by Pete Ayrton
The empty black bag: all that remained of her. Her role in life, in our life, had finished abruptly before the end of the first act.
Only twenty years later – during the preparations for the editing of Rossif’s film, Mourir à Madrid, the day you and some French friends were viewing a series of Spanish and foreign news and documentary films on the civil war – did the horror that dominated her last moments impose its sharp outline on your consciousness. A weekly news film from the Republican government, in its denunciations of the enemy’s aerial attacks on defenseless civilian populations, shows the results of the one suffered by Barcelona on that unforgettable seventeenth of March: alarm sirens, noisy explosions, scenes of panic, ruins, destruction, desolation, cartloads of corpses, hospital beds, wounded comforted by members of the government, an endless line of bodies laid out in the morgue. In the foreground the camera slowly pans the victims’faces and, soaked in cold sweat, you suddenly realize the harsh possibility that the face you fear may suddenly appear. Fortunately, the absent one, with a sense of elegance and modesty, hid in some way to spare you the traumatic, ill-timed reunion. But you were forced to rush from your seat, go to the bar, drink a glass of something, just the time necessary to hide your emotion from the rest and discuss the film with them as if nothing had happened.
The bond linking that death and the meaning of the civil war would not be apparent to you until the day when, now interested in politics, you began to be fascinated in eye-witness accounts and books on the recent history of Spain. Your religious and family education in the forties had succeeded in breaking the link between the two events. On the one hand, after the collective rosary that followed supper, you quickly prayed in a mechanical, routine fashion three Lord’s Prayers for the eternal rest of the absent one’s soul; on the other hand, you accepted without any reservations whatsoever the official version of the conflict as rehearsed by radio, newspapers, teachers, relatives, and all around you: a crusade undertaken by healthy, patriotic men against a Republic stained by all kinds of crimes and abominations. The stark, undeniable reality that your mother had been the victim of your side’s strategy of terror, a product of cold, hateful calculation, was ignored by your father and the rest of the family. The setbacks the former suffered – imprisonment, illness, widowhood – were, according to him, the work of a band of enemies generically labelled as ‘reds.’ Deprived of its context, clean and disinfected, your mother’s death was thus transformed into a kind of abstraction that, although it exempted the real guilty ones from their responsibility, emphasized conversely for you the unreal confusion of their fate. Although the ease with which this whitewashing operation was carried out may seem suspicious, the closed, conservative circle in which you live, the silent complicity of your home, the difficulty in getting objective information, spotlights once more the uncritical acceptance of the facts. It was only at university, when you befriended a student with ideas hostile to the regime and, thanks to him, got to know the books that told the story of the civil war from an opposite point of view, that the bandage fell from your eyes. Imbued with crude but refreshing Marxist principles – hostile to the reactionary values of your class – you began to focus on the events you experienced marginally from childhood from a very different perspective: Franco’s bombs – not the innate evil of the Republicans – were directly responsible for the break-up of your family.
To tell the truth – apart from that belated feeling of historical indignation – the early date of your mother’s departure took from her exit any real degree of grief. What was snatched from you then would weigh heavily on your destiny, but the consequences of your orphanhood would only appear later: alienation from the father figure, insipid religiosity, lack of patriotism, an instinctive rejection of any kind of authority, all the elements and features that later would fix your character no doubt have a close relationship to that state. However, to the extent that the affection for your mother vanished with her, you can say quite rigorously that rather than her son, the son of a woman who is and always will be unknown to you, you are a son of the civil war, its Messianism, cruelty, and anger: of the unhappy accumulation of circumstances that brought into the open the real entrails of the country and filled you with a youthful desire to abandon it forever.
You remember now, in the light of what you have just written, the episode with the axe: the destructive rage that overpowered you one morning in Barcelona, a few months after the war, when you were wandering through the house along with Luis.
At the back of the garden, in the space between the garage and a room used as a junk room, there were two cubbyholes for storing wood and coal beneath the space under the staircase that led to the terrace on the first floor. The junk room was crammed with furniture belonging to the family, awaiting, you suppose, the probable move to Torrentbó. You can remember a number of sofas, armchairs, consoles, corner shelves covered in dust and cobwebs where you used to hide to play at ghosts, happy in the midst of that mixture of valuable objects and broken or useless bric-a-brac. This spot had been transformed into your favorite hiding place when you came back from school until the day when, out of temper or whim, you took the axe from the woodpile and with your brother’s help proceeded to destroy its contents with ferocious enthusiasm.
Piece of furniture after piece of furniture, with no quarter given, you began to cut legs, arms, backs, chop tables, rip the stuffing out of chairs, break decorations, pull springs, bash chairs, possessed by a cheerful, absorbing sense of inspiration that you would not meet again, you think today, except in the act of creation, the exultant vandalism of adult writing: the pleasure of exorcising the symbols of a society, the conventions of a code suddenly perceived as an obstacle; an intense desire for vengeance against an ill-formed universe; the effusive, primeval impulse linked to the binomial of creation—discreation. What meaning can be given to this sudden, excited, enjoyable act of two brothers who were normally calm yet suddenly overtaken by a plan of destruction whose ultimate explanation was beyond them? A protest, accumulated rage, a desire to retaliate? Or boredom, pure lack of awareness, an attempt to imitate the grown-ups? The original cause of the scene, the swiftness and audacity of its execution, will always be an enigma impossible to resolve. You will then focus your memory on the image of those small boys who, with the blows of the axe, liberate in some way mysterious inner energy, perhaps the unconscious, secret desire to make their voices heard.
Juan Goytisolo, born in Barcelona in 1931, is one of Spain’s best-known writers. A bitter opponent of Franco’s regime, Goytisolo went into exile in France in 1956, vowing not to return until Franco’s death – until which time his novels were banned in Spain. Forbidden Territory, his autobiography from which this extract is taken, is, in the words of the TLS, ‘a moving and sympathetic portrait of how one courageous victim of the Franco régime fought his way out of a cultural and intellectual wasteland, educated himself, and went on to inflict a brilliant revenge on the social system which so isolated and insulted him’. Much of Goytisolo’s writing, including the trilogy that comprises Marks of Identity, Count Julian and Juan the Landless, is a celebration of the Arab contribution to Spanish culture which, for Goytisolo, has never recovered from the expulsion of the Moors in 1492. A brilliant essayist and controversial journalist, Goytisolo has lived in Marrakesh for the last twenty years. He was awarded the Cervantes Prize in 2015.
GAMEL WOOLSEY
PUNCTUAL BOMBS
from Death’s Other Kingdom
THE IMPROVEMENT IN THE STATE OF THINGS seemed to be continuing, and we began to hope that some arrangement would be come to between the various parties. We even hoped that perhaps the military coup had not really come off after all, and also that the Government would be able to dominate the revolutionary forces which seemed to be coming to the front. After all there had been so many military coups in Spain and so many revolutions, and so few of them had come to anything. Our village continued perfectly quiet, and in Malaga everything appeared almost n
ormal on the surface, but we began to hear sinister rumours of continual arrests and nightly murders by gangs in the city and also in some of the villages near us.
The Province of Malaga had practically become an independent state with almost the old limits of the Moorish Kingdom of Malaga. The little trains ran but they did not run very far, the posts arrived and went out, but they only went to a few places. Granada, Algeçiras, Cadiz, Seville had all become enemies and everyone thought in provinces – a Spanish habit at the best of times.
‘Granada is attacking us,’ people said. ‘Seville is attacking us.’ The capture of a town in the province of Granada was regarded as putting us one up on Granada. We had scored; and it was seriously suggested that the captured town should be incorporated in the Province of Malaga! This extreme federalism was more important to most of the country people than the class-war aspects of the struggle which some of their leaders were emphasising. They had always thought of the Granadinos as foreigners anyway, and there was nothing very surprising about their turning into active enemies.
Some of the villagers of course were very class-war conscious, and there was one remark which was common at the time which used to annoy me more than I can say. To my irritated ears it used to seem to go on all the time like a sort of chorus, and it was always spoken with maddening self-complacency. It was: ‘You can do nothing against the will of the people!’And I used to think that anyone silly enough to make such a remark at such a moment ought not to be allowed any exercise of the will at all. Another remark which was also common and annoyed me only slightly less, and was made with almost equal self-complacency was ‘If all the Provinces did their part as we have done it would be all over now. But now they want us to help them with their work.’ I used almost to join Maria in her snort of contempt when some villager who had taken no part in the struggle and had no intention of taking part in it unless it actually broke out in the street he lived in and forced itself in at his front door, used unctuously to produce this piece of wisdom again.
Still I can’t help thinking that it was really to the credit of the Malagueñans that they did not on the whole show any disposition for war. They were people of peace, and wanted to take as little part in this unnecessary struggle as possible. They never made any real attempt even to defend their city, which seems curious in Spain, the country of remarkable sieges. Malaga did not seem to us even at that time likely to be the scene of a second Numantia or Saragossa; and time was to prove that we were right.
But those appalling sieges for which Spain is famous, sieges which seemed designed to show how much human beings can force themselves to endure without even hope to aid them, have always taken place in the north of Spain. Numantia, Saragossa, Gerona, the Alcazar at Toledo and of course Madrid, in the present war, and a dozen other sieges which could be named all occurred in the north.
I don’t mean to suggest that Andalucians can’t be extremely brave: they have proved their bravery in every war they have taken part in. But that extraordinary tenacity of whole populations, that screwing your courage to the sticking point and never wavering again, those forlorn hopes which last not for an hour, but for months of taut agonising endurance, that gaunt stoical holding-out against all rhyme and reason, that sublime, or demoniac, stubborn, desperate insanity of courage seems only to exist in northern Spain out of all the countries in the world.
‘The Insurgents can take Malaga any afternoon they feel like it,’ I remember Gerald saying at about that time. ‘But I don’t believe they will take it now, because from a military point of view they ought to get on with their drive north. Malaga isn’t of sufficient strategical importance for them to spare the men to take it.’ Of course we didn’t realise then how many Moors would be brought, much less that there would be foreign intervention on a great scale.
Poor Gerald had had only too much experience of wars, for he had gone to Belgium as a boy of nineteen in the spring of 1915, and not returned to England except for short periods of leave and longer periods spent in hospitals until the summer of 1918 when he finally ceased to be passed for active service at the age of twenty-three. As one of his reasons for living in Spain (besides trying to recover his health) had been that it had been neutral in the last war, and so was not connected in his mind with a period he so much disliked remembering, it seemed curiously hard luck that we should have chosen a house on the edge of an unsuspected volcano.
One hot day when things seemed particularly quiet we heard the really alarming news that several thousand Moors had been brought over.
‘I’d bring over an army in canoes!’ snorted an English naval officer we happened to meet at the club, in disgust at the inefficiency of the officerless Spanish Government Navy, which seemed usually to be tied up to the dock in Malaga at that time.
The poor old women who hung about the kitchen were dreadfully upset at the news about the Moors, and their chorus of ‘Los Moros! Los Moros!’ murmured on all day.
‘Won’t England help us against the Moors?’ they used to ask pathetically. I don’t think that they ever had the least idea of who was fighting or why. They had heard of old wars against the Moors, and thought that those evil days had returned. They had in any case no conception of what the world consisted of. They lived in a medieval world – there was Spain, or rather Malaga, and there was the sea, and they had heard that there were lands beyond the sea; but what lands, or what they were like, they did not know. When we told them that England was cold and wet, they replied quite simply and understanding ‘Ah! you live in high mountains, but there is no doubt plenty of wood to burn there.’ To explain why England was really cold and wet you would have had to begin at the beginning and reform the school system of Spain sixty years ago.
And so we could not easily explain why England would not help them now ‘against the Moors’ – we were rich, we had plenty of battleships, they had often seen vast grey boats flying the British flag coming up from the Straits – it would cost us so little – they sighed – and we sighed too over the impossibility of explaining to these poor creatures suddenly waking up in the midst of a civil war, why it was that Spaniards were killing one another.
But there were terrors even greater than the Moors coming for them. One morning we were quietly sleeping under a grey sky, for it was early morning and the blackness of the night was fading, when – CRASH! a large bomb had fallen out of the grey air, and after it came the sharp rattle of a machine-gun. We leaped from our beds before we even realised what the dreadful noise was. The loud drone of the plane overhead warned us that there was still danger about, and we rushed out, calling the servants as we went, and met Pilar carrying the sleeping Mariquilla and hurrying down the passage towards our room crying, ‘Don Geraldo! Don Geraldo! What has happened?’ There was a second terrific crash as we met, and we hurried her downstairs where we found Maria and Enrique who had run in half-dressed from their cottage, and led them all into the big storeroom where we hung the fruit. Its thick walls and the fact that it had only one small high window and that its only door opened into a long passage made it seem the safest place anyway.
There were two more terrific crashes, but the next sounded much further away. Maria muttered to herself, I don’t know whether prayers or curses, Pilar quietly wept, rocking the sleepy, whimpering Mariquilla in her arms, Enrique as befits a man wrapped his coat stoically about his shoulders. Another crash was obviously at a considerable distance, and Gerald and I rushed up to the balcony to see what was happening.
A big silver-grey plane was hovering at a great height probably trying to hit the planes at the airfield. Artillery and machine-guns had begun to crash and rattle in Malaga. The louder crash of the bursting bombs came at intervals. They left tiny white puffs of smoke in the air as they fell (or were those from shells?). A fire blazed up suddenly near the sea – at the airport? But the planes had dropped all their bombs. Like silver flies they sailed away out to sea, towards Africa. Two little aeroplanes had got up from the field to pursue them,
barking and coughing, obviously completely outclassed, but gamely willing to attack these deadly grey strangers. But the grey bombers out-flew them, grew tiny in the distance and disappeared, and the little coughing planes returned. Distant as we were they looked like noisy toys as they sailed in circles and finally settled down.
The next morning promptly at four, bombs again! as punctual and arousing as an alarm clock, and after that we were bombed almost daily for some time, generally in the early morning but sometimes later and occasionally in the afternoon; the night raids came later. After the first raid we all knew what to do, and were downstairs and gathered together in two minutes, but I refused to stay in the storeroom, it seemed to me to resemble a tomb too closely; I preferred the corner of the dining-room though it was obviously not so safe a place, as it had a large window on the patio, but I think we all had an irrational feeling that the bombs would come to the front door instead of the back. Anyway the servants either through that belief or through blind confidence in us joined us in the dining-room and left the safer despensa to the more timid of the villagers who came seeking refuge.
For after that first air raid the lower floor of the house was always crowded with refugees. Our big house seemed so much safer to them than their own poor little cottages that all our poor neighbours rushed in with their children at the first rumour that planes were coming, or at the sound of some shots in the distance, and many of them spent almost the entire day in our garden too frightened to go home except to get a little food ready. We had one very large room opening off the patio which we gave up to them completely, and a number of them brought their bedding and slept in it after the night raids began. But as the air raids continued a great many villagers became too frightened to stay in the village during the day, and every morning there was a pathetic stream of frightened people carrying their children and driving their goats, going off to the mountains. I can still see in my mind the touching little Swiss Family Robinson groups and hear their shrill frightened chatter, as they hurried by looking up at the sky as they went fearful of seeing planes approaching.
