by Pete Ayrton
His history was well known in Madrid. Instead of staying in a smart, influential parish, he chose a parish of poor workers, rich in blasphemies and rebellion. They did not blaspheme less for his sake, but they loved him because he belonged to the people. At the outbreak of the rebellion he had taken the side of the people, the side of the Republican Government, and he had continued in his ministry. During the wildest days of August and September he went out at night to hear the Confession of whoever demanded it, and to give Communion. The only concession he made to circumstances was that he doffed his cassock so as not to provoke rows. There was a famous story that one night two Anarchist Milicianos called at the house where he was staying, with their rifles cocked and a car waiting at the door. They asked for the priest who was living there. His hosts denied that there was one. They insisted, and Father Lobo came out of his room. ‘Yes, there is a priest, and it’s me. Whats up?’
‘All right, come along with us, but put one of those Hosts of yours in your pocket.’
His friends implored him not to go; they told the Anarchists that Lobo’s loyalty was vouched for by the Republican Government, that they simply would not allow him to leave, that they would rather call in the police. In the end, one of the Anarchists stamped on the floor and shouted:
‘Oh hell, nothing will happen to him! If you must know, the old woman, my mother, is dying and doesn’t want to go to the other world without confessing to one of these buzzards. It’s a disgrace for me, but what else could I do but fetch him?’
And Father Lobo went out in the Anarchists’ car, into one of those gray dawns when people were being shot against the wall.
Later on he went for a month to live with the militiamen in the front line. He came back exhausted and deeply shaken. In my hearing he rarely spoke of his experiences in the trenches. But one night he explained: ‘What brutes – God help us – what brutes, but what men!’
He had to fight his own bitter mental struggle. The deepest hurt to him was not the fury vented against churches and priests by maddened, hate-filled, brutalized people, but his knowledge of the guilt of his own caste, the clergy, in the existence of that brutality, and in the abject ignorance and misery at the root of it. It must have been infinitely hard for him to know that princes of his Church were doing their level best to keep his people subjected, that they were blessing the arms of the generals and overlords, and the guns that shelled Madrid.
The Government had given him a task in the Ministry of Justice which was anything but simple: he had come to Madrid to investigate cases of hardship among the clergy, and he had to face the fact that some of the priests whose killing by the ‘Reds’ had been heralded and duly exploited came out of their hiding, safe and sound, and demanded help.
I needed a man to whom I could speak out of the depth of my mind. Don Leocadio was most human and understanding. I knew that he would not answer my outcry with admonitions or canting consolation. So I poured out all the turgid thoughts which clogged my brain. I spoke to him of the terrible law which made us hurt others without wanting to hurt them. There was my marriage and its end; I had hurt the woman with whom I did not share my real life and I had hurt our children because I hated living together with their mother. I inflicted the final pain when I had found my wife, Ilsa. I told him that Ilsa and I belonged together, complementing each other, without superiority of one over the other, without knowing why, without wanting to know, because it was the simple truth of our lives. But this new life which we could neither reject nor escape meant pain, because we could not be happy together without causing pain to others.
I spoke to him of the war, loathsome because it set men of the same people against each other, a war of two Cains. A war in which priests had been shot on the outskirts of Madrid and other priests were setting the seal of their blessing on the shooting of poor laborers, brothers of Don Leocadio’s own father. Millions like myself who loved their people and its earth were destroying, or helping to destroy, that earth and their own people. And yet, none of us had the right to remain indifferent or neutral.
I had believed, I still believe, in a new free Spain of free people. I had wanted it to come without bloodshed, by work and good will. What could we do if this hope, this future was being destroyed? We had to fight for it. Had we to kill others? I knew that the majority of those who were fighting with arms in hand, killing or dying, did not think about it, but were driven by the forces unleashed or by their blind faith. But I was forced to think, for me this killing was a sharp and bitter pain which I could not forget. When I heard the battle noise I saw only dead Spaniards on both sides. Whom should I hate? Oh yes, Franco and Juán March and their generals and puppets and wirepullers, the privileged people over there. But when I would rather hate that God who gave them the callousness which made them kill, and who punished me with the torture of hating any killing and who let women and children first suffer from rickets and starvation wages, and then from bombs and shells. We were caught in a monstrous mechanism, crushed under the wheels. And if we rebelled, all the violence and all the ugliness was turned against us, driving us to violence.
It sounded in my ears as though I had thought and said the same things as a boy. I excited myself to a fever, talking on and on in rage, protest, and pain. Father Lobo listened patiently, only saying sometimes: ‘Now slowly, wait.’ Then he talked to me for days. It may be that the answers I gave myself in the quiet hours on the balcony, while I stared at the Church of San Sebastian cut in two by a bomb, were fused in my memory with the words Father Lobo said to me. It may be that insensibly I made him into the other ‘I’ of that endless inner dialogue. But this is how I remember what he said:
‘Who are you? What gives you the right to set yourself up as a universal judge? You only want to justify your own fear and cowardice. You are good, but you want everybody else to be good too, so that being good doesn’t cost you any trouble and is a pleasure. You haven’t the courage to preach what you believe in the middle of the street, because then you would be shot. And as a justification for your fear you put all the fault on to the others. You think you’re decent and clean-minded and you try to tell me and yourself that you are, and that whatever happens to the others is their fault, and whatever pain happens to you as well. That’s a lie. It is your fault.
‘You’ve united yourself with this woman, with Ilsa, against everything and everybody. You go with her through the streets and call her your wife. And everybody can see that it’s true, that you are in love with each other and that together you are complete. None of us would dare to call Ilsa your mistress because we all see that she is your wife. It is true that you and she have done harm to others, to the people who belong to you, and it is right that you should feel pain for it. But do you realize that you have scattered a good seed as well? Do you realize that hundreds of people who had despaired of finding what is called Love now look at you and learn to believe that it exists and is true, and that they may hope?
‘And this war, you say it’s loathsome and useless. I don’t. It is a terrible, barbarous war with countless innocent victims. But you haven’t lived in the trenches like me. This war is a lesson. It has torn Spain out of her paralysis, it has torn the people out of their houses where they were being turned into mummies. In our trenches illiterates are learning to read and even to speak, and they learn what brotherhood among men means. They see that there exists a better world and life, which they must conquer, and they learn too, that they must conquer it not with the rifle but with their will. They kill Fascists, but they learn the lesson that you win wars not by killing, but by convincing people. We may lose this war – but we shall have won it. They, too, will learn that they may rule us, but not convince us. Even if we are defeated, we will be stronger at the end of this than ever we were because the will has come alive.
‘We all have our work to do, so do yours instead of talking about the world which doesn’t follow you. Suffer pain and sorrow and stick it out, but don’t shut yourself up and run round
in circles within yourself. Talk and write down what you think you know, what you have seen and thought, tell it honestly and speak the truth. Don’t produce programs which you don’t believe in, and don’t lie. Say what you have thought and seen, and let the others hear and read you, so that they are driven to tell their truth, too. And then you’ll lose that pain of yours.’
In the clear, chill nights of October it seemed to me sometimes as though I were conquering my fear and cowardice, but I found it very hard to write down what I thought. It is still difficult. I found out, however, that I could write honestly and with truth of what I had seen, and that I had seen much. Father Lobo exclaimed when he saw one of my stories: ‘What a barbarian you are! But go on, it’s good for you and us.’
One evening he knocked at our door and invited us to go with him to see a surprise. In his small room was one of his brothers, a quiet workman, and farm labourer from his village. I knew that his people brought him wine for Mass and wine for his table whenever they could, and I thought he wanted to invite us to a glass of red wine. But he took me into his bathroom. An enormous turkey was standing awkwardly on the tiles, hypnotized by the electric light. When the countryman had gone, we spoke of those simple people who brought him the best thing they had, not caring whether it was absurd or not to dump a live turkey in the bathroom of a city hotel.
‘It isn’t easy for us to understand them,’ Father Lobo said. ‘If you do, it’s a basis for art like Breughel’s or like Lorca’s. Yes Lorca’s. Listen.’ He took the slim war edition of the Romancero Gitano and started reading:
And I took her down to the river,
Thinking she was a maiden,
But she had a husband...
He read on with his strong, manly voice, not slurring over the words of naked physical love, only saying: ‘This is barbarian, but it’s tremendous.’ And he seemed to me more of a man, and more of a priest of men and God, than ever.
In the worst weeks, when it took some courage to be seen with us, he spent long hours at our table, aware that he gave us moral support. He knew more about the background of our tangled story than we ourselves, but he never gave away what he had heard from others. Yet I did not dream of doubting his word when, after the campaign had passed its peak, he suddenly said: ‘Now listen to the truth, Ilsa. They don’t want you here. You know too many people and you put others in the shade. You know too much and you are too intelligent. We aren’t used to intelligent women yet. You can’t help being what you are, so you must go, and you must go away with Arturo because he needs you and you belong together. In Madrid you cannot do any good any more, except by keeping quiet as you do. But that won’t be enough for you, you will want to work. So go away.’
‘Yes, I know,’ she said. ‘The only thing I can do for Spain now is not to let people outside turn my case into a weapon against the Communists – not because I love the Communist Party, for I don’t, even when I work with Communists, but because it would at the same time be a weapon against our Spain and against Madrid. That’s why I can’t move a finger for myself, and even have to ask my friends not to make a fuss. It’s funny. The only thing I can do is to do nothing.’
She said it very dryly. Father Lobo looked at her and answered: ‘You must forgive us. We are in your debt.’
Thus Father Lobo convinced us that we had to leave Madrid. When I accepted it, I wanted it to be done quickly so as not to feel it too much. It was a gray, foggy November day, Agustín and Torres saw us off. The Shock Police lorry, with hard loose boards for benches, rattled through the suburbs. There were few shells that morning.
Father Lobo had sent us to his mother in a village near Alicante. In his letter he had asked her to help me, his friend, and my wife Ilsa; he did not want to bewilder his mother, he said, and he had put down the essential truth. When I stood before the stout old woman with gray hair who could not read – her husband deciphered her son’s letter for her – and looked into her plain, lined face, I realized gratefully Don Leocadio’s faith in us. His mother was a very good woman.
Arturo Barea was born in Badajoz in 1897. At the start of the Civil War, he organized office workers in a Republican volunteer military unit La Pluma (‘The Pen’). His knowledge of French and English were ideal qualifications for his job as censor at the Foreign Ministry’s press office, where he met Ilsa Kulcsar, who later became his second wife and the translator of his writings into English. He kept the job as censor until rumours of Ilsa’s Trotskyist sympathies forced the couple to go into exile in February 1938, first to Paris, then to England. The rumours stemmed from the fact that Arturo and Ilsa wanted to be more flexible in allowing foreign reporters to report bad news – this went against the Communist Party line. From 1939 until his death in 1957, Barea worked for the Latin American section of the BBC’s World Service. During this time, he made over eight hundred fifteen-minute broadcasts under the pseudonym ‘Juan de Castilla’ – these broadcasts often came top of the station’s listener poll. Barea, who found the pub the ideal place to discover English habits, even learnt the locals’ way of dealing with the weather:
What I am quite proud of is the fact that I have now mastered the rules of the game played each morning when people meet in the street: ‘Lovely morning, Sir.’
‘Very nice day, isn’t it?’
At the beginning I tried earnestly to say that it looked like rain when it did. But after having heard many times a reproachful: ‘Oh, don’t say that, Sir,’ I understand that here I have come across a national complex. Now I answer always: ‘Yes, indeed, a very nice day,’ even if the shower already hangs over our heads. After all, these are still ‘nice’ peaceful days which I, the refugee, can appreciate more than others.
Arturo Barea is buried in the churchyard of Faringdon near Oxford, where he lived for the last ten years of his life.
BERNARDO ATXAGA
MARKS
from De Gernika a Guernica
translated by Margaret Jull Costa
IN A SMALL MUSEUM IN MILAN, there is a rock known as il masso di Borno. It isn’t just any rock. It’s full of striations, lines and marks made by some sharp implement, marks that are sometimes straight, sometimes slightly curved, and there are spiral shapes too, like suns or asterisks; marks that form what we would now call geometric designs.
A plaque on the base on which the rock sits explains that it remained buried until 1956, the year in which it was uncovered by a flood and the subsequent shifting of the soil; it explains, too, that its abstract decoration dates back seven thousand years. Archeologists believe that, at that moment in prehistory, five thousand years before the birth of Christ, a few human beings chose to leave those marks on that rock, a message capable of reaching us across seventy centuries.
We cannot decipher the message in all its detail, because we lack the necessary references which, in cave paintings, point to a particular event or speak of the hunt for bison or the death of a warrior. All we can say about il masso di Borno is that the striations, lines and marks express a primordial, elemental message, saying basically: ‘We were here. Once we, too, were alive.’
It must have been more than a mere need to scribble, more than a mere impulse. One has only to look at the precise way the marks were made, the care taken to make the resulting design attractive and enduring. These are not chance incisions in clay blocks or sandstone. These are deep marks made on a very large, hard rock. There is no doubt about it, the people who made those marks did so for a reason. They wanted their striations, lines and marks to have meaning and to carry a message. Seven thousand years later, we cannot understand precisely what they meant to say, apart, as I say, from that elemental message: ‘We were here. Once we, too, were alive.’
The message is far from straightforward. If we accept that the marks were made on purpose, we must assume that already, seven thousand years ago, those people understood about death or – which comes to the same thing – had grasped the idea that life is the most valuable thing there is, life as life, the s
imple acts of breathing, eating, thinking, drawing, sleeping, singing.
This is not an exaggerated assumption to make. We know that they buried their dead – an unequivocal sign of their awareness of death – and constructed tombs and cromlechs, like those that can still be seen today in Carnac and in many places in the Basque Country. From the chronicles left by those who had dealings with primitive peoples similar to those who lived seven thousand years ago, we do know something of their feelings about death. As Cabeza de Vaca wrote in the sixteenth century about the indigenous peoples of North America: ‘These people love their children and treat them better than anyone else in the world, and when someone’s child dies, the parents and the relatives and all the village mourn them for a whole year, and each morning, before dawn, the parents begin to weep, and the whole village follows suit... ’ They were perhaps, as Cabeza de Vaca himself says, ‘crude people, lacking reason’, but they knew about the elemental, basic values.
Nor would it be any exaggeration to speak of our ancient ancestors’ sensitivity to beauty, the sensitivity shown by the people who made those marks on il masso di Borno and by their predecessors, men and women living fifteen, thirty or even a hundred thousand years ago. The proof of this is that shells have been found in the caves they lived in, the shells of molluscs with no food value, like those of the colourful Nassa reticulata. Even clearer proof can be found in the rock paintings of bison and horses in the caves of Altamira, Lascaux, Pimiango or Santimamiñé. A parenthesis: I once visited one of those Cantabrian caves – Santimarniñé, on the outskirts of Gernika – and there I met the painter José Luis Zumeta, and, rather childishly, I began asking myself if they were so very different, the painter standing before me and the Neolithic creator of the horses and bison on the cave walls. I soon gave up, because the differences were innumerable, and I began thinking, instead, about possible similarities. I came to no firm conclusion about that either, until we left and Zumeta said: ‘Right, I’m off back to my studio to see if I can get some work done.’ At the time, he was working on a version of Picasso’s Guernica, and was in a hurry to get on. It occurred to me then that what they did have in common, the present-day painter and the painter living seven thousand, thirty thousand or a hundred thousand years ago, was that strong desire to draw, to paint. In fact, in our own age, the connection has grown even stronger, ever since the avant-garde artists of the twentieth century taught young painters to appreciate primitive art.
