It was another demented attack. From the early hours of the morning the artillery of the 13th Division pounded the Republican positions while these fired back with their heavy artillery at the Francoist positions, but the Ifni Riflemen did not emerge from their dugouts around Creu del Batlle until noon, when they launched their attack on Gardeny. What followed were six nightmarish hours. Manuel Mena placed his machine guns at the foot of the hill, trying to cover from there the ascent up the slope by his comrades, who attempted to take advantage of the pauses in enemy artillery, mortar, machine-gun, and rifle fire to gain a few yards crawling through burnt shrubs and seeking shelter in ditches and hollows opened in the red earth by the bombs, trying to scale inch by inch that clayey outcrop bristling with barbed wire and machine-gun nests where the toughest of the Republican defence was concentrated. Finally, towards three in the afternoon, the Republicans abandoned their trenches at the top of the hill for fear of being surrounded by the First Regiment, which had overtaken its left flank at Camí de Gardeny, and fell back towards the plateau and the castle, where they kept resisting, desperately supported by Russian tanks and sheltering behind a system of successive obstacles while the two Francoist regiments finished scaling the hill at the same time as invading the plateau, the cannons of the 13th Division crushed them, and a squadron of Heinkel He 51s strafed their positions with steep dives and low-level flights.
By mid-afternoon the castle had fallen, and Manuel Mena, still bewildered by the uproar, the blood, and the smoke of combat, contemplated from the ramparts undermined by the impact of the bombing, the city of Lérida at his feet, with the tower of the old cathedral on the left and the River Segre on the right. It was only a partial victory, so the calm lasted a very short time: two Republican battalions recently arrived from the Madrid front counterattacked around nine that night. They did so lighting the darkness with a flare and they did so with fury, while they sang at the top of their lungs the anthem of the 46th Division and tried to climb the hillside throwing hand grenades and firing automatic weapons. The counterattack failed in barely half an hour, and for the rest of the night all that was heard were occasional dispersed gunfights between the castle and the first houses on the outskirts of the city.
The conquest of Lérida was completed the following day. Towards noon, after several hours of heavy artillery preparation, the 13th Division rushed down on the city, the two regiments of the 1st Brigade surrounding it on the flanks and the two regiments of the 2nd assaulting it head-on. At that hour the machine guns of Manuel Mena’s company were covering the regiment’s descent from the Gardeny hill, with the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen at the top, towards Academia and Alcalde Costa streets, where the city started and where its defenders had taken refuge around a gas station. Once the Republican opposition was defeated at this point, the rest was easier. While Manuel Mena’s machine-gun company escorted them, clearing the way and helping them to eliminate the sparse pockets of resistance, the soldiers of the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen entered the ruined city down calle Alcalde Costa, taking every precaution to shield themselves from the desperate shots from terrified Republican snipers and soldiers clambering down from the old cathedral with the aim of getting themselves to the safety of the other side of the river before they were trapped in the city by the anticipated demolition of the highway bridge. Thus, advancing with maximum prudence, Manuel Mena crossed avenida de Catalunya and the Sant Joan Plaza and walked past City Hall and the military hospital and four churches that had been burned down at the outbreak of the war, and finally, having crossed the built-up area of the city from one side to the other, without firing a single shot he and the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen took the final objective: the railway station, an intact neoclassical building with a big clock on its façade that at that moment read exactly three o’clock in the afternoon.
Lérida was practically theirs. After a couple of hours the 4th Bandera of the Legion and the Ifni-Sahara Tabor took control of the old cathedral and made prisoners of its garrison and, a short time later, two almost simultaneous blasts shook the city with a disastrous tremor: the Republicans had blown up the main bridge and the railway line to keep the Francoists from crossing the Segre and continuing their advance towards Barcelona. It was the end. Franco had just conquered his first capital of a Catalan province, and from that moment on the city and the River Segre marked the front line. As for the 13th Division, after having suffered more than a thousand casualties in the four previous days, they urgently needed a rest, and during the three and a half months that followed, until just before the most senseless battle of that senseless war began, all its units were sent to the reserves.
All except for a few chosen units, among them the First Tabor of Ifni Riflemen.
11
The meeting at Manolo Amarilla’s house, to which my cousin Alejandro and my wife also came, took place one afternoon when Ernest Folch and the rest of the team were busy shooting B-roll footage of Ibahernando and the surrounding countryside. We had arranged to meet at five; at seven-thirty I had another interview very nearby, in Ibahernando itself, with the only two classmates of Manuel Mena’s still alive: my aunt Francisca Alonso, Alejandro’s mother, and Doña María Arias, the village schoolteacher.
I thought I would recognise Manolo Amarilla as soon as I saw him, but I was mistaken. The man who opened the door to my wife and me was about seventy years old; he was very thin, with glasses, short grey hair, and slightly reddish skin, and was wearing a checked shirt and worn blue jeans. After a cheerless greeting (or with cheer so forced it almost didn’t strike me as cheerful), he led us through a well-tended patio to a living room with walls decorated in the traditional style of the village, with ceramic plates, antique bronzes, pictures, and metalwork, some of which, as he explained in passing, were his own work. Alejandro was waiting in the dining room, sitting at a brazier table drinking coffee. We sat down with him and talked about generalities while my wife set up to film us and Manolo’s daughter, a silent, smiling woman in her thirties named Eva, who worked as an economist in Madrid and who exchanged a few words with Alejandro and with her father, served us coffee. It was at that moment that I recognised him. I mean that was the moment when I remembered having seen Manolo Amarilla before, though I wouldn’t have been able to specify the exact location or timeframe, and when I thought I hadn’t recognised him when we came in, it was because it was as if he was hiding his face behind a mask; then I remembered what Alejandro had told me about his wife and I realised that the mask was not the mask of old age but of widowhood.
I immediately tried to centre the conversation on Manuel Mena. As soon as I mentioned his name, Manolo commented that, after the death of the second lieutenant, he had frequented his house with his wife or the woman who would later become his wife (who was also a niece of Manuel Mena’s), and that one thing had always surprised him a great deal and that was that nobody ever spoke of him there.
“It doesn’t surprise me,” my wife said then. She had not yet started to record us but had the camera set up ready to do so. “If my son had died in a war at the age of nineteen, the last thing I would want to do is talk about it.”
Her comment opened wide the doors of the conversation, and as soon as we began I sensed that Alejandro and Manolo had been talking about the years of the Republic and the war in the village all their lives, and I wondered whether, apart from their common socialist activism, it wasn’t precisely this common interest that had knotted such a close friendship between the two. We spoke for quite a while about Ibahernando immediately before the Republic and then about Ibahernando during the Republic, about the turmoil of civic, cultural, and collaborative life at the time, about my great-grandfather Juan José Martínez and Don Juan Bernardo, and Don Eladio Viñuela and the community of Protestants, about the foundation of the Casa del Pueblo and about my grandfather Paco. In a comment on the unstoppable political and social radicalisation of the months leading up to the war, A
lejandro said:
“I remember the first times I came back to the village as a socialist, in the second half of the seventies, when we socialists were just coming out of clandestinity.” He was speaking with the contained vehemence he always reserved for these matters. “I was a kid obsessed with the war back then, and when I met any old socialists from the Republic I always said the same thing to them: what I don’t understand is how you became enemies of people who objectively were not your enemies. That is, I’d say, the Republic had come to support you against those who were in charge, the large landowners, the oligarchy. But the Republic did not come to support you against the small landowners and tenant farmers; quite the contrary: the Republic had also come to protect them, and from the same people, besides. And I asked them: how is it that you didn’t understand that your true enemies were, I don’t know, the Duchess of Valencia, or the Duke of Arión, or the Marquis of Santa Marta, who lived in Madrid, and not the small landowners and tenant farmers of Ibahernando? How did you not understand that your class enemies were not those who were here, but those who were there, and that, instead of fighting against the ones here, what you should have been doing was allying yourselves with them to go and fight the ones from there?” He left the question hanging in the air and smiled with melancholy, as if laughing at himself in silence. “How innocent, no? How were people from here going to understand that, when half of them were illiterate and they had no horizon beyond the village, when the vast majority had never left here and only saw those from here and never those from there? That could maybe have been understood by the small landowners and tenant farmers, for them at least it might have been easier to understand it, especially if they made an effort to understand it and if they hadn’t had the mentality of despotic and high-and-mighty young gentlemen; although, the truth is I’m not even very sure they could have…Anyway. The thing is that they didn’t understand either, and instead of allying themselves with the poor almost as poor as them against the rich, they allied themselves with the rich against the poor who were even poorer than them. And they fucked up.”
“This wasn’t Madrid or Barcelona,” Manolo chimed in with a slightly academic coldness, which contrasted with Alejandro’s ardour. “In the village the confrontation wasn’t between rich and poor, but between people who could eat and people who went hungry.”
“That was the fundamental difference,” Alejandro agreed. “But later there were others. There was also the difference between people of order, people who couldn’t understand why someone would chop down trees and burn down olive groves and intimidate this person or another—”
“Yes,” Manolo interrupted him emphatically, abandoning his detachment. “But don’t forget that the people of order were arming themselves.”
“I’m not forgetting it,” Alejandro reassured him and, speaking only to him, added: “I’ve told you many times about my uncle Manuel.” Now he turned to me. “My uncle Manuel, the person my mother was raised with, her second father, so to speak,” he explained, before continuing: “One night he was on his way home, shortly before the war, and some men attacked him. Nothing happened: they pulled a knife on him, scared him. The next day my uncle went to the Civil Guard to report what had happened. And the captain said to him: ‘I’m sorry. I can’t protect you. Arm yourselves.’ And that’s what he did: they gave him a firearms permit and he bought himself a pistol.”
“It’s true that there were groups of agitators in the village,” Manolo said; the mask was still there, stuck on his face, but, especially when he was speaking, his dulled eyes seemed to light up for moments and his almost-extinguished features became reanimated. “Youths who were no longer illiterate, who read at the Casa del Pueblo and who didn’t back down before those who were in charge, who confronted them. And, of course, then the ones in charge didn’t hire them, for being Republicans or leftists or for going to the Casa del Pueblo or for whatever reason. And the young men got even angrier and agitated more. And that’s how the situation became so tense.”
“That was the problem: that the village split down the middle, and coexistence became very difficult,” Alejandro said. “Look, Javi: there’s nothing that irritates me more than equidistant interpretations of the war, the 50 per cent ones, those that say that it was a tragedy and that both sides were right. It’s a lie: what happened here was a coup d’état supported by the oligarchy and the Church against a democracy. Of course that democracy was nowhere near a perfect one, and in the end there were very few people who believed in it and respected its rules, but it was still a democracy; so the ones who were in the right politically were the Republicans. And that’s it. But I also get very irritated by the sectarian or religious or childish interpretation of the war, according to which the Republic was an earthly paradise and all Republicans were angels who didn’t kill anyone and all the Francoists were demons who never stopped killing; that’s another lie…Look, I always understood very well that my paternal family, yours, was Francoist; at the end of the day they were the ones who gave the orders in the village; but for a long time I wondered why my grandfather Alejandro, my mother’s father, a very poor man, a shepherd, a simple day labourer, had voluntarily enlisted in Franco’s army and had left for Madrid with your grandfather Paco and with a few men from Ibahernando in the early days of the war. And now, after many years of asking myself that question, I understand that the answer is obvious: he was a man of order, he did not accept, could not understand, not bringing in the harvests or burning them, burning olive groves, invading estates, stealing animals, intimidating people. He thought it was wrong, it was simply intolerable to him. My grandfather Alejandro was a man who was traumatised by fear, disorder, and by the impossibility of coexisting in peace. Just like your grandfather Paco. Neither of them went to war out of political passion, because they wanted to change the world or bring about a national-syndicalist revolution; that’s what you have to understand, Javi. They went to war because they felt it was their obligation, because they didn’t see any other way out. And do you know what they got out of the war? Nothing. Others put on their boots, took everything, but not them. They didn’t get anything out of it. Nothing at all. Your grandfather even had to leave the village to support his family, working bits of land here and there, from dawn till dusk, and my grandfather, you know, was a poor farmhand all his life. That’s how it was, and in this village nobody will tell you any different because they’d be lying. But Manolo is completely right: Ibahernando is not Barcelona or Madrid. Beyond the confrontations produced by the Republic’s efforts to modernise the country and all those things the history books tell you, and they’re true, what happens here before the war is something much more basic, like what happens in all the villages of Extremadura, Andalucía, and so many other places: it’s a situation of extreme necessity that sets, as Manolo said, those who had nothing to eat against those who had something to eat, not much, barely enough, but they had something. And here is where it really does come to resemble a tragedy, because those who are going hungry are right to hate those who have enough to eat and those who have enough to eat are right to fear those who are going hungry. And each side reaches a terrifying conclusion: us or them. If they win, they’ll kill us; if we win, we’ll have to kill them. That is the impossible situation into which the responsible people of this country led these poor people.
Eva, Manolo’s daughter, interrupted us at that moment to offer us another cup of coffee; we all declined, but we accepted the water she served us instead. She hadn’t yet finished pouring when, impatient to continue, I brought up the murders committed in the village at the outbreak of the war. I mentioned the Shearer’s father; they mentioned Sara García. By then I had already read and heard a lot about that murder, and I asked them if they knew why she was killed.
“She was engaged to a leader of the Socialist Youth, one of the men who left the village after the coup to join the Republicans in Badajoz,” Alejandro said; then he swallowed sal
iva, but, to judge by the face he made, what he swallowed could well have been vinegar. “They say she was murdered to get back at him. They also say that a bastard she’d turned down was the one who did it…I don’t know.”
“She was very beautiful,” Manolo said. “Have you ever seen a photo of her?”
Without waiting for my reply he stood up and came back a few minutes later with a handful of books and papers. Alejandro and I were talking about the village Falangists.
“Before the war there were none,” Manolo joined in, sitting down again. “My father told me.”
“His father was a military man,” Alejandro told me.
“And an ‘old shirt’: his membership card of the Cáceres Falange was number seventeen,” Manolo specified. “And he told me that he’d come to Ibahernando many times to try to convert people before the war. And nobody paid any attention to him. Here the right-wingers were for Gil Robles or Lerroux. They joined the Falange when the war broke out, as they did everywhere else. Look at this.”
Lord of All the Dead Page 15
