Ten hours of work in the shop are on our backs; it weighs you down. I have lifted eight thousand characters. Ten hours standing on our feet. At the age of forty, most typographers have varicose veins. El Capillo, that yellow-toothed swine, has put us on piecework, the dirtiest job imaginable. Now we are on our way downtown in the soft cool of the evening—the poets’ “mauve hour.” What we would really like is to take a bath or to punch someone in the nose.
“You’ll see,” says Porfirio suddenly, still thinking about the foreman, “if I don’t smash in his old horse’s teeth for him one of these days!”
It’s very light out. A lulling transparency attenuates the shapes of things, even to the delicate outlines of the foliage. It is not yet dusk, but the full light of the day has already passed. The turquoise tint of the sky and the straight clear perspective of this avenue which reminds one of a garden call an image into my companion’s mind: the image of a half-starved child being eaten up by bugs in the San Luis Hospital. I, too, am thinking of your Paquita. I know that you are going to talk about her. You say, without any transition, as if you knew that I am reading your mind (and perhaps you do):
“The nuns are badgering her because she doesn’t want to say her prayers.”
Perhaps this is the very moment when the sister noiselessly approaches bed number 35, room IV. The little girl is lying down with her eyes closed pretending to be asleep, but she can hear the ineffable rustling of starched clothing, the slithering of gray heelless slippers along the floorboards. The little girl can feel the stern gaze of the old woman’s dismal, petrified face falling on her blue-tinted eyelids.
“Paquita, I know you are not sleeping. Paquita, you are a wicked child. Say your prayers.”
This is the awful moment of the blue cold. The blue cold starts in Paquita’s kidneys and climbs up, climbs up slowly, squeezing her in a vice, toward her heart, her throat, her brow; it presses in at her temples for an instant, like an icy halo, and vanishes: it’s over; she can open her eyes, she is no longer afraid … The old woman has gripped Paquita’s hands with authority and forces her to join them—the blue cold comes from the touch of those bloodless old hands which would nonetheless like to be good. Paquita obeys, but her terror has already passed. Slowly, with a depthless obstinacy in her powerless glance, Paquita says “No” with her eyes. And the sister goes away, sad and severe.
In his cell at the Model Prison, old Ribas stops abruptly with his back against the door: from this point the whole length of a green branch may be seen in the narrow window, sometimes motionless, sometimes gently waving. Although he is nearsighted, Ribas has never worn glasses; that is the secret of the distant expression we have often noticed in him. He would really like to know what kind of leaves they are; it tortures him and makes him smile at the same time. He is alone, calm, weakened, without fear, confident. He knows that we will win in a month, three months, six months, twelve months. The length of time is of no importance. He knows that there is always the great expedient of dying like Ferrer, in order to live on usefully in the comrades’ memories, leaving a kind of dignity to the children, and that it isn’t even very difficult any more when you have a long, wearisome life behind you like a gray ribbon, grayer and grayer, almost black. “After all, at my age when one is not very intelligent, it’s about the best thing that can happen to you.” The day, however, has been a bad one. No letters from home. It is ridiculous, of course, to be worried like this. But what if something had happened to little Tonio? And besides, he only left fifty pesetas in the house.
Dario is talking in the back room of a café on the Tibidabo road. You can hear cars going by, carrying people to supper at the all-night restaurants. He is surrounded by twelve heads, dramatically silhouetted in the reddish shadows. An oil lamp is placed in front of him. His blue pencil traces out straight lines and crosses on a sheet of paper in order that these men should understand exactly what must be done. The lamp sputters darkly.
THIRTEEN
The Other City Is Stronger
HERE AND THERE ACROSS THE BLACK MASSES OF MONTJUICH, THE MOON spreads patches of shiny blue, near-white, lacquer. The houses at the foot of the mountain are blue and black rectangles, stippled with gold dots along the line of the windows. Each of these perforations is a lamp lighting up a home. In each of these homes reigns the repose of the evening, the talk of the evening, the concerns of the evening; when that luminous pinpoint vanishes, the man and the woman will have gone to bed. And tomorrow the luminous dot will be lighted again, and thus each day … One is overcome at the thought of the relentless persistence of all these little destinies. In each one of these lighted compartments, men are sitting down at this moment across the table from their lives: lives that still wear the same face of an old, ageless serving-woman, resigned to her cloistered existence. There are some who are happy. The old serving-woman smiles on them; a few little joys, of which some are unclean, swarm over them in the impoverished air.
We are having a discussion on the balcony; behind us, in one of our rooms, there is a lamp burning which, seen from that house over there in the distance, is also nothing but a pinpoint or luminous perforation. The round tower of the fortress, on the summit of Montjuich, is in clear view.
We are at Santiago’s house because he has not been under surveillance since he was let out of prison—last year—after that sabotage business in the streetcar yards. He pretends to be discouraged: we suspect a certain amount of sincerity in his role. We can hear him splashing about under the faucet in the kitchen. All the noises of this house come floating around us for a moment; they seem light and transparent to me in the moonlight. The baby, in his crib, is doing a kind of dance in the air with his little legs and purring: “m-mm-mm” or humming “a-aa-aa-aa” on a flat note. The mother is ironing linens on the plain wooden table. We can hear the dull thud of the iron on the cloth. The mother is chatting quietly with a neighbor. The two voices are alike: one could be the slightly amplified echo of the other. Whole sentences mingle with our discussion.
“You’re right,” says Dario, “that’s the real revolution. The real revolution begins when millions of men begin to move, feeling inexorably that it no longer possible to turn back, that all the bridges have been burned behind them. It’s a human avalanche rolling on.”
Miro and Jurien are smoking. Tibio is quietly plucking his mandolin, dropping chords into the night which glide down to the earth and are lost, amber disks, among the vacant lots.
“Our job is to give a good shove to that first big stone that will perhaps bring on the avalanche.”
Other voices, inside the house: “Six pesetas, the grocer; two, the baker; three, the sewing machine; eleven …”
A barking dog, a banging door drown out this accounting. Then:
“… how she loved him though, how she loved him! Do you know what she did … ?”
We will never know.
A short, dark-haired woman, annoyed by our vain chatter, has gone over to lean on the railing and looks out at the beautiful night horizon—the horizon of her poverty—almost without seeing it. Her sour voice, her tired glances darkened by some vague reproach, her blotchy skin are familiar to me. She is at the age when well-dressed women are still desirable, and the others are already finished. I know what she is thinking: “As if they wouldn’t do better to try and earn a little more money.”—“It’s all right,” she was saying a little while ago, “we land on our feet every month, then back into our misery like a cat that some nasty kid throws out the window at regular intervals. It’s already something to be able to feed our faces almost every day.” Her husband had wanted to be a painter: he’s a sign painter. They haven’t loved each other for a long time. And why should they love each other, as dull as worn-out coins where the eyes on the effigy of some ideal republic have been rubbed away? Existence—it certainly can’t be called life—is too hard.
Dario thinks the movement is soon going to start up again with a good chance of success. He talks about salaries
, the employers’ association, the artillery juntas that have just sent an insolent appeal to the governor; events and forces seem to take shape under his hands like pieces on a chessboard … I answer that the workers’ force has not yet become clearly conscious of itself. That there is no organization: sorry number of union members, amorphous groups. No clarity of ideas, no body of doctrine …
“Oh, doctrines!” says Dario with an evasive gesture of both open hands. “The fewer there are, the better it goes. A specialty of intellectuals. There will always be time to make theories afterward.”
“I mean no lucidity. Vague ideas—some only good for leading us to a dead end. No precedents. The habit of being defeated. We have never yet won. All the communes have been strangled. We are on the verge of discovering some great truth, of finding the key, of learning to win. But the old defeat is still within us.”
There comes a time when Dario stubbornly refuses to listen any more. He puts on his mask of weariness and repeats:
“That’s all very possible. But if the employers association refuses to agree to the fifteen per cent—and they will refuse—the strike will become generalized; if there is a general strike, the troops won’t march against us. If the troops don’t march, we will be the masters of the situation …”
He shrugs off the invisible load that weighs endlessly on his shoulders and says, jovially:
“… and one bright morning we will wake up having found the key, as you say, but without having looked for it. While if we waste our time looking for it …”
Tibio says, while the fleeting chords escape from his fingers like amber disks:
“The rich lands have all been fertilized by the life and the death of countless organisms. You have to enrich the soil in order to harvest good crops. We will always have been good for something.”
I fall silent, finding argument useless since I know that at this moment Dario has nothing to answer me. He is the man of this hour, of this country, of this proletariat which he must lead toward uncertain lights: the future. Sometimes they call him “Comrade Future-minister,” and that makes him smile with a mischievous glow in his eyes which seems to say, “Well, why not?” and grudgingly shrug his shoulders. In fact he is much closer to the fortress dungeons or the little anonymous mounds of the cemetery … These men are the leaven of a people slow to awaken. Each does his job, performs his task, and passes. We no longer even know the names of those who were tortured in Montjuich and in Alcalá Alcada del Valle, but without them several thousand proletarians of this city would not have this tempered courage, this burning hatred, this exaltation that makes fighters of them in the pain of their daily existence. “We will always have been good for something.” But I am unable to cry out to you that it is no longer enough, that it is imperative to turn that page; perhaps to go about it entirely differently.
The other city is stronger.
Stupid Sunday. Sunshine everywhere: yellow streetcars shuttle back and forth. The balconies of the wealthy houses slightly grotesque, are decked out with red cloth; some little stunted trees, raw green, are steaming in the sultry air. All this is raw and colorful; all stupid, stupid, stupid with the incredible satisfaction of being stupidly stupid in the sunshine. A procession is going by between two rows of bored-looking ninnies. And it’s hot. Marching in a procession makes you sweat.
Hats off, they watch the procession go by as sluggish as a bored, broken-winded animal. It drags itself out for the length of the avenue, to strains of music which sound sleepy in spite of their din …
There’s an old priest with the low forehead of a sly animal, mopping his brow with a pitiable air of weariness. “Oh Lord, what drudgery! What heat! And what an exasperating idiot, that fellow over there, carrying his candle at if it were an umbrella!” He is probably saying such things to himself, marching solemnly on the heels of a bald, sanctimonious gentleman with glasses, solemnly carrying a beautiful, brand-new checkered flag, stiff with ennui. Pompous gentlemen, dressed up in their Sunday-best solemnity, carry bulky smoking candles. The Municipal Guards—solemn in their black helmets trailing white plumes, blue shirt fronts, white gloves swinging sleepily back and forth—escort a perspiring group. A plaster Virgin, surrounded by candelabra, glass gewgaws, and artificial flowers, weighs down on the shoulders of eight obese bearers.
The other city is stronger. José’s mouth narrows—the sign of something wrong; his face is hardened wax. We cross slowly over to the next street corner, for the crowd is kneeling in front of the Blessed Sacrament. The soldiers bend down on one knee, their rifles at the ready, their heads bowed. We are the only ones standing, held up by a kind of defiance. But their city is stronger, stronger …
Wearing a gilded cape, a little old man wrinkled like a mummy (but with big red hands folded over his (stomach) advances under a canopy. Without those big peasant’s hands you might think he had just stepped out of a reliquary, iced over in his golden embroideries. People hold open the folds of his train.
He moves on. The flabby paunches, the skimpy shoulders, the shapes, sharp or buried under layers of fat, all dressed in black, the faces rosy or blue-tinted, close-mouthed, the white-tonsured pates, crudely carved out of dirty wood—file by one after another. A fat sweaty gentleman wearing his high silk hat and carrying his candle stops for a moment and you can see that his fingernails are black. Little girls in white strew flowers in front of all this Sunday ugliness on parade, moving inexorably forward, following tall black horsemen … This city will march over our stomachs. First the gendarmerie and then the processions. These same little girls will throw flowers onto the pavement where our blood has been spilled.
But now José, disarmed, is smiling. Two brown-skinned kids are making pee pee under a tree. Huge smiles spread across their gritty faces; they’re having a swell time pissing during the procession. “Except ye be converted, and become as little children …”
The four towers of the Holy Family, held aloft by intricate scaffolding, extend their apocalyptic ugliness into the blue. They look like monumental factory chimneys, only misshapen, crying out their uselessness. They also make you think of phallic symbols.
Under the watching stars, at the corner of two narrow, dark streets, the fiery furnace blasts forth. Circles of liquid fire flicker ceaselessly around the flamboyant letters, now red now yellow, announcing FIFTY BAILARÍNAS. On both sides of the entrance, repeated six times, Juana the Cuban (more svelte and more ardent on these posters than in real life, a Creole at thirty pesetas a trick)—a white shawl dotted with golden flowers, arms and legs darting like flames, long oblique eyes which seem to laugh out of their shadowed depths like flashing knives.
Poor devils, who can’t even go inside—for lack of the price—devour her with their eyes. There are always three or four of them on the sidewalk, looking for an improbable windfall.
The hall is poor, almost bare, cruelly lighted by huge arc lamps. You sit at white marble tables. Drink. Look. Think of nothing. Your day is over. It’s not time yet to go to sleep on your cot in your four-pesetas-a-week hole in the wall, where you can hear your neighbor coughing on one side and, on the other, through the paper-thin walls, a panting couple making love after a bitter whispered argument. Here is the fruit of your labor, the climactic moment of your day. Feast your eyes on forms, on colors, on rhythms, on delirium, on laughter, on everything denied you in life. From dusk to dawn fifty women will act out, for you, all the joy they know. Some of them will talk to you without seeing you, the spangles about their waists tingling through your veins; their castanets and their heels will echo in your loins long after; you will drink greedily as soon as they have gone off into the wings, and, this night, for a long while, long before the deep, black sleep of the weary carries you off—you will see before you the white and red smile of their lips, the black and fire of their eyes.
Lucecita, a skinny girl sheathed in black, a purple knot around her hips, glides before your eyes, leaving behind a suggestion of despair: the image of an ash-gray mas
k, an overpainted mouth and a pointed chin, eyes like raindrops glistening out of shadows under black lines.
El Chorro’s hairy fingers beat out the rhythm of the dance on the table. José is preoccupied by his idea: we must shake this city out of its torpor by acting with sudden and terrible boldness. A few men would be enough. He himself—afraid of nothing, no longer able to wait, consumed with a desire for action and sacrifice—would go first. He idolizes the memory of Angiollilo the typographer, gentle yet obstinate like a missionary, who, twenty years ago, followed Cánovas del Castillo (the butcher of Montjuich and Cuba!) patiently from town to town in order to strike him down one day in the name of that future anarchy where human life will be sacred. He refuses to get married: “That’s like drowning. No thank you! A true revolutionary can’t have a wife or kids. Above all don’t imagine you can live—or you’re good for nothing except wearing a collar.” I found him a while ago reading over the trial of Emile Henry.6 There is a legend that says that Henry faltered at the last minute, three yards from the scaffold. “That’s impossible,” José grumbled. “It’s a filthy lie made up by the newspapers.” He was unwilling to understand how that final crisis might yet heighten the dauntlessness of the condemned, the fruit of a difficult victory won over himself. “I tell you he was all of one piece!”
“Benito will kill again on Sunday,” José murmurs.
“So?”
“The governor will certainly be in his box.” At the next table the woolly-haired, low-browed stokers from an Argentinean freighter are laughing heartily because two women, Asunción the blonde, Pepita the brunette, with saffron scarves wrapped around their waists, are doing the dance of the breasts with convulsive smiles. One girl fair, the other dark; one cool, the other arid as the desert. The fruits of their flesh, set off by coral tips, quiver as they shimmy all over, standing in place. Guitars twang. The heat from their loins mounts to the brain, flushes their faces and clouds their eyes. José alone retains a glacial calm. He barely unclenches his teeth:
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