No Pasarán!

by Pete Ayrton

  The stroppy tyke’s last words stuck in his throat he was so beside himself; it made him retch. He banged against my trunk, head flopping like a rag, leaning his left forearm on my bark, doing the splits, floods of puke on the ground.

  ‘Shame about the Pernod!’ he told the Frenchman who replied, in a friendly tone: ‘You know only too well that the people don’t... ’

  The Spaniard, wiping the gunge away with the back of his hand: ‘Yes, I know. Have you got a handkerchief? Not washing with soap for over a year is... ’

  The other gives him a rag, and they walk off.

  ‘But we are right.’

  ‘Ça t’fait une belle jambe,’ an old Frenchie says to a lame man who’s arguing with him. A cold blast against my resentful branches, as that man wrote: ‘A cold blast cutting into your face.’ Prey to a falcon, pigeons; prey to a buzzard, partridges; prey to a hawk, sparrows; prey to an aeroplane, women, children and rank-and-file soldiers. And it all goes awry. I’ve not been pruned for some time. But if the planes think their bombs will get the better of me, they’re wrong: it’s the sap that counts, trunk and leaves grow of their own accord. Men ought to know a severed foot will always grow back. There’s more to life than budding leaves.

  A blistered face says to a bandaged head: ‘In the latest of their newspapers that I read, I came across an article by Pemán the bard that begins: “Consequently God, the Generalísimo of this Crusade... ’”

  The river of blankets spreads; ambulances ring their bells. The plump guy continues: ‘Yes, like 31 December, Barcelona. At nine at night, either Burgos or Radio Nacional announces over the ether: “We’ve just learned the reds have received five ambulances from the reds in Buenos Aires; they won’t go very far.” Two hours later, to celebrate the New Year, they bombed the city centre. By this time our front-line had gone.’

  The sirens again. What’s the colour of fear? Is it grey or black? Fear is striped and splits men into slender tear-drops or down the middle; sunders them, silently wounds them; levels them, unites them, fuses them, undoes them; makes them forget time, want death, believe in oblivion, in miracles, resort to dreams. They chase after whatever, because fear is a great sophist. Fear is free and rushes in, vaults down from the sky, nobody knows how, infectious as the wind; it can be resisted in spring with fresh green leaves, in autumn or winter there’s nothing doing.

  The slow beat of marching troops slices through the silence. Where are they coming from? After the atonal, dragging noise of the crowds, what’s drumming the earth, where is this hidden rumble born? People crouching down lift their heads, those hiding peer out, those who reckon they’re intrepid come nearer; children run to the road-side. Troops are on the march, coming from the direction of France. What makes hope rise like steam? There they are, in full view: in rows of six, fair lads black as Castilian bread, olive-skinned lads toasted like Andalusians. Thirteen hundred men returning because they want to, a fragile respite against so much ignominy. Thirteen hundred men of the International Brigades returning, because their foreign blood is Spanish blood. One, two, one, two. As they walk, they leave their footprints, right fists scouring the air from right to left, from left to right. They smile, their strength is everyman’s; the grief is Spain’s.

  ‘No pasarán.’

  ‘No pasarán.’

  A miserable, pitiful old lady sheltering by my trunk shouts to them: ‘Pasarán overhead, but no pasarán down below.’

  ‘No pasarán.’

  Nobody believes a word of it; the hoarse shouting burns their throats. They weep.

  ‘No pasarán.’

  They’re entering Figueras now; you can hear the clamour. People stay quiet, waiting for the end of the alarm, salt in their eyes, dawn on their faces.

  The tide rises again. It’s night-time, the people onwards to the frontier.

  ‘I’m going to the Centre.’

  Nobody asks, when will we be back? They’re all convinced it will be a few months: two, three, six at most. The world won’t allow something so shameful.

  ‘Now for sure, France will have no choice but to intervene.’

  ‘Now they’ve got the Germans at their frontier... ’

  A girl, maybe five years old, bellows; an older child, by her side – how old is she, nine or ten?

  ‘Shush, the aeroplanes will hear you.’

  And the littl’ un shushes.

  Max Aub was born in Paris in 1903 to a French mother and a German father. At the outbreak of the First World War, his father was declared an enemy alien in France, so the family settled in Valencia. In 1921, Aub became a Spanish citizen and in 1929 joined the PSOE, the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Aub and José Bergamín were sent to Paris as cultural attachés at the Spanish embassy. They were given the job of organizing the Republic’s pavilion at the International Art and Technology Exhibition, due to open in July 1937. It was Aub who got Picasso to produce a work of art for the pavilion – the result was Guernica. Opening the pavilion, Aub said:

  ‘Goya and Picasso are realist painters though they seem extravagant members of this frightening people that are the Spanish, frightening because they are the only people in Europe able to take a dagger to themselves.’

  Denounced as a ‘German-Jew’ to the French government, Aub was twice interned in 1940 and 1941 in the Camp Vernet in the French Pyrenees and then sent to Djelfa Camp in Algeria. Released from Djelfa in 1942, Aub sailed to Mexico, where he was to live for the last 30 years of his life. Playwright, journalist, critic and novelist, Aub is best known for The Magic Labyrinth, a six-volume cycle about the Civil War of which only the first volume, Field of Honour, has been translated into English. Max Aub possessed a great sense of humour – Jusep Torres Compalans, his biography of a fictitious artist, included (his) paintings for the exhibition that accompanied the book. The story included here is the title story from Enero sin Nombre (January Without Name), Aub’s stories about the Civil War and exile, published to critical acclaim in Spain in 1997. Much loved in Mexico, he died there in 1972.

  * I don’t understand this date; it’s contradictory. The sentence quoted was uttered by Don Adolf Hitler on 6 June 1939 on the occasion of the return to Germany of a number of Nazi effectives sent to Spain. We shouldn’t put too much trust in trees; with their butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth airs, they only guess. And here’s proof of that.

  † Another error. Many Spaniards fought side by side with the French.

  JORDI SOLER

  THE CAMP AT ARGELÈS-

  SUR-MER

  from The Feast of the Bear

  translated by Nick Caistor

  WHEN I WOKE UP on the 14th April 2007, I was toying with the idea of getting out of a commitment I had somewhat rashly made six months earlier. Then it had seemed so far in the future that it had been easy to say yes, but now the day had arrived I was sorry I had agreed to do it. My wife and children had left home early to do their own things, while I had remained a while longer in bed. The previous night I had stayed up to watch a Russian film, and what I most felt like doing was making coffee and sitting to watch it again, notebook and pen in hand so that I could transcribe a poem that is its essence, a beautiful, striking poem spoken in Russian, a language I don’t understand and whose Spanish subtitles must suffer from the shortcomings typical of that genre: subtitles are an extra indication of what the image is telling us; they have to be understood quickly at one glance, and do not permit any re-reading or much reflection, because you are immediately required to read the next one, and then the one after that. Despite all this, I had stored in my mind a verse which, even if it wasn’t exactly what the Russian poet had meant, had made a profound impression on me. The commitment I had so rashly accepted was to take part in an event to be held in the south of France, in Argelès-sur-Mer, an obscure place of evil memory, a cursed spot on the map, a beach which for decades had been a taboo for me and all my family, and since I wasn’t brave enough to disappoint the person who had invit
ed me so that I could sit around in my pyjamas drinking coffee and going through the Russian film again, a few hours later, trying hard to keep my phantoms at bay, I found myself in Argelès-sur-Mer, talking yet again about the damned war, my elbows digging into the Republican flag covering the table, to a group of readers from that town. At the end of the event a woman came up to the table. She was dressed in black, her head covered in a scarf and with a brown, tattered rag round her neck that acted as a foulard. Half an hour earlier I had seen her sitting in the back row and thought she cut a really odd figure, and immediately afterwards (because the professor chairing the discussion was talking endlessly and so left me time to think about this and lots of other things) I had wondered what part of my book – which was the reason for this event – could interest this woman, who frankly looked like a tramp. She pushed her way through the dozen or so people who had come up to the table for me to sign their books. She was quite violent, but no-one dared say anything to her because she looked so strange; to be more exact, she was ugly and sinister-looking. The first thing she did when she finally reached the table was to give me a long, reproachful and sly look, made worse by the sight of her bare gums when they appeared beneath her half-smile. Still gazing at me and smiling, she began to search for something in her clothes, and at the end of several seconds of tense expectation (they could have concealed anything from a book to a fire-arm), she took out a photograph, together with a grubby piece of paper folded in four, and handed them both to me without a word. She turned on her heel and disappeared, less violently than before because the others were keeping well out of her way, leaving me with several questions on the tip of my tongue. Trying to make this weird encounter seem perfectly normal, I put what she had given me into my jacket pocket and continued signing copies and talking to my readers as if nothing had happened. However, before putting the documents away I had fleetingly glimpsed, in a blur because I was not wearing my glasses, that the photograph was an old snapshot of three soldiers in the countryside from the time of the Civil War. The instant it had taken me to see what the old woman had given me was enough to make me feel queasy, because the piece of paper was so dirty and full of stains that it seemed like a piece or scar from her battered, ruinous body. By the time twenty minutes later we went out onto the terrace to close the event with a glass of wine, I had completely forgotten the incident. After all, it’s not uncommon that we writers who deal with the topic of the Civil War find people coming up to us with documents, letters and photographs, in the perfectly legitimate hope that their story, or that of their father or grandfather, that event which marked their lives and those of their descendants forever, become known and, if possible, spread more widely. I had been invited by the Association of FFREEE (Fils et Filles de Républicains Espagnols et Enfants de l’Exode), made up of the children of the Republicans who lost the war in 1939 and found themselves forced into exile on the other side of the Pyrenees, a group of enthusiasts convinced that it is essential to maintain, protect and preserve the memory of that schism which even today defines and distinguishes millions of people. The association’s chairman, the man who had invited me and who for some reason or other I had not had the courage to say no to, saw my book as important because in it I describe one of the concentration camps where at the end of the Civil War the French government had interned the Spanish Republicans fleeing Franco’s repression in dreadful conditions. That camp was nearby, on the beach of Argelès-sur-Mer, and as I narrate in my book, my grandfather Arcadi spent sixteen months prisoner there, enduring systematic, prolonged maltreatment that is one of the darkest episodes in the history of France: the Republicans, pursued by the fury of the Francoists, were seeking asylum in France, but the French government received them as if they were criminals, and locked them in a concentration camp. I’m explaining this in order to emphasize that the invitation to celebrate the 14th of April on that beach of ill repute seemed to me from the start to be both inappropriate and even slightly sarcastic, but the FFREEE chairman had made it impossible for me to say no, and that morning, as I was weighing up the possibility of not going and instead staying in my pyjamas to watch the Russian film, it had occurred to me that to talk about the concentration camp in situ in that cursed, taboo place, was an invaluable way of normalizing my relationship with that beach, and better still, was my own way of combating oblivion, an oblivion that I myself denounced in that very book, writing that the Argelès-sur-Mer beach was a kind of collective amnesia because today it is a cheap holiday resort full of bars and bodies sunbathing on the same sand, on the exact same spot where tens of thousands of Spaniards were dying of hunger, illness or cold, not that many years earlier. In reality there are very few things that can be done to ward off oblivion: raise a monument, put up a plaque, write a book, organize an event, because the natural thing is in fact to forget, and at this point, at this stage in the story I’m telling, I can only ask myself: what if all this nonsense about that damned war and its consequences isn’t simply a dead weight? Besides, this is the twenty-first century, and Spain and France are no longer what they were in 1939; we don’t have pesetas or francs anymore, and there isn’t even a frontier between the two countries: to get to the place where the event was being held, I had climbed into my car, which was parked outside my house in Calle Muntaner in Barcelona, and driven for two hours without stopping once to Argelès-sur-Mer; in two hours I had completed the same journey it had taken my grandfather Arcadi and most of the Republican exodus several weeks to cover in 1939. The traces of that exile have been buried beneath a toll motorway you can drive along at a hundred and forty kilometres an hour, and a crowd of tourists who, smothered in cream, expose their bodies to the sun on the long beach of Argelès-sur-Mer. Very little can be done to ward off oblivion, but it is essential we do so, otherwise we will end up without foundations or perspective. That is what I thought, and that was the reason why in the end I gave up my domestic morning, took off my pyjamas and got into my car, still thinking obsessively of that verse from the Russian film I had memorized and which had robbed me of sleep; ‘Live in the house, and the house will exist’.

  As proof of how much things have changed, the Argelès-sur-Mer municipality is now run by the children of the men who in 1939 were imprisoned in the concentration camp. I learned this during the reception held at the end of the event on the enormous terrace looking out over the vineyards which produced the wine we were drinking and with in the background the sea, shimmering like silver in these early days of spring. It was a wonderful evening and by now I was beginning to feel I’d done the right thing in accepting the invitation, and for having done what little one can do to combat oblivion. At that moment I felt I could assert that the Civil War and its consequences are a dead weight only insofar as they are ignored, but that they are an important means for viewing the future if all the details are revealed. And so I was full of optimism when I approached the table to refill my glass; it was a long trestle set up in the middle of the terrace, covered in white tablecloths reaching to the floor. From time to time these were lifted by the breeze so that the legs were exposed and I could see what was underneath: cases of bottles, folding chairs, a pile of white tablecloths, a huge pot where some of what was being served on the table had been cooked. In the midst of all this, oblivious to the intermittent glimpses the wind offered me, two cats were fighting over a piece of chicken; they were acting out a brutal, silent battle with a fierceness and cruelty that shook me profoundly. In those few seconds, in the two glimpses allowed me by the tablecloth, I saw the cats clawing at each other, leaping in the air and rolling on the ground, before they suddenly ran off as fast as they could.

  Jordi Soler was born in Mexico in 1963; there he grew up as part of a community of Catalan exiles. His writings, many of them autobiographical, chronicle the Republican diaspora in Mexico. It is estimated that over 25,000 Spaniards were given asylum in Mexico at the end of the Civil War. Soler’s family were among those who founded La Portuguesa in the province of Ve
racruz; a coffee plantation in the midst of a hostile, tropical forest. The success of the plantation and Soler’s subsequent return to Barcelona, the city from which his family had originally fled, is the subject of a moving memoir, Los Rojos de Ultramar, published in 2004. Soler is a writer, journalist and rock critic who now lives in Barcelona. He is founding member of the Orden del Finnegans, a group of Spanish writers who meet every Bloomsday to honour James Joyce’s Ulysses. This extract is from La Fiesta del Oso, a powerful novel about exile and memory which begins at the camp at Argelès-sur-Mer where so many Republicans were interned.

  JORGE SEMPRÚN

  ‘OUR WAR’

  from Veinte años y un día (Twenty Years and a Day)

  translated by Margaret Jull Costa

  ‘“OUR WAR”,’ HEMINGWAY COMMENTED. ‘You all say that. As if it were the only thing or even the most important thing you have in common. Your daily bread... ’

  He was mumbling, talking to himself.

  His voice had an unmistakably American twang.

  That was two years before. Was it that long already? Yes, it was easy enough to work out: late May 1954. In El Callejón, a restaurant in Madrid.

  Leidson was having lunch with Hemingway and various people from the world of bullfighting. He remembers Domingo ‘Dominguín’. Not just because he was memorable, but because Domingo was the first to speak of that long-ago death.

  They were sitting round the table after lunch, and the drink was still flowing. They had eaten the usual cocido madrileño – meat, vegetable and chickpea stew. Michael Leidson was passionate not just about recent Spanish history, but about Spanish history as a whole. He was less passionate about Spanish cuisine. Or, rather, he liked it, but it played havoc with his stomach. Stew for everyone, there was no avoiding it: the rest of the afternoon would be spent in flatulent sleep.