by Pete Ayrton
De Foxá shook General Edqvist’s hand in silence, choked by emotion. When he was settled in his sleigh, he smiled, finally:
At last, he said, you are done annoying me. I’ll telegraph Madrid, and as soon as I have an answer, we’ll know where things stand. Thank you, Malaparte.
Adiós, Agustin.
Adiós.
A few days later, the answer came from Madrid. The prisoner was taken to Helsinki, where Spanish officers were waiting for him. El traidor was flown to Berlin, and on from there to Spain. It was clear that the Spanish authorities wanted to make something out of this. The prisoner was overwhelmed with care and attention, and he took it all joyfully.
Two months later, I returned to Helsinki. It was spring. The trees were covered with a foam of tender green leaves, birds singing in their branches. I went to fetch de Foxá from his villa at Brunnsparken, and we strolled along the Esplanade, heading towards Kämp. The sea was so green it seemed also to be bursting with leaves, and the little island of Suomenlinna was white with the wings of seagulls.
And the prisoner el traidor? Any news?
Again? shouted de Foxá. Why do you keep meddling in this business?
I did something to help save his life, I said.
De Foxá told me that el traidor had been warmly welcomed in Madrid. He was paraded around, and the people said: See this handsome boy? He was a Communist, he fought with the Russians, he was taken prisoner on the Russian front. But he wanted to come home, to Spain. He has recognized Franco. He is a brave boy, a good Spaniard.
He was taken to the cafés, the theaters, bullrings, stadiums, cinemas.
But he said: You think this is a café? You should see the cafés in Moscow.
And he laughed:
This is a theater? A cinema? You should see what they have in Moscow!
And he laughed. They took him to the stadium. He shouted out:
This is a stadium? You should see the stadium in Kiev.
And he laughed. Everyone turned to look at him, and he shouted:
You think this is a stadium? The stadium in Kiev, now that’s a stadium!
And he laughed.
Do you understand now? said de Foxá. Do you finally understand? It’s your fault they were furious with me at the ministry. It’s all your fault. That should teach you to meddle in things that don’t concern you!
But el traidor – what did they do with him?
What did you want them to do with him? Nothing! They didn’t do anything with him, said Agustin with a strange voice. Why are you always getting involved?
Then he smiled: Anyway, they buried him as a Catholic.
Curzio Malaparte was born Kurt Erich Suckert in Tuscany in 1898. Promoted to captain during the First World War, Malaparte joined the Partito Nazionale Fascista and took part in Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922. In 1926, encouraged by the idea of the Fascist New Man, he took the name Malaparte in homage to (Napoleon) Bonaparte. Coup d’Etat: The Technique of Revolution, a book published in 1931 that was critical of both Hitler and Mussolini, got Malaparte into trouble with the Fascist authorities and stripped of party membership. In 1941, he was sent to the Finnish and Russian fronts by Corriere della Sera to cover the war – his experiences in eastern Europe provide the material for his great war ‘novel’ Kaputt, a collection of journalism, The Volga Rises in Europe, and brilliant short stories that include ‘The Traitor’ (‘El Traidor’). After the war, Malaparte moved to the left and joined the Italian Communist Party. An admirer of Chairman Mao, Malaparte fell ill on a visit to China in 1957. He died in Rome in 1958. His house, Casa Malaparte on the island of Capri, is the star of Godard’s 1963 film Contempt (Le Mépris) – the modernist villa and Brigitte Bardot are a marriage made in heaven. ‘The Traitor’ is included in The Bird that Swallowed Its Cage: The Selected Writings of Malaparte adapted and translated by Walter Murch.
MERCÈ RODOREDA
MOVIE MATINÉE
translated by Peter Bush
SUNDAY, 2 JUNE. This afternoon Ramon and I went to the Rialto. By the time we were inside we’d already fallen out and while he was buying the tickets, I felt like crying. And it was all over something stupid, I know. This is how it all started. Yesterday I went to bed at one. I’d stayed awake until midnight because the electric blue thread had gone missing and without it I couldn’t finish the smock. And mother was grumbling: ‘You never remember where you leave things, just like your father,’ making me feel even more upset. Father glared at her and went on squeezing the blackheads on his nose by the table, the hand mirror propped up against the bottle of wine. Finally I did find the thread and could finish the smock. However, I still had to iron my blouse and skirt. I was exhausted when I got into bed and thought about Ramon for a bit until I fell asleep. Today when he rang the bell after lunch, I was ready and dressed, with three roses in my hair into the bargain. He walked as if he was crazy and didn’t give my blouse and skirt that had been such a bother to iron a single glance, he went over to my father, who was half-dozing in the rocking-chair, and told him: ‘Figueres says better not to fill in any form: I’d been thinking they must have lied to you.’ Father opened one eye, shut it straight away, and started rocking. But he carried on talking as if he didn’t realize he was annoying father, harping on about how refugees had to do this and that and all the while not a glance in my direction. In the end he said: ‘Let’s be off, Caterina.’ And he took my arm and we went out. I told him: ‘You’re another one always saying things to upset him. You’re a pain.’ However, that was the least of it. Halfway there we were walking and still not saying a word when all of a sudden he let go of my arm. Oh, I immediately saw what that was all about: Roser was approaching along the pavement, going in the opposite direction. He’s always telling me that he and Roser had only had a bit of fun. Yes, right, a bit of fun. But he’d let go of my arm. She walked by stiffly, not even looking our way. I told him, ‘Anyone would think she was your fiancee and not me.’ (I’ve just noticed that I’ve written this without a break, and my teacher always told me to start a new paragraph now and then. But as I’m only writing this for myself, it makes no odds.)
So I still felt like crying when he was buying the tickets, and the cinema warning bell made me feel even sadder. I wanted to cry because I love Ramon and I like him when he’s got the scent of quinine he gets when he’s been to the barber for a haircut, even though I’d rather he wore his longer and looked more like Tarzan. I’m sure I’ll get married, because I’m pretty, but it’s him I want to marry. Mother always says he’ll end up in Guyana with all his black marketing. But he won’t spend his whole life doing that, and he says it means we can get married quicker. And perhaps he’s right.
We sat down without exchanging a word and the picture-house reeked of Zotal disinfectant. First it was the news: a girl skating, then a lot of bicycles, and after that four or five gentlemen sitting around a table and then he started whistling and stamping his feet like a mad man. The gentleman sitting in front turned round and they kept on arguing until the news finished. Then they showed a cartoon that I didn’t like at all: there was a load of talking cows. In the interval we went to the bar to drink a glass of Pampre d’Or and he met a friend there who asked him if he had any packets of Camel and Nylon stockings and he said he would next weekend because he’d be going to Le Havre. I really suffer when he goes away because although I never say anything, I always think they’ll catch him and put him in handcuffs.
The black market was to blame for the fact we missed the start of the main film and when we went to take our seats, everybody grumbled because my wooden soles squeak a lot even if I walk very slowly. The characters in the film really were in love. I can see we don’t love each other in the same way. There was a spy and a soldier and at the end they executed both of them. I think films are very nice because if the characters who are in love are unhappy you feel a bit sorry for them but you think it will all turn out fine; now when I’m in that state I never know if it will all turn out fine
. And if, like today, there’s an unhappy ending, everybody is sad and thinks: what a pity! On days when I’m feeling desperate, though nobody knows, it’s much worse. And if they did, they’d all laugh. When it got to the saddest part, he put his arm round my shoulder and that’s when we stopped being angry with each other. I said: ‘Don’t go to Le Havre this week.’ And a lady behind went: ‘Shush.’
I’ve just read everything I’ve just written and I can see it’s not really what I wanted to say. I always have this problem: I describe things I think are important at the time and then realize they aren’t. For example, the business about the blue thread I couldn’t find last night. Then, anyone who read this diary would say I think Ramon doesn’t love me when I believe he really does, even if it seems he’s only got buying and selling rubbish on his mind. But even that’s not what I really wanted to say. What I’d like to know how to say is the fact that, although I’m always sad, deep down I am happy. If anyone read that, they’d laugh like crazy. Yes, I know I’m a chump, and father always tells me he’s a simple soul, and that’s what makes me even sadder because I think we’ll both end up a couple of miserable souls. But, you know...
Born in Barcelona in 1908, Merceè Rodoreda, a star of Catalan writing, is best know for her novel In Diamond Square, about a working-class woman surviving in Barcelona during the Civil War. The novel is an amazing collage of the everyday set against a backdrop of historical events that shaped the 20th century. Rodoreda said she based In Diamond Square on the story ‘Movie Matinée’ included here. Although she refused the label feminist, Rodoreda has great empathy for the conditions in which women survived in wartime – like the photographer Gerda Taro, she sees what the male gaze neglects. In 1937, Rodoreda started to work for the autonomous government of Catalonia; it is said that at this time she had a relationship with Andrés Nin, Catalan intellectual and leader of the POUM. Nin was arrested in June 1937, tortured and executed under direct orders from Stalin. At the end of the war, Rodoreda went into exile, first in France and then in Switzerland. She returned to Catalonia in 1972 and died in Girona in 1983. She is now a Catalan national treasure with Barcelona enriched with libraries named after her and a sculpture in Diamond Square. ‘Movie Matinée’ is included in Rodoreda’s collection Vint-i-dos contes published in 1958.
JUAN GOYTISOLO
THE EMPTY BLACK BAG
from Forbidden Territory
translated by Peter Bush
I REMEMBER MY MOTHER GOING ROUND the nearby farmhouses in search of food. During my father’s illness, the factory committee paid his salary regularly; but the money was gradually losing its value and as the war advanced and the situation in the Republican camp got worse, the ancient barter economy reappeared. We would go with my mother and brothers and sister to visit Aunt Rosario’s family in her flat in the main square in the village or we would walk round the outskirts, taking the road to Espinelves, the path to la Noguera, or one of the shortcuts that curled down to the hidden springs nearby. We often got together to play hide-and-seek with other children in the spacious garden of the Bioscas’ villa or we would go to their house for a Charlie Chaplin film show from a Baby Pathé projector. I can remember a soirée of film and poetry when someone pathetically inspired declaimed poems by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer. At home, I read the illustrated stories my mother gave me and I began to draw and write ‘poetry’ in an exercise book. My future career as a writer was thus inaugurated at the age of six: the lines poured out and, once adorned with my own scribbled illustrations, I was quick to show them to visitors with a precocious feeling of pride.
While I write these lines, I am trying to hold steady the few, faithful memories of my mother: the time she had an argument with father – I don’t know why – and she wiped her nose with her handkerchief; the day I was feeling uncared for by her and I said that I would like to fall ill too, since she was entirely absorbed in caring for her husband, and, unable to restrain herself, she gave me the smack I deserved; the afternoon at my aunt and uncle’s when I learned of the accident in which cousin Paco, Aunt Marías son, had lost a leg, cut off by a tram while he was roller-skating: Aunt Rosario asked me to tell her only about ‘some bad news,’ without giving any specific detail what it was about and, while my mother got dressed and ran with me to her house, I selfishly enjoyed my momentary power over her gradually suggesting, in my own way, all I knew about the drama.
Until then the civil war and its disasters had distant, indirect repercussions on my awareness. The small colony of well-off Barcelona bourgeois lived in Viladrau provisionally on the margin of the conflict and maintained a public attitude of prudent neutrality. Only a few ironic comments – the obligatory reference to the fact that Bono, a well-known ladies’ hairdresser who had also taken refuge in the village, was picked up weekly by an official car in order to do the hair and beautify the wives of government and Generalitat ministers – allowed one to read their real feelings. But, out of earshot of any indiscreet listeners, tongues would be unleashed. At night, we used to be visited by Lolita Soler, a woman in her forties, a gaunt spinster from a monarchist military family, who had lived the siege of Madrid before being evacuated to Catalonia to be stranded like us in that isolated mountain spot. Her bloodcurdling tales of murders, executions, deportations, heroic martyrdoms, recounted in whispers so that we children could not hear her, mingled with encouraging news of the other side’s progress, which she apparently intercepted via a crystal radio on the Burgos wavelength. Her tribulations and adventures – which my family thought were exaggerated – aroused endless discussions in the dining room, which continued long after her departure. The precarious situation in which my grandparents lived, the helplessness of Aunt Consuelo, shut up with them in a flat on the Diagonal, the ever more frequent bombing of the city, intensified my mother’s state of anxiety, and she was already overwhelmed by four children and a sick husband with no hope of a quick cure. In a letter, which my sister found years after, she told her parents of her fear and worry because of a lack of news after an air attack. Every two or three weeks she would get on the coach that took her to the railway station of Balenya and, after spending the day with them and doing a little shopping, she would return toViladrau at night. These ever so brief visits did not stop her worries, however, and after several months they became a kind of ritual.
On the morning of March 17,1938, my mother started her journey as usual. She left home at daybreak and, although I know the tricks that memory and its fictitious re-creations play, I retain a clear memory of looking out my bedroom window while that woman, soon to become unfamiliar, walked with her coat, hat, and bag, toward the definitive absence from us and from herself: destruction, emptiness, nothing. It no doubt seems suspicious that I should wake up precisely on that day and that, forewarned of my mother’s departure by her footsteps or the noise of the door, I should have got up to watch her leave. However, it is a real image and for some time it filled me with bitter remorse: I should have shouted to her, insisted that she give up the visit. It was probably the fruit of a later guilt mechanism: an indirect way of reproaching myself for my inertia, for not having warned her of the imminent danger, and for not attempting the gesture that, in my imagination, could have saved her.
My memory of the frustrated waiting for her to return – my father’s growing anxiety, our comings and goings in search of news to our aunt and uncle’s house or to the village coach stop – is much more reliable. Two days of tension, anticipatory anguish, unbearable silence, visits from our uncle and aunt, Lolita Soler’s sobbing, a round of whispered conversation in my father’s room until that sad St. Joseph’s holiday when the three brothers and sister were brought together on the outside staircase that descended to the garden and Aunt Rosario, with occasional feeble interruptions from Lolita Soler, told us about the bombing, its victims, how she too had been caught, very seriously injured, leading us gradually, like that bull that has just been stabbed by the torero and is now pushed skilfully by his team onto its knee
s so that the fighter can finish it off with one quick thrust, to the moment when, her voice drowned in tears, ignoring the other woman’s pious protests, she uttered the unutterable word, leaving us in a state of bewilderment not because of the grief immediately expressed in sobbing and wailing but rather the inability to take in the brutal truth, still untouched by the bare reality of the fact, and especially its definitive, irrevocable nature.
How her death happened, in exactly which place she fell, where she was taken to, at which moment and in what circumstances her parents recognized her is something that I have never known nor will I ever know. The unknown woman who disappeared suddenly from my life, did so discreetly, far from us, as if to temper delicately the effect that her departure would inevitably have, but thickening at the same time the shadows which would envelop her in the future and turn her into a stranger: the object of guesswork and conjectures, incomplete explanations, and doubtful, undemonstrable hypotheses. She had gone shopping in the center of the city and was caught there by the arrival of the airplanes, near where the Gran Vía crosses the Paseo de Gracia. She was a stranger, also, to those who, once the alert was over, picked up from the ground that woman who was already eternally young in the memory of all who knew her, the lady who, in her coat, hat, and high-heeled shoes, clung tightly to the bag where she kept the presents she had bought for her children, which the latter, days afterward, in suits dyed black as custom ruled, would receive, in silence, from the hands of Aunt Rosario: a romantic novel for Marta; tales of Doc Savage and the Shadow for José Agustín; a book of illustrated stories for me; some wooden dolls for Luis that would remain scattered round the attic without my brother ever touching them.