Birth of Our Power

by Greeman, Richard, Serge, Victor

  “Take a good look at these men, this room! Don’t you see you have to shake them up, snap them out of it, out of this place, out of their stupor?”

  I see that you are alone, José, with your exalted valor which intoxicates you like wine that is too heady; alone, ready for anything, absurd like heroes who come before their time. Lost. The other city is stronger …

  On the way out of there, toward midnight, José spies a poor wretch with the look of a dead fish on the edge of the shadows, about to disappear into the night. José takes him by the arm:

  “Come on, old fellow. I’ll buy you supper. Don’t laugh. I’m not drunk. I’m a man. Maybe you don’t know what that is.”

  6 A young French anarchist, executed May 21, 1894, for having exploded a bomb at the Café Terminus in Paris. At the trial he took full responsibility for his act and practically demanded to be guillotined. —Tr.

  FOURTEEN

  Messages

  THE MAJORITY OF THE FRENCHMEN AMONG US ARE OF ZILZ’S OPINION. THE herd of humanity is not worth fighting for; revolutions won’t change man’s destiny in the least. Let’s look out for ourselves. Derelicts marked for prison or death in the trenches, they create this escapee’s philosophy for themselves, not unlike that of certain profiteers of the existing order. We were just talking about the Russian Revolution. Zilz struck each of us in turn with his triumphant question:

  “Do you like coffee with cream … ?”

  Next over to the Russian Consulate. A blond smooth-faced clerk had me sign some papers. All I really saw of him was a shirt cuff, some well-manicured pink fingers bearing a signet ring, and shiny hair slicked down over his skull with such perfect care and such heavily scented brilliantine that I was dying to muss it up. In a thin voice he insinuated to me that “today even our ministers don’t know how to spell properly.” Thus a revolution is envisaged under carefully combed hair.

  The Arriviste received me in the middle of a white and gold moderne-style room. At times he seemed to be gazing lovingly at his well-manicured fingernails; the white handkerchief in his breast pocket was puffed up like whipped cream; even the inflections of his voice were full of nuances and kind attentions; but his eyes, the eyes of a pretty boy accustomed to making a good impression, said—strangely—nothing. What color were they in fact? As with the faces of certain Greek statues the pupils are represented by shallow holes; any shadow, however light, emphasizes the absence of vision, that abstract depth. I understood in the very first minute that he was successful with women, that is to say, with ladies, published free verse in slim volumes with parchment covers, made an effort to read Bergson, add professed at once and the same time an energetic nationalism (“What we need is a Catalan Barrès”: that phrase of his was to become famous) and the eloquent republicanism of “our great Pi y Margall …” I could see him as he will be in thirty years, a sure fate: heftier, pale-skinned, his eyelids heavier, decorated, no matter what the regime may be—for even the Republics of Labor will have to invent decorations for this kind of precious servant!—ten years from a peaceful death that will utterly obliterate him, all at once, like a newspaper, its charred headline an urgent cry, forgotten without having been heeded, licked by the flames in the hearth. His sympathies tend naturally toward the great cause of the Entente. Naturally because the contrary would have been just as natural. And how could I help but take his part with Letter of Transit #662–491 pressed tightly in my billfold! Already this ticket, Good for one death like the others, engulfs me in deceit and print’s a hypocritical smile on my face. The Arriviste requested some correspondence from me about Russia for a newspaper:

  “Via Stockholm (well, you like to travel). Our only rule is: Objectivity, local color.”

  I know, I know, The little superior air of not taking sides: a maxim of Realpolitik, an allusion to sociology (modern journalism being scientific) a digression on the Slavic soul, and some picturesque, some human interest, some exotic words: muzhik, izba, traktir, chinovnik … This job is at bottom no worse than the other, which consists of spending ten hours a day setting up the names of the Duke of Medina-Coeli’s horses in 6-point italic. The one ruins the lungs, the other deadens the brain: both stupefying in the long run.

  “Bah, one can always take a pseudonym.”

  An hour later the mendicants had reconciled me with the tragedy of life. The beggars of this city are magnificent. (Their misery is a slap in the face to wealth, smug self-satisfaction, the blue sky.) You can see them dragging themselves around on the porches of the churches, in the gilded dust of the boulevards, filthy, misshapen, pitiful, with their stumps of limbs and suppurating sores, stares tenacious as leeches from eyes ringed with tainted blood, maniac glances of eyes flecked with white. Detestable vermin multiply in their rags with joyful abandon. Horrible diseases: leprosy, lupus, psoriasis, erysipelas, pullulate in their open sores. They have local color. I know one who plays rasping music on the steps of the jetty. This flabby gray slug glues himself to the stern stone shaft which stands erect, cleaving the very gold, the very azure of the sea. And the shaft transports him. “Blind from birth”—a fake blind man, they say, a fake slug, that slug; but we, we are authentic. At the door of the cathedral a mummy’s hand shoots out of a gray stone nook toward a rather plump milky-skinned passer-by who is carrying roses and sweet Williams to her patron saint, doubtless a saint who watches over thrifty widows (HERBALIST’S SHOP: medicinal teas our specialty … ) A cadaverous voice issues from behind that long-dried-out corpse’s hand, as august as that of Ramses II: “Carida por l’amor de Dios, Señora.” (Charity for the love of God, Madam!) The passer-by has passed. Never will that hand fall into dust …

  A Herculean torso, bearing a huge, ill-connected head, is dragging itself toward us on its belly and its leather-strapped wrists. With each lurch forward of this half-man, the head, jerked to one side by the shock, spits out a long guttural supplication; you would think it was spewing forth inexpiable curses at the world if you didn’t hear the words “Nuestro Señor” falling heavily like drops of dark blood from those fleshy lips. Voices answer each other. Echo. In the silence of the cathedral, I can hear the same hill mouthed syllables repeated with fervor by a child’s voice falling like drops of gold, heavy and brilliant: “a Nuestro Señor, a Nuestro Señor …”

  “That man,” I say to El Chorro, “makes one think of an earthworm that has been cut in two by the blade of a shovel.”

  El Chorro throws away his cigarette:

  “Very apt! That’s old Gusano: the Worm. The whole town calls him that … Hi! How are you, Feliz. Here’s one of the boys from Tierra. What’s new, you sanctimonious sans-culotte?”

  The stump of a man laughs, exposing strong teeth, greenish at the gums. Ever since a fall of thirty yards from the scaffoldings of a new basilica for the Holy Family diminished him by one-half, Feliz, of the Tierra y Libertad (Land and Liberty) Party, has been up to his ears in land, and starving in liberty. Policemen turn away, when they hear him apostrophizing some respectable passer-by: “It was building your house that broke my back! Eh, landlord … !” He is still able to be of service. His straw mattress is the last place they would look for Cuban certificates of naturalization, fabricated by …

  “Gusano,” says El Chorro, “this comrade is leaving for Russia tomorrow.”

  Gusano stops laughing. His big shaven head, browned by a layer of sweat and dust, looks as if it had been severed and placed casually on this ugly, hairy torso rounded off in a shapeless bulb below. We look at each other intensely for a moment, down to the inexpressible depths of our being. I no longer see anything but the half-man’s eyes: he has gray-blue irises streaked with brown. A sunset over mountain snows. Warmth and virile vigor.

  “He is lucky,” Gusano says simply at last.

  The harbor is peopled with lights. The lighthouse beacons are corning on. The black hull of the Ursula (Montevideo) stands out, steeper than a cliff, a few yards from the dockside. At night the ships lying in the harbor make you think
of great prehistoric reptiles. But the lines of human invention are sharper than those of nature. Collins. Small craft carrying signal lights are moving across the water—which is like flat ink, spotted here and there with phosphorescent arcs. A green light blinks at the other end of the basin between two vertical hedges of masts.

  Some bales of jute that will be loaded aboard tomorrow shelter us comfortably in the uncertain glimmer of a lantern hanging from the corrugated roof of a nearby warehouse. There are about twenty of us perched on bales between two piles of merchandise covered with waterproof canvas. NO SMOKING: we know only too well what is inside: this is no time to start any trouble. Dockers, seamen, watchmen from the storehouses—all comrades, in any case. A stool pigeon? Probably. But what difference can it make to us, this evening, that there should be one that’s false among these valiant souls?

  We talked about the fifteen per cent and the general strike. From out of the shadows a voice, grave with forty years of labor clearly analyzed the elements of the bosses’ resistance: orders from the Allies, support from the banks in Madrid, competition with certain industries in the Asturias, underhanded dealings of a group in the pay of the Central Powers, discontent created by the customs tariffs, the coming revision of Franco-Spanish agreements … And suddenly here I am, not having budged, at the center of this group to which I bear a message. “Objectivity and local color!” the Arriviste told me. That recollection is enough to dispel my scruples at being an informant without information.

  There are things which, if they took place on a planet of the constellation Orion, these twenty men would understand at the slightest hint. Like war, which no people wants. The general strike overthrowing a monarchy like a well-placed sock on the jaw puts you out of commission: knockout. That it takes time, years, thousands of men, thousands of years in prison, thousands of men hanged, shot, murdered, insurrections put down, assassinations, betrayals, provocations, fresh start after fresh start until, in the end, an old Empire, eaten away by termites, suddenly collapses because some workers’ wives have begun to shout “Bread!” in front of the bakeries, because the soldiers fraternize with the mob, because old policemen decorated for zeal are thrown into the icy waters of the canals, because … I don’t have to teach them, they understand these things perfectly. But someone wants the incredible truth repeated: that it has really happened. Someone demands, his hand outstretched:

  “Well, and the Czar? …”

  “No more Czars.”

  Like a breeze—the final eddy of a hurricane uprooting oaks on the other side of the ocean—that makes the leaves tremble gently in a wood, the same breath of inspiration makes these men tremble with excitement. And we carry on this dialogue of shadows:

  “The army?”

  “With the people.”

  “The police?”

  “No more police.”

  “The prisons?”

  “Burned.”

  “The power?”

  “Us.”

  This extraordinary confidence, this leap into confidence, I owe to you, Gusano. It is your gray-blue eyes streaked with brown that I see before me at this moment. It is you who are speaking within me, you, your sober gaze, that masculine strength underneath, so sure of life no matter what happens. We know how to live and to survive, truncated like worms …

  The voice of the man heavy with forty years of labor asks for some clarifications. We are the power, on condition that we start up the revolution once again. The one just completed is not yet ours. The wealthy classes know only too well how to juggle away revolutions: “Abracadabra!” and one sees nothing but red, the blood of the workers. But the Russians see through this. Their eyes are wide open. It’s all right. Take over the land, take over the factories.

  “And the war?”

  Many of them are worried. A docker says he believes the Germans will win. Germany could strangle the revolution. Phrases clash like crossed swords. The revolution is the daughter of the war. No, the daughter of defeat. The vanquished, whoever they may be, will make it. Long live defeat! The future belongs to the vanquished. But all of Europe is already defeated! Declare peace on the world. Take over Europe …

  I am leaving tomorrow. I carry with me, as my only provisions for the journey, as my only message, these twenty handshakes. And Gusano’s, twenty-one.

  FIFTEEN

  Votive Hand

  TUFTS OF STEAM VAPOR CLING TO THE BRANCHES OF LEANING TREES: BIRCHES, fragile greenery with pale silvery reflections, slender leaves green with moisture, green light. And the parched plains. The web of telegraph wires rises and falls. Sparrows—the notes on these dancing staves: the horizon rises and falls with the rolling of a ship. Refreshing breeze of voyage; cinders and dust lashing the face. The burning of noontide on the rust-colored plains. I think avidly of that city, that city which we did not take, of those men, comrades, my comrades. I should like to open my arms, to stretch my whole being out toward them, to say to them—what? I can only find a single word: “Comrades”—richer perhaps in their language: compañeros—because of so many warm men’s voices united by hope and danger whose echoes are still vibrating in my ears …

  El Chorro’s story this morning on the streetcar still provokes laughter within me, as bracing as a swallow of rum when you are very cold. Not that it was a happy story: but so much liveliness came through the tone and the accent that, lowering my eyelids, I could imagine myself walking along a great enticing highway, in the early morning, with this secure and hardy companion:

  “Hombre, I became a man by falling off a ladder. You’ll see what I mean. I used to be a house painter working for a fat swine of a Huertista7 not far from Veracruz. One fine day I fall from a height of four yards with a bucket of red paint in my hand only, my boy, right on top of that bastard—as he was passing under my ladder—so that my bucket lands right on his head. I couldn’t have done it better if I had been trying. My knee is hurting me, but I begin laughing, laughing so hard that my heart, my stomach, and the rest begin dancing a crazy jota inside me. My buddies throw a bucket of water in my face, but it’s too late. They put me under arrest. ‘You a union man?’ I didn’t even know what that meant. ‘No.’ They tie my hands up neatly behind my back. A couple of slaps on the puss given by an extraordinary pair of hands, you can believe me, send me flying and pull me back again before I even hit the ground. ‘You a union man?’ This time I say yes. You’d be a union man for less, right? Well, then the guy gets real nice, gives me some cigarettes. ‘Do you want a priest? Would you like to spend the night in church, Chico? You shouldn’t die like a dog. Think of your soul.’ I say: ‘In church, sure,’ in order to gain time. Without that, they would have dispatched me on the spot; they used to slaughter a man without a sound, in three movements, with a nice machete chop under your chin. So I spend twenty hours waiting around like a good Christian, at the local church between two lighted candles, to be bled the next morning, just like a pig, but with the firm promise of Paradise. I spend a poor night crushing spiders with the head of a little silver saint. Well, imagine that at five in the morning the Carranzistas8 take over the town! They enlist me, naturally, in a red battalion. I begin to understand things. I join the union. Then we go off to fight against Zapata and I go over to the enemy, for he was worth a lot more than we were …”

  El Chorro was on the station platform. His massive jaw, his square teeth, his big nose, the rusty patina of his fleshy Aztec face.

  “Adios!”

  He raised his mutilated hand: the thumb too short, too wide, the index finger straight out, the sharply cut stumps of three fingers. And that whole hand seemed cut off to me, hanging in space, a votive hand.

  What else did I see in those last seconds? A tall, elegant Negro went by, carrying a little leather suitcase with shiny silver buckles.

  We sometimes think that life is always the same, because it carries us along with it. False immobility of the swimmer who abandons himself to the current. That moment on the rambla, when Angel fell, will never
come back. That other moment in the Plaza Real, that couple in the semidarkness under the gray arcade and Joaquin’s torn jacket; the shrug of Dario’s shoulders; it is finished, all of it. There is nothing left before me but that votive hand, floating, and about to disappear. How to snatch it back?

  A pair of taciturn guardia civils are escorting a little music hall poule to the border. She pouts at them from time to time. It is at those times that she looks out at the landscape; then she puts on some lipstick and looks sulkily into her pocket mirror. They stare into space, straight ahead. I have the feeling that she is about to stand up and smack them with the back of her hand, like Punch slapping the Inspector; and their heads will dandle pitifully right to left, left to right, like the Inspector’s head. Some wrinkles around her nostrils cheapen her unpretentious little lady’s face. She must have a nasty voice on the high notes, the calculating mind of a housewife who knows all about prices, and a great jealousy of the rich. She is ashamed of wearing misshapen eighteen-franc shoes. Her lover’s name is Emile.

  “Isn’t that so, mademoiselle, his name is Emile?”

  She would look up with a start. “Fresh!”—then calmer, feeling me entirely disarmed, would ask without hiding her surprise:

  “How did you guess?”

  This scene was played between us in the zone of possible events, just before the dark explosion of a tunnel.