No Pasarán!

by Pete Ayrton

  It was time for me to push on. I shook hands with Andrés Nin and with a young Englishman who also is dead now, and went out into the rainy night. Since then Nin has been killed and his party suppressed. The papers have not told us what has happened in the villages. Perhaps these men already knew they were doomed. There was no air of victory about them.

  Over the short wave

  The syndicalist paper had just been installed in a repaired building where there had once been a convent. The new rotary presses were not quite in order yet and the partitions were unfinished between the offices in the editorial department. They took me into a little room where they were transmitting news and comment to the syndicalist paper in the fishingtown of Gijon in Asturias on the north coast, clear on the other side of Franco’s territory. A man was reading an editorial. As the rotund phrases (which perhaps fitted in well enough with the American scheme of things for me to accept) went lilting through the silence, I couldn’t help thinking of the rainy night and the workingmen on guard with machineguns and rifles at sandbag posts on the roads into villages, and the hopes of new life and liberty and the political phrases, confused, contradictory pounding in their ears; and then the front, the towns crowded with troops and the advanced posts and trenches and the solitude between; and beyond, the old life, the titled officers in fancy uniforms, the bishops and priests, the pious ladies in black silk with their rosaries, the Arab Moors and the dark Berbers getting their revenge four hundred and fifty years late for the loss of their civilization, and the profiteers and wop businessmen and squareheaded German travelling salesmen; and beyond again the outposts and the Basque countrypeople praying to God in their hillside trenches and the Asturian miners with their sticks of dynamite in their belts and longshoremen and fishermen of the coast towns waiting for hopeful news; and another little office like this where the editors crowded round the receiving set that except for blockaderunners is their only contact with the outside world. How can they win, I was thinking? How can the new world full of confusion and crosspurposes and illusions and dazzled by the mirage of idealistic phrases win against the iron combination of men accustomed to run things who have only one idea binding them together, to hold on to what they’ve got.

  There was a sudden rumble in the distance. The man who was reading stopped. Everybody craned their necks to listen. There it was again. ‘No, it’s not firing, it’s thunder,’ everybody laughed with relief. They turned on the receiver again. The voice from Gijon came feebly in a stutter of static. They must repeat the editorial. Static. Black rain was lashing against the window. While the operator tinkered with the adjustments the distant voice from Gijon was lost in sharp crashes of static.

  Antibes, May, 1937

  Author of the U.S.A. trilogy, John Dos Passos was born in Chicago in 1896. Spain was the foreign country that meant the most to him. His writings about the country are contained in Rosinante to the Road Again, written in 1922, and Journeys between Wars, written in 1938, the book which includes his experiences of the Civil War. Writing from an anarchist perspective, Dos Passos was most interested in conveying the grassroots revolution that had started in the countryside. Much has been written about the bitter dispute between Dos Passos and Hemingway during the Civil War. Central to this fight was what had happened to Dos Passos’ close friend José Robles. Hemingway accepted the Communist Party line that Robles had been outed as a Fascist spy and shot; for Dos Passos this was yet another example of Stalinist smear tactics. The attempt to find the truth about the Robles affair was important but it also stood for a fundamental political disagreement that was being fought out between communists and anarchists – which should come first: winning the war or making the revolution? Given that the Communist Party controlled access to the arms of the Soviet Union, it is not surprising that their view prevailed. Dos Passos left Spain disillusioned about the possibility of revolutionary change and began a rightward political journey that ended with his campaigning in the 1960s for Republican US presidential candidates Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon. He died in Baltimore in 1970.

  ANA MARÍA MATUTE

  THE MASTER

  from El Arrepentido

  translated by Nick Caistor

  OUT OF HIS SMALL WINDOW he could see the Palace roof, covered in green lichen, one of the stone escutcheons, and the balcony that was occasionally opened by Gracián the caretaker’s wife, to air the rooms. Through the open balcony he could make out a big, dark painting that from looking at it so often began to take on the dimensions of a revelation. Years earlier, the canvas had enchanted him; it almost dazzled him from its glittering shadow. Over time, the enchantment and amazement had faded: all that was left was the habit. Something fixed and unavoidable, something to be looked at time and again, whenever the caretaker’s wife pushed back the balcony shutters. The painting showed a man, with one hand raised. His pale features, black eyes and long hair had slowly revealed themselves to his avid gaze. He knew them by heart. The raised hand did not threaten, or seek to pacify. It was more as if it was calling for something. Passively but insistently. A call of before and after, an obscure summons that sent a shudder through him. Sometimes he dreamed of it. He had never been in the Palace, because Gracían was a sour individual who was difficult to approach. He preferred not to ask any favours of him. And yet he would have liked to see the painting close up.

  Sometimes he would go down to the river to watch the water flow. And without knowing why, that feeling bore some relation to the sight of that painting. It was when the cold weather began, on the verge of autumn, that he used to go down to the river bank outside the village to watch the river flowing between the reeds and yellow broom.

  He lived at the end of what was known as Calle de los Pobres. His possessions consisted of a black trunk with iron straps, a few books and some clothes. He had a tie knotted round the black iron bars of his bed. At the outset – a long time ago – he used to wear it on Sundays to go to mass. That seemed like the dim and distant past. Now the tie hung there like a rag, dangling from the foot of the bed. Like the dog at the feet of Beau Geste: the one who wanted to imitate the death of Viking warriors ... (Ah, the days when he used to read Beau Geste; what a rotten world. ‘Godmother, can I read this book?’ He would tiptoe into the Great Godmother’s library. The Great Godmother was scrawny; her money was magnanimous. He was the protected, favoured one, the ever so grateful washerwoman’s son. ‘The page-boy’, he thought as he pulled on his boots, eyes half-closed, the eyelids still puffy from his hangover, staring at the rag dangling from the foot of the bed. Everything now was from another time, dangling like the grubby tie.

  He was young when he arrived in the village, and very good. At least, that’s what he heard the old women say:

  ‘That new schoolmaster, what a good thing he is! His hair always combed, and wearing those smart little shoes all day long. Goodness, such extravagance! But of course, he means well.’

  Not now. Now he had acquired a bad reputation. He knew they had asked for another master, to try to replace him. But they had to put up with him, because nobody wanted to come to this stinking corner of the world, unless it was as a punishment, or a naive youngster still full of faith and ‘meaning well’. Not even the Duke went there; the Palace was rotting and falling to pieces, with that big painting inside, and the raised hand calling. He himself came there twenty-something years earlier, full of belief. He believed for example that he was put on this earth for self-denial and to do something. To redeem something, possibly. To defend some lost cause, perhaps. Instead of the tie knotted round the bars, he had his diploma on the wall above the trunk.

  Now he had acquired a bad reputation. But sometimes he ran up the hill like a madman, to listen to the wind. He remembered when he was a boy and listened with a shiver to trains whistling in the distance.

  That morning it was raining, and a patch of grey sky entered the tiny window. ‘If only the wind could get in... ’ But the wind wandered down by the river to escape as well. And
he meanwhile went on treading the earth, round and round, in his boots with holes in. Sometimes he scratched marks on the wall. What were they? Hours? Days? Glasses? Evil thoughts? ‘We have no idea how change occurs. No-one knows how they change, how they grow, grow old, how they become another, distant person. Change is as slow as water dripping on a rock and eventually making a hole in it.’ Time, cursed filthy time had done this to him.

  ‘This? What’s so bad about this?’ he sniggered. He always got up late, didn’t bother about anything or anybody. He didn’t concern himself either with the school or the children. He did thrash them. He took pleasure in that, a substitute perhaps for other unattainable pleasures.

  He no longer read the newspaper. Politics, events, the times in which he lived, were all one to him. Not so in the past. In the past, he had been an enthusiastic defender of men.

  ‘What men?’

  Possibly of men like him now. But no, he didn’t see any dignity in himself. Dignity was a word as empty as all the others. When he drank anisette – he didn’t like wine, he couldn’t take wine – the world changed around him. Around him, even if it didn’t change inside him. White clouds you walked on like cotton wool, treading on dead children who were only children because of their size. ‘I came here thinking I’d find children, but there were only the larvae of men, evil larvae, weary and disillusioned before they reached the age of reason.’

  He was on his way to the inn, and said out loud:

  ‘The age of reason? What reason? Ha ha ha.’

  That ‘ha ha ha’ came out slowly, with no hint of joy. It was things like that which led the old women who watched him pass by to shake their heads, look at him askance, and say:

  ‘Crazy, off his head!’Wrapped in their foul-smelling black weeds. The same old women who had thought he was ‘a good thing’. No, these were different ones, but identical to those who by now must be rotting with earth between their teeth.

  Nowadays he didn’t even notice their foul smell, that had once offended him so much.

  ‘It used to offend me? Offences? What on earth are they... ?’

  He turned the street corner. A gaggle of barefoot boys flooded over him like a tidal wave. They were very small, about five or six years old, and almost knocked him off his feet. They often waited at street corners to push and jostle him. Then they would run off, laughing and calling him names he didn’t understand. A light rain was falling, and the mud had stained their dry, stick-like little legs and slipped through their thin fingers when they raised them to their mouths to hide their laughter.

  Stumbling, he shouted insults at them, then continued on his way for the first glass of the morning.

  From the open door of the inn he could see the bulls roaming loose in the meadow. The rain made their black backs shine like the shells of enormous beetles. It looked as if four white crescent moons were charging the leaden sky. Beyond the grass, the earth was turning red. The month of great heat would soon be upon them, when all the blades of grass, all the cool greenery would be scorched; the bulls would raise the dust under their feet, charge the sun. That was how it always was. The boy looking after them was lying flat on the stone wall, like a frog. He couldn’t understand how the boy could lie there like that without losing his balance, just like another stone.

  The inn smelled of fresh wine. He hated that smell. Without a word, the inn-keeper served him a glass of anisette and a doughnut. He knew his habits. He dunked the cake in the drink, nibbling it like a mouse.

  ‘Don Valeriano,’ said the inn-keeper all of a sudden, ‘what do you reckon to all this?’

  He was holding out the newspaper, but the master swatted it away like a swarm of flies. The printed letters he had once cared so much about were now like flies to him.

  He discovered a bat on the whitewashed wall above the inn door. It looked as if it was stuck there, with its wings spread.

  ‘Lad!’ he called the boy washing glasses in a bucket. A boy whose right eye was completely white, like a small, strange moon. His rough hands, with stubby wart-covered fingers, were streaming with cruelty. He raised his head, smiling, and dried the sweat from his brow with his fore-arm. The soapy water trickled up as far as his elbow.

  ‘There’s the devil for you, lad.’

  The boy climbed on to the table. A short while later he climbed down, the two tips of the bat’s wings dangling between his fingers like a handkerchief.

  Before crucifying the creature like a condemned man, they made it smoke a little. One puff for the boy, another for him, another for the bat.

  This was how most of the morning was spent, until he left to eat the pigswill his landlady Mariana cooked for him. It was the holidays.

  2

  The month of heat was already halfway through. The summer, dust, flies, thirst were racing towards them.

  They came from the nearby village; and the men from this village went on to the next one. So they linked up in a chain.

  He was lying on his bed and at first wasn’t aware of anything. It was three in the afternoon, and he was dozing. He could hear the buzzing of mosquitoes over the water in the tank. He knew how they glinted in the sun like a swarm of silvery dust. It was then he heard the first cries, followed by a heavy silence. He lay without moving, feeling the heat on every pore of his skin. His long, white and hairy legs disgusted him. He had the withered, damp body of someone who flees the sun. He detested it, the implacable ruler over everything at that hour of the day. He heard the bulls bellowing and the clatter of their hooves as they fled up the street. Something was happening. Quickly pulling on his trousers, he walked barefoot to the adjacent room. Mariana had just mopped the floor, and the soles of his feet left marks on the red bricks like blotting paper. The old green shutter he himself had bought to protect himself from the hateful light was still down. A dancing, reverberating white glare shone through the slats. A blindness of whitewash and fire, a mortal glow. Covering his face in his hands, he felt his soft, stubbly cheeks, his eye sockets, his eyelids. Even so, the light reached him, he could sense it on the tips of his hands like a vapour, seeping in through all the cracks. Sweat soaked his brow, arms and neck. He could feel it making his clothes stick to his stomach, his thighs. The bellowing of the bulls faded in the distance, while on Calle de los Pobres he heard footsteps coming closer, and beneath his window came the shout:

  ‘Ay de mi, ay de mi, ay de mi... ’

  He yanked open the shutter. It was like a dream, or rather, like wakening from a prolonged, strange dream. The sun’s fierce glare overwhelmed his eyes. He sensed rather than saw the mayor’s wife running down the street. The memory of the inn-keeper’s newspaper struck him like a blow. He felt empty, as if all of him had become one huge expectation.

  ‘Mariana,’ he called out calmly. Then he saw her. She was in a corner, trembling, her face unusually white.

  ‘It’s broken out... ’ she said.

  ‘What? What’s broken out... ?’

  ‘The revolution... ’

  ‘And that woman shouting in the street? What’s wrong with her?’

  ‘They’re looking for her husband... they’re after him with sickles... ’

  ‘Ah, so that bastard has hidden, has he?’

  Why was he insulting the mayor? All of a sudden he was filled with anger. Because the bellowing of the tame bulls, the lean, black shiny bulls charging the sky in the afternoon was inside him now; and all at once he was wide-awake, as if on a huge untidy bed, his filthy rented camp bed; on all the filthy earth he trod. And he didn’t even know how he had changed, how he had become a rag like the threadbare tie knotted at the foot of his bed. He had changed little by little since the first day he arrived here, hair neatly combed and wearing his smart shoes from morning till night, striding round the village, explaining that the earth seemed to be eternally and pointlessly chasing the sun, trying to explain that the earth was round, slightly flattened at the poles, that we were nothing more than a dust particle spinning and spinning aimlessly around
other particles of dust, like the silvery mosquitoes above the water tank. Trying to tell them that just as we looked at the mosquitoes as they pursued one another over the water, so an infinite number of balls of dust were looking at us as well; trying to explain that everything was an orgy of dust and fire. Ah, and Mathematics, and Time. And mankind, children, dogs were all embraced by his pity; but now he did not even have pity on himself; there was no room for it in all this dust. He no longer heard the bulls. The heart does not alter in a day, or even day by day. It is one particle of dust after another, dust where ambition, desire, lack of interest and interest, egoism all find themselves buried; and love too in the end. Was he once the boy who tiptoed in to his Great Godmother to ask if he could read Beau Geste? What are beautiful gestures? (As he was intelligent and hard-working, the Great Godmother paid for his studies. She paid for his studies and haggled over his pairs of shoes, his food, his suits: she denied him any amusements, leisure time, sleep, love. Later...) But there is no later. Life is one long elongated second filled with disgust and boredom, in which time is nothing more than an accumulation of emptiness and silence; and children’s backs are like the feeble wings of a fallen bird; there’s no room for the weight of the earth, hunger, solitude: none of it fits on to a child’s back.

  Now, without knowing how, or why, anger filled him. Although he had no idea how, the anger was within him.

  3

  They arrived in a van they had seized from the grain wholesaler. Some of them carried weapons: a rifle, a shotgun, an ancient pistol. The others were carrying pitchforks, scythes, sickles, knives, axes. All those peaceful tools being brandished against hunger and humiliation. Against thirst and all the meekness shown over the years; all of a sudden they were sharpened, threatening. El Chato, El Rubio and Berenguela’s three young boys appeared, like rats who had been cowering in the darkness. They joined the newcomers, and their scythes, pitchforks and sickles also glittered like gold in the sun.