Death's Other Kingdom

by Woolsey, Gamel; Jacobs, Michael;

  One day late in August when it was even hotter than usual, Pilar and Enrique had been to Malaga to try to buy some coffee and tins of meat or fish. Food was getting short – the shops would only sell a small quantity of each article to each customer. Tinned foods had almost disappeared, cheese had vanished completely, even bacalao (dried salt cod), that stand-by of the poor kitchen, was getting very scarce. The last time I had been to Malaga I had bought one of these flat ill-smelling fish; but the shopkeeper had said sadly, ‘It is the last I can let you have, Señora; there are no more than a dozen left in the storehouse. I don’t know what is going to happen.’ I thoroughly appreciated the seriousness of a shortage of bacalao, highly nourishing as it is, and each smallest piece capable of giving a queer flavour to whole cauldrons of rice or soup; though nothing will ever make me resigned to its taste or smell, reminiscent, as one of our unfortunate guests in the old days in the sierra put it, of ‘feeding time in the Lion house’.

  But it is the food of foods to the poor – when there is no cheap fish to be had, when the weather is so bad that the fishing-boats do not go out, and there are no sardines and boquerones to be bought, there is always bacalao. It is cheap and a very little goes a long way; and whole families who never taste meat get warmth and nourishment from their stew flavoured with small bits of it. And I began that day really to worry about food – not for ourselves, we could manage I thought until we somehow contrived to get our refugees out of the country, or until Malaga was taken and they ceased to be dependent on us. Even in famines you can generally buy something if you have the money, and we hoped always to be able to get that somehow from Gibraltar – but what would the poor do when bread was scarce and bacalao gone? They could not live on tomatoes and French beans, which was all our garden, for instance, was producing late in August.

  Enrique was counting the days until he could put in his potatoes, and he meant to plant as large a crop as possible: all the land we had available was to be in potatoes and beans. For Enrique expected hunger; he had seen hunger before and saw it coming now. No one was cultivating the land, no one was preparing for their winter crops.

  ‘They are going to be hungrier than the cats this winter!’ he kept saying, an extremely telling expression in Spain where poor pussy always goes hungry.

  That day in the hot and dusty end of August it was getting late, and I was beginning to look out anxiously for Pilar and Enrique – we were always anxious if anyone was out of sight for long in those days. Finally I saw them coming slowly down the street looking hot and tired, and went down to the kitchen to greet them and hear any news. Pilar took a whole kilo of coffee out of her basket, two kilos of sugar, and a great pile, almost an arroba, of russet ripe muscatels. It was far more than I had expected them to get, and I was much pleased; but they both seemed sad and discouraged even beyond the habit of the time.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

  ‘Those people of Malaga!’ said Enrique in a tone of fastidious disgust.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked. It was evidently something painful.

  ‘Well,’ said Enrique, ‘we were in a narrow street somewhere above the Calle San Juan – I can’t tell just where it was, Malaga is so vast a capital! when we saw a crowd about someone or something at the door of a house. We thought someone was hurt so we went to see; but it was not that –’

  ‘What was it then?’

  ‘It was a poor old priest who had come in from the country in disguise and tried to hide himself in some friends’ house, and some one had given him away, and a mob had come after him. They were mostly women – Señora, que caffres! What kaffirs! They were beating the poor old man and trying to kick him only there were so many trying to get at him that most of them couldn’t reach him. But the women were the worst; they hit him on the head and spit in his face and some of them blew their noses on his cape. I never saw anything so ugly –’

  ‘What happened to him?’ I asked, sickened by the picture I imagined. ‘Was he killed?’

  ‘No,’ said Enrique, ‘Gracias a Dios! a Guardia de Asalto came and said he would shoot the next man or woman who touched him, and he took the poor creature off to prison all covered with dirt and blood.’ Where he’ll be shot after the next air raid, I thought. Anyway he will probably have a quiet, quick death. It is the best you can hope for in a civil war if you are on the wrong side – to be killed as quickly and painlessly as possible, as early in the day as you can manage it.

  ‘Que caffres! que caffres!’ Enrique kept repeating.

  After the bombing began the atmosphere had grown steadily worse. It is inevitable where open towns are bombed. Hate is the other side of fear. And it was horrible to see and feel this wave of hate-fear rising around us like a menacing sea. The talk of the villagers came to be more and more about Fascistas, and the Fascista was a purely mythical creature of unimaginable wickedness (twin brother I should think to the ‘Red’ of some of our daily papers) always mentioned in a special tone of horror. There was of course a great deal of talk about atrocities the Fascistas were committing; but also (a most curious feature of the war mentality) a good deal about atrocities they were supposed to be committing themselves, many of them quite imaginary. For instance I was told a melodramatic story about a hunt for a Fascista which had taken place near us, and how they had fired the cane brake to burn him out. ‘That men should hunt each other like beasts!’ they added in enjoyment of horror. But the whole story was quite fantastic. The hunt had never happened. The cane brakes were always catching fire in dry weather from the sparks from the train which ran through them at that point, and the sight of the blackened field had suggested the whole story to the atrocity making instinct.

  I was struck by what I can only call a look of dreamy blood-lust upon their faces as they told such stories. I realised then, what I realised even more clearly later at Gibraltar, listening to the English talk of atrocities, what atrocity stories really are: they are the pornography of violence. The dreamy lustful look that accompanies them, the full enjoyment of horror (especially noticeable in respectable elderly Englishmen speaking of the rape or torture of naked nuns: it is significant that they are always naked in such stories), show only too plainly their erotic source.

  I do not claim of course that no atrocities have been committed in Spain: I am sure they have been. Or even that there were not isolated cases in the Great War. War often produces atrocities. But more than ninety-nine hundredths of all atrocity stories, are, I am sure, always products of the diseased and perverse imagination.

  I don’t believe that anyone entirely escapes the evil influences of war. Enrique was a most sensitive and peaceful young man, and the ugly scene he saw in Malaga appalled him. And yet even in Enrique I noticed a change. The evil in the air was corrupting everybody. It is the same in all wars, a contagious delirium rises from the spilled blood and infects everyone with its ugly madness. I was talking to Enrique in the garden one evening not long after that day, when he began to tell me a story about a man he knew of who had joined one of the murder gangs. He had heard that his brother-in-law had been killed in Seville, and was throwing himself into the work of revenge.

  ‘He says that two hundred Fascists must die to revenge his brother-in-law!’ Enrique said, with a sort of dreamy lustful enjoyment that absolutely amazed me. I was about to protest that nobody’s brother-in-law was sufficient excuse for murdering two hundred people, most of them probably innocent of having done anything at all; but old Maria was before me.

  ‘Deben de matarle enseguida!’ she said severely – ‘They ought to kill him at once!’ Enrique was silenced, and picking up his tools went quietly to work among his flowers. When I say that everyone was corrupted, I ought to except Maria: I do not think she was ever affected at all. Her disapproval of all these goings on of Left and Right only became deeper and deeper every day. She snorted when she spoke of ‘these Anarchistas!’ She breathed fire when she spoke of ‘these Fascistas!’ Everything that interrupted the natural ord
er of things, of birth and burial, sowing and harvest, was evil as a matter of course to her, and should be stopped as soon as possible. All these newfangled ideas were ruining the country. We should all suffer for the folly and presumption of misguided men – but not, on her part at least, suffer in silence! She was always indignant, and as she was unable to catch the Fascists and Anarchists and give them a piece of her mind, we all suffered for it, and Pilar grew wanner than ever.

  But I used to feel sometimes – and with comfort – that Maria was perhaps after all the real voice of Spain, and that when all this delirium was over, Maria and her kind would still be found saying: ‘Let us have no novedad! None of your nonsense!’ And we would all sigh with relief and go back to the austere hard-working life of peace.

  ‘I am for that party,’ Enrique once said, ‘who let me cultivate my cabbages.’

  Chapter 11

  SOME OF MY MOST vivid impressions of that time are of scenes and encounters against a background of crowded cafés or noisy streets. Of enemy aeroplanes over Malaga, and the militia and workmen rushing out into the streets, asking ‘Are they ours?’ ‘Are they the Fascists?’ Then the crash of the first bomb falling and a fusillade of pistol shots from the excited crowds trying in vain to hit these birds of prey – and often someone wounded or killed by stray bullets. Of soldiers’ funerals passing by followed by fellow trades unionists, sad old men and women in dusty black, and wondering children. Of untrained boys going off to the front in lorries, shouting, singing, waving to the crowds in the street, who seemed to look after them with more pity than enthusiasm, saluting, calling goodbye, Salud! Salud!

  One chance meeting I remember with two of the political exiles occurred (modern life is always producing these unsuitable conjunctions!) in an ice-cream parlour – of all places to be sitting in during a revolution with the smoke of burning buildings in the air. However, there we were sitting, for it was in the early days when the cafés and restaurants were still closed. The ‘ice-cream parlour’ as it sold only cooling ices was allowed to open first.

  We found it open with delight and were sitting eating lemon-water ices and drinking chufa, that queer thick whitish drink made of the roots of irises which Spaniards love. The ices were rather expensive, the cheapest cost threepence, far too dear for the Spanish poor, and in those days there were very few of the well-to-do about, so that the ‘parlour’ though it was the only place of refreshment open, was not crowded. As we sat enjoying the contrast of our cool drinks in the shade with the heat and glare of the street outside, some foreigners we had seen in Torremolinos passed by, so we spoke to them and asked them to come in and have something with us.

  They were a married couple, he a Pole and she a German, and they were exiles for their beliefs. I remember how the Pole stretched out his hands in a gesture of despair over the situation in Spain, and the hopeless, disillusioned look on his face as he said: ‘I have been through five revolutions, and the state of the country was always worse afterwards than before.’ We asked him naturally if he had been through the Russian Revolution, but he had missed this greatest one; his had been obscure sad struggles which made no particular stir in the indifferent world.

  Later on the same couple very kindly tried to help us. They somehow heard of the difficulties we were having trying to save Don Carlos and get him out of the country, and came over from Torremolinos to tell us that it was possible to buy forged Danish passports for twenty-five pounds (why Danish of all things?), or Polish nationality papers for five pounds. We would have somehow raised the money and got the Danish passport for Don Carlos; but when we told him about it he said that it was no use. Everyone in Spain knows everyone else: some of the officials on the docks would have been sure to recognise him; and that of course would have been fatal, he would have been taken straight to prison and only left it in all probability to meet a firing squad.

  It was remarkable how freely we ourselves moved about all the time during the Civil War. We went everywhere we wanted to, took long walks in the country, and went all over Malaga; and while we did carry our passports when we remembered to I do not think we were ever asked for them. I only remember one occasion when we really aroused suspicion. We had been sitting drinking tea one afternoon at the English Club, when we suddenly realised that our bus would be leaving in five minutes, so we hurriedly jumped up and ran down the stairs and out into the street. The sidewalks and the park were crowded and there was a sudden movement towards us and a rising murmur of ‘Fascists!’ Then some of them recognised us – there were so few foreigners in Malaga at that time that they were all known by sight – and someone said ‘Oh! It’s only those English,’ and everyone drifted away again. It was only the foolish innocent English, no harm in them.

  I remember another chance meeting we had in a café with an old friend who had done some work for us. He was a very clever craftsman, not a Malagueñan but from somewhere in the north. To our surprise he turned out to be an important leader among the Anarcho-Syndicalists. He was an intelligent, humane man, and deplored the murders as we did, and we kept urging him that day to try to use any influence he had to stop such things. But he sat looking beyond our day into that Future World of the Idealist. Soon – very soon now! – Man would be Free – Man would be Good – Man would be Happy. I looked at him sadly as he sat drinking his coffee and smiling at us from under his thatch of white hair with happy shining eyes – looked at him with sympathy and with pity as one might look at a dreaming youth, whose radiant dreams are destined never to be fulfilled in this world.

  Another café meeting of that time still affects me painfully. It was with a Russian – not one of the ‘Russian Agitators’ about whom we used to hear so much in Gibraltar, but a White Russian, a refugee from the Russian Revolution. We knew him well because he had become a chauffeur and now owned his own car, and had often driven us, and had also formerly acted as chauffeur to friends of ours. Just before the trouble began he had exchanged his Nansen passport for Spanish papers, which he had bought for some quite small sum; but now regretted the exchange. He had just joined the Syndicalist trades union in the faint hope of saving his car from being commandeered as it was all he had to get his living by. So far he had succeeded, but he told us that he did not think it would be possible for him to keep it much longer.

  But what I remember so painfully about the meeting is the state of fear that he was in. He would talk nothing but English which he had learned at school in Russia and spoke very badly; his face was white and drawn, and his dark restless eyes were never still, turning constantly from side to side, anxiously examining the faces around him. Was he simply terrified (I wondered) at finding himself in the midst of a Revolution again, like the one which had destroyed his home and turned him into an exile? Was it possible (I do not know why I should have thought of this) that he could be acting as a spy for the Nationalists? Could that be why he was so afraid? This idea which came to me even then while I watched his white face and restless eyes, had a curious half-confirmation later. We were told that in an empty house which we knew he often visited because he had once worked there and was friendly with the caretakers, the military experts had discovered a Nationalists’ sending station. However, he was not arrested then or later; so I think either that he had nothing to do with it, or (even more likely), that the whole story was the usual baseless fabrication.

  It does not matter what I write about him now, for he is dead. He was accidentally killed (such are the accidents of war!) in the hospital in Malaga, where he was lying ill with bronchitis. A bomb fell on the ward and wrecked it. Poor Pedro, I do not like to think of his death, but I like even less to think of the long-drawn-out terrors that preceded it.

  One of these chance café meetings led to our spending a very unpleasant night. We were sitting drinking tea in what remained of the Café E—(part of it had been destroyed) when we noticed that a young man who had sat down at a table near us was unmistakably English. He was extremely young with blond close-clipped curly
hair and a childish, chubby face. We naturally spoke to him and discovered to our surprise that he was one of our ‘War Correspondents’, representing in fact one of our largest popular dailies. He must have been somewhat hampered in this career, we could not help thinking, by the fact that he was practically a child, had never seen a shot fired in anger (as he kept complaining) – and spoke no Spanish. He had not even managed to see any atrocities as yet, though that, we gathered, was what was chiefly expected of him.

  We tried to encourage him by telling him that if he spent a day or two in Malaga he was sure to see some bombing at any rate. Finally we agreed to have dinner with him at his hotel and try to tell him something about the war. He had been in the north and should have known more about it than we did; but his lack of Spanish and entire ignorance about Spain had prevented him from learning anything worth knowing.

  The full moon was rising we noticed as we left the café, but somehow the significance of that failed to impress us; for up till then we had never been raided at night, but always in the day or just at dawn. We would miss the last bus back by staying to dinner, but everything was fairly normal at the moment and there were taxis for hire. Don Carlos was not with us then, or of course we would not have stayed away from home at night.

  We enjoyed the dinner which was much better than anything we could get at that time; and after it when we were drinking our coffee in the glassed-in patio we spread out a map of Spain on the table and tried to show this ‘War Correspondent’ where the lines probably were. The waiters in Spanish style leaning over our shoulders and arguing the point with the greatest animation and friendliness. An armed patrol which came in for their free supper and saw what we were doing only grinned at us and saluted.