Guerra

by Jason Webster

  We headed to some green outbuildings on the edge of the complex. I had failed to notice them before, half hidden behind a cluster of strawberry trees. They were modern, undecorated cubes built out of breeze block, the red Moroccan flag with its green five-pointed star hanging limply in the still, hot air from a pole thrust into the flat roof. I sensed my nerves kicking in as we headed towards the front door, a black rectangular hole in the dusty facade. A coldness came over me, spreading across my chest and shoulders. I’d been a complete idiot. God knew how this was going to end.

  The soldiers marched me down chipped blue-painted steps to a square blank room lit by a single bulb hanging from the ceiling. A small table stood in the middle, with white, scratched, dirty wooden legs. The soldiers closed the door. I expected to hear the clunk of a key locking me in, but instead, through the small hole at the top of the door where once a window might have been, I could see one of the soldiers standing on guard while the other climbed back up the stairs. I looked for a place to sit but there was nowhere to rest. Leaning in a corner I tried in vain to calm myself and remain positive, justifying what I’d done and trying to rehearse what I’d say. I had obviously broken the law by trespassing on military property, but only inadvertently; and from what I’d seen here this was not an important base. They couldn’t have been doing much more than standing guard at this old site. No matter – they’d caught me, and it was going to take some explaining. Curious about the Civil War? Wanted to see the old HQ of the Legión? They would think I was mad.

  After a long hour’s wait I crouched down in the corner to rest my legs. The air was still and hot, while the floor looked just that bit too disgusting to sit on. But I found it hard to keep still, my cold, moistened fingertips circling around one another frantically as I waited. As the minutes passed my mind seemed to move into a kind of empty trance, my only thought being to try to remember the French word for ‘sightseer’. A kind of paralysis seemed to be coming over me. The soldiers who had once occupied these barracks, the Spanish legionaries, had been hardened killers, famed for their brutality. They particularly enjoyed cutting off the heads of anyone who got in their way.

  Eventually I heard someone coming down the stairs and I stood up, my head reeling from the heat. A young officer came in, his sandy uniform as ruffled and unkempt as those of the soldiers who had arrested me. He looked me up and down with a rough disinterested stare, while I tried to gauge what kind of a man he might be. One of the soldiers brought him a chair. He demanded my passport and started meticulously taking down my details on a bundle of forms and papers he’d brought with him. He leaned his small head in as he wrote, concentrating on every letter, checking and rechecking several times that he’d got it right. The fact that it simply said ‘passport agency’ for place of issue gave him great concern.

  ‘C’est où, ça?’ he barked. They were the first words he’d directly addressed to me. I had no idea where the passport agency was, but he needed a city to place on his form, so I gave him one.

  ‘Londres,’ I replied. Sounded reasonable enough. His head bent down again as he scribbled away.

  Then came a barrage of questions, very fast and all in French. Unfortunately, ‘being arrested’ hadn’t featured in the role-playing situations I remembered from French lessons at school. I silently cursed my teachers as I tried to understand what was being asked of me. A simple grammatical mistake might end me up in more trouble.

  Who was I? I repeated my name.

  Nationality? He had my passport in his hands.

  Where was I staying? I gave the name of my hotel in Ceuta.

  What was I doing here? This was the difficult one. I could only tell him the truth, but depending on what kind of a person he was – and I could already see he was not the most imaginative of people – it might only make things worse.

  I told him the truth. I lived in Spain, I was a writer researching the Civil War, I had wanted to see the Legión’s old headquarters … and so I plodded on, hoping I wasn’t digging my own grave.

  He held his palms together in front of him as though in prayer while I spoke. Anxious as I was, I forced myself to speak as slowly and clearly as possible, not wanting to make the slightest mistake that might give him the excuse he wanted to jump down my throat. But I was well aware of the danger of incriminating myself through zeal of innocence.

  ‘You’re lying!’ he shouted, interrupting me mid-flow. Something in me jumped, my heart freezing, then pounding violently in my chest. But as fear cast a net over my mind, I sensed his move was forced. It seemed mad, helpless as I was, but I couldn’t help feeling that his outburst had been planned from the beginning, as though it was some primitive interrogation technique he’d been taught on a course.

  ‘Who are you?’ he demanded again. I forced down a desire to be facetious and repeated my name. The man might have been an idiot, but he was an idiot with power, and the soldiers outside were carrying rifles. My only concern was to get out of there.

  ‘Where are you staying?’ Ceuta, I said.

  ‘Where are you heading next?’ This was a new one. ‘Tetuan,’ I answered. The old capital of the Spanish Protectorate was only a few miles further south. The first of the wedding guests would be arriving by now, I thought. God, did I wish I was with them. A quick trip back to Ceuta to pick up my things and I could be there in a couple of hours.

  At this point the officer stood up, picked up the chair and walked out, carrying my passport with him. He muttered something to the soldiers on the door, one of them staying put while the other accompanied him back up the stairs. That’s it, I thought. I should have insisted I was only staying in Ceuta, not planning on travelling down to Tetuan as well. As a tourist staying in Spain on a day trip I might have had some more protection. Now that I had admitted I was going to be travelling inside Morocco as well, they could do with me what they liked.

  The interrogation had made me light-headed, my nerves and the effort of answering the officer’s questions leaving my mouth clammy and dry. What was he doing? Perhaps he needed to get clearance to have me locked up for the night? Or taken to another army base? I tried to keep a check on my thoughts, with only partial success. I would find out in good time. Meanwhile, I could do nothing.

  The officer returned sooner than I’d expected.

  ‘Where are you going in Tetuan?’ he asked directly. I had nothing to lose so I mentioned Daniel and his wedding to Muna.

  ‘Muna Bouaiss?’ he asked. I had no idea of Muna’s surname, but decided to take a punt on it. The expression of surprise on his face when I’d mentioned her seemed promising.

  ‘Yes, that’s her,’ I said, not sure if I was digging an even deeper hole for myself.

  In a flash he was gone again, this time running up the stairs. The other two soldiers remained behind, peering in through the open door and smiling. Why hadn’t they shut me in this time? I wondered. What did those sudden grins mean? I smiled back, confused.

  When my interrogator returned, he walked in, passed round the table to approach me and with his hands outstretched patted me on the shoulders in a kind of half-embrace. His face was all light and joy.

  ‘Please pardon our mistake,’ he said. ‘We did not know you were a friend of the colonel’s.’

  ‘Ah, of course.’ I was desperately trying to think on my feet. The colonel? ‘That’s quite all right,’ I said with a laugh. ‘How were you to know?’ I had no idea who this mysterious benefactor was, but I was quickly becoming very fond of him.

  ‘We have all heard of his niece’s wedding to the Englishman,’ the officer explained. He led me out of the door and up the stairs again. My knees were still shaking, my heart slowly trying to recover its poise. I wasn’t sure what was going on, but from the rapid change in manner and tone it looked as though I was being released. Was Muna’s uncle in the military, then? (Later I would find out that indeed he was.) I quickly looked back: the soldiers were smiling and laughing sheepishly behind us. Suddenly they were the ones to be fr
ightened.

  ‘The colonel, as you know, used to be the military governor of this region,’ my former interrogator told me. ‘Until only four months ago, in fact. We have to be careful. This is army property. It is our duty to stop people.’

  ‘Yes, that’s fine,’ I said. As quickly as I’d been arrested, I was now a free man.

  ‘Would you like some tea?’

  *

  Twenty minutes later I was driving back up the coast to the border with Ceuta in a pale-blue taxi hailed down on the road for me by one of the soldiers who had originally taken me in. The churning waters of the Mediterranean lapped at the oily beaches beneath us, while boys with skinny brown legs cycled barefoot in and out of the traffic. The sweet peppermint tea had helped quench my burning thirst somewhat and calmed me a little, but my head still reeled from what had happened, and how close I’d felt to disappearing into the Moroccan jail system altogether. Daniel and Muna would doubtless laugh when I told them the story, and I longed to meet the mysterious colonel whose name alone had secured my release, but at that moment I wanted nothing more than to get back to the relative safety of Ceuta and Spain.

  At the border there was the same chaos I’d witnessed when I’d crossed into Morocco earlier in the day. Bread-sellers huddled around the makeshift taxi rank perched on a dusty outcrop overlooking the sea, while spherical women from the Riff mountains in bright-red and white shawls and straw hats with dark-blue bobbles struggled with canvas bags full of goods to sell. No one here, at least, wanted Ceuta handed over to Moroccan control, as the politicians in Rabat were demanding. There was too much money to be made from the situation as it stood.

  Hustlers selling exit documents jigged energetically among the heaving cars lined up trying to get into Spain. The Ceutans had expensive new vehicles, with the usual bumps and scratches you expected from Spanish driving; the Moroccans’ cars were ancient and dusty, the majority apparently held together with bits of string. Choking on the exhaust fumes, I handed my passport to the Moroccan authorities for the superfluous stamping procedure, adrenaline pumping nervously through my veins. But after a haughty delay it was handed back to me and I was free to cross the border. I wandered down long wire tunnels to where the Spanish police were waiting, keen to get back to the European side and the safety of my adopted country for a while before heading back into Morocco for the wedding.

  A typical member of the Civil Guard was on duty, all lime-green uniform and paunch. This paramilitary police force had originally been set up in the nineteenth century to combat bandits in rural areas. Franco had later used it as one of the pillars of his regime, and its members had developed a reputation as authoritarian thugs. But now in democratic Spain they were milder – polite, bored-looking, but usually all right. A couple of Muslim girls dressed in Moroccan-style clothes were ahead of me. The guard scanned their Spanish passports, flicking through the pages as though trying to see if they were forged. Not finding anything amiss, he handed them back with a grunt.

  ‘We’re Spanish, you know,’ one of the girls said. ‘Just like you.’ And they walked on. I had the impression they had to face this kind of thing every day.

  ‘Spanish,’ the guard said as I approached, with a tone of disbelief and resigned despair. ‘What do they mean, Spanish?’

  As a rule I tried never to speak to customs people or policemen at borders. They were a mild annoyance – obstacles to get past as quickly as possible, without drawing their attention to you. But after my recent experience at the Moroccan barracks, I felt the urge to talk to this surly Spaniard and found myself blurting out my story in a desperate bid for sympathy.

  ‘Can you believe it? I’ve just been arrested,’ I said. ‘Over there in Dar Riffien.’ As I indicated behind me with my thumb I could barely hear the voice of warning screaming at the back of my head, What are you doing? You don’t tell border guards you’ve just been arrested!

  The policeman had been about to hand me my passport, but pulled it back and started checking again. Meanwhile my voice had a life of its own and was continuing with the story.

  ‘At the old barracks of the Legión,’ I said. Somehow I thought the man would applaud me for trying to visit such a site. And as a Spaniard he would immediately give me the sympathy I craved for having been so mistreated by those nasty Moros on the other side of the border.

  ‘Where are you staying?’ he snapped. I told him the name of my hotel.

  ‘How long are you going to be in Ceuta? What’s your business here?’

  Still holding my passport, he had stood up from his stool and was towering over me from inside his control booth. I drew a deep breath, realization of what I’d done seeping slowly into my brain.

  ‘Why were you arrested?’

  It seemed I was back with the Moroccans. Having blundered into being arrested that morning, I was on the brink of repeating the same mistake.

  I told him what I’d said to the Moroccan officer. But my voice was trembling from the mental kicking I was giving myself for being so stupid. I looked beyond the checkpoint towards the city in the distance. There was a row of taxis waiting only a few steps away, ready to take me into town. I imagined sitting in one, being whisked away from all this, back into the warm, welcoming safety of Spain.

  The guard looked at me with an expression of disgust.

  ‘I can’t stop you crossing this border,’ he said. ‘But would to God I could. We get enough arseholes like you coming here.’

  I stared at him in disbelief. Although officious, Spanish policemen in my experience always had good manners. I had never been spoken to like this before, as he dropped the respectful usted form for the familiar – and in this case rude – tú.

  ‘I don’t want to see you here again.’

  He handed me back my passport. It took me a second to react and take it out of his hand before he could drop it on the floor.

  ‘Now fuck off !’

  I walked over the border and into Spain in shock, the noise of the waves beating at the crumbling coastline crying in my ears.

  6

  Mountain Tears

  The last days in the life of Federico García Lorca read like a chronicle of a death foretold. The story grips you powerfully as you find yourself praying till the final page that the hero might somehow be saved. At every turn you beg him to change his mind or take some decision that will steer him away from his inevitable fate. But he never does; the conclusion is always the same: his body lifeless on a Granada hillside, his killers laughing their way to victory. Hundreds of thousands were murdered behind the lines under Franco’s terror regime. Lorca was merely one of many, but he was one of the most famous, and his murder has become a lasting symbol of the horror of Spain’s Civil War.

  On 14 July 1936, the day that Lieutenant José Castillo and José Calvo Sotelo were being buried in the Eastern Cemetery in Madrid, Federico García Lorca was having lunch with a friend on the outskirts of the capital. He was at the peak of his career – celebrated nationally and internationally as an important Spanish poet and playwright, he had recently finished writing one of his great works, The House of Bernarda Alba, and was planning a trip to Mexico, where he would present the play to his favourite actress, Margarita Xirgu. He had already bought his ticket for the journey and had been on the point of leaving Madrid during the tense days in the capital before the outbreak of the war. But the events around him were causing him deep distress and he was unclear about what to do: stay where he was, leave the country, or head down to the family home in Granada where he usually spent the summer. The eighteenth of July was his saint’s day and family tradition was to celebrate it with his father – also called Federico. As the violence increased, friends became worried for Lorca’s safety. Although not a member of any political party, he was alive to the injustices that marked Spain at that time and advocated social reform. ‘I shall always support those who have nothing and who are even denied the tranquillity of nothing,’ he once said. This sympathy for the rural poor had been
the impetus behind his Barraca theatre project, which had put on plays and brought literature to the feudal backwaters of the Spanish countryside during the early years of the Republic. As an artist, an intellectual and a rumoured homosexual, for the reactionary Nationalist rebels he belonged – despite numbering several Falangists among his friends – to the ‘other Spain’, the one they planned to annihilate.

  Lorca himself was aware he might become a target. But the moments before the outbreak of a war can be confusing, optimistic doubts struggling with premonitions of disaster: will it be a quick bloodless power struggle or a drawn-out bloody conflict? The poet in him, with half an eye to the future, seemed to know what was coming. ‘Rafael,’ he told his friend at that last lunch in the countryside outside Madrid, ‘these fields are going to be filled with the dead.’ In that he was right. But regarding his own fate and what he should do, he was less prescient. On several occasions in his work he seemed to have predicted his own death. But now, fearful, and perhaps in several minds as to the right course of action, he opted for the safety of his family home in Granada. It was his first mistake.

  It is possible that on the very train that carried Lorca to Granada in those last days before the war there sat the man who would bring about his downfall: Ramón Ruiz Alonso was also leaving the capital for his home town at about that time. It was midsummer and many people across the country were heading out from the major cities for the coast or the countryside. But Ruiz Alonso was not going on holiday. A member of the far-right Catholic CEDA party, he had lost his seat in parliament to the Popular Front in February that year and had become involved in the plot to stage a military coup. The murder of Calvo Sotelo had galvanized the conspirators into naming a date for the uprising and now at last General Franco had thrown in his lot with the rebels. All was set – timetables, targets, lists of people destined for the firing squads.