Guerra

by Jason Webster

  The enemy was closing in and Miaja and Rojo were desperately trying to build up defensive lines. The question was, where would the attack come from? At this point there came a stroke of luck. During one of the early vanguard strikes on the city, Nationalist forces attempted to get across the Toledo bridge in a mini Italian Fiat Ansaldo tank. One of the Republican carabineros defending the crossing crept up to the machine, taking advantage of its blind spot, and disabled it with a grenade. When its two occupants got out to escape they were gunned down. In the pockets of one of them, Captain Vidal-Cuadras, the Republicans discovered the Nationalists’ attack plans.19 Within an hour they were in Rojo’s hands. The Nationalists were going to come in from across the Casa de Campo, a large park area to the west of the city.

  With only twenty-eight thousand fighters at his disposal – including one women’s battalion – Rojo went about fortifying the positions of the defenders. There weren’t enough to close up any breaches in the lines, but one other factor was in his favour: at that point the attackers only numbered eighteen thousand men.

  Behind the trenches the city braced itself for the onslaught with a growing spirit of defiance. Posters were daubed on the walls urging men to fight and wives to take their husbands’ lunches to them at the front line rather than at the factory.

  ‘We will not abandon the trenches!’ declared La Pasionaria, the great communist orator. ‘We will resist until the last man, until the last drop of blood!’ Dressed in her widow’s black, she would become something of a mother figure for soldiers on the Republican side.

  They were tense times, though. Many feared that hidden anti-Republican sympathizers within the city might rise up to assist the attackers. General Mola, when asked which of the four Nationalist columns bearing down on the capital he thought might eventually take Madrid, declared that a ‘fifth column’ of supporters from within would emerge victorious, thus, according to some, coining the phrase.

  But such talk possibly did his side more harm than good. Paranoia took hold and, in the power vacuum left by the rapidly departing government, the communists and their newly arrived Soviet advisers – some posing as correspondents for Pravda – took control of much of the running of the city. They were ruthless in their dealings with perceived opponents. Unofficial chekas had already been set up around the city since the start of the war, where suspected Nationalist sympathizers were hauled in for questioning and later ‘taken for a ride’ – a short car journey accompanied by a bullet to the head. These acts of violence now increased, however. One pressing issue was what to do with political prisoners in the city’s jails who had declared their support for the rebellion. If they were liberated they would greatly strengthen the enemy. The communists decided to have them killed. As Franco’s troops moved closer to the city, hundreds of army officers, right-wing politicians and priests were loaded into double-decker buses and driven to the village of Paracuellos, some twenty miles up the Barcelona road. There they were shot and buried in mass graves. In total around 2,400 people were killed in this way. It became the most notorious single act of repression carried out by the Republican side during the war.

  The Nationalists were still supremely confident, though, not least because of the recent arrival in the country of some 6,500 German soldiers in the newly formed Condor Legion. Although mostly airmen and technicians, they would play a decisive role as the war dragged on.

  The main Nationalist assault on Madrid began on 7 November 1936, and came, as expected, from across the Casa de Campo. The defenders, travelling up to the front lines on trams, were able to hold the attackers off. Aerial bombardments continued as the Nationalists hoped to spread panic among the populace. There was particular interest in the effect incendiary bombs might have. Then, on 8 November, the first of the International Brigades arrived. Responding to a cry around the world to halt the rise of fascism, thousands of volunteers were arriving in Spain from France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the United States, Britain, and a host of other countries – even some from China. The majority of these were formed into the communist-dominated International Brigades, and they were to suffer some of the heaviest casualties of the war: around a third of the forty thousand who saw action were killed. Their arrival in Madrid at this time gave a massive morale boost to the defenders as they marched up the Gran Vía towards the trenches, singing the ‘Internationale’ to the cheers of onlookers.

  As the days passed and still the city didn’t fall, the Nationalists began to realize that the conquest of Madrid would not be as easy as they had expected. After numerous attempts had been beaten back, they eventually managed to get a foothold across the River Manzanares and take the Garabitas hill, from which they could bombard the rest of the capital. But the main fighting was now taking place in the University City, where the faculty buildings were being fought over floor by floor. Enterprising soldiers would place grenades in the lifts to explode when the doors opened on the enemy on the level above, while some of the Regulares fell ill after eating laboratory animals which had been inoculated with typhus for experiments.20 From his headquarters, General Miaja urgently wired the government in Valencia for more ammunition. In reply he received a counter-order from the prime minister telling him to send down the cabinet’s table silver, which had been left behind in the rush to get away.

  It was at this point that the Durruti column, now with some four thousand men, arrived in Madrid, having left the Aragon front. Durruti immediately asked to be given the most difficult sector of the Madrid fighting in order to show the bravery of his men. Miaja assigned him to the Casa de Campo and the recapture of the Garabitas hill. But armed with Swiss rifles dating from 1886, and in the face of the enemy machine-gun fire, the anarchist lines collapsed.

  The Nationalists inched forward again. The anarchists were ordered to hold them back, but faced with an attack by Regulares and legionaries, they once again turned to run. General Miaja himself had to harangue them to return.

  ‘Cowards! Come and die with an old man! Come and die with your General Miaja.’

  The militiamen returned to the fray, but Rojo had to lead the general away lest he get killed too. Back at headquarters, they seriously considered disarming the anarchists: they were too liable to give in. Durruti was adamant. His men, he assured them, would show what cojones they had.

  Two days later, when he stepped out of a car in the campus area to persuade fleeing anarchists to return to the front line, he was shot, dying in the early hours of the following day in the Ritz Hotel. He was forty years old. Not long afterwards, direct assaults on Madrid ceased as the two sides reached a stalemate. From now on most of the fighting for the capital would take place around the city in various outflanking manoeuvres.

  The mystery surrounding Durruti’s death has never been cleared up. There are many theories regarding what happened. One is that the bullet that killed him came from the Hospital Clínico, where Nationalist troops had been fighting the anarchists through the day, gradually working their way up the building. This is doubtful, as the hospital was about a kilometre away from where Durruti was standing at the time and the nine-millimetre bullet that hit him couldn’t have been fired that far. The other main theories centre on either a conspiracy or an accident. The conspiracy theories are that he was shot by the communists as a political rival, or deliberately shot by one of his own anarchists, who felt he was getting too close to the communists. The accident theories are that one of his colleagues inadvertently shot him with a sub-machine-gun that went off when he placed the butt on the ground or when it hit the side of the car; or that Durruti accidentally shot himself with an automatic rifle.

  Little evidence has emerged to support either of the conspiracy theories, and an accident seems more likely – possibly the first suggestion, as Durruti, according to some, was more in the habit of carrying an Astra pistol than an automatic rifle or naranjero, which had no safety catch.

  The only possessions Durruti had with him at the time of his death were a notebook, a p
air of glasses and some dirty clothes. They were handed to his widow, Emilienne Morin, a ticket girl at the Goya Cinema in Barcelona. He also left behind a five-yearold daughter, Colette.

  Two hours after Durruti died, in an unrelated incident, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the dapper, aristocratic founder of the Spanish fascist party, the Falange, was executed in an Alicante jail. Imprisoned the previous March during the violent build-up to the war, he had been transported to Alicante shortly before the coup for fear that he might try to escape from his Madrid cell. Found guilty by a jury of rebellion against the state, he was led out at six-thirty in the morning of 20 November and, standing with his arms crossed, was shot by a Republican firing squad. His last request was for the patio to be wiped clean afterwards, so that his brother Miguel, also being held prisoner, would not have to walk in his blood. Attempts by leading members of the Republican government to spare him and commute the sentence came to nothing: the local left-wing authorities had taken matters into their own hands and would not be dictated to by central government. Ironically the anarchists were against his execution, regarding José Antonio as a ‘Spanish patriot in search of solutions for his country’.21

  With José Antonio’s death, Franco lost a potential rival as leader of the Nationalist movement, and was simultaneously handed a martyr figure around whom he could develop a cult of devotion. The Falangist ranks had swollen enormously over the previous months, in some cases with men joining as a means of saving their skin when caught up in Nationalist-controlled areas. Franco, however, did not agree with many of the policies of the party, which, despite being authoritarian and nationalistic, called for radical social reforms. Franco needed the Falange’s support, but was himself a conservative, trying to stop change in the country and even push it back. Now, with the leader of the Falange dead, Franco could bring the party under his direct control, while at the same time turning José Antonio into a mythical and symbolic figure at the head of the Nationalist cause, a martyred saint of the ‘crusade’ against the Reds. The fact was that on the few occasions they had ever met, Franco and José Antonio had not got on.

  Durruti and José Antonio are two of the great ‘what-if’ characters of the Spanish Civil War. What if neither of them had died when and as they did? It’s tempting to think the whole war might have changed. Durruti might have been the only man capable of preventing the eventual eclipse of the anarchists by the communists, and the stifling of the revolutionary spirit of the war’s early days as the Republic tried to put on a more respectable and bourgeois face to the rest of the world. Based on his writings from jail during the last months of his life, some have speculated that José Antonio might have been able to curb some of the violence of his followers had he lived and escaped jail, as well as acting as a brake on Franco’s rise to supreme power within the Nationalist ranks.

  It is doubtful, though, if either man would have made such a great impact had they lived. The world was changing very quickly around them and they were both being left behind. With its leader behind bars, and with thousands of new members, the Falange had turned into something larger than and quite different from the small group of fascists that José Antonio had originally created. Had he been back in charge, he might have reformed it more to his own liking, but it is probable that Franco would have marginalized and neutralized him as he did so successfully with his other potential political opponents. As for Durruti, with the Soviet Union being the only serious backer for the Republican side, the communists were in the ascendant and becoming increasingly powerful. Stalin, in his attempts to increase his appeal in London and Paris, would have had little patience with a genuine revolutionary like Durruti having a leading role in the war. Again, as with José Antonio, you feel he would either have been absorbed or removed. As it was, both men were destined to become semi-mythological characters for their respective sides.

  15

  Kiki and Moa

  There was a specific moment when Kiki became a woman: not when she put on her dress or her high-heeled shoes; not even when she applied her make-up: these things were superficial, requirements for her to play the part, to step into character, but nothing to do with the essence of who she became in those moments. From the dirty white sofa in the living room of the tiny attic flat I watched her transformation as she fixed herself up in the bathroom. She talked incessantly to me about work, life at the club, the last time she’d been back in Vigo to see the family – or at least those of them who still spoke to her – about the new condom shop round the corner, about the cold she’d had the week before. And all the while she waxed and plucked and painted, padding where there should be something, strapping down where there should be nothing – all with an efficiency of movement and care which made it clear this was a routine she knew well and had been practising for many years.

  No, all this was just the outer layer, barely skin deep. The transforming moment came in a split second when all this was done and she was staring into the mirror, putting on her earrings, leaning closer to see better what she was doing. Beneath her black cotton skirt her hips rolled out in traditional female form, her waist held tight by a thick black belt, modest sponge breasts pressed against the fabric of her blouse, her slim calves taut from her heels. The instant when the energy she gave off subtly changed, when she ceased being a man dressed as a woman and simply became a woman, was with an almost imperceptible glance at herself in the looking glass, as though casting something out and catching something new from the reflection, like a magic spell. That was when she truly became Kiki, the greatest transformista I have ever known.

  ‘Well,’ she said, pouring us both a glass of wine in the kitchen, ‘are you ready to go?’

  I had been in her flat for two days, sleeping and hallucinating in a cold, pale, wrinkled shell as a high temperature caught hold and pushed me into a world of illogical form and distorted shape. I had arrived in Madrid with nothing but a virus that made my body shake as it worked its way around inside. On the train I had become feverish, banging into the walls and slowsliding doors as I rushed to the toilet. Kiki had been waiting for me at the station, and after a short, perilous taxi ride I had reached the sanctuary of her flat. There I collapsed, vaguely aware of cool hands brushing against my burning brow, my head being tilted as I was given water to drink. Now my temperature was beginning to come down, my body purged, but I felt weak and light-headed.

  ‘Do you want to borrow some of my clothes?’ Kiki had asked. It felt like the first time I’d laughed in weeks. She’d gone down and bought me a couple of new shirts, lending me money until I sorted myself out.

  The flat was tiny and cramped, but done in such a way that you felt deeply relaxed, as though you never wanted to be anywhere else. Everything about it was of a pale, soothing quality. A reindeer skin stretched across the floor on top of white-painted floorboards, while the beams of the sloping attic roof were also white, except for one at the far end which was painted pale pink. A quiet extravagance, very Kiki. There was no television or music system, but a few newspapers dotted spare patches of floor. ‘Noise and entertainment come from life,’ she had said to me when I pointed this out. ‘I don’t need them here in a box.’ The flat was her refuge, her world, her place to be. Although being herself was no simple matter. I sometimes wondered what agonies she had been through inside this tiny space: the serenity she showed to the outside world, I felt sure, had not come without a struggle.

  ‘Come and stay whenever you’re in Madrid,’ she’d said. She was an old friend of Salud whom I’d met four or five times in Valencia and Madrid. They’d worked together years before, doing cabaret shows in villages across Spain, travelling with twenty others in a cramped bus from one corner of the country to the other over the hot summer months, appearing at fiestas where the locals danced for two days before drinking themselves into a coma. Salud did the flamenco; Kiki did the drag-queen bit. But that was when things were tougher and she did any work she could get. Now she had a job at the club and had refined her
act. The drag queens who shared the stage with her were clowns by comparison: none could change so completely from one sex to another as well as Kiki. She didn’t want to be a freak, didn’t want to appear as a mere travesti – a word she never used for herself. Her aim was to pass completely for a woman, and she managed it – only the regulars and people who knew her were in on the secret. Even then I’m not sure they didn’t see a woman anyway, as I always did.

  There had been complaints – brutish businessmen telling the waiters they didn’t want to see a female singer performing: it was supposed to be a drag club. When they were quietly informed of the facts, they would fall back in their chairs, open-mouthed, incredulous and amazed. A few would leave at this point, as though something about Kiki disturbed them at some deep level. Others would return the following night, and the next weekend, bringing friends and wives to see this extraordinary performance.

  ‘No, really,’ they whispered to their unbelieving companions. ‘I swear. They told me so last week.’

  Kiki loved it, but you could tell her act was less to do with entertainment and more to do with reinforcing her self-identity. The attention was wonderful, but while she enjoyed it she always laughed about it too: she knew what it meant to feel blind hatred for what she was. Adulation was just as extreme and perhaps more dangerous, though less disagreeable. It was all based on ignorance – no one had penetrated the real person, so no one could really judge.

  ‘Pío Moa’s giving a lecture tonight,’ she said, handing me a glass of Ribera del Duero. She was trying to get me back on my feet, and I’d been telling her about my interest in the Civil War. ‘We’ll have to go.’

  I had come across Moa a few times in newspaper articles and magazines. A former leading member of a communist terrorist organization and now a right-wing commentator, he had written two or three best-selling books on the Civil War with a hard-line anti-left interpretation, ‘revising’ the accepted truths of the conflict to paint Franco and the Nationalists in a more sympathetic light. For a while historians had mostly ignored him, but the high volume of sales of his books meant people were having to take him seriously, and already works targeting his ‘inaccuracies’ were being published. His bugbears were the mainstream, often left-leaning historians who had done much to shape the commonly held ideas of what had happened in the conflict. Moa seemed to be on a one-man mission to change things, and from the success of his writings he certainly seemed to have an audience.