No Pasarán!

by Pete Ayrton

  This book is dedicated to Martin Chalmers, a

  wonderful reader and fine translator

  CONTENTS

  Introduction • Pete Ayrton

  Luis Buñuel • ‘The Civil War (1936–1939)’, from My Last Breath, translated by Abigail Israel

  Muriel Rukeyser • ‘We Came for Games’, from Savage Coast

  André Malraux • ‘Hullo, Valladolid! Who’s Speaking?’, from Days of Hope, translated by Stuart Gilbert and Alastair Macdonald

  José María Gironella • ‘No More Delay!’, from The Cypresses Believe in God, translated by Harriet de Onís

  Ksawery Pruszyński • ‘A Proletarian Bullfight’, from Inside Red Spain, translated by Wisiek Powaga

  Nivaria Tejera • ‘More Important than a Law’, from The Ravine, translated by Carol Maier

  Arthur Koestler • ‘Portrait of a Rebel General’, from Spanish Testament

  Langston Hughes • ‘Laughter in Madrid’, from The Nation

  Mika Etchebéhère • ‘Of Lice and Books’, from Ma Guerre d’Espagne à Moi, translated by Nick Caistor

  Drieu La Rochelle • ‘A European Patriotism’, from Gilles, translated by Pete Ayrton

  Manuel Chaves Nogales • ‘The Moors Return to Spain’, from And in the Distance a Light...?, translated by L. de Baeza and D. C. F. Harding

  Laurie Lee • ‘To Albacete and the Clearing House’, from A Moment of War

  Pere Calders • ‘The Terol Mines’, from L’Esquella de la Torratxa, translated by Peter Bush

  Antoine Gimenez • ‘Of Love and Marriage’, from Sons of the Night, translated by Pete Ayrton

  John Dos Passos • ‘The Villages Are the Heart of Spain’, from Journeys between Wars

  Ana María Matute • ‘The Master’, from El Arrepentido, translated by Nick Caistor

  George Orwell • ‘Two Memories’, from ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’

  Joan Sales • ‘Accursed Bourgeoisie, You Shall Atone for Your Crimes!’, from Uncertain Glory, translated by Peter Bush

  Leonardo Sciascia • ‘Today Spain, Tomorrow the World’, from Antimony, translated by N. S. Thompson

  Jean-Paul Sartre • ‘The Wall’, translated by Lloyd Alexander

  Manuel Rivas • ‘Butterfly’s Tongue’, from Vermeer’s Milkmaid: And Other Stories, translated by Margaret Jull Costa

  Francisco García Pavón • ‘In Which Are Explained...’, from Los Liberales, translated by Nick Caistor

  Curzio Malaparte • ‘The Traitor’, translated by Walter Murch

  Mercè Rodoreda • ‘Movie Matinée’, from Vint-i-dos-contes, translated by Peter Bush

  Juan Goytisolo • ‘The Empty Black Bag’, from Forbidden Territory, translated by Peter Bush

  Gamel Woolsey • ‘Punctual Bombs’, from Death’s Other Kingdom

  Medardo Fraile • ‘An Episode from Natural History’, from Things Look Different in the Night, translated by Margaret Jull Costa

  Esmond Romilly • ‘At the End of the Alphabet’, from Boadilla

  Dulce Chacón • ‘The Missing Toe’, from The Sleeping Voice, translated by Nick Caistor

  Victor Serge • ‘Speak plainly, you know me’, from The Case of Comrade Tulayev, translated by Willard R. Trask

  Pierre Herbart • ‘My Gods Abandoned’, from La Ligne de Force, translated by Nick Caistor

  Alberto Méndez • ‘Second Defeat: 1940’, from Blind Sunflowers, translated by Nick Caistor

  Arturo Barea • ‘This War Is a Lesson’, from The Clash, part 3 of The Forging of a Rebel, translated by Ilsa Barea

  Bernardo Atxaga • ‘Marks’, from De Gernika a Guernica, translated by Margaret Jull Costa

  Javier Cercas • ‘There’s nobody over here!’, from Soldiers of Salamis, translated by Anne McLean

  Max Aub • ‘January without Name’, from Cuentos ciertos, translated by Peter Bush

  Jordi Soler • ‘The Camp at Argelès-sur-Mer’, from The Feast of the Bear, translated by Nick Caistor

  Jorge Semprún • ‘Our War’, from Veinte años y un día (Twenty Years and a Day), translated by Margaret Jull Costa

  Acknowledgements

  Permissions

  ‘It was in Spain that men learned that we can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own reward. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many men, the world over, regarded the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.’

  Albert Camus

  INTRODUCTION

  THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR, a small war in comparison with the two world wars of the 20th century, continues to ‘punch above its weight’ in terms of cultural and political resonance. The richness and diversity of the texts collected in !No Pasarán! will help explain why this is the case.

  The Civil War started on 17/18 July 1936 when units of the Army rebelled against the progressive policies of the Spanish Republic. The military coup began in Spanish Protectorate in Morocco and spread to mainland Spain. The coup was met with popular resistance especially in the urban centres and was defeated in Madrid and Barcelona. Rapidly the country was split in two. In late July, the Army of Africa, commanded by the Rebel General Francisco Franco, was airlifted to Seville in mainland Spain with planes provided by Hitler and Mussolini. France and Britain adhered to a policy of non-intervention, the only countries to support the Republic militarily were Mexico and the Soviet Union which agreed to ship arms in September.

  At the time, many saw the Civil War as a crucial moment in the fight of democracies against fascism and many who supported the Republic did so on the grounds that its victory would send a clear signal to Hitler and Mussolini that fascism could be defeated. Artists, writers and workers from all over Europe and further afield took sides over the Civil War. The majority of them supported the Republic but there were also some who took the Rebels’ side – both are represented here. For many it was not only a matter of supporting the war through their art: some went to Spain to fight. As early as October 1936, volunteers from abroad began to arrive to enlist on the Republican side in the International Brigade: many were rushed into battle with few weapons and inadequate training.

  So, the battle lines were drawn for a war that was to last for a thousand days until early 1939 when the Rebels made their decisive breakthrough: in January of that year, Barcelona fell to Franco and in March, it was followed by Madrid. Hundreds of thousands of Republicans fled to France in what is known as La Retirada – The Retreat.

  Eighty years on, the Spanish Civil War continues to be the subject of much contemporary art and literature in Spain and elsewhere. There is a continued relevance of the themes it raises: the question of whether winning the war should take precedence over implementing fundamental social change, the use of carpet bombing of towns with the inevitable death of thousands of civilians, the relationship between the role of women and the war effort both on the Rebel and the Republican sides, the claims for independence of autonomous regions, for example, the Basque Country, Galicia or Catalonia.

  Spain was already a deeply divided and unequal society when the Civil War broke out; but, by forcing the Republic to respond, the military uprising brought these divisions to a head. A process of social revolution was unleashed in the towns (the Hotel Ritz in Barcelona became a people’s canteen) and in the countryside (the collectivization of land, the expropriation of estates), which the Republic was initially unable to control. It is because this cleavage – between reform and revolution – is here at its most visible that the Spanish Civil War has so powerful a claim to our literary and political imagination.

  Why the Writers in ¡No Pasarán!?

  There have been several excellent anthologies in English on the Civil War – for example, And I Remember Spain: A Spanis
h Civil War Anthology edited by Murray A. Sperber and, more recently, Spanish Front: Writers on the Civil War edited by Valentine Cunningham, but neither of these anthologies (and others like them) feature any Spanish writers. This seems a strange omission.

  Much well-known English-language coverage of the Civil War includes a succession of books and films about the love life of Ernest Hemingway and who slept with whom in the Hotel Florida in Madrid, the rivalry between Dos Passos and Hemingway, and so on. This kitsch packaging of the war was predicted with wry humour by a character in the Catalan writer Joan Sales’ Uncertain Glory:

  ‘But the worst side to the wars is the fact that they are turned into novels; at the end of this war – and I assure you it’s a war as shitty as any – novels will be written that are especially stupid, as sentimental and risqué as they come: they’ll have wonderfully courageous young heroes and wonderfully buxom little angels. I don’t mean you, Cruells; you’ll not be stricken by one of these tomes. But foreigners ... It’s a pity you don’t believe in my gifts as a prophet; I could tell you, for example, that foreigners will turn this huge mess into stirring stories of bullfighters and gypsies.’

  ‘Bullfighters? I’ve never heard of mention of any, so far as I know ...’

  ‘Right, poor Cruells: a bullfighter has never been sighted in the army, let alone a gypsy, but foreigners have a good nose for business ...’

  (From Uncertain Glory, Maclehose Press, 2014, p. 312)

  For anglophone readers, most of our literary knowledge of the Civil War comes through writers such as Dos Passos, Stephen Spender, George Orwell, Ernest Hemingway and W.H. Auden. They are insightful writers and have much of value to say but this was a Spanish War and the overwhelming majority of combatants – active or passive – were Spanish. And so many of the contributors to ¡No Pasaran! are Spanish: speakers of Castilian, Basque, Catalan and Galician. They include writers such as Arturo Barea, Max Aub and Mercè Rodoreda who lived through the war and those like Javier Cercas, Manuel Rivas and Bernardo Atxaga who are writing about it now. Many works in contemporary Spanish culture make reference to the Civil War; in fact, its importance is growing. This making up for lost time is no accident. From the end of the War in 1939 to the death of Franco in 1975, there was harsh censorship of the arts: exiled Spanish writers could publish in places such as Chile, Argentina or Mexico, but usually not in Spain, and the distribution of their work was very limited. Within Spain, the defeated Republicans kept silent for fear of weighing their children down with memories of a lost cause that could only bring them grief. After the death of Franco, the democratic parties overseeing the transition to democracy formulated the Pact of Forgetting (el Pacto del Olvido) which was an attempt to let bygones be bygones and concentrate on the future. It was given a legal basis in the 1977 Amnesty law. This attempt to sweep Franco’s (and to a lesser extent Republican) crimes under the carpet lasted until 2000 when the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory was founded by the sociologist Emilio Silva Barrera. Silva Barrera wanted to locate and identify the remains of his grandfather shot by Franco’s forces in 1936 and he led a campaign for this to happen. In response to this pressure, the Socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero passed in 2007 The Historical Memory Law which sought to remove symbols of Francoism from public buildings and provided a budget for public exhumations. The right-wing government (2011–2015) led by Mariano Rajoy did not repeal the law but cut off funds for its implementation. In November 2015, the city of Pamplona asked the courts to investigate crimes committed against its residents during the Civil War and the dictatorship of General Franco. This is the first time a public institution has decided to present a criminal complaint to the Spanish courts.

  That the legacy of the war remains contested throughout Spain can be seen in the many defaced Francoist and Republican statues as well as in numerous books and films. The Historical Memory Law has led to new atrocities coming to light. As Bernardo Atxaga writes in a recent book De Gernika a Guernica:

  In the newspaper El País, dated 4 November 2006, I read these words spoken by a man from Fuenteguinaldo, in the province of Salamanca:

  ‘Apparently, the Falangists asked the priest to draw up a list of all the reds and atheists in the village. On 7 October 1936, they went from house to house looking for them. At nine o’clock at night, they were taken to the prison in Ciudad Rodrigo, and at four o’clock in the morning, were told they were being released, but, at the door of the prison, a truck was waiting and, instead of taking them home, it brought them here to be killed.’

  By now, the only surprising thing is how long it has taken for these facts to come to light: seventy years. A whole lifetime.

  (p. 348)

  The war at the front

  The content of ¡No Pasarán! reflects the different aspects of the Civil War. The war at the front is best known for accounts of armies engaging each other in combat. Within these accounts of battles, there are epic personal encounters like the one described by Chaves Nogales between a Republican fighter (the militiaman) and a Moor (the Caid) near Madrid:

  The cunning Caid approached stealthily from behind and when, he was within striking distance, he charged and thrust his bayonet into the militiaman’s back, at the same time as the latter raised the butt of his rifle to bring it down on another Berber’s head. Neither the Moor nor the militiaman missed. Another fell to the mighty club, but the militiaman was pierced by the Moor’s bayonet. As he toppled, his head fell against the chest of the victim and thus they fell together like skittles and lay on top of one another.

  (p. 110)

  The war in the countryside

  In the countryside, years of feudal exploitation had led to poverty and class hatred; thousands starved for nine months of the year. In the war years in many parts of Spain peasant revolutionaries seized the land and organized collective farms. This process fundamentally changed relationships. Hierarchies crumbled and now it was the turn of the haves to flee or, at the very least, to watch their step. The collectivization was part of a general revolutionary process that took place in the countryside often with a considerable degree of violence. When the war was over, the victors sought revenge. Jorge Semprún’s Twenty Years and a Day (the sentence given to political prisoners under Franco) describes how the landowners, under Franco, forced rural workers to re-enact every year the violent murder of a landowner in 1936 – a ritual of submission designed to keep them in their place:

  They were not the murderers of 1936, but the ceremony, in a way, made them accomplices of that death, forcing them to take responsibility for it, to bring it back into the present, to bring it alive again.

  A baptism of blood, you might say.

  By perpetuating the memory the farm workers perpetuated their condition not only as vanquished but as murderers – or as children, relatives, descendants of murderers. They acted out the awful reason for their defeat by commemorating the injustice of the death that had treacherously justified their defeat and their reduction to the ranks of the vanquished. In short that ceremony of atonement, which was attended by some of the provincial authorities, civil and ecclesiastical, helped to make sacred the very social order which the farm workers had thought rashly no doubt – fearfully too, one imagines – they were destroying when they murdered the owner of the farm.

  (p. 387)

  However, it is clear that the acts of violence of the rural landless were not on the same scale as the landowners’ systematic use of terror during the Civil War to turn the clock back in the countryside.

  The war against the Catholic Church

  The Primate of Spain supported Franco, as did many local priests, monks and nuns. So the church, seen by many in the countryside as the source of their oppression, was another target of the revolutionaries. Many churches were destroyed. ‘Priests and monks were killed because they were seen as representing an oppressive Church historically associated with the rich and powerful whose ecclesiastical hierarchy had backed the military reb
ellion.’ (Helen Graham, p. 27*)

  The popular vengeance exacted on the clergy was often brutal. This fury is captured by José María Gironella in The Cypresses Believe in God, his portrait of small town life written in 1953:

  The leaders of the mob broke into the house. Nobody there. Empty. In the waiting-room there was a table and, a huge chronological album of the popes. Santi was among the first in and he rang every bell his fingers could find. Down a gloomy corridor they came to the communicating door. They entered the church. Those who had remained outside were waiting for the immense door of the church to be thrown wide.

  When they heard the first blows, they rushed up the stairs unable to restrain themselves, and, as one man, flung themselves against the doors, trying to help those struggling with them inside. At the sixth try, the doors gave way. And at that moment all the lights went on. Santi had discovered the switches in the sacristy and had illuminated the festival. The temple was incapable of holding them all. Shots rang out.

  (p. 42)

  The role of women

  Initially the revolutionary militia woman was the role many young Republican women aspired to: she would wear blue overalls, have a rifle slung over her shoulder and go to the front to fight the Fascists. But the women fighters were aware of the ambiguity of their situation. Mika Etchebéhère, one of the few women to lead an army column, writes movingly:

  – Why should the militia men feel jealous?

  – Firstly, I am mother to all of them, so they alone have the right to be loved. On one side, and this is most subtle, I am wife to all of them, untouchable, on a pedestal. But, if for one reason or another, I go to visit other soldiers I leave my pedestal, I come back to earth like other women, like them I am able to sin and be guilty of the same illicit thoughts ...

  (Mika Etchebéhère, Ma Guerre D’Espagne a Moi, Actes Sud: Arles, 1998,

  page 273).

  This was the time of La Pasionaria’s (the Communist leader, Dolores Ibárruri) famous speech ‘A salute to our militiawomen on the front line’, but the period of women fighters was short lived. It thrived as long as making a revolution and waging a war were seen to go hand in hand. By October 1936, this was no longer the case; it had become clear to the Republican government that the priority was to win the war. That required a conventional army and a return to a more traditional division of labour captured in the slogan: ‘men to the front, women to the home front’. Women had to replace in the factories the men who had gone to the front and also to find the food and supplies to feed themselves and their children – a exacting task poignantly described in Mercé Rodoreda’s classic novel In Diamond Square.