by Serge Pey
Copyright © Serge Pey, 2011
Originally published in the French as Le Trésor de la guerre d’Espagne by Zulma, 2011
English language translation © Donald Nicholson-Smith, 2020
First Archipelago Books Edition, 2020
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Names: Pey, Serge, 1950- author. | Nicholson-Smith, Donald, translator.
Title: The treasure of the Spanish Civil War / Serge Pey; translated from French by Donald Nicholson-Smith.
Description: First Archipelago Books edition. | Brooklyn, NY : Archipelago Books, 2020. | “Originally published in the French as Le Trésor de la guerre d’Espagne by Zulma, 2011”–Title page verso. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2019051644 (print) | LCCN 2019051645 (ebook) | ISBN 9781939810540 (paperback) | ISBN 9781939810557 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Pey, Serge, 1950—Translations into English. | Spain–History–Civil War, 1936-1939–Refugees–Fiction. | Political refugees–France–Fiction.
Classification: LCC PQ2676.E878 A2 2020 (print) | LCC PQ2676.E878 (ebook) | DDC 843/.914–dc23
Archipelago Books
232 3rd Street #A111
Brooklyn, NY 11215
www.archipelagobooks.org
Distributed by Penguin Random House
www.penguinrandomhouse.com
Cover art: Camp d’Argelès-sur-Mer, November 1940, Dr. Alec Cramer
Cover design: Zoe Guttenplan
This work was made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
This work received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United State through their publishing assistance program.
Archipelago Books also gratefully acknowledges the generous support from Lannan Foundation, Nimick Forbesway Foundation, the Carl Lesnor Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Ebook ISBN 9781939810557
v5.4
a
TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As so many times before, I am indebted to Mia Nadezhda Rublowska for all kinds of support, and most especially for her merciless reading of this translation against the French. John Simmons and Richard White kindly offered me guidance on the game of chess. Great thanks too, of course, to Jill Schoolman and all at Archipelago Books.
I should like to dedicate this translation to A. Roa, an anarchist veteran of the Spanish Civil War to whom I broke a promise, very many years ago, to translate his memoir of La Retirada and of his sojourn in a French prison camp.
D. N.-S.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Translator’s Acknowledgments
Epigraph
An Execution
The Washing and the Clothes Line
La Cega
Dog Language
Cherry Thief
The Scarab’s Revenge
The Movies
The Piece of Wood
Morse Code
Chess and Beauty
The Arrest
The White Library
The Treasure of the Spanish Civil War
The Apostle of Peace
The Bench
Postface
There is a mean in things: in a word, there are definite bounds beyond and short of which what is right cannot exist.
Horace, Satires, Book I, 1, 106-7
An Execution
THERE WERE FOUR of them at the entrance to the field. Then another one appeared behind the shed. Five now. The boy saw birds scared up from the bushes. Yet another one, rifle in hand. Six. The boy heard a horse whinnying and a bird flapping off behind a boulder. Then he saw the guardia civil corporal pointing them out to the other five with his cord riding-crop. Slowly the mounted guards surrounded the man and the boy.
“Are you the spitter?”
The man did not reply. He simply spat straight ahead, between the horse’s legs, without lowering his head.
“You have six hours to leave this property and you won’t be warned again.”
The man spat for a second time between the legs of the horse, which sidestepped and reared at its own shadow. The corporal drew his revolver and, trembling, pointed it at the man’s head. The man still did not look down. Then the guard, pulling his horse to the side, took aim at a little black pig that the boy and the man were fattening up for the feast days. The pig’s head exploded from the impact of the shot and its body rolled soundlessly onto its side. Despite the detonation the man’s gaze did not waver and he spat yet again between the horse’s legs. The man had spoken.
“We’ll get you soon, spitter! You’ll end up like that pig and then you can go spit in hell!” said the corporal before disappearing with the other riders in a cloud of dust.
The boy watched an eagle wheeling in the sky. As though harnessed to an invisible noria, the majestic bird drew all the sunshine towards the two of them where they stood amidst shadows. The boy would remember this. The man kept silent for a long while, observing the eagle as it turned towards the mountain, perhaps to check its work and draw the sun to another valley. At last the man turned and spoke to the boy.
“Give me your knife.”
The man gutted the piglet and wrapped it in leaves, then dug a hole and lit a fire in it with dry wood. When he had glowing embers he placed the animal’s spread-eagled carcass on them and covered it with soil. The boy and the man had been collecting stones all morning without exchanging a single word when the boy suddenly came upon a snail’s glistening shell under an old tree stump. It was glossy and yellow. A bluish spiral wound around it up to the gaping hole that once contained and protected the creature’s body. The boy picked up the shell and showed it to the man.
“I found a shell.”
“Keep it, kid,” the man replied. “They say that shells bring good luck because they hold the voices of the departed.”
The boy thought to himself that it would soon be midday. And indeed the man pointed out the shortening shadows as they climbed the mountainside and shrank little by little. By the time the pig was ready the sun was casting no shadows.
* * *
—
The boy was crouched by the spring filling their canteen when he saw a flock of birds rise suddenly from a bush. Further off, the noise of a waterfall had abruptly become the only sound. Then he sensed them, up above, with their horses. He heard a man’s voice yelling words he did not understand. Three shots rang out, followed by a fourth. For a brief moment the silence in the boy’s chest was broken and the roar of the waterfall was deafening.
A horseman had asked, “Where’s the kid?”
A rasping voice answered, “Go and see, and take care of him. He must be by the stream. You, set fire to the hut and the chicken coop.”
The boy dragged himself in among an old oak tree’s roots which, as they wound between rocks, had created a niche he had discovered earlier while trailing a fox. This hideaway was exactly the right size for him. He crawled backwards into the burrow and pulled a branch across the entrance to conceal it. Then he let himself slip down to the point where the narrow passageway made a right-angled turn and continued undernea
th a boulder.
Sweat trickled into the boy’s eyes and for a moment he stopped breathing. The sound of his heart filled the whole den. He felt as though he no longer had any heart and that the whole universe was a vast throbbing.
The guard came down to the spring. The boy knew that he was inspecting the canteen that he had left behind and the wine bottle tinkling like a bell under the stream of water. The horse came close, passed above the rocks, then returned and halted by the branches that concealed his hiding place. The guard knew the boy was in there. He sensed the boy’s presence. He was a hunter, honed like a knife, well used to tracking every kind of game, man or beast. The boy pictured him flaring his nostrils and deeply inhaling the scents of the forest as he scanned the trees without turning his head.
“What are you doing?” came the far-off voice of the corporal. “Did you find him?”
The guard guided his horse around the rocks. The boy heard him dismount. The sound of his boots came nearer, then he was pulling aside a few branches just above the hidey-hole. The guard knew that the boy was not far away. Suddenly his voice came, distant: “I know you’re there. You can come out. I won’t kill you.”
The boy knew that the guard had not seen him, because he was speaking from the other side of the rocks. The guard was lying to gain his trust and then shoot him. The boy was behind the guard and very careful not to make the slightest movement for fear of causing stones to topple.
“Come out of your hole. You can’t stay in there all day.”
From the silence that followed the boy realized that the guard had spotted the hole. The guard knew that the boy was down inside, crouched underground. But he could not enter the boy’s hiding-place because the passage was too narrow, so all he could do was fire blindly down the hole in hopes of hitting him. The boy told himself that he had a chance of surviving, for he was at the elbow-bend in the burrow behind another rock. The boy sensed that the guard now had his rifle pointing at the entrance and was about to fire.
“Come on. I’m not going to hurt you.”
A stone tumbled by the boy’s shoulder. It was at that moment that the guard fired wildly into the den. The bullets passed close to the boy without hitting him and grazed the rock against which he was leaning. He remained motionless, burying his face in the earth. Then the voice of the corporal resounded again.
“Come on back. Forget it. You got him. It’s late already.”
The guard waited for a moment. The boy heard him reload his gun and then depart on foot, leading his horse. The boy did not budge.
* * *
—
The boy stayed where he was, underground, for several hours. Nightfall approached. At long last the horses left, hooves resounding dully on the stones on the far side of the hill. The guards had been waiting to see whether he might emerge, because there were to be no witnesses able to identify them. They were certain now that the boy was dead. But the boy stayed in his crevice, perfectly still, until he heard a bird begin singing once more. It was true that the boy was dead. His hand had swollen up and taken the form of a snail. His fingers had turned into slimy tentacles twisting this way and that. First the boy saw the pig that the man had roasted spread out on the ground. Then it was the dead body of a snail with its eyes open and a stone still clasped in its hands. The man too had turned into a snail. He too had fingers that waved like snail’s tentacles. One by one they separated from his hands and started crawling along the ground like little translucent snakes.
The boy did not weep. He took his knife and began scraping beneath a rock. As he removed earth he found stones that he tossed behind him. When the hole was big enough he pulled over the man’s body, which suddenly began to resemble an enormous glob of spittle. It had neither head nor hands and the torso was all viscous and soft. The boy took the man’s wallet and knife, which were also covered with drool. He removed his leather jacket and belt and rolled him in a blanket. He left him his pack of cigarettes so that he could carry on smoking underground, even though his mouth had disappeared.
The boy gently slid the body into the hole he had made. He thought to himself that in this way the man’s ghost would continue to take care of the field. Using his feet, he heaped up pebbles and arranged a circle of white ones roughly above the man’s heart. Then he heard a yell. It was his own voice.
The morning sun dazzled him as he stood before the open door of the hut. The boy’s mouth was full of phlegm and the snail shell was intact on the wine drum that he used as a table. A shadow raced across the mountainside: in the sky the eagle, with its invisible leash, was now drawing part of the sunlight to the other side of the valley, wrenching trees one by one from the rocks that the storms of the night had scattered across the mountain.
The boy picked up the empty shell and spat into it, several times, as though to bring it to life. He wanted a snail to be born from his saliva. Then he took his knife and made a little hole under a stone to slip the shell into. In the sky the eagle had now drawn away all the sun and the mountain was following it too. The boy cried out to them to wait for him, because he did not want to be alone. The boy told himself that he was with the man on the edge of that abyss, that he was dangling from the line of the horizon like a hanged man who, when the rope broke, would fall back into his own body.
The Washing and the Clothes Line
THE NEIGHBORS THOUGHT my mother was crazy. How to explain that she sometimes put her washing on the line, sometimes in the field, sometimes on the grass, and sometimes even hung it from the branches of trees? What sense did it make that she would often lay it in the shade or in the windiest spot weighted down by large stones like the punctuation marks of some secret message?
On this morning my mother had taken the flowerpots outside because the sun was back. The same sun that disappeared at times behind the sun and that we would look for all over the house, in the dust, under the bed, in a book open at a ripped page, or beneath a mislaid shoe.
Beginning the day meant following a strict ritual. The first thing was the search for fire. Moment by moment, the great kindler, the sun, prepared the celebration of noon. There were days that began like night. We heard red owls hooting, bells ringing in places unknown, shutters slamming, even songs of freedom from the depths of cellars. But this time it was daytime in the day because it had already been daytime in the night.
My mother had taken the flowers outside as if to give the horizon permission to stretch out, because the tramuntana had blown very hard and now calm reigned like a bird on a branch. By bringing the flowers in their pots from their sheltered spot in the hallway my mother was telling the sun it was time to rise.
* * *
—
I learned my letters as I ate my alphabet soup. Tiny letters, without much meaning. For her part, my mother read the earth, because marks on the ground were the writing of the night. From those signs, outside the house, she knew that a fox had passed by along the road, or a dog, or a bicycle. So well did she read marks on the ground that I thought she must come from the future. Sometimes she would point out a flight of birds at a place in the sky that the birds had yet to reach.
Flowers and cats were my mother’s vowels. In hanging out her washing she wrote consonants that filled the world with sound. With our sheets and shirts she dictated sentences that only heaven could understand. Through the window I saw my pants, a script signaling to trucks on the main road and to unknown shepherds by their fires.
On this morning my mother seemed to be singing for an illiterate god belching forth cries like vowels. Everything was decreed: the cawing of a crow, the whine of a knife-grinder at work, a lost airplane, a crate full of guns, the voice of a white cloud altering its ephemeral aspect. This morning in particular my mother had taken the washing down from the clothes line and spread it out on the grass before going off to light a fire at the far end of the field.
“That crazy woman is drying her wash
with smoke,” said the neighbors.
My mother really did hang her washing out any old how. She paid no attention to the season. She didn’t bring things in when it rained. Sometimes she left them to the mercy of nighttime prowlers. Even if the line was free, she would often lay them out on the dew-drenched grass. But what the neighbors did not know was that my mother was not just hanging out her wash but making signals: the sheets spread out on the grass, anchored by stones, meant that the coast was clear and it was safe to come down from the mountain. If she left a single pair of pants on the line, you had to be careful because police were stationed where the two valleys met. When my mother hung only dresses on the line she was announcing the delivery of bundles of clandestine newspapers. A sole sheet on the clothes line along with a red skirt signified the arrival of weapons or a dangerous package. A bedspread meant that we could put someone up overnight. Only my mother was allowed to say that the way was clear and that the men of the sun could therefore come down into the valley. My mother did not speak: she sewed. That was her job. She had a mouth full of needles.
“Mama, I’ve put the fire out at the far end of the field.”
“So go now and take the sheets down but leave the pants.”
I knew a few of the codes. My father’s shirt meant “Go round behind the graveyard”; my sister’s skirt, “Beware – suspicious person!”; a pair of pants with one leg folded back, “Meeting the day after tomorrow as agreed.”
My mother had taught me the secret language of drying the laundry. She was a virtuoso when it came to interrogative vowels, secret imperatives, and conjugations of shoelaces. Grammars of silence, unities of space rather than time, new coordinating conjunctions, agreements of past participles with auxiliary verbs that were neither the verb être nor the verb avoir – none of these held any mystery for her, for she was herself the mystery. But this morning, as I was eating my lunch, she suddenly rushed over to me and whispered: “Quick! Take your shirt off and go and hang it on the line, then bring back all the wash still there. Quick! Hurry up!”
