Savage Coast

by Muriel Rukeyser

  She got down the street; as she turned for good night, she saw, lit shockingly by the lamp above them, a group of the English.

  The twisted shadows made their faces wormy and grave-eaten.

  Their throats were dark, like the knotted throats of that unprotected army.

  They were deciphering the notice of martial law.

  SHE LAY BETWEEN the sheets, running her hand over the turned-back top, running her fingers like spiders over the cold cloth. The luxury, the voluptuousness of being lapped in fine extravagant cloth, was very great. All luxury. The hot-water faucet with its flat shine. The chair at the foot of the bed with her clothes thrown over it. The opened suitcase, Aaron’s Rod, fresh dresses. The wide passeig during General Strike, full of walking people, the smiles, the greeting fist. A black-and-white checkerboard of a dining room floor.

  The luxury of this room, a black cave in the world of Spain.

  The room was smaller than the connecting one at the Olympic, its ceiling lower, the wallpaper made it close in. Her big bed drew itself together, contracted tight, and hung suspended before the tall double shutter. A crack down the center showed a square black window a hand could touch, so close outside.

  She ran her fingers back and forth, madly, along the sheet. Her hip was convulsed in pain, separately, while the rest of her body lay exhausted, thrown flat on the bed. Flaming cathedrals, smoky images. There was a crucifixion going on in her hip, and the long, writhing legs of Jesus stretched like a drawn nerve down her thigh. Moving.

  The army must be out of the city by now, walking. Stumbling in the dark across the hills to the south. The dark, soul hills. En una noche oscura . . .

  Or marching north, encountering mountains and other armies, the savage Pyrenees, the world in Spain, marching hallucinations flooding Europe, finding hostile polite troops in France, a friendly country, murder in Germany, the bony candid faces of British tithe-marchers, weapons everywhere, spreading wide, and then the planes, the new formal death, bombs, grenades, gas, reconnoiterings, skies, and then farther abroad, farther into the past, the anonymous men, the anonymous past . . .

  She stretched suddenly in an agonized, stiff cat-stretch.

  Mother, father, leader! she thought. The brave men, brave. The love, mature and Hans, recognized by strangers, muscles set; the dark tense army. Could we have gone like that, who come into wars as tourists, helpless, heavy with paraphernalia, delicate, asking for ice and hot water? The feted peeresses during the Russian Revolution, she thought.

  Tourists in time of war.

  No orders, no orders.

  What could they do?

  The scene in the committee-room at Moncada arrived before her, the bright hot room, the braided lines drawn down the secretary’s cheeks, no foreign nationals, no foreign . . .

  The stretch snapped, and her eyes opened frantic.

  Image of oppression, a sea throwing up anonymous hearts, netted in veins, floundering, enmeshed.

  Image of destruction. The shutter had moved with a wind. She had seen, cast at her eyes, a Fascist, a man with gold epaulets, breathing and hoarse, obscured behind the smoke of his fuming revolver. And another came, and more, each with a thousand workers in his pistol-smoke, Banquo’s children against a shutter, fifty men, all hoarse with fear, all golden-shouldered.

  She recognized this death: the spy’s attack, the general’s shot in the head: this was the worst. She sighed, and was fully awake again.

  The leg was the past, and she was far away from it. It leapt now, cruelly, and settled to a steady throbbing, whose echo was pulsed in veins: the past, poetry, music, walking through thousands of streets, stone, a generation shrieking, stone, all the girls saying, we will be mastered, stone, plane’s flight, flag’s signal without war, where flags mean survival, the wheels of speed, books, gifts, war. With each throb, riding on throbs, she said the name of someone she loved, some place she could return to, trying to make herself believe the past, hush the insistent past.

  The leg grew quiet.

  Hans! she thought.

  His fine, weird eyes deepened before her. The pure life! he had said. Mother, father, leader! How to have it? What to do now, how to make life in this, how to be part? His carved cheeks were certain as wood. Surely he had a plan, she was certain he had a plan, he would make a life happen. The soldier in all the pride and effort and naked poverty going to Saragossa, walking across range past range of impossibility, black and silver like the land, faces in midnight changing in a wind, conviction building them, darkness painting them out, passion reviving them, arson, phoenix.

  Hans, remaining in Spain.

  The word, she prayed obscurely, the word, some sign.

  Sleep, but: first the word!

  A memory broke through, splitting tempest, echoing oracular, vague and august and arbitrary, words of any meaning arriving with one meaning, a ship like a bird reaching, splitting the agony with bombs of sense:

  LET EACH STAND IN HIS PLACE

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Las Pompas Fúnebres

  The crash of arsenals, chutes gasping for the air, fast bombers letting loose daytime destruction, death knocking on the ground, the knocking on the door. The knocking on the door.

  Sleep crowding over, spilling black, knocks that march with brother faces through.

  He was calling . . . HIS PLACE.

  The Welshman.

  He was saying, come down, come down. Time to start.

  To start? Where?

  Besieged by confusion again, days shattered, a whole life lived in a few days, shattering down into confusion again?

  To start?

  She pulled herself up through the end of the night.

  The day was violent white through the slits, shutter light falling in slats on the floor. Her clothes fallen on the chair, voices at the near wall, voices at her door. The Welshman’s voice, calling, “Come down, we’re starting to march. We have to be in our places in ten minutes. We’re marching with the army.”

  A Zaragoza!

  Hans, at the Palacio.

  She answered.

  He would wait for her downstairs. Only hurry.

  There was cold water, godsend, running between her fingers over her face and wrists, waking, morning. She was busy at the chair. Awake. To hurry. Before. Too late.

  THEY WERE WAITING at the door, the heavy, carven door with its black African fruit was swinging back, the sharp street was struck white with morning, filled with people, the athletes, the city people, standing before the Madrid, before the jewelry store, the electrical appliance shop, all the hotels.

  The young athletes stood about, one knot bound to the small Spanish soldier, back to the wall, in the friendly attitudes, against the wall, of a tram at the brick of the chapel-side. “There!” The picture was taken. The Dutch boy spooled the film further in his camera. “I’ll get one of the pictures to you,” he promised the soldier. The bayonet in the center of the group was bound with a red strip. Yes. But, knotted about it, ragged, was the strip of black.

  A Spanish family was ripping a square of black cloth in front of the hotel.

  Helen asked the Welshman.

  “In memory,” he said. “We’re marching for the war dead, too.”

  She put her hand out to the family, with the Welshman’s hand. He was binding his strip about his arm.

  All the athletes wore the brassards now, black, bound tight about the arm.

  She took the scrap. The week. In memory?

  “Pin?” she asked the Welshman, smiling the thin, twisted smile down. He shook his head no. And then, with the twist, the smile, he unpinned from his lapel the Olympic pin and handed it to her.

  “But do take it!” he insisted. “You should have one, anyway; here, I have one that fits the buttonhole. You take the pin.”

  The scrap of black pinned to the waist, carried for badge.

  Peter and Olive came up, tied with black. He was carrying a camera. “I’ve been taking pictures of the teams,” he said.
“The English are going today—oh, you don’t know, do you—you slept late, didn’t you?” He laughed. “Good for you,” he said. “You missed all that mess of meetings.”

  “What mess?”

  “Johnson went with the English to their consul this morning.” He turned to the Welshman, who looked at him with the long unbelieving look he had before the gunboat. “The consul won’t let us go with them,” he said. “English boats for the English.” The Welshman scowled in a painful quick grimace, and turned on his heel. He crossed the street to talk to the English captain.

  “It’s true,” said Peter. “But Johnson’s trying to find something else. The consul hasn’t done a thing.”

  “But they didn’t want to go!” Helen said.

  “They’re planning other Games,” Peter went on. “Maybe, October. At the Olympic, they said . . .”

  “I know . . .”

  A whistle blew, at their heads.

  The line was moving, up the street. The Americans blew the shrill sport-whistle to call their people together.

  Johnson pulled the American flag out of his belt. It was small, after the banners: a Fourth-of-July flag with a gilt spearhead. Stationery stores, the front of tourist cars, the consulate over the wrecked square, the bullet hole channeled deep through the deep plate-glass of its bank-window door. He waved the flag over his head. “Americans!” he called. “Sweatshirts!”

  They were slipping the blue jackets over their heads, lettered in white over the shoulder, PEOPLE’S OLYMPIAD.

  The Spanish family finished the black cloth, and were running down the street to the avenue.

  There was a motion ahead. The Dutch and the Belgians had already started. The English were falling into line.

  “Four abreast,” Johnson was calling. “We’ll all go together. Here, Peter, Helen, Olive, everybody!” the social workers were here, the bitches came running, cured by sleep, glad of the action—they all crowded in behind the small team.

  On either side of the street, families waved. The windows emptied, and the street ran along with them, waved, and calling, wearing the strips of black.

  EL SERVICIO DE POMPAS FÚNEBRES

  Citizens of Barcelona are advised that all matters pertaining to the funeral rites must be regulated through the offices installed in 82 Calle de Muntaner, telephone number, 80.020.

  The line swung into the great avenue, broadening from cramped groups circled around their flags into the spaced formations of parade; they fell into the great crowds swamping the avenue, and, at first, were indistinguishable, part of the people. Little by little, as the line lengthened and the flags were raised, they became identified, and the waves of greeting fell on them like waves of heat, rolling over the blood.

  The cheers were beginning to go up.

  As they passed down, the crowds parted in the sunlight, drawing the children off the center, standing near the trees, stopping, waving. Fists went up.

  The avenue was the same they had gone down last night: The sign of the Berlin games, the drug stores, the Church of Bethlehem, with its ruined front, its lean stone saints with the broken skulls darkened by fire in their hands, the signs “BEWARE OF FALLING RUINS.” The dwarf hunchback passing rapidly before it, the tall man with his arm around the shoulders of the older woman (weeping violently, would not be comforted), the burned arches, rubble of plaster, twisted pillars, walls fallen to lay bare the skeleton of brick, cancelled altar. The people at the door, staring inside, wheeling to face the line of march.

  They filed past, turning toward the church. A stream of fine smoke still flared up at one corner.

  The flags were in order now. The leaders of each nationality put flags high in the air. Looking down the line, the countries began to be spaced off. Only, the French were not there.

  Helen heard running behind her, and stopped, turning with a violent insistent motion backward. She must not be wrong.

  He came up to her quickly, his face hardened. He had been looking up and down the line. It was because the flags went up that he could find her.

  He said, “I knew you would understand about last night.”

  “Hans,” she spoke quickly, walking fast to catch up with the march, “I shouldn’t have gone away to the hotel. But it straightened us out. The American team talks about going, but there isn’t any way for them to leave. I don’t want to go.”

  “Will you stay?” He asked with great pressure behind the words; he smiled, the intensity was too much to carry. She wished again that something might be said on a less simple plane, that their words might not be all clichés and repetitions. But it was unnecessary and ruinous to hope for that, and it was only a flash; she saw down the great walk, down the stream of foreigners. No words could ever mark them down, the sun, the flags, the war. Here she was.

  “Yes, I want to,” she said.

  He was looking up front, too, at the sweatshirts of the athletes. He fell out of step, and she looked questioningly at his face.

  “I shouldn’t be walking here, perhaps,” he said tentatively. “The American team.”

  “None of us are in the team,” Helen showed him the train people, the social workers, two other Americans who were attaching themselves, who had come out of the crowd to join the march. “But we could walk somewhere else, if you’d rather,” she said, thinking, Shall I be cut off entirely, and, If we can be together through this thing . . . and, How romantic I am!

  “So long as we are together,” he answered, answering her, and stepped in line firmly. They were passing the Shirley Temple Club, still hanging torn and shattered, and entering the Plaza de Cataluña again.

  Peter leaned over from the row ahead. “Do you know the line of march?” he asked.

  “Around the plaza once, and then down the Rambla a block or so to wait for the army.” Hans told him how the Palacio had heard the arrangements: the army was starting from mobilization headquarters, swinging up toward the plaza, and around to fall in with the Olympic people.

  Peter spoke to the two bitches, walking with him and Olive, and they changed places with Helen and Hans. The four of them made a line now.

  The street opened out into the square. Cars raced down, the guns finding them, the salutes up. A brand-new open car squealed, tires on paving, as the brakes jammed on beside them. It was marked, in white lettering that staggered from over the rear fender across the doors: POPULAR FRONT. It escorted them through the open square.

  Many pushed back, crowding to the sidewalks to watch them. Cheer after cheer arose, gathering sound, rising to a peak at the sight of the Americans, fist up to greet the city, arms lifted with the mourning bands trembling. The line swung around the park in the center, swerved in a ripple of mass to avoid the body of a horse, head extended, lying forward from the long neck on the curb.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Olive said, blankly. She was staring up.

  Planes!

  They followed her look. Not into the sky, but lower, at the upper-story windows of a corner building. At the window hung the long drooping American flag, extended on its pole.

  The consulate.

  Hanging from the window, crowding the window, the staff of the consulate, and at the front, answering to a cry of consul, the important face of the man fading into nothing, for, with the logic of a film, the action, the necessary move, his hand came up clenched. He held it there. The crowd shouted up to him. The team shook their flag joyously, madly. The American fists, strangely national, stamped with the eagle for the second, came up.

  “Jesus,” said Olive, singing out the words, “I never thought I’d live to see the day!”

  Peter laughed. The Americans, red-faced, were smiling, amazed and open. “What I’d give for a picture of that!” he swore, smacking his fist down on his open palm.

  “Go ahead, take it,” Olive was pulling at his camera.

  But at the window, they were turning, formally retreating now, as the line passed, as the black thin lines on the arms went into the Rambla.

  LAS VÍCT
IMAS DE LA TRAGEDIA

  Partial list of identified

  bodies and of those wounded

  in the insurrection:

  Grau Martinez, Juan Parisis, Celestino

  Criado y Aguilar, Juan Pecus y Torelló,

  Francisco Herrera y Santiago.

  Antonio Agulló Santiago, Domingo Capuja,

  Germinal Vidal, Ramón Jover Brufau,

  Luciano Padua Jornet.

  Pedro Ros Brugués, Juan Pragas Susagna,

  Catalina Benedicto, Enrique Manzano

  Carretero.

  José Fernández, Diego Serrés Borrás,

  Angel García, Benito Calvo, Francisco

  Truñón, Jaime Teruel Puerto.

  Florián Federico Pastor, José Villegas,

  Juan Matas, Rafael Bellors, Abilio

  Prado, Roque González, Enrique Fontbernat

  y Verdaguer.

  Captain Miguel Montesinos, Baltasar

  Barrio, Modesto Moya, Pascual Asensio

  Pradas, Vicente Picó Quiles, Antonio

  Martínes González . . .

  The Rambla was spick, the sun cleaned everything, the debris of burned cars and broken wood was scarcely seen behind the trees, the marching people; the white truce-flags hanging from the fine apartment houses were gay, twinkling against the fretted iron of balconies. Behind some of the flags the curious turned, watching the parade; three girls leaned from a high window, there a couple stood, the woman in the curve of the man’s arm, standing against the window-frame.

  The black-streaked arms came up, always saluting.

  A man with a mourning band remained immobile at the march’s edge, his eyes did not change, his arm stayed up, his head only nodded at the flags.

  Two women ran behind the first line of watchers, following someone in the march—and here, behind them, a woman with a blond northern face fell in with the Norwegians.

  They reached an intersection two blocks below the plaza. Already the first ranks were breaking at a signal. The march broke, split about its leaders, and gathered, circular, around the tall Welshman, hoisted to the shoulders of the Irish weight-thrower. The teams grouped, waiting for a word, a slogan, and the people following them and lining the inner walks crowded through. To one side of the Welshman the poster glared: