by Pete Ayrton
We are in a small office room. Behind a desk sits a man who says he is not letting anyone into Spain, journalists especially. The one who has my passport stands behind me, by the door. Next to the desk sits another man, easily a creature from one of the posters, and further back on a small sofa – another one; he in turn wouldn’t be out of place on an engraving from a French Revolution. It may be just a bureaucratic routine but they all could pass for a tourist attraction; after all it’s Spain.
So, the one sitting next to the desk is an army man, tall, black-haired and swarthy, but his army must be an odd sort. He is wearing breeches, a semi-military jacket, his rifle resting peacefully against the civilian office desk. (O, those birthing days of new nations and ideological systems before everything limps, cools and sets in a formula!) On his head he has something that should be photographed or no one would ever believe me. It’s a kind of forage cap, black over one ear, red over the other. On each side three big letters, red on the black, black on the red – FAI. Carnival, you’d say? Nope. You would not take this man for a harlequin, trust me.
The soldier of revolution, a militiaman, member of the Catalonian Federación Anarquista Iberica (FAI), takes up my case. I don’t understand a word he is saying but I’m under the impression he is on my side. He addresses not so much the man behind the desk but the fellow sprawled on the sofa. The sofa friend also cuts an interesting figure, though of a different kind. He wears an odd garment between a frock coat and a stroller, something from the previous century, sometimes seen on a pensioner in a small provincial town. But out of this dried plank of a body grows a bull’s neck, wrapped in a black-and-red cravat (again: the colours of the all-powerful in Catalonia FAI) and on it – a big head, large fleshy face with a muscular nose and relatively small eyes, peering out from under the folds of old wrinkled skin. Above it all unfurls, rather unexpectedly, a great whirl of hair, a thick black mane like Beethoven’s. But no, he’s a Marat, the legend of the French National Convention, the dangerous Marat. I instinctively feel it is this man I need to convince.
The small room has suddenly erupted into a big battle for Portbou, in the name of Polish journalism. In this battle the main adversary is the gentleman behind the desk in civilian clothes; no forage cap or black-and-red scarf, just a trace of red in the lapel. This man demands a proof that I am a journalist. I show him my professional credentials, Polish and international. The man doesn’t know what it is. Enter Marat, who begins to say something that sounds conciliatory. The desk man looks irritated, again takes my passport and soon discovers a German visa. What was I doing in Germany? I take my passport back from him and show him it was a transit visa. We all calculate the time trapped between foreign stamps and the calculation supports my claim. It’s my turn to attack: I pull out heavy artillery in the form of my recommendation letter, discarded a minute ago without perusal, from the newly appointed ambassador of Spain to Paris, Luis Araquistain. The forage-capped militiaman wants to make sure it is the new, just appointed, ambassador but the Marat dismisses all the doubts in the matter. A spirit of reconciliation rises over the battlefield. At any rate, both anarchists are on my side. The plain-clothes official tries to negotiate a honorable defeat and save his face by demanding that I surrender the ambassador’s letter. Inconvenient but what can I do? I exchange the letter for three round seals in my passport. The man who had escorted me here and who was giving me such little hope for my stay in Spain, now leads me back to the doorway. The three inquisitors send me on my way with three raised fists.
There is still plenty of time before the departure of the Barcelona train. In a huge waiting hall there are nine waiters to serve one young Spanish woman and myself. The mood is family-friendly, and revolutionary. The posters on the walls overflow with colours, red flags in the windows, the barlady’s kid is sitting on the counter playing with a lobster shell. The little town lies below the railway station, descending like an amphitheatre into a small fishing port. The church is shut, on the door a note informing it has been ‘appropriated’, that is sequestered by the militia and Popular Front. At last the Barcelona train arrives at the platform, all carriages covered in revolutionary posters and slogans. I load my baggage into a big car, its walls displaying a revolutionary fusion of literature and religion: a popular novel of Blasco Ibanez and the great work by Saint John – the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Inside the carriage, though, no sign of the revolution or the Apocalypse: just four workmen whiling the stop away with a game of bezique.
The train moves. Its colourful carriages begin to bore their way through tunnels, veer suddenly away from sea shores and fly over olive groves and fields. Villages flash past like white splashes, punctuating the flow of stone-walled fields on hillsides, sleepy stations, Shell and Dunlop ads. The field-workers greet us raising their hands clenched into fists. But after a while it gets tedious. The chessboard of vineyards and fields, manifestly well-tended but small, looks more like Germany, or at least Polish Wielkopolska,* which instead of rolling out flat swells into hills and puckers into earth terraces. The only exotic feature are two tall carts on huge wheels pulled by mules and asses. One can grow skeptical about that revolution, which at Portbou greeted me so colourfully, loudly, dangerously, but here merely administers the land of industrious ants, bees or termites. I doze off, wake up to a passport control, very civil this time, doze off again, and then at last – Barcelona.
It’s only 8 o’clock in the evening but the night has fallen, black as ink, the way southern nights can. At the railway station a milling crowd of militiamen and workers. Red arrows direct to places where foreigners who come to fight for the revolution report. I take a cab across the huge town, badly lit and full of people. The hotel, to whose owner I have recommending letters, has not – luckily – been ‘appropriated’ like that church in Portbou, or like many other Barcelona hotels. I am given a tiny quiet room on one of the top floors, with a view onto a grey wall of another tall building. I’m worn out by the journey and take to bed early. Suddenly, mid-sleep, a huge, inhuman – industrial – voice begins to roar straight into my ear. It fires the words and complete sentences with the speed of a machine gun. The voice penetrates the wall, completely blocking out the whir of the city, filling my little room and all its nooks and crannies until it overflows like water in a bathtub. The radio megaphone stops for a moment but then, in a somewhat changed tone of voice, begins to spew words again. Outside, on the black street of Barcelona, people gather around the loudspeaker to hear the latest news from the front. But this doesn’t sound like a news bulletin. More like speeches, homilies, incantations. The soft, supple like steel Spanish language comes out of the speaker heavy as lead. The words are falling through the air like iron tiles knocked off the roofs down onto the stone pavement of the street. I don’t understand practically any of them, and that’s what increases the sense of strangeness further still. Through the black night, out of darkness emerge contours of familiar words – revolution, proletariat, España, el pueblo, fascismo, muerte. Sometimes, though rarely, I manage to link one contour with another floating immediately behind out of the invisible loudspeaker, and tie them up with an invisible string of sense. But it doesn’t happen often. I’m too tired, I simply lie there, on a bed in a hotel room, in a strange city, in the middle of the unbelievably black night that pours in through the window and with it a wave of bizarre, grating sound. At last, the weariness grows heavier than the wave. I fall asleep rocked by the echoes of its thunderous verbosity, weighed down by sheer physical exhaustion wrapped in darkness, swept by a tsunami of foreign words which now, dying down, pulls me slowly into some unfathomable deep. One thing I’ve learned for sure now is that in the revolutionary Spain I’ll never be alone, not even for a moment. That wherever I go I’ll be feeling the presence of light or darkness, followed by cries and pleas; that always and everywhere I’ll be tossed like an odd piece of debris on this huge, swelled sea which has flooded everything.
The whole next day I spent in the biggest
city of revolutionary Spain, the city where the revolution has been the bloodiest, the cruelest but also the most heroic. It is a big and beautiful city, rich too, and all that has now become the backdrop for the new brave world. The posters from Portbou have multiplied into thousands of colourful blots on the walls, glistening in the sun. The motorcars with huge unfurled flags whiz past, covered in slogans, emblems and anagrams of the two main trade unions, political parties and other revolutionary institutions which had ‘appropriated’ them, daubed on with white paint. Inside the cars sit the militiamen dressed in blue monos or battle dresses, or some garb in the process of becoming uniforms. But above all – the mono. In the gates of townhouses, especially the gates of big banks, post offices and government buildings, one can always spot a group of people’s militiamen bearing rifles and donning the mono. The mono has been raised to the status of uniform, in fact the mono has dethroned the uniform. The mono is simply a one-piece overall, worn by workers and also by aircraft pilots. Now the mono has come out of factories and hangars. It’s become an accessory of power as once epaulets were.
It’s a Sunday and the crowds are bigger than normal. Imagine that one day the whole of Warsaw’s Powiśle, the whole of working Praga and the red Wola poured into Aleje Ujazdowskie.† Just like now, out of the remote suburbs, the port districts and the narrow streets of old Barcelona the crowds spilled out onto the boulevards of Rambala, wide pavements of Paralelo, into Plaça de Catalunya, flowing in front of the palatial stores and their elegant vitrines. And they are armed crowds. It’s hard to picture a bigger number of people armed with rifles out on a stroll in a big city. It’s hard to imagine a complete mobilization of motorcars by the working classes! Spain is the motherland of the baronial Hispano-Suiza and now I’m seeing dozens of those luxurious limousines decorated with Soviet emblems, hammers and sickles, scratched by an untried hand in wonky lines on the glossy black paint. At the feet of the Columbus monument sandbags stacked into a barricade, four heavy machine guns eyeing four streets. The crowds flow on under the black-and-red flags of the Iberian Anarchist Federation and the red hammer and sickle of the Trotskyist POUM – Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista. From the windows of the hotel Colon, where the army soldiers fought and died, hang banners of the unified socialist and communist parties. The walls of the great hotel are scarred with bullets but the pockmarks are relatively few. These people, who every day are sent in groups by the People’s Tribunals to be shot, these people imprisoned inside ‘Uruguay’, the white ship seen in the port, didn’t really put up much of a fight here.
The crowds overflow the streets, conscious of their victory, and of their power. The posters ridicule army officers and newspapers announce daily new sentences passed by workers’ tribunals. The churches saved from burning display placards: patrimonio de público – public property. The palaces of the ship magnates of this great merchant port are ‘appropriated’ and tenanted by workers’ organizations. The illustrated ‘Ahora’ carries a picture of a worker-militiaman sleeping in the royal bed of the Pedrales palace. In front of the palace of a Catalan press baron, who bore a title of conde, stands a row of five Packards. Not because it’s a magnate’s palace but because it’s the headquarters of the metalworkers’ union. In another grand ‘appropriated’ building lives the army chief, colonel Sandino. Can’t help feeling it looks like Sankt Petersburg in the spring of 1917, the Petersburg of Kronstandt sailors, gallivanting about town in the imperial limousines, the Petersburg of Madame Krzesińska’s palace ‘appropriated’ by the communists.‡ Out of the loudspeakers flows the Internationale. The crowd greets it with raised fists; as the song descends on them from above they pick it up and up it goes in a fractured chorus. This September evening has the scent of that Russian spring.
Among the posters I spot something very Spanish – a poster advertising a bullfight. Tonight’s bullfight. The revolution has not disturbed the ways of traditional entertainment. Well, except in two ways: it says the bulls of today’s corrida will be supplied from the stables of ex-marqueses and ex-condes. The revolution, this last true revolution, added the ‘ex-’. It’s also this revolution that has added the sentence that the corrida is organized in partnership with People’s Militia. The tanks that crushed the churches have now stopped at the gates of an arena. Not to be missed.
I’m a few minutes late, running under the huge arches of the outside cloister and into the staircase, I’m out on the galleries, pushing my way up step by step through the crowd filling the amphitheatre. Suddenly the crowds stand up and raise their fists. I look back. Before me the arena: a yellow, sandy ring, a semicircle full of people, portraits of toreadors hanging from above. The military band strikes out the hymn of proletarian revolution.
Arriba, parias de la tierra,
En pie, famélica legión,
Atruena la razón en marcha
Es el fin de la opresión.
The Internationale, just like before in the street, now sweeps around the bullring. The crowd picks it up with enthusiasm. The fists are stuck into the air. From underneath the hanging portraits of the famous toreros rises the song:
Agrupémonos todos
en la lucha final;
el género humano
es la International!
[...]
And then something odd happens, something that accidentally mixes and fuses the Hispanic spectacle with the proletarian revolution. Apparently, it was assumed that the orchestra would stop playing – into the ring runs a big bull. The public shouts. Some sit down, others keep their fists in the air. Two red banderilleros approach the bull, which is standing still, as if stunned and blinded. But people around me keep on singing, picking up the echoes of the orchestra and lifting up the song again:
Ni en dioses, reyes ni tribunes
está el supremo salvador
nostros mismos realicemos
el esfuerzo redentor.
[...]
For centuries Catholic holy days were celebrated with corridas, canonizations of saints were preceded with ‘running of the bulls’ which went on for days. Until recently, children going to their first communion, on that same day in the afternoon were taken to see their first bullfight. In this country of magnificent temples, of Saint Theresa and Ignatious Loyola, Catholicism slipped over the corrida like water off a duck’s back while all its holidays got mired in bullfight. One would expect something different from a faith which itself went through human corridas and revealed itself to the world on the fighting arena, the ancestor of this one today. One would expect something more from a faith whose saints addressed wolves as ‘brothers’. The corrida, honoured by Catholicism, the corrida rooted deeply in the Iberian paganism, kept alive in Roman provinces, universally popular under the Moors – survived them all. The tank of history that crushed church portals has now stopped at the gates of the arena. We shall have a corrida on the First of May and each anniversary of the October Revolution, on Lenin’s Day, Rosa Luxembourg’s and Liebknecht’s, just as we had on Corpus Christi. Except now it’s ‘Arise, ye damned of the Earth... ’ that will open a bullfight.
Ksawery Pruszyński was a Polish journalist, publicist, writer and diplomat. He was born in 1907 in the Volhynia (now Ukraine) into a landowning family who after the Russian Revolution settled in Kraków. Pruszyński studied law at the Jagellonian University and, while continuing his academic career, started working for a newspaper, Czas (Time), as a proofreader. In 1930 he made his debut as a reporter with a series of articles from Hungary, and in 1932 with a book, Sarayewo 1914, Shonghay 1932, Gdańsk 193?, which presented his argument that Gdańsk would be the cause of a world war. Throughout the 1930s he travelled in Poland and Europe and published, among others, Bunt Mtodych (The Youth Revolt). In 1933 he travelled to Palestine; the resulting book, Palestine for the 3rd time, made him a popular and respected journalist. In 1936/37 he was a war correspondent from Spain; Inside Red Spain records his experiences of the Civil War. During the Second World War he fought as a soldie
r, taking part in the Battle of Narvik (Norway, 1940) and the Battle of Falaise (France, 1944) but also worked as a diplomat in London and in Moscow (1941/42). After the war he decided to stay in the new communist Poland and joined its diplomatic corps, first at the UN, later as ambassador to the Netherlands. Pruszyński died in 1950 in a car crash in Germany.
* Wielkopolska – western part of partitioned Poland (1772–1918) under German occupation (transl.).
† Powiśle, Praga, Wola – traditionally working-class districts of Warsaw; Aleje Ujazdowskie – Warsaw’s central boulevards along the Royal Park of Łazienki, lined with palaces, government buildings and embassies (transl.).
‡ The palace belonging once to Matylda Krzesińska, the famous prima ballerina assoluta at the Mariyski Theatre, born into a Polish aristocratic family, a mistress of the future Tsar Nicolás II; it was from the balcony of her palace that Lenin addressed the revolutionary crowds on his return from Finland (transl.).
NIVARIA TEJERA
MORE IMPORTANT
THAN A LAW
from The Ravine
translated by Carol Maier
EVERYTHING’S CONFUSED FOR ME, everything inside there was confused for me. But I’m sure we waited an hour in that room full of people, waited for something to happen that I didn’t understand. Finally a door opened and Papa appeared, accompanied by six other prisoners and, through another door, men in long black kimonos, who looked like the witches you see in storybooks. ‘They’re the magistrates’ robes,’ Auntie said, frightened. The lights blazed overhead and above them, the fan made the shadow of the flag and the shadows from people’s heads move across the ceiling. This was the assembly room, because that’s what a sign over the entry said, and when the men sat down around a large table it seemed that everything would get dark. It was a very important place, so there were several priests. I recognized don Eutimio and don Tarife. They visit us and Grandpa’s said we must always respect them. ‘They’re a different kind ofpriest. They tell jokes and they’ll pass up the bishop’s thin wine for an excursion or to visit a sick person. Besides,’ he adds, ‘they talk like anyone else and understand God’s weaknesses.’ One morning don Tarife didn’t enter with ‘God grant us a good day’ but ‘God sure prescribes strong purgatives,’ because there were thunderclaps, which he laughingly called purgatives. Grandpa enjoyed those stories, even felt important because they showed that he and don Tarife thought the same way. But other priests appeared too, asking in low voices why they were bringing the prisoners loose like that when they should bring them tied, which made Grandpa tense his cheeks and praise ‘such a Christian statement’ between his teeth. I don’t think they were brought loose. I could see that the prisoners were walking two by two, holding their hands together and going to sit on a long bench. ‘They have them handcuffed, like criminals,’ Mama said. Papa looked all around until he found us. I could feel by his eyes that he was hugging us, but I felt chilled too. He seemed more alone than before, more a prisoner. Outside, in the street, there were some children skating. I could hear them clearly and would have gone out if that hadn’t been ‘Papa’s trial.’ I’d have gone out for sure if I’d known that Papa would be set free. But at that moment Papa was suffering, he was in danger, and right then that was all I could think of.
