by Pete Ayrton
Every evening, whole brigades of anarchists came down out of the hills to loot the hotel wine cellars. Their behavior pushed many of us into the arms of the Communists. Few in number at the beginning of the war, they were nonetheless growing stronger with each passing day. Organized and disciplined, focused on the war itself, they seemed to me then, as they do now, irreproachable. It was sad but true that the anarchists hated them more than they hated the Fascists. This animosity had begun several years before the war when, in 1935, the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI) announced a general strike among construction workers. The anarchist Ramón Acin, who financed Las Hurdes, told me about the time a Communist delegation went to see the head of the strike committee.
‘There are three police stoolies in your ranks,’ they told him, naming names.
‘So what?’ the anarchist retorted. ‘We know all about it, but we like stoolies better than Communists.’
Despite my ideological sympathies with the anarchists, I couldn’t stand their unpredictable and fanatical behavior. Sometimes, it was sufficient merely to be an engineer or to have a university degree to be taken away to Casa Campo. When the Republican government moved its headquarters from Madrid to Barcelona because of the Fascist advance, the anarchists threw up a barricade near Cuenca on the only road that hadn’t been cut. In Barcelona itself, they liquidated the director and the engineers in a metallurgy factory in order to prove that the factory could function perfectly well when run by the workers. Then they built a tank and proudly showed it to a Soviet delegate. (When he asked for a parabellum and fired at it, it fell apart.)
Despite all the other theories, a great many people thought that the anarchists were responsible for the death of Durutti, who was shot while getting out of his car on the Calle de la Princesa, on his way to try to ease the situation at the university, which was under siege. They were the kind of fanatics who named their daughters Acracia (Absence of Power) or Fourteenth September, and couldn’t forgive Durutti the discipline he’d imposed on his troops.
We also feared the arbitrary actions of the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista), which was theoretically a Trotskyite group. Members of this movement, along with anarchists from the FAI, built barricades in May 1937 in the streets of Barcelona against the Republican army, which then had to fight its own allies in order to get through.
My friend Claudio de la Torre lived in an isolated house outside of Madrid. His grandfather had been a freemason, the quintessential abomination in the eyes of the Fascists. In fact, they despised freemasons as heartily as they did the Communists. Claudio had an excellent cook whose fiancé was fighting with the anarchists. One day I went to his house for lunch, and suddenly, out there in the open country, a POUM car drove up. I was very nervous, because the only papers I had on me were Socialist and Communist, which meant less than nothing to the POUM. When the car pulled up to the door, the driver leaned out and... asked for directions. Claudio gave them readily enough, and we both heaved a great sigh of relief as he drove away.
All in all, the dominant feeling was one of insecurity and confusion, aggravated, despite the threat of fascism on our very doorstep, by endless internal conflicts and diverging tendencies. As I watched the realization of an old dream, all I felt was sadness.
And then one day I learned of Lorca’s death, from a Republican who’d somehow managed to slip through the lines. Shortly before Un Chien andalou, Lorca and I had had a falling-out; later, thin-skinned Andalusian that he was, he thought (or pretended to think) that the film was actually a personal attack on him.
‘Bunuel’s made a little film, just like that!’ he used to say, snapping his fingers. ‘It’s called An Andalusian Dog, and I’m the dog!’
By 1934, however, we were the best of friends once again; and despite the fact that I sometimes thought he was a bit too fond of public adulation, we spent a great deal of time together. With Ugarte, we often drove out into the mountains to relax for a few hours in the Gothic solitude of El Paular. The monastery itself was in ruins, but there were a few spartan rooms reserved for people from the Fine Arts Institute. If you brought your own sleeping bag, you could even spend the night.
It was difficult, of course, to have serious discussions about painting and poetry while the war raged around us. Four days before Franco’s arrival, Lorca, who never got excited about politics, suddenly decided to leave for Granada, his native city.
‘Federico,’ I pleaded, trying to talk him out of it. ‘Horrendous things are happening. You can’t go down there now; it’s safer to stay right here.’
He paid no attention to any of us, and left, tense and frightened, the following day. The news of his death was a terrific shock. Of all the human beings I’ve ever known, Federico was the finest. I don’t mean his plays or his poetry; I mean him personally. He was his own masterpiece. Whether sitting at the piano imitating Chopin, improvising a pantomime, or acting out a scene from a play, he was irresistible. He read beautifully, and he had passion, youth, and joy. When I first met him, at the Residencia, I was an unpolished rustic, interested primarily in sports. He transformed me, introduced me to a wholly different world. He was like a flame.
His body was never found. Rumors about his death circulated freely, and Dali even made the ignoble suggestion that there’d been some homosexual foul play involved. The truth is that Lorca died because he was a poet. ‘Death to the intelligentsia’ was a favorite wartime slogan. When he got to Granada, he apparently stayed with the poet Rosales, a Falangist whose family was friendly with Lorca’s. I guess he thought he was safe with Rosales, but a group of men (no one knows who they were, and it doesn’t really matter, anyway) led by someone called Alonso appeared one night, arrested him, and drove him away in a truck with some workers. Federico was terrified of suffering and death. I can imagine what he must have felt, in the middle of the night in a truck that was taking him to an olive grove to be shot. I think about it often.
At the end of September, the Republican minister of foreign affairs, Alvarez del Vayo, asked to see me. Curious, I went to his office and was told only that I’d find out everything I wanted to know when I got to Geneva. I left Madrid in an overcrowded train and found myself sitting next to a POUM commander, who kept shouting that the Republican government was garbage and had to be wiped out at any cost. (Ironically, I was to use this commander later, as a spy, when I worked in Paris.) When I changed trains in Barcelona, I ran into José Bergamín and Muñoz Suaï, who were going to Geneva with several students to attend a political convention. They asked me what kind of papers I was carrying.
‘But you’ll never get across the border,’ Suaï cried, when I told him. ‘You need a visa from the anarchists to do that!’
The first thing I saw when we arrived at Port Bou was a group of soldiers ringing the station, and a table where three somber-faced anarchists, led by a bearded Italian, were holding court like a panel of judges.
‘You can’t cross here,’ they told me when I showed them my papers.
Now the Spanish language is capable of more scathing blasphemies than any other language I know. Curses elsewhere are typically brief and punctuated by other comments, but the Spanish curse tends to take the form of a long speech in which extraordinary vulgarities – referring chiefly to the Virgin Mary, the Apostles, God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit, not to mention the Pope – are strung end to end in a series of impressive scatological exclamations. In fact, blasphemy in Spain is truly an art; in Mexico, for instance, I never heard a proper curse, whereas in my native land, a good one lasts for at least three good-sized sentences. (When circumstances require, it can become a veritable hymn.)
It was with a curse of this kind, uttered in all its seemly intensity, that I regaled the three anarchists from Port Bou. When I’d finished, they stamped my papers and I crossed the border. (What I’ve said about the importance of the Spanish curse is no exaggeration; in certain old Spanish cities, you can still see signs like ‘No Begging or Blaspheming – Sub
ject to Fine or Imprisonment’ on the main gates. Sadly, when I returned to Spain in 1960, the curse seemed much rarer; or perhaps it was only my hearing.)
In Geneva, I had a fast twenty-minute meeting with the minister, who asked me to go to Paris and start work for the new ambassador, who turned out to be my friend Araquistán, a former journalist, writer, and left-wing Socialist. Apparently, he needed men he could trust. I stayed in Paris until the end of the war; I had an office on the rue de la Pépinière and was officially responsible for cataloguing the Republican propaganda films made in Spain. In fact, however, my job was somewhat more complicated. On the one hand, I was a kind of protocol officer, responsible for organizing dinners at the embassy, which meant making sure that André Gide was not seated next to Louis Aragon. On the other hand, I was supposed to oversee ‘news and propaganda.’ This job required that I travel – to Switzerland, Antwerp (where the Belgian Communists gave us their total support), Stockholm, London – drumming up support for various Republican causes. I also went to Spain from time to time, carrying suitcases stuffed with tracts that had been printed in Paris. Thanks to the complicity of certain sailors, our tracts once traveled to Spain on a German ship.
While the French government steadfastly refused to compromise or to intervene on behalf of the Republic, a move that would certainly have changed the direction of things, the French people, particularly the workers who belonged to the Confédération Générale de Travail, helped us enormously. It wasn’t unusual, for instance, for a railroad employee or a taxi driver to come see me and tell me that two Fascists had arrived the previous night on the eight-fifteen train and had gone to such-and-such a hotel. I passed all information of this kind directly to Araquistán, who was proving to be by far our most efficient ambassador.
The nonintervention of France and the other democratic powers was fatal to the Republican cause. Although Roosevelt did declare his support, he ceded to the pressure from his Catholic constituency and did not intervene. Neither did Léon Blum in France: We’d never hoped for direct participation, but we had thought that France, like Germany and Italy, would at least authorize the transport of arms and ‘volunteers.’ In fact, the fate of Spanish refugees in France was nothing short of disastrous. Usually, they were simply picked up at the border and thrown directly into camps. Later, many of them fell into the hands of the Nazis and perished in Germany, mainly in Mauthausen.
The International Brigades, organized and trained by the Communists, were the only ones who gave us real aid, but there were others who simply appeared on their own, ready to fight. Homage should also be paid to Malraux, albeit some of the pilots he sent were little more than mercenaries. In my Paris office, I issued safe-conduct passes to Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Joris Ivens, so they could make a documentary on the Republican army.
There was a good deal of frustrating intrigue going on while we were making a propaganda film in Spain with the help of two Russian cameramen. This particular film was to have worldwide distribution, but after I returned to Paris, I heard nothing for several months on the progress of the shoot. Finally, I made an appointment with the head of the Soviet trade delegation, who kept me waiting for an hour until I began shouting at his secretary. The man finally received me icily.
‘And what are you doing in Paris?’ he asked testily.
I retorted that he had absolutely no right to evaluate my activities, that I only followed orders, and that I only wanted to know what had happened to the film. He refused to answer my question and showed me rather unceremoniously to the door. As soon as I got back to my office, I wrote four letters – one to L’Humanité, one to Pravda, one to the Russian ambassador, and the last to the Spanish minister – denouncing what seemed to be sabotage inside the Soviet trade delegation itself (a charge that was eventually confirmed by friends in the French Communist Party, who told me that it was ‘the same all over’). It seemed that the Soviet Union had enemies, even within its own official circles, and indeed, some time later, the head of the delegation became one of the victims of the Stalinist purges.
Another strange story, which sheds a curious light on the French police (not to mention police all over the world), concerns three mysterious bombs. One day, a young and very elegant Colombian walked into my office. He’d asked to see the military attaché, but since we no longer had one, I suppose someone thought I was the next best thing. He put a small suitcase on my desk, and when he opened it, there lay three little bombs.
‘They may be small,’ he said to me, ‘but they’re powerful. They’re the ones we used in the attacks on the Spanish consulate in Perpignan and on the Bordeaux–Marseille train.’
Dumbfounded, I asked him what he wanted and why he’d come to me. He replied that he had no intention of hiding his Fascist sympathies (he was a member of the Condor Legion) but that he was doing this because he despised his superior!
‘I want him arrested,’ he said simply. ‘Why is none of your business. But if you want to meet him, come to La Coupole tomorrow at five o’clock. He’ll be the man on my right. I’ll just leave these with you, then.’
As soon as he’d gone, I told Araquistán, who phoned the prefect of police. When their bomb experts got through with their analysis, it turned out that our terrorist had been right; they were more potent than any others of that size.
The next day, I invited the ambassador’s son and an actress friend of mine to have a drink with me at La Coupole. The Colombian was exactly where he said he’d be, sitting on the terrace with a group of people. And as incredible as it may sound, I knew the man on his right, and so did my friend. He was a Latin American actor, and we all shook hands quite amicably as we walked by. (His treacherous colleague never moved a muscle.)
Since I now knew the name of the leader of this terrorist group, as well as the hotel in Paris where he lived, I contacted the prefect, who was a Socialist, as soon as I got back to the embassy. He assured me that they’d pick him right up; but time went by, and nothing happened. Later, when I ran into the boss sitting happily with his friends at the Select on the Champs-Elysées, I wept with rage. What kind of world is this? I asked myself. Here’s a known criminal, and the police don’t want any part of him!
Shortly afterward, I heard from my Colombian informant again, who told me that his leader would be at our embassy the next day applying for a visa to Spain. Once again, he was correct. The actor had a diplomatic passport and got his visa with no trouble whatsoever. On his way to Madrid, however, he was arrested at the border by the Republican police, who’d been warned ahead of time; but he was released almost immediately on the protest of his government. He went on to Madrid, carried out his mission, and then calmly returned to Paris. Was he invulnerable? What kind of protection did he have? I was desperate to know.
Around that time, I left on a mission to Stockholm, where I read in a newspaper that a bomb had leveled a small apartment building near the Etoile that had been the headquarters of a labor union. I remember the article saying quite precisely that the bomb was so powerful the building had simply crumbled to dust, and that two agents had died in the blast. It was obvious which terrorist had done the job.
Again, nothing happened. The man continued to pursue his activities, protected by the careful indifference of the French police, who seemed to support whomever had the upper hand. At the end of the war, the actor, a member of the Fifth Column, was decorated for his services by Franco.
While my terrorist was cheerfully going about his dirty work in Paris, I was being violently attacked by the French right wing, who – believe it or not – had not forgotten L’Age d’or. They wrote about my taste for profanity and my ‘anal complex,’ and the newspaper Gringoire (or was it Candide?) reminded its readers that I’d come to Paris several years before in an effort to ‘corrupt French youth.’
One day, Breton came to see me at the embassy.
‘Mon cher ami,’ he began, ‘there seem to be some disagreeable rumors about the Republicans executing Péret because
he belonged to POUM.’
POUM had inspired some adherence among the surrealists. In fact, Benjamin Péret had left for Barcelona, where he could be seen every day on the Plaza Cataluña surrounded by people from POUM. On Breton’s request, I asked some questions and learned that Péret had gone to the Aragón front in Huesca; apparently, he’d also criticized the behavior of certain POUM members so openly and vociferously that many had announced their firm intention of shooting him. I guaranteed Breton that Péret hadn’t been executed by the Republicans, however, and he returned to France soon afterward, safe and sound.
From time to time, I met Dali for lunch at the Rôtisserie Périgourdine on the place St.-Michel. One day, he made me a bizarre offer.
‘I can introduce you to an enormously rich Englishman,’ he said. ‘He’s on your side, and he wants to give you a bomber!’
The Englishman, Edward James, had just bought all of Dali’s 1938 output, and did indeed want to give the Republicans an ultramodern bomber which was then hidden in a Czechoslovakian airport. Knowing that the Republic was dramatically short of air strength, he was making us this handsome present – in exchange for a few masterpieces from the Prado. He wanted to set up an exhibition in Paris, as well as in other cities in France; the paintings would be placed under the warranty of the International Tribunal at The Hague, and after the war there would be two options: If the Republicans won, the paintings would be returned to the Prado, but if Franco was victorious, they’d remain the property of the Republican government in exile.
I conveyed this unusual proposition to Alvarez del Vayo, who admitted that a bomber would be very welcome, but that wild horses couldn’t make him take paintings out of the Prado. ‘What would they say about us?’ he demanded. ‘What would the press make of this? That we traded our patrimony for arms? No, no, it’s impossible. Let’s have no further talk about it.’