No Pasarán!

by Pete Ayrton

  (Edward James is still alive and is the owner of several châteaux, not to mention a large ranch in Mexico.)

  My secretary was the daughter of the treasurer of the French Communist party. He’d belonged to the infamous Bande à Bonnot, and his daughter remembers taking walks as a child on the arm of the notorious Raymond-la-Science. I myself knew two old-timers from the band – Rirette Maîtrejean and the gentleman who did cabaret numbers and called himself the ‘innocent convict.’ One day, a communiqué arrived asking for information about a shipment of potassium from Italy to a Spanish port then in the hands of the Fascists. My secretary called her father.

  ‘Let’s go for a little drive,’ he said to me two days later, when he arrived in my office. ‘I want you to meet someone.’

  We stopped in a café outside of Paris, and there he introduced me to a somber but elegantly dressed American, who seemed to be in his late thirties and who spoke French with a strong accent.

  ‘I hear you want to know about some potassium,’ he inquired mildly.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied.

  ‘Well, I think I just might have some information for you about the boat.’

  He did indeed give me very precise information about both cargo and itinerary, which I immediately telephoned to Negrín. Several years later, I met the man again at a cocktail party at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. We looked at each other across the room, but never exchanged a word. Later still, after the Second World War, I saw him at La Coupole with his wife. This time, we had a chat, during which he told me that he used to run a factory in the outskirts of Paris and had supported the Republican cause in various ways, which is how my secretary’s father knew him.

  During this time I was living in the suburb of Meudon. When I got home at night, I’d always stop, one hand on my gun, and check to make sure I hadn’t been followed. We lived in a climate of fear and secrets and unknown forces, and as we continued to receive hourly bulletins on the progress of the war, we watched our hopes slowly dwindle and die.

  It’s not surprising that Republicans like myself didn’t oppose the Nazi–Soviet pact. We’d been so disappointed by the Western democracies, who still treated the Soviet Union with contempt and refused all meaningful contact with its leaders, that we saw Stalin’s gesture as a way of gaining time, of strengthening our forces, which, no matter what happened in Spain, were sure to be thrown into World War II. Most of the French Communist party also approved of the pact; Aragon made that clear more than once. One of the rare voices raised in protest within the party was that of the brilliant Marxist intellectual Paul Nizan. Yet we all knew that the pact wouldn’t last, that, like everything else, it too would fall apart.

  I remained sympathetic to the Communist party until the end of the 1950s, when I finally had to confront my revulsion. Fanaticism of any kind has always repelled me, and Marxism was no exception; it was like any other religion that claims to have found the truth. In the 1930s, for instance, Marxist doctrine permitted no mention of the unconscious mind or of the numerous and profound psychological forces in the individual. Everything could be explained, they said, by socioeconomic mechanisms, a notion that seemed perfectly derisory to me. A doctrine like that leaves out at least half of the human being.

  I know I’m digressing; but, as with all Spanish picaresques, digression seems to be my natural way of telling a story. Now that I’m old and my memory is weaker, I have to be very careful, but I can’t seem to resist beginning a story, then abandoning it suddenly for a seductive parenthesis, and by the time I finish, I’ve forgotten where I began. I’m always asking my friends: ‘Why am I telling you this?’ And now I’m afraid I’ll have to give in to one last digression.

  There were all kinds of missions I had to carry out, one being that of Negrín’s bodyguard from time to time. Armed to the teeth and backed up by the Socialist painter Quintanilla, I used to watch over Negrín at the Gare d’Orsay without his being aware of it. I also often slipped across the border into Spain, carrying ‘special’ documents. It was on one of those occasions that I took a plane for the first time in my life, along with Juanito Negrín, the prime minister’s son. We’d just flown over the Pyrenees when we saw a Fascist fighter plane heading toward us from the direction of Majorca. We were terrified, until it veered off suddenly and turned around, dissuaded perhaps by the DC-8 from Barcelona.

  During a trip to Valencia, I went to see the head of agitprop to show him some papers that had come to us in Paris and which we thought might be useful to him. The following morning, he picked me up and drove me to a villa a few kilometers outside the city, where he introduced me to a Russian, who examined my documents and claimed to recognize them. Like the Falangists and the Germans, the Republicans and the Russians had dozens of contacts like this – the secret services were doing their apprenticeships everywhere. When a Republican brigade found itself besieged from the other side of the Gavarnie, French sympathizers smuggled arms to them across the mountains. In fact, throughout the war, smugglers in the Pyrenees transported both men and propaganda. In the area of St.-Jean-de-Luz, a brigadier in the French gendarmerie gave the smugglers no trouble if they were crossing the border with Republican tracts. I wish there’d been a more official way to show my gratitude, but I did give him a superb sword I’d bought near the place de la République, on which I’d had engraved: ‘For Services Rendered to the Spanish Republic.’

  Our relationship with the Fascists was exceedingly complex, as the García incident illustrates so well. García was an out-and-out crook who claimed to be a Socialist. During the early months of the war, he set up his racket in Madrid under the sinister name of the Brigada del Amanecer – the Sunrise Brigade. Early in the morning, he’d break into the houses of the well-to-do, ‘take the men for a walk,’ rape the women, and steal whatever he and his band could get their hands on. I was in Paris when a French union man who was working in a hotel came to tell me that a Spaniard was getting ready to take a ship for South America and that he was carrying a suitcase full of stolen jewels. It seemed that García had made his fortune, left Spain, and was skipping the continent altogether under an assumed name.

  García was a terrible embarrassment to the Republic, but the Fascists were also desperate to catch him. The boat was scheduled for a stop-over at Santa Cruz de Tenerife, which at that time was occupied by Franco. I passed my information along to the ambassador, and without a moment’s hesitation he relayed it to the Fascists via a neutral embassy. When García arrived in Santa Cruz, he was picked up and hanged.

  One of the strangest stories to emerge from the war was the Calanda pact. When the agitation began, the civil guard was ordered to leave Calanda and concentrate at Saragossa. Before leaving, however, the officers gave the job of maintaining order in the town to a sort of council made up of leading citizens, whose first venture was to arrest several notorious activists, including a well-known anarchist, a few Socialist peasants, and the only Communist. When the anarchist forces from Barcelona reached the outskirts of town at the beginning of the war, these notable citizens decided to pay a visit to the prison.

  ‘We’ve got a proposition for you,’ they told the prisoners. ‘We’re at war, and heaven only knows who’s going to win. We’re all Calandians, so we’ll let you out on the condition that, whatever happens, all of us promise not to engage in any acts of violence whatsoever.’

  The prisoners agreed, of course, and were immediately released; a few days later, when the anarchists entered Calanda, their first act was to execute eighty-two people. Among the victims were nine Dominicans, most of the leading citizens on the council, some doctors and land-owners, and even a few poor people whose only crime was a reputation for piety.

  The deal had been made in the hope of keeping Calanda free from the violence that was tearing the rest of the country apart, to make the town a kind of no man’s land; but neutrality was a mirage: it was fatal to believe that anyone could escape time or history.

  Another extraordinary event t
hat occurred in Calanda, and probably in many other villages as well, began with the anarchist order to go to the main square, where the town crier blew his trumpet and announced: ‘From today on, it is decreed that there will be free love in Calanda.’ As you can imagine, the declaration was received with utter stupefaction, and the only consequence was that a few women were harassed in the streets. No one seemed to know what free love meant, and when the women refused to comply with the decree, the hecklers let them go on their way with no complaints. To jump from the perfect rigidity of Catholicism to something called free love was no easy feat; the entire town was in a state of total confusion. In order to restore order, in people’s minds more than anywhere else, Mantecon, the governor of Aragón, made an extemporaneous speech one day from the balcony of our house in which he declared that free love was an absurdity and that we had other, more serious things to think about, like a civil war.

  By the time Franco’s troops neared Calanda, the Republican sympathizers in the town had long since fled. Those who stayed to greet the Falangists had nothing to worry about. Yet if I can believe a Lazarist father who came to see me in New York, about a hundred people in Calanda were executed, so fierce was the Fascists’ desire to remove any possible Republican contamination.

  My sister Conchita was arrested in Saragossa after Republican planes had bombed the city (in fact, a bomb fell on the roof of the basilica without exploding, which gave the church an unparalleled opportunity to talk about miracles), and my brother-in-law, an army officer, was accused of having been involved in the incident. Ironically, he was in a Republican jail at that very moment. Conchita was finally released, but not before a very close brush with execution.

  (The Lazarist father who came to New York brought me the portrait Dali had painted of me during our years at the Residencia. After he told me what had happened in Calanda, he said to me earnestly, ‘Whatever you do, don’t go back there!’ I had no desire whatsoever to go back, and many years were to pass before I did in fact return.)

  In 1936, the voices of the Spanish people were heard for the first time in their history; and, instinctively, the first thing they attacked was the Church, followed by the great landowners – their two ancient enemies. As they burned churches and convents and massacred priests, any doubts anyone may have had about hereditary enemies vanished completely.

  I’ve always been impressed by the famous photograph of those ecclesiastical dignitaries standing in front of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in full sacerdotal garb, their arms raised in the Fascist salute toward some officers standing nearby. God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression, and bloodshed.

  I’ve never been one of Franco’s fanatical adversaries. As far as I’m concerned, he wasn’t the Devil personified. I’m even ready to believe that he kept our exhausted country from being invaded by the Nazis. Yes, even in Franco’s case there’s room for some ambiguity. And in the cocoon of my timid nihilism, I tell myself that all the wealth and culture on the Falangist side ought to have limited the horror. Yet the worst excesses came from them; which is why, alone with my dry martini, I have my doubts about the benefits of money and culture.

  The great Spanish film-maker Luis Buñuel was born in 1900 in Calando, a small town in the province of Teruel. In 1917, he went to the University of Madrid, where he ended up studying philosophy and befriending Federico Lorca and Salvador Dali. Buñuel moved to Paris in 1925, where he made Un Chien Andalou (with Dali) and L’Age d’Or (without Dali, who objected to its anti-Catholicism). In 1934, Buñuel returned to Spain and started to make commercial films for Filomofono. By then, he was a communist fellow-traveller. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Buñuel was sent by the Republican government first to Geneva and then to Paris where, he produced España 1936, a moving documentary that won much support for the Republican cause. He then went to Hollywood to give advice on films being made about the Civil War and was still there when the war ended. Buñuel returned to Spain in 1961 to make Viridiana – a film that bizarrely was passed by the government censors, who requested only a minor change to the ending. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, provoked great controversy and was banned in Spain for the next 17 years – until the death of Franco.

  When De Sica saw it in Mexico City, he walked out horrified and depressed. Afterwards, he and my wife Jeanne went to have a drink, and he asked her if I was really that monstrous, and if I beat her when we made love.

  ‘When there’s a spider that needs getting rid of,’ she replied, laughing, ‘he comes looking for me.’

  (My Last Breath, page 238)

  Buñuel died in Mexico City in 1983.

  MURIEL RUKEYSER

  WE CAME FOR GAMES

  A Memoir of the People’s Olympics, Barcelona, 1936

  from Savage Coast

  WE COULD SEE VERY LITTLE from the train. But what we could see was full of sunlight and mystery at the same time: the Water-polo team out there on the station platform doing exercises, and all the yellow flowering mimosa trees full of little boys trying to see into the windows of the compartments.

  There was the station, and the row of houses beyond. We showed no sign of starting. The engineer, somebody said, was sitting on the steps up front, eating bread and sausage.

  I could hear a radio playing Bing Crosby songs, and then a wild yodeling broke in; it was the Swiss team in the car ahead.

  An old Catalan woman said, ‘This train isn’t going to move, not anymore.’

  I say ‘we,’ but I had been sent down from London by myself. It was the hot, beautiful summer of 1936, my first time out of America, with all the smiting days and nights of the month in England.

  I was working for the people who had brought me over with them, and I had driven across to London from the landing in Liverpool on the first morning. Then the first tastes: many people who came to my friends’ flat, people who afterward would be the Labour government, and the people I saw, poets and refugees and the League of Nations correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. A brilliant performance of The Seagull, and the Russian Ballet, and a tithe-marchers’ day, all silent, with the signs reading WE WILL NOT BE DRUV. The feeling of Hitler in the sky, very highly regarded by many, the feeling of Mussolini. Adventures in meaning, too; curiosity about the cooperatives, for my friends were working on a book about co-ops in England and Scandinavia as well as in the U.S.; curiosity about Russia; all-absorbing delight and storm about people, for me, and my own wish not to be ‘druv,’ for I was driven.

  When the editor of an English magazine said, ‘Will you go to Barcelona for me?’ I put away a chance to go to Finland and Russia with my friends. The Olympic Games were to be held in Hitler’s Berlin early in August, and there were going to be Games in Barcelona as a peaceful assertion and a protest. France had asked for more money for these Games than the sum allotted to the big Olympics, and the United States and many other countries were going to send teams. The wedding of the other editor of the magazine, a woman I had never met, came at that moment too – and my editor would have to go to the wedding. I told my editor I would go. He came to the station with me, and gave me a handy black and orange book, a Guide to 25 Languages of Europe.

  Now that book was being passed among us on the train.

  On the way south, there was a tantalizing hour in Paris, glimpses of avenues and buildings seen in movies and paintings and dreams, and kiosks with posters advertising gas masks for children. A change of trains, and the night, and the Spanish frontier at Port Bou, and then this train, going slowly, with a flash of the Mediterranean, and shoulders of olive hills, and a Catalan family in the wooden compartment with me. Slowly, and the olive, yellow-strapped uniform of the Civil Guard; the grins over English cigarettes and the Olympic teams, whom everybody had noticed at the frontier because one or two had some difficulty about the collective passports under which they traveled.

  The train had gone more and more slowly, and then stopped here, Moncada. A small station after
Gerona, a clearly unimportant town. The Spaniards begin to talk to the Hungarian athletes, partly in French, partly in a mixture of sign language and 25 Languages. But the phrase-book language, ‘One o’clock exactly. Thank you very much,’ would not carry the questions about the Olympics, or politics. The Spaniards said, ‘The Army. Some on one side, some on the other. Not good to talk.’ These are not Spaniards; they are Catalans. Their own nation, their own language (not in the orange and black book), and they have been preparing for these Games, these Jocs, for a long time. People are hurrying to Barcelona from Paris, from Switzerland, from America, from all over France, from England, whose unions have sent a tennis team and some track people.

  The train does not go. On the station platform, there are armed civilians patrolling, and now the small boys are climbing the little blossoming trees. Rumors begin to go through the train, and the Catalan family sitting with me begins to make a plan. The heavyset fine father talks to his mother, who agrees; he pats his young olive-colored son on the head. The boy is eleven; he looks at me with iodine-color eyes as his father invites me to come into the town with them. His father says, ‘It is General Strike.’

  At that moment two Americans come through the train. They have heard that an American woman is here. The lady from Peapack, New Jersey, had shared my compartment on the French train; she is up front, and is concerned about me. I decided for the train, and told the Catalan family I would find them later.

  We went through the train, talking; really we were collectors of rumor. The engineer was in charge of us now, and the stationmaster spoke for the town. No, he could not say how long the strike would last. But the shooting had begun at the barracks in Barcelona that morning. It had something to do with the Games, they said; or something to do with the moment of the Games, at which several thousand foreigners were expected in the city. Some of the soldiers, at the appeal of the crowd before them, had refused to fire and had turned against their officers, to immense cheers. There was something about generals, a general flying in from the Islands.