BÉNÉDICTINE
El Mejor
de los licores
behind him, the five-lamp streetlight stood, freak lily, and the striped awnings, the pale house, the twinkling trees about his head, the ABELLO sign he leaned on.
Gathered at his knee, the remnants of the faces first seen at the Olympic Hotel were recognizable among the Catalans and the Spanish athletes pressed close: the purple lips of Toni, and the printer, the team manager in his straw hat; the beautiful Dutch-English boy with the darker, stockier others of the Dutch team; the Belgians, the man who had walked from Antwerp, lost in the Pyrenees, the thin scholastic face of the boy who had complained against the French; the Norwegians, latest arrived; the whole English team, long fair Derek, the captain, the Jewish sportgirl with her famished look; and the Americans, the Negro boxer, the blond head of Johnson, the dark partner, Johnny, the Negro girl; the German woman in the trench coat who had been in thirty years of revolution; the guide of the Olympic roof; a hero-seeming man with heavy light eyebrows who had stood in the hall of the Olympic as the foreigners came.
“Olympic athletes, friends of the Olimpiada!” the Welshman was saying. “The committee of the Olimpiada wishes to speak for us to the people of Barcelona.”
The crowd pushed closer. A Catalan was repeating to them, to applause.
He was explaining that the Olympics would be held in October, that the athletes were here to demonstrate with the victorious army of free Catalonia . . .
. . . Felisa Alonso, José Aragonés y
Sardá, Juan Altisench y Prats,
Rafael Aguilar y Padilia, Raul
Anglada y Taavedra, Gerónimo
Auret Sanvicente . . .
. . . that the French had left in the interests of the United Front, which now extended across the Pyrenees.
The clamor.
The waves of joy, black ribbons, signs, noise which overbore the ears with cheering.
And the Dutch boy up, to tell of hope, confidence in this war, wish from a neutral country for quick victory.
The English picture of a land at the point of wedge, the key of the arch, that would be swung to the side of Spain, because its people could swing it.
Gunboats, illusion, cheers.
The American, bringing greetings from the farthest off, wishes of trade union groups to a country now governed by those speaking for such groups. Victory. Peace. Solidarity.
And, here, the dark boy, pushing his hair back with a slow, meditative gesture, flinging the thrown-back hand up and out in an explosion of will, as if a ball could rise up to the sun, so thrown, crying for his country, among the bursts of love and backing, clusters of cheers,
listen, he cries,
for the Italian people,
who are with you and will show it at their first moment, their second of first speech again.
The crying applause, forever, tidal.
Sensation.
But far, now, far, the vibration, no sound, nothing in sight but the Italian boy pushing his hand back over his head and pitching it up to the sun,
but the vibration,
but the unheard clock,
the approach.
THEY WERE WAITING through the speech now.
The approach.
They fell back to the sides, under the sparkle of trees, the lamps, until the twinkling white caught their eyes. Truce.
The white traffic markings down the streets drew boundaries here. The march stayed well within, its officers calling the pace, songs, snatches of songs, beginning to rise, the march slowing, dissipating off into the two linings of the road as the column was broken into two long lines within which the army might pass.
The car, POPULAR FRONT, slowed alongside and came to a stop.
Its driver shouldered up in his seat, twisted around to watch for the approach.
An armored car, a truck with heavy metal plates nailed hurriedly in place, marked large C.N.T., rolled past, grinding its gears, filled with uniformed men.
. . . Silverio Malo, Eloy Jiménez Martínez,
Francisco Arromolo Garrido, Francisco
González Arteche.
Francisco Caparrós García, Alfonso Colón
Queral, Juliana Vara Cerezuela, Blas
Zannuy Centeno, Jaime Roselló Aznar,
Agustín Tomás Navarro, José Cemalias,
Diego Caparrós, Gregorio Estorche, Buenaventura
Zofre Lozano y Juan Castellano.
El diputado del Parlamento de Cataluña
Amadeo Colldeforns y su padre . . .
Hans cried out, “Here they come!” he spoke swiftly, under his breath, to Helen, “I’ll tell the other Germans that I’m here with them, and come right back.”
THEY COULD NOT be seen, they could not yet be heard; it was the cry advancing with them, its front advancing as their front rank came up, that made them known: a great female animal cry, the victorious wail of spectators, the city acclaim of those on the edge and sympathetic, who still have throats to cheer, while those silent fighters pass between their lines.
And now the “Internationale” sprang up, strange, in foreign inflections, as the Norwegians began to sing, changing the wordfall, the sound, almost the song itself.
The Dutch, and the Hungarians; picked it up, unfamiliar, only the form carrying it through, the marching tune.
The French were missing.
But it reached the crowd of Belgians, the song came nearer, the great crying welcome to the army came, mixing, until the chorus became a crying greet:
“C’est la lutte finale,
“Groupons-nous, et demain,”
. . . El directivo de la C.N.T. Francisco
Ascaso, Eduardo Gorgot, José Biota,
Javier Noguera, Alejandro Prodonis y
Fuentes, Concepción Canet y Alcaráz.
Vicente Vázquez, Salvador Guerrero,
José González y Valencia, Enrique Arnau
y Erude, Julián Gil y González . . .
“L’Internationale . . .”
Here! The first line of set faces, brackets of arms set in perpetual fist, red bands about the head, straight stony foreheads dark.
“Sera le genre humain . . .”
In a high sung note, praising, crying, speeding an army of unarmed men, who walked rope-soled, blankets slung at the shoulder, their women with them, a few, among them, a few, running beside in the blaze, past the shining confiscated roadsters, the homemade armored cars, the lines of spectators, and the Olympic lines who backed them, singing the unique song, finally arriving to the double English version, the English and Americans singing, welcoming, as the army passed; an army, not in the pathetic small battalions of the night before, but rounded up, strong in numbers, unshakable, but barely clothed, barely helmeted, barely armed.
They passed for minutes, the lines of soldiers, passing to a new phase of war. The city was strong now in its own defense; in a day, everything would be running once more, the city would be held; but these were going to meet the outer front. Almost exhausted by the internal battle, with the strenuous look of purity on their faces, they must be renewed to the next front.
They must be renewed. They must be enough.
. . . Francisco Sanchis y Fernández,
Francisco López González, Salvador
Vidal y Perrino, José Martí, Luis
Pius, José Parera y Cabré, Alejo
Sáez de Sanmiguel, Luis Botella y
José M. Valenzuela.
Francisco Albella Vázquez, Ginés
Mula, Juan Fuster y Segú, Pedro
González, Teresa Querol y Querol,
Lorenzo Cabrizas y Mercader.
Bonifacio González, Antonio Vicente
Marco, José A. Clemente, José Orriols.
A esta lista hay que añadir Eugenio
Preimau, José Vila y Peiró, Luis
Mitjavila, Guillermo Prat, José Pros,
José Mirato Fornés, José Fabrés, que
ingresaron ayer
, por la tarde, a más
de nueve muertos ingresados también
al mismo tiempo, los cuales hasta
ahora no han podido ser identificados . . .
Now, they touched, the two streams, at different speeds, with different meanings, changing each other subtly, strengthening each other, and changing each other’s speed, according to laws of hydraulics, streams of armies passing friends, leaving their cities, saluting each other.
A woman ran alongside the Americans. She was trying to reach her son. The line was moving again, falling in behind the army. Hans was back. Helen said to him, “Do they think we’re going to Saragossa?”
The woman cut in, joining the line. “American?” she asked. “Are the Olimpiada people with the army?”
“Yes,” said Hans across Helen.
“¡ Viva Olimpiada!” answered the woman, with an abrupt nod of her head. “You see how they care how you sympathize with us.”
“Do they think we’re going to the Front?” Helen asked. The cheers, the welcomes, the acclaim the line was receiving seemed too much. They entered the Plaza de Cataluña again. The army should have all the cheering.
“Only a very few, perhaps,” the woman answered. “They know you are with the Games.”
“With Catalonia,” said Hans.
“Bravo, you are good people,” the woman said, dropping out of line. The plaza was opening before them.
The army was continuing, cutting an avenue of shouts and cries, vivid red and blue and black, and the few uniforms and helmets spotting the march with khaki and metal. They were going on very rapidly, their faces in the pure set, the vigor and effort very plain. This was where the Olympic line broke off. They slowed, swung flags, turning off, breaking parade formation; nobody proceeded, the Americans turned, the English and Norwegian, Belgian, Dutch, and the few Italians and Germans, all turning, watching the army go, marching through the shot stone, the streets of noise, the brilliant farewell, hurrying, with set, young faces to the Fascist line.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
MES HOMES!
MES ARMES!98
As the army moved away from them, they broke ranks, standing in the street now as anomalous crowd, broken through by pedestrians. From the front, one of the Catalan speakers waved and shouted; they turned to hear; he waved them on with him to the next square. They followed in small groups, losing the line of nationality they had kept in the march, taking down the flags. The citizens who had been magnetized to the parade joined them, calling to friends in the street as they went along, so that the line grew, becoming half Barcelona, half Olympic.
Peter ran up to Helen and Hans. “I found it!” he said, out of breath. “They say we can go swimming off the end of the piers—” He had a little package of the suits under his arm. “That must be where those boys were swimming as the Djeube went out.” He thrust his head up and looked over the crowd with a farsighted bird’s look. “As soon as this is over,” he said. “What’s up?”
Hans watched him quietly. “One more meeting,” he answered. He held Helen’s hand very tightly, so that her knuckles pressed together in the fast grip. “The square’s a few blocks off.”
Peter turned and waved to Olive to come up. As he waved, a man standing on the curb noticed the gesture, and hurried over. It was Spanner. He looked from one to the other, the cheek-veins visibly purpling in his surprise and effort to straighten things out.
“Here,” he said, “you don’t have to be doing this, you don’t have to be marching with a crowd like this, you’re all right without it, you’re Americans—”
“That’s right,” said Peter.
“Well,” Spanner went on, his short legs pumping to keep up with them, “the city’s not so bad by now, it’ll all be cleaned up in a couple of days.”
“Of course,” Helen agreed, staying close to Hans, but hearing Peter and Spanner talking loudly beside her, “everybody’s been saying the same thing.”
“This can’t last,” Spanner said violently. “The reaction will set in any day now. The rebels will march in here and clean up, they’ll put the city on its feet in no time. Why, the people here are religious, they won’t have to wait for Mola’s army—do you think they’ll stand for these church-burnings? No sirree, they won’t—”
Peter cut him short. “Do they look as if they wouldn’t?” he asked, gripping Spanner’s elbow and pulling him around to face the street.
“Oh, look!” Spanner said, contempt darkening his face, making the egg-blue eyes brighter and shallower. “They couldn’t get any word out. But the post office is open now, and the cables—”
“See here, Spanner. If we thought the Fascists were coming in, we’d have got out of this city so damn fast, by foot, or any other way there was,” Peter stopped him again. “We stayed because it was in the hands of people we trusted. And the same people are leading this march, and we’re wearing this black”—he put out his arm like someone who asks to have his muscle felt—“for the same people. That’s how it is.”
“Well, then,” said the newspaper man, pulling out a handkerchief to wipe his hands, “my mistake. But it seems to me—I thought you were just stringing along with these people for the time being . . .”
A new flood of people joined their line, and Spanner got cut off, wiping his hands, stepping back to stand on the curb; he made a few notes on a little pad, and was enclosed by the crowd and finally blotted out.
“If that’s going into the Paris Herald-Trib,” Olive remarked, “and if that’s a sample of what the papers are saying . . . Look, Peter! He said the post office was open. Come on, we’d better send cables. Helen, you’ve got to.”
The old connections were being set up.
“Yes,” Helen answered, “I do. I’ll hurry, Hans, I’ll come to the square. I won’t say anything about plans.”
“No, don’t,” he looked down at her gravely, “they ought to give us all our orders today sometime.”
“Don’t you want to send a message, that you’re safe?” Olive asked him.
He shook his head. “Kann nicht,” he said.
THE POST OFFICE held long lines at all the windows. A representative from the Belgian team was cabling, and Toni was filling out a form for the Hungarians. He motioned them over to him. “I’ve had to cross out two,” he told them, pointing with his pen at the form, “just don’t say anything about the war. They seem to be nervous about spies.”
They were sending the word safe. Olive looked down at the word, still in wet ink on the ruled line. “It’s a very strange thing to say about us at this point,” she said in a small voice. “The last things we’ve been feeling are courage, smugness, safety—what this sounds like.”
Helen put her hand on Olive’s shoulder, looking with her at the form. “Oh, it’s simple enough. Whatever we said would be three-quarters untrue.”
The clerk at the wicket counted words. He looked up at them, with the same detective look that the officers at the frontier had. “Straight English? No code?” he barked, and hammered the stamps down with military sharpness when they nodded. He urged them on with the sideway motion of his head.
Toni was waiting at the door, smiling into the sun.
“Hurry!” he said. “The meeting!”
THE LITTLE SQUARE shot out of the dark streets into full sunlight, watercolor bright, clasped around with the government buildings. The ornate, full-breasted statues, the scrollwork in stone, the pompous rows of windows—and, lined along a balcony, the officials, waving down at the Olympic members, who were lost in the city crowd that waved back with them.
The sun picked out every detail, heated the stones of the street, flamed through the wind, white. High up, on one of the rooftops, laundry flashed, whipped into flags like the white truceflags that recurred all through the residential sections. But this was a line of white, flapping, about the shoulders of the two soldiers in their blue uniforms, faced in red, with silver buttons. They leaned on their carbines, looking down at the crowd, backe
d by the pure blue and white of sky and laundry.
There should be churchbells ringing, bells, that is.
The line of government representatives, bowed and smiled, straightened, with the look of energy on their faces; as all those in authority had tapped, it seemed, the pure energy, either they had opened their reservoirs for this effort, or they were more tired than human beings can survive. The kids on thrones, Peter had said of the boy who relaxed against red velvet on the balcony of Communist headquarters. Here were the older statesmen, with the same look.
On the margin, the two American school teachers who had stayed at the Madrid were telling their story to Johnson; the adventure of being at Sitges, the resort, when the war broke out, of trying to get a cab in from the coast, and standing helpless until the first man with a gun came along to offer them reassurance and a place for the night; imagine, the first man we saw, armed to the teeth! they cried; the story of the boy on the shore who ran up the steps of the church as they were about to set fire to it, crying, “Don’t do it, it brings tourists, and also, it is beautiful,” and preventing the burning with his argument.
Deeper in the crowd, Toni talked to one of the volunteers. He would go to Saragossa later in the week. The organization was good, everything was moving ahead; all the trade union quarrels had been lost in this war, the Anarchists held, the P.O.U.M. was holding, the Catalanistas saw here a chance for their country and for the United Front together; if there was such complete organization now, it might be true, the rumor that Bela Kun had been down here during June; but he was reported in Argentina that month, in Hungary, in five different places. Preparations had been made, all over Spain; the government had been warned, and had been ready with arms; the two regiments that had revolted under Goded in Barcelona were fools to advance with the cry “Long live the Republic!” for those who answered their machine gun volley with football tactics, tackles, head-on charges, were shouting back the same slogan triumphantly, with rage.
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