Suddenly the lights went out. There were startled exclamations, and then listening silence – and in the silence we could hear the drone of an aeroplane – aeroplanes – coming closer, hovering overhead, searching like bees, and then the crash of the first bomb.
‘My God!’ said Gerald. ‘That’s a real bomb at last, a two hundred kilo, I should think.’ Another bomb shattered the silence with its horrible rending crash, and with the crash there was a chorus of shrill cries, and the cries seemed to me to be dragged down by the roaring crash of the bomb, and carried down with it through the earth.
Looking up we could see the moon shining in through the glass roof above us, and I thought rather absurdly: People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. We withdrew to the stairs which seemed a little safer, though the Hotel I—had not been built with bombs in mind. The crashes came again and again, but further away each time, over the port. Gradually the droning died away and finally ceased: the raiders were gone.
We went out to the street door but we found that a horrible change had come over the city. The friendly waiters glared at us suspiciously – for all they knew we might have been signalling to the enemy with night-lights (a charge seriously made against a Spanish woman I knew). Armed patrols were dashing up and down the street in motorcars, trying to find out in the darkness and confusion where the damage was. We persuaded one of them to take along our young journalist, anxious to see some bloody bodies. I thought he was brave, for the patrol with their waving revolvers and angry excited speech which he could not understand did not seem safe companions for a moonlight ride.
We had seen enough, and only wanted to go home; but there were no taxis and if there had been it would not have been safe to take one as we would probably have been shot by some nervous patrol for fleeing Fascists; so we asked for a room for the night. The manager and the waiters would hardly answer, staring at us with angry, frightened, suspicious eyes. An old chambermaid finally took us up to a room sighing as she went: ‘Ay, mi Madre!’ and occasionally whispering an invocation to the Virgin. But she at least was not full of hate, but only sadly resigned to these inexplicable horrors, and regarded us merely as poor fellow sufferers, all of us likely to be killed together before the night was over.
The room they gave us had two enormous glass windows on to the street. There were no mosquito nets, and the droning of the mosquitoes was incessant. I had given up all idea of sleeping and was consequently falling into a doze when it seemed to me that the mosquitoes’ note was changing. Then came the familiar crash of a fallen bomb. We jumped up and went into the bathroom to escape the glass windows, and looking up again perceived the moonlight shining down on us through a glass skylight.
‘Good Lord! what is this place?’ said Gerald in disgust. ‘The Crystal Palace?’ ‘I shall stay here,’ I answered tiredly. ‘There aren’t so many mosquitoes anyway.’
The raid was soon over; but it was impossible to sleep again for the town was horribly awake. An armed gang was going about dragging people ‘on the Right’ out of their houses. There were thundering knockings, cries of ‘Bring out the Fascists!’, women’s screams. We lay awake, feeling with horror the tide of fear-hate rising around us, knowing what would happen before the night was over – the murder of prisoners by the fear-maddened mob. And this not because the mob was one of Spaniards as we are so fond of saying: it will happen in England if there are any prisoners to murder unless the police are too strong for the crowd: it will happen in any city where there are air raids. It is the answer fear makes to its enemies. Indeed, something like it almost happened during the Great War when they paraded the German prisoners on the coast after one of the Zeppelin raids. Only the determination of the soldiers and police saved the prisoners from injury. Soldiers who were there still speak of the mob’s behaviour with horror.
During the night there were two more raids; but one raid is much like another unless they are using really big bombs, and they fall close to you; then they are really appalling and unforgettable. The next morning the day dawned as brilliant and cloudless as if the dark night had never been. But the whole city seemed different to us. The hotelkeeper and the waiters no longer seemed suspicious but sullen and ashamed and only anxious to get rid of us, and we felt that we never wanted to see them again. Everyone seemed tarred with the same brush, stained with the same foulness of mania and crime.
We escaped thankfully from the hotel and went to the café for our coffee and rolls and met there our young journalist sitting over his. He was full of gratitude – thanks to us he had seen a shockingly wounded man and two horribly mangled dead women in a house which had been wrecked by a bomb. He had also been to the cemetery that morning to see the bodies of the prisoners who had been shot at dawn. The bodies were piled in a trench, forty of them, he said. But we noticed that by an ingenious system known to atrocity collectors he seemed to have multiplied the number by four in his story which he showed us.
But he was really a very nice boy, and he seemed sick and unable to eat as he told us about the bodies lying uncovered in a long trench so that people could go in and have a look at them. And he had acquired overnight a new trick of staring apprehensively at the faces around him. I think that everyone in Malaga that morning felt dislike and distrust of his fellow men. It was like the morning after some debauch, when people feel that they have been taking part in something ugly and feel sullen and ashamed.
A window in the café had been shattered by the wind of an explosion near it, and I thought again absurdly – People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Just then a nervous waiter dropped a tray full of tumblers at our feet, and we and everyone else in the café leaped into the air.
‘Let’s go before anything else gets broken,’ Gerald said. Outside the street still smelled like burnt-out grates when we stopped at the corner to say goodbye to the young journalist. He seemed to me rather pathetically like a brave boy who had wandered into the wrong world, and I hoped that he would go home soon to the England of gardens and policemen before anything happened to him.
When we got back to the village at last we found the servants in tears – they were sure that we had been killed by a bomb.
One last memory of that time – not ugly but only sad. I have not mentioned Pilar’s gentle timid romance for a long time. I have not spoken of it because it was over so soon. Her one fair day had ended almost as soon as it began.
One morning a fortnight or so after Don Carlos came to us Pilar put on a new dress she had just had made from some cheap silk I had given her. I think there is something very touching in the fact that there is a special word in Spanish for the first wearing of a new garment: it shows how few new clothes most Spaniards ever have. The word is estrenar and that morning Pilar was estrenaring her new dress, and we were all teasing her about it.
‘Que guapa está Pilar estrenando todos los dias un trajo nuevo!’
‘Ya que tiene novio –!’
Pilar, wearing an air of ironic indifference, was secretly much pleased by our teasing and by being again after so many barren lonely years in the position of a girl with a novio, a prétendant, and a new dress to wear for him. She had even stuck a scarlet hibiscus flower in the knot of her long black hair, and I thought, looked really beautiful, the flaming passionate red of the great wide flower contrasting so strangely with her thin dark face of a melancholy resigned Madonna.
Gerald and I had to go to Malaga and hurried off after lunch, leaving Pilar serving coffee to the C—s in the upstairs sala where they generally sat in order to be with Don Carlos. I heard her laughing at some joke as we went down the street.
We got back late in the afternoon. There seemed to be an unusual number of people in the street, and I thought that they looked at us strangely. I was filled with alarm for our refugees – could the Terrorists have come for Don Carlos while we were away? We hurried on. As we entered the stable we heard a babble of high voices in the kitchen and hurried more. When we entered we saw our
usual old women in a state of excitement and distress. Pilar sat quietly weeping in a corner, and even old Maria seemed sad and disturbed.
Antonio had been killed. He had been talking to a friend in the street who was as unused to firearms as he was himself. The friend, telling some exciting story, made a careless gesture and his gun went off shooting Antonio through the heart and killing him instantly. We had been right in thinking that the villagers looked at us in a particular way. They had been silently commiserating with us on the misfortune that had befallen our house.
I do not think that Pilar had ever been at all in love with Antonio: he was really a very dull young man. But his attachment had been the greatest pleasure of her life. And it had given her dignity and value in her own eyes. It had been a late, thin blooming after barren lonely years. And now it was over.
Everyone was much shocked and grieved by poor Antonio’s death – for what had that poor, good young man to do with war? Poor as he was he had had one proud possession with which to endow Pilar if she would have him as well as his strength and willingness to work – if only there were any work. It was, like Maria of Cártama’s olive trees, a small but on that account all the more dearly valued possession. It was in fact a little patch of ground near his village, about a quarter of an acre of unirrigated secano with two old carob trees growing on it and half a dozen young olives of his own planting which would not bear for years to come.
Late that night when all the neighbours had gone, Pilar came to my room where I was undressing. She had a dirty crumpled piece of paper in her hand. It was Antonio’s will carefully written out by himself and found in his breast pocket after his death.
‘Oh! Señora,’ she said, and her voice moved me with its grief and pity for the dead young man.
‘Señora, he left me his olive trees –’ and she threw herself weeping in my arms.
Chapter 12
IT IS EASY TO IMAGINE how much this reign of terror worried us for the safety of Don Carlos and his family. We had come to identify ourselves with them and with their fate. We felt that we must save him. It was as if we had been chosen by fate or providence to protect them in their danger. Much as I liked and admired Don Carlos, it was as much for the sake of the family happiness as anything else that I so wanted to save him. They were so charming as a family and so happy together. There would have been something so truly horrible in this mutual love and happiness being shattered by a brutal murder, and the wife and children left desolate.
I cannot speak too highly of Don Carlos’s courage and of his wonderful gaiety and good humour in the horrible position in which he found himself, when he must have felt like a rabbit in a burrow when the weasels are sniffing about the entrance eager for its blood – and how much more poignantly, since we have been given these too-tightly drawn nerves, this too-lively imagination as if it were to enable us to suffer as intensely as possible the apprehension of approaching evil.
I think it was really remarkable that far from being sad or silent we used often to have the gayest evenings – a hush falling only when we heard a lorry stopping outside, then some of us would creep to the windows on the street anxiously watching what the armed men in the lorry would do. When we saw that they had only come to change the patrol, and the lorry began to move off again, we would all give a long breath of relief, and come back to our seats, rather thoughtful for a while until the indomitable Don Carlos would make some joke or begin some amusing story.
But over our bean stew or whatever it was that Maria had managed to get for us that day, and our pint of wine between the eight of us, brought in secret from the shop by Pilar hidden in her basket or apron, we used often to talk and laugh until the servants would tell us we were making too much noise, the villagers in the kitchen would disapprove of our hilarity in these times.
Don Carlos had an endless fund of amusing stories. One I remember, which diverted me extremely was a description of a curious reform school run by the Brothers of some teaching order for the obstreperous sons of the rich, who had, I suppose, been spoiled by their too indulgent Spanish parents. The boys were extremely tough, but the Brothers were tougher and went about armed with life-preservers. A boy began to make trouble – BAM!!!! as the comic strips say, a Brother landed him one on the side of the head, and when he recovered consciousness the lesson continued. According to Don Carlos the school had a notable success and some famous alumni, one of whom, a friend of his, had given him a striking description of the course of his studies.
Another of Don Carlos’s stories amused us very much, I remember, as a tale of the times. A cousin of his, a gentle rather timid young man, had to go from one house to another during the first days of the rising. He was frightened of the journey because his way lay partly along the main road; but all went well until he met one of the usual lorries full of armed men who all greeted him with shouts of Salud! and enthusiastically saluted with thrown-up arms. He timidly returned the salute as best he could – when to his horror, the lorry pulled up with a great grinding of brakes and several heavily armed men got out. He was paralysed with fear but determined to die bravely. The leader, a perfect walking arsenal, came up to him – he waited for the shot or blow that was to end it all – then the leader said in good humoured reproof: ‘That’s not the way – you’ve got it all wrong! It’s the left arm. It’s not meant for a menace: it’s a greeting, a salute – see, like this!’ and he threw up his arm in the correctly made Popular Front salute.
It was later at night when we went to bed that the real horror of the situation which we had been keeping away with talk and laughter would flow back upon us. Then, when the lights were out and the old house dark and silent, fear would come out of the darkness. Then I used to lie awake listening for the coming of the murderers. And those hours had exactly the quality of a nightmare – the feeling that something horrible was coming – the inability to flee – the inability to wake –
I used to think then, and I still think with absolute horror of what the people of Spain have suffered: of the nightmare life which thousands and thousands of people on both sides have led, until at last the hiding place was discovered – and there was the knocking at the door, and the voice of their enemies at last –
We used to listen, as I say, for the coming of the murderers – and once we heard them come – but not thank Heaven! to us. We heard lorries down in the village below, shouts, cries, protests, loud knockings on a door, angry voices, women’s agonised screams. We lay awake wondering for whom they had come, what was happening in the darkness below us, whether they would come to us. Then at last the lorries went away, the angry, troubled voices died down, even the last sound, a woman’s sobbing, died away, and a brooding silence lay over the houses.
The next morning we learned for whom they had come; and the next afternoon we met a small procession of men going to the cemetery carrying on their shoulders the cheap coffin containing the body of the poor man who had been shot, recovered from some field or ditch. The men of the village who walked with the body had troubled, sullen faces. The people of Malaga had done this thing against their wills. The dead man had been an hijo del pueblo, a son of the village, whatever his faults, and the village alone had had the right to judge him. They had tried, and been unable, to protect him, and they felt wronged and insulted by his death. The solidarity of village life, the most important unity in their lives, had been broken.
Don Carlos’s courage and good spirits in his terrible situation were really beyond praise, and so indeed was the behaviour of the whole family. Doña Maria Louisa was in any case almost a saint, one of those lovely, practical Spanish saints. She used generally to sit up all night, so that Don Carlos could sleep tranquilly knowing that someone was always on the watch, and also so that she would be dressed and ready if the worst did happen. How many times I remember getting up myself in the night at that time hearing a car stop nearby, creeping silently to the window and looking cautiously out. Feeling all the time that I would have been much bette
r in bed. After all if the Terrorists came we should soon know it! (I had the same feeling about air raids but much more strongly. There is no danger of sleeping through an air raid, and the possibility that there might be one never kept us awake for a minute.) The house was fortunately a perfect fortress like all old country houses in Spain; the windows barred with iron rejas and tremendous bars of iron carried across the outside doors (the one on the street door was so heavy that Maria could hardly lift it into place). There was no question of anyone entering the house except with a battering ram unless we opened the door to them ourselves, and that was going to give us time to prepare for them.
Actually we were much safer at night than in the day when the open stable door into which anyone could come (though they could only get to the house by going through the kitchen wing where Maria was generally lying in wait for them), was an unavoidable danger, since to shut it against the constant stream of visitors and hucksters would have aroused too much suspicion.
For we still had visitors all day, but now only our old women came and a few near neighbours with young children who were more afraid of going to the sierra than of staying in our house. Most of our village friends had fallen away. It was not that they had ceased to be our friends, but because they were afraid to come near Don Carlos. As someone says The condemned are contagious, and we too carried something of the infection about us. Our richer village friends, the farmers, bailiffs, master masons, people of mildly conservative sympathies and consequently apt to be suspect, never came at all, though they sent us messages by Enrique. It was as if we had a case of smallpox in the house.
I think that it was only our chorus of old women who never seemed to think of us as being infectious at all. A great deal of the ‘character’ for which the Spanish are famous I think is found most of all in its older women. They have suffered and resigned themselves, worked beyond their strength, spent themselves for others. This patient stoicism, a stoicism that is not hard, but gentle and quietly resigned, accepting life as it is with all its ills and griefs with dignity and without complaint, is one of the most remarkable of Spanish characteristics. And it has been seen a thousand times everywhere in Spain during this war.
Death's Other Kingdom Page 10
