Savage Coast

by Muriel Rukeyser

  Olive stared at him. She looked as close to puritan as she could ever look. “They’re busy,” she said.

  The Englishman was laughing. “You ran into some other balls though, didn’t you, Derek?”

  The tall boy ran his hand through his blond soft hair. “I never had to do such a thing in my life,” he said hopelessly.

  “They shot at our people while they were practicing yesterday,” the Englishman tried to control himself—“and our Derek here was forced to lie flat on the courts while they fired over his head!”

  Derek turned a hot color and protested. “I don’t see why we have to be subjugated to anything like it,” he said.

  “For the Games—” said the captain. A stout Spaniard came in and sat down beside them. “Olympiad,” he repeated. The Spaniard nodded gravely. “Viva l’Olimpíada,” the Spaniard said.

  “Above all, the Games,” he continued, “will mean everything to the city and the army that we carry on with our plans. After all, we are the only ones capable of making an international United Front gesture at this time. They are so anxious about the rest of Europe.”

  “And if the Fascist press got hold of that, if we didn’t play,” said Derek thoughtfully.

  “The only thing is,” said the captain, “if the government itself doesn’t think Games are in order just now—”

  “Two thousand foreigners, in a city at war! The French are conscious of that,” Helen said, remembering M. Corniche.

  “Yes, and a city afraid of epidemic and food shortage,” agreed the captain.

  “God, I’d hate to leave,” said Helen.

  “But in case, mind you, in case!”

  The dedication, she thought. Give me something to do for this.

  “Oh, in an extremity,” Derek was saying, “if the consul wanted, we could get a couple of boats sent up from Gib.”

  “You must have something extra in the Mediterranean now,” said Helen.

  “I don’t know,” the captain considered. “They were supposed to have been recalled.”

  “Oh, there must be something down there, you’re right,” went on Derek. “They could pop us around by way of Gib and the Bay of Biscay, and we’d be home in no time.”

  The captain looked up. “Collins!” he said sharply. “Where the hell have you been? Out all night, and off the first thing in the morning, while I sit here like an old lady.”

  The Spaniard smiled smoothly back and forth at the captain and the Irishman standing in the doorway, grinning wildly, showing the gaps where his teeth were gone.

  “I’ve been doing the town with a couple of Catalonian lads,” he said in his broad speech. “And if you don’t mind, I’ll sit here beside you.” Helen liked his shiny cheekbones and length of arm. “They’re a fine race, the Spaniards; they remind me of the Irish.”

  He waited for the laugh and the questions to stop. “It’s their attitude toward the church that I refer to especially,” he went on. “It makes me a happy man, to know I can feel at home in a strange country. And I’m a happy man these days; it brings back to me certain days in Ireland.”

  “He’s been out until two in the morning, collecting dead priests,” said the captain.

  “Oh no, not just that. I’ve been looking up some places in town, and I’ve stood a good many drinks,” he said. “I used to be a sailor, and I know Barcelona. And the people are princes. They have a fine feeling about the church.”

  “Is it true that priests fired from the cathedrals?” Helen asked him.

  “Fired?” he cried. “It was all they could do to get them off the rafters. I saw one priest’s body—he’d been firing from the highest place he could reach, firing right onto the street, and he didn’t stop when they burned the church. He was burned all up one side”—he ran his hand down his hip—“and all one leg before he fell, burning and shooting.”

  There was a silence. “He collects priests,” repeated the captain. He said something he had wanted to say for a long while: “I was in the war—three years service.” They all looked up at him. He was the oldest of them. “That fighting was nothing like this. Only the nerve was the same. And here, the government has to win. All of Europe is taking sides on this.”

  “I hope France is sending guns in a mile a minute,” Olive exclaimed.

  The talk split. The Irishman was telling Helen a story about nuns who had also fired on the people and had been driven naked from the convent. She was skeptical. The Convento de las Carmelitas had surrendered, and many stories might have circulated, he said, but it still was a good idea. Across the floor, the captain was being cornered in a debate on the victims of war, pushed further and further away from his logical argument on the destruction of poverty, until he was cornered into the athlete’s reductio ad absurdum: destruction of the unfit, the diseased. Peter came back, and interrupted.

  “You’re playing into the Nazi’s hands,” he said. “What about Diogenes, Steinmetz, Pope? They were all cripples.” He began to tear the captain’s fallacy apart.

  “The legal mind,” said Olive, and winked. “He was pushed into that statement, Peter, and he’s an athlete.”

  A tall, Semitic-looking girl, all thin arms and legs, came in and sat down on the other side of Helen. “Oh, my goodness,” she said, letting her head fall back and trying to sum Helen up, “Are you Jewish?”

  “Yes,” said Helen.

  “Well then, my goodness, what are you doing for food? I haven’t had anything to eat for three days, and I’ll never be able to play tennis on that.”

  “Three days!”

  “Yes,” she said miserably. “I went to the stadium, and even the beans had Christian meat in them.”

  “But, God,” said Helen, “you’re in a different world now. You’d better eat!”

  “Well, I’ve had some bread,” the girl said, “but I can’t help it. I can’t eat anything else. My goodness,” she went on, “are you from New York? Will you take a card to New York for me? I’ve got relatives.”

  Helen suddenly remembered the lady from South America, her large beseeching eyes, and the postcard. The girl was still talking.

  “I’ve got other relatives, too,” she said. She was a very dumb girl. Peter looked up from his unfit-discussion and grinned, returning to the incapacitated.

  “Perhaps you know them,” she said, dangling her long leg from her other knee. “They live in a large city.”

  She sat there in the dark lobby trying to place them, Helen and Olive (the others left one by one) reeling off, caught deep in Spain, American place-names: Chicago, Yonkers, Beverly Hills, Wounded Knee, Cleveland, Sandusky, New Bedford, Minneapolis, Tuscaloosa, laughing (and Peter joined, his scores all settled) Kennebunkport, Taos, Gary, Chapel Hill—no, like Nashville, she insisted, laughing as the names got trickier, more unfamiliar, rolling like praises from them as they forgot in maudlin listing all the wars, Far Rockaway, Topeka, Moberly. Oh no, my goodness, she said (Collins brought in a larger hero-faced woman93 in a polo coat, introducing her as the London Daily Worker correspondent, veteran of thirty years of revolutions), they were pretty rich, they had retired from the bakery business.

  “Cincinnati!” said Peter.

  THEY WENT TO the next hotel. Its black doors carried Negro hands with African black fruit in them, exotic knockers magnified from the chaste delicate fingers of Moncada. Great hammer blows fell in the halls when they let fall the hands; and finally, a little exasperated Frenchman in a white coat let them in. “Understaffed, understaffed!” he muttered as he led them up the pitch-black double staircase. “Hall porter at the wars, crazy antifascist,” he croaked on the threshold to the vestibule, the bottom of a white shaft, sunk through the building, lit by skylight, decorated with palms, a closed-up brilliant patio of a reception room. “You’ll want lunch,” he said, leading them across a black-and-white checkered floor; “there’ll be rooms ready when you bring your bags, the beds’ll be made,” (bed, bed, thought Helen) and he sent a waiter along.

  “A table
, in a hotel, with dinner on it,” said Olive, ordering.

  Peter and Helen came up from the soup in the same moment with lavender things in their spoons resembling Spanner’s hands.

  “Journalist—inkfish—octopus,” said Peter.

  The two Americans at the next table, one very dark, scholarly anemic, one dead blond and healthy, turned, friendly. They were the leaders of the team. They wanted Games, speaking about them the way the English had, in anxiety and distress. Helen saw in their words her own impatience with the days: nightmare of action, streaming passionately fast, flashing by, a stroke of brilliance, which cannot bring the deep resolve, the moment when this stagger dance of danger and war changes into responsibility, moment of proof. She pushed herself back with an effort; looked at Peter for confirmation of this wish, and found none now; he was talking about the street.

  “Take rooms here,” the muscular blond said, “it’s a safe street; fifty Fascists were killed here between Sunday and Monday.”

  “Outside?”

  “Fighting, and in their homes; there are small squads going through the city now, looking for known Fascists; the problem is as much cleaning-up, establishing the order, as of driving the enemy back to the west. The city is under control, unless troops push the battle into the town again.”

  “And the team?”

  “The team will stay, all of us want to: only if the government asks us to go—in the meantime, we can see the city. Moscow may have looked like this in October.”

  The brightness, the hot color, the flicker of joy! The windows of red chairs rimmed and carved in gold; the black sashes, yellow leather straps, the romantic silver hills, fading down to the rows of young faces, held in pure effort, the boy in the camión, the party men’s salute. That was the common seal.

  There was no instant to collect this. The athletes moved and talked; up the black steps arrived the two bitches—“they told us at the Olympic you’d be with the teams—” the waiter ran with more piled plates—the athletes spoke for a minute, then said goodbye.

  “If we’re not wearing jewelry, it’s because we’re taking advice. A fat white newspaperman said, ‘No coats, no jewelry on the streets. Let them think you’re workers.’”

  “Spanner!”

  But Spanner himself came running up the steps, purpling breathless. “Go to the consul,” gasping, insistent.

  “You’re not backed—by an athletic association—are you?” he wrenched out.

  “No. A union,” said the dark one.

  “Well, better go round,” Spanner said. They left, and he sat down with Helen, Peter, and Olive. The bitches went to arrange for rooms.

  Spanner watched everyone leave. Olive filled his wineglass.

  “There,” he said. “Thanks.” His cheeks were swamped with little veins, but his egg-blue eyes were schoolboy’s, innocent. “Consuls are not notoriously of dispositions such as would make them particularly friendly to a People’s Olympiad team—or to a situation like this, for that matter. Do you know the make-up of the town, at all? Well, the three biggest plants—and this is the only industrial city other than Madrid—are Ford, General Motors, and Armstrong Cork; and Ford is talking about moving his plant out of the city proper into the seaport areas so that he can avoid Spanish taxes on cars shipped to Mediterranean markets. And then there are the British firms. But, no matter what foreign companies there are, the labor is Catalonian; with a strong precedent of labor war, nationalist fighting—always fighting for freedom, and they always will. Unless they all kill each other off first.

  “But right now the consulate’s watching out for business interests first. After all, he’s looking out for his own. And hell, there’s something else—with the dealers turning in brand-new cars, and those kids racing around in them, and the Fascists doing likewise,” he laughed, and his neck shook over the open shirt collar, “between racing the brand-new cars and shooting them up, there’s not much time for checking and repairs. Everybody’s eyes are on the automobile plants—”

  “Are they socializing industry already?” asked Helen.

  “Well, of course the strike’s still on. But they look to have the tranvías and soterráneos going by tomorrow or the next day—a lot of people were killed at those subway entrances; you saw the one at the Plaza España. The telephone service is on again between here and Madrid, but nobody knows for how long. And a plane is leaving tonight—this is inside stuff—for Zaragoza, Saragossa—that’s the front the fighting will be on after this.”

  “Can you get your stories through?”

  “They go up to the border by mail or courier, and then by plane to Paris. I guess, after this, I can get them out by wire, but you won’t be able to get reports out by commercial wire or cable, I don’t think.” He glanced at them with a notebook look. “Do you imagine your Games will come off? Well?”

  “We want them to, very much,” Peter said eagerly. “Everyone wants them. What do you hear about the chances? They mean so much—and now!”

  “The city’s at war, of course,” said Spanner, deliberately. “The temper of the people isn’t so good for games. And it might be foolish for them to expose themselves in a stadium; also, I’m sorry, but is there time?”

  “The Fascist press will make a big thing of it if they don’t come off,” Peter remarked. He looked at Helen. “I wish we could do something.”

  Spanner laughed paternally. “This is headlines for the Fascist press, no matter what develops—for any press.” He was grave again. “I’ve heard it compared to 1914,” he went on. “Well, it’s too close to get any perspective, but it’s the cue for the next war, certainly. And after Ethiopia! You wouldn’t remember,” he said, looking at them for signs of age, “but everyone thought Ireland would blow up— Ireland was going to be it in 1914, until Sarajevo threw the whole thing over to a corner of Europe—a feudal corner that nobody took seriously—like Spain.”

  “You can see the crack-up from here,” said Peter. “The train split on the war, the teams think about their countries now; if they’d only stay the hell out!”

  “They’re in now,” answered Spanner. “You heard the Italian consulate was burned—what the papers outside of Spain won’t print is that the reason they burned it was that the consulate set up a machine gun when the fighting began, and sprayed the street with bullets before they set fire to the building.”

  Outside of the door was the sound of horror.

  “And Italian guns and money are pouring in . . .”

  A long thin athlete took the stairs four at a time. He had been standing in the street before the Condal as they came out.

  “Well,” said Spanner, finishing off his wine.

  “The French!” the athlete cried in a raw Welsh accent. “Your team said to tell you—the French are leaving.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Il n’y a pas de Pyrenees

  —Vendredi headline, July 2494

  Above a charred ring, reddish and high over the city, the fortress stood in profile, the angle of its walls narrow as the bow of a ship, pointing to the full sea.

  Emerging from the city, they saw it constantly; and now, past the jostled houses, the fumes of burning carcasses, the closed streets, over the marked walls scored by bullets and the flimsy bullet-swayed carnival, the statue of Columbus, shot spout-high above the harbor on its black pillar, a jet of monument leading up to his explorer’s eyes.

  Beyond that, the cement breakwaters and docks, the idle ships with their shadows that float and circulate, the little sharp Mediterranean craft.

  The waterfront was crowded now, and they were walking into the crowd’s density, passing young couples, boys going in rows down to the docks, families with little children running in snatches about them, their brief shadows flying on the ground. The even sound of a great crowd talking and laughing was broken, each few steps, as the noise of voices grew louder and the laughter was wound a pitch higher. The water was broken everywhere by sun. Sun sprang in bursts along the sides of ship
s hanging over the gay water, outlined each cobblestone with its band of narrow shadow, ran in a glassy flash over all faces as a porthole window swung to catch it and throw the light over the harbor.

  Peter looked across the fire-bright reach. In a glimpse, superimposed on it, he saw the gray, choppy water off beaches he knew. “It’s so brilliant here, in spite of the war,” he said, and pulled back his shoulders until the blades met.

  “It’s altogether different from our strikes,” answered the Welshman, going with his jagged walk beside Peter and Olive and Helen. “We have the miners, surprised to be in daylight, and all the black . . .”

  “Where are you from?” Olive asked him.

  “South Wales,” he said, “the grimmest country: its life is nothing like this—” with a reaping gesture of his great length of arm.

  Helen saw over the harbor to the curve, where the black circle had stamped the ground around it with scorches. “What was burned there?” Helen asked.

  They looked over. “It must have been the yacht club,” said the Welshman. “There were tons of ammunition discovered there; it exploded as they set fire, the soldier told me.”

  The boats that were warped in were very quiet. One sailboat stood idle at the edge. Peter glanced at Olive and Helen. The man on the boat was swinging an end of rope, whistling. Under his foot as he leaned on the rail, were the words JEFE-PALMA.

  “Come on,” said Peter, “there’s our man.”

  He crossed the stream of people passing in the other direction. The three others stood to watch. The Welshman with his long head on one side, his throat crooked and long, grinned against the sun, talking gaily. Olive and Helen smiling, the contagion completely caught.

  Peter stood with his foot up on the edge. The boatman kept his position, moving only his head, so that his forehead wrinkled like a monkey’s as he looked up.