Don Felipe moved back into the interior of the room. The King seemed to be smiling into space at the thought of some low pleasures he had just left behind the purple hangings in the background. For the first time in his life, Don Felipe looked at the august portrait with a kind of hatred which even he was surprised to feel. A poor portrait. A stupid smile. (He shrugged his shoulders …) “It is true, he does look as if he’s thinking dirty thoughts.” The thunder was still rolling along the boulevards. Don Felipe caught himself saying out loud:
“As for me, Your Majesty, I’m heading over the Pyrenees!”
And, as in former times back in school when, as soon as the teacher turned his back, little Felipe would stick out his tongue in a complicated grimace which was his greatest secret and his most powerful weapon, now the Deputy Commissioner of the Security Police, fifty years old, balding and overweight, stuck out his tongue at the King.
EIGHT
Meditation on Victory
NIGHTS. OUR FOOTSTEPS IN THE NIGHT. OUR VOICES, THOSE MEDITERRANEAN voices ringing like cymbals … “This is the land of lotteries,” cried Eusebio. “Who wouldn’t play his life on the lottery of the barricades? Double or nothing!” We were certainly neither Germanophiles nor Alliadophiles (another term coined by the newspapers). But with each faraway upheaval of the shell-torn soil on the Somme, the Artois, Champagne, or the Meuse, we were better able to hear the foundations of the world cracking. “What a great Paris Commune there will be after the defeat!” Deserters embroidered on the stories of the April mutinies among the immensely weary horizon-blue armies. “There will be a German revolution,” asserted others, who seemed more daring. Germany and Austria were subsisting on chemically prepared foodstuffs, the newspapers proclaimed daily. A French Commune, a German Commune—after the Russian Commune—we could already make out the red flags waving proudly through the haze of the future. They were necessary to reason, to that vague confidence in the universe without which life becomes unthinkable to anyone with his eyes open. And what if the circle of absurdity were not broken? If, after this war, these millions of dead, this disemboweled Europe, we were to know once again the peace of times past with the old, multicolored flags flying over the bone heaps? This city, this country condemned the war from the depths of its soul. The newspapers kept it quiet, for they all lied (and the propaganda bureaus of the belligerents gave them new reasons for lying on the first of every month), but everyone said it. We lived in expectation of a catastrophe which would be at the same time a retribution and a renascence, a rehabilitation of human energies and a new reason for believing in men. The Russian Revolution, the first sign, had revived that universal expectation.
Couet sometimes wore a pair of heavy infantryman’s boots which marked him out on the streetcars as a deserter. People would stare at him. Once someone asked him: “Deserter? …” He nodded yes, out of defiance. “Ali, you are quite right, young man,” said a well-dressed old man, putting his arm around his shoulder. Another smiled his approval … When, in order to avoid an unnecessary conversation I gave the same answer (falsely, as it happened) to the butcher while he was cutting meat, he immediately wiped his hand clean and held it out to me, cordially … In the factories, the workers were willing to work short weeks in order to keep management from laying off the deserters: those fugitives who, by withdrawing their own lives from the tempest of the Front, seemed to be defending life itself.
And this city, this country, peaceful, vigorous, happy, voluptuous, laid out along the edge of the brilliant blue sea, listened to the dulled echoes of the artillery barrages, listened to the beating of the exhausted heart of a wounded Europe, and lived on spilled blood—a profitable pasture! We were all working for the war. We were, in the factories, all of us more or less war workers. Clothes, hides, shoes, canned goods, grenades, machine parts, everything, even fruit—the sweet-smelling Valencia oranges—everything that our hands made, worked, manipulated, embellished” was drained off by the war. The faraway war caused factories to be built in this peaceful country, and filled them with workers who often came from the burning fields of Andalusia, the mountains of Galicia, the barren plains of Castille. The war raised salaries. The war unloosed that fever to live and laugh, to maul women on shabby back-room couches, to see the bailarínas flitting about, with their naked breasts, in the cabarets; for after the pressure of work it was necessary, in that constant fever of death and madness, to feel yourself living. The avidity of men in shirt sleeves turned loose by the factories in the evening, miserable but muscular, without a place to stay Worth sitting under a lamp in, but with a peseta in their pocket to buy an evening of painted pleasure—without confidence in the future, or rather with no other hope than that of their simmering revolt.
Every city contains many cities. This was ours. We did not penetrate into the others. There was the city of the calculating businessmen who gorged themselves in the best restaurants and who spent their nights undressing the expensive creatures whom we glimpsed passing in limousines. There was the city of the priests, the monks, the Jesuits in their monasteries surrounded by vast gardens like fortified cities. The city of power—held in contempt—with its decorated generals, its policemen bought for a douro, its jailers, its informers. The city of writers, professors, journalists—a city of paid phrases, of poisoned words and ideas, of lucrative alchemies. The city of spies, labyrinth of mines and countermines, of secret rendezvous, of multiple treacheries like equations with several unknowns: military intelligence, consulates, Herr Werner, financial dealings through Amsterdam, Mata Hari carrying an address in her handbag (another equation—the exact equivalent of that last bullet, the coup de grâce, that would crash through her skull within a few months at the foot of the stake in Vincennes).
Prowling spies sometimes crossed our paths, ready to strip our power bare like the vermin who strip corpses on the battlefields. They offered their money and they asked for nothing in return: the last word in subtlety! The careers of secret agents would be made or broken by the general strike, the possible ruin of the industries working for the Entente. A whole stinking underground mob, drooling over the limbs of a proletarian giant ready to leap forward, imagined they were making it move at their will, like a puppet. That made us laugh. “What a rude awakening they’ll have, those s.o.b.s, if things work out! …” In those cities the blood of Europe and the labor of three hundred thousand workers had brought forth a strange spring of wealth, spurting into a network of golden rivulets. And we knew it. It was in the order of things! Dario would explain: “They can no longer put up with the rule of the bureaucrats in Madrid and the political bosses in the provinces. Neither their wealth nor their businesses will be safe as long as the old court camarillas and their personnel of pious, lazy, corrupt scribblers whose bribes start at twenty-five centimes are in power. They are choking, and money is suffocating them.” Dario laughed. “And they need us to pull their chestnuts out of the fire. We need them to shake up the old edifice. Afterwards, we’ll see …” Yes, we’ll see. We know the old story. With the monarchists overthrown and the Jesuits in flight, three to six months later, the republics establish order by machine-gunning the workers. An old tradition. Whoever lives will see. We won’t always be the weaker. With what is brewing on the other side of the Pyrenees …” We’ll twist the neck of tradition, right?”—“We’re the power, the only power.”—“In ’73 Alcoy and Cartagena held out for months. We have our Communes, which will be remembered. Wait a bit. Hombre! this will be something beautiful!”
It is already something beautiful to be carrying that victory within us. I have doubts, but it is because I am a newcomer in this city: I cannot, as you do, Dario, feel the strength of this people mounting in my very veins. In spite of myself, I often see you with the skeptical eyes of a foreigner: and I see your inexperience, your embryonic organization, your boldly delineated ideas, shedding great light here and there, but incapable of organizing themselves, of becoming precise, disciplined, implacable and self-critical in or
der to transform the world … Only a few thousand union members among three hundred thousand proletarians. Tiny unions that are in reality more or less anarchist discussion groups. Doctrines that border on dreams, burning dreams ready to become acts because men of energy live by them (and because at bottom they are no more than simple truths raised to the level of myths by minds too richly primitive to operate on theories). It is true that at the call of a union of about a hundred comrades, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of workers would be there, in the street, at our side. It is true that, for more than ten years, the government has not succeeded in building a new prison in this city. The boys in the building trades don’t go in for that kind of work. When the government tried to bring in workers from the provinces it only took a few explanations and a few bloody noses to inculcate the feeling of proletarian duty in them.
Dario, I don’t know whether we will win. I don’t know if we will do any better than they did at Cartagena or Alcoy. It is perfectly possible, Dario, that we will all be shot at the end of this business. I am uncertain of today and I am uncertain of ourselves. Only yesterday you were carrying loads in the harbor yourself. Bent under your burden, your elastic step carried you over the rickety planks laid out from the quai to the loading deck of a freighter. The dark oily waters sent you back the reflected image of a giant slave, hideous from the front, your face encrusted with bitter grime, bowed under an Atlas’ burden. Your dripping body was ablaze in a flash of sunlight. I, myself, was wearing chains. A literary expression, Dario, for only numbers are worn nowadays, but they are just as heavy to bear. Our old Ribas from the Committee was selling detachable collars in Valencia. Portez spent his time grinding up stones in mechanical molds or drilling holes in steel cogwheels. Miro, with his feline agility and rippling muscles, what was he doing? Oiling machines in a cellar in Gracia. The truth is that we are slaves. Will we take this city? Just look at it, this splendid city, look at these lights, these flames, listen to these magnificent noises—automobiles, streetcars, music, voices, bird songs, and footsteps, footsteps and the indiscernible rustle of silks and satins—to take this city with these hands, our hands, is it possible?
You would certainly laugh, Dario, if I spoke to you aloud like this. I would read in your crafty eye an ironical thought which you would not voice. You distrust intellectuals, especially those who have tasted the poisons of Paris. And you are right to do so. You would say, opening your broad hairy-backed hands, so fraternal and steady: “As for me, I feel able to take everything. Everything.” Thus we feel we are immortal until the moment when we no longer feel anything. And life goes on after our little droplet has returned to the ocean. Here my confidence meets yours. Tomorrow is full of greatness. We will not have brought this victory to ripeness in vain. This city will be taken, if not by our hands, at least by others like ours, but stronger. Stronger perhaps for having been better hardened, thanks to our very weakness. If we are beaten, other men, infinitely different from us, infinitely like us, will walk, on a similar evening, in ten years, in twenty years (how long is really without importance) down this rambla, meditating on the same victory. Perhaps they will think about our blood. Even now I think I see them and I am thinking about their blood, which will flow too. But they will take the city.
“The citadel,” said Dario … “We will take the citadel from within.”
NINE
The Killer
IT HAPPENED THAT AN APPARENTLY TRIFLING EVENT CROSSED OUR PATH AND stirred up the human tide of the city in a very different manner. Fervent multitudes stood night and day in the boulevard in front of the windows of the hotel where Benito was staying. His appearances on the balcony were greeted with joyful ovations. His automobile was constantly blocked by a dense crowd that threw flowers and would have torn his clothes to pieces each time had he not been protected by some husky sports whose friendly shoves were like punches. “Benito, Olé! Olé!” Waves of shouting pursued the retreating red automobile from which a sharp, swarthy profile with a hawk nose and large white teeth was smiling beneath a broad felt hat, looking for all the world like an Indian warrior in a detachable collar. A precious Sunday was lost because Benito had to kill his bull that day. The thin sword in the hand of this excowherd from Andalusia seemed to by parrying the death blow aimed at the monarchy. Everything was forgotten; only the matador existed. “He kills like an angel,” wrote the newspapers. “Let’s go watch Benito!” cried Eusebio, “we’ll fight better afterwards!” When Benito entered the ring a hushed whisper went through the stands. Ten thousand pairs of eyes were riveted to this athlete in silk stockings—narrow in the hips, broad through the shoulders in his gold-embroidered maroon jerkin—as he saluted the other city with his sword: the capitán general, a fat old man with a chest full of ribbons; the governor (white sideburns, black paunch); the important citizens in their loge draped with garnet-colored velvet; the ladies, leaning out over floating, arabesque-covered tapestries resembling fantastic flowers from a distance, black lace mantillas over tall hairdos, the ivory of faces and bare arms, the play of fans. The bravos and the shrill applause came across to us from the enemy city which occupied the shady side of the arena. Next, more discreetly, with a slight bowing of his head and his sword, Benito greeted the people, the masses of ardent faces on which the sun was burning harshly. “Olé! Olé! Olé!” Benito met this tumultuous outcry with a starry smile.
The bull charged, his gallop heavy and emphatic (but muffled like the beating of some great heart) toward this flamboyant man, admired by the multitude, on whom the living light of ten thousand pairs of eyes and the ill-contained passion of ten thousand men were concentrated, surrounding him with a sort of magnetic field in the sudden silence. The beast was a thoroughbred with such a powerful head that his legs seemed short by comparison. The yellow, green, and orange banderillas stuck into his neck lay flat over his back; his flanks were striped with thin streams of red. Dazzled and furious, made drunk by the noise, the sun, the colors, the warm blood, the beast had struggled alone, for ten eternal minutes, against glittering shadows. Every time he thought he had finally caught one of those agile phantoms on the end of his horn, his huge and baffled fury ended up in the tantalizing folds of a flashing cape. Blazing colors such as are never seen in the sierras or on the plains of Andalusia, or even in blood itself—the purples burning like black flames, the reds redder than blood, the blinding blues, the emerald greens at once liquid and hard—appeared like lightning flashes; and the man, the gilded shadow, appeared again farther off, elusive. The animal was gathering speed again, his muzzle flecked with foam, his back steaming—in his glassy, bloodshot eye there was a glow of intelligence, a tiny flame at the bottom of a well, struggling against bewilderment and rage in order to take aim at the new enemy who seemed to be waiting, without a cape, a huge grotesque insect with gilded wings. The banderillero twists his body deftly, escaping the black horn which would have torn his innards had his muscles slipped five or ten centimeters. He straightens up again, elegantly, on the toes of his dancing slippers, have planted another dart—carrying the royal colors—painful arrow of fire in the brute’s neck. The beast turns and thrashes about on the golden sand in the middle of a circle like a living crater, tormented by man, multiple and false, agile, winged with purple, with blue, with motley laughter, man dancing around him in a cleverly cruel game. The beast turns about and the city turns around him, savage, with ten thousand fixed stares, all alike: those of the ragged beggars, the sweating proletarians, the well-dressed gentlemen, the charming señoras; of the elegant dandies, the officers in stiff corsets, the heavy businessmen, the overweight doctors; alike on the shady side and the sunny side—perfumes and perspiration, great furies simmering under momentary forgetfulness and carelessness with pretty white teeth, soft sensual looks, leaders whose calculations are as precise as the mechanism of machine guns—all turns around under the implacable umbrella of a blue marble sky, around the maddened bull who wants to kill and who will be killed.
“Eu
sebio?”
“What?”
Heads, bodies, hands are growing all around us like tropical vegetation; a powerful odor of warm and vibrant flesh—the smell of masses of men and of sunlight—makes our nostrils throb. I also breathe in the acid smell of the oranges being eaten greedily by a young girl of whom I can see only a head of luxurious black hair (giving off a vague aroma of almonds) and the sunburned line of a neck which makes me think, for a fraction of a second, of enormous flower stems, of the thrust of tall palm trees, then of the whole outline of a sunburned body, terribly thin, hard, and hot.
“What will happen tomorrow, Eusebio?”
That square Roman legionary’s brow, damp now, those pupils enlarged like cats’ in the darkness, their flood of reflections, that grimace of a smile which looks sculpted into rough old wood by a barbarian hand: Eusebio, hardly glanced at me in reply.
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