No Pasarán!

by Pete Ayrton

  I’d never thought anyone anywhere could interpret my relationship with Lluís in such a tawdry way.

  Luckily, I’ve got a good supply of potatoes in the pantry and don’t need to ask him for vouchers, which I’ve had to do occasionally, because I can’t let Ramonet go without his ration of bread and potatoes. I feel so angry with Llibert. I could ask him for another voucher but I’ve taken a firm decision not to ask him for anything at all unless it’s vital – I mean vital for the boy. I’ll get by on my own as long as I can. I found a tenant farmer in Castellvi de Rosanes by the name of Bepo who had potatoes to sell: he played hard to get and only wanted banknotes ‘with serial numbers’. I can’t tell the difference: those in the know hoard them, so none are in circulation. I’d not thought to bring silverware or anything similar, which was what Bepo wanted in place of banknotes ‘with serial numbers’. We finally did a deal: almost the whole of Lluís’ monthly pay for a sack of potatoes!

  The worst was to come: I had to transport it. Bepo refused to organise that or even carry it from his farm to the station; he didn’t want any complications, didn’t want to be caught as a black marketeer since the punishment is now so draconian. The maid had stayed at home with the boy; perhaps I should have brought them with me so she could help carry the sack, but then Ramonet would have been a constant nuisance ... Finally another fistful of notes helped decide Bepo to carry it to the railway station on his donkey: not all the way to the station – that was under police watch – but nearby. From then on I was on my own.

  It was so heavy! That sack of potatoes landed me in bed for four days.

  There is a heavy police presence in the Barcelona stations so you have to throw whatever you have out of the compartment window before reaching Sants station, and when the train begins to slow you jump out after your sacks. I confess that the trains reduce speed so much to help our feats that the acrobatics aren’t especially remarkable: the train drivers themselves are into wholesale black marketeering. The spectacle of so many people jumping out of a moving train might even be a pretty sight if it weren’t all so painful.

  Once in Sants, the last act in the drama began: how to get the sack home. If you are really lucky you find a taxi, but it’s more likely you’ll have to carry it yourself – on your back and dragging it. There’s always the danger the Supplies police will confiscate it or people hungrier than you will steal it. And, my God, there’s no shortage of the latter. You can always see skeletal old men and women on wasteland searching through the rubbish accumulating there because it’s hardly ever removed nowadays ... I was exhausted when I got home and my aching back made me see every star in the sky and more besides. At least such episodes have the virtue of showing that people do sometimes help each other out of the benign understanding that comes from being in the same wretched boat. When I still had two kilometres to walk and couldn’t take another step, two soldiers, who told me they were on leave in Barcelona, offered to carry the sack; they did it so disinterestedly that they didn’t even want to tell me their names. All I know is that they came from Mollerussa. Would you believe it? Before their providential appearance, while I was walking with the sack on my back my thoughts were of Jesus walking along the Street of Bitterness with the Cross! It’s always a consolation to think of someone who’s had an even worse time: what you call a strange form of consolation.

  Thanks to God, we got home and now have potatoes in the pantry once again. I’m back here and looking at the lime tree humbly doing its duty, which can’t be as easy as we who aren’t trees think it is. How comforting to have a house, a bolthole where one can curl up in the middle of the hostile, incomprehensible world that surrounds us! How happy the three of us – Lluís, Ramonet and I – could have been before the war if it hadn’t been for Lluís’ bad moods... He hasn’t a clue about one obvious fact: we were happy, or could have been if he’d wanted. For him, having this large house and collecting the dividends from the factory was as natural as breathing: it never occurred to him that the majority of people have nothing apart from the clothes they stand in. I sometimes think Lluís would love me more if he were poor; I mean then he would at least be aware of his love for me. Because he does love me: the problem is he doesn’t realise he does. If he were really, really poor, he would discover what a boon it is to have a quiet corner in the world with a table, two beds and three chairs – and a wife and son. In the end, we need so little to be happy: a little love is the secret, that’s all there is to it. A little love for what you already have, and it’s as if you have everything you could ever want! I am sure I could be poor and happy if Lluís loved me. I’m not at all like my brother Llibert... And that’s where I find selfish consolation, the only silver lining in this never-ending war: the hope that with all these deprivations Lluís will come to appreciate his home and his family. We were once caught in a storm on an excursion of ours. There was a woodcutters’ cabin nearby. We went in and lit a fire. It was lovely! Even Lluís said so: ‘It’s so pleasant to listen to the rain when you’re in the dry, even if it’s only a cabin.’ We could be so happy in a cabin if we loved each other, so happy listening to the rain in the humblest of shelters! But he never stayed home, except on the evenings when you visited; you’d have thought the chairs were pricking his behind. He always seemed restless and unsatisfied: he expects more from life than it, poor thing, can ever give. He’ll feel miserable until he realises that the best thing in life is that cup of herbal tea by the fireside drunk in the company of his loved one while out in the garden the wind is scattering the dead leaves. Uncle Eusebi used to say: ‘Lluís is always looking but he never sees a thing.’ When it comes to me, I think he’s forever oblivious!

  Joan Sales was born in Barcelona in 1912. At the beginning of the war, Sales, an early supporter of the Catalan republic, trained in its School for Officers and was posted to the anarchist Durruti Column which had just killed all its officers for attempting to turn it into a regular army unit! Sales survived this posting and was then sent to the Aragon front with the 30th Division. His war experiences are the subject of his wonderful novel, Uncertain Glory, which begins with the rise of Catalan anarchism from 1909. In exile in France, then in the Dominican Republic, then in Mexico, Sales kept Catalan culture alive, publishing the literary journal Quaderns de I’exili. In 1948, he returned to Catalonia to set up a publishing house, the Club Editor, which published the best of Catalan writing, including Mercè Rodoreda and Llorenç Villalonga. Uncertain Glory was published complete only in 1971. It is a laconic masterpiece that covers the war from the bottom up. A great writer and promoter of Catalan culture, Sales died in Barcelona in 1983.

  * La Soli: Solidaridad Obrera, the newspaper of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, C.N.T., the main anarcho-syndicalist union.

  † The barbers – and bakers – of Barcelona were organized in anarchist unions. The reference to chains also harks back to the early-nineteenth-century cry of ‘Vivan las cadenas!’ of the clerical-led anti-liberal crowds who wanted to keep their chains.

  LEONARDO SCIASCIA

  ‘TODAY SPAIN, TOMORROW

  THE WORLD’

  from Antimony

  translated by N. S. Thompson

  THE FIRST TIME I WENT from my home town to Palermo I was ten years old. I was with my father and we were going to see off a brother of his who was leaving for America. It was my first train journey, and the train, the railwaymen, the stations and the countryside were all a wonderful novelty for me; there and back, I did the journey standing up, looking out of the window. It was then I had the idea that I would be a railwayman when I grew up: getting off the train a moment before it stopped, blowing the whistle, shouting out the name of the station, then remounting with a sure-footed leap as the train was pulling out. At a certain point in the journey, the railwayman shouted, ‘Change for Aragona!’ Those who were not going to Girgenti got out, loaded with suitcases and bundles, to get onto another train that was waiting. In the game I later played with the other boys in th
e district, I kept that cry for myself; it was like the voice of destiny itself, which had some men born to live to the east of Aragona, and others to the west, although I could not say exactly what fascination the cry had for me then. I remember the town of Aragona as it appears from the train, a few minutes before it arrives at the station. It seems to rotate on a pivot, doing a half turn around the large mansion which dominates the town, with the bare countryside below. It is only a few kilometres from my town, but I have never been to Aragona – I only have an image of it from the train.

  In the Aragon of Spain, a region which has many towns like the Aragona in the province of Girgenti, I remembered that far-off journey and the game I played afterwards with the other boys, and that cry always came floating across my mind, ‘Change for Aragona’, just like a tune or the words of a song spring to mind, and develop and come in variations for days. I thought, ‘Change, my life is changing trains ... or, I’m about to get on the train of death... Change for Aragona... change here ... change here ... ’ and the thought became a musical obsession. I believe in the mystery of words, I believe that words can become life, or destiny, in the same way that they can become beauty.

  So many people study, go to university and become good doctors, engineers and lawyers, or become civil servants, M.P.s and government ministers: and I would like to ask these people, ‘Do you know what the war in Spain was? Do you know what it really was? Because if you don’t, you won’t ever understand what’s happening under your own noses, you won’t understand Fascism, Communism, religion or mankind, you won’t ever understand anything about anything, because all the world’s mistakes and its hopes were concentrated in that war, like a lens concentrates the sun’s rays, causing fire, and Spain was lit by all the world’s hopes and its mistakes, and the same fire’s splitting the world today.’

  When I went to Spain, I was barely literate, I could just about read the newspaper, the History of the Royal Families of France and write a letter home. When I came back, it seemed as if I could read the most difficult things a man could think and write about. And I know why Fascism is not dying, and I am sure I have met all the things which should die with its death, and I know what will have to die in me and in all other men so that Fascism will die out for ever.

  ‘Hoy España, mañana el mundo’, said Hitler from the propaganda postcards the Republicans dropped: they pictured him with an arm outstretched over Spain, with squadrons of aircraft appearing to drop from his gesture, and a wreath of weeping children’s faces over the Spanish earth. ‘Today Spain, tomorrow the world’, said Hitler, and I felt they were not words invented by the propaganda machine, the whole world would become Spain; breaking the bank there would not mean that the game was all over. No one, except for Mussolini, wanted to play all his cards there. The Germans were testing their new, accurate instruments of war, while Italy was throwing in everything: new fighter planes and old Austrian cannon, tanks good enough for the regimental review and machine-guns from 1914, and the poor soldiers with their footcloths, puttees, and the grey-green uniforms that became as hard as a crust in the rain: the wretched unemployed of the Two Sicilies. And the best of it was that not even the Francoist Spanish were grateful for all our efforts, they had even made a joke of our initials, Corpo Truppe Volontarie [Volunteer Corps] with the phrase Cuando te vas? which means ‘When are you leaving?’, as if we were in Spain simply to annoy them. I would like to have seen them get by alone, all those priests, country gentlemen, pious women, young men of the parish club, career officers and the few thousand carabineros and Civil Guard – I would like to have seen them against the peasants and miners, against the Red hate of the Spanish poor. Or perhaps it was humiliating and shameful for them to have us see that misery and that blood, like being forced to have your friends see how poor you are at home and how mad your family is: there was all of Spain’s irrational pride in that wish to have us leave. There were even those with Franco who secretly felt unhappy and anxious about what they saw happening on their side, it was not merely a few who said, ‘If only José were here, everything would be different.’ Without José Antonio they were not convinced by the general’s revolt: ‘no es justo que el conde Romanones poséa todas las tierras de Guadalajara’, and they were sadly certain that Franco would not take a hectare of land off Romanones. They felt shame at tearing Spain apart with foreign weapons and soldiers, with the Germans crushing whole cities with bombs just like someone out on a walk might squash an anthill, and with the Moors – led by the Spanish – coming to avenge themselves, after centuries, on the sons of that Christian Spain that had expelled them. When the prostitutes and bourgeois gentlemen of a captured city watched the Moors march past and applauded, ‘Moros, moritos’, I could read the mortification and hate in the faces of some of the Spanish soldiers. As far as we Italians were concerned, the fact that we accused them of putting too many people up against the wall – and it seems our commanding officers were continually protesting about it – provoked antagonism in those who wanted the firing squads, and shame in those who did not, and so there was not a single Spaniard who was not upset by our presence.

  All these feelings and reactions became intensified at Zaragoza, perhaps because of the prostitutes and next to a woman, prostitute or not, a man wants to be himself, and then there was the wine, that moment of truth that wine gives before the glass that makes you drunk. And in Zaragoza there were Moors and Germans, requetés and Falangists, Aragonese and Andalucians, and among the Italians too there was the dyed-in-the-wool Fascist from the north, who had enrolled to come and give the anti-Fascists in Spain a good hiding, who regarded the Sicilian unemployed in the same way that the Castilian soldier regarded the Moors. So with wine inside him and a woman by his side, everyone was either at his best or his worst.

  I would say that the least peasant in my home district, the most ‘benighted’, as we say, that is, the most ignorant, the one most cut off from a knowledge of the world, if he had been brought to the Aragon front and had been told to find out which side people like himself were on and go to them, he would have made for the Republican trenches without hesitation, because for the most part, on our side, the countryside remained uncultivated, while on the Republican side the peasants worked away even under shell fire. As far as I can gather, the Republicans had divided the land up among the peasants and, seeing that the young ones were fighting the war, the old had attached themselves to their piece of land with so much fury that not even the shelling and the thought that the cultivated land might become disfigured with trenches from one moment to the next, could keep them away from it. Looking from a hill with binoculars on clear mornings, you could see the peasants beyond the Republican lines, with their black trousers, bluish shirts and straw hats, guiding the plough which a pair of mules, or a single mule, was pulling behind it. The ploughs were made in the shape of a cross, with a ploughshare no bigger than an axehead – the same that the peasants in my area still use – which makes a furrow like a mere scratch, barely turning over the dry crust of the earth. Ventura had a pair of binoculars, and I loved to watch the ploughing, when I could forget the war and feel as if I were in the countryside around my home town. It is a beautiful countryside in autumn: the whirr of partridges suddenly rising up, the slight mist from which the earth emerges, brown and blue. Aragon is a land of hills, the mist gets trapped between them and they become more beautiful in the mist and sunshine; not that it is a really beautiful landscape, which seems beautiful straightaway to everybody, it is beautiful in a special way, you would need to be born there to realize its beauty and love it.

  The front was a zig-zag line, like the braid on a general’s peaked cap. There had been no great movements from the start of the war, even the business of Belchite had not brought about anything new. There were actions which were like a fracas in hell, which seemed as if they would drag the front so much further forward, or even backwards, up to the houses of Zaragoza, but it all ended in nothing. We went to take possession of trenches that h
ad belonged to the Reds the day before, or else the Reds would come and occupy ours, and then, again, we would go back to the trenches of the day before. Ventura liked this kind of exchange because he found American books and newspapers in the Republican trenches and he was in love with anything that came from America.

  Born in Racalmuto, Sicily, in 1921, Leonardo Sciascia was one of the outstanding 20th-century Italian writers. A man of the left, his political views were greatly influenced by the Spanish Civil War, which Sciascia saw as a crucial moment in the fight against Fascism. In ‘Antinomy’, one of the four novellas that make up Sicilian Uncles, he writes about the Italian soldiers sent by Mussolini to fight with the Rebels. Peasants and workers, they were surprised to find that they ended up fighting for the landowners and the Church – their enemies in Italy. In the Civil War, Sciascia also saw the support for Franco of organized crime, which in Sicily took the form of the Mafia, a malignant force he fought in his political life and writings. In 1979, Sciascia was elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies, where he remained until 1983. His time as a deputy was taken up by the Commission of Inquiry into the kidnapping and assassination of Aldo Moro, a former prime minister, by the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades). The assassination is the subject of his 1978 novel, The Moro Affair. Sciascia’s novels are elegant page-turners that entertain as they unravel the mechanism of power in our societies. He died in 1989 in Palermo.

  JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

  THE WALL

  translated by Lloyd Alexander

  THEY PUSHED US INTO a big white room and I began to blink because the light hurt my eyes. Then I saw a table and four men behind the table, civilians, looking over the papers. They had bunched another group of prisoners in the back and we had to cross the whole room to join them. There were several I knew and some others who must have been foreigners. The two in front of me were blond with round skulls; they looked alike. I suppose they were French. The smaller one kept hitching up his pants; nerves.