No Pasarán!

by Pete Ayrton

  We are not so very far from those people living seven thousand years ago. Many of our experiences are similar. Raise your hand anyone who has never made a mark on a wall. Many years ago, in a barracks in Hoyo de Manzanares, I did just that.

  It was a very isolated barracks, about one square kilometre in extent, with a central building that had doubled as the Nazi headquarters in The Dirty Dozen. The sentry boxes looked across at the bare slopes of the mountain, and doing guard duty there was no joke, especially in winter, when the temperatures often plummeted to twenty degrees below zero. The worst thing, though, wasn’t the cold or the howling of the dogs that prowled round the barracks, but the feeling that our lives were not our own, that – to give just one example – they depended less on us and more on the whim of some jumped-up student promoted to the rank of temporary second lieutenant. It was a situation wholly inimical to poetry or any kind of creative writing because, if I may put it like this, we were not inhabited by the Word, but by anger and a loathing for all the manipulative authority figures above us. Sometimes, though, we did manage to shake off that mood and fly a little higher; then we would get out a knife or some other sharp implement and carve something on the wall of the sentry box or of the barracks itself. Our mark would remain there for those who came after, leaving a message: ‘We were here too. Once we, too, were alive.’

  That was in the winter of 1974. Less than a year later, in that same barracks, Baena Alonso, Sánchez Bravo and García Sanz were all shot. In another barracks, Otaegi was shot, and in Barcelona, Paredes Manot. As we know, they were the last prisoners to be shot under Franco.

  ... from the rock to the tree

  From the rock to the tree, from il masso di Borno to the forests of California or Nevada, whose trees bear carvings made by the shepherds who lived there, utterly alone, with only their sheep and their dogs for company, and visited only by coyotes.

  There are hundreds of such carvings in the forests of California and Nevada. Many of them represent the house where the shepherd was born, the house in Vizcaya or Navarra that he left behind, others show women who were not quite as remote as that house where they were born, women from some roadside club or brothel in Stockton or Fresno. There are also names and dates on the white bark of the aspens: ‘Jean Saroiberry, 1912’; ‘Pierre S, 14-VIII-1931’; ‘Miguel García, 1935’.

  By carving their names and adding a date, by being more explicit than the men and women of seven thousand years ago, the shepherds were giving a more specific meaning to their marks. Initially, these were simply an affirmation of the fact that they were alive, an expression in which the negative – nostalgia for home, the lack of a wife – mingled with the positive – ‘I can at least give expression to those feelings’; but when we look at them thirty or forty years on, the messages have a more dramatic quality, because they speak of people who are no longer here. Walking among those carvings, we inevitably feel that we are in a gallery of epitaphs.

  In one such ‘gallery’, in a forest in the Peavine Mountains, I met a young man who had returned to America with the sole object of visiting the carving made by his father in 1957, a few years before he vanished in a snowstorm. ‘I had to do it,’ he told me, ‘because when he died, I was still a child, and afterwards, we went back to Vizcaya, and I forgot all about our life here. Now that I’ve seen his tree, though, I feel at peace. I’ve put a cross by the tree too, so now the tree is complete.’ I asked him if he had found it hard to find the tree, and he told me that a shepherd who came from the same Basque village as his father and who still lived in Nevada, had drawn him a map.

  On the way back, he continued talking about his father as if we really had visited a cemetery and were on our way home for a comforting bowl of soup. When we reached the car park and he opened the door to his car, I saw on the seat a tape by Paco Ibañez. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said, seeing that I had noticed, ‘I was listening to him on the way here. I really love those songs, especially Jorge Manrique’s poem on the death of his father. “And even though his life was lost,”’ he quoted, “‘his memory brings us sweet consolation.’” Those lines summed up the conversation we had just had.

  And yet – and now I begin a darker parenthesis – not all deaths are like those of the shepherd in the Peavine Mountains or like the one mourned by Jorge Manrique, deaths whose pain diminishes over time and that leave a scar, a mark on our memory. There are other deaths that, far from fading over time, never stop hurting.

  Popular stories passed on by word of mouth are also marks, words that stand out on the linguistic surface like the lines and asterisks on the surface of that rock, and they often refer to such enduring deaths. They speak of ‘lost souls’ who cannot rest because they left some important matter unresolved. Like the Flying Dutchman, or Mateo Txistu, a priest who, just as he was about to consecrate the host, left the church to go off with his dogs to hunt a hare; an irredeemable sin that doomed him to keep on hunting for ever, never to rest again, always whistling to his dogs, his whistles blending in with the whistling wind. Or perhaps like the farmer who, in a village in Guipúzcoa, during the Civil War, betrayed one of his neighbours and thus condemned him to death; perhaps he will never rest either. Years after the event, sensing that his final hour was near, he asked the priest to go to the dead man’s widow and beg her forgiveness, ‘Otherwise,’ they say he said, ‘I will end up in hell.’ But the widow told the priest to tell the traitor to talk to God about it, not her, because He was wiser and knew the human heart better than anyone. I remember that, as children, we never went anywhere near the house of that repentant traitor. People said you could still hear agonizing cries issuing from it, saying barkaidan, mesedez, ‘please, forgive me’.

  There are, however, other still more sinister stories or marks, for not all criminals are like the farmer who took literally what his religion had taught him and lived in mortal fear of hell. On the contrary, most belong to the line of Cain and, like him, never acknowledge their crime. They say and go on saying: ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ Or they say, even more wickedly than Cain: ‘I’m not the murderer. The real murderer was Abel.’ Or they say: ‘So what if it was a murder. He deserved to die.’ Poets like Jorge Manrique are not equipped to speak of such crimes; for that we need poets who are more like prophets. Like Celso Emilio Ferreiro, who walked to a mountain in Galicia to visit the place where, in 1936, hundreds of people had been killed, and there he recited: ‘Here in this mountainous place, innocent people were sacrificed. Few now remember that holocaust, but we will not forget it as long as we live. Each year we come here to curse the murderers.’

  The marks on the tree or on the rock, the ones that say ‘once we, too, were alive’, last over time; no one erases them and they can be visited fifty or a hundred years later, like those carvings left by the shepherds; even seven thousand years later, like those on il masso di Borno. But the marks that say ‘they were killed here’ are harder to find. They rarely last. And when they do, it’s always down to the efforts of people who, despite all, know what truly matters, know the importance of death. That is what happened in the Guipúzcoan village of Andoain and what happened in the valley of Valdediós, near Oviedo.

  In Andoain, Franco’s so-called ‘nationalists’ shot a man they had taken prisoner near a farm called Asu. It happened on 16 August 1936. His bones were found and his story reconstructed thanks to a farm labourer who remembered the mark left by his own father: ‘My father and I used to come to this field to mow,’ he explained years later. ‘And he used to say to me: “Be careful, because there’s a dead man buried over there.” We always put the hay rick beside the man who had been shot.’

  The place was eventually excavated and the bones taken to the cemetery. Then an investigation was made into what exactly had happened, and the message of that mark became clearer still. Now it says:

  ‘They killed him here, in this field near Andoain. There was no trial, they didn’t even bother taking him to prison. When he realised what awaited him, he wrote
a letter to his family, who lived in Bordeaux; but he couldn’t give it to the owner of the farm, because the lieutenant in charge of the batallion took the letter from him and tore it up. The lieutenant warned him, moreover, that he would have no cross or epitaph, so that no one would ever know what had become of him. The people on the farm were watching, though, and finally, after nearly seventy years, they were able to give him a decent burial.’

  A grave without a name and a criminal getting off scot-free and whom no one can now identify. All we know about that lieutenant is that he belonged to a batallion of requetés – Carlist militiamen – the kind who always had the name of Christ on their lips.

  And from Andoain to Oviedo, where, during the Civil War, a particularly cruel crime was committed. It happened in the monastery of Valdediós, which, at the time, was being used as a psychiatric hospital. Nationalist soldiers from the Arapiles batallion arrived and shot most of the people working there: thirteen women and five men, to judge by the remains retrieved from the mass grave. This is how the British writer Justin Webster described it in the first Spanish edition of Granta magazine:

  ‘It was an exceptional case, even bearing in mind the exceptional brutality of the war in Asturias. The fighting had stopped there. The victims were not just civilians, but nurses, mainly women. They clearly assumed they would be safe from any reprisals, otherwise they would have left. Two of them were little more than girls. They were all executed without trial, at night, and buried in a makeshift, shallow grave. Their murderers were members of the regular army, not crazed fanatics.’

  Justin Webster managed to speak to a woman, who had lived next door to the hospital, and who, in 1937, was nine years old. At first, she refused to talk to him, because she had received two phone calls, both asking the same question: ‘How much have those bastards paid you to say where the dead are buried?’ In the end, she agreed to speak to him, on condition that he didn’t use her real name.

  ‘Concepción Moslares and Ángeles García, both from Oviedo, were working on the day and night shifts respectively,’ writes Justin Webster. ‘Nati remembers how, on that night, she was in bed, about to go to sleep, when she heard shots, the instantly recognisable rat-a-tat-tat of the machine gun coming from somewhere in the village below. No one went outside.

  ‘At first light, her father went down the hill to see what had happened. He found only dead bodies buried in a grave so shallow that human hands and hair were still visible. Nati’s father remembered seeing the fair hair of Lucia, a beautiful nineteen-year-old girl who worked in the kitchen. The soldiers had already left.’

  With the help of several men sent by the landowner, Nati’s father covered up the scantily buried bodies, placing stones on the grave so that the dogs would not continue to gnaw at the corpses. Years later, the new owner of the land finished the job, filling up the grave with heavy, clayey soil and creating a path that went around it, ‘so that the cows don’t trample over the dead’, he said.

  It has often been said that humanity, civilisation, began at the point when the men and women of seven thousand, fifteen thousand or thirty thousand years ago decided to begin burying their dead, creating a ‘marked place’, for example, the dolmen at Locmariaquer, near Carnac. The family who owned Asu farm and the people who worked the land in Valdediós felt exactly the same, which is why they took pains to make those graves decent and to separate them off, thus saving them from the dogs and from being forgotten.

  The burial of the dead is a threshold. Outside that threshold, there is nothing, just a zone bereft of humanity. Unfortunately for Lucia and the other people shot on the night of 25–26 October 1937, that was the true homeland of the commanders of the Arapiles battalion.

  ... and from landscape to skin

  I was on holiday in Hondarribia – or as it was known then, in the mid-1960s, Fuenterrabia – and one of my cousins asked me to go with him to the harbour where his father, my uncle, was mending the engine on a boat. It was a hot day and, when we arrived, all the fishermen were bustling about barechested and in shorts. My uncle was too. I noticed a strange mark on his skin, which looked like a piece of whitish rope that ran from his right shoulder to just below his knee. In a low voice as if he didn’t want to be heard, my cousin explained that this was a scar dating from his father’s days as a soldier in the Civil War. A German plane had machine-gunned him on 26 April near Gernika.

  In fairy tales, a mark on the skin is almost always a good sign, for it offers proof that the hero, though apparently only a woodcutter’s son, is really a prince. This was not the case here. The scars were a bitter memory for my uncle and, as he himself told us that night, the sight of them in the mirror always filled him with gloom. The world was full of murderers. The pilot of the Heinkel 51 who had, in the literal sense of the word, hunted him down, was clearly one of them. He kept coming back again and again to the field where my uncle was trying to hide, until he had shot him and left him for dead. My uncle thought the pilot would give up and go on his way, but no. ‘He wanted another trophy,’ he said. ‘He flew so low that I could see him clearly. He was wearing a kind of red jumpsuit.’

  I think that, by then, in the early 1960s, I’d already heard about the war, thanks to a teacher, who used to get very upset whenever he found us playing at ‘war’, and would tell us how horrible real wars were, but I had no idea about what had happened in Gernika. I did recall a story my mother told us about her experiences in the shelters in Eibar and Bilbao, and how she saw the chemist Boneta burst into hysterical laughter when, on emerging from one of those shelters, he saw that his house and his pharmacy had been destroyed by the bombs dropped by the planes, and how, two hours later, she saw that same man sobbing like a child because he had lost everything; and once, at a swimming pool, I was approached by a woman who wanted to tell me that her father had died during the bombing of Durango while he was attending mass. But not a word about Gernika. I hadn’t even seen a reproduction of Picasso’s painting.

  Other marks

  In August 1936, the nationalist troops are leaving Asu farm and walking down the streets of Andoain, and a boy is watching anxiously. The soldiers are behaving not like disciplined soldiers, but like vandals, breaking down the doors of houses and stealing anything they find there: some are looking for jewellery, others for furniture or clothes. From one of the houses in the square they take – at this point, the boy changes windows so as to see better – a particularly fine wardrobe with an oval mirror; the mirror gleams in the sunlight. For some reason, the soldiers deposit it in the middle of the square, and there it stays for hours, losing its glitter as the light fades, until night falls. The boy can see nothing now, but from his room, with the window still open, he hears the sound of guns: rapid fire followed by individual shots. ‘They’re shooting people,’ his mother tells him, coming into the room and closing the window. ‘Then giving them the coup de grace.’ The following morning, the window is still closed, but he can hear perfectly clearly what the soldiers out in the square are shouting: ‘¡Viva Cristo Rey! Long live Christ the King!’ He gets up and goes over to the window to look out: the wardrobe is still there, but it has been totally destroyed. The sun is again beating down, but the mirror no longer glitters.

  The years pass, and the boy, who has grown up now and works in a factory, decides to take a chance and leave some record of what happened. He can’t do what the people at Asu farm did – he doesn’t know where the shots came from, nor where the victims were buried – so he decides to compose a kind of traditional ballad and tell what he saw and knew: ‘Ate guztik ireki burdin handiz jota, zerbait dagon lekura atzaparrak bota; ez da bekaturikan, ez zaio inporta, Kristoren izenian eginda dagota. Nahigabeturik daukat gaur nire bihotza, ezin ahazturik nago tiro haien hotsa, hemezortzi gizoni eman heriotza... ’ (They broke down the doors with iron bars, grabbing anything that took their fancy, it’s not a sin, it doesn’t matter, it’s all done in the name of Christ. My heart today is sad, I cannot forget that I heard those shots, th
ey killed eighteen men... ’) Later in the song, he lists all the names of the eighteen men who were shot, as well as the names of some of the village’s señoritos, the young gentlemen from wealthy families who, it was thought, had collaborated with the murderers.

  The tune, the easy rhymes – typical of this kind of mark, the equivalents of the lines and asterisks carved on the rock – continued to broadcast that story for a good long time. I heard the song, shortly after returning from my holiday in Hondarribia, sung by a boy who worked at the same factory as the composer, and it impressed me even more than my uncle’s scars, because I didn’t know then how common such executions and criminal acts were, nor about the existence of mass graves like the ones visited by Celso Emilio Ferreiro.