by Pete Ayrton
They couldn’t find the mayor or the priest.
‘The doctor’s mother helped them escape on a straw wagon,’ said two of the women who were on their way to plough, babies strapped to their backs.
The Duke’s palace was closed up, as ever. They slit the caretaker Gracián’s throat with a sickle, and strode over his body. He lay there outside the door with its big rose-shaped iron studs, as if he had collapsed on his own silence. His blood congealed in the sun, a prey to the flies’ gluttony. A strange breeze had blown up that dried the sweat. Everybody in the village was curious to discover the inside of the Palace. The Duke only went there once on a hunting expedition; and Gracian would never let anyone in, not even for a quick glimpse.
Part of the Palace was visible from Mariana’s window. The shutter was finally raised, without fear of the sun. To his surprise, he stood facing it, only too aware of his soft, white flesh, his wrinkles, the lines beneath his eyes, the black, moist down on his legs. The sun inundated him cruelly, with a stab of sharp, uneasy pain. He stared at the Palace. Its sloping green roofs rose proudly above the low clay tiles of Calle de los Pobres, its stone escutcheons stained by swallows’ droppings, the balcony with the painting and its iron bars. He stood motionless at the window, like a statue of salt, while the armed men swarmed up Calle de los Pobres, and saw him. He heard their footsteps on the stairs, but didn’t even turn round until they called out to him.
The leader of the mob lived three villages further up. The schoolmaster knew him from having seen him occasionally at the market. He sold leather harnesses. His name was Gregorio, and he had two grenades in his belt, as well as the only rifle. He must have taken it from one of the Civil Guards they had killed at dawn that day.
He pointed to him and asked:
‘What about him?’
‘Him? Who knows?’ replied El Chato, shrugging his shoulders. He suddenly remembered El Chato as a boy. Still full of good intentions, he had told El Chato back then: ‘The sun and the earth... ’ bah! Now here he was, with the same widely-spaced, staring eyes full of pained suspicion.
He stepped towards them, feeling beneath the soles of his feet the floor that was hot now, but still slippery from the water. He faced them with the same doleful courage that he had confronted the sun, and said, beating his chest:
‘Me? You really want to know how I live?’
And like a boil that has been growing for a long, long time, it was as though his tongue finally burst:
‘Me? If you want to know how I live, let me tell you: in hunger and misery. Hunger, misery, and thirst, and humiliation, and all the injustice of this earth. That’s how I live. And it burns deep inside from breathing it in for so long... Do you hear me, big man? Hunger and misery my whole life through! Giving everything in return for this... ’
He flung open the small door to his bedroom, and they could see the black iron bedstead, the dirty, crumpled sheet, the straw mattress. The trunk, the peeling wall, the sad naked bulb dangling from a wire covered in flies.
‘For this: for that stinking bed, a plate of food at that table at mid-day, and another at night-time, my whole life through... Do you see that trunk? It’s full of knowledge. The knowledge I devoured at the cost of my dignity... that’s right, in exchange for my dignity, all that knowledge. And now... this.’
Gregorio was staring at him open-mouthed. El Chato explained, with another shrug:
‘He’s the schoolmaster, you see... ’
‘Oh, alright then,’ said Gregorio, as if relieved. Dropping the rifle on to the table, he poured himself some wine. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he said:
‘So you know about reading and writing... Good, I need people like you.’
‘And I,’ he replied, in a hoarse, almost inaudible voice: ‘I also need: people like you.’
4
They went after all those who, without him knowing or even suspecting it, he had engraved on the darkness of his immense thirst, his failure. He was the one who uncovered the priest’s hiding place, and the mayor’s. He knew in which hayloft, which corner they would be. A sharp lucidity led him on to places the others had not even imagined.
‘What doesn’t this fellow know... ?’ asked El Chato with surprise.
Gregorio wondered the same that night:
‘How much do you know, mister?’
Then a muffled peace fell on the village. Only the anger, the setting fire to the church and the mayor’s hayloft stayed in the memory. They were finally inside the Palace, in the Yellow Room, with the big balcony open on to the night. On the table, the Duke’s wines and wine-glasses. And the pale July night turning pink beyond the roofs, down by the church. There was no sound from the bulls anywhere. They had been dispersed, and the boy looking after them was below, drinking with El Chato and Berenguela’s boys. The others were doing the rounds of the houses, one by one. A big bonfire outside the Palace gates was consuming paintings and objects, male and female saints, books and clothing.
He was talking to Gregorio, even though Gregorio did not understand him. Gregorio was staring at him as he drank his wine. Looking and listening, trying hard to understand. It had been such a long time since he had talked to anyone!
‘I was taken in as a child, my studies were paid for... in exchange for living like a slave, to be the old woman’s plaything, do you hear? Turning me into a miserable dummy, for that swine of a woman... ’
The nauseating memory of the Great Godmother’s parchment-like skin came back to him, and her mansion that was similar to the Palace, with the same smell of mould and wet dust. Her clinging caresses, her alcoholic breath, the pearls on her wrinkled bosom.
‘Aha, so you paid the price, did you? She used you as... ’ said Gregorio with a dark laugh, winking his right eye.
‘That was what I had to pay. Do you understand, Gregorio? But I escaped all that, I wanted to make everything better, to make sure what was happening to me wouldn’t happen to any other young boy. I slipped through her fingers and started to fight alone, with a faith ... with a faith that... ’
His ideas came back to him, fresh and new. His desire for revenge, but a revenge without violence, a reasoned, constructive revenge:
‘So that it wouldn’t happen to any other young boy... But what has happened to me here? I don’t know. I don’t know, Gregorio.’
All at once he was overwhelmed by an immense weariness:
‘I’m as rotten as a dead man.’
And yet a day, an hour had arrived. Dust and fire spinning and spinning around dust and fire. Outside, the Duke’s books and saints were burning. And there, on the wall above them, was the enchanting canvas. He lifted his gaze to it once more. The painting seemed to fill the whole room. ‘Perhaps if I had owned a painting like that... or had painted it... perhaps things would have been different,’ he told himself.
‘Now everything is going to change,’ said Gregorio. ‘Aren’t you drinking?’
He was thirsty. He didn’t usually drink wine, but this was different. Suddenly everything was different. ‘Perhaps I was afraid of wine... ’
At that moment El Chato came in and said:
‘It’s time for this one,’ pointing to the painting.
‘No, not that one,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
‘Because no. Just because.’
El Chato came up to him:
‘Are you a church-goer then? You never went there!’
‘I’ve got nothing to do with the church, but don’t touch that painting.’
Gregorio stood up, curious. He bent over the small gilt plaque on the frame, reading it awkwardly. Then he burst out laughing:
‘You don’t want it touched because it’s called THE MASTER?’
Without knowing how, an image flashed through his mind of a big Cross that was taken out whenever there was a drought, swaying from side to side above the fields. A man with gaping wounds, covered in blood. And the old women’s chants: ‘Oh sweet master, have pity... ’
He was a horrible sight, with his blood and wounds. But that wasn’t the reason. Even though it was written there – as he knew very well, from staring at it so often through the window – even though it said: THE MASTER.
He shuddered the way he did when he went down to the river and the wind blew. And the man in the portrait was there as well; so big, so utterly alone, with his raised hand. His pale, narrow face, his long black hair, those dark eyes that always, always followed him wherever he hid...
‘Because you’re a master too?’ laughed Gregorio, pouring himself more of the Duke’s wine. He thought: ‘Master? Master of what?’
Then he saw the pair of them. The two of them: El Chato and Gregorio, staring at him like larvae over in the damp school. With exactly the same expression in their eyes as when he told them: ‘The earth revolves around the sun... ’ Oh, the mockery. Those incredulous peasant eyes, the utter pointlessness of words. I NEED PEOPLE LIKE YOU. He had been dreaming the whole day, the whole day.
‘Give me some anisette: isn’t there any?’
No, there wasn’t any. Only wine. El Chato took out his knife and slashed the portrait from top to bottom.
As calmly as when he laughed without a hint of joy: ‘Ha ha ha’; just as calmly he picked up Gregorio’s rifle and fired at El Chato’s stomach. El Chato’s mouth gaped, and he fell slowly to his knees, staring and staring at him. Gregorio leapt like a snake. He stopped him, pointing the gun at him. And once again the two men’s eyes stared at him: one pair closing in death; the other pair flooded with amazement, anger, fear. He cried out:
‘Don’t you understand? Don’t you understand a thing?’
Gregorio’s hand moved: perhaps he was trying to reach one of the grenades he was so childishly exhibiting. (Like the schoolboys with their cans of lizards, tadpoles, sloes; like schoolboys who understand nothing, who are weary before their time, and don’t want to know anything about the sun and the earth, the stars and fog, the weather, or mathematics; like the boys who crucify the devil in bats, and throw stones at their schoolmaster, hidden behind the brambles; like those boys who lay traps and trip people up, and scoff and laugh, and moan when they are caned; and burn time, life, the whole of man, all hope...) Just like them, there in front of him once more were the burning eyes, the look of blank amazement that was born of another, vaster and interminable amazement he could not grasp. He said:
‘Here’s one for you too, and you can thank me for it.’
He shot at Gregorio not once but twice, three times. Then he threw away the rifle, went down the stairs and out of the back door into the countryside. With a loud, solitary cry he escaped, he fled and fled. Just as he had wanted to flee for almost twenty-five years.
5
He roamed the countryside for two days like a wolf, eating blackberries and wild strawberries, hiding in the bats’ caves, near the ravine. From there he could hear the bulls again as they splashed in the water and on the pebbles. The bulls who had escaped, fearful of the church on fire, their bearings lost.
On the third day he saw the trucks arriving. This was the other side, the new ones. The revolution announced by Mariana had been snuffed out by these others.
He came back down into the village slowly, the sun blinding him. He was unshaven, and had the smell of death in his nostrils. Almost as soon as he reached the square, opposite the Palace, he saw them with their military jackets and tall boots, their black pistols. The old women who had once said: ‘How well-combed his hair is, and he wears shoes all day’, the ones who used to say ‘crazy, off his head!’ now pointed him out again. They had dragged out the swollen bodies of the mayor and the priest like two sacks of potatoes. And the black, scaly fingers of the old women pointed at him and Berenguela’s young boys:
‘Murderers! Murderers!’
Just as he was, with three days’ beard and shirt open over his chest, they arrested him.
‘Let me get something,’ he asked them. They let him go into Mariana’s house, keeping a gun on him. He went up to the bed, unknotted the tie from the bars, and put it on. When the truck pulled away, with his hands fastened behind his back, he had his eyes closed.
They lined the three Berenguela boys up on the river bank. He was the last. The air was warm, fragrant. The youngest of Berenguela’s sons, just turned sixteen, shouted at him:
‘Traitor!’
(Somewhere there was the man with his hand raised, calling out. A man with his hand raised, slashed from top to bottom by the clumsy knife of a boy, of an incomplete human larva; a grain of dust pursuing a ball of dust, a ball of dust pursuing a ball of fire.) The hot July sun carried the echo of the shots into the distance. He rolled down the bank towards the water. And he suddenly knew that always, always, denied any other love, he loved the river, with its reeds and its yellow broom, its round, smooth pebbles, its poplar trees. The river where upstream the frightened, tame bulls were splashing, still bellowing. He knew he loved it and that was why he rolled down towards it and began to stare at the water, as he stared at it on certain evenings in his life, when the cold weather was beginning.
Born in Barcelona in 1926, Ana María Matute was sent at the age of four to live with her grandparents in the mountain town of Mansilla de la Sierra. The mountain people that she grew up with feature constantly in her fiction. In the ‘posguerra’ (post-war) period, her writing attracted the attention of Franco’s censors, who forced her, on many occasions, to make changes to her writings. As she said ‘They called me irreverent, immoral, they twisted everything.’ Matute’s best-known novels are the trilogy The Awakening, Soldiers Cry in the Night and The Trap, which traces the history of a girl from the beginning of the Civil War to the 1960s. Matute believed that the post-war period was crucial in forming the literature of her generation:
The ‘dazed children’ as I call my generation, grew up into discontented adolescents who rebelled against all forms of mysticism and myth and refused to identify with a world governed by rewards and punishment, by good and bad men. The wolf was beginning to emerge from his sheep’s clothing.
Winner of the Cervantes Prize in 2010, Matute died in Barcelona in 2014. This story is from her 1961 collection El Arrepentido.
GEORGE ORWELL
TWO MEMORIES
from ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’
Two memories, the first not proving anything in particular, the second, I think, giving one a certain insight into the atmosphere of a revolutionary period.
Early one morning another man and I had gone out to snipe at the Fascists in the trenches outside Huesca. Their line and ours here lay three hundred yards apart, at which range our aged rifles would not shoot accurately, but by sneaking out to a spot about a hundred yards from the Fascist trench you might, if you were lucky, get a shot at someone through a gap in the parapet. Unfortunately the ground between was a flat beetfield with no cover except a few ditches, and it was necessary to go out while it was still dark and return soon after dawn, before the light became too good. This time no Fascists appeared, and we stayed too long and were caught by the dawn. We were in a ditch, but behind us were two hundred yards of flat ground with hardly enough cover for a rabbit. We were still trying to nerve ourselves to make a dash for it when there was an uproar and a blowing of whistles in the Fascist trench. Some of our aeroplanes were coming over. At this moment a man, presumably carrying a message to an officer, jumped out of the trench and ran along the top of the parapet in full view. He was half-dressed and was holding up his trousers with both hands as he ran. I refrained from shooting at him. It is true that I am a poor shot and unlikely to hit a running man at a hundred yards, and also that I was thinking chiefly about getting back to our trench while the Fascists had their attention fixed on the aeroplanes. Still, I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.
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What does this incident demonstrate? Nothing very much, because it is the kind of thing that happens all the time in all wars. The other is different. I don’t suppose that in telling it I can make it moving to you who read it, but I ask you to believe that it is moving to me, as an incident characteristic of the moral atmosphere of a particular moment in time.
One of the recruits who joined us while I was at the barracks was a wild-looking boy from the back streets of Barcelona. He was ragged and barefooted. He was also extremely dark (Arab blood, I dare say), and made gestures you do not usually see a European make; one in particular – the arm outstretched, the palm vertical – was a gesture characteristic of Indians. One day a bundle of cigars, which you could still buy dirt cheap at that time, was stolen out of my bunk. Rather foolishly I reported this to the officer, and one of the scallywags I have already mentioned promptly came forward and said quite untruly that twenty-five pesetas had been stolen from his bunk. For some reason the officer instantly decided that the brown-faced boy must be the thief. They were very hard on stealing in the militia, and in theory people could be shot for it. The wretched boy allowed himself to be led off to the guardroom to be searched. What most struck me was that he barely attempted to protest his innocence. In the fatalism of his attitude you could see the desperate poverty in which he had been bred. The officer ordered him to take his clothes off. With a humility which was horrible to me he stripped himself naked, and his clothes were searched. Of course neither the cigars nor the money were there; in fact he had not stolen them. What was most painful of all was that he seemed no less ashamed after his innocence had been established. That night I took him to the pictures and gave him brandy and chocolate. But that too was horrible – I mean the attempt to wipe out an injury with money. For a few minutes I had half believed him to be a thief, and that could not be wiped out.
