by Pete Ayrton
I don’t care two hoots, I thought. Seville has seen the last of me. There I was wrong.
Arthur Koestler was born in Budapest in 1905. In 1927, after a year in Palestine, Koestler returned to Berlin and began to work for the Ullstein group of newspapers. In 1931, he was appointed foreign editor of the Berliner Zeitung am Mittag and that year joined the Communist Party of Germany. Koestler spent the next years in Paris engaged in anti-fascist activity for the Comintern, and in 1936 was sent undercover to visit Franco’s headquarters in Seville – his cover was credentials from the News Chronicle. In Seville, Koestler found decisive evidence of the involvement of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany on Franco’s side – at the time something the Rebels denied. In 1937, Koestler returned to Spain and was in Málaga when it fell to Franco. He was captured and imprisoned in Seville under sentence of death – his Dialogue with Death is an account of this imprisonment. An international campaign for his release led to him being exchanged for a Nationalist prisoner held by the Republicans. Koestler’s experiences in Spain led to disillusion with communism and the Party, from which he resigned in 1938. Later that year he started writing, in Paris, Darkness at Noon, his most famous novel, which was published in 1940; it is a searing critique of communism and Stalin’s purges. The prison scenes are inspired by Koestler’s imprisonment in Spain. By now a committed anticommunist, Koestler settled in the UK in 1953. In 1983, he committed suicide in London with his wife. This extract is from ‘Portrait of a Rebel General’, originally published as part of Spanish Testament.
LANGSTON HUGHES
LAUGHTER IN MADRID
from The Nation, 29 January 1938
THE THING ABOUT LIVING IN MADRID these days is that you never know when a shell is going to fall. Or where. Any time is firing time for Franco. Imagine yourself sitting calmly in the front room of your third-floor apartment carefully polishing your eyeglasses when all of a sudden, without the least warning, a shell decides to come through the wall – paying no attention to the open window – and explodes like a thunderclap beneath the sofa. If you are sitting on the sofa, you are out of luck. If you are at the other side of the room and good at dodging shrapnel you may not be killed. Maybe nobody will even be injured in your apartment. Perhaps the shell will simply go on through the floor and kill somebody else in apartment 27, downstairs. (People across the hall have been killed.)
Who next? Where? When? Today all the shells may fall in the Puerta del Sol. Tomorrow Franco’s big guns in the hills outside Madrid may decide to change their range-finders and bombard the city fan-wise, sending quince-y-medios from one side of the town to the other. No matter in what section of the city you live, a shell may land in the kitchen of the sixth-floor apartment (whose inhabitants you’ve often passed on the stairs), penetrate several floors, and make its way to the street via your front room on the third floor.
That explains why practically nobody in Madrid bothers to move when the big guns are heard. If you move, you may as likely as not move into the wrong place. A few days ago four shells went through the walls of the Hotel Florida, making twenty that have fallen there. The entrance to the hotel is well protected with sandbags, but they couldn’t sandbag nine stories. All this the desk clerk carefully explains to guests who wish to register. But most of the other hotels have been severely bombed, too. And one has to stay somewhere.
The Hotel Alfonso a few blocks away has several large holes through each of its four walls but is still receiving guests. One of the halls on an upper floor leads straight out into space – door and balcony have been shot away. In one of the unused bedrooms you can look slantingly down three floors into the street through the holes made by a shell that struck the roof and plowed its way down, then out by a side wall into the road. Walking up to your room, you pass a point where the marble stairs are splintered and the wall pitted by scraps of iron; here two people were killed. Yet the Hotel Alfonso maintains its staff, and those of its rooms that still have walls and windows are occupied by paying guests.
The now world-famous Telefonica, Madrid’s riddled skyscraper in the center of the city, is still standing, proud but ragged, its telephone girls at work inside. The Madrid Post Office has no window-panes left whatsoever, but the mail still goes out. Around the Cibeles Fountain in front of the Post Office the street cars still pass, although the fountain itself with its lovely goddess is now concealed by a specially built housing of bricks and sandbags, so that the good-natured Madrileños have nicknamed it ‘Beauty Under Covers,’ laughing at their own wit.
Yes, people still laugh in Madrid. In this astonishing city of bravery and death, where the houses run right up to the trenches and some of the street-car lines stop only at the barricades, people still laugh, children play in the streets, and men buy comic papers as well as war news. The shell holes of the night before are often filled in by dawn, so efficient is the wrecking service and so valiantly do the Madrileños struggle to patch up their city.
A million people living on the front lines of a nation at war! The citizens of Madrid – what are they like? Not long ago a small shell fell in the study of a bearded professor of ancient languages. Frantically his wife and daughter came running to see if anything had happened to him. They found him standing in the center of the floor, holding the shell and shaking his head quizzically. ‘This little thing,’ he said, ‘this inanimate object, can’t do us much damage. It’s the philosophy that lies behind it, wife, the philosophy that lies behind it.’
In the Arguelles quarter to the north, nearest to the rebel lines – the neighborhood that has suffered most from bombardments and air raids – many of the taller apartment houses, conspicuous targets that they are, have been abandoned. But in the smaller houses of one and two stories people still live and go about their tasks. The Cuban poet, Alejo Carpentier, told me that one morning after a heavy shelling he passed a house of which part of the front wall was lying in the yard. A shell had passed through the roof, torn away part of the wall, carried with it the top of the family piano, and buried itself in the garden. Nevertheless, there at the piano sat the young daughter of the house, very clean and starched, her hair brushed and braided, her face shining. Diligently she was beating out a little waltz from a music book in front of her. The fact that the top of the piano had been shot away in the night did not seem to affect the chords. When passers-by asked about it, calling through the shell hole, the child said, ‘Yes, an obús came right through here last night. I’m going to help clean up the yard after a while, but I have to practice my lessons now. My music teacher’ll be here at eleven.’
The will to live and laugh in Madrid is the thing that constantly amazes a stranger. At the house where I am staying, sometimes a meal consists largely of bread and of soup made with bread. Everybody tightens his belt and grins, and somebody is sure to repeat good-naturedly an old Spanish saying, ‘Bread with bread – food for fools.’ Then we all laugh.
One of Franco’s ways of getting back at Madrid is to broadcast daily from his radio stations at Burgos and Seville the luncheon and dinner menus of the big hotels, the fine food that the Fascists are eating and the excellent wines they drink. (Rioja and the best of wine areas are in Fascist hands.) But Madrid has ways of getting even with the Fascists, too. Mola, a lover of cafes, said at the very beginning of the war that he would soon be drinking coffee in Madrid. He was mistaken. Then he said he would enter Madrid by the first of November. He didn’t. Then he swore he would enter the city on the eighth of December. He didn’t. But on the evening of the eighth some wag remembered, and the crowds passing that night in Madrid’s darkened Puerta del Sol saw by moonlight in the very center of the square a coffee table, carefully set, the coffee poured, and neatly pinned to the white cloth a large sign reading ‘For Mola.’
Bread and coffee are scarce in Madrid, and so are cigarettes. The only cigarettes offered for sale more or less regularly are small, hard, and very bad. They are so bad that though they cost thirty centimos before the war they bring only tw
enty now despite their comparative scarcity. The soldiers call them ‘recruit-killers,’ jocularly asserting that they are as dangerous to the new men in the army as are bombs and bullets.
Bad cigarettes, poor wine, little bread, no soap, no sugar! Madrid, dressed in bravery and laughter; knowing death and the sound of guns by day and night, but resolved to live, not die!
The moving-picture theaters are crowded. Opening late in the afternoon and compelled to close at nine, they give only one or two showings a day. One evening an audience was following with great interest an American film. Suddenly an obús fell in the street outside. There was a tremendous detonation, but nobody moved from his seat. The film went on. Soon another fell, nearer and louder than before, shaking the whole building. The manager went out into the lobby and looked up and down the Gran Via. Overhead he heard the whine of shells. He went inside and mounted the stage to say that, in view of the shelling, he thought it best to stop the picture. Before he had got the words out of his mouth he was greeted with such a hissing and booing and stamping of feet and calls for the show to go on that he shrugged his shoulders in resignation and signaled the operator to continue. The house was darkened. The magic of Hollywood resumed its spell. While Franco’s shells whistled dangerously over the theater, the film went its make-believe way to a thrilling denouement. The picture was called ‘Terror in Chicago.’
Langston Hughes was born in Missouri in 1902. A leading member of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes went to Spain in 1937 as a correspondent for Afro-American newspapers.
On his way to Spain, he spoke at the Second International Writers Congress in Paris on the links between fascism and racism: ‘...I come from a land whose democracy from the very beginning has been tainted with race prejudice born of slavery, and whose richness has been poured through the narrow channels of greed into the hands of the few.’
As a black man, Hughes understood the very special oppression of the Moors, African soldiers enlisted to fight in Franco’s army. In his ‘Letter from Spain’, he explains the feelings of the black soldiers of the International Brigade about fighting the Moors:
And as he lay there dying
In a village we had taken.
I looked across to Africa
And seed foundations shakin’.
Cause if a free Spain wins this war,
The colonies, too, are free –
Then something wonderful’ll happen
To them Moors as dark as me.
Hughes’ stature in the Hispanic world grew from this moment on and his writings were translated and celebrated throughout the Spanish-speaking world. He died in New York in 1967.
MIKA ETCHEBÉHÈRE
OF LICE AND BOOKS
from Ma Guerre d’Espagne à Moi
translated by Nick Caistor
A NIGHT SPENT COUGHING and scratching is even longer than one when you can’t sleep, because it’s impossible to fill it with thoughts, memories or ideas. If only I could have the luxury of really coughing, of getting rid of this choking sensation I feel in my chest all the time. I cover my head, cough under the blanket, I feel I’m suffocating, my temples are about to explode, I want to throw up. At the same time, I scratch until I feel my fingernails are wet with blood.
In the morning, I tell myself, I’ll go and see the doctor. I won’t eat any more tinned stuff, and I’ll ask him for a cream. But where and when could I spread it on? I haven’t undressed for three weeks... I could ask the male nurse to leave me on my own in the clinic for a moment, but that would only emphasize my difference to the others, the fact of being a woman.
My skin is burning, my eyes sting, my back hurts. Very slowly, I wrap myself in the blanket and start to crawl towards the door. Suddenly, I hear Rogelio’s voice:
‘Where are you going? I’m as wide-awake as you. Would you like me to heat up some coffee?’
‘No, I’m just going outside for a while so I can cough properly. Sleep, I don’t want any coffee. In the morning if I’m not better I’ll go and see the doctor. Let me go out.’
‘It’s so cold out there you’ll catch pneumonia. Stay here and cough all you like, you’re not disturbing anyone: just listen to the commander snore. I can’t sleep because of my stomachache. Have a spoonful of cough medicine, come on, do as you’re told.’
I swallow the cough mixture, sit with my back against the wall, and end up dozing off in a kind of torpor, interrupted from time to time by coughing fits. A stabbing pain in my right shoulder jerks me fully awake. Is it muscular, or does it come from somewhere deeper? It doesn’t get any worse when I breathe in, so I decide it’s because of the position I’m sitting in. It’s time to get up anyway, Rogelio and the commander are already having breakfast.
‘I heard you coughing a lot in the night,’ says the commander. ‘It’s time you went to see a doctor in Madrid. You’re not getting any sleep, or hardly any at all; you can’t go on like this.’
‘I’m sure it’s nothing more than a heavy cold, or at worst a touch of bronchitis, it’s not serious because during the day I hardly cough at all. It’s not so much the cough as the urticaria that worries me, I’m sure it’s the tinned food.’
‘Or the lice,’ says Rogelio. ‘I don’t see why you wouldn’t have them like everybody else. Those little creatures are no respecters of rank.’
‘But my head doesn’t itch ... ’
‘That’s because you’ve got them on your body, like all the rest of us,’ Rogelio insists. ‘If I were you I’d go and undress in the first-aid post to check.’
‘It could indeed be lice,’ the commander says. ‘That’s one more reason to go to Madrid. You could also take advantage of the journey to fetch some new books. It was a good idea to give the militia something to read, and an even better one to set up a school. When I told Colonel Tomas about it, he said he would give the order for it to be adopted by the whole brigade. He wants you to go and tell him the best way to put it into practice.’
‘I’ll go with you,’ Rogelio says. ‘If we arrive in time for breakfast the colonel’s wife will give us some fried bread with chocolate, like the last time. If you want to change socks, here’s a dry pair.’
We are out of luck, and arrive too late. Colonel Tomás and his wife have already had breakfast. Everything in the room is very tidy. It’s obvious there is a woman in charge of the household. Lots of the men are unhappy about family life like this at the front, but not me. Besides, I like the wife a lot. She has a soft voice, looks you straight in the eye, and has the manners of a well-behaved child. The only thing I find shocking is that she is so young. She can’t be more than twenty, whereas the colonel must be around forty.
Colonel Tomás asks me how to obtain books and school equipment. I explain that the Madrid bookshop owners give everything for free when they’re told it’s for the front, and suggest what I think are the most suitable kinds of book: romances, adventure novels or thrillers, and illustrated magazines, even foreign ones, provided they have good reproductions. As for the school at the front, it isn’t just for those who can’t read or write. We have had to organize a course at a higher level for the militiamen who want to improve their handwriting or their knowledge of arithmetic. We ought to extend the libraries and the school to wherever a lack of action allows it, not simply as an antidote to monotony, nostalgia and the harshness of life in the trenches, but to promote an education that doesn’t require many resources.
‘I’m so convinced you’re right,’ says Colonel Tomás, ‘that straight-away today I’m going to send a message to the other battalions in the brigade, recommending they create a school and a library.’
‘Wouldn’t you care for some coffee?’ the colonel’s wife suggests in her gentle, melodious voice.
‘Thank you very much, it’ll have to be some other day,’ I say, ‘it’s already late.’
I don’t know if my voice betrays it, but all of a sudden this peaceful conjugal scene irritates me as an injustice, a lack of respect for all the men who have neith
er home nor wife, the ones scratching day and night at their lice in the trenches.
My anger is directed not at the young girl with humble gestures, but to the man, the colonel, the leader who gives himself permission to disregard the harsh law imposed by the solitude and misery the mass of combatants have to suffer. On our return journey, I won’t allow Rogelio to talk of ‘the good life that fellow enjoys.’
‘It could be that he’s ill,’ I say, ‘and he needs to have someone with him who can take care of him and look after him. His skin is so yellow he could well have liver problems. Let’s leave it at that. There are women as well at Puerta de Hierro, and nobody thinks that’s odd.’
‘That’s because there the militia women cook and clean for everyone, they’re not the wives of any particular officer; they’re not there to sleep with them.’
We have more visitors at the command post. They are officers from a battalion in our brigade who want to learn more about the libraries. Two of them are primary school teachers and are especially interested in our school. As is only fair, before we begin discussing important matters, we drink a glass of the horrible brandy which has popularly become known as ‘rat poison’, apparently made from pure alcohol.
I start scratching furiously, excusing myself by saying I must have eczema caused by the tinned food, some sort of vitamin deficiency. I slip my hand into my sleeve to scratch my arm, and up by my elbow I feel something crawling on my skin. I grasp it between thumb and first finger, thinking it must be a small scab, but of course it’s an enormous, monstrous louse with a dark, striped back. It is waving its legs desperately in the air, and looking me in the eye, yes, looking at me, even if nobody believes that a louse can look.
Humiliated, not knowing what to do with this ghastly creature I’m clutching in my fingers – I can hear the others laughing and saying ‘That’s some deficiency!’ – I rush out to the first-aid post, where fortunately I find no-one. I squash the louse under my nail on the edge of a table, and start to strip off. My brassiere is crawling with lice. I stamp on it furiously, then put my jersey and oilskin back on. I return to the command post, where the commander asks if I want to go to Madrid.
