No Pasarán!

by Pete Ayrton

  Well, a few weeks later, at the front, I had trouble with one of the men in my section. By this time I was a ‘cabo’, or corporal, in command of twelve men. It was static warfare, horribly cold, and the chief job was getting sentries to stay awake and at their posts. One day a man suddenly refused to go to a certain post, which he said, quite truly, was exposed to enemy fire. He was a feeble creature, and I seized hold of him and began to drag him towards his post. This roused the feelings of the others against me, for Spaniards, I think, resent being touched more than we do. Instantly I was surrounded by a ring of shouting men: ‘Fascist! Fascist! Let that man go! This isn’t a bourgeois army. Fascist!’ etc., etc. As best I could in my bad Spanish I shouted back that orders had got to be obeyed, and the row developed into one of those enormous arguments by means of which discipline is gradually hammered out in revolutionary armies. Some said I was right, others said I was wrong. But the point is that the one who took my side the most warmly of all was the brown-faced boy. As soon as he saw what was happening he sprang into the ring and began passionately defending me. With his strange, wild, Indian gesture he kept exclaiming, ‘He’s the best corporal we’ve got!’ (¡No hay cabo como el!). Later on he applied for leave to exchange into my section.

  Why is this incident touching to me? Because in any normal circumstances it would have been impossible for good feelings ever to be re-established between this boy and myself. The implied accusation of theft would not have been made any better, probably somewhat worse, by my efforts to make amends. One of the effects of safe and civilised life is an immense over-sensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions seem somewhat disgusting. Generosity is as painful as meanness, gratitude as hateful as ingratitude. But in Spain in 1936 we were not living in a normal time. It was a time when generous feelings and gestures were easier than they ordinarily are. I could relate a dozen similar incidents, not really communicable but bound up in my own mind with the special atmosphere of the time, the shabby clothes and the gay-coloured revolutionary posters, the universal use of the word ‘comrade’, the anti-Fascist ballads printed on flimsy paper and sold for a penny, the phrases like ‘international proletarian solidarity’, pathetically repeated by ignorant men who believed them to mean something. Could you feel friendly towards somebody, and stick up for him in a quarrel, after you had been ignominiously searched in his presence for property you were supposed to have stolen from him? No, you couldn’t; but you might if you had both been through some emotionally widening experience. That is one of the by-products of revolution, though in this case it was only the beginnings of a revolution, and obviously foredoomed to failure.

  George Orwell was born Eric Arthur Blair in Bengal in 1903. Homage to Catalonia, his book about his experiences during the Spanish Civil War, is a classic. Orwell went to Spain a man of the left: he went to fight fascism. But in Spain, he found that to do this was far from straightforward. Political infighting between the communists, the anarchists and the POUM made cooperation on the front difficult and in the cities created an explosive situation that erupted in the 1937 May Days of Barcelona. The victory of the communists in the fighting led to the dispersal and outlawing of the POUM, mass arrests of workers by the Republican government and the dissolution of the agricultural collectives of Aragon; voluntary militias were absorbed into the regular army of the Republic. As a supporter and member of the POUM, Orwell was clearly living on borrowed time and, with his wife, escaped to France in June 1937. The warrant for his arrest in Spain stated that he was wanted for ‘rabid Trotskyism’. In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell wrote of these days: ‘No one who was in Barcelona then, or for months later, will forget the horrible atmosphere produced by fear, suspicion, hatred, censored newspapers, crammed jails, enormous food queues and prowling gangs of armed men.’ Orwell’s writing on the Civil War is an attempt to convey what it was like for individuals. Orwell said that all he could write about was what he and other eyewitnesses saw in those heroic days. As more and more documents of the time become available, the accuracy of his testimony is confirmed. Orwell died in London in 1950.

  JOAN SALES

  ‘ACCURSED BOURGEOISIE,

  YOU SHALL ATONE FOR

  YOUR CRIMES!’

  from Uncertain Glory

  translated by Peter Bush

  17 May

  How mysterious that so many people cannot see mystery anywhere: I mean the incredulity of people whose starting point is the belief that nobody can believe. We should really pity them like those plain witless children one ought to love but can’t...

  Luckily, that’s not by any means true of my father. He believes: he perhaps never grasps what, but he does believe. Else how do you explain his life? La barrinada... do you remember how we distributed it on the streets? We never sold a single copy.

  That hapless weekly still appears every Thursday, now with articles against the ‘cannibals disguised as anarchists’, the ‘hyenas who dishonour the most humane of social philosophies’. Hyenas are one of his obsessions, though I don’t think he has the faintest idea what a hyena looks like. I don’t believe he could tell an owl from a magpie, and apart from pine trees – which anyone can identify – I suspect he couldn’t name any species of tree. My poor dad, who was born and has lived in the heart of Barcelona and whose only excursions have been occasional Sunday trips to Les Planes with its ocean of greasy paper and empty sardine tins.

  He must be thinking of Les Planes when he writes his articles on Nature in La barrinada: wondrous Nature would cure the world’s ills if she were only allowed to work unfettered. His beloved paper would reduce the whole of medicine to lemon, garlic and onion: he’s almost a vegetarian, and if he doesn’t agree with nudists it’s because, in spite of everything, he still clings to vestiges of a sense of the ridiculous.

  How can a person as harmless as my father arouse so much hatred in other anarchists? I don’t know if you heard about it – some dailies covered the story but I’m not sure they reach the front – but supporters of La Soli attacked the editorial offices of La barrinada, that is, our flat on carrer de l’Hospital, a few weeks ago, long before the events earlier this month, and threw off the balcony a pile of back copies – unsold issues – that we kept in the lumber room.* Luckily the police arrived before they could do worse damage. The government even advised my father and his friends to arm themselves, avoid being caught off guard, and be ready to repel fresh attacks. ‘The only arms I need are ideas’ was all he would say.

  A few weeks after you and Lluís went to the front a taxi brought him home one day with his face covered in blood. It gave me a fright but fortunately it wasn’t serious. That great lifelong friend of his, Cosme, had brought him in the taxi – you may remember that short plump fellow with a pock-marked face, a turner by trade, who often came to our clandestine meetings. Cosme in fact supports the C.N.T. but is a close friend of my father’s and he told me what happened while I washed Father’s face with hydrogen peroxide: ‘Just imagine, Trini,’ Cosme said. ‘A train of anarchist volunteers was leaving the estació de França for Madrid and my grandson was one of them – that’s why I was in the station. The place was packed, what with people leaving and those who’d come to bid them farewell. All of a sudden we heard this bawling: “What are you doing, you wretches? Where are you going? You want to impose your ideas with guns? Have you let them militarise you? What happened to our principles that you always supported?” They weren’t far off lynching him as an agent provocateur! Lucky I spotted him! It was your father, old Milmany – who else could it be? It was one hell of a struggle to drag him away: he was refusing to come. I imagine he didn’t recognise me, he was so overexcited. As I dragged him out of the station by the arm he was still bellowing: “You’re off to defend Madrid? That octopus sucking our blood?’”

  Father said nothing as I washed the cuts on his face. Luckily they were only scratches inflicted by a handful of women who’d grabbed him. Cosme talked and talked: ‘I love your father, Trini. How can I not
love him when we’ve always been friends? I love him more than he knows but it’s sometimes very hard to keep faith with him. If volunteers don’t go to the front, if we don’t wage war with machine guns and cannons, the fascists will win and we’ll be done for.’ ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s hard to see how any ideas can ever triumph if they reject any kind of organised strength.’ I immediately regretted saying that: my father looked at me so sadly; he’d not said a word till then. ‘Trini, everybody is a pacifist in peacetime.’ He kept looking at me. ‘Cosme was too, and now... you’ve heard him. The point is to be one always, in times of peace and times of war, whatever the situation. If not, it would mean nothing; there’d be no point in calling oneself a pacifist.’

  Father stayed with me a few hours, during which I discovered that Llibert was climbing the greasy pole. ‘He’s got an office like a minister’s,’ he told me, ‘with twenty typists and countless employees jumping to obey his orders. He has a cream limousine with a uniformed chauffeur who opens the door for him, standing to attention and saluting. It’s a requisitioned vehicle, naturally; it must have been the Marquis de Marianao’s, and I expect they requisitioned car and chauffeur alongside everything else.’

  ‘Has Llibert no shame?’ I asked.

  ‘One day he wanted to show off and drive me home and I was the one who died of shame when I saw how our neighbours on carrer de l’Hospital who know me well were looking at me: they were amazed to see me in a vast vehicle that was so silent, creamy and shiny! And when his repulsive flunkey opened the door, stood to attention and saluted us militarily... I wanted the earth to open and swallow me up! If Llibert hasn’t gone to the front like your man,’ he added, ‘don’t think it’s because he’s keeping faith with the pacifist principles I inculcated in you from childhood – not at all! Later I’ll tell you about his wall posters. If he hasn’t gone to the front it’s because he thinks he’s more useful in the rearguard: to believe him, he is absolutely indispensable in Barcelona, he is irreplaceable because thanks to him, as he readily tells you, we are winning the war. We are winning the war, he says, thanks to the propaganda battle... ’

  In effect, they had made my brother something like the executive director ofWar Propaganda. It turns out that he was the one who plastered – and still does – the city walls with those justly famous posters: ‘Make tanks, make tanks, make tanks, it’s the vehicle of victory!’ or else ‘Barbers, break those chains!’† And so many others, half in Catalan and half in Castilian, respecting the two joint official languages, which would make us split our sides if Barcelona were in the mood.

  One of these posters makes me want to vomit whenever I see it: it shows a wounded soldier dragging himself along the ground and making one last mighty effort to lift his head and point a finger: ‘And what did you do for victory?’ This is the offering from my brother and the other people safely ensconced in the Propaganda department offices! Posters encouraging others to go to the front are his speciality. There’s also the enigmatic variety, abstract posters where you can only see blotches of colour, and amid the crazy chiaroscuro mess of light and shade it says: ‘Liberatories of prostitution’. I’ve never met anyone who understands what that one’s all about. At the other extreme there’s a very specific one: a hen on a balcony accompanied by a slogan: ‘The battle for eggs’. Apparently the idea is to suggest that if each citizen of Barcelona were to keep a hen on the balcony, nobody would go hungry. As if hens don’t need grain to lay eggs! As if poor hens live on fresh air!

  It seems all this is the work of Llibert, or at least so says his father. He’s not only involved in poster production. His hyper-activity encompasses broad and complex fields: the man is a walking encyclopaedia! He is behind various newspapers in Catalan and Castilian, all encouraging people to go to the front; he gives talks on the radio in a quivering tone that gives me the shivers, all to the same end; he contracts foreign lecturers to give similar talks – world famous celebrities nobody has heard of – and organises performances of ‘theatre for the masses’ ...

  This ‘theatre for the masses’ deserves special mention. According to Llibert, proletarian theatre must be performed by the masses. From what I’ve heard – I’ve never set foot inside – the masses fill the stage while the theatre remains empty, since nobody ever goes. This is the reverse of what used to happen when there were few actors – hardly any – and the theatre was packed from the stalls to the gods. Apparently that was bourgeois theatre.

  Llibert’s stirring dynamism and boldness aren’t at all challenged by the difficulties of organising an equally proletarian opera season. He has requisitioned the Liceu and all they put on is proletarian opera. I don’t know where my beloved brother found the libretti and music for the operas he stages, because I’ve not set foot there either, but a friend of mine from the science faculty, Maria Engràcia Bosch, was intrigued enough to go. She’s a person I meet up with now and then and she tells me about what’s happening in Barcelona: if it weren’t for her, I’d never have found out. We met at the faculty years ago and although she’s quite a bit older than me and was in her final year when I was only beginning, we felt close because we’re from the same neighbourhood: she lives off carrer de Sant Pau.

  I bumped into her not long ago on the Rambla and she invited me to a cup of malt in a café: ‘I’ve things to tell you,’ said Maria Engràcia Bosch. And she told me that as she often walked past the Liceu, that’s on the corner of Sant Pau and very close to her house, she was intrigued by the proletarian opera they were advertising and one evening couldn’t resist the temptation to go – I should add that the price of tickets to the Liceu is now within anyone’s reach. She was one of the six who made up the audience that evening, and to compensate maybe two hundred people were on stage: ‘Opera for the masses, right! Where on earth did your brother get the score and libretto? An unbelievably awful tearjerker about a people’s uprising! The exploited masses come and go on stage, exit to the right, walk back on from the left, singing incantations to the future with their fists held high. From the rather nebulous plot you gathered that one of the exploited proletarians, the youngest in fact and a tenor, was practising free love and caught a bad dose of gonorrhoea – one for the history books! He separates out from the masses and staggers to the front of the stage. There is a deafening drumroll and the masses sink into a highly tragic silence whilst the tenor threatens the six members of the audience with a grand flourish of his arm and blasts out the first line of an aria full of pathos: “Accursed bourgeoisie, you shall atone for your crimes!’”

  I couldn’t believe it but Maria Engràcia Bosch had seen it with her own eyes and heard it with her own ears.

  After this proletarian opera, what could one say of my darling brother Llibert that wouldn’t pale in comparison? People who have been to his office tell me he gives all and sundry a big welcoming hug, calls everyone ‘companion’ and is ultra friendly, that his every pore breathes out success, victory, dynamism, smarminess and efficiency; he is organisation, efficiency and audacity personified; he is the provident hand for all those seeking a ‘helping hand’ or a ‘voucher’.

  He brings one of Uncle Eusebi’s sayings to mind: ‘By dint of revolving around others, we end up believing that others revolve around ourselves.’ My brother had always wanted the entire world to revolve around him. When we were kids we crossed the courtyard of the Hospital of the Holy Cross four times a day going to and from our street to carrer del Carme, and the lay school where Mother and Father taught. He’d sometimes stop in front of the ‘little pen’ which is what we called the morgue; it looked out onto a side street that crossed Carme and a grille was all that separated it from passers-by. I had to hang on to the bars and stand on tiptoe to see the corpses. As they were laid out facing the grille, feet were what we saw best – yellow, filthy feet. Those feet were so sad! ‘Here’s the end that awaits us all,’ was Llibert’s invariable comment, ‘if we don’t look after number one!’ I must have been six or seven and he eleven or twelve.
In my eyes he was already a ‘grown-up’ who knew everything, the secrets of life and death, and I’d listen to him like an oracle. So a way existed to avoid ending up displaying one’s filthy feet to the people walking from carrer de l’Hospital to carrer del Carme. I thought when I was Llibert’s age I’d see it as clearly as he did.

  One morning we found the traffic had ground to a halt: a funeral cortège, the like of which I’ve not seen since, was coming from Bethlehem parish church; six huge horses caparisoned in black velvet were pulling a black and gold open carriage that contained a coffin resembling a chest made of silver and gold; men on foot, in breeches and wearing white wigs and black dalmatics escorted the carriage; behind came fifty or sixty priests intoning dirges for the dead and in their wake a band of gentlemen in frock coats and top hats. ‘Here’s a fellow who looked after number one,’ said Llibert. ‘Who?’ I asked. ‘The men in wigs?’ ‘No, love, they’re only the flunkeys.’

  They’ve yet to give him a state funeral, but it will happen! Don’t you find it incredible that people can envy a corpse? Anyway, he’s already got a uniformed chauffeur opening the door to his cream limousine.

  Perhaps you think I’m grousing too much, given that he’s my own brother, but I was really incensed by one barbed comment of his. I’d muttered something about his cream car and uniformed chauffeur and he roared back at me in a rage: ‘Yes, of course, you’ve got it all sewn up: a young guy from a rich family and an orphan to boot. I must look out for myself – it’s every man for himself, you know – I can’t go dowry hunting!’