end of the meeting, some people started singing the Internationale, I rose.
“I’ll only say a few words to conclude this meeting. You saw what happened, and I suppose you also saw what might have happened. If you want all this to finish well, go out slowly, don’t sing, don’t shout in the street, don’t stand about in groups—go home, or wherever you want to go, but don’t give any occasion for trouble.”
“Do you mean to insinuate that I’ve come here to put my foot in it and provoke something?” grunted Teodomiro.
“Oh, no, you’ve come here to represent the authorities and to avoid disturbances. There haven’t been any disturbances during the meeting, thanks to you, and now I don’t want any to arise in the street. Let him who hath ears…”
The meeting of Novés became famous in the region, and meetings were held in all the little villages around. The Popular Front found ample ground between Santa Cruz de Retamar and Torrijos.
But what happened in Novés on a small scale, happened throughout Spain, not always with the same turn of events. During the period known as the Two Black Years, the parties of the Right had entrenched themselves in the countryside and now they spared neither coercion nor promises nor gifts. Their efforts were particularly hectic in the cities. A giant poster showing Gil Robles addressing the multitude covered the whole front of a big house in the Puerta del Sol. So as to sow confusion among the members of the Anarchist trade unions, they published posters against the Communists, signed with the initials C.N.D.T., very similar to the Anarchist “C.N.T.” Cardinal Gomá, Primate of Spain, issued a declaration in which he claimed that the Pope himself had asked him to appeal to the Spanish Catholics so that they should give their votes to the parties defending the Faith. Inmates of charitable institutions, cloistered nuns and the servants of big houses were taken to the ballot box in groups. In the working-class districts the offers of payment for each vote in favor of the Right rose to fifty pesetas.
The elections of February the 16th were a victory of the Popular Front. The Chamber met with 265 Deputies of the Left, 64 of the Center, and 144 of the Right.
The highest number of votes had fallen to Julián Besteiro, who was not a professional politician and whose theories were not shared by a great many workers, but who seemed to embody the longing of the Spanish people for culture, decency, and progressive social development.
When the high tide of enthusiasm had passed, the mass of voters went home. The politicians resumed their fight for power. The Popular Front began to disintegrate after the first session of the Cortes. It appeared as though the voice of the people had not been heard.
Novés underwent a change. The public offices were given to the people who had the best contact with the Popular Front Deputy for Torrijos. But the men who met at Eliseo’s had played out their role as soon as they had voted, and Heliodoro brought the full weight of his economic power to bear upon the new administrators. There was no more work than before for the men who waited sitting on the stone wall along the road. “It will come very soon now, you’ll see,” said Old Juán. “You won’t change things without trouble.”
A fortnight after the elections I moved my family back to Madrid.
I HAD FOUND a large and inexpensive flat in the Calle del Ave María, a street hardly more than three hundred yards from the Puerta del Sol, yet belonging to the oldest working-class quarter of the city. I liked it because it was near the center and my place of work. But it had another attraction for me. It was one of the streets which led to El Avapiés, the quarter which had dominated my boyhood. My mother had lived three streets further down. My old school, the Escuela Pía, was so near that I could hear its clock striking the hours at night. Each street and each corner held a memory for me, and there were still old friends of mine living in the shabby tenement houses.
Aurelia, my wife, went there reluctantly. She admitted that the flat had the advantage of size, important enough for the four children, but all the other tenants were merely workers, and she considered ourselves as belonging to a higher social category, too good for such surroundings.
I suppose what I wanted was to get back to my own roots.
It was on the very morning when the lorry with our furniture arrived that Angel and I met.
The men who had come with the lorry began to unload and carry things upstairs. One of them was different from the four others who were big, heavy, sluggish porters. He was in his mid-forties, short and very wide across the shoulders, his round face mobile like a monkey’s. He worked harder that anyone else, smiling all the time and showing two rows of tobacco-blackened teeth. He drove the others on, pushed each piece of furniture into its exact place, made faces at the children or told a funny story to enliven his work, and bounded indefatigably to and fro.
When everything had been moved in I gave a twenty-five-peseta note to the driver, to be distributed among the five. When the little man bounced up to him, and asked for his duro, the driver stared.
“Why the devil should I give you a duro?”
“What d’you think? I’ve worked for it like the others.”
“And who asked you to work? If the gentleman called you in he’ll pay you himself.”
“I thought he was one of your men,” I said.
“Oh no, sir, we thought he belonged to you.”
“Now look—I’ll explain. But can I have a fag?” I gave him a cigarette. He lighted it, very much at his ease, and said: “I’m Angel, you see. They call me Angelito hereabouts. I’ve got nothing to smoke and I’m out of work—and it’s not because I don’t want to work but because there just isn’t any. I saw the car with the furniture and said to myself: ‘Let’s lend a hand. We’ll get something out of it, even if it’s no more than a glass of wine.’ Now, if you people don’t want to shell out a bean, that’s just bad luck for me. I won’t ask anything of the gentleman, because it’s you whom I’ve saved a lot of work, and so it’s you who ought to pay me. But if you won’t, never mind. Salud!”
He spat on the pavement and stalked away composedly.
I called him back.
“Don’t go off like that. It’s true that you might have asked beforehand. But we’ll find something for you.”
The lorry drove off and I felt like a drink, so I invited Angel to the bar in the ground floor of the house. In the doorway he asked me:
“Do you like wine?”
“Indeed I do.”
“Then let’s go to the tavern at Number 11, they’ve got a white wine that’s good. I mean, if it’s all the same to you. Because in this bar they ask forty centimos for a glass of beer, and for the same money I can drink four glasses of wine, the same size, over there. And I’ll tell you something, I’ve been hungry for a glass of wine for months!”
We went to the tavern, I gave Angel his duro, and he told me his story.
He lived in the next street, the Calle de Jesús y María, as a concierge in a poor tenement house; he was married, but luckily he had no children; he had started as an errand boy in a chemist’s shop, become a helper in the laboratory, and ended as an employee in one of the big pharmaceutical stores.
“And then, two years ago, I had words with one of the bosses, because I told him I had no intention of going to Mass. So they chucked me out. And I’ve been out of work ever since.”
“Because you didn’t go to Mass?”
“That’s what I’m telling you. After Asturias they went and set up the Sacred Heart, with its little altar and all, in the middle of our store. And they told us we had to be there with a burning candle at the Feast of Consecration. They turned eight of us out into the street. Then, when I was applying for another job, those dirty swine wrote a letter saying quite simply that they had had to dismiss me because of Asturias. What had happened was that at the time when the fight was on in Asturias, our trade union told us not to go to work, and so I stayed at home two days. I’m only sorry because of my wife, she’s had a thin time of it. Now I want to send her to her own people, they’re quite well off and have got a farm in the province of Burgos. And I’ll take the firm’s Asturian certificate, and they’ll have to take me on again and pay my arrears.”
It was one of the Popular Front projects to enforce the re-engagement of staff dismissed during the reprisals for October 1934.
On the following day Angel turned up at my new flat. “I’ve come because, what with the moving-in, you’ll be needing a lot of things here in your flat. I can install the light for you, paint the rooms, go shopping, or take the children for a walk. I’ve taken a fancy to your family.”
For a few weeks Angel spent his time tearing layers of old paper from the walls, filling holes with plaster and painting the rooms. He continued to come when everything was in order; he helped in the house, and took the children for walks in the Retiro in the evenings. I liked him and he gave me the affection of a privileged family valet. He was the classical Madrileño, bred in the streets, cocky, carefree, and alert as a bird, always merry and very shrewd. In a few weeks’ time he belonged to the circle that met every night in Emiliano’s bar downstairs.
And so did I. For I could not take friends into the chilly emptiness of my so-called home life, and I did not want to stay there in irritation and isolation, or in empty disputes. Nor did I want to go out with Maria every night. But I needed to be with people who would make no demands on me, when I had finished with the complicated, often repellent and often disturbing operations of my day’s work.
Every night after supper Rafael came to fetch me and we went down to Emiliano’s bar to drink our coffee. There we met Fuñi-Fuñi. He had been at school with Rafael, and I had known him since I was a boy. He had been given his nickname at school because he first sniffed—“fnn-fnn”—and then sneezed every time he lifted his head and sniffed after every second word he talked. His nose was a tiny, soft blob with two holes stuck on to his round face, and he could not breathe through it properly. He was very shortsighted and wore big round glasses; his optician had to figure out a new kind of bridge for them, because otherwise they would never have stayed on. The mustache above his broad lips rose in rough bristles like a porcupine’s quills, and the whole looked rather like the moon-shaped face, fringed with spikes, of some grotesque fish.
Fuñi-Fuñi lived close by and used to come to the bar to have a political discussion with Manolo, our concierge’s young son. Fuñi was an Anarchist intellectual, imbued with political theory and abstract philosophy; Manolo was a skilled mechanic with Communist sympathies, who swallowed every book on Marxism that fell into his hands. Rafael and I used to sit down with them, and Angel would join us.
For several nights Angel sat listening to the conversation with strained attention, losing the thread between names and quotations which meant nothing to him. From time to time he interrupted Fuñi.
“Who’s the bird you’re talking about now?”
Fuñi-Fuñi would explain about Kant, or Engels, or Marx, or Bakunin, and Angel would make odd faces while he listened. Then one night he hit the table with his flat hand and said:
“Now it’s my turn. All those things you’ve been talking about day after day, and all those things you’ve just told us are just stories. I’m a Socialist. All right. And I’ve never read that Marx or that Bakunin, and they don’t interest me a bit. I’m a Socialist for the same reason that you’re an Anarchist and Manolo a communist. Because we’re fed up with things. There you go and get born into this world, and when you’re beginning to understand what’s what, you find that Father’s out of work, Mother with child, and the cooking pot empty. Then they send you to school so that the Friars should give you food by way of charity, and as soon as you can, even before you’ve learned to read, off with you to work like a man. You get four coppers from the master and nothing from your mates, but all the time it’s: ‘Boy, bring me a glass of water.’ ‘Boy, take out those pails.’ ‘You’ll get a kick in the pants.’ And you get it too. Until you’re a grown man, and then you earn a duro. A measly five pesetas. So what happens? You get infatuated, you marry, you have children, and next thing, you’re out of work. Then your wife goes a-charing, the kids go to the Friars’ school to get free soup, and you can run round in circles in the streets and curse. Well, and that’s why I’m a Socialist, because of all the ugly things yours obediently, Angel García, has had to swallow in the forty-odd years of his life. And now I tell you—shut up about Bakunin and Marx. U.H.P.! Do you know what that stands for? Union of Brother Workers. Just like the people of Fuenteovejuna, all as one. That’s what counts. Because we don’t get anywhere with all that balderdash from one side and the other, we just kick each other instead of getting together. And that’s why the others will thrash us!”
Angel’s rhetorical fire and gesticulations had attracted the other customers and they pressed round our table. When he ended they cheered him, and from that evening on he was the most popular speaker in all the taverns of the quarter. There he would stand and hold forth:
“What about the priests? Well, the priests can go and say their Mass and let anyone who wants it have his confession or extreme unction. I won’t say anything against that, because everyone is free to believe what he believes. But they shouldn’t get a centimo from the State, and they should have to pay taxes on their business. So-and-so many Masses per year, so-and-so much income tax…
“And the rich? I wouldn’t do away with the rich. If someone makes a lot of money because he’s smart, well let him do what he damn well likes with it. But when he dies, then his money and his property go to the State. None of your inheritances, and none of your wealthy young gentlemen doing nothing. And there’ll be limits to being rich. Beyond that limit not a centimo. Because in this business of the rich, it’s the money we’ve got to settle, not the men. If someone has got money let him spend it, or put it in a drawer, but there won’t be any more people living on dividends and interests. The State will have to look after their business and there’ll be an end to all that coupon cutting. You understand me, something like what they’ve got in Russia. Over there, they give one of the Stakhanovites a hundred thousand roubles as a bonus, but he’s got to go on stakhanovizing, because they’ve no Treasury bonds or shares which bear interest there. Here, if they give someone a hundred thousand duros, he puts them in the bank, and starts on the high life, and chucks his hammer on the scrap heap. And that’s all wrong.”
Angel treated me as though he were my henchman and wet-nurse at the same time. But he never knew how much moral support he gave me. The foolish and funny things he said when he was trying to brush away intellectual and political complications outside his ken were exhilarating, because behind them stood his sturdy loyalty and common sense, his belief that sooner or later all the working people would get together and settle their world sensibly and firmly. And he seemed irrepressible and indestructible.
Most days, before I went home for supper, and coffee and discussion downstairs in the bar, I left my office together with Navarro, our draftsman, and had a glass of wine with him at the tavern of the Portuguese. There I looked at the melancholic, drowsy drunkard in the corner who was my old friend Plá, an aging and hopeless bank clerk, and listened to Navarro’s problems, thinking of my own.
Navarro had dreamed of becoming an artist when he was young, and had become a draftsman in the Topographical Institute. His civil servant’s pay was pitiful, and in the afternoons he made commercial publicity drawings, or mechanical sketches to accompany our patents. He knew nothing about topography, publicity, or mechanics, but he had learned how to make impeccably correct drawings, just as a shoemaker’s apprentice learns how to put nails into shoe soles. His drawings were perfect in line, but they had to be checked very carefully because it meant nothing to him to have left out a wheel or a screw.
He was married and had two sons, sixteen and twenty years old. His work permitted him to keep his household on a comfortable level and to let his sons study for a professional career. But he himself had become a money-making automaton. His wife ruled the house, and she was entirely under the influence of her Father Confessor, a Jesuit, on the one side, and of her brother, a Captain in the Civil Guard, on the other. Between them, the three of them managed the house and the sons who had realized as young boys that their father was a nobody, while The Family, their family, was the mother’s, with an illustrious surname and a Captain Uncle who had fierce mustaches and a post in the Ministry of the Interior. Both went to the Jesuit College in the Paseo de Areneros, and they represented Navarro’s gravest problem.
“I can’t think what to do with the boys, Barea. Their uncle has put them into that Falange thing, and now they go round with life preservers in their pockets, and provoke rows with students at the university. They egg them on at their school and send them to the university to make trouble. What should I do?”
I could speak frankly and even brutally to Navarro:
“To tell you the truth, Juanito, you’re simply not capable of doing the only thing which would solve the problem. And the worst of it is that it’s you who will pay the piper.”
“But what can I do, in God’s name? Tell me what I can do.”
“Buy a strong stick, get hold of the Captain, the Father Confessor—and your wife—and tickle their ribs a bit. And then take the boys and deal with them.”
“You’re a barbarian, and you wouldn’t dream of doing it yourself.”
“All right, I’m a barbarian, and that’s exactly why I would not have got myself into that particular mess of yours. But you’re good, meek, and helpless.”
“But I don’t want my boys to get mixed up in politics! Ever since their uncle came back from Villa Cisneros where they sent him for taking part in the August Revolt, he’s been filling their whole mind with stories about heroism and heroics. And they’ll be badly caught one day. But what can I do, Arturo, what can I do?”
His only consolation was to drink a glass of wine at the Portuguese’s and to see all the Walt Disney films shown in Madrid. As one of his few intimate friends, I saw him quite often in his home and came to know the atmosphere of absolute, freezing intolerance in which this modest and tolerant man had to live. His wife eternally quoted her brother or her Father Confessor: “Pepe told me… Father Luis said we ought…” Navarro was haunted by a hopeless longing for a home where he could sit in his armchair in the midst of his family, with gaiety and warmth around him.
He arrived at the office one morning with a deeply worried face and wanted to speak to me.
A few days before, a tumultuous row had broken out between right- and left-wing students at the Central University. It had started with cuffs and blows as usual and had ended in shots: there had been one dead. Somebody had fired a pistol and a Republican student had been killed. During one of the following nights, Navarro had been working very late at home and had found himself without matches; he had looked for a box in the pockets of his elder son’s jacket and found a short club made of a lump of lead tied with cord to a stick. The lead was stained with dried blood. In the morning, just after the son had left home, saying he was going to the university, the police had come to fetch him. He was hiding in his uncle’s house.
Navarro was desperate: “Of course, the police will find him sooner or later. Or, what’s worse, the others will have singled him out and they’ll get him as soon as they can. Because each group keeps a list of the ones who stand out on the other side.”
“It’s just a youthful affair,” I said unconvincingly.
“Youthful—stuff and nonsense. That’s the work of grown-up men. People like his uncle and the black frocks get the boys involved and use them as cannon fodder so that they kill each other. I wonder if they won’t employ my Luis, though. If the Right wins, it’s on the cards that they will call in my Luis, and give him a living. And they’ll promote the Captain to Major and Father Luis to Canon. It’s I who have all the worries. His mother is in high spirits because of the boy’s feat, his uncle calls him a hero, and his little brother has brought me a letter from the Reverend Fathers saying that they lament what happened—I don’t yet know what has happened—but that we must all be patient because it’s in the service of God and Spain. And here am I, his father, made a complete fool of!”
I was thinking that Navarro was unable to influence the course of his own life because he was shackled by his own character and his circumstances, and was just feeling an almost supercilious pity, when I caught myself up: was I not in a very similar state? Was anything achieved if one decided to submit to things as they were? Was it not better—perhaps—to rebel once and for all, and to know that it was one’s own fault if everything crashed?
All the signs indicated that everything was going to crumble and crash. The country was drifting towards a catastrophe. Though the Right had lost seats in the Parliament, it had gained in the sense that all its supporters were now prepared to wage war on the Republic in every possible field. And they were in good positions to do so. The Right could count upon a great part of the army officers, the clergy, home-grown and foreign capital, and the barefaced support of Germany.
The Republican parties, in the meantime, were subject to the pressure of the country which demanded that the reforms promised during the election should be put into force without further delay, and each of the parties exploited this demand to attack the others. Alcalá Zamora had been deposed as President of the Republic, and Azaña had been appointed in his place; this robbed the Republic of one of its ablest constructive brains. The Basque Country and Catalonia increased the difficulties by their particular claims. The workers distrusted a Government in which there were no Socialists of any shade whatsoever and which kept on temporizing. The debates in the Cortes were nothing but a mêlée in which the Right made the best use of the situation. Gil Robles, doubly defeated because his claims to Chieftain had been so flamboyant and his electoral strategy so unsuccessful, disappeared as the leader of the Right, and Calvo Sotelo replaced him.
As soon as the Government began negotiations about the Statute of the Basque Country, then Galicia, Valencia, Old Castile, and Léon in their turn presented a claim to autonomy. When it came to the point of reinstating the workers and employees who had been dismissed from their posts after the October Rising in Asturias, some of the firms affected closed down, and others refused to take the men back. Angel had applied for his re-engagement; he was still out of work. Strikes broke out all over Spain and fantastic rumors were rampant. Everybody expected an insurrection of the Right. The workers were ready for a violent counter-move.
In the higher civil service and in the judiciary, the obstruction was barely disguised. The young man who had shot at the Socialist Jiménez de Asua was acquitted, although he had killed the detective who was guarding the Deputy; the acquittal was granted on the ground that he was mentally deficient and infantile—just a boy to whom his father, a high-ranking army officer, used to give pistol ammunition “to melt down and make lead soldiers, because it kept the boy amused.”
Day after day I stumbled on object lessons in my contacts with the Ministry of Labor and with our clients.
When I was a child, the Puerta de Atocha was the easterly boundary of Madrid. Beyond it was only the terminus of the Saragossa and Alicante railway lines, and a few houses scattered in the hills. Sometimes, when my mother wanted to escape from the unbearable summer heat in our attic, she prepared a cold supper and we went down the Atocha valley, to lie in the grass and eat our supper in the open. It was a poor people’s outing. Dozens of workers’ families camped near us in the yellow grass.
At that time, the Basilica of Atocha, never to be finished, and the Ministry of Public Works were under construction. The Madrid milkmen sent their goats to browse on the hillocks between the heaps of building material. My childish imagination was deeply impressed by the immense excavations, by the cemented foundations and the stone blocks straggling in the field, which were to become the new Ministry. Sculptures by Querol, destined for the frontispiece, were lying about half unwrapped: gigantic horses’ legs, naked female bodies, all sawed into bits as though by a monstrous crime.
The edifice cannot claim great artistic merit. It was planned around 1900, and is a huge bulk of mixed Doric, Roman, and Egyptian elements, striving to be monumental and succeeding merely in being disproportionate. But to my child’s eyes it was a cyclopic work which was to outlast centuries.
In the ground floor of this building I passed a long stretch of my life. And I was to see the giant pillars of the entrance, which had loomed in my infancy, crash down in splinters, hit by a bomb.
When the big building became the Ministry of Labor, the Patent Office was housed on its ground floor. For fifteen years I went nearly every day into those vast stone halls and glass-roofed office rooms.
The fields in which I had eaten my supper and played thirty years before had been converted into pretentious modern streets. But farther on, white stone blocks still littered the waste ground at the foot of the unfinished basilica’s ugly white-and-red tower, and women, tired from work as my mother had been, sat in the evenings on the benches of the dusty gardens.
The chief of the Patent Office, with the title of Director-General, owed his post to a political appointment and changed with every Government. I had to deal with the three permanent officials, and to crowd all my business into the brief hours when they were available.
Don Alejandro, Departmental Chief, was tall, scrawny, with glittering blue eyes, thin lips and nose. His impeccable dignity hid a clever trickery, ever ready to pull a fast one if it involved no risk.
Don Fernando, Head of the Patents Department, was a merry, fat man with a pendulous belly, always harassed, always in a hurry, and always too late; he had a moon face and a savage appetite embittered by flatulence and hyper-acidity which he tried to drown in bicarbonate. His favor was not for sale, but a case of champagne bottles softened him, a letter from a Deputy calling him “My dear friend” melted him. He had been young in a period when politicians appointed and dismissed the civil servants, when each change of Government meant a hundred posts suddenly vacant and quickly refilled. He had been bred in awe of politicians, and still felt it.
Don Pedro, Head of the Trade Marks Department, was a tiny, fragile man, with a little shaven head crowned by a toupee, rather like the cowlick of a naughty boy, and a gentle, womanish voice. He came of a wealthy family and was deeply religious, without vices great or small, methodical, meticulous, fastidious, the only man who came to the office on time and who never left before the end of office hours. He was incorruptible, and impervious to political pressure. Only a priest could ever make him change his mind, for a priest was infallible to him.
I had to steer the interests of about a thousand clients past these three men. I had to remember that Don Alejandro admired the Germans and sent his sons to the German College, that Don Fernando kowtowed to Deputies, and Don Pedro obeyed the Church. I could obtain astounding results by fencing cleverly with a few bank notes, an amiable letter from a German personage, an amiable letter from a politician, or an amiable letter from a prominent Father.
And I knew from direct experience that the Patents Office was only a small sample of Spanish Administration.
There had been the case of the representative of a foreign firm who had come specially to Madrid by air, to settle the account for aircraft engines supplied to the Spanish Army. The account amounted to a hundred thousand pesetas and had been endorsed by the Finance Ministry. Our client thought he would only have to call and receive the money. I had to explain about the forms he would have to fill in so that the date for payment would be fixed—and that some of the money owed by the State to veterans of the Cuban War had not been paid because the date of payment had never been settled. I had then to indicate to whom a commission might be acceptable; the client left by the next passenger aircraft, carrying with him the money of his firm minus twenty thousand pesetas—five per cent commission.
I worked out the reasons for, and the inferences from, this state of affairs in the long hours while I waited in the cool stone halls of the Ministry. A great many of the civil servants came from the middle class and remained in the middle class, trying to live up to an ideal of independence and ease which was not within the reach of their meager salaries. They had felt the power of connections. They had found it easier to cede to pressure than to resist, easier to accept a tip than to wax indignant, because indignation meant the risk of transfer and banishment to an obscure provincial post. Or if they were independent, like Don Pedro, they were still bound to their education and class, doubly submissive to the moral rule of their spiritual advisers in this general hopeless corruption.
How could these administrators have been other than opposed to the Republic which threatened their benefactors and advisors, and their own precarious position in the machinery of the State?
And on the other side there were the clients.
There was Federico Martínez Arias. He was the manager of a rubber manufacturing company in Bilbao. He was an old client and on friendly terms with me. Of humble origin, he had worked himself up to a safe position in the society of Bilbao; he was the Consul to two Latin-American Republics. In Spain he had become wealthy, in America he would have reached the millionaire class. He used to have endless discussions with me on social and economic problems. He was greatly influenced by Taylor and Henry Ford, and mixed their ideas with a dose of Spanish feudalism.
“I belong to the school of thought which says that a worker must be well paid. In our factory we pay the best wages in the whole of Bilbao.”
Beyond the pay, he wanted to organize and supervise the workers, giving them decent houses, decent cities, comfort, schools, culture, leisure, but all under the rule and control of the factory.
“The workers have not the right qualities to do it for themselves. They are like children, you’ve got to lead them by the hand so that they don’t stumble… The worker does not need more than a good house, good food, a bit of diversion, and the certainty that his living is safe.”
“But in your opinion he must accept it and not start thinking and discussing.”
“He doesn’t want to. Just look what Ford has done with his thousands and thousands of workers. What trade union has ever given them as much as Ford? Labor must be organized by the State. The worker is part of the State mechanism.”
“Goodness me, have you turned Nazi, Don Federico?”
“No, but I do admire the Germans. It’s a marvel what that man Hitler has achieved. We want a man of his kind here in Spain.”
But he was not a political fanatic, nor a religious one. He believed. He believed in the divine mission of the Leader as the head of the national family, a very Catholic and Spanish concept; he also believed in the submission of the serfs. “Even if the Leader is wrong—what would become of an army if the soldiers were to start discussion?”
“If the soldiers could speak out, we might not get wars, Don Federico.”
“Certainly. And what would it lead to? Life is a struggle, even the grass blades bore through a stone so that they can grow. Read Nietzsche, Barea.”
“But you call yourself a Christian, Don Federico.”
“I know, I know—pacifist blah. ‘Peace on earth’—yes, but remember what follows: ‘to men of good will.’ You aren’t going to tell me, I hope, that those Socialists and Communists preaching red revolution are men of good will?”
Don Federico called on me at the office, and after talking over his outstanding affairs, he said suddenly:
“I’ve come to take you with me to Bilbao.”
“What for?” I was not astonished, for our business often made it necessary to go to the other end of the country at a moment’s notice.
“What for? To work for me. Get out of this hole. You’ll never get anywhere here. I offer you the post of attorney to the firm, at one thousand pesetas per month and a commission.”
The offer was tempting. The salary was high as salaries go in Spain, the chances it opened were better. It would have meant surmounting the last barrier between me and an upper-class existence. Attorney to the Ibérica in Bilbao would have meant being accepted into the society of Bilbao, one of the most powerful groups in Spain. It would have meant a prosperous future. It would have meant renouncing once and for all everything—everything, that is, of which I still had Utopian dreams!—and hadn’t I told myself I had to be a good bourgeois?
I did not know then as I know now that this incident was a critical juncture in my whole life. It was nothing but the voice of my instinct which prevented me from accepting.
“Don Federico, I’m afraid you can’t very well take me on. Do you know that I’m almost a Communist?”
He gaped.
“Of all the absurd things I’ve heard in my life, this beats the lot. You a kind of Communist! Don’t talk nonsense. Pack your suitcase and come to Bilbao. I know you can’t do it tomorrow. Tell your chief he’s got to find someone in your place, I’ll leave you three months for it. And I’ll pay you your salary as from today so that you can arrange for the move comfortably. Don’t say anything now. I will write you an official letter as soon as I am in Bilbao, and you can answer then.”
The letter came, a very formal business letter, and I answered it in the best business style. I did not accept. A few days later Don Federico’s great friend, Don Rafael Soroza, owner of an important dolomite deposit, came to the office. He patted me on the shoulder.
“So you’re coming to join us in Bilbao, eh?”
“No, sir, I’m staying here.”
“But, my dear fellow, you’re an idiot—forgive my frankness. Just in these days…”
“What about these days?”
“In these days we need men like you.”
He launched forth into politics and economics. While I listened, I remembered Don Alberto de Fonseca y Ontivares, the apothecary of Novés. The man before me represented a parallel case, with a different final twist. Soroza was in his late fifties, sturdy, expansive, and cheerful; but the later half of his life had been disturbed by business. He came of a patriarchal family from the Asturian mountains. Though his father had made him study law and follow the career of a lawyer, he had lived quietly in his little village after his father’s death, farming his land. Then German prospectors arrived.
Few people know with what meticulous thoroughness German agents investigated the soil and subsoil of Spain for some twenty years. And few know that there exist dozens of companies, apparently of genuine Spanish complexion, which serve as cover for the most powerful German concerns, often not so much to do business themselves as to prevent others from doing it.
The Germans found dolomite in one of Don Rafael Soroza’s properties, and tried the same game with him which they had played so successfully with the apothecary of Novés. But by pure accident the piece of land was already registered as a mining site, because it included an abandoned coal mine, and the rights were the property of Don Rafael’s family. The Germans set up a limited company, installed Don Rafael as its manager, and so Don Rafael began to earn money without knowing how he did. Germany took shiploads of dolomite.
“You just imagine the amount of magnesia consumed all over the world because of people’s digestion. The Germans buy all the magnesia I am able to extract from the dolomite, and now they’re asking for greater quantities. It’s an excellent insulator, and they’re going to use it for refrigerators and for covering all the pipes in the ice factories. It’s better than asbestos. We must take out a patent.”
Don Rafael registered innocuous patents which protected the rights to use magnesia as a non-conductor of heat. The Rheinische Stahlwerke, the I.G. Farbenindustrie, and Schering-Kahlbaum sent us patents protecting the extraction of magnesium from dolomite and its exploitation for mechanical purposes. German firms were busy investigating the use of magnesium and its alloys in internal combustion engines. The raw material was to come from Spain, and a ring of patents impeded its industrial exploitation.
When Don Rafael had ended his discourse, I told him:
“In short, you’ve turned Falangist.”
“No, Barea, no. It’s something much bigger. I’m a member of the National Socialist Party. You know that my partners are Germans, and they’ve let me join, although I’m a foreigner. Now what do you say, Barea?”
“That you’ve got yourself into a mess, Don Rafael.”
“Nonsense, man. The Cause is making progress with giant strides. In one or two years’ time we’ll have Fascism here, and then we’ll be a nation such as we ought to be. It won’t last more than a year as it is. Mark my words… And now, tell me, when are you going to join Don Federico? He belongs to us too.”
“As a matter of fact, I’m staying in Madrid. The climate of Bilbao is bad for me, and I’m in a sound position here.”
“I’m sorry to hear it. Well, you know your own business best.”
I did not dare to tell him that I was a Socialist as I had told Don Federico. He would have fainted. But what the devil had he to do with the Nazi Party? I could figure it out in the case of Rodríguez Rodríguez, who had spent his life in the German Embassy. But this Asturian gentleman-farmer?
He supplied me with the answer himself when he called me to his Madrid office to decide on a few pending matters.
“I’m leaving tomorrow, and wanted to settle these points with you before I go.” With childlike gaiety he added: “I’ve got guests at home, you know.”
“Are you going on a bear hunt?”
Bears are still to be found in the mountains where Don Rafael had his manor house.
“Nothing of the kind. They’ve sent a few German lads to me. They’re on a research tour—geology, mines, topography—and some engineers are coming as well, I believe, to look round for a good airport site. It’s a pity we have the Republic, for, believe me, with the help of the Germans and with what we have ourselves, this could be a great country.”
“You have not done so badly, personally.”
“No. But that is how things are in the whole of Spain: we’re treading wealth under our feet and don’t know it. Spain is the richest country in the world.”
“Yes. And look how our people live!”
“But why is it so, tell me, why? It’s the fault of that handful of demagogues who have become the masters of this country. Remember what they did to Primo de Rivera and how they would not let him run things as he wanted to. But all this won’t last much longer. We’re going to make an end of all those Freemasons, Communists and Jews, at a single stroke, Don Arturo—at a single stroke.”
“But there aren’t enough Jews in Spain for your stroke, Don Rafael, unless someone invents them.”
“We shall find them, Barea.”
DON MANUEL AYALA had wired us to meet him on the airfield at Barajas. We were waiting for him, my chief and I.
A Douglas used on the lines to Barcelona and to Paris stood out glaringly new between the old Fokkers. I went up to it and studied the fuselage. Something at the back of my mind made me uncomfortable and marred my pleasure. I did not know what, and it bothered me, because. I had always been in love with aviation. I had to grope for it.
Whatever I knew of the theory of aerodynamics I owed to the Junkers v. Ford case, in which I had been acting for our client. It was some time now since the last Junkers and Heinkel patents had passed through my hands. I wondered what they were up to now.
When Captain Barberan in Morocco had taken me up into the air in his crate and when he spoke of his dream of a transatlantic flight, it had been beautiful.
I remembered the first flights I had ever seen, and my delight as a small boy. There was that long, exciting walk in the flat grounds of Getafe while I waited for the arrival of Vedrines, the first man to fly from Paris to Madrid. There were the three afternoons when I tramped through the fields to the Velodrome at Ciudad Lineal until the weather was fine enough and Domenjoz could show us what looping-the-loop was.
I would have liked to fly in that Douglas to Barcelona high above the wild coast of Catalonia and the translucent water, and see the shimmering, shifting light of sun and clouds on range beyond range of distant mountains.
I stopped and focused my troubled memory.
It had happened in the ’twenties, when Junkers had built a four-engined aircraft to tour the world and bring home contracts for the big airlines planned just then by various countries. Junkers was our client. The Germans tried to obtain a commercial air base in Seville, where the tower for the anchorage of the Zeppelin had been constructed. Spain could be a key position in the network of communications with America. There had been many and complicated moves in the game, and one of them was the law suit between Junkers and Ford about the patent for aircraft with wings placed below the fuselage.
My old chief and I had had to go to the airport of Getafe when the four-engined Junkers was due to arrive in Madrid on its propaganda tour. A solemn reception was planned and the King of Spain was to be there. When the monster arrived, a little after the scheduled time, the King and his aides-de-camp inspected it thoroughly; the King insisted on being taken up for a trial flight, and diplomatic engine trouble had to be evolved. But while the official formalities were still going on, a German scientist explained the features of the machine to several Spanish officers who had come with the possibility of an army contract with Junkers in mind, and my chief and I went with them.
The man had the title of doctor, but I never caught his name. He was small and thin and sandy-haired, with thick glasses riding on the bridge of a pendulous nose. His hands were enormous. I remembered having thought that they looked like the skinned hands of a big ape. When he moved his bony fingers, the articulations seemed to jump out of their sockets and to assume strange shapes.
First he folded those hands on his back, behind the heavy tails of his coat, and led us through the cabin where the luxurious armchairs for the passengers were lined up. Then he took us through tunnel-like passages which ended in the engine rooms, and finally we came to the pilots’ compartment, separated from the passengers’ cabin by a sliding door.
The pilots’ compartment was shaped like an elongated hemisphere, corresponding to the curved part of the aircraft’s nose. Its outer wall consisted of a duraluminum frame and glass panels. The seats of the two pilots were raised in the center of the half globe, as though suspended in mid-air, and commanded a free field of vision in almost all directions.
Here the little doctor freed his hands and began to explain in Spanish:
“Now that you have seen the machine”—he stopped all praise by weaving those bony fingers in the air—“I will show you something more interesting.”
With surprising agility he bounded along the curved glass floor and began to unscrew some of the cylindrical rivets placed where the duraluminum bars crossed. Hollowed sockets with a screw thread appeared underneath.
“As you see, it suffices to unscrew the rivets to uncover the threaded socket into which you can screw the legs of a machine gun in a few moments—these—and these—are for the machine gunner’s seat. You take away this glass panel here, and the barrel of the machine gun is adjusted so that it protrudes. Here on both sides—here—and here—there is room for two more machine guns, so that the airplane is protected and equipped to attack another airplane. And now come with me, gentlemen.”
He ran in front of us with small, bouncing steps to the passengers’ cabin. There he showed us how the legs of the armchairs were screwed to the floor.
“They can be taken off in two minutes, and this room is empty. Into these sockets you screw equipment for airborne troops and if necessary for bomb storage and releasing gear. Here are the trapdoors… Now I will show you where the bombs are to be installed.”
Underneath the huge wings he unscrewed other mock rivets and demonstrated the sockets which were to receive the bomb racks. He bounded on his toes and his bony fingers danced while he gloatingly repeated the procedure:
“Here—you see—and here! Now what do you think of it? In a single hour we can transform the planes of a commercial airport somewhere in Germany, say in Berlin, and come to bomb Madrid. Ten hours after the declaration of war we can bomb the enemy’s capital. And if it is we who declare war, five minutes after the declaration. Ja, ja, this is Versailles!”
The old and famous balloon pilot who was with us and whom I knew well turned to me and muttered:
“That fellow is as loathsome as a spider. One feels like squashing him underfoot.”
I had been very glad at the time that the Spanish Army contracts for bomber aircraft did not go to Junkers, in spite of the enticing demonstration the cadaverous doctor had given the staff officers.
I had managed not to think of the incident too often since then. But it had changed my views on the future of aviation. It had poisoned my pleasure in flying. It was bothering me just now. There had been Abyssinia. There was Hitler. It was so easy to drop bombs on defenseless towns: you took the rivets off the sockets and fixed the machine guns and bombing gear.
I was getting morbid, I told myself. This Douglas with its sober English comfort was nothing but a luxury vehicle to make flying a pleasure.
The plane from Seville circled and made its landing. We went to meet our client. He was not alone, and I did not recognize his companion. A funny pair they made, plodding across the field.
Don Manuel Ayala was short and squat, in his mid-seventies, desiccated and burned by the sun, a sharply pointed nose in the wrinkled, furrowed face, bright mouse eyes behind old-fashioned gold-rimmed glasses fastened to his lapel with a black silk cord, a white, tobacco stained mustache drooping over his small and very thin mouth. The man with him was old, heavy, and uncouth. I thought he was big until I realized that only his extremities were big: hands and feet so huge as to be shapeless, and a large head lolling on disproportionately wide shoulders. He had a coarse peasant face, clean shaven, but blue black from the roots of the hair. What made him look comic was his suit. It was as though a giant had been ill in hospital, lost half his weight, and now came out into the street for the first time in his old clothes. They hung loosely on him, as on coat hangers. But he walked with sure, firm steps.
Then I recognized him. I had never seen him out of his clerical garb before. He was our client’s brother, the Jesuit—Father Ayala.
Whenever Don Manuel Ayala had come to Madrid, he had asked me to accompany him. He had lived seventy years of his life cloistered in a small village in the province, of Huelva and never gone further than on a sporadic visit to Seville. He administered the landed property he had inherited from his father and sold its produce, but otherwise he led the life of a recluse. He grew exquisite wines which were treated with care, and in his old age he suddenly decided to launch them on the market. Somebody gave him an introduction to our firm, and we provided a set of trade marks, labels, and model bottles for his wines and cognacs. He was merry and loquacious, easygoing and a little cynical about himself. He considered his wish to become a famous winegrower as the sudden whim of old age, but was resolved to indulge it, just as he suddenly took to air travel when he came to Madrid.
“At my age one is no longer afraid of anything. Why shouldn’t I give myself the pleasure? I’m only sorry to be so old just when all these new things are turning up.”
He felt awe and pride for his brother, the Jesuit, who was so holy and so important that nothing might be said about him. In 1930, the year before the coming of the Republic, he had taken me along for the first time when he went to see his brother at the Jesuit Residence in the Calle de Cedaceros. I had found Father Ayala repulsive. He was dirty and greasy, his habit slovenly, his huge, stiff-soled boots never cleaned, the nails of his splay fingers edged with black. I had no glimpse of his mind, but I knew the strength of the man. At that time, the threads he held in his fingers led to the Royal Palace, to the Cortes, to aristocratic salons, and to officers’ rooms in important garrisons. But he never appeared in public. I knew he now lived in civilian clothes in a Seville tenement house together with two other Jesuits. Why did he suddenly accompany his brother on this trip to Madrid, by air, unexpectedly? What new spider’s web was he weaving?
Father Ayala left us when we reached our office and Don Manuel apologized for him: “The poor man is very worried about what is going to happen.”
He went on explaining while the lift took us upstairs.
“You know, when the Republic dissolved the Order, my brother went to Seville and took a tiny little flat with two others. They’re still living there, a communal life. There are hundreds like them in Spain. Of course, quite a lot left the country, but gradually they’ve been coming back. Now things are going to change, and their place is here, don’t you see?”
When we had finished our business talk, Don Manuel invited me to have lunch with him, “because my brother has abandoned me and you know the best corners.”
The old man was deeply religious; he lived a bachelor’s life and had hardly had any contact with women. But he had a weakness for good food and good wine. When we were installed in one of those “corners” he liked, Don Manuel asked me:
“Now tell me how things are going in Madrid, politically.”
“As far as I am concerned, I’m very pessimistic. The Left groups are quarreling with each other, and the Right is out to ruin the Republic. And now some idiot has had the idea of making Azaña President and so immobilizing a man—perhaps the only man—who might have been able to govern the country in its present state.”
“Yes, yes, and that’s a great advantage for us. Believe me, Largo Caballero and Prieto and all those people aren’t important. The only dangerous man is Azaña. Azaña hates the Church and he’s the man who’s done us most harm. Now his teeth are drawn. Otherwise it would have been necessary to eliminate him before doing anything.”
“Caramba, Don Manuel, that’s a side to you I’d never suspected—that you should think of killing anyone!”
“Not I, no, I can’t kill a fly myself. But I must admit that certain things may be necessary. That man is the ruin of Spain.”
“The ruin of your Spain, you mean.”
“Man alive, of yours as well. Because you’re not going to tell me you’re on the side of that Communist rabble!”
“Perhaps not. But certainly not on the side of the Falangists. Now look, Don Manuel, I don’t believe in the Monarchy. I’m for the Republic with my whole heart.”
“Psh, I don’t care about Monarchies or Republics. There you have Portugal with an ideal Republic. An intelligent man at the top, the Church respected and in the place that’s due to Her—that’s what I like.”
“You talk as if you were your brother.”
“If you only could hear my brother! And I agree with him. Communism! Do you know that the Society of Jesus solved the social question centuries ago? Read history, my dear fellow, just read it. Then you’ll see what the missions in America did, particularly the one in Paraguay. The Society administered the country and no one went hungry. No one, get that straight. The Indians have never been so happy as they were then. When one of them needed a blanket, he got it, as a gift, not for sale. The Fathers even found them wives, if necessary. They needed no money. It was a paradise, and a model administration.”
“And a mine of wealth for the Holy Fathers, I presume.”
“Now don’t be a demagogue. You know that the Society is strictly poor.”
“You won’t deny that it had influence, and still has it.”
“I won’t deny anything. But neither can you deny that the Society had many enemies and that the poor fellows must have means of defense.” He stopped and thought. “If only they had done as my brother told them in time… but they wouldn’t listen. When Don Alfonso said he would go, and make way for the Republic, my brother advised against it. With a few regiments everything could have been settled in a couple of days. Well, you saw what happened.”
“I know your brother has excellent contacts.”
“Oh no, no, the poor man never left the Residence except for a little walk. But the Holy Fathers consulted him, because—although it’s not for me as his brother to say so—he’s a great person. But always his simple self. You have met him after all. Don’t you agree?”
It was true. Father Ayala had never changed. There were others of his Order to be men of the world. He had shown his uncouth contempt and guarded his power. I told Don Manuel that I agreed. Mellowed by the meal, he expanded.
“Good times are just round the corner, Barea. Nearer than you think. Now we have the means, and we have the leader. This Calvo Sotelo is a great man. He’s the man of the Spain of the future—of the very near future.”
“You don’t think we shall get another military rising as in 1932? Or do you?”
“And why not? It’s a patriotic duty. Rather than get Communism we have to man the barricades. But it won’t be necessary. The whole nation is with us, and all the muck will be swept away at a single stroke. Maybe not even that will be necessary. Calvo Sotelo will become the Salazar of Spain.”
“Yes, most people seem convinced that it will come to an explosion overnight. But if the Right take to the street, I think there’ll be few of them left to tell the tale. The country is not with them, Don Manuel.”
“If you call that mob ‘the country,’ no. But we have the army and the middle class, the two live forces of the country. And Azaña will not get rid of that with a laugh, as he did in August 1932.”
“Then, according to you, Don Manuel, we shall have a paternal Government, Paraguayan or Portuguese style, in August 1936?”
“If God grants it, Barea. And He will.”
We finished the lunch pleasantly joking, for neither of us wanted to go further in showing his thoughts to the other. I never saw either of the two brothers again.
On Monday I sent my eldest daughter on a holiday to the mountains with Lucila, Angel’s wife, who was going to stay on her family’s farm near Burgos, while her husband was still out of work.
It was the 13th of July 1936. When I had seen them off, I went directly to the Ministry with my brief case.
The rooms of the Patent Office stood empty. A crowd of people clustered round the door to Don Pedro’s office. I saw Don Pedro himself gesticulating and vociferating behind his desk, his eyes filled with tears. I asked one of the employees:
“What the devil is going on here?”
“Good Lord, don’t you know? They’ve killed Calvo Sotelo!”
Many of the staff belonged to the Right, particularly four or five typists, daughters of “good families,” and a far larger group of sons of similarly good families, some of whom were members of Falange. Now they were standing round Don Pedro’s desk, making a sort of chorus to his outcries at the assassination of the political leader.
“It’s a crime against God! Such a man, so clever, so good, such a Christian, such a gentleman, killed like a mad dog—” he moaned.
“We’ll settle the account. They’ll have little time to rejoice. Now the only thing we can do is to go out into the street.” Thus the response of the chorus.
“No, no, for God’s sake, no more bloodshed—it is not Christian. But God will punish the evildoers.”
“God will do it? Well then, we’ll lend God a helping hand,” replied a very young man.
I went away. There was no work to be done in the Patent Register that day.
The news had caught me by surprise, as it had caught the whole town. Yet it was obvious that the killing of Calvo Sotelo was the answer to the killing of Lieutenant Castillo of the Republican Shock Police. The only question was whether it would prove to be the fuse which would light the powder keg. And my daughter in the train to Burgos! If I had known in time, I would have stopped the journey. Though she might be better off in a small hill village than in Madrid once things started to happen. But—small village? I had seen what could happen in Novés. And the only thing I knew about Lucila’s family was that they were well off and considered important people in their village, which was not exactly a guarantee of safety if the countryside was in an uproar. I walked on to the Glorieta de Atocha, not knowing what to do.
The wide expanse of the square was like an ant-heap, not because of the assassination of Calvo Sotelo, but because of the preparations for Saint John’s Fair, the Verbena de San Juán. The foundations for the hundred and one amusements of the Fair were set up on the paving stones. There were the simple wooden frames for the canvas walls of the junk stalls, there was the circle of steel rails for the merry-go-round. A row of men clinging to a cable slowly raised a tall pole from which flapped a circular canvas. Two mechanics streaked with grease adjusted and hammered the pieces of an old steam engine. The men were in vests, with bare arms, and sweated profusely in the July sun. Peeling and flaking pieces of bedaubed wooden horses were piled up in a heap. Smoke rose from the minute chimneys of the caravans of the fair people. And the female tightrope walker was walking around with drooping breasts, her armpits sweaty, looking after the food and helping out the artists who had turned themselves into carpenters. Wagons and lorries unloaded packing cases and indefinable, bulky objects. The children and the onlookers contemplated the assembling of the stalls with ecstatic attention.
Madrid was preparing for its amusement. Who thought of Calvo Sotelo?
I was wrong. Nobody failed to realize the significance of his death. The people of Madrid felt the fear of soldiers about to depart for the front. Nobody knew when and where the attack was to begin, but everybody knew that the hour had come. While the fair people were setting up the merry-go-rounds, the Government had proclaimed a “state of alert.” The Building Trade Union of the C.N.T. declared itself on strike, and some of the U.G.T. members, who wanted to go on working, were assaulted. The Government shut down all centers of the right-wing groups, without distinction, and arrested hundreds of their people. It also closed the Ateneos Libertarios, the local centers of the Anarchists, and arrested hundreds of their members. It was clear that they intended to avert the conflagration.
In the Calle de Atocha, I met my Communist friend, Antonio, with four others.
“Where are you going?”
“We’re on sentry duty.”
“Don’t be stupid. They’ll only arrest you. Anybody can see a mile off that you’re out on business. Your friend there couldn’t show more clearly that he’s carrying a pistol if he tried.”
“But we’ve got to be in the streets to see what’s going on. We must protect our branch!” The local branch of the Communist Party, of which Antonio was secretary, had its office near by. “And we don’t even know whether the police aren’t going to close it down. Of course we’ve cleared all our people out of the office.”
“What you should do is set up a stall at the Fair.”
Antonio gasped: “This isn’t a joke, you know.”
“No, it certainly isn’t a joke. I mean it. It’s quite simple. Go and buy a few toys in a store, at once, now, get hold of a few boards for a trestle table, and a blanket, and set up a stall in the Fair. I know a tradesman quite near, in the Paseo del Prado, who’s a friend of mine and will let you use his telephone even during the night, because he doesn’t close his bar during the Verbena. So you can stay there and keep informed without making yourselves conspicuous.”
They did it, and I helped them. That very afternoon Antonio set up a stall with cheap toys at the side of the Botanical Gardens. The members of his local branch who manned the pickets came and went, stopped to finger the toys and pass on their news. The first sensational piece of news came in the middle of the afternoon: the Socialist Party, all the trade unions belonging to the U.G.T., and the Communist Party had concluded a mutual assistance pact and pledged their support to the Republican Government. Antonio was full of enthusiasm and impatience behind his toys.
“Why don’t you join the Party?”
“Because I’m no good for your discipline, as you know.”
“But we need people now.”
“I’ll think it over. First let’s see what happens.”
None of us doubted that the Right would carry out its rising. My brother Rafael and I went to the Verbena that night, fetched Antonio away from his post and sat down in the open outside my friend’s bar. The Fair was not yet in full swing and there were few people merrymaking, although there was no lack of groups of police, Shock Police, and workers. The public at large, usually so ready to enjoy summer nights in the open, was afraid of gatherings.
“The greatest problem,” said Antonio, “is the Anarchists in the C.N.T. They’re capable of making common cause with the Right.”
“Don’t be an idiot.”
“I’m not an idiot. Now look here, who can understand their going on strike just now and starting to shoot up the U.G.T. people? We’ve already had to give protection to some of our comrades on their way home this evening. It’s worst in the University City. Particularly since the Government has been stupid enough to shut the Ateneos. Not that I like the Anarchists—I’d like to get rid of all of them—I’d like to get rid of all of them—but all the same we can’t afford to let them go over to the Fascists!”
“No fear. Did they go over in Asturias? When the hour comes to fight—if it does come—they’ll be with us.”
“You’re an optimist. And I’m afraid you’ve got a soft spot for the Anarchists.”
I was stubborn in my hope.
That week was one of incredible tension. Calvo Sotelo’s funeral was turned into a demonstration by the Right and ended in shooting between them and the Shock Police. In the Cortes, Gil Robles made a speech in Calvo Sotelo’s memory, which was officially described as a declaration of war. Prieto asked Casares Quiroga to arm the workers, and the Minister refused. Detentions and assaults were on the increase in all districts of Madrid. Building trade workers of the U.G.T. went to work in the University City under police escort, for the C.N.T. continued to attack them. Expensive cars, with their luggage carefully covered so as to escape attention, left the town in considerable numbers on the roads to the north. People began to flee from Madrid and from Spain.
On Thursday rumors ran riot. Fantastic stories circulated, and the evening papers loaned color to them. Officially, nothing had happened. The army had not revolted in Morocco, nor had a military rising taken place in southern Spain. The phrase used to calm the public was as equivocal as the rumors: “The Government has the situation well in hand.” To stress this fact, broadcasts were started on the same subject. They had the opposite effect. If nothing was happening, why all this nervousness?
Outwardly, Madrid looked as though it were celebrating its fiesta. In that broiling heat, the people lived more in the streets at night than in their asphyxiating houses. The café terraces, the doorways of bars and taverns, the gateways of tenement houses were choked with groups of people who talked, disputed, and passed on news or rumors. But in spite of all the tension, an undercurrent of vague optimism survived.
On Friday night—July the 17th—our circle in the bar of my house was very large. At eleven o’clock, the Calle del Ave Maria seemed to overflow. The balconies of the houses stood wide open and the voices of the radio sets poured through them. Every bar had its loudspeaker on. The people sitting on the terraces carried on their discussions in shouts and screams. Gossiping women were sitting in the doorways and flocks of children played and made a noise in the middle of the street. Taxis carrying members of the Workers’ Militia on their round drove up and down the slope. Their brakes screeched when they stopped outside one of the bars.
The loudspeakers bawled out news, and the street submerged in silence to listen and to hear.
“The Government has the situation well in hand.”
It was strange to hear the phrase proclaimed in a badly synchronized chorus along the street, from different altitudes. No two voices were the same: they reached one’s ear clashing and repeating each other. A loudspeaker in a fourth floor room somewhere down the street was left behind and shouted into the silence the word “hand.”
“They should leave it in our hands,” said Fuñi-Fuñi.
“Yes, so that you can shoot us,” cried young Manolo.
“We Anarchists are as good anti-Fascists as you are. Or better. We have been fighting for the revolution in Spain for nearly a century, and you only started yesterday. And now, as things are—you’re sending your masons to work like a lot of sheep, and the Government refuses you arms. What do you expect? Do you think the Fascists are going to give you higher wages in the University City because you’re good little boys? You’re a nice lot. The builders going to work—”
“We’re disciplined. Do you want to give the others a handle so that they can say we have gone into the streets? Let the Fascists do it, and then you’ll see.”
“Yes, yes, leave them to it, and you’ll see what happens once they’re in your house, while you’re on your way driving lorries with cement for their public works!”
“And if only you go on shooting at our own people, the Fascists won’t get into our houses, I suppose? What logic!”
“The logical thing about it is that you have not yet found out that the hour has come to make the revolution.”
“Of course I haven’t found it out. What has come is the hour to defend ourselves when they attack us. After we’ve crushed them, thanks to the action they’ve taken, we can make the revolution.”
“I don’t agree.”
“All right. Go on killing builders.”
On the following day, Saturday, July the 18th, the Government openly announced that there had been insurrections in many of the provinces, although it continued “to have the situation well in hand.” Rumors and news, inextricably mixed, chased each other: Morocco was in the hands of Franco; the Moors and the Foreign Legion were disembarking in Seville; in Barcelona the battle was raging; in the provinces a general strike had been declared; the Fleet was in the hands of the rebels—no, it was in the hands of the sailors who had thrown their officers overboard. In Ciudad Lineal a few Falangists had attempted to seize the transmitter of the Navy Ministry, or, according to other reports, they had seized the buildings of film studios in Ciudad Lineal and had installed their headquarters there.
Under the avalanche of contradictory reports, the people reacted in their own way.
“They say that… but I don’t believe it. What can four generals do? As soon as they start leading the troops out into the street, the soldiers themselves will finish them off.”
“Well, I’ve been told that… but it’s just the same with me as with you, I can’t believe it. It’s all an old wives’ tale. Maybe some drunken playboy has marched into the street to proclaim a rising—in Villa Cisneros.”
Villa Cisneros was the place in Northwest Africa where the Republican Government had deported right-wing promoters of the Anti-Republican military rising in August 1932.
As the afternoon neared it end, it was no longer rumor, it was an admitted fact that a military rising had taken place in several of the provincial garrisons and that there was street fighting in Barcelona. But “the Government had the situation well in hand.”
My brother and I went down into Emiliano’s bar to have a quick coffee. Our friends had gathered.
“Sit down here,” cried Manolo.
“No, we’re going to the People’s House to see what they’re saying there.”
We were just about to leave when the radio interrupted its music and the voice we had begun to know so well said brusquely:
“An urgent order has been issued to the members of the following trade unions and political organizations to report immediately to the center of their respective groups.” The speaker went on to enumerate all the trade unions and groups concerned; he enumerated all the groups of the Left. The bar was in a tumult. A few of the men drew pistols.
“Now it’s the real thing. And they won’t catch me unprepared!”
Within two minutes the bar had emptied. Rafael and I hurried back to our flats to tell our families that we might not come home during the night, and then we met again. Together we hastened to the secretariat of the Clerical Workers’ Union. There they were doing nothing but drawing up a list of the members who reported, and telling us to wait. We decided to go to the People’s House after entering our names.
I had a funny feeling in my throat when I saw the streets of Madrid.
Many thousands of workers were on their way to report to their trade union, and many of their organizations had their seat in the People’s House. From the outlying districts to the center of the city the houses were pouring forth men all going in the same direction. On the roof of the People’s House burned a red lamp which was visible from all the attics of Madrid.
But the People’s House lay in a narrow, short street lost in a maze of equally narrow and short old streets. And so it happened that the House seemed more and more unapproachable the more the multitude thickened. At the beginning, sentries of the Socialist Youth Organization checked the membership cards in the doorway. Then they had to demand the cards at the two corners of the street. By ten o’clock sentries were guarding the entrances to all the streets in a two hundred yards’ radius of the House, and within this circle thronged thousands of persons. All the balconies of all the houses stood open and countless loudspeakers were shouting the news:
The Right had taken to open insurrection.
The Government was tottering.
Rafael and I dived into the living mass of the crowds. We wanted to get through to the tiny room where the Executive Committee of the Socialist Party had its office. The stairways and the narrow corridors of the People’s House were blocked. It seemed impossible to advance or recede a single step. But those workers in their boilersuits asked us:
“Where do you want to go, compañero?”
“To the Executive.”
They flattened themselves against the wall and we were pushing through, when we were deafened by a surging shout, by the roar:
“Arms! Arms!”
The cry was taken up and re-echoed. At times you heard the whole syllable and at times a cacophony of “a-a-a.” Suddenly the multitude was welded into a single rhythm and repeated:
“Arms, Arms! Arms!”
After the third cry there was a pause, and they started afresh. The clipped rhythm leapt along the corridors and down the stairs, and won through to the streets. A fine dust silted down from the vibrating ceiling. Through the open windows, with a bodily impact, came the shout of a hundred thousand people:
“Arms!”
I FELT SLUGGISH AFTER THE MEAL and tired from my night without sleep. It was good to rest my drowsy head on Maria’s thigh and relax like a contented animal. I stared upwards into the tops of the pine trees and the bits of blue, luminous sky between their branches. Maria began to play with my hair and to stroke my neck. A quick wave of desire lapped over my weariness and repose. The scent of resin was clinging to the skin.
Then we lay side by side in the pile of dry pine needles.
“Let me sleep a bit, will you?” I said.
“No, I won’t. Tell me what happened last night.”
“Nothing at all happened. Let me sleep now. I’ll tell you later.”
“But I don’t want to let you sleep. Tell me what happened. What should I do with myself while you’re asleep? Get bored?”
“Sleep a bit, too.”
“I won’t let you sleep. Look, if you like, we can walk down to the village early this evening and stay at the inn overnight. But I won’t let you sleep now.”
We were enmeshed in a senseless, unfriendly discussion. My nerves were raw and taut from last night’s excitement, from the weary listlessness which always invaded me after sexual contact, from the blurred, distorted, nagging vision of the happenings of the last twenty-four hours, from sheer hunger for sleep. In the end we shouted at each other. I rose.
“Now we’ll go to the station at once. I’m going back to Madrid. If you like come with me, and if not, do as you please.”
We walked down through the pine wood, silent and sullen. To slide on the pine needles which polish one’s shoe soles until they shine had always been exhilarating; that afternoon we only cursed when we skidded on the slope. We found it irritatingly ludicrous to slip and to land on our backsides. And we had to walk down a long slope for more than an hour until we reached the little village in the hills.
“No train until five. Let’s drink a glass of beer.”
There were few people in the inn: four or five couples of holidaymakers and four Civil Guards playing cards, their belts unstrapped, their coats unbuttoned. Two of them sat there in their shirtsleeves. They gave us a glance and went on with their game. After a few moments one of them turned round and said paternally:
“A little quarrel, eh?”
A young man in the corner stood up and came towards us. I had not seen him; his table was in the gloom and I was still blinded by the sun outside.
“What are you doing here, Barea?”
“Spending Sunday in the country. And you?”
“I’m staying here for a month or so, to have a good rest. I feel almost like going back to Madrid, what with the things that are happening, but my wife says I’d be silly to do it, and I suppose she’s right. A few shouts for Calvo Sotelo, and then—a pricked balloon! Last night when I heard the radio I thought it was going to be serious, but this morning people came out here with their snacks and their bottles of wine to spend the day here, just like other Sundays. Just like you yourself. There have been fewer of them, though, to tell the truth.”
“I don’t really know what to say to you. Last night I too thought it was serious. Today I can’t make up my mind what to think. I was almost inclined to stay here for the night, but I’ve had a row with the girl and I’m going back at five.”
“Stay here.”
“What for? I would if it were only to stay with you for a while and have a talk. But I prefer going back to staying a night with a bad-tempered face beside me. And anyway, I’m done up, my nerves are all on edge.”
“You can come home with me if you like.”
“No thanks. I’ll take the train back.”
One of the Civil Guards was watching us all the time. It did not surprise me, for Hernández was known as a Socialist and in the small mountain village everyone was aware of it. He went there every summer to strengthen his weak lungs; his work—he was a printer—was bad for his health, and he used to rent a woodcutter’s shack among the pines for himself, his wife, and his children.
When Maria and I rose at half-past four, the Civil Guard Corporal who had watched Hernández and myself put on his uniform coat. While he was buttoning it up, I went to Hernández’ table to say good-by.
“So you’re really going?”
“Yes. Come to Madrid with me.”
“I’d like to. But I’ll only go when they send for me. They know where I am. As long as they don’t call me back, things can’t be very serious.”
The Corporal went out of the door in front of me and turned round in the road.
“Your papers.”
He looked twice at my cedula personal, the identity paper which also registers the category of the owner’s income. I saw that he was impressed and astonished. He stared at me doubtfully.
“How is it you know Hernández?”
“I’ve known him since we were boys,” I lied.
“Do you carry arms?”
“No.”
“By your leave.” He passed his hands over my body. “All right. You can go.”
Twenty-four hours later the Civil Guard had taken over the little village in the Sierra. Early in the morning, they shot Hernández by the roadside. But I learned this, and knew that I had escaped the same fate by a narrow margin, only many days later. At the time, Maria and I climbed the torturous road which led up to the tiny station building, in morose silence.
The railway track runs on a ledge of the Sierra between two tunnels, the village lies embedded in a circle of serried, pine-grown hills. Only at the bottom of the valley is there a meadow where cows graze. It was very peaceful to look down from the bench on the station. The cows were gently browsing, the air was drenched with the scent of pines, the blue sun-filled sky was calm, without a breath of wind. When one of the cows raised its head, the air carried up the clear, mellow sound of its bell.
The station canteen-keeper said:
“It’s early for you to be going back.”
“Yes, but it will be very crowded later on.”
“And how are things in Madrid?” As though Madrid were thousands of miles away. The canteen-keeper’s small children clung to his trousers and watched us with wide-open eyes. Smiling, I answered his question:
“It’s a little confused at the moment.”
The train, a short train which came from Segovia, carried few passengers. The people who had gone to the Sierra from Madrid had not yet abandoned the pleasure of the pine needle carpet. An elderly couple in our compartment, well-to-do provincials, looked at us questioningly. After a while, the man offered me a cigarette.
“Did you come from Madrid this morning?”
“Yes, we did.”
“Are things very unruly there?”
“Oh well, much ado about very little. As you see, people went to the Sierra as usual for their Sunday.”
He turned to his wife.
“Now you see I was right. These women are always afraid of something. A new Government, that’s all.”
“You’re probably right. But I shall have no peace until we’re with Pepe. Don’t you agree?” She turned to Maria for support, and told her about their son who was at the university in Madrid and—“God guard us!”—had gone in for Left politics. He belonged to the Students’ Association. And she could not stay quiet.
The women went on talking, and I withdrew into my corner and reviewed in my mind the happenings of the past night.
Rafael and I had succeeded in pushing our way through to the cubicle at the end of a long passage where the Socialist Party secretariat was housed. Carlos Rubiera was there, Margarita Nelken, Puente, a couple more whom I knew by sight, tackling a torrent of people, telephone calls, shouts and written notes which were passed to them from hand to hand along the corridor.
Carlos Rubiera saw me.
“Hullo, what brings you here?”
“I’ve come to see if I can be of any use.”
“You’re just in time. Go and help Valencia.” He showed me an officer in the Engineers’ uniform who was sitting at a small table. “Hey, Valencia, here’s someone you may be able to use.”
We shook hands and Valencia asked:
“You’ve been in the army?”
“Four years in Morocco—Sergeant in the Engineers. We belong to the same army.”
“Good. At present I’m in command of the guard here. We’ve got Puente and his boys, and an inexhaustible number of volunteers. The bad thing is that we have no arms and no ammunition, and that most of the lads have never handled a rifle in their whole life. They’re all in the big room on the terrace. We’ll see what Puente says.” Puente was the commander of the Socialist Militia.
It amused me to note the contrast between the two. Valencia was very much the officer, slim, erect, his uniform fitting like a glove. A long, oval face, gray eyes, a fine, straight nose and full mouth. In his early forties. The gray mass of his hair, black and white threads mixed and swept back in faint ripples, gave a sternness to his head which the gay eyes and the mouth belied. It was impossible not to sense his firm energy.
Puente, a baker by profession, must have been about ten years younger, although his round, fresh face made it difficult to assess his age. But the lines of his face were blunted and harsh. He had a town suit which did not fit his solid, strong body. He looked as though it would have suited him better to stand there in a sleeveless vest and exhibit his naked muscles and hairy chest.
It was Puente who steered Rafael and myself through the clogged passages and stairways to the saloon. There one could breathe. It was a large assembly room which opened on to a roof terrace. No one who did not belong to the Militia had been allowed through; there were no more than fifty persons, standing about in groups. In every group one man was holding a rifle and the others were mobbing him, because each one wanted to hold the rifle for an instant, handle the trigger and take aim, before passing it on to the next. Puente clapped his hands, waiting for the men to line up before the dais.
“All those who don’t know how to handle a rifle—to the left!”
“Shall we get rifles?” shouted a few voices.
“Later, later. Now listen. Our friend Barea here has been a Sergeant in Morocco. He’ll explain to you all about how a rifle works. And you”—he turned to those who had gone to the right and therefore claimed to be familiar with rifles—“come along with me. We’ll relieve our comrades who are posted in the streets.”
He marched off with his men, and there we were left standing on the platform, Rafael and I, in front of thirty-odd curious faces. I wondered whether I had forgotten the mechanism of a rifle in twelve years, selected a Mauser and began to take it to pieces, without saying a word. It was an old Mauser of 1886. My fingers found their way back instinctively to their old practice. The red cover of the table before me was soon plastered with oily parts.
“If there’s any mechanic among you, step forward.” Five men pushed themselves to the front. “I’ll explain to you how the pieces fit together. You will find it easier to understand than the others, and later you can explain it to them in groups of two or three. In the meantime my brother here will explain the theory of firing to the rest.”
Rafael took another rifle and marched his men out on to the terrace. After half an hour each of the mechanics was ready to take on a small group. Rafael was left with two difficult cases, men who seemed incapable of holding a rifle straight. “You’ve got the oaf platoon,” I said into his ear. I went and looked down from the terrace.
The house on the other side of the street, some six yards away, had all of its balconies open and all its lights lighted for me to see. There were dining rooms with a lamp in the middle illuminating the table. In one, a woman was collecting what was left over from supper. In another, the empty table was covered with a dark-green cloth with embroidered flowers along its edge. The owner of the flat was leaning in shirtsleeves over his balcony railing. In the flat below the family was having supper. Then there were bedrooms and sitting rooms, all different, each with its own personality, and all alike. From every flat came the voice of a radio set, all the same, each with its own pitch, pouring music over the heads of the mass packed in the street, a dense, black mass of moving heads. A wave of heat rose from below; it smelled of sweat. Sometimes a soft breeze swept this billow of human warmth from the terrace, and then it smelled for a few seconds of trees and flowers. The noise was so intense that the building throbbed with it, as though it were trembling. When the music stopped and the hundred loudspeakers cried: “Attention! Attention!” you heard the multitude fall silent with a dull rolling sound which died away in the distance in the streets of the quarter. Then only coughs and grunts came, until someone commented on a piece of news with a joke or a blasphemy. A firm voice shouted “Silence!” and a hundred mouths repeated the command, drowning everything else for seconds. As soon as the announcement was over, the rumbling noise grew worse than ever.
By midnight the Government had resigned. A new Government was being formed. Over my head a voice said: “Dirty dogs.”
I looked upwards. On the top of the roof swayed a red flag, almost invisible in the darkness of the night; above it, the red lamp. From time to time, when a shiver of the flag dipped a fold into the red glare, it flashed in a sudden blaze. In a corner of the wall, a winding iron staircase led to the roof. Somewhere on the top I saw the faint glow of a burning cigarette. I climbed up. At the highest point, on an open platform above all the roofs, I found a militia lad.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m on watch.”
“Because they might come over the roofs?”
“Yes, because they might.”
“Whom do you mean?”
“The Fascists, of course.”
“But you can’t see anything from here.”
“I know. But we’ve got to watch out. Imagine what would happen if they caught us by surprise.”
The iron platform rose into the dark. Below was the bulk of the building, crudely lighted. The sky was clear and powdered with flickering stars, but there was no moon. Round us shimmered the glow from the lights of the streets of Madrid and dwindled away into darkness. The street lamps of the suburbs cut through the fields in parallel threads of beads, white flames which seemed to flicker like the stars. The noise of the street came to us muffled through the huge bulk of the house. Twenty steps, and it seemed a different world. I leaned my elbows on the railing and stayed for a long while, quiet.
Then they called us to a belated supper. From somewhere they had produced roast lamb and some bottles of wine for the guard. We ate and talked. The people were still calling for arms. Puente said to me:
“We’ve got twenty rifles and six cartridges per rifle in the building.”
“Then we’re in the soup.”
“Well, it will all be settled now. I suppose they’ll give the Government to our Party, to the Socialists. Anyhow, it will have to be settled soon. The Fascists are in Valladolid, and marching for Madrid. But don’t tell any of the lads here.”
I went back to the terrace, while Puente had to inspect his men. The long waiting began to wear down the crowd. Some people nodded, sitting on the stairs and in the passages, others leaned against the wall and dozed. I climbed up to the little platform and saw the dawn begin as a faint white sheen in the east.
The loudspeakers started again: “Attention! Attention!… The new Government has been formed!”
The speaker made a pause and then read the list of names. People fished hastily in their pockets for a piece of paper and a pencil. All the sleepers had awakened and were asking: “What did he say? What did he say?”
The speaker went on with his litany of names. It was a national Government, he had said. Then the name of a Minister without Portfolio rebounded over the heads: Sánchez Román. It was impossible to hear more. The multitude burst into a roar: “Traitors—treason!” And above the medley of curses and insults surged the cry: “Arms! Arms!” The roar grew and swelled. In the stairways and corridors the crowds wanted to move, to go up, to go down. The building quivered as though it were worn out and ready to crumble in a cloud of dust.
A new shout rose: “To the Puerta del Sol!” The short word “Sol” whipped through the air. The dense mass in the street swayed and moved. The People’s House poured forth an unending stream from its doors.
“Sol! Sol!” The cry was still cracking through the air, but from farther away. The crowd below thinned out. Daylight slowly filled the street with a pale, almost blue haze. The People’s House was empty. The first rays of the sun caught us with Puente and his Milicianos, left alone on the terrace. Up on the roof, from his iron balcony, the sentry cast a long, misshapen shadow over the tiles.
“What are we going to do?” I asked Puente.
“Wait for orders.”
Down in the street a few groups of people were standing in heated discussion. Isolated words drifted up to us.
“Don’t you think we ought to go to the Puerta del Sol?” I asked.
“No. Our orders are to wait. We must keep discipline.”
“But not under this Government.”
The Milicianos echoed my words. One of them began to cry openly. I said to Puente:
“I’m very sorry, but I can’t help it. I came here last night of my own will to help in any way I could. I was willing to go everywhere with you, and to be posted anywhere. But I’m not willing to serve under a Sánchez Román. You know as well as I do what his being a Minister means. It means that this Government will try to make a deal with the generals. I’m sorry.”
I shook hands with him. It was not easy. The militiamen turned round, and some of them leaned their rifles against the parapet of the terrace: “We’re going too.”
Puente swore at them, and they took up their rifles again, except two who marched out behind Rafael and myself. We walked through the emptied house. A few people moved on the stairways like ghosts. We gulped down a scalding cup of coffee in the bar and went out into the deserted street.
A street cleaner was spraying the pavement with the jet from his hose and the smell of a moist dawn hung in the air.
But from the center of Madrid, from the Puerta del Sol, sounded a tremendous clamor, a muffled bellow which made the air throb and which grew louder as we came nearer. At a street corner a tavern stood open, with a table in the doorway. On the table, a coffee urn on a charcoal heater, a basin with water, cups and saucers, a row of liquor bottles. We stopped to take another cup of coffee and a glass of cognac. The tavern’s radio interrupted its crooning: “Attention! Attention!” The tavern keeper increased the volume: “A new Government has been formed. The new Government has accepted Fascism’s declaration of war on the Spanish people!”
One of the two Milicianos who had come with us from the People’s House said: “Then it’s all right. Salud.” He walked off and then turned back. “But one never knows with those Republicans in the Government.”
When we reached the Puerta del Sol, the crowd had dispersed and the shutters of the bars were clanking open. The people who carried on their discussions in groups and clusters along the pavement went in to have their breakfast. A radiant sun rose over the houses. The day was going to be hot. Taxis passed by, cluttered with militiamen; many of them carried flags with the inscription “U.H.P.” The Sunday buses lined up to carry the people into the open country. Beside us a conductor shouted: “Puerta de Hierro! Puerta de Hierro!” Groups of boys and girls and whole families came in driblets to climb into the buses with rucksacks on their backs.
“What a night!” exclaimed a man as he sat down.
I remembered that I had arranged to meet Maria in the Puerta del Sol at seven in the morning on Sunday and to go to the Sierra with her for the day. This was Sunday. It was half-past six. I did not want to go home—there was nothing I could do—and it was a splendid morning.
“Listen,” I said to Rafael, “tell Aurelia that I won’t be home till late tonight. Give her some explanation, say I had work to do at the union. Or anything. I’ll wait for Maria here and go with her to the Sierra. I’ve had enough.”
That was what had happened on the night of the 18th. Last night—though it seemed far away. The conversation of the others droned on and on. I was tired, annoyed with the whole day, annoyed with Maria, annoyed with myself, unwilling to go home and be shut in with my wife on top of it all.
Then we were in Madrid. People stormed the tram. We preferred to walk. The first buses crowded with holiday-makers came back from the banks of the Manzanares. Outside the station was a traffic block. A policeman with a white helmet was trying to unravel it with great shouts and gesticulations. There were lorries full of people singing at the top of their lungs. A luxury car with suitcases heaped on the luggage rack coasted by.
“They’re running away, they’re running away!” yelled the men in the lorries. The big car swept past them in silence; the road which led away from Madrid was free. Yet the shout had not been threatening; it had been excited, but merry: the crowd made fun of people who fled from Madrid out of fear.
The gaiety died out in the streets as soon as we had passed the hill of San Vicente. Pickets of Milicianos asked for our papers at the street corners. Police had drawn a cordon at the entrance of every street leading to the National Palace. Few people were about, and they all hurried. More cars with Party emblems painted on their doors and the inscription “U.H.P.” passed us at great speed. People greeted them with the raised fist. A dense smoke column rose at the bottom of the Calle de Bailén. A loudspeaker told us through an open window that General Franco had demanded unconditional surrender from President Azaña. The Republican Government had answered by a formal declaration of war.
A few churches were burning.
I took Maria to her house and hastened home.
The streets round the Plaza de Antón Martín were choked with people. They were filled with an acrid, dense smoke. They smelled of burned timber. The Church of San Nicolás was on fire. The dome had a helmet of flames. I saw the glass panes of its lantern shatter and incandescent streams of molten lead run down. Then the dome was a gigantic, fiery ball with a life of its own, creaking and twisting under the impact of the flames. For an instant the fire seemed to pause, and the enormous cupola cracked open.
The people scattered, shouting:
“It’s coming down!”
The dome came down with a crack and a dull thud and was swallowed by the stone walls of the church. A hissing mass of dust, ashes, and smoke rose. Broken glass tinkled shrilly. Suddenly made visible by the fall of the cupola, a fireman’s ladder was swaying in the air. A fireman at the top was pouring his jet on to the market stalls in the Calle de Santa Isabel and on the walls of the cinema beside the church. It was as though a harlequin had suddenly been left alone, ridiculous and naked, in the middle of the stage. The people cheered, and I did not know whether they meant the fireman or the collapse of the dome. The fire roared on, muffled, behind the stone walls.
I walked into Serafín’s tavern. His whole family was in the back room, the mother and one of his sisters in hysterics, and the bar was full of people. Serafín was running from the customers to his mother and sister and back, trying to do everything, his round face streaked with sweat, half crazed and stumbling at every step.
“Arturo, Arturo, this is terrible, what’s going to happen here? They’ve burned down San Nicolás and all the other churches in Madrid, San Cayetano, San Lorenzo, San Andrés, the Escuela Pía—”
“Don’t worry,” a customer who sported a pistol and a red-and-black scarf challenged him. “There are too many of those black beetles anyhow.”
The name Escuela Pía had shaken me: my old school was burning. I hastened down the Calle del Ave María and found Aurelia and the children outside the house among the neighbors. They greeted me with cries:
“Where have you been?”
“Working all day long. What’s going on here?”
Twenty neighbors started giving me information: Fascists had fired at the people from the churches, and so the people had stormed the churches. Everything was burning…
The quarter smelled of fire, a light rain of ashes filtered down. I wanted to see for myself.
San Cayetano church was a mass of flames. Hundreds of people living in the tenement houses alongside had dragged out their furniture and stood there, dumbly staring at the fire which threatened their own homes. One of the twin towers began to sway. The crowd screamed: if it fell on their houses, it would be the end. The tower crashed on the pavement.
In front of San Lorenzo a frenzied multitude danced and howled almost within reach of the flames.
The Escuela Pía was burning from inside. It looked as though shattered by an earthquake. The long wall of the school in the Calle del Sombrerete, with its hundred windows of cells and classrooms, was licked by tongues of fire which stabbed through the window grilles. The front was demolished, one of the towers crumbled, the porch of the church in ruins. Through the side door—the entrance for the poor pupils—firemen and Milicianos came and went in ceaseless action. The glow of the central fire in the gigantic building shone through the opening.
A group of Milicianos and a Shock Police officer came out of the door. They carried an improvised stretcher—boards across a ladder—and on it, wrapped in blankets, a small figure of which nothing was visible but the waxen face under a thatch of white hair. A pitiful old man, quavering, his eyes filled with fright: my old teacher, Padre Fulgencio. The multitude opened a path in silence, and then men put him into an ambulance. He must have been more than eighty years old. A stout woman beside me said:
“I’m sorry for poor old Father Fulgencio. I’ve known him ever since I was a tiny little girl. And to think of him going through all this now! It would have been better for him if he had died. The poor man has been stricken with paralysis for many years, you know. Sometimes they carried him up to the choir in a chair so that he could play the organ, because his hands are all right, but from the waist down he’s like dead. He wouldn’t feel it if you were to stick pins into his legs. And you know, all this has happened because the Jesuits got hold of the school! Because before that—and believe me, we can’t stand the black frocks—but all of us here liked the old Fathers.”
“Padre Fulgencio was my chemistry teacher,” I said.
“Then you know what I mean. Because that must have been quite a long time ago. Well, I mean to say, you aren’t old. But it must have been a good twenty years ago.”
“Twenty-six.”
“There, you see. I wasn’t far out. Well, as I was telling you, some years ago, I don’t remember if it was before the Republic or just after, the school changed so that you wouldn’t have recognized it.”
The fire was crepitating inside the church. The building was a shattered shell. The woman went on, hearty and verbose:
“The Escolapians—you know, they were nice and, mind you, I don’t like the black frocks generally—went and joined one of those Catholic School Associations, or whatever they were called, but it was all managed by the Jesuits. You remember how it was when the Father Prefect used to go to the Plaza del Avapiés and give us coppers, and my own mother went and kissed his hand. But you see, all that was over and done with when the Jesuits came. They started that what-d’you-call-it, the Nocturnal Adoration, and then the fine young gentlemen came and prayed. Nice prayers, I can tell you! Didn’t we see them drilling in the schoolyard and getting in arms? And then, would you believe it, this very morning they started firing at us with a machine gun from the windows up there and people could hear it in the whole quarter!”
“And were there any casualties?” I asked.
“They caught four or five over there in the Mesón de Paredes Street and Embajadores Street. One was killed on the pavement there, the others have been taken away, no one knows where.”
I went home in profound distress. I felt a weight in the pit of my stomach as if I wanted to cry, and could not. I saw flashes of my boyhood, I had the sensation of the feel and smell of things I had loved and things I had hated. I sat on the balcony of my flat without seeing the people who walked through the street and stood there in groups, talking loudly, trying to sift the conflict within me. It was impossible to applaud the violence. I was convinced that the Church of Spain was an evil which had to be eradicated. But I revolted against this stupid destruction. What had happened to the great library of the college, with its ancient illuminated books, its unique manuscripts? What had happened to the splendid collections of Physics and Natural Science? All that wealth of educational material! Had those priests and those Falangist boys really been so incredibly stupid as to expect the college to serve as a fortress against an enraged people?
I had seen too much of their preparations not to believe in their use of churches and monasteries for their stores of arms. But I still hated the destruction, as much as I hated those who drove the people to it. For a moment I wondered where Padre Ayala was, and whether he liked the outcome of his silent work.
What would have happened if our old Father Prefect had thrown open the gates of the Church and the college and stood there himself under the lintel, in the face of the crowd, upright, his gray hair stirred by the wind? They would not have attacked him, I was sure of it.
Later I was to learn that my dream had not been vain: the parish priest of the Church of Santa Paloma had put the keys into the hands of the militia and his church with its art treasures was saved, although the papier-mâché saints were smashed and the metal ornaments used for the war. And similarly San Sebastian, San Ginés, and dozens of other churches had been preserved, some of them for the bombs to come.
But that evening I felt leaden. The fight was on, it was my own fight, and I was repelled and chilled to the core.
Rafael took me to Antonio’s stall at the Fair. There were still people about and the customary amusements functioned. But Antonio was wildly excited and about to leave. The garrison of the big barracks, the Cuartel de la Montaña, had fired from a machine gun at a lorry carrying members of the Socialist Youth returning from the Puerta de Hierro. The police had drawn a cordon round the barracks. It was the headquarters of the insurrection in Madrid, it seemed.
“We must go there,” Antonio said. I refused. There was nothing I could do. I had seen enough, I was dead tired. Rafael went off with Antonio and I returned home. I slept four hours and woke just after four in the morning. It was bright daylight. In the street below people were talking and disputing. I dressed and went down. A taxi with Milicianos stood in the Plaza de Antón Martín. The men were drinking milk at the dairy which belonged to Serafín’s brother-in-law. I joined them and drank two glasses of cold milk out of the icebox.
“Where are you going?”
“To the Cuartel de la Montaña. It’s getting serious there.”
“I’m coming with you.”
Shock Police stopped our car in the Plaza de España. I walked on to the Calle de Ferraz.
The barracks, in reality three different barracks joined together, is a huge building on the crest of a hill. In front of it lies a wide glacis on which a whole regiment has room for its drill. This terrace slopes down to the Calle de Ferraz on one side and is cut short above the Northern Railway Station on the other. A thick stone parapet runs along its whole length, with a sheer drop of twenty feet to a lower glacis which separates the barracks from the public gardens of the Calle de Ferraz. At the back, the building looms high over the wide avenue of the Paseo de Rosales and the open country to the west and northwest. The Cuartel de la Montaña is a fortress.
Rifle shots were cracking from the direction of the barracks. At the corner of the Plaza de España and the Calle de Ferraz a group of Shock Police were loading their rifles in the shelter of a wall. A multitude of people were crouching and lying between the trees and benches of the gardens. A wave of furious shots and cries was surging from them, and from others I could not see, nearer to the barracks. There must have been many thousands ringing the edifice on its hill. The pavement on the other side was deserted.
A plane came flying towards the barracks at great altitude. People yelled: “It’s one of ours!”
The day before, Sunday—that Sunday on which we had gone to the Sierra in the morning, hoping that the storm had blown over—groups of officers on the two airfields of Madrid had attempted an insurrection, but had been overpowered by the loyal forces.
The machine flew in a wide curve and banked down. I could not see it any longer. A few moments later the ground and the air shook. After dropping its bombs, the plane made off. The crowd went mad with joy, some of the people in the gardens stood up, waving and throwing their caps into the air. A man was making a pirouette when he fell, shot. The barracks was firing. The rattle of machine guns rose above all the other noises.
Shouting and screaming, a tight cluster of people appeared on the other side of the Plaza de España. When the mass arrived at the street corner, I saw that it had in its midst a lorry with a 7.5 centimeter gun. An officer of the Shock Police was trying to give orders on how to unload the cannon. The crowd never listened. Hundreds of people fell upon the lorry as though they wanted to devour it, and it disappeared beneath the human mass like a piece of rotting meat under a cluster of black flies. And then the gun was on the ground, lifted down on arms and shoulders. The officer shook himself, and shouted for silence.
“Now as soon as I’ve fired it off you’re to carry it over there as quickly as you can, do you understand me?” He pointed to the other end of the gardens. “But don’t kill yourselves… We’ve got to make them believe that we’ve got plenty of guns. And off with all of you who aren’t helping.”
He fired off the field-gun and even before the barrel had come to rest the dense mass of men closed in and carried it one hundred, two hundred yards further on. Again the gun roared, and again it started on its crazy run over the paving stones. It left in its wake people hopping on one foot and screaming with pain: the wheels had rolled over men’s feet. Machine-gun bullets were spraying the street very close to us. I took cover in the gardens and threw myself down behind a stout tree trunk, just behind two workers lying on the lawn.
Why the devil was I here—and without any kind of weapon in my pockets? I knew perfectly well that it was sheer useless folly. But how could I be anywhere else?
One of the two men in front of me raised himself on his elbows. He gripped a revolver with both hands and rested it against the tree trunk. It was an enormous, ancient revolver with a nickel-plated barrel and a sight that stuck out like a wart. The cartridge drum was a shapeless bulk above the two hands clutching the butt. The man pressed his face perilously close to the weapon and pulled the trigger, laboriously. A terrific bang shook him and a pall of stinging smoke made a halo round his head.
I almost leapt to my feet. We were at a distance of at least four hundred and fifty yards from the barracks, and the front of the building was completely screened by the trees of the gardens. What did that damned fellow think he was firing at?
His companion took him by the shoulder. “Now let me have a shot.”
“No, I won’t. It’s my revolver.”
The other swore. “Let me have a shot, by your mother!”
“No, I won’t, I’ve told you so. If they bump me off the revolver is yours; if not, you can just lump it.”
The other turned round. He had a clasp-knife in his hand, almost as big as a cleaver, and he brought it down on his friend’s behind. “Give me the revolver, or I’ll prick you!” He stabbed at his buttocks with the point of the knife.
The man with the revolver jumped and bellowed. “It’s gone in!”
“Now you see—you let me have a shot or I’ll puncture you.”
“Here you are, but hold tight, it kicks.”
“D’you think I’m an idiot?”
As though following a fixed ritual, the other raised himself on his elbows and clutched the butt with both hands, so deliberately and ceremoniously that it looked almost like a supplication. The nickel-plated barrel lifted slowly.
“Go on, get it over!” shouted the owner of the revolver.
The other turned his head.
“Now it’s you who’s got to wait. It’s my turn. Now I’ll show those bastards!”
Again we were shaken by the crash, again the acrid smoke clung to the ground around us.
The bangs of mortars and the rattle of machine guns went on at the barracks. From time to time the gun roared at our back, a shell made the air throb, and the explosion resounded somewhere in the distance. I looked at my watch: ten o’clock. Ten! It was impossible.
Just then a silence fell, followed by a pandemonium of cries and shouts. Through the confused noise rose the words: “Surrender! White flag!” People burgeoned from the ground. For the first time I saw that there were women as well. And all of them started running towards the barracks. They swept me along. I ran with them.
I could see the stone stairways in the center of the parapet which led from the lower to the upper glacis; they were black with tightly packed people. On the terrace above a dense mass of bodies blocked the exit.
A furious burst from the machine guns cut through the air. With an inhuman shriek, the crowds tried to scatter. The barracks spouted metal from its windows. Mortars sounded again, nearer now, with a dry crack. It lasted some minutes, while the wave of cries was more frightful than ever.
Who gave the order to attack?
A huge, solid mass of bodies moved forwards like a ram against the barracks, against the slope leading upwards from the Calle de Ferraz, against the stone stairs in the wall, against the wall itself. An immense cry rose from the multitude. The machine guns rattled, ceaselessly.
And then we knew in an instant, though no one told us, that the barracks was stormed. The figures in the windows disappeared in a flash, other figures whipped past the windows after them. The tide of screams and the firing now sounded inside the building. A Miliciano emerged in a window, raising a rifle high into the air and throwing it down outside. The multitude answered with a roar. I found myself part of a mass which pushed on towards the barracks.
The glacis was strewn with bodies, many of them twitching and slithering in their own blood. And then I was in the barracks yard. The three tiers of galleries enclosing the square yard were filled with running, yelling, gesticulating people who waved rifles and called senselessly to their friends down below. One group was chasing a soldier who forged ahead, crazed, but swerving aside whenever anyone crossed his path. They had run almost the whole round of the gallery when somebody tripped the soldier up. He fell. The group of people closed round him. When they separated, there was nothing to be seen from the yard where I was.
A giant of a man appeared in the highest gallery, bearing on his huge hands a soldier who threshed the air with his legs. The big man shouted:
“Here he comes!”
And he threw the soldier down into the yard. He fell, revolving through the air like a rag doll, and crashed on the stones with a dull thud. The giant lifted his arms.
“And now the next!”
A crowd had gathered in the corner of the arms depot. The rifles were there. One militiaman after the other came out, brandishing his new rifle, almost dancing with enthusiasm. Then there was a new rush at the door.
“Pistols—Pistols!”
The depot began to pour forth black boxes, passed from hand to hand over the heads. Each box contained a regulation pistol—a long-barreled Astra caliber 9—a spare cartridge frame, a ramrod, and a screwdriver. In a few minutes the stones of the yard were spattered with black and white patches—for the inside of the black boxes was white—and with grease-stained paper. The depot door was still spitting forth pistols.
It has been said that there were five thousand Astra pistols in the Cuartel de la Montaña. I do not know. But that day, empty black-and-white cases dotted the streets of Madrid. What was not found, however, was ammunition. It had been seized at once by the Shock Police.
I walked out of the barracks.
When I served my first few months in the army, a conscript soldier destined for Morocco, it had been in these barracks; that was sixteen years ago.
I had a glimpse of the officers’ mess in passing. Dead officers were lying there in wild disorder, some with their arms flung across the table, some on the ground, some over the window sills. And a few of them were young boys.
Outside on the glacis, under the glare of the sun, lay corpses in hundreds. It was quiet in the gardens.
ON TUESDAY MORNING, the day after the storming of the barracks, I went to the office and had a conference with my chief on what course to follow in the circumstances. We decided that our office would continue to function and the staff come to work in the mornings as usual. We even attempted to co-ordinate our work for the day, but gave it up as soon as we realized that postal communications had been uncertain. I took a briefcase full of papers which had to be registered and submitted in the Patent Office and left for the Ministry.
Two floors below us was the head office of Petróleos Porto-Pí S.A., a company set up by Juán March after the organization of the Oil Monopoly, with scarcely any other purpose than that of claiming fantastically high compensation for alleged oil-bearing properties from the Spanish State. The door stood open and I saw two Milicianos with rifles slung over their shoulders and pistols in their belts rummaging through the drawers. One of them turned round and saw me standing at the door.
“Come in!”
I entered. The Miliciano went past me to the door and shut it. Then he addressed me:
“Now, my fine bird, what brings you here?” He had grasped his pistol and held it with the muzzle pointing to the floor. “Just you drop your nice little case there and put your hands up!”
He did not search me for arms but simply emptied all my pockets on to the desk. My notecase attracted his attention. He drew out the wad of papers and began to scan them. In the meantime the other Miliciano rifled the briefcase.
“I think you’re barking up the wrong tree,” I said.
“You shut up and speak when you’re spoken to.”
“All right. I suppose one is allowed to smoke. Tell me when you’re through.”
I had not yet lighted my cigarette when the man shoved the U.G.T. membership card under my nose.
“Whose is this?”
“Mine, I should say.”
“Do you mean to tell us that you’re one of us?”
“I do. But it’s a different question whether you’re going to believe me or not.”
“I’m not swallowing fairly tales. Whose is this cedula personal?”
“Mine too, I imagine.”
He turned to his companion. “I told you this was a good rat trap! We’ve caught a bird already. A cedula of the hundred-pesetas class, just like the bigwigs, and a U.G.T. card! What do you have to say to that?”
“It’s possible, but it’s a bit unlikely, it seems to me. Leave him for a moment and look at what I’ve got here.”
When they had finished thumbing official and legal documents and trying to decipher the complicated designs for a liquid-air installation, they resumed their cross-examination.
“Explain who you are and what all those scrawls mean.”
I gave them circumstantial explanations. They took me down to the concierge, who was pale with fear but confirmed what I had said.
“It seems we’ve got to take a look at that office.”
We went up to our office in the lift and I led them into the confessional.
“Now, what is it you want to know?”
“Well, we want to know what kind of office this is and what people you’ve got here.”
“I’ll show them to you, that will be the best way.” I said to Maria: “Tell everybody to come here—”
“Don’t you move,” one of them said to her and pushed the button on the desk. Carlitos, our office boy came in.
“Hullo, kid, you’re buttons here, aren’t you? Now listen, get every one of the staff in here, just as if this gentleman here had sent for them. You know who he is?”
“Hell, of course I know. You’re on the wrong track, pal.”
But he brought in our employees one by one. They stood in a silent semicircle and waited.
“Now you can introduce them,” the leader of the pair said.
“The best thing will be for you all to show your union cards. The only person here who hasn’t got one is our chief—here he is—and he’s one of the partners of the firm.”
The two Milicianos accepted the facts, although they clearly showed their desire to search the office. Before they left, they fired off their parting shot:
“All right—but we’ll come back. This outfit will have to be taken over. It’s good-by to employers now, and you”—this was directed to our chief—“can look round elsewhere for your meal-ticket.”
It was getting late for the Ministry; the Patent Departments would close within an hour, and there would be no taxis to be had. I walked down the stairs with the two Milicianos. Now they turned friendly.
“You know, my lad, what with you looking like a bourgeois louse and with the figure on your cedula, we thought you must be one of those Falangists. Because they carry our union cards in their pockets, you know. And then you turned up in the door of that robbers’ den!”
“I looked in precisely because I was astonished to find anyone in that place just now—and so you’ve made me late for the Ministry with these papers of mine!”
“We’ll take you there in a jiffy, don’t you worry.”
Outside was a car and two militiamen with pistols from the Cuartel de la Montaña in their belts. When they saw us coming, they laughed broadly.
“Have you bagged him?”
“No, he’s one of ours, we’re going to take him to his Ministry.”
That was my first experience in a requisitioned car with a self-appointed driver. We started with a violent jerk and shot down the Calle de Alcalá in defiance of all traffic regulations. Passers-by raised their clenched fists, and we all, including the driver, returned the salute. The car responded with a swerve and the driver tore at the wheel so that we tumbled over one another. There was nothing to be done except to wait for the moment when the madly careering car would crash into another mad car or lorry passing us, brimful with Milicianos who would raise their clenched fists, or when it would dash on to the pavement, crush a couple of pedestrians and end up against a lamp post. But nothing happened. We crossed the Paseo del Prado through a maze of boards and girders, the dismantled skeletons of fair-stalls and merry-go-rounds.
When we came to the Ministry, my companions decided that they wanted to have a look at it; they had never been in a Ministry.
Shock-Police posts at the entrance would not let anyone through who did not possess a pass; when the militiamen walked up the broad stairs, trying to follow me, a corporal barked at them:
“Where are you going?”
“We’re going in there with him.”
“Are they coming with you, sir?”
“Have they got passes?”
“No.”
“Then you have to ask for forms over there and wait for your passes.”
“Well, if you come in, you know where to find me,” I said with a childish feeling of triumph.
In the Register everything was topsy-turvy. A dozen employees of patent agencies were waiting in the hall, but the places behind the windows of the counters were deserted. A few of the employees of the Ministry were standing in the middle of the hall and discussing the latest events with the others. One of the Register people saw me and said:
“If you’ve got anything for us, Señor Barea, let me have it, I’ll register it for you. It’s not exactly my job, but no one else has turned up. Well, one has—Don Pedro himself.”
“I should have thought he would prefer not to leave his house today.”
“You don’t know him then. Go in and see him.”
Don Pedro was buried in mountains of papers and working feverishly.
“How are you, Arturo, do you want anything?”
“Nothing, sir. They told me you were here, and I came in to say good morning. I tell you frankly that I didn’t expect to see you today.”
“What should I do in your opinion? Go into hiding? I’ve never done harm to anyone and I haven’t ever meddled in politics. Of course—I have my opinions which you know, Barea.” He changed to the more distant form of address.
“I know them; they seem to me a little dangerous just now.”
“Of course they are. But if one has a clear conscience, one isn’t afraid. What I am, though, is shocked and horrified. Those people respect nothing. One of the priests of San Ginés came to my house. He is still there, shivering and trembling, and making my sisters almost die of fright. And those burning churches… I can’t believe that you approve of all this, although you do belong to the Left.”
“I don’t approve of it, but then I don’t approve of rifles stored in churches either, nor of conspiratorial meetings held by Christian Knights at two in the morning.”
“They were forced to defend themselves.”
“So have we been, Don Pedro.”
There we were off again, careful not to hurt each other’s feelings too much, neither of us hoping to come to any agreement with the other, yet both trying to behave as though discussions were still of value. I was not very attentive. I knew his arguments as much by heart as I did my own. I thought about the man himself.
His religious faith was so strong, his integrity so complete, that he was unable to admit even the possibility that anyone professing the same faith might have a lower moral standard than he himself. He was a simple, childlike man who after the death of his parents had taken refuge in an almost monkish life together with his sisters; he had a private chapel in his house and thus was aloof from the political life of the sacristies; he neither smoked nor drank, and I imagined that he had never known a woman.
There was something else I knew about him. In 1930, a clerk in a patent agent’s firm had developed tuberculosis. He was earning two hundred pesetas per month, was married, and had two children. His illness had presented him with an insoluble problem. To give up work or to apply for admission to one of the State sanatoria would have meant starvation for his family. The illness made rapid progress, and the moment came when he was unfit to go to work. His firm paid him three months’ salary and dismissed him. The employees of the private patent firms and of the patent departments in the Ministry collected money for him, and I asked the three chiefs of the Patent Office for their contribution. A few days later Don Pedro called me to his room and shut the door. He inquired about the result of the collection, and when I told him that it had netted four hundred pesetas, he exclaimed: that was bread for one day, and hunger for the future. I explained that we were not able to do what would be necessary to provide a place in a sanatorium for the man and financial support for his family in the meantime. Don Pedro said that everything was settled, including the recommendation to the sanatorium which would cut short all the red tape; he was going to pay for the cure; I was to tell the consumptive man’s wife that his friends had collected enough money to pay her two hundred pesetas per month for the duration of her husband’s illness. “Nobody will know, because we can manage all this between you and me.”
It had been arranged as Don Pedro suggested. The clerk was cured, he lived with his family in the north of Spain. Neither he nor his wife ever learned what had happened. When the young man was dismissed from the sanatorium, Don Pedro had wept with joy.
How could I have quarreled with this man, whom I respected, much as I disagreed with all his beliefs and political ideas? The discussion dragged on painfully. In the end Don Pedro rose and held out his hand.
“I don’t know what is going to happen here, Barea, but if anything does happen…”
“If anything happens to you, let me know.”
The workers’ militias had occupied all the barracks of Madrid: the conscript soldiers had been discharged. The police had arrested hundreds of persons. News from the provinces was still contradictory. After a fierce battle, Barcelona was finally in the hands of the Republicans. So was Valencia. But the list of provinces which the insurgents had caught by surprise was long.
Crossing the Plaza de Atocha, I wondered what course the War Ministry would follow. A general mobilization? General Castello had the name of being a loyal Republican. But would he dare to arm the people? Would President Azaña bring himself to sign the decree?
Milicianos had drawn a cordon across the Calle de Atocha.
“You can’t get through, man, they’re firing from the roof up here. Get yourself under cover round the corner.” I heard the crack of a rifle shot. Two Milicianos on the other side of the street fired back, one with a rifle, the other with a pistol. In the doorway of the house where I stood there was a cluster of people and two more militiamen.
“I think I can get through as long as I stick to the front of the houses.”
“All right, if you like. Have you got papers?”
I showed him the U.G.T. card and he let me through. Shots crackled from the roof. I kept very close to the wall of the house and stopped when I had passed it. A group of men came out of the entrance. Two of them were carrying the limp body of a boy of sixteen. His head was oozing blood, but he was alive. He moaned: “Mother—Mother—”
The whole quarter of El Avapiés seemed in an uproar round the Plaza de Antón Martín. Shots sounded from many roofs. Milicianos were chasing snipers over the roofs and through the skylights. Somebody said that two or three Fascists had been killed in the Calle de la Magdalena. But the people showed little alarm. Men, women, and children from the tenements were in the streets, all looking up at the upper stories of the houses, all shouting and shrieking.
A strong voice shouted the order which I then heard for the first time: “Shut the balconies!”
The street resounded with the clatter of the wooden laths of window and balcony blinds. Some windows stayed open, and people pointed at them with their fingers.
“Señora Maña!” someone kept on shrieking. After a while a fat woman came out on an open balcony. “Shut your balcony, quick!” And the fat woman rolled down the blinds without a word.
Then it grew quieter. The houses showed blinded fronts. A little boy squeaked: “That window’s open, over there!”
On a third floor a window stood wide open and its curtain flapped, leisurely. A Miliciano growled: “Some son of a bitch could fire at us from behind that curtain.” People round him began to scream: “Shut that window!” The curtain went on flapping, like a challenge. A militiaman took up his stance on the opposite pavement and loaded his rifle. He took aim. The mothers clutched their children and edged away from the man, who stood in the middle of the deserted space and fired. Broken glass clinked. One of the men entered the house and came out with a little woman, shrivelled and humped by old age, who cupped her hand to her ear. The others shouted in chorus:
“Who’s the tenant of the flat up there, Señora Encarna?”
When at last the old woman understood, she answered with perfect gravity:
“And that’s what you’ve called me for, children? That’s the staircase window. The Fascists live on the first floor. They’re bigoted devils, they are.”
Within a few seconds the balconies of the first floor were thrown open. A Miliciano leaned out from the last window in the row: “There’s nobody here—they’ve flown!”
Furniture and crockery rained down on the paving stones.
The loudspeakers interrupted their music, and the crowd clamored for silence. The shower of furniture ceased. The Government was speaking:
“The Government, on the point of finishing with the criminal sedition fostered by military who have betrayed their country, requests that the order now about to be re-established should remain entirely in the hands of the public forces of law and order, and of those elements of the workers’ associations which, subjected to the discipline of the Popular Front, have shown such abundant and heroic proof of lofty patriotism.
“The Government is well aware that Fascist elements, in despair at their defeat, are trying to sham solidarity and join with other turbid elements in an effort to discredit and dishonor the forces loyal to Government and People by displaying an alleged revolutionary fervor which expresses itself in incendiarism, looting, and robbery. The Government commands all its forces, whether military or civilian, to quell any such disturbances wherever they may encounter them, and to be prepared to apply the utmost severity of the law to those who commit such offenses…”
The pieces of furniture stayed there, strewn over the pavement. Milicianos stood guard beside the spoils. The people clustering in ardent discussions were cheerful; now the insurrection was beaten, the Right would soon realize what Socialist rule would be like. The blindfolded, somber street became illuminated and almost festive.
At the entrance of the Calle de la Magdalena appeared three lorries packed with standing Milicianos who shouted rhythmically: “U.H.P.—U.H.P.—U.H.P.”
The street took up the cry, with raised fists. When one of the lorries stopped and the militiamen came tumbling out, the crowd clotted around them. Many of the men had rifles and army leather straps; there were some women in men’s clothes, in blue boiler suits.
“Where have you come from?”
“We’ve had a good day—we’ve given the Fascists a beating they won’t forget so quickly—we’ve come from the Sierra—the Fascists are in Villalba, but they won’t have much guts left to come to Madrid. We met a lot of soldiers going in the other direction when we were coming back.”
“But how is it that they let you come back?” a stout woman asked a man who seemed to be her husband, a mason by the traces on his overall, in his mid-forties, somewhat the worse for drink.
“Now listen to her! Who would have the right to stop us? When we saw it would soon be getting dark, we all said it’s time to go home to bed, so that the ladies shouldn’t get frightened without us. Some of the lads stayed behind, but they had taken their wives along.”
After supper a boisterous crowd thronged the streets, fleeing from the suffocating heat of their houses and still optimistically discussing the Government declaration and the impending end of the insurrection. Rafael and I set out to make a round of the most popular meeting places of the quarter. I wanted to see the people.
First we went to the Café de la Magdalena. It is a very old café and music hall, where, in the last century, generations of gypsy dancers and flamenco singers had paraded, to be followed by “national and foreign dancers” who came nearer and nearer to strip-tease acts as the era of the cakewalk, machicha and rumba passed. There was always a core of simple-minded customers, workers, and strangers who came to have a drink and stare at crude variety numbers, and round them a fringe of prostitutes with their pimps lying in ambush and the police never far away.
That night some two hundred people blocked the entrance, all trying to get in. Two Milicianos with rifles over their shoulders guarded the door. Rafael and I were determined to get through, and we made it. The rowdy who was porter and ticket collector at the same time never asked for our tickets, but greeted us so unctuously with a “Salud, comrades” that Rafael muttered: “He thinks we’re plain-clothes cops.”
The huge saloon was crammed with couples of sweating men and women, who swayed and pushed in a futile attempt to follow the strident tune of the dance band, all braying brass and bleating saxophones. Above their heads hung a streaky pall of bluish smoke turned gray by the dust. They smelled like a truckload of sheep doused with cheap eau-de-Cologne. The men and women were clad in workmen’s overalls as though in a uniform, and a pistol was stuck in almost every belt. The big Astra pistols from the Cuartel de la Montaña glinted blue, and their burnished mouths glittered in the garish light.
When the band stopped, the mass howled: “More—more!” They struck up the Himno de Riego, the Republican anthem. The multitude sang the chorus to the words of the popular parody:
Simeon had three old cats
And gave them food on a plate…
When it was over, they howled louder than before. The small jazz band intoned a crazy Internationale, with drums, cymbals, and jingling jazz bells. All the people stopped, raised their clenched fists, and sang religiously:
Arise, ye starvelings from your slumbers,
Arise, ye criminals of want…
A swarthy, bulky man with frizzed black hair falling over his ears and neck, a black-and-red scarf wound round his throat, towered above the others and roared: “Long live the F.A.I.!”
At the Anarchists’ war cry, it seemed for an instant as though it would come to a brawl. The air was thick with insults. Black-and-red scarves gathered at the back of the saloon. Nervous fingers fumbled at belts and hips. Women squealed like cornered rats and clutched at their men. The Internationale broke off as though choked by a huge fist.
A little man in the ludicrous coat of a waiter had jumped on to the dais and was screaming something, while the big white drum behind him made a frame for his contortions and punctuated them with its thuds. The crowd fell silent, and the little man shrieked with a grating voice:
“Comrades”—he must have thought that he had better not use the Communist style of address alone, and corrected himself —“or fellow workers! We’ve come here to have a bit of fun—don’t forget we are all brothers in the struggle against Fascism, all brother workers—U.H.P.!”
The saloon shook when the crowd repeated the three magic letters in a staccato rhythm. Then the band struck up a galloping fox trot, the couples started to dance in a furious whirl. They had more room to dance now; many had left.
Rafael and I were edging out, when a mass of flesh bulging out of a tight boiler suit hooked itself on to my arm, with opulent breasts almost at the height of my shoulders and a wave of cheap, cloying scent: “Come on, sweetie, buy me a drink. I’m dying of thirst.”
I had seen her many a night walking on her beat at the corner of the Plaza de Antón Martín. I freed my arm.
“I’m so sorry, but we’ve got to go. We’ve been looking for a friend, but he isn’t here.”
“I’ll come along with you.”
I did not dare to give the woman an aggressive refusal; a mischievous phrase could easily provoke an attack from those temperamental so-called Milicianos, particularly as Rafael and I were too well dressed for the place. The woman clung to us until we came to the Plaza de Antón Martín. There we took her into the Bar Zaragoza, bought her a beer, and disappeared. She was swallowed by a delirious mass of half-drunken men and women, of pistols and black-and-red handkerchiefs, menacing splotches of color in a swaying sea of heads.
We crossed the street and went into Serafín’s tavern. The small bar was cluttered, but we walked through to the back room. There were familiar faces. Old Señor Paco was there, the politicizing carpenter, with a new, shiny leather belt and the straps of a soldier, a rifle between his knees, holding forth to an enthralled audience:
“As I say, we had a fine day in the open, there in the Sierra. Just as if we’d gone shooting rabbits. Near Villalba a post of Shock Police stopped us in the middle of the road, and sent us up to a hill top between rocks and scrubs with a corporal and two constables. The wife had cooked a tortilla to take along, and Serafín had filled my leather bottle with wine in the morning, so everything was fine. The worst of it was that we all got scorched among the stones there, because the sun shone straight down on us. But we didn’t see the tip of a Fascist’s nose, and we’ve had a very nice day. There were some shots from the direction of the road, and for a time we heard machine guns, but very far away. The corporal said he had posted us there so that the others shouldn’t sneak through the hills, and he also said things were very serious over near Buitrago. Well, so that was that. We’ve eaten splendidly, my nose is peeling from the sun, and we’ve had a first-class day. Most of us came back in the evening. The Lieutenant of the Shock Police wanted us to stay, but what the hell, we aren’t soldiers, I said. Let them stay there, that’s what they’re paid for.”
“Are you going back tomorrow, Paco?”
“At six in the morning, if God wills it. Well, of course, that’s just a manner of speaking, because we’ve done with that sort of thing now.”
There was a man in the circle whom I had never seen before. He smelled of gasoline and had cold gray eyes and thin lips. He said:
“We’ve had an even better day. We’ve made a clean-up.”
“Have you been chasing Fascists across the roofs?”
“That’s for kids. We’ve been selling tickets for the Other World in the Casa de Campo. We led them out like sheep. A shot in the neck, and that was that. We haven’t got much ammunition to spare.” While he was speaking, his hand made a gruesome shadow play in the air. Cold shivers ran up and down my spine.
“But that’s all the Government’s affair now, isn’t it?”
He stared at me with his frosted eyes.
“Pal—the Government, that’s us.”
We talked of him while we walked home, Rafael and I. If that kind of person got power there would be a frightful slaughter. But it was to be hoped that the Government would step in. We looked at each other and shut up.
When we came to the street corner, where two Milicianos stopped us and asked for our papers, we heard from the far end of the Calle del Ave María the noise of shouts, running feet, a shot and a cry. Then the running feet sounded again, further away, and the street lay silent. The pair of Milicianos did not know what to do. One of them turned to us: “Shall we go?”
The street was deserted, but I sensed the people whispering behind the closed doors of the houses. One of the Milicianos loaded his rifle, the other followed suit. The bolts clanked loudly. Down the street someone cried: “Halt!”
The militiamen answered the shout. Two shadows moved towards us, keeping close to the walls. Before our groups met, we saw the dead man.
He was lying across the gutter, a tiny black hole in his forehead. He had a cushion of blood under his head. The fingers of his outflung hands were contracting. The body jerked and then lay still. We bent over him, and one of the Milicianos lighted a match close to his mouth. The little flame burned unwaveringly and lighted up the gaping face and glazed eyes. The big black-and-red scarf looked like a wound in the throat. It was the man who had shouted “Long live the F.A.I.!” in the Café de la Magdalena.
One of the Milicianos said philosophically: “One less.” Another went to telephone. Three mounted guard over the corpse. The house doors opened and curious faces drew near, gray disks in the darkness.
I could not sleep. The heat choked me, and through the open balcony entered the noise of the street and the music from the loudspeakers. I got up and sat on the balcony in my pajamas.
I could not continue to drift.
When I had gone to the People’s House on Saturday, I had done so because I wanted to serve in the ranks of the anti-Fascist formations in the capacity in which I would be most useful. I knew that what we lacked and needed above all were officers, closely knit groups of trained men who could lead and organize bodies of militia. I was ready then to do such work and to exploit my hated experiences in the Moroccan War. But Azaña had nominated the Government of Martínez Barrio with Sánchez Román as a discreet negotiator, a Government clearly created so as to make a deal with the rebels, and when the Commander of the Socialist Militia had told his men to accept it with discipline, even while the masses were roaring with fury and forcing the President to rectify his step within an hour, I had walked out. I was unable to submit to this sort of blind political discipline.
I had rubbed elbows with the mass of Milicianos, of people calling themselves Milicianos and accepted as such, for three days and nights. This was a pseudo-military machinery of which I did not want to become a part.
But I could not continue on the fringe of events. I felt the duty and I had the need for action. The Government stated that the rising had finished, but it was evident that the contrary was true. The rising had not yet begun in full earnest. This was war, civil war and a revolution. It could not finish until the country had been transformed either into a Fascist or into a Socialist state. I did not have to choose between the two. The choice had been taken for me by my whole life. Either a Socialist revolution would win or I would be among the vanquished.
It was obvious that the vanquished, whoever they would be, would be shot or locked up in a prison cell. That bourgeois life to which I had tried to resign myself and against which I had been struggling had ended on the 18th of July 1936. Whether I would be among the victors or the vanquished, a new life had begun.
I agreed with Prieto’s statement in Informaciones: This was war, and a long war at that.
A new life meant hope. The revolution which was the hope of Spain was also my own hope for a fuller, cleaner, more lucid life.
I would get away from the two women. Somewhere I would be needed. I would shut myself up in work as though behind the walls of a fortress. For the Government simply had to take things in hand.
And supposing it was unable to do so? If revolution meant the right to kill with impunity—where would we end? We would kill each other for a word, for a shout. The revolution, Spain’s hope, would turn into the bloody orgy of a brutal minority. If the Government was too weak, it was up to the political groups to take the lead and to organize the fight.
But I was still under the impression of what I had seen that very night in the quarter of El Avapiés. I had seen the mass of prostitutes, thieves, pimps and gunmen in a bestial frenzy. This was not the mass which had stormed the Cuartel de la Montaña, mere human bodies against machine guns. This was the scum of the city. They would not fight. They would not carry through a revolution. But they would rob, destroy, and kill for pleasure. That carrion had to be swept away before it infected everything.
I had to find my own people. We needed an army. Tomorrow, today, I would go and see Rubiera. We would work together again, as we had done years before, and we would achieve something useful.
For a short time I dozed on the balcony. One of the children in the room behind me began to cry. I wondered what would happen to my children. The office was going to stop work. On what were the people out of work going to live? I had the means to hold out for months; but what would happen to those who lived on their weekly wages and had received their last pay envelope on Saturday the 18th?
A motor horn was barking impatiently down in the street. It was daybreak. My boy in there was crying more loudly. The door of our house clanked open and Manolo, the concierge’s son, came out, leather straps, rifle and all. I called down: “Where are you going?”
“To the Sierra, with the boys here. There will be a bit of shooting. Do you want to come along?”
The lorry was full of militiamen in the blue boiler suits which by now seemed to have become a uniform. Most of them wore the five-pointed star of the Communists. There were three girls among them.
The lorry lumbered up the street, its occupants singing at the top of their voices. Downstairs a door was thrown open; the smell of freshly made coffee was wafted up to my balcony. I dressed and went down to Emiliano’s bar. The manager, Emiliano’s brother, had red-rimmed eyes, puffed with sleeplessness.
“It’s a dog’s life. Emiliano will have to come here and do his own work. Tomorrow I’m going to the front.”
The first customers drifted in, the night-watchman, the Milicianos who had been on guard in the street, the baker’s men, a driver.
“Salud!”
“Salud!”
A band of sparrows was pecking among the paving stones and hopping on the balcony rails. From a window high up came the call of a caged quail: “Pal-pa-la—pal-pa-la!”
The street was deserted and flooded with peace.
THE WORK AT OUR OFFICE was practically at a standstill. The firm was faced with the problem of whether to carry on in a void or to shut down altogether and risk being taken over by a workers’ committee. For at that time, such committees had begun to take control of private firms, factories, and tenements in each case in which the owners were known to sympathize with the Right or had deserted their offices and buildings, either because they were guilty of conspiracy with the rebels or because they were afraid of staying on. In this emergency, the workers and employees set up committees which carried on the work; other committees were formed by trade unions, and imposed their control on firms the owners of which were suspect.
This movement was an act of self-defense against economic collapse. It developed without order or concerted action, and there were many cases of bad faith or crude theft. Yet with all its blemishes and errors, it prevented Madrid from being starved within one week, and it prevented the black market from flourishing.
Our chief decided that to maintain his unproductive business would be a lesser evil. It looked as though the situation would soon be settled by events outside his control. Already on July the 18th, one of our staff had disappeared and not even his family knew his whereabouts. Two of our men who had been officers reported to the War Ministry and were posted away from Madrid. Our two German employees had vanished. There were three men and four typists left, apart from myself and Carlitos, the office boy. We agreed to keep the office open from ten to twelve. There were no further difficulties, since the patent business had nothing to do with the war, involved nothing but papers, and did not arouse the interest of any of the workers’ groups which assumed control of undertakings whose products had more immediate value.
My brother Rafael was the accountant of a perfumery wholesaler’s. His chief was an intelligent autocrat hated by the whole staff; within twenty hours of the murder of Calvo Sotelo he had crossed the frontier together with his family. His staff took over the store, with the backing of the Communist Party to which the most active of the employees belonged, and tried to carry on the business on which their living depended. As I had time hanging on my hands, I often went there and observed how it worked; but the same thing happened in some hundreds of warehouses and stores all over Madrid. Simultaneously, each trade union and each party group began to organize its own militia. That was the time of the militia battalions with high-flown names apparently taken from penny dreadfuls, such as the “Red Lions” or the “Black Eagles.”
It was also the time of the vouchers.
One morning, two militiamen with rifles over their shoulders and the black-and-red scarf of the Anarchists wound round their throats turned up at my brother’s store and presented to him, as the man in charge, the following voucher:
| Valid for | ||||
| 5,000 | safety razors | |||
| 5,000 | sticks of shaving soap | |||
| 100,000 | razor blades | |||
| 5,000 | bottles of branded eau-de-Cologne | |||
| 10 | 50-liter flagons of barber’s eau-de-Cologne | |||
| 1,000 | kilos of toilet soap | |||
My brother refused to accept the voucher: “I’m sorry, but I can’t give you what you ask for. And by the way, whom do you want all this for?”
“Look at the stamp: the Anarchist Militia in the Círculo de Bellas Artes… What do you mean, you can’t let us have it? That’s a joke.”
“No joke at all, pals. I wouldn’t accept that kind of voucher unless it was endorsed by the War Ministry.”
“All right, then we’ll take you with us.”
To be taken to the Círculo de Bellas Artes meant the risk of being found at dawn in the Casa de Campo, with one’s neck shattered by a bullet. The two Milicianos were alone, while there were plenty of men with pistols in their pocket about in the store. My brother told the two to wait and rang up the command of the Anarchist Militias in the Círculo. They had not heard of the voucher and asked my brother to bring the two Milicianos and the voucher to them. There it turned out that the men had attempted a bold theft; the Anarchists shot them that night.
Yet vouchers which had to be accepted piled up on my brother’s desk, papers which no one would ever redeem. The only money which reached the cashier came in payment for the scanty orders from tradesmen carrying on their business, but as no credit was granted any more, they bought nothing but goods whose sale was absolutely certain. Food began to be frighteningly scarce.
The trade unions which enforced the acceptance of their vouchers could not refuse to issue meal vouchers to their members. They had taken over many cafés and restaurants in the city; when a trade-union member wanted a meal, he was given a stamped voucher from his organization and went to one of its restaurants. Meal vouchers became valid tender when wages began to peter out. At first, people squeezed in at small café tables as best they could. Then the tables were pushed together in the middle of the room and converted into long mess tables. People sat down next to each other as they arrived, though they tried to snatch a seat near the kitchen door. Meals were distributed at one o’clock sharp. There was no bread; many people brought a roll or a chunk of bread along in their pockets. A stream of women and children passed through, all coming to carry their food home in a pot tied into a napkin or large handkerchief. The menu was based on rice and potatoes boiled with meat, the ration was practically unlimited. Albacete was in the hands of the Government, so that communications with Valencia were safe, and Valencia poured the rice and potatoes into Madrid, where all supplies were taken over by the trade unions. Each organization seized as much as possible and shared the food out among the communal restaurants under its control. Empty churches served as storehouses. The smell of a badly kept grocer’s shop streamed out into the streets from wide open church doors.
In my brother’s office the staff distributed the money among themselves at the end of the month, and the meal vouchers every day. But their stock of perfumery goods was rapidly dwindling. They were beginning to feel desperate.
The Government was powerless in the face of the chaos. There was no group which would accept orders from it.
The political parties were subdivided into their local branches, the trade unions into trade groups as well as local branches. Each of the groups and branches set up its own communal feeding center, its own supply service and storehouse, its own militia battalion, its own police, its own prison, its own executioners, and a special place for its executions. They all made propaganda to attract new members, except for the U.G.T. The walls of Madrid were covered with appeals: “Join the C.N.T.” “Join the Communist Party!” “Join the P.O.U.M.” The Republicans pure and simple did not count. People flocked to the centers of the organizations, let themselves be introduced by one or two old members, and obtained membership card.
Fascists found this a useful subterfuge. They selected the groups which were least strict in their requirements and joined in large numbers. Some people paid heavily for a membership card antedated by two or three years. With this backing, Fascists would commandeer their own cars and use them to save their friends and to kill off their enemies. Criminals found cover by the same method. They, too, would form their own police and proceed to rob and kill with impunity. No one was safe. Consulates and embassies opened their gates to refugees; some of them set up refuges on a grand scale, ran them as luxury hotels and bought whole houses for the purpose.
Side by side with all that chaos, misery, and cowardice, the other thing which was alive behind the bombastic names of Red Lions and Black Eagles began to assume shape. The excursions to the Sierra were stopped. Positions were established in the hills. Loyal officers set out to mold that embryo of an army. Every group could create a militia battalion, but now the arms, the few arms available, were in the hands of the War Ministry; they were distributed to the volunteer militias, but they in turn had to accept the Ministry’s rule in order to exist. At the same time, parties and trade unions competed in showing each other a model of discipline and bravery.
The Rebel Army under General Mola was thrown back behind Villalba; Toledo was retaken; Saragossa was attacked through the province of Huesca; a force was landed in the Balearics; Ceuta was raided.
But there was still no cohesion, although there was plenty of enthusiasm. Party pride seemed stronger than the feeling of common defense. A victory of an Anarchist battalion was paraded in the face of the Communists; a victory of a Communist unit was secretly lamented by the others. The defeat of a battalion was turned into ridicule for the political group to which it belonged. This strengthened the fighting spirit of the individual units, but also created a hotbed of mutual resentment damaging the military operations as a whole and circumventing a unified command.
I had gone to see Antonio, the Communist, and Carlos Rubiera, the Socialist. I told Antonio that I wanted to work, but refused to join a party militia; the leaders of the Clerical Workers’ Union, which I had helped to found together with Rubiera five years earlier, told me that I might be useful in helping to organize the Clerical Workers’ Battalion. I tackled the task with something like despair. I doubted the response of the white-collar workers.
They allotted us a commandeered house with a tennis court in the aristocratic Barrio de Salamanca. Fifty volunteers started their military training on that court. We had our theoretical instruction in the enormous marble hall with its pretentious Doric columns; there we ranged benches taken from a near-by school, installed a dais, a huge blackboard and a map of Spain. The War Ministry let us have two dozen rifles and one spare cartridge case per rifle.
I made them form platoons on the tennis court and began to lecture them on the handling of a rifle. Before me I had a double file of anemic faces perched on starched collars, with a sprinkling of coarser heads topping blouses or braided, tight-fitting livery coats; most of my volunteers were clerks, but a few were office boys and messengers. Some were very young and some old. Many had spectacles which made their eyes glitter and their faces look nervous.
After the first two minutes of my instruction one of the recruits stepped out of the file.
“Now look here, all that’s stuff and nonsense. The only thing we need to know is how to shoot. Then give us a rifle and we’ll march to wherever we have to. I haven’t come here to play at soldiers.”
I ordered them to fall out, took them to the hall and stepped on to the platform.
“Now, you all want a rifle and you all want to go to the front to fire off your rifle and to kill Fascists. But none of you wants to go through the military instruction. Now, suppose I give a rifle to every one of you this moment, pack you into a couple of lorries and place you on the crest of Sierra—in face of Mola’s army, with its officers and sergeants who are used to giving commands, and its soldiers who are used to obeying orders and who know what each order means. What would you do? Each of you would run about by himself and fire off bullets, I suppose. Do you think the men you would have to face are just rabbits? And even if you went shooting rabbits in a party of ten or twelve, you’d have to know how to do it if you didn’t want to shoot each other.”
We went back to the tennis court and continued the instruction. Many times I was interrupted when someone exclaimed: “We’re wasting our time—anybody knows how to throw himself down when he’s got to!” It was the same with each new batch of volunteers. But slowly a unit began to emerge, although it still had nothing but two dozen rifles passed from platoon to platoon. It was the beginning of the Battalion La Pluma, The Pen.
In those days, Angel practically lived in my flat. Since his wife had gone away, he helped Aurelia with the house, the children, and the shopping, as he had done in the first weeks of our acquaintanceship. He knew so many people in the quarter in which he had been born and bred that he always found something for our meals. One day he turned up pushing a wheelbarrow with two sacks of potatoes, and followed by a train of women. He stopped before the door of our house and cried:
“Form a queue, please.”
The women obediently stepped into line, and Angel produced a scale and weights out of thin air, by a conjurer’s trick.
“Two pounds each, my girls, and mind no one comes twice!”
When the potatoes in the first sack had disappeared, Angel opened the second sack and swept the queue with a glance.
“Friends, I need potatoes myself. These here are for me.” He weighed out twenty pounds and put them in the first sack. “And now let’s get rid of what’s left.”
Angel went for potatoes to the market of Mataderos where the goods trains were unloaded. His quick tongue always secured him the friendship of the man in charge of the distribution to the tradesmen. He was a street vendor himself, he would say; that was what he did for his living, and the poor people of El Avapiés got something to eat as well. “Now look, pal. Here you are giving the potatoes to a shopkeeper of the Barrio de Salamanca, so that he can feed the rich and the Fascists. Won’t you let me have two sacks?” Then he would invite the man to a cup of coffee and cognac early in the morning and get his two sacks. Once the Anarchists from a branch in the neighboring street wanted to expropriate the two sacks of potatoes, but the women almost rioted against them, and Angel obtained the protection of the Anarchists’ leaders.
Then came days when even Angel found no potatoes, because no potatoes reached Madrid. Aurelia took the children to her parents. I was about to leave the flat, when Angel said: “If you’ll come to my room with me, I’ll go along with you. I’ve nothing to do today.”
I accompanied him to the Calle de Jesús y María. The street begins in the Plaza de Progreso, among the houses of the well-to-do people, and for a stretch of fifty yards the inhabitants of its old houses are small tradesmen and skilled workers. So far the street is paved with big square porphyry blocks. Then it narrows down and changes its face. The paving is made of sharp edged pebbles, the houses are low, squalid, and rickety, the people who live in them are very poor workers and prostitutes. The tarts lounge in the open doors and fill the street with their quarrels.
Angel lived on the ground floor of a small tenement house stuck between two brothels. His flat was a single big room divided into a bedroom, dining room, and kitchen by thin partition walls. There was nothing in the bedroom but a double bed and a night table. The kitchen was half the size of the bedroom. Light and air entered through the door and through a barred window which opened on to a courtyard three yards square, containing the lavatory for all the tenants of the ground floor and the water tap for the whole house. The room, now deserted, smelled of mildew and urine. I waited for Angel while he changed in the bedroom.
Suddenly, an explosion shook the house. Angel came out, still struggling into his coat. Piercing cries and the patter of feet sounded outside. Angel and I went out into the street. People were running wildly. A few yards away, several women were lying on the ground and shrieking. One of them was dragging herself along on a belly torn to bleeding tatters. The walls of the houses and the paving stones were spattered with blood. Then we were all running towards the injured.
In the last house of the wide stretch of the street was a clinic for nursing mothers. At that hour there had been a queue of women, most of them carrying a child, waiting for the distribution of milk. A few yards further down, prostitutes had been following their trade. A bomb had fallen in the middle of the street and sprayed the mothers and the street walkers. A woman propped up on her bleeding arm stump gave a scream and let herself drop heavily. Near me was a bundle of petticoats with a leg sticking out, bent at an impossible angle over a swollen belly. My head was swimming, I vomited into the gutter. A militiaman beside me cursed and was sick. Then he began to tremble and broke out into spasmodic laughter. Someone gave me a glass of neat brandy and I poured it down my throat. Angel had disappeared. Some men were busy picking up the wounded and the dead and carrying them into the clinic. A man stuck his head out of the gate, white hair and spectacles over a bloodstained surgeon’s overall, stamped his foot, and yelled: “No more room! Take them to Encomienda!”
Shrieks sounded from the Plaza del Progreso. Angel was beside me, his coat and hands splashed with blood.
“Another bomb in the Plaza del Progreso!”
Groups of people came running down the street in frenzied fear, pairs of men carrying someone between them, women with children in their arms, all screaming and shrieking. I saw nothing but arms and legs and bloodstains in motion, and the street rocked before my eyes.
“Go to Encomienda! There’s been one here too.”
The whirling mass of arms and legs disappeared through the Calle de Esgrima.
We went back to Angel’s flat and washed. Angel changed again. When we came out of the house, the neighbors told us that a plane had flown low over Madrid from north to south, dropping bombs all along its course. It had left a trail of blood from the Puerta de Toledo to Cuatro Caminos. By accident or because the pilot guided himself by the open spaces, most of the bombs had fallen in public squares and many children had been hit.
That was on the 7th of August 1936. That evening and that night, Fascists were firing from windows and from skylights. Many hundreds were arrested. There were mass executions of suspects during the night.
Antonio sent for me while I was at home in the evening. The local branch of the Communist Party was organizing pickets to paint the street lamps blue and to see to the blackout. Rafael, Angel, and I went. We worked in small groups, each protected by two armed Milicianos; but it was an almost hopeless task to improvise a blackout in August, in Madrid. Shuttered houses were stifling. It was impossible to stay in any public place with the shutters closed. We had to compromise. People were to avoid the rooms facing on to the street and stay in the inner rooms, using only candles. It was easy to paint the street lamps blue, with a mixture of water, aniline dye, and plaster, only a few tenuous, white rays filtered through. We turned off every other lamp.
The streets looked ghostly in our wake, night black, with white dots on the pavements and blue, sickly blobs of light a little higher up in the dark. Sometimes the front of a house was lighted by the fugitive glow of a candle carried through a room in the house opposite, which turned a balcony into a yellow square of light, streaked by the black lines of the railing, and leapt distorted along the walls. The people thronged the streets as they did every night, but they were only half visible in the penumbra, shapeless black bulks from which voices came and, at intervals, the dazzling spark of a lighter or the little red glow from a cigarette outlining a few heads.
Some lorries arrived carrying Milicianos returning from the Sierra and from Toledo. Their headlights were switched on; the crowds caught in their beams looked livid and naked. The cry went up: “The lights—turn out the lights!”
Brakes screeched, and the lorries rolled slowly on amid the sound of breaking chairs and pitchers. The red light of the rear lamps glowed like a bloodshot eye. In the darkness it was as though nightmare monsters were panting there, about to spring.
By midnight the whole quarter lay in deep shadow. In the Calle de la Primavera we stopped under a street lamp which had been forgotten. One of us climbed up, while another reached him the brush soaked in blue dye. A shot cracked, a bullet ricocheted on the wall above the lamp. Somebody had shot at us from one of the houses opposite. The people lounging in the street took refuge in doorways. We marched out the tenants of the four houses from which the shot might have come. The concierge and neighbors identified them one by one. Then we weeded out those who had been in the street from the others, and started to search each flat in turn. All the tenants surged after us and asked us to go into their flats with them; they wanted to clear themselves, and at the same time they were afraid that a stranger might have hidden in their rooms. We searched through attics and lofts full of cobwebs and old rags, we climbed up and down stairs, we caught dust and dirt on our clothes and banged against rafters and invisible nails. At four in the morning we had finished; we were filthy and sleepy, it was broad daylight, but we had not found the sniper. Somebody had brought a huge pitcher filled with steaming coffee and a bottle of brandy. We drank greedily.
One of the men said: “That bird’s saved his skin.” As though in answer, Angel exclaimed: “Let’s go to Mataderos and see the ones who were polished off this time.”
At first I refused to go, and then I suddenly gave in. It was easier. I dug my fist into Angel’s ribs and said to him: “You’re a brute—after what we saw yesterday afternoon, too!”
“God save us—come along, then you’ll get rid of the bitter taste of seeing those mangled kids yesterday. Do you remember the woman with child, who had her leg doubled up on her navel? Well, she was still alive and she gave birth in the clinic. Then she died. A boy, it was. Nobody in the whole quarter knows her.”
The executions had attracted far more people than I would have thought possible. Families with their children, excited and still drowsy with sleep, and militiamen with their girls were walking along the Paseo de las Delicias, all in the same direction. Requisitioned cars and lorries were passing by. Crowds and cars had collected at the entrance to the vegetable market and the slaughterhouses at the Glorieta. While carts and trucks with green vegetables came and went, militia pickets on duty meandered round and asked anyone who caught their fancy for his papers.
Behind the slaughterhouses a long brick wall and an avenue with stunted little trees, not yet rooted in the sandy soil under that ruthless sun, run along the river. The landscape is arid and cold with the chill of the cemented canal, of sand, and of dry, yellow tufts of grass.
The corpses lay between the little trees. The sightseers ambled from one to the other and made humorous remarks; a pitying comment might have provoked suspicion.
I had expected the bodies. Their sight did not shake me. There were about twenty of them. They were not mangled. I had seen far worse in Morocco and on the day before. But I was shaken by the collective brutality and cowardice of the spectators.
Vans which belonged to the City of Madrid arrived to collect the corpses. One of the drivers said: “Now they’re going to water the place and make it nice and spruce for tonight.” He chuckled. It rang like fear.
Somebody gave us a lift back to the Plaza de Antón Martín. We entered Emiliano’s bar to have our breakfast. Sebastian, the concierge at Number 7, was there with a rifle leaning behind him. He left his coffee when he saw us and started to explain with extravagant gestures: “What a night—I’m dead beat! I’ve accounted for eleven.”
Angel asked: “What is it you’ve done? Where have you been?”
“In the Pradera de San Isidro. I went with lads of my union and we took some Fascists with us. Then friends from other groups turned up and we had to lend them a hand. I believe we’ve got rid of more than a hundred this time.”
I felt hollow in the pit of my stomach. Here was somebody whom I had known almost since I was a child. I knew him as a cheerful, industrious man who was fond of his children and of other people’s children; doubtless rather crude, with little brains, but all the same honest and forthright. Here he was turned into an assassin.
“But, Sebastian—who dragged you”—I used the formal pronoun usted instead of the customary, familiar tú—“who in the world has dragged you into such things?”
He looked at me out of shame-filled eyes.
“Oh well, Don Arturo”—he did not dare to speak to me in the way he had spoken for over twenty years—“you’re not going to start with sentimentalities, I hope. We must make an end of all those Fascist swine.”
“That’s not what I was asking you. I want to know who dragged you into these doings.”
“Nobody.”
“Then why are you doing it?”
“Well, someone has to.”
I said nothing and he began to stammer.
“The truth is… the truth is, to tell you the truth in confidence… it’s like this. You know I found work a year or so ago with a recommendation from the C.E.D.A., which my landlord got for me. And after the February elections I didn’t need their scrap of paper any more and went back to my own union, of course. The boys all pulled my leg because I had belonged to the C.E.D.A., and because they said I had turned a reactionary, and so on. Naturally I told them I was as good a revolutionary as they. Then one day they took some Fascists for a ride and one of our boys said to me: ‘Now then, up with you, come on, as you’re always talking of killing Fascists.’ And you can imagine the rest. I was between the devil and the deep sea, because it was either the one or the other, either I had to finish off one of those poor devils, or the lads would have bumped me off. Well, since then I’ve simply been going there, and they tell me when there’s something doing.”
He stopped and pondered, and then shook his head slowly.
“The worst of it is, you know, that I’m beginning to like it.”
He stood there with a drooping head. It was repulsive and pitiful. Emiliano’s brother gulped down a glass of brandy and swore. I swore too. Then I said:
“Sebastian, I’ve known you all my life, and I used to respect you. But now, I tell you—and you can denounce me on the spot—that I won’t ever speak to you again.”
Sebastian lifted the eyes of a whipped dog, full of water. Emiliano’s brother blasphemed and smashed his empty glass on the marble slab: “Get out!”
The man walked out meekly, with bowed shoulders. None of us saw him again, and days later we heard that he had gone to the front. He was killed by a bullet, in an attic in front of the Alcazar of Toledo.
At eleven o’clock that morning, a middle-aged woman in black came to see me in the office. She was tearful and agitated: “I’m Don Pedro’s sister. They arrested him this morning. I’ve come to you because he told me to get in touch with you if anything happened… I don’t know where they’ve taken him, I only know that the men who came for him were Communists and took him away in a car.”
I went to Antonio and explained the case. “If I were you, I wouldn’t interfere in this mess,” he said. “From what you tell me he’s a Rightist and known as such. So no one can help him.”
“All right, maybe we can’t save him, but we must try, and you’ve got to help me try.”
“I’ll help you to find him if it’s true that our people have arrested him, but I won’t interfere in any other way. I’ve got enough unpleasantness with these matters as it is.”
We found out to which tribunal Don Pedro had been taken, and went there together. The men in charge let us see the denunciation. Whoever had written it knew the Ministry inside out; it described in great detail how Don Pedro had behaved on the day of Calvo Sotelo’s assassination, explained his religious creed and stated that he had a private chapel in his house and kept a priest in hiding there. The denunciation ended with the statement that he was a rich man and possessed a numismatic collection of considerable value.
“You see, there’s nothing to be done,” said the man who showed us the papers. “Tomorrow we’re going to take him for a ride.”
I took a deep breath and said: “You accuse him of belonging to the Right. He does. It is also true that he is a practising Catholic and a rich man, if that’s an offense, and that he has a collection of antique gold coins. But I don’t think that’s a crime.”
“It isn’t. We know that the fellow who denounced him is a son of a bitch who only put in that bit about the collection so as to make us go for the old man. Don’t you worry. We may take him for a ride, but we aren’t thieves.”
“I know, or I wouldn’t be working with the Party. But as you see, the only concrete thing against him is the story about the priest he’s hiding. It doesn’t surprise me of the man. I believe he would be capable of hiding me too if the Fascists were after me. But tell me, has the priest taken active part in the rising?”
“I don’t think so. He’s just a priest of San Ginés who’s got the jitters and gone into a burrow like a rabbit, but I don’t believe he’s any good for a man’s job any more, he’s over seventy.”
“Then you must admit that it wasn’t a crime to hide him. And now I’m going to tell you another thing the man you’ve arrested has done.” I told them the story of Don Pedro and the consumptive clerk. “It would be a crime to execute a man who had acted like that,” I ended.
“I can’t do anything about it, my lad. What you can do, if you like, is to stand surety for his good faith yourself. The other members of our tribunal will see whether they find it a strong enough guarantee. But I would advise you not to do it, because we might just as easily have to lock you up yourself.”
Don Pedro was set free that afternoon. I went again to see Antonio and reported the fact to him.
“I knew it. They asked me plenty of questions about you. And apparently they couldn’t find anything concrete against the old man. It’s a pity that we can’t investigate every single case in the same way, but it’s quite impossible, I assure you.”
He stopped and went on after a long pause: “You know I’m counsel for the defense on one of the tribunals? Come with me this afternoon, you can stay as a witness. We must finish half a dozen cases tonight. I personally believe that the Government ought to take the whole thing into its own hands. On the day of the bombing, the tribunals didn’t even sit and pass sentence, everyone who was brought in was shot, and that was that. The people wouldn’t listen to reason. The same thing happened when Badajoz was taken by the Fascists and our people were slaughtered in the bull-ring there. Before that you could straighten out some of the cases, but now it’s getting more and more difficult every day. The worst thing about this job I’ve taken on is that, in the long run, one is drawing suspicion on oneself by defending others and trying to see that things are done decently. I think I’ll chuck it up and let them do their dirty work alone.”
He took me to one of the most popular churches in Madrid, which had been turned into a prison and a tribunal. The offices had been installed in the priest’s house, the prison in the crypt. The church stood in a small, dingy street, but the priest’s old, two-story house was imbedded in high, modern buildings in one of the big streets of the town. We entered a narrow doorway and walked through a long corridor with stone wall and stone floor, dark, dank, and oppressive. Then the corridor turned at a right angle, and we stood in the entrance to a wide, flagged courtyard with two carpets of well-tended lawn in the middle and potted flowers along the walls. Before us was the huge colored glass window in the back wall of the church. The sun shone on the bits of glass in their leaden frames and made them glint. Sparks of blue, red, green, and purple fell on flagstones, grass and walls, and the flagstones were mottled with green and the lawn with deep purple. While we walked past, each piece of glass in turn sent out a flash of its own pure color. There was an age-old grapevine covering the south wall with its green leaves and golden-green grapes, and a flock of sparrows which did not scatter at our steps.
The militiamen on sentry duty sat on canvas chairs in the shade, smoking and contemplating the birds.
Antonio and I climbed a narrow stairway and found ourselves in a room, which must have been the parish priest’s. A missal lay open on a lectern near the balcony. Half of its left page was covered by a huge gilt Q fringed with red arabesques. The book was printed in a clear, old letterpress and the first letter of each chapter and each verse was painted by hand. The initials of the chapters were gilded, the initials of the verses were smaller and painted only in red. A voice at my back said: “It is prohibited to take away the prayer book.” A Miliciano was sitting in the upholstered leather armchair behind an old, massive desk covered with green cloth. He was a boy of twenty-three or so, strong, with broad shoulders, a broad grin and broad, milk-white teeth.
“You wouldn’t believe how many people are after that book. But it looks pretty here, don’t you think? One of our comrades can sing Mass and sometimes he does it for us.”
While we were chatting, another man entered, in his forties, with a fierce mustache, black and crooked teeth and lively gray eyes. His Salud sounded more like the growl of a dog than like a salute, and he started at once to swear, displaying an inexhaustible vocabulary of blasphemies. When he had vented his bad temper he dropped heavily into a chair and stared at us.
“Well,” he said after a while, “today we’ll liquidate all the Fascists we’ve got here. A pity it’s only half a dozen, I’d prefer six dozen.”
“What’s bitten you today, Little Paws?” asked the young Miliciano.
I looked at the older man’s hands. They were huge, with knotted fingers, and broad, chipped nails like spades, rimmed with black.
“You can call me Little Paws as much as you like, but if I get hold of one of those dirty dogs today and smack his face, his head will fly off its socket. Do you know whom we found this morning in the meadow when we counted up? Lucio, the milkman, as cold as my grandfather in his grave. They shot him in the neck and the bullet came out through his Adam’s apple. You can imagine the row. One of our oldest Party comrades, turned to cold meat under our very noses! They stuck one of those little rubber balls for kids into his mouth so that he shouldn’t crack a joke. And for all I know, we rubbed him out ourselves, because we helped out some other comrades when they came with their lot, and we didn’t know them. Somebody’s playing tricks on us. We went to see Lucio’s mother and she told us that last evening three comrades had come to fetch him in a Party car. She must have seen something in our faces, because she insisted we should tell her what had happened. And so we told her, and I won’t say any more about it. Now we’ve got to warn all our comrades to be on their guard and not fall into a trap, and we must try and catch out the others. What have you got there?”
“Three new-comers.”
“That’s not much. All right, let’s settle yesterday’s lot.”
The young Miliciano, Little Paws and a third taciturn man constituted themselves a People’s Tribunal, with Antonio as counsel for the defense. Two Milicianos brought in the first prisoner, a twenty-year-old boy, his elegant suit dirty with dust and cobwebs and his eyelids reddened.
“Come nearer, my fine bird, we won’t eat you,” Little Paws jeered at him.
The militiaman in the armchair took a list from the desk and read out the name and the details. The accused belonged to Falange; several comrades had seen him selling Fascist newspapers, and on two occasions he had taken part in street fights. When he was arrested, a lead bludgeon, a pistol, and a Falange membership card were found on him.
“What have you got to say for yourself?” the judge in the chair asked.
“Nothing. I’ve had bad luck.” The prisoner fell back into a defiant silence, his head bent, his hands rubbing against each other. Little Paws leaned forward from his chair:
“All right. Take him away and bring the next one.”
When we were alone, the judge asked: “Are we all agreed?”
The three of them and Antonio all answered in the affirmative; the Fascist would be taken out and shot that night.
The next to be brought in was a gray-haired man around fifty, his face distorted by fear. Before the judge began to speak, he said:
“You’re going to kill me, but I’m an honest man. I’ve worked all my life and I’ve earned everything I possess by my own labor. I’ve never mixed in politics.”
Little Paws rose with a threatening movement, and for an instant I thought he was going to hit the man. “You shut up, you mangy cur!”
The judge searched among the papers. There was a wallet among them, which Antonio grasped and searched. The judge said:
“Be quiet, Little Paws… We don’t kill anyone here if it isn’t necessary. But you’ve got to explain a few things. We have a concrete denunciation; it states that you’re a bigoted clerical.”
“I’m a Catholic, but that’s no crime. There are priests who are Republicans.”
“That’s true, there are some—though I wouldn’t trust them an inch. But the denunciation says that you’ve given money to the C.E.D.A.”
“That’s a lie.”
“Thirdly, one of your nephews who often comes to stay in your house is a Falangist, and one of the worst at that.”
“I won’t deny it. But what have I got to do with it? Haven’t any of you a relative who belongs to the Right?”
Antonio had been checking and comparing papers. Now he called me to him while the accused man went on explaining that he had a shop in the Calle de la Concepcion Gerónima, that he never left his shop, that he never mixed in politics…
Antonio silently handed me two papers, one the denunciation, the other an I.O.U. for ten thousand pesetas, lapsed months before. “The same hand-writing,” I whispered. Antonio nodded. “That’s why I wanted you to look at them!” He turned round and interrupted the prisoner in his stream of words:
“Explain this.” He held out the I.O.U.
“But there’s nothing to explain about it, it hasn’t anything to do with politics. I loaned the money to an old friend of mine who was in difficulties. I hoped it would help him to get out of them, but it didn’t work. He’s a rolling stone, and he just spent it I forgot about the I.O.U., I simply happened to have it in my pocketbook with the other papers.”
“We must check up on it. What’s your friend’s address?”
When he had given it, Antonio told the two Milicianos to take the prisoner out of the room. Then he put the two papers on the desk side by side.
“We must clear up this story. We must get that other fellow here at once. You know I’m dead against those anonymous denunciations. If someone has something to denounce, let him come and do it face to face. As it is, we’re liquidating people who haven’t done anything, or who are just bigoted, and some who are just fools.”
The young judge nodded, Little Paws muttered something. While they waited for the denouncer to arrive, they proceeded with the other prisoners. Three were sentenced to death in the half-hour’s interval. Then two militiamen brought in the man whose address the prisoner had given. He was still young, thin, with a tired face, his hands and legs trembling. Antonio showed him the anonymous letter at once.
The man stuttered: “Yes… yes… I’m a good Republican, I’m one of your people…” Then his voice gained a little firmness: “That man is a dangerous Fascist, brothers.”
“Now, then, we’re not your brothers or anything of the sort. They didn’t feed me out of the same trough as you,” growled Little Paws.
Antonio spread out the I.O.U. and asked:
“And this paper here—brother—won’t you tell us what it means?”
The man could not speak. He trembled and shook. Antonio sent the guard for the prisoner and waited until the two stood facing each other. Then he said: “Well—here you have the man who denounced you.”
“You, Juán—why? What have you got against me? You aren’t political either. And I have been like a father to you. There must be a mistake somewhere, gentlemen. But, let me see—this is your writing—” He suddenly screamed, shaking the other by the arm: “Answer me!”
The denouncer lifted a pallid face with bluish lips which quivered helplessly. The other let go his arm and stared at us. Nobody spoke. Then Little Paws rose and let his hand fall on the shoulder of the denouncer, who jumped, and said: “That settles you, friend.”
“What are you going to do to him?” asked the older prisoner.
“Nothing. A bullet through his head, that’s all,” said Little Paws. “This swine’s blood must be blacker that the priest’s frock.” He jerked his thumb towards the silken cassock hanging behind the door.
The judge got up. “Well now, this affair is cleared up, you are free. And this other man stays here.”
“But you can’t kill him for this. After all, it’s me he has denounced, and I forgive him as I hope God will forgive me.”
“That’s our affair, don’t worry.”
“But no, no, it’s my affair. I can’t go away from here before you give me your word that nothing is going to happen to him.”
“Now look here, don’t be a damn’ fool, and get out of here,” said Little Paws. “You caught us in a soft hour, now don’t try to make us turn back, because then we might take you both for a ride. Hey, you there, take that man away and lock him up.”
The two Milicianos led the denouncer away, but the man he had denounced refused to go. He implored and begged the tribunal and in the end knelt down.
“I beg you, gentlemen—for the sake of your own mothers—of your children—of whatever you love in the world! I would never be free from remorse all my life…”
“This fellow must have been to the theater more often than was good for him,” shouted Little Paws. He took him by the elbow and lifted him from his knees without visible effort. “Now be off with you, go home and say a paternoster if you like, and leave us alone.”
I stood on the balcony and saw the man stumbling down the street. A cluster of people from the next house stared at him, then stared at the rectory door, and whispered among themselves. An elderly woman cried after him: “Got out by the skin of your teeth, eh?”
The man glared at her as though he were drunk.
The sixth prisoner was a coal merchant from the same street, a primitive man of tremendous physical strength, with a brutal, bloated face. The judge snapped at him: “So you’ve been paying money to Gil Robles—to the C.E.D.A.—have you?”
“Me?” The coalman opened his bleary eyes. “And you’ve dragged me here to tell me that? I’ve got nothing to do with that cur. I’m here because somebody’s out for my blood. But I’ve got nothing to do with that lousy fellow. I’m an old Republican. By this cross!” He blew a loud kiss on his crossed thumbs, black as cinder. The judge laid a receipt on the desk. “Then what’s this?”
The coalman took it between his huge fingers and began to spell out: “Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas—C.E.D.A.?—what the hell—ten pesetas.” He gaped at us. “I don’t know what to say. I did pay them. But to tell you the truth, you see, a poor fellow like me isn’t much good at books and so on, and so when I saw all those stamps and that bit about Confederation, I thought ‘It’s the insurance.’ And now it looks as if those dirty swine had stolen two duros out of my pocket and got me into the soup as well.”
“Do you realize that we can shoot you for paying money to the C.E.D.A.?”
“Me? Damnation! After they’ve stolen my money, too? You’re crazy, the lot of you.”
Little Paws hit him in the ribs so that he swiveled round and faced him. “You there—look me in the eyes and answer: did you or did you not know that the money was for the C.E.D.A.?”
“Hell, how often have I got to tell you the same thing over again? If I say so, then it is so, gospel truth. They’ve diddled me out of those two duros, as sure as my name’s Pedro. May God grant that they have to spend it on the doctor’s bill!”
“You speak of God quite a lot,” grumbled Little Paws.
“As it comes, lad. It’s useful to have Him at hand so that you can swear at Him sometimes, and then He sometimes helps you out.”
When the coalman was told that he was free, he said: “I knew it anyhow. The wife started weeping like a waterfall when your boys came to fetch me, but I told her you wouldn’t take me for a ride. Not me. The whole quarter’s known me for the last twenty years, and they can tell you whether anybody’s ever seen me mixed up with the priests. I was the first to vote for the Republic. Never mind, boys, anybody can put his foot in it from time to time. Come along and have a drink on me now!”
We heard him lumbering down the creaking stairs.
“That’s all for today,” said the judge.
“You’ve put a fast one over on me—two out of six have got away. But at least we’ve got that stool pigeon left. I’ll settle accounts with him tonight,” said Little Paws.
We walked through the big, cool, stone nave of the church, through pools of deep shadow and swathes of colored light. Someone was singing a flamenco song high up in the dusk; metal tinkled. A Miliciano perched on the top of the High Altar was wrenching off brass candelabra and throwing them down into the hands of another who stood at the altar’s foot and dropped each piece on a mountain of metal scraps. “That’s all for cartridge shells,” said Antonio.
The wood of the altars was bare and ugly. The crippled images lying on the ground had lost their respectability. Old, worm-eaten wooden statues leered with noseless faces. Plaster-covered stuffing stuck out from many-colored robes. From the gilt screen in front of the High Altar hung a collection box, its lid secured with a big lock and smashed by a hammer blow. The Child Jesus lay on one of the altar steps, a sky-blue ball spangled with silver stars, dangling a pair of minute feet and topped by a two-pronged stick. One of the prongs ended in the papier-mâché head of a fair-haired child with blue eyes, the other in a chubby, pink hand, its thumb doubled on the palm, the four other fingers sticking out rigidly. The tunic was missing, but a shabby coat was wrapped round the stick and turned it into a scarecrow, with the blond head hanging sideways and smiling archly.
“Put a cigarette in his mouth, then he’ll look like a good proletarian,” the Miliciano shouted from the height of the altar. “Imagine all the money they got out of the silly, bigoted old women with the help of the little angel! But if one of them had lifted the petticoats and seen that broomstick underneath, she would have fainted, don’t you think?”
I thought of the stage-setting in the Church of San Martín as I used to see it when I was a boy: the image taken out of its niche on the eve of the Saint’s Day; the rural landscape rigged up with lamps hidden behind boards and empty sardine boxes loaned by the fishmonger of the Calle de la Luna; the priest cursing the smell, while the pious women of the parish covered up those boxes with rugs and sheets in the sacristy; scarlet, gold-studded cloth hoisted on to the High Altar, the holes gnawed by mice in the course of the years disappearing in its rich folds; the trappings taken down at the end of the Novena, in a shower of dust and cobwebs, while the Saint’s image lolled on the floor like the wax doll in an empty shop window.
Bit by bit, I recognized the pieces of scenery in the despoiled church before me. Here were the ladders of worm-eaten pinewood, which had been blazing with votive candles. Here was the shrine, open and void. It smelled of rancid wax and crumbling wood. The empty space in the golden arch where the Child Jesus had been was festooned with spiders’ webs.
Yet above the broken trumpery rose the inaccessible stone pillars and cross-vaults, dark with age and smoke. The organ towered across the nave and aisles. Late sunlight filtered through the windows in the slender lantern of the dome.
THE BATTALION LA PLUMA, the battalion of the pen-pushers, was organized; it had its officers and formations which took over the new recruits; it had still no arms and no equipment. Gregorio, one of my office colleagues, was made its Captain, mainly because his experience in dealing with Ministry officials seemed to make him particularly fit for negotiations with the War Ministry. He went there day after day, came back with empty hands and exclaimed that only the Anarchists were able to squeeze arms out of the Ministry’s depots, because they called the officers Fascists and traitors and threatened them with being taken for a ride if they did not give them arms.
My own work as organizer and instructor was over. I had nothing to do. The couple of hours at the office were nothing. I hated having to go round Madrid as did so many thousand others, raising a clenched fist when a car filled with Milicianos passed, shouting “Long live” or “Down with” together with the crowd, saluting the body of fallen militiamen carried past under a red shroud, and being afraid of an error, a denunciation, a sniper’s bullet.
In Serafín’s tavern we were talking of a man who had fallen in Toledo. Serafín asked me whether I had known him. “Since he was so high,” I said and raised my flat hand to indicate the height of a young boy. Two minutes later a couple of armed militiamen entered, with a little man at their heels, who pointed me out to them. The Milicianos took me by one arm each and said: “Come along.” It was lucky that I was surrounded by people who had known me all my life. In the course of the explanations it emerged that the little man had denounced me as having given the Fascist salute.
One morning, Navarro, our draftsman, came to me with a crazed face. His two sons had been arrested and taken to the Circulo de Bellas Artes; the younger one had come back at midnight, set free because he was not yet sixteen. He knew nothing about his brother’s fate. Could I do anything? I went to Fuñi-Fuñi and discussed the case with him, but not hiding my opinion that it was hopeless, because the boy had been mixed in university brawls and in all probability wounded one of his adversaries. But we could at least attempt to find out his fate for certain.
Fuñi-Fuñi found it out. The student had been shot in the Casa de Campo during the previous night; the family could try to find and take away his body, but it might already be buried in a cemetery. I told the father. After this I did not see him for many days. Then I happened to go into the tavern of the Portuguese, and there I found Navarro, drunk. He called me to his table and I sat down. We said nothing for a long while. Then he looked at me and said:
“What can I do, Barea? I don’t belong to the Right, as you know. I belong to you. But your people have killed my son. What can I do?” He flung his face down on his crossed arms and sobbed. His shoulders heaved in jerks, as though someone were hitting him on the chin at regular intervals from under the marble table. I got up softly and left him.
Angel established himself as my bodyguard. “You’re much too trustful, and say just what comes into your mind to anybody,” he declared. “Think of your row with Sebastian. If he takes it into his head to denounce you to his gang they’ll bump you off.” He went with me to the office in the mornings and waited patiently in the doorway until I came out. When I was talking to somebody he kept out of sight, but not out of reach of my voice. Whenever I tried to put him off, he would say: “I won’t go. You look too much like a Señorito, someone will have a go at you some day. But not while Angelito is with you.”
In desperation I took Angel along when I visited Antonio another time to see whether he could not give me something useful to do. In one of the rooms of the Party secretariat I saw thousands of books dumped on the floor. “The boys in the Sierra have asked for books, and so we’ve cleared out the libraries of some of the Fascists,” said Antonio. “Let me handle this for you,” I begged him. “I don’t think all these books are good reading for the Milicianos out there.” Nobody else seemed to bother, so I dived into the surf of books, together with Angel. There were some rare old editions which I salvaged, and text-books which were put aside and turned out to be very useful at a later stage. But after a week, when the books were classified, I was again left without anything to do.
Then I remembered the patent of a very simple hand grenade which had gone through my hands. Its inventor, Fausto, was an old mechanic whom I had come to know well. The ordnance factory at Toledo had just taken up its production when the insurrection broke out. This was the kind of weapon which was needed now. I saw Fausto and asked what had been done about his invention.
“I really don’t know. The officers of the factory have all disappeared, and now they’ve got a workers’ committee, and nobody knows anything about anything. I’ve been there.”
“Would you like to get things going?”
He was delighted, but skeptical. I spoke of the matter to Antonio, who had proved most accessible to me, and he in his turn sent me to see the Comandante Carlos of the 5th Regiment.
The Communist Party had taken the first big step towards the formation of an army by organizing the 5th Regiment, not as a loose militia, but as a closely knit and disciplined body. Volunteers flocked to it. The idea caught on among the masses outside the political groups, because it seemed something beyond party ambition and propaganda. In those late August days the 5th Regiment was already a myth, as well as a very concrete fact.
Its commander, Carlos, came from somewhere in Central Europe, I imagined, but he had lived in America for years and spoke excellent Spanish. I showed him the model of the grenade, explained its possibilities, and when I left he gave me an authorization to collect the several hundreds of grenades in stock in Toledo and to investigate the chances of resuming their production. He accompanied me through the vast building. I saw recruits drilling, who moved and acted like trained soldiers, and I said so, profoundly impressed, but Comandante Carlos shook his head discontentedly. He wanted to show me a workshop for hand grenades set up by Asturian miners; it did not belong to the 5th Regiment, but supplied all the fronts.
In the workshop, men and women were filling pieces of iron tubing with dynamite and fixing short fuses. We stumbled over dynamite cartridges, filled bombs and cigarette stubs in a hellish medley. I felt most uncomfortable.
“But, Carlos, this place is going to blow up any minute.”
“I can’t do anything about it. They are free to do as they like. They’re under no kind of discipline, and nobody will ever persuade them that they are crazy, because they have been handling dynamite all their lives and think they know everything there is to know about it.”
At eleven in the morning we left the workshop. At half-past eleven an enormous explosion shook the district of Salamanca, and the hand-grenade workshop was wiped out.
A few days later, Fausto and I went to the ordnance factory in Toledo in a little car which the Communist Party had put at our disposal.
The city of Toledo was in Government hands, but the Alcazar was held by a strong force of cadets, Falangists, and Civil Guards with their families, under the command of General Moscardó. They had ample ammunition and food stocks, and the old fortress, with casemates scooped out of the living rock, defied the armament of the militia. The struggle had gone on since the beginning of the rebellion. The militia had occupied all the buildings which dominated the Alcazar and set up a battery outside the town on the other bank of the river Tajo. Several assaults had failed. At the time we went there, the Government had offered to pardon the rebels if they surrendered, and they had rejected the offer. There was talk of a new and final assault. There was also talk of the advance of an enemy column towards Toledo and Madrid. Oropesa had been taken by them.
When we arrived at the ordnance factory down in the valley, we knew only that a workers’ committee had taken the plant under its control; but it became clear at once that there reigned an atmosphere of mutual distrust. Nobody knew anything, nobody was ready to make a decision. Fausto remembered in what part of the building the grenades were stored. We found them, but the man in charge said:
“You can’t take them away without an order from the War Ministry, approved by the Workers’ Committee.”
“Never mind, we’ll settle that,” Fausto answered. “But the main thing is that you should go on producing them.”
“Well, you see… it’s like this: we do produce something.”
They were producing “something” indeed, something which consumed material and justified the payment of wages. They had been producing thousands of screws needed for the grenade, and two workers at automatic lathes were continuing to produce them. Miles of steel wire had been turned into springs, and percussion pins were still being produced on a large scale, but none of the other parts of the grenade, not even the explosive charge.
“We had to shoot the explosives expert,” said the Responsable. “For sabotage. He absolutely refused to give us explosives for rifle cartridges, so we confiscated his whole stock. But then the cartridges exploded. So we had to shoot him.”
“Of course, if you put mitramite, which is what was in stock here, into a rifle cartridge, it blows up the whole rifle,” said Fausto.
The man shrugged. “I tell you, the cartridges exploded in the rifle, and that’s sabotage.”
Before we went away, depressed and helpless, the man took us with a mysterious mien into a corner and showed us a switchboard. “What do you think of that? If the Fascists come here we’ve prepared them a nice surprise. If you pushed down this lever now, not one of the workshops would be left. They’re all mined, with a dynamite charge underneath. But that’s a secret.”
In the car Fausto said: “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. We shall have to produce the thing in Madrid. Carlos might help. Let’s have a look at Toledo.”
We were at the bottom of the sun-drenched valley. The Tajo purred where it flowed into the reservoir of the power plant. Poplars hemmed the path with their green and their shade, people were picnicking, drinking, and laughing in the river meadow. The towering rock of the town showed its tawny flanks flecked with tufted grass and cistus, and its crown of city walls. Far away on the other side of the river a cluster of men dispersed and revealed the outline of a toy cannon, at its muzzle a wad of cotton-wool smoke. Something went screeching through the air. Then came a dull thud followed by a second thud from behind the city walls on the crest of the hill. The echo of the two shots rumbled between the sheer rock walls of the gorge at Alcántara Bridge.
Now we could hear the crackle of rifle shots up in the town, but they sounded like squibs let loose on a fairground.
We went as far as the corner of the Zocodover, the market square of Toledo. Broken chairs, trees with their branches lopped off, twisted iron bars, the bandstand smashed, clothes and old papers scattered here and there, the fronts of the houses scarred, jagged glass splinters fringing the window frames, the balcony of a hotel swinging loose in the air. In the middle of the square was nobody, there seemed to be nothing but a silent void. Taking cover from the fire of the Alcazar in doorways and behind jutting corners, Milicianos and Shock Police in dark blue uniforms crouched in ridiculous positions, vociferating and gesticulating, letting off shots, shouting orders, blowing shrill whistles. Sometimes a puff of smoke, as though from a smoker sitting behind a window, was wafted out of the rosy, enigmatic façade of the Alcazar, but it was impossible to hear the sound of the shot among the hundreds of shots from the crowd at the foot of the fortress. It was like a sound film when the synchronization of sound and picture goes wrong: the actor opens his mouth to speak, but you hear the voice of the woman who listens to him with closed lips.
“Let’s get out of it,” Fausto growled. Later on he said: “We’re going to lose the war if this is a symbol.”
We passed commandeered cars and lorries. Militiamen and militia girls were making merry; they were laughing and singing, the men drank from leather bottles and their girls tickled them in the armpits so that the wine spattered. Once more the shots sounded like fairground squibs, and the cannon on the other side of the river decorated its muzzle with a fluff of cotton wool. In tomorrow’s papers we would see the photograph of a pretty girl letting off a gun.
Near Getafe a small plane was doing stunts in the air, a sun-gilded fly showing off its glinting back and belly. People stared at it and blocked the pavement; a convoy of militia cars blocked the road. Fausto sounded the motor horn.
“Go to hell,” shouted one of the Milicianos and stayed there in the middle of the road, staring into the air.
When we came to Toledo Bridge we had to give the right of way to a municipal van coming from the Pradera de San Isidro. Fausto glanced at me: “Do you think it’s carrying something? It’s a bit late for that.”
The garbage vans collected the bodies of those who had been executed and took them to the cemetery.
Fausto drove faster, and we overtook the van. Its iron doors were shut. Then it bumped over a hole in the road, and loose iron bars clanked in its hollow bowels. It was empty. I wiped some drops of sweat from my forehead.
Antonio had left a message at home; he wanted to see me as soon as possible. I found him in the Party secretariat, very busy and surrounded by Milicianos who had come from the Sierra. He asked me curtly: “Do you know English?”
The militiamen turned round and watched me with curiosity.
“Well, I don’t speak English, but I read it and I translate from it quite fluently. If that’s any good to you.”
“Go into the next room and speak to Nicasio.”
“Antonio told me you want some work to do,” the other secretary said. “The Foreign Ministry needs people who understand English. So if you like—” He scribbled out a note and rang up somebody.
“Go there and ask for Velilla, he’s a party comrade and will tell you all you want to know.”
Shock Police guarded the Foreign Ministry. I had to wait in the enormous entrance where the Sergeant on duty had a desk. All except one of the iron doors were shut. It looked like the reception desk of a prison. Then a young man, masked by big, horn-rimmed glasses and a mop of unruly hair, came straight towards me. “You’re Barea, of course.” He took the note out of my fingers and tore it up without having read it. “They need people who know languages in the Press Department.”
“I know French well, but I don’t speak a word of English. I can translate from it, though.”
“You won’t need more. Let’s see the Head of the Department.”
A single desk lamp threw a circle of light on heaped-up papers and a pair of white, cushioned hands. Two palely glinting disks stuck on to an egg-shaped blob moved in the dusk beyond the region of the beam from the lamp. Then I took in the head, a pallid, hairless dome, and smoked glasses in tortoiseshell rims. The two soft hands rubbed one against the other. Then a three-cornered tongue pushed out between the lips and curved up towards the nostrils; it looked almost black in that light.
Velilla introduced me to Don Luis Rubio Hidalgo, who invited me to take a seat, tipped up the conical light shade so that the room, he himself, and his heavily lidded eyes without lashes became visible, and began to explain.
He was the Chief of the Press and Propaganda Department at the Foreign Ministry. His office included the censorship of foreign press reports; he would like me to join them as a censor for press telegrams and telephonic press dispatches. The work was done in the Ministry during the day and in the Telefónica during the night, from midnight to eight in the morning. It was for this night work that he needed me. I could start the following evening. The salary was four hundred pesetas per month. I would be taken to work by one of the Ministry’s cars. It was sufficient for him that I could translate from English.
I accepted the job. It sounded interesting. But I disliked my new chief, and said so to Velilla. “Nobody likes him,” he answered, “but he is in the confidence of the Minister. We distrust him. There are two boys in his department who are comrades, but we must see that we get the whole thing into our hands. Come and see me as often as you can. You will have to join our cell, there are eleven of us.” He ran on, with an engaging mixture of simple faith and involved argument. He believed that the war would be over in a few weeks and Spain become a Soviet Republic. I disagreed, but found him likable; I felt ready to work with him.
When I told the whole story to Angel, who had waited for me outside the Ministry, he grumbled because it would mean being out at night when, as he said, the Milicianos shot off their rifles at anything that moved because they were afraid, and when the phantom cars of Falange went about their murderous business. But he would look after me. When I told him I would be fetched by car and he would have to stay at my flat so that my wife and children should not be left alone, he grumbled again and was proud. All my friends in Emiliano’s bar were pleased and intrigued by my new job. It dominated the conversation, until all its aspects had been thrashed out. Then everyone began to discuss politics. A few days before, Largo Caballero had taken over the Government, Manolo summed up the general opinion by saying: “Now something will get done. This is a War Government, and now the rifles will go to the front. No more parading up and down the streets—Prieto will show those people something!” Prieto had been made Minister of War.
“Yes, you watch out,” said Fuñi-Fuñi. “No more trips to Toledo for you!”
“But I’m already a member of a battalion, only it hasn’t got any arms yet. As soon as they give us arms, I’ll be the first to go.”
“All right, so it’s no more Toledo, is it?” the other insisted, and the customary quibble began. It was cut short by a distant noise which came nearer: motorcycles, motor horns, sirens. We all rose. A dispatch rider came racing down the street, the exhaust of his motorcycle open, his siren sounding ceaselessly. In those days, when Madrid had no air raid warning system, the alarm was given by the motorcyclists of the Town Council who had sirens mounted on their vehicles.
The women and children of the house came down to take shelter in Emiliano’s cellar. The men crowded into the bar. The iron shutters clanked down, and a few women screamed at the noise. Then the people grew quieter and spoke softly, for they all listened. The drone of planes came close and went away, came back, and seemed to hover overhead. Downstairs in the cellar a child began to cry, other children followed suit, some of the mothers shrieked in hysterical rage. Up in the bar the men stared at each other.
Then the hum of the engines no longer sounded in our ears. Somebody rolled up the shutters. We flocked out into the street. It was very still, the night was dark and decked with stars. People went to their flats to see with their own eyes that nothing had happened, but the men soon came down again. Nobody seemed able to sleep. The women came after the men: the children were afraid that the planes might come back. At dawn the street was crowded. Newcomers brought news from other quarters of the town: bombs had fallen in the district of Cuatro Caminos, and there had been many casualties. We had not heard the bombs. After sunrise, Manolo’s militia friends arrived in their car. They were going to Toledo. He had not slept? Nor had they. “Come along, we’ll have our siesta out there.”
They rolled down the street, singing the Internationale. In the evening they brought Manolo back, dead. While they were taking their siesta in the fields, a plane had dropped a bomb close to the car. Manolo had a tiny orifice in his forehead. He had not wakened. He still slept placidly, pale from the sleepless night.
The Fascists had entered Talavera de la Reina.
At six that evening I went to the Foreign Ministry and Don Luis introduced me to my future colleagues and the work. I read through the journalists’ output from the day before and he explained the principles of his censorship. I was given an official pass which authorized me to go anywhere in Madrid at night, and an identity card. At a quarter to midnight a car came to fetch me from my house. All the neighbors saw me off.
I felt elated and light-headed. During the day I had been sorting out the new situation with Aurelia and with Maria. I had explained to myself and to the two women, one after the other, that I would have to work during the night and to sleep during the day. I would no longer be able to meet Maria in the afternoons, as she had demanded. I would no longer have to struggle with the other’s clinging and cloying nearness at home, where I had stayed more since the air raids had begun. At daybreak I had discussed my future work with Aurelia; she had been quick to see the disadvantage which it implied for her, and she had opposed my “getting mixed up in those things.” In the afternoon I went to see Maria; she had resented my absence from the office in the morning and had her doubts about the new arrangement, but accepted it with good grace. It separated me more clearly from my home; it coincided with her belief that a victory of the Government and the social revolution in its wake would bring about my final separation from Aurelia and my agreement to a life together with her. She found it natural that I wanted to take an active part in the war. Her own young brother had just joined a volunteer battalion. Thus my new work held out new hope to her. I saw it, but made no comment. I would be inside the fortress of my work.
The car carried me through deserted streets, their darkness streaked with the feeble rays of light filtering through blinds and tavern doors. It was a new, chilling Madrid. Five times in the course of our short route a pair of Milicianos gave us the “Halt!,” dazzled us with their pocket lamps and scrutinized our papers. The official Ministry Pass did not impress them; when at last I held out my U.G.T. card, one of the sentries said: “Why didn’t you show that one first, comrade?”
The last control was at the door of the Telefónica. It was too dark to see anything but smooth concrete walls towering over the narrow Calle de Valverde. A Shock Police sentry in the door took me to the guard room, where a Lieutenant examined the Ministry papers and then passed me on to the Workers’ Control.
The control desk was a sort of counter at one side of the big entrance hall, manned by a dark-skinned, unshaven, burly man who had tied a huge black-and-red scarf round his throat in a slovenly knot.
“What d’you want, brother?”
He pushed aside the official papers. “O.K.—but what is it you want here?”
“As you see, I’m going to censor the reports of the foreign journalists.”
“What’s your organization?”
“The U.G.T.”
“All right, you’ll find one of your people up there. He’s daft. But we’ll have to settle that business with the foreigners. They’re Fascists, all of them. The first one who does anything wrong—you just bring him to me. Or simply ring me up. And keep your eyes skinned when they talk their lingo. I can’t think why they’re permitted to talk their own language. Hell, if they want to make reports, let them do it in Spanish and pay for a translator. Then they come down the stairs with a lot of noise, talking their English, and nobody knows when they’re calling one the son of a bitch. Well, your office is on the fifth floor, and these two will go with you.”
A pretty, flirtatious girl took me and the two Milicianos up in a lift; then we walked through long, dim, twisting passages with many doors and entered the last door of all. The narrow room smelled like a church and the darkness which filled it was suffused with a violet glow. A small circle of light was sharply outlined on the desk. The glow and the smell of wax came from the violet carbon paper wrapped round the bulb in place of a blackout shade. The censor on duty, a tall, bony man, rose and welcomed me. Two shadowy bulks at the other end of the room moved: the orderly and the dispatch rider, the smooth moon face of an elderly valet and the meager, dusky face with lively eyes of a bootblack.
Then I plunged into the work and did not emerge for many nights. The organization was simple. The journalists had their own room on the fourth floor; there they wrote their reports in duplicate and submitted them to the censor. One copy was returned to the correspondent, stamped, and initialed, the other sent to the telephone room by orderly. When the connection with Paris or London was established, the correspondent read out his dispatch, while a switch censor sitting by his side checked the text and through his earphones controlled the service conversation as well. If the journalist wanted to transmit his report by telegram or radio, the censored copy was sent by dispatch rider to Transradio.
The big American agencies and Havas had teams of reporters who worked in shifts and produced a stream of what they called snaps; the more important British and American newspapers had their special correspondents. The majority spoke English, but there were a number of Frenchmen and a sprinkling of Latin-Americans.
My colleague and I were supposed to deal with all of them. He knew colloquial English, I could read the English of technical reviews and of books. His French was very thin, mine was not bad. But none of us had ever worked with the press. Our orders were strict and over-simple: we had to cut out everything that did not indicate a victory of the Republican Government. The correspondents battled against this rule with all their wit and technique. Perea and I pooled our knowledge and often called in one of the switch censors; we searched the dictionaries for double meanings and cut out a phrase when it remained obscure to us. At the beginning I thought that I would soon have a clearer view of the work and be able to turn it into something positive. But the opposite happened. As the autumn went on, the Republican forces suffered one defeat after another, and the journalists did their level best to get their reports of the facts through; the Frenchmen used argot, the Englishmen and Americans their respective slang, and they all tried to catch the switch censor napping by putting some insinuating words into their conversations with their editors, or by inserting into their dispatches little phrases not contained in the original text.
The most important battle in September was that for the Alcazar of Toledo. Colonel Yagüe’s column was marching up the Tajo valley and drawing near to Toledo. The Government forces tried to take the fortress before the relief column arrived. Part of the Alcazar was blown up; but the defenders held out in the rock casemates and in the ruins. On September the 20th—I remember the date because it is my birthday—big tank cars were driven to Toledo and the Alcazar’s cellars were flooded with petrol and set on fire. The attempt failed. On the same day a well-equipped column of volunteers coming from Barcelona paraded through the streets of Madrid and was cheered by the crowds: the men had come to fight Yagüe’s army.
At that time the Government tried to suppress the wild tribunals by creating a new, legalized form of Popular Tribunal in which a member of the judiciary acted as the judge, and militia delegates as his assessors; it authorized militia squads to track down and arrest Fascists, so as to eliminate the terror of the man hunt. But the tide of fear and hatred was still rising, and the remedy was hardly better than the disease.
It was the official policy to pass only reports according to which the Alcazar was about to fall, Yagüe’s column halted, and the Popular Tribunals a pattern of justice. I felt convinced that our news and censorship policy was clumsy and futile. But when I dealt with the journalists I disliked the glib assurance with which they took our defeat for granted and tried to squeeze out sensations, and then I carried through the official orders with a savage fury, as though by cutting out a phrase I were cutting out a hated and dreaded fact.
When I went to the Foreign Ministry in the evening to receive my instructions for the night, I usually had a talk with Don Luis, who seemed to single me out. He would tell me stories of how extremists had threatened him because he had let through an unfavorable piece of news, or of how he had been taken to task because some correspondent or other had sent out reports in the diplomatic bag of his embassy; of how he had fallen under suspicion and was afraid of being taken for a ride one fine day. He was on good terms with the Communists—after all, I was there because they had recommended me!—and Don Julio, the Minister, who backed him, was very much favored by them. But the Anarchists…
He would end each of his perorations by opening the drawer of his desk and showing me a pistol. “Before they get me, I’ll get one of them! Well, anyhow, take great care and don’t let anything pass, and above all, watch over your colleague who is weak, very weak!”
In the last week of September, Fausto, the inventor of the hand grenade, came and fetched me away from my day sleep. He had a written order from the War Ministry to collect the grenades stored in the ordnance factory, but he had no means of transporting them. The hundreds of cars and vans which were driven aimlessly round Madrid were in the hands of Milicianos, the Ministry had no control over them. Each militia group would willingly fetch the grenades for its own unit, but not for the Army Depot.
“If Prieto hears about it, the bombs will be fetched,” I said.
“Yes—but will Prieto know about it before the Fascists enter Toledo? I’m going there myself and I want you to come along.”
I went with him. The Toledo road was choked with Milicianos and cars, coming and going. Some shouted that the Alcazar had fallen, and some that its fall was a question of hours. Near Toledo the crowds thickened. The rock was wreathed with the bursts of explosions. Ambulances drove slowly over Alcántara Bridge, and the people greeted them, raising their clenched fists. We drove on to the ordnance factory, but gave up all hope as soon as we heard that the factory lorries stood ready to transfer to Madrid the whole stock of brass tubing and the machinery for cartridge production. Fausto was in despair. Neither of us was in a mood to drive up to Toledo. I suggested going back to Madrid via Torrijos so that I could stop at Novés.
In Torrijos the streets were blocked by carts. People were loading them with clothes, mattresses, and furniture, jostling each other and shouting. “The Fascists are coming,” said an old man in answer to my question. “The Fascists will get us. Yesterday they dropped bombs from their planes, and killed a lot of people, and this morning we could hear their guns. And the people who’ve passed through here! They’ve come from all the villages, even from Escalonilla, which is only half an hour from here.”
Novés was almost deserted. A few women hurried through the street. Both casinos had their doors shut. I asked Fausto to drive on to Old Juán’s mill. There I found the old man tying up bundles with his two mill hands. He was amazed at seeing me. “You’ll have to hurry, the Fascists are coming. We’re moving to Madrid tonight.”
“They won’t be here as quickly as all that,” I said.
“Listen, Don Arturo, those fellows are already on the road. They dropped bombs here two days ago. They killed two cows of the village, and Demetria and her child and husband. People saw pickets of Moors on the Extremadura Road early this morning. I tell you, if you don’t hurry, you won’t get away.
We’ll meet in Madrid, Don Arturo, and then I’ll tell you what happened here. It was horrible.” We left Novés in the direction of Puebla de Montalbán so as to reach the Extremadura Road. When we got there Fausto glanced round and stopped the car. “So that’s that. What shall we do? Go back via Toledo?”
“The road to Madrid is still free, I believe. Let’s take it—but step on it.”
The road was deserted. It was strewn with heaps of clothing and armament, caps, coats, straps, blankets, rifles, tin plates, and mugs; the ditches were littered with them. Rifle and machine-gun shots sounded in the distance, from the direction of Toledo we heard the dull explosions of five bombs. Fausto drove on at top speed. We began to pass Milicianos sitting by the road, barefoot, their boots or sandals lying beside them. There were more and more of them; then we overtook others who were marching on laboriously, most of them without their rifles, in shirtsleeves or open vests, their faces and bare chests burned red. They shouted at us to give them a lift, and screamed insults when our little car drove past them. We expected a shot in the back. Then the road became crowded. Trudging Milicianos mingled with peasants walking at the head of a mule or donkey which carried their wife and children, or driving a cartload with bundles and crockery, their family perched on top of the bedclothes. So we reached Navalcarnero.
An officer and a few men of the Shock Police had drawn a cordon across the road. They stopped militiamen in their flight, made them deliver their arms and ordered them to line up in the plaza. The little garrison had a solitary machine gun set up in the square: it stemmed the threatening panic. The people of Navalcarnero were packing and shutting up their houses.
They stopped our car, too. Fausto and I scrambled out and explained the aim of our journey to the officer, whose face was a mask of sweat-streaked dust. We simply had to get through to Madrid and report to the War Ministry, Fausto concluded, so that army lorries could be sent out to collect the ordnance material before the Fascists arrived and got it.
At that instant a group of Milicianos with rifles pushed through the crowd and seemed about to break through the cordon by force. The officer left us standing and climbed on to the roof of our car. “Halt—go back, or we fire! Now, listen…”
“Shut up with your lousy commands. Let us through, or we’ll get through by our guts,” shouted one of the Milicianos.
The officer shouted back: “All right, you may pass through, but listen to me first!” The disarmed Milicianos surged round the car. Fausto muttered: “If we get out of this, today’s our real birthday!”
But the officer spoke well. He called the militiamen cowards to their faces, he made them see how shameful it would be to go back to Madrid in their state, he told them that they had been dirty curs to throw their rifles into the ditch. Then he explained that they could reorganize in Navalcarnero and stay there until the forces arrived which were under way from Madrid. In the end he shouted: “That’s all—those of you who’ve got guts will stay, the others can go on. But they must at least leave us their rifles so that we can fight!” A deafening clamor drowned his last words. He had won.
The officer jumped to the ground and at once sent armed pickets back along the road to collect as many rifles as possible. Then he turned to us, wiping his brow: “Now you can go on, comrades.”
It was almost dark when we reached Madrid. We had left the vanguard of the refugee carts in Alcorcón. I went straight to the Foreign Ministry and spoke to Rubio Hidalgo. “Don’t worry,” he said. “The Fascists have already been halted, and the Alcazar won’t last out this night. A few Milicianos have stampeded, that’s all. The most important thing is that you shouldn’t let through any news of this kind. Tomorrow morning there will be good news, you’ll see.”
That night I had to battle against the journalists. One of them, a young, supercilious Frenchman who worked for the Petit Parisien, tried so many tricks and blustered so much that I threatened him with arrest. I don’t remember more than that I shouted myself and gripped my pistol. In the morning it was no longer possible to conceal the fact that the rebels had advanced as far as Maqueda on the Extremadura Road, a village nearer to Madrid than Puebla de Montalbán where we had passed a few hours earlier, and as far as Torrijos on the Toledo Road. Their column on the Extremadura Road threatened Madrid, the other threatened Toledo. The Government capped this piece of news with the announcement that the Alcazar had fallen; this had to be officially denied later on. Some days afterwards, on September the 27th, the rebels entered Toledo. The ordnance factory was not blown up and they occupied it intact.
The censorship work was turned into an unending nightmare. My colleague on the night shift was so panic-stricken that he had to go; I worked alone from nine in the evening to nine in the morning, hardly knowing what I did. The nearer Franco’s forces drew to the capital, the more cryptic became the dispatches of the journalists, the more pressing their manner. With the mounting menace and fear, a new wave of killings swept the city. The food situation grew more and more difficult, only the communal restaurants were able to provide meals. There was a strict curfew starting at eleven o’clock; it was dangerous to be out in the streets. On September the 30th the Government decreed the incorporation of all militias into the regular army, which did not exist yet. I ate in the canteen of the Telefónica or in a near-by café and Angel took food home to my family. Snipers’ shots cracked through the dark under my windows. I lived on black coffee and brandy during those nights.
When I crossed the street in the early morning to have breakfast I saw the thin stream of refugees from the villages, with their donkeys and carts and gaunt, yellow dogs. They traveled by night for fear of being bombed in daylight. The first batches were billeted in big, requisitioned houses, those who came later had to camp in the avenues of the city. Mattresses were heaped up under the trees in the Castellana and Recoletos, and the women did their cooking at open fires on the pavement. Then the weather changed and torrential rains chased the refugees into the overcrowded houses.
Old Juán of Novés came to see me one morning. I took him to my café and he began to tell me his story, in his slow, equitable manner.
“I was right, Don Arturo. Old people are not often fooled. The things that have happened! When the rebellion broke out, our people went mad. They arrested all the rich men of the village and all those who worked with them—me too. But they let me out after two hours. The lads knew that I never mixed in politics and that there was always a piece of bread in my house for everyone who needed it. And then, you see, my boy is in the Shock Police, and so I became a Republican through him. Well, they set up a tribunal in the Town Hall and shot all of them, including the priest. Heliodoro was shot first. But they buried them all in hallowed ground. The only one who escaped was José, the one from the casino, because he often gave a peseta or so to the poor people when they hadn’t anything to eat. It’s always useful to light a candle to the devil! Well, so the families of the men who were shot went away, and our people at first wanted to share out their land, and then they wanted to till it communally. But they couldn’t agree and there was no money. They requisitioned my mill, but of course they hadn’t any grain to mill, and it was much the same thing in all the other villages. A few joined the militia in Madrid, but most of us stayed on and lived on our garden produce and on what had been stored in the rich men’s houses. Then the rebels came nearer, and the people who’d been most active, like Eliseo, got away. But we others thought we had nothing to fear and stayed on. A few left when the first bombs fell, but you know how attached one is to one’s own home and land, and so most of us stayed. Until the people from other villages passed through on their flight and told us that, when they enter a village, the Fascists shoot all the men and shave the women’s hair off…
“So, what with one thing and another, we all decided to get away. But it was at the very last minute, the day you passed through. The others were already in Torrijos and Maqueda, and their two groups joined and cut us off from Madrid on the roads. So we had to walk across the fields. They were chasing us. When they caught a man he got a bullet through his head. They drove the women back to the village with their rifle butts. The Moors gleaned the fields afterwards, and when they got hold of a young woman they tumbled her on the ground. You can imagine the rest. They did it to a girl who was a servant at Don Ramón’s. They threw her down in a plowed field and called their comrades, because the girl’s very pretty. Eleven of them, Don Arturo. Marcial, one of my mill hands, and I were hidden in a thicket and saw it happening. Marcial was so scared that it upset his innards and he dirtied himself. But afterwards he dared to come with me and we picked her up. She’s here in the General Hospital, but they don’t know yet whether she will be all right or not. Because, you see, we couldn’t manage to carry her on our backs, and so she had to walk along with us across the fields for two days, until we got to Illescas, and from there they took her to Madrid in a cart… I’m all right here, I’m with relatives, and so are some of the others. But there’s something I want you to see, Don Arturo, because it’s so frightful. It’s the place where they’ve put the poorest of our people, those who haven’t got anybody here in the town.”
After a meal in the canteen, Old Juán made me go with him, although I was stupid with tiredness. He took me through a marble portal with wide marble stairs and Doric columns, into a big hall. When he opened the entrance door, the stench of excrement and urine hit me in the face. “But what is this, Uncle Juán?”
“Don’t ask me. It’s sheer misery. All the lavatories are broken and blocked. The people were bewildered by this place, you see, and didn’t know what to do with it, so they smashed it all up… I told you it was frightful.”
In one of the reception rooms of the palace, a horde of women, children, and old people, filthy, unkempt, evil-smelling, lived in a litter of truckle-beds, crockery and pieces of furniture. A woman was washing napkins in a washbowl; the dirty water slopped over and trickled under one of the camp beds, in which an old man was lying in his drawers, smoking. Three women were quarreling round a table. The blue-green tapestry hung from the walls in shreds, the marble mantelpiece was chipped, the fireplace choked with refuse and muck. Two small children were squalling; and a third sat in a corner, clutching at a dirty little mongrel which barked ceaselessly and shrilly. In another corner stood an iron bedstead, with a goat tied to one of its legs.
While I stared, Old Juán said: “Here are the people of Novés—you don’t recognize them? Well, I told you they were the poorest of all, and I don’t suppose you ever saw them. They were too poor to talk to you. In the other rooms are people from three or four other villages. They all hate each other, and they’re always fighting because one’s got a better place than the other, and some have a washbasin and some not, and so on. In the end they destroy everything so that the others shouldn’t get it, the mirrors, and the lavatory bowls, and the pipes. There’s no water left except in the garden pond.”
“But can’t someone put it in order? Somebody must have brought them here, after all.”
“Nobody. When they arrived with their donkeys and carts, some militiamen got hold of them in the middle of the street and put them in here. They do send them meal vouchers, but nobody cares about them apart from that.”
It was on that day that Franco proclaimed himself the Caudillo—the dictator—of Spain, I remember.
During the days that followed, the caravans of donkeys and carts with tired men, women, and children squatting on their bundles, never ceased. Battalions of Milicianos were hastily organized and sent out. Every day news came which showed how the armies of the rebels were fanning out like locust swarms, advancing on Madrid from all sides, from the Sierra de Gredos and the Alberche valley, passing by Aranjuez, through Sigüenza, in the Sierra de Guadarrama. Many people thought the war would end quickly; if the rebel armies closed the ring, if they cut communications with Albacete, Valencia, and Barcelona, Madrid would be lost.
On October the 13th, Madrid heard enemy gunfire for the first time.
I had lost my hopes and plans of arriving at a better understanding of the foreign journalists’ way of working, and of thus gaining some influence on their attitude. The journalists, their reports, my life in the Telefónica by night, the life of Madrid by day, were converted into a rapidly moving strip of pictures, some clear, some blurred, but all so fleeting that it was impossible to focus attention on any one of them. I could no longer decipher the hand-written sheets some of the correspondents submitted to the censorship; it looked as though they were made intentionally illegible. In the end I made a ruling that every dispatch had to be typed. It helped a little. One of the Frenchmen made it his excuse for leaving, but when he protested against my “high-handed measure” I saw that he was afraid. He was an exception. While I slashed their reports according to orders, I admired the personal courage of the correspondents, although I resented their detachment. They went out, risking the bullet of a foreigner-hating Miliciano, or the capture by Moors in the fluctuating fighting, so as to produce a few meager lines of a military report, while we could not pass the sensational articles they would have liked to write—or did write and pass on in some unimpeachable diplomatic bag.
So I saw myself sitting there in the darkness, behind the livid light-cone, working in the dark, when everybody thought I knew what was happening. I knew nothing except that the ring round Madrid was drawing closer, and that we were not equipped to meet the menace. It was difficult to sit still. Sometimes, when I walked past a group of slightly tipsy pressmen who had tried to get the better of me the whole night long, and had perhaps got it, I longed to have a row with them. What to us was life and death, meant nothing but a story to them. Sometimes, when the Anarchist of the Workers’ Control in the hall downstairs told me again that all those foreign journalists were Fascists and traitors, I felt a twinge of sympathy. When I saw a certain one of them sprawling on the bed in the telephone room, snoring while he waited for his call to come through, I remembered how he had baited us in the certainty of Franco’s prompt entry into the town, and I hated the brute.
I found it impossible to be friendly with Maria when she rang me up and demanded that we should meet. All our lives had come to a dead end.
The air raids became an almost daily occurrence. On October the 30th a single aircraft killed fifty little children in Getafe. The building trades unions sent out men to dig trenches round Madrid and to construct pillboxes and concrete barricades in the streets. The streets filled with refugees no longer from outlying villages, but from the suburbs of Madrid, and the nights were punctuated with distant gunfire. Elite units went out to man trenches not very many miles away; militiamen came, fleeing from the contact with tanks. La Pasionaria met them on the outskirts of the town and mustered her best strength to put new heart into them. The C.N.T.—the Anarchist Trade Union Center—sent two Ministers into the War Government. The journalists were writing reports which tried to say that we were lost, and we tried not to let them say it.
In the evening of November the 6th, when I went to the Foreign Ministry to receive my orders for the night, Rubio Hidalgo said:
“Shut the door, Barea, and sit down. You know, the whole thing is lost.”
I was so inured to his dramatic statements, that I was not impressed and only said: “Really? What’s the matter?” Then I saw papers burning in the fireplace and others stacked and packeted on the desk, and asked: “Are we going to move?”
He wiped his gleaming pate with a silk handkerchief, passed his dark, pointed tongue over his lips, and said slowly:
“Tonight, the Government is transferring to Valencia. Tomorrow, Franco will enter Madrid.”
He made a pause.
“I’m sorry, my friend. There’s nothing we can do. Madrid will fall tomorrow.”
But Madrid did not fall on the 7th of November 1936.
* In 1935, 25 pesetas were slightly more than 12 shillings, or about three dollars, at an exchange rate of roughly one dollar=7 pesetas. This exchange rate applies to all sums in pesetas mentioned in this book [The Clash] previous to the Civil War.
† The various references to events in Asturias in this and the following chapters allude so the events of October 1934, when the workers’ associations called a general strike, which was followed by revolutionary risings in Asturias, Barcelona, and Madrid, so as to prevent the coming to power of the right-wing leader Gil Robles and his party, the C.E.D.A. (Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas), with a clearly Fascist program. The armed rising of the Asturian miners, stronger than the other abortive movements, was suppressed by General Ochoa’s Legionaries and Moors, then for the first time used on the soil of the Peninsula and against Spaniards. The ensuing violent measures of oppression during the “Two Black Years” (Bienio Negro) roused public indignation to such a degree that Gil Robles was never called upon to form a Government.
—Author’s Note.
‡ Cacique is the current term for the local political “boss” of the Spanish countryside, who often is the local moneylender as well.
§ The Guardia de Asalto, here translated as “Shock Police”, was set up by the Spanish Government in the early days of the Republic, as a corps loyal to the Republican authorities and qualified to replace the old Civil Guard, the rural constabulary which traditionally served the interests of the great landowners and their caciques.
—Author’s Note.