No Pasarán!

by Pete Ayrton

  Page 13

  Here there is a sentence crossed out which is illegible. The text on this page is placed around the outline of an infant’s hand. Presumably he used his child’s hand as a stencil. He wrote on it:

  Time has passed. I have no idea how many days because they are all the same, but what most surprises me is how the boy grows. When I reread this notebook, I realise I no longer feel the same. And if I lose my anger, what is there left? The winter is a closed box which stores up all the snowstorms. These mountains still seem like the place where winter spends the winter. My sadness has also frozen with the cold. All I have left is the fear that used to make me so afraid. I’m afraid the boy might fall ill, afraid the cow will die because I can barely feed her by digging up roots or giving her the few shoots of grass still growing when the snow came. I’m afraid of falling ill myself. I’m afraid someone will discover we are up here on the mountain. I’m afraid of so much fear. But the boy is unaware of all of this. Elena!

  At night, the wind howls round the mountain with an almost human moan. It’s as if it were trying to show me and the child how humans should grieve. Fortunately, the cabin is strong enough to withstand all the storms.

  Page 14

  Today I killed a wolf! Four of them came sneaking round the cabin. At first I was frightened, because their hunger gives them an almost human ferocity. But then I thought they might be able to provide us with food. When the biggest wolf came scratching at the door, I carefully opened it wide enough for him to poke his head in, then I quickly trapped his neck in the door’s edge. A single blow from the axe was enough. I hit him so hard his appetite spilled out with his blood. I’ll eat its flesh, and the entrails will provide the boy with nourishment. That is good, but the bad thing is I have smelled blood once more, I have heard again the sounds of death, and seen the colour of victims.

  On this page there is a drawing which shows a boy riding on a wolf; both of them are smiling and seem to be flying through the air above a field full of flowers.

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  A wolf told a boy that with his tender flesh

  He could survive the winter.

  The boy told the wolf to eat only one leg

  Because he was so young and tiny

  That he needed the wolf to be nice and plump

  Ready for the moment when

  Even one-legged, he would need some roasted

  Wolf to dine on.

  They stared at each other, sniffed one another and felt so bad

  That they would have to harm each other

  They agreed to repeat the scene

  Without resorting to the deceit

  That for two people who love each other to survive

  They always have to admit

  That whatever their feelings, one must live

  And the other one die.

  And as a corollary:

  The pair of them perished of hunger.

  Underneath these lines there is a musical scale and some notes, although these do not correspond to anything that resembles real music. Several experts have tried to decipher this supposed tune, but to no avail.

  Page 16

  The snow keeps coming down. I feel so weak it’s harder and harder for me to chop firewood to heat the cabin where the cow, the boy and I live. All three of us are losing strength. Yet the boy, whom I still have not given a name, is surprisingly lively. He makes noises in his throat when he’s awake that sound like gurgling. On the one hand, I like it that he’s not asleep, because his total dependence on me makes me feel important in a way that no one except Elena has ever done before. On the other, his eyes are so huge in his eye sockets and his cheeks so sunken that I can see his skull. He is so skinny! The cow is too, but she still gives enough milk for the boy and me. I am emaciated too, and frozen stiff.

  I have no idea what month we are in. Could it be Christmas already? Today I followed an animal’s tracks and went down the mountain in the direction of Sotre. In the valley bottom I saw some woodcutters. I felt a familiar, solid fear grip me. Nowadays I am proud of my fear, because at the end of this monstrous war I have seen too many people die thanks to their courage. If we stay up here, the cow, the boy and I will die. If we go down into the valley, the cow, the boy and I will die.

  Page 17

  I’ve thought a lot about it, but I don’t want to give them the final satisfaction of victory. It may be right and proper for me to die, since I was nothing more than a bad poet who sang of life in trenches where death ruled the roost. But for the boy to die is nothing more than necessity. Who is going to tell him about the colour of his mother’s hair, about her smile, the graceful way she glided through the air as though trying not to disturb it? Who is going to beg for forgiveness for having conceived him? And if I do survive, what am I going to tell him about me? That Caviedes is a village perched on a mountain that smells of the sea and firewood, that I had a teacher who could recite Góngora and Machado from memory, a father and mother who were unable to keep me on the farm, that I have no idea what I was looking for when I went to Madrid in the midst of the war... a balladeer dodging bullets? That’s right, my son! I wanted to be a balladeer dodging bullets!

  Now I’m your gravedigger!

  This last phrase is underlined with a thick, heavy line, so firmly drawn it has torn the paper of the black oilskin notebook.

  Page 18

  I can no longer provide food for the cow, and the cow can no longer provide food for the boy. I scrape about under the snow searching for grass shoots, but they are increasingly rare and straggly. Among the roots of the frozen hazel trees I found some kind of bulbs. I use them to make a paste that is completely tasteless but which, when boiled and mashed, I offer to the cow and the boy. I don’t know if it is of any use as food, but I am giving him my saliva, and he is surviving. Even though he is very weak, he is already trying to stir, but he doesn’t have the strength. He bends backwards, supporting himself on his head and feet. He quickly collapses. If I could, I would go down into the valley and beg for food, but it’s impossible now to get out of these mountains. I was born in a village where it never snows, and nobody taught me how to cope with this silent, endless snow. Whenever I stray further than usual from the cabin I find myself buried up to the waist, and it takes me an age to free myself from this white trap. What little the wolves left of the dead cow is so hard by now I can’t even shave off any bits with the axe. Fortunately, the carcass is covered with snow, because yesterday I tried to dig it out to find lean meat

  Page 19

  among its remains and I discovered a beast, half torn flesh and half skeleton, which stretched out its neck as though trying desperately to escape. The cow’s few remaining ribs form a kind of bowl that looks as if it should contain its soul. But the soul has also been devoured by the wolves. And by me. And the boy.

  Here there is a drawing meant to show a stylised cow’s head, elongated like an arrow, flying through the air. Underneath is the phrase: Where can cows’ heaven be?

  I ought to kill the other cow while she still has some meat on her. But I have no way of keeping it fresh. If I leave the meat out in the snowdrifts, the prowling wolves would only sniff it out. I keep the inside of the cabin warm enough that what’s left of her would soon go off. I wonder if the cow thinks I am saving her from the wolves, or does she know that it is the wolves that are saving her from my axe? Perhaps she knows the truth, and that is why she no longer gives milk.

  There follow several pages, nine in total, which must have been torn out together, because the tear is exactly the same in all of them. It has been carefully done: there are no jagged edges. In the numbering that follows, we have not taken into account the sheets missing from the notebook.

  Page 20

  The boy is ill. He hardly moves. I’ve killed the cow, and am giving him her blood, but he can barely swallow any. I’ve boiled her meat and bones to make a thick, dark broth. I’m giving it to him diluted in snow water. Yet again, everything smells of death.


  He’s very hot. I’m writing with him asleep on my lap. How much I love him! I sang him a sad song by Federico:

  The tears of a skull

  Awaiting a golden kiss.

  (Outside, dark wind

  And muddied stars).

  I can’t remember any more which poems I used to recite for the soldiers. When you are hungry, the first thing that dies is memory. I can’t write a single verse, and yet my mind is full of a thousand lullabies for my son. They all start the same way: Elena!

  Today I kissed him. For the first time. I had not used my lips for so long I had forgotten about them. What must he have felt when he first came into contact with their cold touch? It’s terrible, but by now he must be three or four months old, and until today nobody had ever kissed him. He and I know how, without a kiss, time stretches out interminably, and now it seems as if there’s not enough of it left for us to be able to catch up. Fear, cold, hunger, rage and loneliness drive out tenderness. Like a crow it only comes back when it scents love and death. Now it is back, but it’s confused. It can smell both things. Can tenderness be white and black? Elena, what colour was your tenderness? I no longer remember. I don’t even know if what I feel is sorrow. But I kissed the boy without trying to take your place.

  Page 21

  There’s a smell of something rotten. Yet all I remember is the scent of wild fennel.

  In large, very large letters, the remainder of the page is covered with the words ‘OH, WITHOUT YOU THERE IS NOTHING’ written in an unsteady hand.

  Page 22

  I couldn’t find my pencil (or what’s left of it) so was unable to write for several days. That is silence too, that is being gagged. Today, when I discovered the stub again under a pile of firewood, I felt I had rediscovered the gift of speech. I don’t know what I feel until I write it down. It must be my rural education. Today I spent a long time up on a leafless tree trunk trying to spot the tracks of an animal that could provide us with food. All I saw was an uninterrupted white expanse stretching to the horizon. A stubborn, freezing wind swept across the snowy waste, its howling only reinforcing the silence. While I was up there watching, I felt something I could not identify, something that might have been good or bad. Now I’ve found my pencil, I know what it was: solitude.

  I have the feeling that everything will come to an end once I come to the end of this notebook. That is why I only write in it occasionally. My pencil must also have lost the war. I think the very last word it will write will be ‘melancholy’.

  Page 23

  The boy has died. I have decided to call him Rafael after my father. I did not have enough warmth to keep him alive. He learned from his mother how to die without any fuss, and this morning simply did not respond to my words of encouragement.

  The rest of the page, written in an almost beautiful handwriting that is much more carefully done than anything up to this point, repeats over and over Rafael, Rafael, Rafael, a total of sixty-three times. The R of Rafael is always a vertical flourish interlaced with a big round circle that starts on the left, rises above the vertical line, and comes back to the vertical more or less in the middle, only to part from it again, like a starched petticoat that tails away at the bottom. It is both English and gothic at the same time.

  Page 24

  The word Rafael is repeated a further sixty-two times.

  Page 25

  The word Rafael again, in the same handwriting, but much smaller: one hundred and nineteen times.

  Page 26

  This is no longer written with the same pencil, which has probably run out. Instead the author has used a piece of charcoal or something similar. The words are hard to make out because, after they were written, he obviously drew his hand across the page in an attempt to rub them out. Bearing this in mind, we think we have faithfully transcribed what was written: ‘Infamous flock of nocturnal birds’.

  EDITOR’S NOTE: In the year 1954 I visited a village in the province of Santander called Caviedes. It is perched on a mountain top and smells of the nearby sea, although this cannot be seen because the houses all overlook an inland valley. I asked around, and was told that the local schoolteacher, known as Don Servando, was shot as a Republican in 1937, and that his best pupil, who had a boundless love of poetry, had fled aged sixteen to the loyalist zone in order to join the army which lost the war. Neither his parents, who were called Rafael and Felisa and died at the end of the war, nor anyone else in the village ever heard from him again. People thought he was crazy because he was always writing and reciting poems. His name was Eulalio Ceballos Suárez. If he was the author of this notebook, he must have been eighteen when he wrote it. I personally think that is too young for so much suffering.

  Alberto Méndez was born in Madrid in 1941. Published in 2004, the year of his death, the short story collection Blind Sunflowers is his only book. The organizing theme of the book is defeat – not defeat on a grand scale but defeat as it affected everyday lives on both sides of the war. Like Cercas’ Soldiers of Salamis, Méndez’s work is part of the process of rediscovering the grassroots history of the Civil War. It is a process that seeks to disprove the view propagated by Franco and the Nationalist movement that ‘There were no victims, only heroes; no dead people, only those who had fallen in the name of Spain’. The stories of Blind Sunflowers are part of a wider process to give back a history to the many unidentified and lost dead. Méndez died in Madrid in 2004.

  ARTURO BAREA

  THIS WAR IS A LESSON

  from The Clash, part 3 of The Forging of a Rebel

  translated by Ilsa Barea

  THE DEADLY CLOUD HAD LIFTED. The anti-climax made us laugh. It was no longer likely that the police would be used to get rid of Ilsa. I had lodged a sharp complaint against the denouncers, not sparing the man whom I suspected behind the move. At lunch, while we were sitting in amity with the police agents, I had seen George Gordon’s face flushed and twitching. A couple of days later he made a movement as though to greet us, but we overlooked it.

  I wanted to be merry. I took Ilsa round the corner to the Andalusian bar, Villa Rosa, where the old waiter Manolo greeted me as a lost son, examined her thoughtfully, and then told her that I was a rake, but not a genuine rake, and that she was the right woman to cope with me; drank a little glass of Manzanilla with us, tremulously, because the war had made him very old. He did not get enough food. When I let him have some tins given us by a friend in the International Brigades, he was so humbly grateful that I could have cried. In the evening we went to Serafín’s and plunged into the warm welcome of the cronies. Torres, Luisa, and her husband came gabbling with pleasure. They thought that our troubles were over and that soon we would do work in Madrid again.

  But Agustín, who had staunchly visited us every day, though it could do him no good with his boss Rosario, told me bluntly that we ought to leave Madrid. As long as we stayed on, certain people would resent our very existence. Intrigues might not always go through official channels, and we could not walk about for good with a bodyguard. Moreover, I was going crazy, in his opinion.

  I felt in my bones that he was right. But I was not yet ready to leave Madrid. I was tied to it with hurting, quivering nerve-strings. I was writing a story about Angel. If they did not let me broadcast any more, I had to talk through print. I believe that I could do it. My very first story (The story of the militiaman who made a fly his pet) had been printed, incongruously enough, in the Daily Express, and the fee had overwhelmed me, accustomed as I was to the rates of pay of Spanish journalism. I realized that the story had been published mainly because Delmer had liked it and provided a witty headline and caption such as: ‘This story was written under shellfire by the Madrid Censor – who lost his inhibitions about writing by censoring our dispatches.’ All the same, my first piece of simple story-telling had gone out to people who, perhaps, would through it get a glimpse of the mind of that poor brute, the Miliciano. I wanted to go on; but what I had to say had its roots in Madrid. I would not let
them drive me away, and I could not go before I had cleared the red fog of anger out of my brain. It swept me, together with the relief that she was alive and with me, every time I watched Ilsa. All my submerged violence rose when I saw her still bound to her rack, still lashed by the ugliness of the thing which people of her own creed were inflicting on her, and still quiet.

  The man who helped me then, as he had helped me through the evil weeks that went before, was a Catholic priest, and of all those I met in our war he commands my deepest respect and love: Don Leocadio Lobo.

  I do not remember how we first came to talk to each other. Father Lobo, too, lived in the HotelVictoria, and soon after we had moved in he became a regular guest at our table, together with Armando. The mutual confidence between him and Ilsa was instantaneous and strong; I felt at once the great attraction of a man who had suffered and still believed in human beings with a great and simple faith. He knew, because I said so, that I did not consider myself a Catholic any more, and he knew that I was divorced, living in what his Church called ‘sin’ with Ilsa and intending to marry her as soon as she had her divorce. I did not spare him violent outbursts against the political clergy in league with the ‘powers of darkness,’ and against the stultifying orthodoxy I had come to hate in my schooldays. Nothing of all this seemed to impress him or to affect his attitude to us, which was that of a candid, detached friend.

  He wore no cassock but a somewhat shiny dark suit. His strong, regular features would have made him an attractive man, had they not been deeply furrowed by his thought and struggle; his face had a stamp of inwardness which set him apart even in his frequent moments of expansion. He was one of those people who make you feel that they only say what is their own truth and do not make themselves accomplices of what they believe to be a lie. He seemed to me to be a reincarnation of Father Joaquín, the Basque priest who had been the best friend of my boyhood. Curiously enough the origins of both were alike. Father Lobo, like Father Joaquín, was the son of simple country folk, of a mother who had borne many children and worked tirelessly all her life. He, too, had been sent to the seminary with the help of the local gentry because he had been a bright boy at school, and because his parents were glad to see him escape from grinding poverty. He, too, had left the seminary not with the ambition of becoming a prelate, but with that of being a Christian priest at the side of those who were hungry and thirsty for bread and justice.