Treasure of the Spanish Civil War

by Serge Pey

  Pua said that the holes left in the beach at Argelès were the real treasure, but not everyone understood what he meant.

  The Apostle of Peace

  “LOOK! IT’S THE beam of peace!”

  I looked up and saw the immense beam that bisected the roof of the labor exchange. A beam that ran the full length of the hall.

  In those days I believed that the workers wanted to turn the world into a house of happiness. I thought that this was why, in each town, they raised a beam, for the world was wide and many beams and many halls would be needed to build their house.

  But when my father said, “Look! It’s the beam of peace!” his Spanish-accented French made la poutre, the beam, sound like l’apôtre, the apostle. What I heard was “the apostle of peace” – and there, sure enough, before us at the end of the beam, stood an imperious white-plaster bust of Jean Jaurès.

  The Spanish exiles had a great veneration for the French socialist and anti-militarist, fatally shot on the eve of the Great War by an assassin prophetically named Villain. The anarchists avenged Jaurès’s murder by executing Villain in Ibiza during the Spanish Civil War, and they always pronounced the victim’s name with an emotional reverence.

  In my town Jaurès’s bust stood against a black backdrop in a hall with metal folding chairs. A red flag and a tricolor were draped around the head. Seen in profile, the plaster figure seemed to be guarding the entrance to a place where History held public meetings. At the time, the roof of the labor exchange was supported by wooden posts, since replaced by concrete columns. The enormous beam that traversed the room ended at the exact place presided over by the mute, bearded bust of the great man.

  From l’apôtre to la poutre is a very small step, and only years later did I realize my mistake. It happened on a Sunday morning when I arrived early for an all-tendency anti-Franco meeting: I noticed then that Jaurès, at the end of the beam, was smiling his plaster smile.

  As a boy, listening to my father, I had looked at the beam but had not followed it to its termination in the wall. A child’s eye may stop looking before seeing all that is to be seen. And yet what I misheard, as a newcomer to History and on account of my father’s pronunciation, was not wrong: the “apostle of peace” became a true beam, a light in the darkness of the great butchery of workers that was the First World War.

  Poutre or apôtre, in either case Jaurès played his role to perfection, and to this day, whenever I notice his statue in public squares I picture a beam taking shape above it and dangling from it, like the two pans of a pair of scales, the two eyes of a child of exiles.

  And the voice of a Spanish Republican still murmurs, in the French of his hope, “Look! It’s the apoutré of peace looking at us.”

  The Bench

  THIS BENCH IS a bench.

  This bench is the very epitome of a bench: a long narrow wooden seat allowing several people to sit together.

  This bench is a Platonic idea of a bench: all alone, gliding through the heaven of the pure ideas of all benches. A worm-eaten bench, polished and worn by generations of schoolchildren in gray smocks. A bench on either end of which you should not sit for fear of toppling off, feet in the air, to roars of laughter from infinity. A true bench, therefore. Horizontal, wobbly, lopsided – stopping-place for all wayfarers, even those who have lost their way.

  This bench, on the concrete floor of the guardhouse, with a soldier sitting on it, is the matrix of all the benches in existence. But here beside the railroad line, amidst ghosts of the travel-weary and thirsty, it has become the centerpiece of a bench museum, saved long ago by some collector from the programmed elimination of all the world’s benches.

  The soldier has chosen his spot well. He asks me to sit, like him, at one end of the bench, so that he can watch me. When I entered the guardhouse I had seen from his reddened eyes that he was exhausted and had obviously not slept in a long while.

  At his signal we both sit down at the same time, one at each end of the bench.

  The nearby church bell tolls one in the morning. A police dog barks very close to the guardhouse. Despite the trains that pass regularly, the soldier has nodded off.

  I have been in the guardhouse for at least two hours now, my legs hurt, and my wrists are raw from the handcuffs.

  By shifting my backside, I try to find the exact point that would allow me to get to my feet without making the bench tip and above all without making the soldier slide off. The slightest false move or haste on my part might cause the soldier’s weight to raise the bench and thus alert him to the fact that I have stood up. I resolve to alter my position by imperceptible increments. At each of these movements my guard instinctively corrects for the slight challenge I have made to our seat’s stability.

  The soldier is dreaming. He is in a huge house where an old woman walks on crutches. He opens a door. The door of an armoire. But he closes it again. He knows that behind it is the mouth of a fathomless well. Now the door opens by itself. Someone is pushing it from within. Someone is waiting for him at the bottom of the well. The soldier leaves the house. Then he realizes that he has failed to rescue the old woman on crutches. He goes back inside but the old woman has vanished. He thinks that she must already have gone out through another door. He looks for her outside but does not see her. The soldier tries to walk but his legs are numb and won’t let him. He knows that someone imprisoned in the well is after him, but he cannot go more quickly. Just as he is about to be caught he wakes up. He doesn’t know where he is, but then realizes he is in the guardhouse. The bench has moved. The guard restores the bench’s equilibrium balance and shifts his position because his legs hurt.

  It occurs to the guard that his prisoner too must have legs that hurt. The guard goes back to sleep.

  A fly is circling in the guardhouse. I know that I have to turn into a fly. I have to brave the storm. I have to land on dung. I have to escape through the skylight of the guardhouse. Another fly has come in. It looks at me, then changes direction. Turning my head for a split second I see that it has landed on the soldier. I must become a fly too. Flies have a freedom that we lack.

  I must acquire the fly’s ability to be present in two different places almost simultaneously. I must be swift and silent. I must absolutely choose to be a fly.

  I see myself now soaring above the soldiers and the trains. The fly is delivering a message. The fly is a maquisard within the temporary jail where I find myself.

  Outside, a noncommissioned officer is shouting orders under the rain. The same orders over and over. Then comes barking: it seems to me that the soldier marching along the railroad line has a dog on a leash. I can hear the dog panting. I can hear my guard sleeping behind me; he is snoring softly. He seems calm now. The handcuffs hurt my wrists. I wiggle my toes in my shoes. I have pins and needles. That is what we used to say as kids: pins and needles. In point of fact it is the blocking of the circulation in my thighs, the backs of which are on the edge of the bench, that is numbing my two legs. My feet are blocks of wood. I am in pain. I simply have to get up. My blood absolutely must start flowing again. Thousands of needles are pricking my feet. I raise first one and then the other shoe and tap a foot gently on the floor to get the blood moving. I have to get up at all costs and get the circulation going again, but the bench must not move.

  I have no illusions about the fate that awaits me. A suspect I assuredly am. The policemen who arrested me on the train handed me over to this army unit while my papers were checked. It will not take them long to discover my real identity – before the night is out, or possibly tomorrow.

  I hear the church bell tolling: the night is half over. Then another bell responds like an echo. I have heard two bells tolling almost at the same time, but there is a lag between them. Twice, three times I note this lag. Then I realize that I am myself this interval in time, this “almost” that separates the two peals. I must become an echo.

 
Should I kill this soldier in order to escape? I could, but I don’t think I will. I don’t want to kill the sleeping soldier. A third bell resounds as if from underground. My concern right now is to stop my feet going numb by letting the blood flow through my thighs. I lift each leg in turn and rotate my ankles. My first goal is to shift from my closed-knee sitting position at the end of the bench to a spread-legged one from which I can better control the bench’s balance.

  I have lucked upon a tired soldier, for despite the directives of his superior officer he has sensed my change of position but failed to forbid it. In fact his posture is just like mine.

  It is a posture, however, which does not alter the fact that, should either of us stand up, the bench will inevitably tip up and clatter back onto the concrete floor.

  I move my backside slowly on the end of the bench, centimeter by centimeter, raising myself up from time to time so that the bench tips down slightly at the soldier’s end, unbalancing him. Regularly, still half-asleep, he corrects the balance that I have thus disturbed by almost indiscernibly moving his own rear end.

  My movements toward the front of the bench are as slight and natural as those any man sitting down all night long might make to avoid cramps. The soldier is in the same situation as me. His position is likewise unstable. Since I am handcuffed, he cannot possibly imagine that I might escape. So he himself shifts his backside, quite naturally, to avoid tipping up the bench.

  The bench thus represents the invisible plane on which we are ensconced and which constrains us. That the soldier’s own legs might fall asleep is one external disturbing factor, for example, for which I am not exclusively responsible. Quite as easily as an escape attempt on my part, the soldier’s painful legs could also precipitate a fall.

  The equilibrium of the bench might be considered not as a static situation but rather as a cycle, a succession of situations involving my feet, the guard’s feet, and even noises and motion outside the guardhouse. The notion of equilibrium inside the guardhouse depends on a specific point of view that at once unites and separates the two of us. That point of view combines those of the bench, the guard, and myself.

  The soldier has a back just like mine and fatigue just like mine. He has no wish to disturb the peace of his fragile slumber.

  By now I am at the very end of the bench. I know that the soldier has moved his rump a tiny bit further along and is supporting himself on legs spread even wider. He is leaning on the barrel of his rifle: I see that, in response to my barely perceptible shifts, he has thus assumed the position of a tripod and the bench has become perfectly stable.

  I know that the time has come to put the bench’s confident balance to the test.

  I decide to get to my feet, breathing from my stomach and letting the blood flow down through my legs. The tingling in my right foot makes me stumble, but I rise successfully and the bench does not tip. When I hoist myself up onto the windowsill I can see a soldier patrolling the station platform.

  I decide to sit back down on the bench and wait for the next train to come through. The station is suddenly silent. I realize that this next train will be my last chance. But will it ever arrive? In the rhythm of the cars gliding along the rails you can hear whole symphonies. The ties, bolts, and track ballast, along with the cadence of the wheels, suggest so many musicians playing under the direction of an invisible conductor. Trains cannot be against me, nor can their music.

  Every would-be fugitive ought to master the circus arts: aerial perch, tightrope, chair balancing, stilts, and walking globes. On this bench I am juggling horizontally with equilibrium so as not to fall. Or, perhaps better, balance is seeking its own balance so as to go on existing.

  In fact the bench, the soldier, and I constitute a set of interactions that may be deemed stable just so long as no agency has an interest in changing its strategy. But should the bench no longer be at risk of tipping up even though I am standing, my strategy will have created a new equilibrium. A pendulum self-stabilized in the wake of its oscillation is said to be “in stable equilibrium.” As I get to my feet I make doubly sure that the bench does not wobble.

  The soldier is still sleeping, believing that I am still on the other end of the bench. But I am on my feet, behind him, contemplating his crossed hands grasping his rifle.

  The bench, balanced, is not budging. I have become its extremity, detached now, and leaving through the window.

  The bench was really a stilled pendulum. A motionless horizontal clock. The guard sitting on one end restored stability at each of my subtle movements. This meant that his strategy, which counted on his being woken up when he was tipped off the bench, did not work. I had calculated most carefully that the bench would not rise and clang back onto the floor when I got to my feet. Once, twice, three times I stood up, and each time the bench remained perfectly stable. Without realizing it, the guard had definitively corrected the imbalance and was now still asleep, leaning on his gun.

  Outside, the rails began to quiver. A rumble caused the guardhouse floor to shake. The train I was awaiting was pulling in. The last one of the night. It was now or never. Later would be too late.

  I got up slowly, and just as I had trained him to do over the last few hours, my guard, grunting, adjusted his position. I had become double. One me was still sitting at the back of the room on the bench but another me was standing before the window and heaving myself up.

  I had trained the bench not to tip up and to wait for me. I had almost reached the window. The confidence filling me now was founded on the fact that I could not imagine that this was me escaping, only that I was still sitting on the bench to make sure it would not tip up.

  Perhaps the one escaping was just a figment of the imagination of the one still seated? Perhaps I was just an illusion? All the same, I was on my feet and past my guard.

  He was still sleeping as I pulled myself up to the window. Outside I could see the train, stopped. A compartment window was open, and opposite me was an officer, perhaps a commanding officer.

  He looked at me. I did not believe that this was an officer across from me, just a man. For his part he could not believe that I was a prisoner escaping.

  The officer was not there: it was someone else at the train window watching me tumble noiselessly onto the platform with my hands manacled. And it was not he who watched me cross the railroad line and go down the little path behind the station. Not he who said nothing and failed to raise the alarm. It was he, however, who, too late, fired at me. I crawled under the stationary train. Then I ran off on the far side toward the trees.

  Behind me nobody moved.

  I am thinking that we are not in a state of war. That the enemy has not bombarded the entire region. That thousands of children are not wandering the roads. I fancy that I am playing a game in winter, by the fire, drinking a glass of brandy and stuffing an old pipe.

  I watch the dice rolling on the table and move my men. A game is a formal arrangement in which two or more players each decide on a strategy in the full awareness that its success depends on the choices of all. Two players, the soldier and I, chose a bench as our scales. The player who stood up first without causing the bench to tip would undoubtedly have a chance to win and leave through the window. The victor would maintain equilibrium but lose the bench. Those were the stakes. The loser would win the bench and carry it on his back his whole life long as testimony to a theory of equilibrium.

  I tell myself that it is not me running through the trees but that other me sitting on the bench in the guardhouse by the station platform. But one rider on a seesaw has escaped today. I am a plaything in thrall to a mathematical law that I do not understand.

  At the end of the walkway leading into the woods, which is cluttered with the trunks of felled trees, a dog barks when it sees me but then goes silent as though grasping the implications of this signal.

  The guardhouse in which I was being held capti
ve is locked with a key, and the soldier is still sitting on the bench. I know he must be awake by now. He is afraid, and raises the alarm through the window. But it is already too late. A siren blares on the platform. The other soldiers begin firing towards the forest. I am running alongside a stream. I think I recognize the trees in the forest.

  Postface

  Aunque me tiren en el puente

  y también la pasarela

  me verás pasar el Ebro

  en un barquito de velas

  They can shoot at me on the bridge

  and on the walkway too

  but you’ll see me cross the Ebro

  in a little sailboat

  CHILDREN LOVE TO sleep on chairs. We sleep in the back room.

  There are not enough beds in the shack, which is a stone’s throw from the fishermen’s cooperative. My mother uses three chairs to make a bed. She turns one around so that the seat is towards the wall. The second she positions the other way round, in other words with its back to the wall, and the third, like the first, with the seat towards the wall. This means that you aren’t likely to fall and you can sleep until dawn, before the boats come in. My father and mother sleep in the big bed; my sister curls up in a corner with a rag doll.

  My uncle has heaved a mattress onto the kitchen table in order, he says, to avoid scorpions. He sleeps there between the window and the door, just to the left of a flypaper dangling from the ceiling. My father told him to make sure not to get his hairs – his little fly and all his stuff – stuck to it. This aroused raucous laughter in the shack. I myself did not understand the remark. Nor did I ask for a translation. For me words are like flies escaping from the lips. Words stick to things, and words with no place to land end up with the others on the flypaper dangling so close to my uncle’s endangered knees. I think you have to catch words in order to invent things. Flies escaping from the flypaper are so many things in embryo that come to life for me all day long, there behind the fishermen’s cooperative.