Malaga broadcast perpetually, and always at the top of her lungs. Voices cried on us to stand firm, to repel the wicked Fascists – they are beaten everywhere already, but we must stand firm and complete the victory, destroy them once for all. Then, work for man’s good, create happiness everywhere, build a glorious new Spain. Other voices were issuing instructions, announcing meetings. Sometimes when even the brazen voices grew tired there was music, cante hondo. Madrid spoke more soberly, the crisis was great, but we would meet and overcome it, the voices said. Sometimes some famous politician made an address. Prieto did once, but he is not at all a good speaker, and while his remarks were sensible, no doubt, the only thing which I can remember was a joke he made. The worst thing about the rebellion, he said, had been the weather. The heat in Madrid was at its height, and Prieto, a large fat man with a million things to do was feeling it severely. Azaña only spoke once, at midnight; but it was a very fine speech, simple and from the heart.
A type of announcement which was a pathetic feature of all the Spanish broadcasts, Government and Insurgent alike, were those which individuals and families were allowed to make when they were separated from their relatives and friends and wanted to inform them of their safety. They were always in the same form: ‘Juan Lopez of Malaga, now in Madrid, wants to inform his family that he is safe and sin novedad,’ that is, that nothing has happened to him.
‘The family of Maria Martín of Velez want to inform their relatives in Granada that they are safe and well.’ But we seldom heard them, for they were given during the day when the stations were least busy, and when our radio was not working, so we only occasionally caught a few as we passed some café, whose radio going full blast was always surrounded by a crowd of silent listeners standing in the street within hearing distance.
But the thing we waited for most eagerly was not the foreign stations nor the Government’s but the Insurgent broadcasts from Seville. During the day Seville played music and made personal announcements, in the evening the news began, and I might as well mention at this point that this news was far more accurate than news from the Government side, having indeed some relation to fact which Government news then never did, being simply a recital of triumphs and victories, almost all entirely imaginary, so that we listened anxiously to Seville hoping to get at least some faint idea of what was really going on in Spain. The BBC news at that time appeared to be obtained by adding together news from Madrid and Seville and dividing by three; it was always unlikely and generally fantastic sounding. The French was slightly more reliable, we always felt, perhaps only because the resonant voices of the French announcers carried more conviction than the mealy mouths of the BBC. But with this lack of any probable-sounding news from abroad it is easy to imagine with what excitement we turned on Seville every night hoping by a process of deduction, elimination and guess work to gather from what they chose to tell us at any rate some information about the rapidly changing state of affairs in the country.
Still it was not the news from Seville, however surprisingly related to truth, which made us wait for her broadcasts so eagerly every night, but the speeches of that amazing ‘radio personality’, General Queipo de Llano. Unfortunately few English people speak Spanish or listen in to Spanish stations; for it is very unsatisfactory to have to try to describe Queipo de Llano, he has to be heard. Nothing at all like him can ever have been heard on the air before, and never will be again. He really has tremendous personality on the radio, he creates a character which seems combined of ferocity and a sort of boisterous, ferocious good humour. I am told that he does not drink at all, but he has the mellow loose voice and the cheerful wandering manner of the habitual drinker. He talks on for hours always perfectly at ease, sometimes he stumbles over a word and corrects himself with a complete lack of embarrassment, speaks of ‘these villainous Fascistas’ and an agonised voice can be heard behind him correcting him, ‘No, no, mi General, Marxistas.’ ‘What difference does it make’ – says the general and sweeps grandly on – ‘– Yes, you canalla you anarchists of Malaga, you wait until I get there in ten days’ time! You just wait! I’ll be sitting in a café in the Calle Larios sipping my beer, and for every sip I take ten of you will fall. I shall shoot ten of you for every one of ours! (he bellows) If I have to drag them out of their graves to shoot them! –’
We were later told by one of the Italian journalists who had been present that he always broadcasted in full dress uniform with all his medals on, and that his staff similarly clothed were lined up behind him. It was from this group that there used to come those protesting voices when the general made some unfortunate slip. But it is impossible to give a good idea of Queipo de Llano on the air to those who have not heard him. He had a tremendous fascination for us, we could never resist him. He was like a tyrant in an old melodrama, he could ‘tear a cat’, as Shakespeare says. It was like listening to an old Drury Lane Tamburlane, it was like listening to Mr Punch. But unfortunately it was real.
I must not give the impression, however, that he was the only voice of Insurgent Spain, though he was our favourite performer, for we hardly thought of him as true; but Seville was much the most important Nationalist station then, Granada was inaudible, and most of the northern stations, shut away behind their high mountains, were nearly so. But I remember once hearing a speech from Seville by someone else, I have no idea who it was, which was very fine. The clear earnest voice with its beautiful Castilian accent was expressing noble ideas in noble words – through work, through sacrifice, we were to conquer, to increase men’s welfare and happiness, to build a glorious new Spain. But Oh! how like the speech of the Anarchist I had just been listening to, it was: there were only a few words to be altered. For they were both the voice of the best thing in Spain, pure, passionate Idealism.
Chapter 5
WE WANTED VERY MUCH to go into Malaga to see with our own eyes what had happened there; but for the first day or two after the rising no one was allowed to enter the town limits without special permission and a very good reason for asking for it. Anyway the trains and buses were not running so that getting there and getting back again might have been difficult. Also we found that the servants became very upset when we spoke of going, so we put it off. But by the third day we began to get impatient and feel that we really must see something for ourselves, so we sent Enrique down to the village square to find out if there was any means of transportation. Even if there were not we thought one of the endless stream of lorries passing by might well give us a lift. However Enrique returned saying that the buses and trains were running again though not so frequently, so after lunch we started off. We found that buses were indeed running, but not the same buses; before the rising they had been fairly new and good, now the one that stood waiting appeared to have been rescued from some car dump. It was paintless, lightless and hornless, and when it started we discovered that it was also brakeless. However we were glad to find any bus at all, so we got in, and after much preliminary cranking and cursing, it finally moved off, trailing a cloud of thick black smoke behind it; but once started, rushed away at surprising speed. It pulled up with difficulty at the usual stopping place outside the big market, once the docks of the Moorish city, though now far from the sea, and still declaring in Arabic letters carved in the arabesque scrolls of its façade, ‘Allah Alone Is Great’.
We had stopped beside the stalls of the fruit vendors, and I was somehow surprised to find that they were as full and rich as ever. Fragrant Malaga muscatels, peaches and large purple plums seemed to be the most desirable fruits of the season, and I made a mental note to buy a big basket on my way back and fill it there. But though the fruit looked as luscious as ever we noticed that no one was coming to buy it; apart from the old women who kept the stalls there was hardly anyone about – I did not see a single woman in the streets near the market, the usual cheerful bargainers had disappeared. The streets were empty, and as we went along them we noticed that the cafés and shops we passed were all shut and barre
d. We turned off from the poor shopping streets and went through a little alley into the Alameda, a broad avenue with trees and flower-beds down the centre; it looked just the same except for the unusual emptiness, so we walked along it until we came to the end where there was a sort of square formed by its junction with the Calle Larios; on the corner of this stood the Casa Larios, the headquarters of Malaga’s principal industries. It had been a big modern office building: it was now an ugly smoking shell. The streets had been cleared, but the roped-off sidewalks were still blocked with rubble and twisted iron from the window bars. From here we could see the beginning of the Calle Larios, Malaga’s most important shopping street, and it was smoking and full of rubbish too. We began to walk warily like cats sensing danger.
We had stopped to examine the ruins of the Casa Larios, and found ourselves surrounded by the groups of people who were hanging about it. Furtively I examined them, and saw with a shock that they all looked quite mad. Just then an old workman came up to us, he was a rough powerful-looking old man, but had a twisted, crippled hand, in the other he was carrying a great bar of rusty iron. ‘Look! Look!’ he said grinning and brandishing the bar of iron in our faces, and pointing at the ruins with his crippled hand – he was drunk, and maudlin with pleasure in destruction.
I looked at the other faces around us and all looked queer and wild. The burning of the houses had been an orgy, and they were still completing their satiation among the ashes. Arson, I am sure, is a vice of the nature of an erotic crime: it is rape on the grand scale. The mad faces in the streets of Malaga seemed drugged with the lust of burning; and all the queer creatures of the gutter and the cellar, the twisted, the perverse, and the maimed had crawled up into the light of the flames.
We got away from the mad old workman and the dazed staring faces as quickly as we could and went on up the Calle Larios; there we found that only about half the houses had been burnt. Some were completely gutted, some only partly destroyed; there was a horrid smell of ashes and cinders and burnt iron like the smell of burnt-out grates. Rubble and bricks and twisted iron littered the pavements and in some places covered half the streets. Groups of calm, intelligent-looking young workmen were going about quietly repairing the damage as far as they were able, carrying away the rubble from the streets and sidewalks in carts, roping off the more dangerous places, taking down parts of the walls where they seemed to be too undermined to be safe to leave standing. A truck with a wrecking-crew from one of the garages was dragging away the wreckage of three or four motorcars.
It was reassuring to see these sensible young men going about their work in this quiet, efficient manner. For, apart from these busy workers there were very few people about except the crazy creatures who wandered from one ruined house to another. And I confess that I thought that the atmosphere was ominous in spite of the calm, helpful workmen. The city was evidently in a state of fear, and the people were staying close at home in their houses.
I only saw one person I knew there, a boy who worked for the grocer we dealt with. This grocer was an unpopular man, an Asturian of a rather disagreeable temper, very conservative in his sympathies and apt to hold forth on his opinions. We had already heard that his shop had been sacked during the house burning; nothing had been stolen; but sweets, hams, liqueurs, sugar, coffee, chocolate – all the luxuries most desirable to the half-fed men who were handling them – piled in the middle of the street and burned. The shop itself was not damaged except for the breaking of door and window because it belonged to some inoffensive citizen – ‘And why should we ruin that poor man who never did us any harm?’
It was symptomatic of the time that the grocer’s boy and I did not speak to each other as we would ordinarily have done. He looked at me without bowing but with recognition in his face, then he looked at the ruins and looking back at me slightly shook his head: I, too, looked at the ruins and back at him with an expression in which I tried to convey some of the regret I felt, and having exchanged all that we had to communicate we passed on still without speaking.
We wanted to get away from the Calle Larios with its ashes and ugliness, and go somewhere where we could get some news and also if possible some coffee, or even some water, for the heat and ashes made us terribly thirsty. All the cafés and restaurants were shut, so we decided to try the English Club. On the way there we met an Englishman we did not know, but remembered seeing around Malaga; we thought he was the owner or manager of some factory or business, I do not know what. Seeing English faces, he stopped to speak. He was haggard and dishevelled and seemed dreadfully upset.
‘My God! This is terrible!’ he began. ‘They burned all the houses round us in the Caleta the other night. My children were in hysterics. Thank God, I’m getting them off on a destroyer. I don’t know what my workmen will do –’
His agitation distressed us, and though we felt very sympathetic we wanted to escape from it. The poor man was obviously having a horrible time; I don’t know why we should have wanted him to be dull and phlegmatic about it. He began to tell us a rather confused story about a Miss Someone-or-other who had just escaped with her life and lost all her clothes in the fire. The way that she had just escaped with her life seemed to be that she had been politely warned that they were going to set fire to the building where she was, and had walked out of it before the fire was started. It reminded me of some character in fiction who just escapes with his life by not being present at the battle of Malplaquet. But I suppose it seems worse for British subjects to lose their luggage than lesser races their lives.
We left the poor Englishman with our sincere wishes for the best, for we could not help thinking that a factory was going to be a doubtful and dangerous possession in Malaga for some time to come. The club was open and we had some very refreshing tea, but we were disappointed to find only one Englishman, an engineer whom we did not know, who had just come down from the sierra to get some money to pay his men and found all the banks closed and heavily guarded. He said that everything was perfectly quiet in the mountains so far, and knew even less about the rising than we did.
We were surprised to find that, though the club is on the third floor, all the windows had been shattered by bullets and a large engraving of Queen Victoria had got one in the eye. It seemed to explain the rather curious fact that only about a dozen people had been killed by all the hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition which had been fired on the first day.
‘How many houses did they really burn?’ we asked the steward, a nice man who was lucky enough to be a Rock Scorpion born in Gibraltar and consequently the fortunate possessor of a British passport.
‘Half the Calle Larios, that’s two or three blocks of houses, thirty or forty villas in the Caleta–Limonar district, and a few other houses in different parts of town.’
‘What about Granada, is anything certain known?’
‘Well, they say the Insurgents have succeeded, but that the Albaicin (the poor quarter) is still fighting. They say the Insurgents are entrenched in the Alhambra with two companies of Artillery and some guns – but it’s all rumour. The Granada broadcasting station is silent, destroyed in the fighting, I suppose.’ And Granada was never heard from. But I was told later that that was because it was a weak station and its waves could not pass the tremendous barriers of Sierra between us.
There did not seem anything more to be learnt at the club, and Malaga at the moment was certainly not a place to stay in for pleasure so we went off to get our bus. I tried as we went to buy coffee at various small shops on the way, but they were all shut with doors and windows locked and barred. ‘They’ll probably be open tomorrow,’ a worried-looking Guardia Civil told us. Our bus was ready to start and already crowded to the brim when we got to the market, but the driver obligingly waited while I bought my basket and hurriedly filled it with fruit from the nearest stalls, then he somehow crowded us and the basket in; the country people with their usual good humour and good manners squeezing themselves into smaller and smaller space
to make room for us.
‘Que lastima de Calle!’ everyone was saying: ‘What a pity about the Calle Larios!’ In our village at any rate the destruction in Malaga was not at all approved of, they thought it only showed how ill-behaved townspeople are.
When we got home we found the servants standing in the doorway looking out anxiously and much relieved to see us at last. They said it had seemed such a long time and they couldn’t help thinking of awful things that might have happened to us. They did not trust the people of Malaga, wicked dwellers in large capitals that they were.
Poor Pilar was very much upset when I told her that our favourite shop for dress lengths had been burned.
‘Oh! Señora,’ she said. ‘They might as well have given us some if they had only known. Why all the poor girls in Malaga might have had dresses with what they’ve destroyed like that!’ I think she really felt more for the innocent pretty silks and cottons blackening and withering in the fire than for all the people who had lost their possessions or even their lives. In fact her feelings were those of an artist or at any rate of a connoisseur.
Chapter 6
WE WERE LATE IN GETTING UP on the morning after our trip into Malaga, even the rushing of the lorries failed to do more than slightly disturb our dreams; for we had returned very tired and then had been unable to tear ourselves away from the voices of the radio until a late hour. It seemed to me as I dressed that there were fewer lorries on the road, fewer sounds of enthusiasm. I met Enrique doing something to our innumerable pots of flowers as I passed through the patio on my way to the kitchen, and spoke of this impression I had had. He replied sardonically that it was because all the lorries were getting smashed up in accidents or ruined for lack of oil, water, and attention.
Death's Other Kingdom Page 3
