by Norman Lewis
CHAPTER 8
ON FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12, what had been described in the press as the Battle of Madrid faltered to an end. There was no official statement about the end of hostilities in this small local war, but it was evident that the snipers had left the rooftops, the shopkeepers had removed their window shutters, and most of the Assault Guards were back in their barracks. We saw no displays of relief in what might have been described as a stunned calm following the battle in this extraordinary city. Working-class families in the under-privileged areas of Atocha and Tetuan tasted once more the pleasures of the streets. The sellers of obscene books had set up their stalls again and drew small crowds, slyly turning over the much fingered leaves, although rarely buying.
Vendors of blinded singing birds had set out their three-inch high cages on the pavements, and ‘beggars’—sideshows of human beings with grotesquely distorted heads, bodies or limbs—were put on display in the dark, inner slum courtyards, viewers being supplied with torches for a small payment. By ten in the morning it was estimated that little short of a thousand of the more affluent citizens were once again taking coffee in the top cafés, while symbolically prostrate rows of boot-blacks worked on their shoes.
We spent the afternoon drifting from café to café with our Spanish friends Manuel and Estebán, both of whom were expecting to be arrested and were anxious, on what would probably be their last day of liberty, to savour its joys (the highest expression of which was café visiting) to the very full.
Next morning Estebán disappeared. Manuel decided to leave while the going was good. Later in the day he came to say goodbye to us. There was a great deal of shaking of hands and slapping of shoulders. During the few days we had known Manuel we had become greatly attached to him. He was an affectionate and enthusiastic fellow; a Utopian and a visionary, full of great thoughts and charming fallacies—but like so many of his kind threatened by a premature doom. We later learned that he had been arrested immediately after leaving us.
It had been agreed between us that Eugene would be free to go his own way if he wanted to get more closely involved in the present crisis. A contingent of what by this time had come to be described as the Red Army was moving down on the capital from the North, and was at that moment in the vicinity of Camillas, a small town some fifteen miles to the city’s south. Here it was in the process of enlisting other militant groups in the neighbourhood before what was hoped to be the final attack on Madrid. This was expected to be launched in less than a week’s time. Eugene, of course, was wildly enthusiastic about the possibility of joining this group, and had received the warmest possible encouragement from Manuel and his friends. His only remaining problem was how to get to Camillas. The news was that the many wrecked vehicles until recently blocking the road had been cleared, and that farm-carts were able to get through. Eugene had been assured that we could reach this small town in a day. His further argument was that even should it be impossible to get a lift, we had far exceeded a hike of this length on a single good morning in our walk earlier in the month.
It was settled that I would go with him as far as Camillas, but I made it quite clear that I had no intention of joining in the final attack on the capital itself—nor in any other military adventure undertaken by the so called Red Army. We set out next morning shortly after dawn and it very soon became clear that this was a journey by no means likely to compare in any respect with the uncomplicated stroll to Zaragoza.
There was nothing to eat in any of the cafés in Madrid, so we made for the Levante for a drink of their own creation designed to camouflage the staleness of the accompanying biscuit. A few more trams had appeared and we took one on which a line of evenly spaced bullet holes remained along a bench on which passengers would once have been seated. The latest plague was an invasion by starving, semi-wild dogs, and one had just been destroyed by a guard at the entrance to the Cuatro Caminos station. Here we had hoped for seats on a train to take us at least halfway on our journey to Camillas. We were advised by the stationmaster to return next day when it was hoped that an armed guard would be found to accompany us on the journey. We asked him who would provide the guard—the Gobernación, or the People’s Militia—and he replied that he hadn’t the faintest idea. Then, by the greatest of good luck, he remembered that a hearse would be calling to leave a coffin at the station, and the driver, when it arrived, was happy to give us a lift for a few miles on our way.
Thereafter we were free of the city and on the open road lined with small villages in the process of becoming suburbs. They seemed to us to have retained a certain oriental flavour with the small windows of their houses deeply set in whitewashed walls and their robust chimneys—also whitewashed—projecting from flat roofs. To me it looked like Agadir, in South Morocco—particularly where goats were to be seen tethered on a roof. For me this was Islam.
These people, said our driver, were the owners of a single cow, or even more often a single goat. There was an old law—called by the Spanish a fuera (meaning privilege)—by which the peasantry in some village communes were allowed to buy a quarter of a square mile of land from its feudal owner for an exceedingly low price. To qualify for this the peasant had to throw a lead ball, weighing ten kilograms, five metres.
Travelling wizards visited these villages to deal with a variety of sicknesses, most reported as having a sexual origin. Other specialist healers paid regular calls to treat sore feet, eye troubles, and depression in general, and sometimes to save time and expenses the various healers travelled together in bands. Although primitive—as they admitted even to themselves—these communities lived, on the whole, satisfactory lives. All their recent problems were blamed on the present right-wing government which had allowed speculators to double prices, thus compelling these simple country folk to learn what communism was all about. Political agents from Camillas appeared on the scene to tell them that their first step was to fly the red flag on their roofs. This they did and the next day the Assault Guards arrived in an armoured car and shot the roof off wherever a red flag was to be seen.
We arrived in Camillas in the early afternoon. What was remarkable about this small town was that back at the end of the nineteenth century the leading citizen was a villain who carried out a massive fraud by which most of its inhabitants were ruined. After this he escaped to Holland where he started a religious sect known as The Unseen Power. This was to become the most influential of many such movements in the Low Countries. Returning to Camillas some years later, he put things right with all his victims and left a memory of his presence in the shape of a nativity play. This, despite the disapproval of the Holy Church, continued to attract immense local audiences, and even foreign pilgrims, until its final suppression.
Our arrival coincided with the day when the long-awaited advance of the ‘Red Army’ was to take place. The critics were already murmuring that this had been too long delayed. A revolutionary citizens’ army, bolstered so strongly as it had been by enthusiasm and ideals, might only four days earlier have routed an uninspired opposition. The loss of the four days had given the Government the time it needed to ready itself for action, but nevertheless, Camillas with its flower bombardments, parading volunteers, the captured cannon, and the brass band still managed to be in good heart.
There was a bust of Lenin, brushed over with aluminium paint, on the café table and a small red flag was given away free with a cup of coffee. The scene was one of nervous good humour. Four smallish teenage girls in soldiers’ uniforms were surrounded by admirers, and we arrived at the moment when they had decided to shear a few inches off the tunics’ sleeves to smarten them up. A middle-aged captain with a greying walrus moustache was in command here, and I waited my turn to ask him a question. ‘How far away are the Fascists at the moment?’
‘No way of knowing,’ he said. ‘We’ve got them on the run. Getting out while they can. That’s if we let them. Are you a volunteer?’
‘No, my friend is,’ I told him.
‘They told m
e about him. English, isn’t he?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, we’ll be going after them any minute now. You ought to come along with us anyway. Be quite an experience.’
‘Thanks. Perhaps I will,’ I said.
The moment had come. I decided to tackle Eugene on his volunteer obsession, and I took him aside. ‘I gave your father a promise to look after you,’ I said, ‘and that naturally included bringing you back alive.’
He laughed. ‘That’s understood,’ he said. ‘You’re not going to let him down.’
‘What you don’t seem to be able to see is that the Red Army we’ve been hearing so much about is a figment of the imagination. They were supposed to have entered Madrid by today. Where are they?’
‘I’ve just listened to the six o’clock news,’ he said. ‘They were reported to have occupied Tetuan this morning.’
‘I listened to the eight o’clock news,’ I told him. ‘Nothing was said about it. The locals don’t take these stories seriously any more. What they do believe is that a thousand of the new Assault Guards took over the central area of the city yesterday.’
‘We shall have to wait and see,’ Eugene said. ‘In the meantime, have they told you about Casas Viejas?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘What about it?’
‘It’s a village in the hills five or six miles from here. It was occupied a week or two ago by the Liberation Army. We could go and see it for ourselves if you like. The road is open. Why don’t we do that?’
‘I’ll do a deal with you,’ I told him. ‘Your father provided all the necessary funds for this trip, the objective so far as he was concerned being the pilgrimage to Seville. I can’t see myself going back to break the news to him that you’ve joined a revolutionary army. I’ll go to Casas Viejas with you and talk to the Liberation Army people, but after that we must either go on to Seville, or I personally shall feel obliged to turn round and go home.’
‘What happens about the tickets and the money?’
‘I’ll have to think about that. It’s his money. It would be a question of ringing him up and finding out what he wants done. You have to realise that the responsibility is mine.’
‘So there’s nothing for it really?’
‘No, not really.’
‘But you wouldn’t object to going over to Casas Viejas?’
‘No, why should I? It should be an interesting experience.’
I had read somewhere that twenty-odd villages scattered throughout Spain bore this name. It meant simply that they were old. Nothing was said about starving to death. It was a place name likely to be found among the swamps of a river delta, or the barren lower slopes of a mountain range, or in a borderland area of a province subject to invasion by starving soldiers from across the frontier.
The café-owner’s younger brother, who was an enthusiastic Red, was happy to run us over there in his veteran Seat through a landscape turning into a wilderness within a mile of the village. A few twisted oaks had been able to root themselves among the rocks, but were shortly to be smothered by a dense growth of spiny bushes. I asked the driver what was the attraction of the place. Why on earth did people go there? ‘The mountains,’ he explained. ‘The Guadarramas. Tourists come here for the view. We bottle up the water from the river down there and sell it for the nerves.’
Casas Viejas was round the next corner and proved to be just as expected. Order of a kind has to exist in these old places by the simple fact that everything worth having is kept, and nothing’s thrown away. There is no rubbish. This could have been a village scene put together for an exhibition and tidied up every morning before the show opened. It was empty and silent, with its people housed in hutments with minute, square windows built as high as they could be from the ground, and a massive door sagging on its hinges. A notice stuck to a shed in the tiny square said, ‘Viva España Soviética.’ An old man, with a woman at his back, was at a door. The man bowed. ‘There’s no one here to talk to you but us people,’ he said.
‘Which direction did they take?’ the driver asked. ‘The People’s Army, I mean.’
The man straightened up to point ahead. ‘They went up that road,’ he said, ‘and then the next turning to the left just before you get to the top of the hill.’
‘There should have been a fair number of them,’ I told him. ‘People’s Army men with red flashes on their tunics.’
‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘red flashes as you say. I don’t know one army from another, but I noticed the flashes. I’m only on holiday up here for a couple of days. Mind you, you couldn’t get an army up that road. This wasn’t an army. It was just a few soldiers.’
‘Give me a rough idea how many. Fifty? A hundred?’
‘Well, say fifty. Maybe less. This wasn’t an army of any kind. Red or otherwise. You could say there was a half-company of soldiers at most. Some didn’t even have guns. If the Guards go after them they won’t stand a chance.’
‘Hold on a moment,’ I said. ‘What Guards are you talking about?’
‘The Assault Guards from Madrid.’
‘What, here?’
‘There’s a few of them down past the village. They came in when I was down there and pulled in off the road behind the Egg-Cup Hill.’
‘But what are they doing there?’ I asked him.
‘Nothing.’ He smiled as if at his inner thoughts. ‘Just waiting’s my guess.’
‘They’re waiting,’ Eugene said, ‘to take our friends in the rear.’
By the greatest possible luck the driver who’d given us the lift was still there and quite happy to take us to the junction with the Madrid road. ‘I’m a widower,’ he said, ‘with nothing to do with my time. I’ll have to leave you to look after yourselves at the turning to Madrid. If the Guards catch me with you they’ll blow my van apart. Used to be a football ground up there once, but the people lost interest and it’s all thorn bushes now. The Guards go up in their four-wheel drives but you’d never get anywhere in an old wreck like this. Lucky you came after they’ve just done the autumn cut-back of the jungle, otherwise you’d never even get through.’
It was three or four hundred yards to the turn-off but when we were halfway there we were already breathing in the sharp odour of the sap still oozing from cut stems. The opening into what was left of the bushes would have taken two cars but it soon narrowed to a bottle-neck and Eugene, who suffered from hay-fever, began to sneeze. Rodrigo, our driver, was proud of the barbarity of the past. ‘Used to be a prison camp up here,’ he said. ‘That was before my time. Rapists were given six months in an open camp. The way they made them work they couldn’t breathe properly. Most of them died of lung trouble before they could finish their sentence.’
The van, picking its way in low gear round the stumps, overheated, lost power, and finally we stopped. Rodrigo lifted the bonnet and let it drop. He switched off the engine and looked at his watch. There was a moment of silence, then we heard the roar of a powerful car climbing the hill, with no possible doubt that the Assault Guards were on our track. ‘Better make a run for it,’ Rodrigo said. ‘I’ll stay with the car.’
For a moment at least, the Assault Guards would be held up by Rodrigo’s van, before they butted it aside with their powerful vehicle. We decided to run for it, cutting across country as far as we could before making a cautious return to the road. We were ready with a story that we were collecting specimens for a natural history magazine and I had warned Eugene to throw his party card away, which he refused to do.
Clambering down an easy slope where the thorn bushes were less of a thicket, we were suddenly alarmed by a burst of gunfire behind us and overtaken by panic we tried to tear our way through. It was a mistake I was to regret, for strands of barbed wire tore into the muscles and veins of my left leg, leaving an open wound.
The immediate problem was to deal with that wound. Once back in Madrid, I attended the City Hospital, where, despite the problems arising from casualties of the revolt, a doctor
saw me immediately and did all he could with the damage. Having applied the necessary dressings he warned me to keep the limb well exercised, and thought that daily walks undertaken in a vigorous manner would be a good thing. ‘Get out of the city,’ he said, ‘and go for a good, fast stroll down a country road. I may still decide to put that leg in plaster,’ and this, a few days later, he did.
On the whole we had had a lucky escape. Eugene had been torn by the thorns, although he had escaped the barbed wire, and although Rodrigo’s van had been battered by the Assault Guards he was still able to drive it away next day.
It was at this point that it became clear to us both that the existence of the Red Army poised somewhere in the outer suburbs for its descent upon the capital was the stuff of dreams, and that normality was about to return to the capital; the sight of its citizens walking in its streets with their hands held high would eventually be forgotten. Nevertheless the official State of Alarm was to continue. Armoured cars and even light tanks cruised aimlessly in the suburbs. Places of entertainment suspected of having favoured the old so-called Fascist regime still remained shuttered. No trains ran and public transport outside urban areas had yet to be restored. The Assault Guards, who had spent much of the revolt sheltering in doorways, now made their presence felt, chasing revolutionaries off the scene and pulling down old red flags that had been overlooked. The revolt, it was generally believed, had been within an ace of success and was only, as it seemed at this time, likely to fail through divisions that had risen between the leaders of too many factions.
