No Pasarán!

by Pete Ayrton

  ‘Jef Last is still in Madrid,’ I said in a worried tone.

  ‘He’s writing me such wonderful letters! I wonder whether we shouldn’t publish a small collection.’

  ‘For goodness’ sake, at least wait until he authorizes it.’

  ‘I can assure you, those letters deserve to be published.’

  ‘But Jef doesn’t deserve a bullet to the back of the head. When will you understand... ’

  ‘My dear friend, not another word. I have a very firm opinion about all that. I have still to formulate it precisely. Meanwhile therefore I prefer not to talk about it. You must admit though that as far as Return from the USSR is concerned, I was right not to give in to any pressure, even from you, and to publish without backing down. Just look at these press cuttings. (He lowered his voice.) My wife is worried, you know. She is afraid of violence, an attack... But I’m not frightened. Fear is an emotion that is foreign to me. Except for once, in Italy, when my window flew open in the middle of the night. It was the wind.’

  Born in Dunkirk in 1903, Pierre Herbart fought in the French army in Morocco in 1923. His experiences in Africa made him a committed opponent of colonialism and he joined the French Communist Party in 1933. He went to the USSR with André Gide in 1936. On his return from the Soviet Union, Herbart set off to Spain with the manuscript of Gide’s Return from the USSR, one of the first publications by a fellow traveller to criticize post-revolutionary Russia. While Herbart was in Spain asking Malraux’s advice about publication, Gide published the incendiary manuscript in Paris. These events among others are narrated with brittle humour in Herbart’s autobiography, La Ligne de Force. Herbart played a key role in the Resistance in Brittany and under the name General Le Vigan was in charge of the liberation of Rennes. He was sent to cover the situation in Algeria for the daily France-Soir, and his 1947 articles were among the first to warn of impending unrest in North Africa. An iconoclast, who never refrained from attacking the powers that be, Herbart died in total poverty in Grasse in 1974.

  ALBERTO MÉNDEZ

  SECOND DEFEAT:

  1940 OR MANUSCRIPT

  FOUND IN OBLIVION

  from Blind Sunflowers

  translated by Nick Caistor

  THIS TEXT WAS FOUND in a cabin in the mountains of Somiedo, on the borders of Asturias and León. Also discovered were the skeleton of an adult male and an infant’s surprisingly well-conserved naked body, laid on some cloth sacks stretched out over a palliasse. They were covered in a wolfskin and the fleece of a mountain goat, as well as wild boar fur and dried moss. The two bodies lay side-by-side, and were wrapped in a white bedspread, ‘as if in a nest’, according to the official report. The bedspread was as clean as the rest of the room was dirty, foul-smelling and wretched. The dried but still stinking remains of a cow missing its head and one hoof were also found. In 1952, while I was searching for other documents in the Civil Guard General Archive, I came across a yellow envelope with the letters NN (no name) written on it. The envelope contained an oilskin notebook, consisting of a few ruled pages. The contents were written in a neat, flowing hand. On the first pages, the handwriting is large, but it grows progressively smaller, as if the writer had more to write about than would fit into the book. Comments apparently added later are occasionally scribbled in the margins. This is obvious not only because of the handwriting (which as I said becomes progressively smaller) but also because they clearly reflect very different states of mind. I have nevertheless included these comments on the corresponding pages. A shepherd came across the notebook on a stool, under a heavy stone that could not have been put there by accident. A leather satchel, an axe, a bed-frame with no mattress and two pottery bowls on the cold hearth were the only other items listed in the civil guardsman’s report. A simple black dress was hanging from the ceiling. There were no other signs of life, although the report states (and this is what encouraged me to read the notebook) that a phrase had been scrawled on the cabin wall: ‘Infamous flock of nocturnal birds.’

  The text of the notebook is as follows:

  Page 1

  Elena died giving birth. I was unable to keep her on this side of life. To my surprise though, the boy is alive.

  There he is, unravelled, shivering, lying on a clean cloth alongside his dead mother. I have no idea what to do. I don’t dare touch him. I think I am going to let him die with his mother. She will know how to look after an infant’s soul. She will teach him to laugh, if there is a place for souls to laugh. We will not get over the mountains to France. Without Elena I have no wish to reach the end of the journey. Without Elena there is no way through.

  How does one correct the mistake of being alive? I’ve seen so many dead people, but I haven’t learned how one dies!

  Page 2

  It’s not right that death should come so soon, when life itself has had no time to begin.

  I’ve left everything as it was. Nobody will be able to say I interfered. The mother dead, the child restlessly alive, and me paralysed by fear. The colour of flight is grey; the sound of defeat is sadness.

  At this point there is a poem that has been crossed out. Only a few words are legible: ‘vigorous’, ‘no light’ (or ‘my light’, it is not clear which) and ‘to forget the explosion’. In the margin, in smaller handwriting: ‘Is this child the cause of death, or its fruit?’

  Page 3

  I want to leave everything written down in order to make it clear to whoever finds us that they are also to blame, unless they are victims too. Whoever reads this, please scatter our remains out on the hills. Elena could go no further, and the boy and I want to stay beside her. I am guilty only of having allowed what happened to happen. I had not learned how to avoid grief, and now grief has chopped Elena from me with its scythe. I only know how to write and tell stories. Nobody has taught me how to talk to myself, or to protect life from death. I write because I don’t want to remember how to pray or to curse.

  How can such a beautiful story end on a mountain racked by the wind? It’s only October, but up here every night autumn becomes winter.

  The child cried all day, with surprising strength. He has forced me to think of him, even though all I do is stare at Elena dead beside me, and have paid him no attention the whole morning. I now realise I have not shed a single tear over her, probably because the child’s sobbing is more than enough. And it’s necessary. I would never have managed to cry so helplessly; I would never have succeeded in screaming so angrily. Tears have been shed over Elena’s dead body without any effort on my part. How is it possible for someone to shed tears and fade away at the same time? Now it seems as though the boy has lost consciousness. I went over to look at him. He’s still breathing, although it felt to me as though his skeleton had somehow been removed.

  Page 4

  I’ve been studying Elena’s chalky face. She is not as waxily pallid as she was when she died. It’s as though all the colour has drained from her. Perhaps death is transparent. And frozen. For the first few hours, I felt the need to keep her hand in mine, but little by little the sense of her fingers caressing me faded, and I was afraid this would be the memory of her that remained engraved on my unrequited skin. I haven’t touched her for several hours, and am no longer capable of lying down beside her. The boy is, though. He’s curled up against his mother. For a moment I thought he was trying to bring some warmth back to the lifeless body that was his shelter through all the droning numbness of war.

  Yes. We’ve lost a war, and to allow ourselves to be caught by the Fascists would be akin to handing them another victory. Elena wanted to follow me, but now we know we made the wrong decision. I’d like to think it was the most generous mistake imaginable.

  We should have listened to her parents. I beg their forgiveness for having allowed Elena to come with me when I fled.

  Stay here, it’s not you they’re after, I told her. I’ll follow you. They’ll kill me. I’m dying. We talked of death in order to take a chance with life. But we were wrong. We shoul
d never have started out on such an endless journey with her eight months pregnant. The child will not survive, and I’ll let myself fall onto the grass. The snow will come and bury me, and later out of my eye sockets will grow flowers that will enrage those who preferred death to poetry.

  Miguel, your prophecy will come true!

  Where can you be now, Miguel, why aren’t you here to comfort me? I would gladly sacrifice eternity to hear your liquid verses just once more, your level voice, your friendly advice. Perhaps all this pain will make a poet of me, Miguel, perhaps you won’t have to be so kind in your appreciation of me? Do you remember, you used to call me the proletarian archer? Elena loved you for that, and loves you even after her death, I’m sure.

  Page 5

  Would Elena have preferred me to disentangle the child from the placenta, to tie his umbilical with one of my bootlaces, to seek to humble the victors with the seed of revenge? I don’t think she would have wanted a defeated child. I don’t want a son born of flight. My son does not want a life born of death. Or does he?

  If the God I have heard about were a good God, he would allow us to choose our past, but neither Elena nor her son will be able to go back along the path that has brought us to this cabin that will be their burial place.

  At first light, sleep overcame me, and I dozed off leaning on the table. I was awakened by the boy’s sobs: they sounded less vigorous, more ailing. His anger yesterday left me indifferent, but today’s lament has touched me. I don’t know whether it was because I was dazed from sleep and cold, or because after three days without food I’m also beginning to feel weak, but the fact is that without realising it I found myself giving him the tip of a rag dipped in diluted milk. At first he did not seem to know if he should live or simply allow himself to become part of my plan, but after a while he began to suck on the liquid. He was sick, but then went on sucking greedily. Life seems determined to win out.

  I think it was a mistake to pick him up. I think it was a mistake to distance him from death for even an instant, but the warmth of my body and the food he managed to take in have sent him into a fitful but deep sleep.

  Page 6

  I used some sacks of hay to make him a cosy cradle. I covered him with the crocheted bedspread Elena’s grandmother made. Elena insisted on bringing it with her, as if all her past were bundled up in it. It’s no longer as comforting as it was when the three of us fled, but it warms the child up. Perhaps it still bears traces of his mother’s smell.

  I must confess I find the contrast between life and death unbearable.

  To see the two of them in the same bed, flat on their backs, with Elena completely gone and him still so undefined was like drawing a line between what’s true and what’s false. All at once death was death, nothing more, stripped of the body’s innocence, of life’s animal nature. By the end of three days, a dead body is a mineral without the moisture of breath or the fragility of flowers. It isn’t even a defenceless object. It’s not something that could feel under attack, and yet it crouches there as though trying to hide. By the end of three days, a dead body is nothing more than solitude. It doesn’t even have the gift of sadness. The boy’s umbilical cord is drying out. He’s still crying.

  Around this passage there is a faint drawing in which one can make out a shooting star, or the childish representation of a comet, which is crashing into a tearful, waning moon.

  Page 7

  I haven’t eaten. I still have some dry bread and tins of fish that we brought with us on our escape. The boy has had some more diluted milk. It seems to fill him up. Today I’ll bury his mother under the oak tree. I don’t have the strength to milk the cows, but they are becoming ill and their lowing also serves to take my mind off Elena. I’d like someone to come up from the valley and round up the cattle so I don’t have to decide whether to feed myself or let myself roll down the slope to death. But in these fearful times, even cattle have to fend for themselves. Until winter arrives, they will be unaware of the existence of wolves, cold, and the natural order of things. As it stands, they and I are facing the same fate. If nobody comes, the four or five of them that need to be milked will die. How could the person looking after them have vanished, just like that? But that is of no importance in such bleak times as these. Anyway, while I make my mind up, I’ll need milk for the boy.

  It’s raining. So much the better; no one will dare make the trip up to the cabin in such unsettled weather. I’ve managed to catch two of the cows. One of them has mastitis. I’ll have to kill her to stop her suffering. Today the child ate three times.

  Page 8

  Today I buried Elena under a beech tree. It’s less robust than the oak. The sound of the earth falling on her mingled with the smell of her decomposing body. I was reduced to such bitter tears that for a moment I felt sure I was going to die too. But dying is not contagious. Defeat is. And I feel I am transmitting that particular epidemic. Wherever I go there will be the stench of defeat. Defeat killed Elena, and it will be the death of my son, whom I have not yet named. I lost a war and Elena, whom nobody could ever have considered an enemy, has died defeated. My son, our son, who is not even aware he was conceived with the flames of fear all around him, will die, mortally wounded by defeat.

  I placed a big white stone on her grave. I didn’t write her name on it, because I know that if any angels still exist, they will recognise Elena’s kindly soul among a whole host of other kindly souls.

  I’m trying to recall some of Garcilaso’s verses to recite over your tomb, Elena, but I no longer have any recollection of them. How did they go?

  There are several failed attempts to write the poem, all of them crossed out. The only lines that are legible are the following:

  Take these tears which on ground so bare

  I shed today as so often in the past

  although they may not help you there,

  until that dark and eternal night

  closes these eyes that saw you last

  and brings me new and brighter sight.

  Page 9

  I don’t know why I’m writing this notebook. And yet I’m glad I brought it with me. If I had someone to talk to, I probably would not write it; I derive a certain morbid pleasure when I think that somebody will read it after they have found my dead son and me. I’ve put a stone marker on Elena’s grave so that the sense of remorse will be threefold, even though the time for pity is past. It’s very cold now. Soon it will start to snow, and then all the paths up to the cabin will be cut off. I’ll have the whole winter to decide what death we are to die from. Yes, I think the time for pity has gone.

  Page 10

  In the margin are several roughly-drawn faces, obviously meant to be portraits. Three of them show the face of a child, and two that of a woman – the same woman in both cases. There are sketches of old people, both men and women, some of them wearing berets, others with scarves tied round their necks. There’s also a dog, pictured complete. Underneath all these drawings is the phrase: What graves are you lying in now?

  The sick cow lows plaintively. Its milk has dried up. I don’t dare kill her yet because I need snowdrifts to build up for me to keep the carcass in. There is plenty of firewood, and I’ll try to feed the other one by digging out grass from under the snow. What worries me most is this pencil. It’s the only one I have, and I want to be able to write everything so that whoever finds us in spring knows how we met our death.

  Written in capitals as if in a printed book, the following phrase: I AM A POET WITH NOVERSES.

  Page 11

  Today it snowed all day. These mountains must be where all winters have their home.

  The boy is still alive. The snow round the cabin is like a shroud. The dead cow provides us with meat: I keep some of it smoked, and the rest has been frozen by this early winter weather. Fortunately we get plenty of milk from the living cow, which is now inside the cabin with us. It helps to keep us warm. The sweet potatoes we stole as we went through Perlunes keep perfectly, buried in t
he snow. To judge by the greedy way he drinks the soup I make, the boy seems to like them. What’s surprising is the way he is beginning to fill the space. I can remember when he was an intruder in the cabin, something that should not have been there. Now the entire hut revolves around him. On the few days when there is sun, our bed reflects the light like a mirror, and the silence piles up around the noises the boy is constantly making, either because he is crying, or is taken by surprise by his bare leg waving in mid-air, or the sight of the withered, weary cow that has replaced a hearth to warm our family. His gentle, rhythmic breathing helps ward off the loneliness which without him would vanquish me.

  Page 12

  I found a mountain goat half-eaten by wolves. There was a lot of meat left on it, so today we will eat the remains. I’ve made a very mild soup from its bones and innards which the boy seems to keep down well.

  At this point there is a significant change in the handwriting. Although it is still very neat and tidy, it seems to be written in more haste. Or perhaps less steadily. Probably some length of time has elapsed.

  Would my parents recognise me if they saw me? I can’t see myself, but I imagine I am filthy and humiliated. I am yet another product of the war they tried to ignore but which flooded their stables, their starving cattle, their sparse crops with fear. I remember the poor, silent village of ours that closed its eyes to everything apart from fear. I remember how it shut its eyes when they killed Don Servando, my teacher, when they burned all his books and exiled all the poets whose work he knew by heart.

  I’ve lost. But I could have won. Will someone else take my place? I’m going to tell my son, who is gazing at me as though he understands, that I would not have left my enemies to flee with nothing, I would not have condemned anyone for being a poet. I threw myself into battle armed only with paper and pencil, and words gushed out of me that brought comfort to the wounded. But the comfort I gave also created bloodthirsty generals who were the reason for the wounded. Wounded, generals, generals, wounded. And there was I, stuck in the middle with my poetry. Their accomplice. And then there were the dead.