by Pete Ayrton
In a little stone town in a valley full of poplars we went to visit the doctor in charge of the medical work for the Jarama front. He was a small dark brighteyed young man, a C.P. member, I imagine; he had the look of a man who had entirely forgotten that he had a life of his own. Evidently for months there had been nothing he thought of, all day and every day, but his work. He took us to one of his base hospitals, recently installed in a group of old buildings, part of which had once been a parochial school. He apologized for it; they had only been in there two weeks, if we came two weeks later we’d see an improvement. We ate lunch there with him, then he promptly forgot us. In spite of the rain that came on, we could see him walking up and down the stony court inside the hospital gate with one member of his staff after another talking earnestly to them. He never took his eyes off whoever he was talking to, as if he were trying to hypnotize them with his own untired energy. Meanwhile we tried to stimulate our driver, a singularly spineless young man in a black C.N.T. tunic, the son of a winegrower in Alcazar de San Juan, to fix the gasoline pump on the miserable little Citroën sedan we had been assigned to. At last the doctor remembered us again and our driver had gotten the pump into such a state that the motor wouldn’t even start, he offered to take us to the village to which we were bound, as he had to go out that way to pick a site for a new basehospital. We set out in his Ford, that felt like a racingcar after the feeble little spluttering Citroën.
Rain was falling chilly over the lichengreen stone towns and the tawny hills misted over with the fiery green of new wheat. Under the rain and the low indigo sky, the road wound up and down among the great bare folds of the upland country. At last late in the afternoon we came to a square building of light-brown stone in a valley beside a clear stream and a milldam set about with poplars. The building had been a monastery long ago and the broad valley lands had belonged to the monks. As we got out of the car larks rose singing out of the stubby fields. The building was a magnificent square of sober seventeenthcentury work. In the last few years it had been used as a huntingclub, but since July none of the members of the club had been seen in those parts. A family of country people from Pozorubio had moved out there to escape the airraids and to do some planting. They invited us in with grave Castilian hospitality and in a dark stone room we stood about the embers of a fire with them, drinking their stout darkred wine and eating their deliciously sweet fresh bread.
With his glass in his hand and his mouth full of bread the doctor lectured them about the war, and the need to destroy the Fascists and to produce as much food as possible. Wheat and potatoes, he said, were as important as machinegun bullets in war.
‘I am an illiterate and I know more about driving a mule than international politics. That is all my parents taught me,’ the tall dark thinfaced man who was the head of the family answered gravely. ‘But even I can understand that.’
‘But it’s so terrible, gentlemen,’ the woman broke in.
‘There are no more gentlemen or masters here,’ said the man harshly. ‘These are comrades.’
‘How soon will it be stopped? It can’t last all summer, can it?’ asked the woman without paying attention to the man. Tears came into her eyes.
‘The war will stop when the Fascists are driven out of Spain,’ said the doctor.
Then he explained how the country people must tell everybody in the village to send to Madrid to the Department of Agriculture for free seed potatoes and that they must use the milldam to irrigate the fields. Then we gravely wished them good health and went out to the car and were off into the rainy night again.
Village bakery
We stopped at their village, Pozorubio, to load up on bread. We went into the bakery through a dimly lit stone doorway. The baker was at the front, so the women and young boys of the family were doing the baking. The bread had just come out of the oven. ‘Yes, you can buy as much as you want,’ the women said. ‘We’d have bread for Madrid if they’d come and get it. Here at least we have plenty of bread.’ We stood around for a while talking in the dry dim room looking into the fire that glowed under the ovens.
As we got back into the car with our arms piled high with the big flat so sweet loaves the doctor was saying bitterly, ‘And in Madrid they are hungry for bread; it’s the fault of the lack of transport and gasoline ... we must organize our transport.’ Then he snapped at his Belgian chauffeur, ‘We must get back to headquarters fast, fast.’ You could see that he was blaming himself for the relaxed moment he’d spent in the warm sweetsmelling bakery. As the car lurched over the ruts of the road across the hills furry black in the rainy night there went along with us in the smell of the bread something of the peaceful cosiness of the village, and country people eating their suppers in the dim roomy stone houses and the sharp-smelling herbs in the fires and the brown faces looking out from the shelter of doorways at the bright stripes of the rain in the street and the gleam of the cobbles and the sturdy figures of countrywomen under their shawls.
Socialist construction
Fuentedueña is a village of several hundred houses in the province of Madrid. It stands on a shelf above the Tagus at the point where the direct road to Valencia from Madrid dips down into the river’s broad terraced valley. Above it on the hill still tower the crumbling brick and adobe walls of a castle of Moorish work where some feudal lord once sat and controlled the trail and the rivercrossing. Along the wide well-paved macadam road there are a few wineshops and the barracks of the Civil Guard. The minute you step off the road you are back in the age of packmules and twowheeled carts. It’s a poor village and it has the air of having always been a poor village; only a few of the houses on the oblong main square, with their wide doors that open into pleasant green courts, have the stone shields of hidalgos on their peeling stucco façades. The townhall is only a couple of offices, and on the wall the telephone that links the village to Madrid. Since July, ’36, the real center of the town has been on another street, in the house once occupied by the pharmacist, who seems to have been considered hostile, because he is there no more, in an office where the members of the socialista (U.G.T.) Casa del Pueblo meet. Their president is now mayor and their policies are dominant in the village. The only opposition is the C.N.T. syndicalist local which in Fuentedueña, so the socialistas claim and I think in this case justly, is made up of small storekeepers and excommissionmerchants, and not working farmers at all. According to the mayor they all wear the swastika under their shirts. Their side of the story, needless to say, is somewhat different.
At the time of the military revolt in July the land of Fuentedueña was held by about ten families, some of them the descendants, I suppose, of the hidalgos who put their shields on their houses on the main square. Some of them were shot, others managed to get away. The Casa del Pueblo formed a collective out of their lands. Meanwhile other lands were taken over by the C.N.T. local. Fuentedueña’s main cash crop is wine; the stocks in the three or four bodegas constituted the town’s capital. The Casa del Pueblo, having the majority of the working farmers, took over the municipal government and it was decided to farm the lands of the village in common. For the present it was decided that every workingman should be paid five pesetas for every day he worked and have a right to a daily litre of wine and a certain amount of firewood. The mayor and the secretary and treasurer and the treasurer and the muledrivers and the blacksmith, every man who worked was paid the same. The carpenters and masons and other skilled artisans who had been making seven pesetas a day consented, gladly they said, to taking the same pay as the rest. Later, the master mason told me, they’d raise everybody’s pay to seven pesetas or higher; after all wine was a valuable crop and with no parasites to feed there would be plenty for all. Women and boys were paid three fifty. The committees of the U.G.T. and the C.N.T. decided every day where their members were to work. Housing was roughly distributed according to the sizes of the families. There was not much difficulty about that because since the Fascist airraids began people preferred to live
in the cavehouses along the edges of the hill than in the big rubble and stucco houses with courts and corrals in the center of town, especially since one of them had been destroyed by a bomb. These cavehouses, where in peacetime only the poorest people lived, are not such bad dwellings as they sound. They are cut out of the hard clay and chalky rock of the terraced hillsides facing the river. They have usually several rooms, each with a large coneshaped chimney for light and to carry off the smoke of the fire, and a porch onto which narrow windows open. They are whitewashed and often remarkably clean and neat. Before the civil war the housedwellers looked down on the cavedwellers; but now the caves seem to have definite social standing.
The village produces much wine but little oil, so one of the first things the collective did was to arrange to barter their wine for oil with a village that produced more oil than it needed. Several people told me proudly that they’d improved the quality of their wine since they had taken the bodegas over from the businessmen who had the habit of watering the wine before they sold it and were ruining the reputation of their vintages. Other local industries taken over by the collective are the bakery and a lime kiln, where three or four men worked intermittently, getting the stone from a quarry immediately back of the town and burning it in two small adobe ovens; and the making of fibre baskets and harness which people make from a tough grass they collect from the hills round about. This is a sparetime occupation for periods of bad weather. After wine the crops are wheat, and a few olives.
The irrigation project seemed to loom larger than the war in the minds of the mayor and his councillors. Down in the comparatively rich bottomland along the Tagus the collective had taken over a piece that they were planning to irrigate for truck gardens. They had spent thirteen thousand pesetas of their capital in Madrid to buy pumping machinery and cement. A large gang of men was working over there every day to get the ditches dug and the pump installed that was going to put the river water on the land before the hot dry summer weather began. Others were planting seed potatoes. An old man and his son had charge of a seedbed where they were raising onions and lettuce and tomatoes and peppers and artichokes for planting out. Later they would sow melons, corn and cabbage. For the first time the village was going to raise its own green vegetables. Up to now everything of that sort had had to be imported from the outside. Only a few of the richer landowners had had irrigated patches of fruits and vegetables for their own use. This was the first real reform the collective had undertaken and everybody felt very good about it, so good that they almost forgot the hollow popping beyond the hills that they could hear from the Jarama River front fifteen miles away, and the truckloads of soldiers and munitions going through the village up the road to Madrid and the fear they felt whenever they saw an airplane in the sky. Is it ours or is it theirs?
Outside of the irrigated bottomlands and the dryfarming uplands the collective owned a considerable number of mules, a few horses and cows, a flock of sheep and a flock of goats. Most of the burros were owned by individuals, as were a good many sheep and goats that were taken out to pasture every day by the village shepherds under a communal arrangement as old as the oldest stone walls. Occasional fishing in the river is more of an entertainment than part of the town economy. On our walks back and forth to the new pumping station the mayor used to point out various men and boys sitting along the river-bank with fishingpoles. All members of the C.N.T., he’d say maliciously. You’d never find a socialista going out fishing when there was still spring plowing to be done. ‘We’ve cleaned out the Fascists and the priests,’ one of the men who was walking with us said grimly. ‘Now we must clean out the loafers.’ ‘Yes,’ said the mayor. ‘One of these days it will come to a fight.’
Cooperative fishing village
In San Pol, so the secretary of the agricultural cooperative told me with considerable pride, they hadn’t killed anybody. He was a small, school-teacherylooking man in a worn dark business suit. He had a gentle playful way of talking and intermingled his harsh Spanish with English and French words. San Pol is a very small fishingvillage on the Catalan coast perhaps thirty miles northeast of Barcelona. It’s made up of several short streets of pale blue and yellow and whitewashed houses climbing up the hills of an irregular steep little valley full of umbrellapines. The fishingboats are drawn up on the shingly beach in a row along the double track of the railway to France.
Behind the railway is a string of grotesque villas owned by Barcelona businessmen of moderate means. Most of the villas are closed. A couple have been expropriated by the municipality, one for a cooperative retail store, and another, which had just been very handsomely done over with a blue and white tile decoration, to house a municipal poolparlor and gymnasium, public baths and showers, a huge airy cooperative barbershop and, upstairs, a public library and readingroom. On the top of the hill behind the town a big estate has been turned into a municipal chickenfarm.
The morning I arrived the towncouncil had finally decided to take over the wholesale marketing of fish, buying the catch from the fishermen and selling it in Barcelona. The middleman who had handled the local fish on a commission basis was still in business; we saw him there, a big domineering pearshaped man with a brown sash holding up his baggy corduroys, superintending the salting of sardines in a barrel. ‘He’s a Fascist,’ the secretary of the cooperative said, ‘but we won’t bother him. He won’t be able to compete with us anyway because we’ll pay a higher price.’
He took me to see a little colony of refugee children from Madrid living in a beautiful house overlooking the sea with a rich garden behind it. They were a lively and sunburned bunch of kids under the charge of a young man and his wife who were also attending to their schooling. As we were walking back down the steep flowerlined street (yes, the flowers had been an idea of the socialista municipality, the secretary said, smiling) it came on to rain. We passed a stout man in black puffing with flushed face up the hill under a green umbrella. ‘He’s the priest,’ said the secretary. ‘He doesn’t bother anybody. He takes no part in politics.’ I said that in most towns I’d been in a priest wouldn’t dare show his face. ‘Here we were never believers,’ said the secretary, ‘so we don’t feel that hatred. We have several refugee priests in town. They haven’t made any trouble yet.’
He took me to a fine building on the waterfront that had been a beach café and danceplace that had failed. Part of it had been done over into a little theatre. ‘We won a prize at the Catalonia drama festival last year, though we’re a very small town. There’s a great deal of enthusiasm for amateur plays here.’ We had lunch with various local officials in the rooms of the choral society in a little diningroom overlooking the sea. Far out on the horizon we could see the smoke of the inevitable nonintervention warship.
And a fine lunch it was. Everything except the wine and the coffee had been grown within the town limits. San Pol had some wine, they said apologetically, but it wasn’t very good. First we had broadbeans in oliveoil. Then a magnificent dish of fresh sardines. My friends explained that the fishing had been remarkably good this year, and that fish were selling at war prices, so that everybody in town had money in his pocket. The sardine fishing was mostly done at night with floating nets. The boats had motors and great batteries of acetylene lights to attract the fish to the surface. After the sardines we had roast chicken from the village chickenfarm, with new potatoes and lettuce. Outside of fish they explained new potatoes were their main cash crop. They sold them in England, marketing them through a cooperative. My friend the secretary had been in England that winter to make new arrangements. The cooperative was a number of years old and a member of the Catalan alliance of cooperatives. Of course now since the movement they were more important than ever. ‘If only the Fascists would let us alone.’ ‘And the anarchists,’ somebody added... ‘We could be very happy in San Pol.’
We drove out of town in the pouring rain. As the road wound up the hill we got a last look at the neat streets of different colored stucco houses and
the terraced gardens and the blue and white and blue and green fishingboats with their clustered lights sticking out above their sterns, like insect eyes, drawn up in a row along the shingle beach.
The defeated
Barcelona. The headquarters of the P.O.U.M. It’s late at night in a large bare office furnished with odds and ends of old furniture. At a big battered fakegothic desk out of somebody’s library a man sits at the telephone. I sit in a mangy overstuffed armchair. On the settee opposite me sits a man who used to be editor of a radical publishing house in Madrid. We talk in a desultory way about old times in Madrid, about the course of the war. They are telling me about the change that has come over the population of Barcelona since the great explosion of revolutionary feeling that followed the attempted military coup d’état and swept the Fascists out of Catalonia in July. They said Barcelona was settling down, getting bourgeoise again. ‘You can even see it in people’s dress,’ said the man at the telephone, laughing. ‘Now we’re beginning to wear collars and ties again but even a couple of months ago everybody was wearing the most extraordinary costumes... you’d see people on the street wearing feathers.’
The man at the telephone was wellbuilt and healthylooking; he had a ready childish laugh that showed a set of solid white teeth. From time to time as we were talking the telephone would ring and he would listen attentively with a serious face. Then he’d answer with a few words too rapid for me to catch and would hang up the receiver with a shrug of the shoulders and come smiling back into the conversation again.
When he saw that I was beginning to frame a question he said, ‘It’s the villages ... They want to know what to do.’ ‘About Valencia taking over the police services?’ He nodded. ‘Take a car and drive through the suburbs of Barcelona, you’ll see that all the villages are barricaded... ’ Then he laughed. ‘But maybe you had better not.’ ‘He’d be all right,’ said the other man. ‘They have great respect for foreign journalists.’ ‘Is it an organized movement?’ ‘It’s complicated... in Bellver our people want to know whether to move against the anarchists. In some other places they are with them... You know Spain.’