Savage Coast

by Muriel Rukeyser

  THE ROAD HAS fortifications, thrown-up bales of hay, later there are barricades of paving stones flying the red flag for unity. There are machine-gun nests, dead horses, dead mules, terrible spots that I cannot identify at several crossroads. A Ford sign on the way into the city.

  As we reach Barcelona, the white flags are at all windows—towels, sheets, tablecloths hung over the windowsills for peace. Shooting is heard again and again—not cannons or machine guns (except once), but guns. My teeth feel the shots, and everything else, too; a nerve in my leg jumps. Ahead of us, a man falls, and our truck swerves and turns, taking a detour as some street-corner battle opens.

  We are taking another road to the Hotel Olympic—immense building requisitioned for the athletes.

  In the streets, there are no cars that are not armed and painted with initials or titles. VISCA (that’s Viva) CATALUNYA.

  Overturned cars, dead animals, coils and spires of smoke rising from burning churches. The coils of color climbing the architectural heart of the city, Gaudí’s marvelous church, untouched by harm. The Chinese Quarter, money-set.

  FROM THE ROOF of the hotel, the city is laid out before you, the wide avenues to the port, the Rambla, and there Columbus on a gilded ball and the water beyond. The heights over the city, Tibidabo, are very beautiful, the squares are illuminated, and the bullring, Monumental y Arena across the way, still a perfect place for snipers.

  Look down, you can see the teams arriving still. Cars are overturned, here in the Plaza España, one of the two centers of the fighting. Guards stream into the building, and girls with rifles take their places in the cars.

  In the dark, we set out for dinner at the stadium, with M. de Paiche (whose stomach has been badly upset by the diet of beans and soda) and his secretary. The windshield of the car we drive in is spangled by bullets, and there is blood on the cushion behind me. I sit upright; but the car goes up a winding road, and I can’t help learning back.

  Two thousand foreigners, thrown on the city as civil war began, are to be lodged and fed here.

  The stadium is filled with athletes and stranded nationals. We eat beans; they are delicious. News goes around. We meet the English team, and at last the American team. Block parties have been held for months, and tryouts at Randall’s Island—and here they are: Dr. Smith and George Gordon Battle in charge, and Al Chakin, boxing and wrestling; Irving Jenkins, boxing; Frank Payton, Eddie Kraus, Dorothy Tucker, Harry Engle, Myron Dickes, all track; Bernie Danchik, gymnast; Julian Raul, cycling; Charles Burley, William Chamberlain and Frank Adams Hanson.

  In the meetings that night, the decisions are made to leave—the French, whose M. de Paiche says, “We have much to learn from Spain”—and many others, to take the burden of thousands (some say twenty thousand) of foreigners off the government at this crucial and bloody moment. The French leave the next day on the Chellé and Djeube; we all see them off, waving from the dock. Even the gypsies, in red and pink, salute with clenched fists up. At the last moment, as on the deck the arms all rise together, the ship we watch appears to lift up on the sea.

  The American and British athletes decide to stay, and ask us to come with them, to clear the Olympic building of as many people as possibly can go. The British are wonderful, brave, droll—they are feeling particularly humiliated, for they have had to lie down on the tennis courts while they were shot at—lie down on the courts! We go with them into the narrow streets, with barricades thrown breast high, paving torn up, the crowds in lyric late nighttime Catalan—to the Hotel Madrid in the Calle de Boqueria. Here, on the street, in the hotel and the two restaurants, the Condal and our own, we have the next days. We send our cables; the Telefònica, run by American business, is proud of a continued service.

  At the American consulate, Drew Franklin tells us that Companys has asked him to supervise our leaving. There is no safe conduct, the consul tells us, don’t try to go to the border by car. An art professor and a correspondent are there; the men should leave off their jackets, the women should not wear jewelry—“They will think you are proletarians.” The hysterical reports have begun to register. Our three Hollywood men have reached the frontier, and have told reporters that they saw wild scenes of looting from the train, that they suffered deprivations and saw horrors.

  Some of the athletes are talking of joining the fighting forces, which now include many members of the Assault Troops in their blue uniforms, the Civil Guard, and men and women who a week ago had been civilians.

  We walk, going back always to the Madrid, talking with Otto, with the English athletes, smoking Bisontes (the Spanish relative of Camels) and drinking wine. There was a moment outside a house in Moncada, when they taught me the double-spouted drinking; I learned laughing how to bite off the free-pouring drink. My practice drink was water, not wine, and they were shooting at the house— real practice conditions. We went in the house, and I learned. Now we drank from glasses, and from the pouring too; we came to our decisions in these days. It cleared and deepened between us; it was certain for Otto. He had found his chance to fight fascism, and a profound quiet, amounting to joy, was there; it was the German chance, in or out of Germany.

  We talked with the athletes about what might happen. It was a matter of doing what we did entire, with our whole selves committed. What about King Edward, said the English. There was a rumor that something was happening so that his life was at last coherent, politically and erotically; it had something to do with the American woman, Mrs. Simpson, but there was a lot more besides.

  Who would help the government and the people of Spain against the generals and the officers, the Fascist revolt backed by Germany and Italy? The checks and guns had been found in the Fascist strongholds. News of all this was published in the papers, which were coming out whole after the first days in which front-page stories were torn out, and sometimes hardly anything but the lists of the dead and wounded appeared. The death of the dancer La Argentina, whom I had loved to watch, was noted in a tiny paragraph.

  But who would help? Not England, we thought. The English interests in cork, wine, many valuables, were visible. Her leaders liked Mussolini—“gentle,” Churchill called him—and thought Hitler would improve. But the French were naturally and politically friendly. And America would surely be the friend of the Republic. “We can count on you,” the poet Aribau had said.

  The army begins to go. “A Zaragoza,” is the word.

  The city is under martial law. We are called to a meeting of the Olympic people remaining, in a smaller square. The Norwegian speaks, briefly, and the Italian representative of his team. The Catalan speaks, in the language that is beginning to break open to us, glints like French, flashes like Spanish:

  “This is what the Games stand for,” not only to work against what is about to happen in Berlin, what is happening in Germany and through Hitler, but the true feelings of the Games, their finality: ‘Amor i fraternitat entre els homes de tot el món i de totes les races.’”

  And Martín, the organizer of the Games, has the last word. He speaks to us as foreigners, as ourselves. He is speaking to me directly, at least that is how I hear his open words:

  “The athletes came to attend the People’s Olympiad, but have been privileged to stay to see the beautiful and great victory of the people in Catalonia and Spain.

  “You have come for the Games, but you have remained for the greater Front, in battle and in triumph.

  “Now you will leave, you will go to your own countries, but you will carry to them . . . the tense sunlit square, Martín about to start for Saragossa, the people in the streets, the train, the teams, the curious new loving friendship, the song of the Jocs:

  No és per odi, no és per guerra

  Que venim a lliutar de cada terra

  “. . . you will carry to your own countries, some of them still oppressed and under fascism and military terror, to the working people of the world, the story of what you see now in Spain.”

  Afterword

  Now, a life
time later, I think of all that followed. The British team had invited us to go out with them, but when the ship—H.M.S. London—arrived “from Gib,” her officers would allow only British to board. So the Belgians, saying they were grateful for what the Americans had done to help them during World War I, took us on the Ciudad de Ibiza, taking almost twice the number she was supposed to carry.

  The Catalan government told us we were welcome to stay, the men if they would fight, the women if we had experience in nursing or child care. I had none of that; work in a bookshop, in a theatre office, proofreading the Mu books, research (if that was what it was), and a first book of poems.

  Otto, on the dock, looked deep into me. “You will do what you can in America,” he said, “and I in Spain.” He smiled, with his own happiness. He was not going to run in the Games. He had joined the militia, and he was going off to Saragossa. . . . We spoke of my coming back to Spain, but it was not very real. These days were all we could look at. “Gifts of the revolution,” he said. He had been waiting to fight against fascism since Hitler came to power.

  I waved to him from the deck. Ernie and Rose were there, the American team, the Belgians—the man who had walked over the Pyrenees—and the Hungarian team from France. The ship pulled away from the harbor, with Columbus standing on his black pillar.

  All night toward France. We stayed on the dark crowded deck and talked. The Hungarian printer from Paris said to me, “And in all this—where is the place for poetry?”

  “Ladis,” I answered, “I know some of it now, but it will take me a lifetime to find it.” We talked all night. With the morning light we saw the Cape of Agde, and then went into the harbor of Sète, to the canal, all at peace, and the houses with their red tile roofs and yellow deep cadmium awnings, and the swallows flying.

  They took us in, and stamped our papers with police passes. There was dancing in the streets that night; I danced with Jo Gasco, who later left his shop and fought in Spain for six months of every year.

  There were rumors that the People’s Olympics might be held in October.

  Sète produces vermouth and Valéry. It was at peace, a curious distant peace. I rented a little kayak and, after I paddled about two hundred yards out, let it drift and cried at last. I did not want to go on, but they came for me, and I paddled to the plage.

  A week later, at the Berlin Olympics, Hitler refused to recognize the victory of Jesse Owens, the black American who won the hundred-meter race. The Berlin officials said the Negro had “a following wind” that helped him. He won three other events, however.

  Everybody knows who won the war in Spain.

  I COULD NOT get back; nobody would send me. You had to belong to a party or an organization or something, or have a press card. Nobody would give me a press card.

  Otto’s letters came, from training, from hillsides near Huesca, from Huesca, from near the Segre River. Then they stopped. I was able sometimes to hear about other people with the International Brigade—with the Lincoln Battalion—but nobody could send me word of Otto.

  One freezing January evening, Ernst Toller came over to me in a restaurant and told me the news was very bad. The Republicans had been driven far north and the fighting seemed to be entering Barcelona.

  The help that in Spain seemed sure to come from the United States to the Republic had never come. People here had a hard time sorting out the “teams”; Loyalists, in our American usage, were people against the Republic. And there were powerful, all-powerful, forces here on the side of Franco. Joseph Kennedy’s argument to Roosevelt was one we would come to know—that Spain was the place to “stop communism.”

  I went home and sent a cable to Otto’s Barcelona address, the permanent address, military headquarters, and slept a terrible sleep. The next day, the news of Barcelona’s fall was on the radio.

  Had the cable arrived? Had it fallen into the wrong hands? Had it killed Otto?

  The stories of the Spanish walking in the rocks and snows of the Pyrenees were coming in. There was talk of a buffer zone to be created, and I thought: it will be a paradigm of all boundaries. Let me tell the story of the beginning and this first ending of the war, I had asked publishers. My publisher (by then there was another book of poems) said, “Of course, if you can get a press pass.”

  I called Henry Luce, for whom I had done a story with Margaret Bourke-White. “See Whit in the morning,” said Luce. Now that was Whittaker Chambers. I had not even known there was a left wing until a story of Chambers’, Can You Hear Their Voices, was done as a play my freshman year at college. I told him that, early the next morning, sitting at his desk at Time.

  It was the last thing he wanted to hear. He was in a different incarnation by now, hating the Left, and living in an enormous hollow construct of his own.

  He changed the subject. “What have you got for us on Spain?” he asked me.

  I told him I wanted to get the story of the refugees and the buffer zone—the “end” of the war.

  “But what can you give us?” he repeated. It was clear, slowly, that this was some game of his—a supposed deal in which I would have a story.

  “I want to get the story, I want to write it,” I said. It sounded foolish as I said it. He expected some spy stuff.

  He exploded. “If you haven’t got something for us—! I can send someone down from Paris.” That ended it.

  NEARER OUR OWN time. The Olympics in Mexico City, where the black athletes made their protest. In the meantime, the acts of this century, events which said in tragic clarity that our lives would not be shredded, not as athletes nor women nor as poets, not as travelers, tourists, refugees.

  The high-rise apartment houses going up in Spain, the supermarkets, the tourist industry, the American naval bases.

  NEARER. AT THE P.O.W. camp in Hanoi. The American prisoners want two kinds of news: word of the coming elections, and word of the Olympics just now held in Munich.

  “Killed! Jewish athletes killed during the Games!” the prisoners say in horror. There are eight officers who have been brought down, safely, from their bombers.

  “Eleven of them,” answers Jane Hart, Senator Hart’s wife. The prisoners respond to her coolness, her friendliness, her factuality. They are lean and tanned, wearing their Asian robes of dark red and purple.

  “Athletes—shot!” they say. We tell them we will phone their families when we get back to the States.

  THINGS THAT ENDURE to our own moment. Word finally came, through the Germans in Mexico, that Otto had been killed in the battle on the banks of the Segre River, at a machine-gun nest where six hundred out of nine hundred were killed that day. It is in the Franco histories. Their intelligence worked very well. They knew every gun position.

  Not to let our lives be shredded, sports away from politics, poetry away from anything. Anything away from anything.

  “Why do you care about Spain so much?” a friend asks me, a curious look in her green eyes, the question real on her fine face. She is watching the Derby on TV with passionate interest. During the time before starting, there are film clips of human runners. “It was so long ago,” she said.

  Going on now. Running, running, today.

  *Originally written for and published by Esquire magazine, October 1974.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This project is indebted to the considerable help of a number of people. I’d like to thank William Rukeyser for his enthusiasm and permission to work on Savage Coast; Ammiel Alcalay for his tireless dedication to recovery projects, and for his invaluable intellectual guidance and friendship; and Jane Marcus for encouraging me to go into the archive in the first place, and especially for her mentorship, humor, and radical spirit of inquiry. Thanks to David Greetham and Richard Kaye for their insights, interest, and excitement; Jan Heller Levi for helping put the pieces together; Robin Vogelzang for her expertise and good eye. A special thanks to Aoibheann Sweeney, at the Center for the Humanities, CUNY, for consistently giving me a place to make this work visible; and to th
e participants in the Center for the Humanities 2011–12 Mellon Seminar, who workshopped part of the introduction. I’d also like to thank the participants in the Muriel Rukeyser celebration at the Century Club, the Modernist Studies Association seminar on Women’s Documentary Forms, and the Modern Language Association Rukeyser Centenary Roundtable— in particular Anne Herzog, Elisabeth Däumer, Eric Keenaghan, and Stefania Heim—for affirming the importance of Rukeyser studies, and for their intellectual solidarity. The research for this project has spanned seven years, and much of it has been enabled by fellowships from the Graduate Center, CUNY, for which I’m very grateful. Thanks especially to Amy Scholder, Jeanann Pan-nasch, Elizabeth Koke, and Drew Stevens of the Feminist Press for their fantastic work on the book. To Cecily Parks, for her friendship through the student years, and now in work and motherhood; also to Miciah Hussey for his generosity and humor. To Theresa Epstein, Perry Kennedy, and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy for their sustaining support, and to August, who’s been an exciting beginning as I end this project. Most especially, thanks to Casey Hale, my best friend, for his dedication to our family and this book—“love’s not a trick of light.”

  The Feminist Press is an independent, nonprofit literary publisher that promotes freedom of expression and social justice. Founded in 1970, we began as a crucial publishing component of second wave feminism, reprinting feminist classics by writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and providing much-needed texts for the developing field of women’s studies with books by Barbara Ehrenreich and Grace Paley. We publish feminist literature from around the world, by best-selling authors such as Shahrnush Parsipur, Ruth Kluger, and Ama Ata Aidoo; and North American writers of diverse race and class experience, such as Paule Marshall and Rahna Reizo Rizzuto. We have become the vanguard for books on contemporary feminist issues of equality and gender identity, with authors as various as Anita Hill, Justin Vivian Bond, and Ann Jones. We seek out innovative, often surprising books that tell a different story.