by Carlos Rojas
“If you really want to write the book, let’s get out of here today,” she exclaimed aloud, to her own surprise. “We’ll go wherever you say and I’ll follow you if that’s what you want. But let’s get out of here right away, before it’s too late for all of us!”
Sandro looked at her as if he couldn’t hear her and barely recognized her. He stood slowly, stretching and shaking his head. Marina had the impression of a man who had wakened from a hypnotic trance in which he had been made to think he was a bull pierced by banderillas: that horned bull painted by Goya as soon as he had recovered from syphilis and accepted his deafness, whose reproduction in the Gudiol Catalogue, when Sandro showed it to her, disturbed her as no other painting had. “The original belonged to the duke and duchess de Veragua,” he had told her then. “Wouldn’t you like to see it?” “No, absolutely not,” Marina replied immediately. “I’d be afraid of going blind afterward.”
“What did you come to tell me? Who had extreme unction?” Sandro repeated, in a daze.
“I suppose it was Franco. I heard the news on the radio and came out to tell you.”
“Do you think he’s died?”
“Yes, I have the feeling he passed around noon. Tonight or tomorrow they’ll have the courage to say so.”
“If that’s so, before you know it it’ll seem as if he never existed,” replied Sandro. “The past is never corrected here. It’s simply forgotten and repeated later with slight variations. In any case, we’ll soon witness the disintegration of the only Empire of God the world has ever seen. I wonder what became of the Imperial Order of the Yoke and Arrows, created in 1939 or 1940 to be offered to Hitler, Mussolini, and His Diminutive Majesty Vittorio Emanuele, the third of the terza Italia.”
“In any event, you must be the only one who remembers it now,” said Marina with a shrug. “They ought to give it to you before the empire breaks apart.”
She was overcome by fatigue. “If you really want to write the book, let’s get out of here today. Let’s go wherever you say and I’ll follow you, if that’s what you want. But let’s get out of here right away, before it’s too late for all of us!” She wondered why Sandro would not hear those words or why he would pretend to ignore them. She was embarrassed at having shouted them, above the sound of the torrent and beneath the skies of stone, when she always spoke in murmurs. Only then did she understand that she had never uttered that plea. Her scream had stopped between her temples or in the deepest part of her throat, there, between esophagus and chest, where the mad affirm instinctively that their identity is hidden. “It’s better this way,” she said to herself, “because we’ll never be able to escape this house.”
“I remember a good deal about those years: the years of our imperial infancy, with ration books,” Sandro repeated. “The bimonthly phrases with the words of the Caudillo who is dying now, and that educational warning for girls at church doors: ‘Woman, do not enter the house of God without stockings or in short sleeves. Do not be a tool of Judaism.’ The world will say that here concludes the final military and clerical version of Fascism and Nazism. In the end, history is summarized in simplifications in order to become comprehensible or to amuse the mad gods who are dreaming us. It’s also within the realm of possibility that we’re the ones who are mad and the gods don’t exist.”
“Yes,” Marina agreed quietly, “that’s very possible.”
“‘That was a collective madness,’ a former Franquista soldier, badly wounded at the university campus, said to me about the war. Then I asked him, as I could ask him the day after tomorrow: ‘And this?’” He took Marina’s arm and they began to descend the slope of the oak grove behind the mill. “Perhaps your husband is the only one who’s right . . .”
“What does my husband have to do with anything?”
“In the end, history turns into poor reporting, and he believes that all the ills of the West come from the despotism of the media. By now, in the United States, they’ll probably identify Franco with the recipients of the Order of the Yoke and the Arrows, ignoring poor Vittorio Emanuele, whom nobody remembers. Still, Germany and Italy provided fewer than four thousand trucks to Franquista Spain. The United States sent more than twelve thousand through General Motors, Ford, and Studebaker. And Texaco supplied approximately half a million tons of petroleum, with extensive credit, in each year of the conflict. Even in 1945, the Spanish deputy secretary of foreign affairs truthfully told a reporter: “Without American oil, without American trucks, without American credit, we never would have won the war.”
“I didn’t know all that.”
“There’s more. In April 1938, at a press conference, President Roosevelt stated that he had read that American-made bombs were dropped on Barcelona a few weeks earlier. This, according to what he said, was very possible and would be in compliance with perfectly legal operations. The bombs would have been sold to the German government or to German companies to be reexpedited later to the Franquista forces. The bombings of Barcelona were carried out by Italian planes, using gasoline that Mussolini imported from the USSR. Another operation that may seem paradoxical to you, although its legality is also clear. All of this, of course, is past history today, and could barely turn a windmill. In the American attack on Nagasaki, more people died than in Hiroshima. Nevertheless, no one remembers Nagasaki now, just as we all forgot about the tiny king of Italy, because great crimes absolve themselves when repeated. In another generation, more explosives would be launched in Vietnam than in the entire world during the Second World War. Historical memory in our time is nothing more or less than a ‘scaling’ of genocides.”
“I suppose Goya would think the same thing about his time.”
“Probably, although back then the art of killing was still innocent. It was limited to shooting men on a slope or stringing them up alive in a tree and quartering them afterward. No one, not even Goya, could have foreseen a century like this one.” Doubtful, he tried to correct himself almost immediately. “Perhaps he did predict it after all, and we all have our place in the frescoes at the Quinta del Sordo.”
In silence now, they walked down the path that climbed between groves of oaks and cork oaks. The last rains were drying in the livid earth, but the woods still smelled of wet juniper and rockrose. Down the hill, where hawthorn and giant ferns narrowed the path, another aroma of recently emerged but hidden patches of mushrooms, honey, and very old wood awaited them. In the hollow, at once distant and very near, Marina thought she could see a dark, wild grove of chestnut trees.
“Where are you taking me, Sandro?”
“We’re almost there now,” he replied, obliquely. “It’s a very quiet backwater of forgotten history.”
A dry stream ran among the chestnuts, and farther on, at regular intervals, there were abandoned gardens with grapevines and dead almond trees. At the bottom of the slope and the final incline of the path, Marina saw three stone crosses, a base of carved marble, and two gravestones. Time had begun to devour everything and the moss to turn it green; but clearly visible on the marble was the eagle, imperial before it became organically democratic, the swastika, and the emblem of the Fascio. Marina read very slowly the inscription that was being devoured by the winds: “Passerby: here the red fury rushed past, leaving as an imprint of its Satanic passage forty martyrs . . . Remember them with a prayer. 7-2-1939.” It took more than a year and a half to carve the other stone: “. . . They are present in our zeal. Long live Spain! Up with Spain! 22-11-1940.” Above that lost verse from Cara al Sol appeared the names of Colonel Domingo Rey d’Harcourt; Don José Pérez del Hoyo, lieutenant colonel of artillery; Commander Don José Pereda; Second Lieutenant in the Civil Guard Don Joaquín Rodrigo Ginés, “and thirty other martyrs.” The other tablet remembered Fra Anselmo Polanco y Fontecha, bishop of Teruel; Don Felipe Ripoll Morata, vicar general; Don José Coello de Portugal, commissioner of police; Don Antonio Galea, Italian captain; Bolgioni, Italian soldier; and Gerardo Imping, German soldier.
“I can
’t believe it,” murmured Marina.
“R. showed me the place this summer,” Sandro continued. “Farther up, near the highway, there’s another stele as tragic and grotesque as this one, that remembers the same crimes. The forty prisoners were killed here on February 7, 1939, in full Republican retreat, and two days before the victors reached these places. Facing the hollow you’ll see that house, Molí d’en Calvet, I think it’s called, where they heard the shots and saw the light of the bonfire where they tried and failed to burn the corpses. Eleven days later a shepherd happened to find the bodies, although by that time the entire village was probably concealing the tragedy. No doubt about it, this must have been the last slaughter in Cataluña before the Franquistas began their own executions. In 1941 an Augustinian published a book, written in illiterate prose, recounting the atrocity. He said there was no sign of a bullet in the bishop’s remains and suggested the possibility that he had been burned alive. He affirmed that during the autopsy the body bled fresh blood, to the astonishment of the forensic scientists, and erroneously predicted the forthcoming canonization of Monsignor Polanco. He did not know or said nothing about the fact that the prelate could have saved himself.”
“Let’s go,” Marina interrupted. “You shouldn’t have brought me here without warning me.”
Sandro shrugged. In the half-light of the ravine, she looked pale. And yet now she climbed the slope along ruined paths with agility. In a window of the Molí d’en Calvet, behind olive trees and yews, a light flared that seemed to be of cinnabar. From time to time a stone rebounded down the precipice. Dead leaves and broken heather rustled under their feet. A young eagle came out of nowhere and flew over them, flapping its wings, toward the foliage. Marina did not even look up to follow it. When they reached the old town highway, they were panting and slowed their pace. A laborer was digging at the side of the road, and his dog lapped three times with its pink tongue at the edge of a pond. Only then, not looking him in the eye, did Marina ask:
“How could the bishop have saved himself?”
“The day before the slaughter, Azaña had fled to France. A year and a half earlier, when his brother-in-law was consul in Geneva, the notebooks containing the diaries of the president of the Republic were stolen there. A member of the consulate had taken them to the other side as a kind of safe-conduct. Azaña wanted to recover them at any price. Part of the manuscript, with derogatory judgments and observations of Prieto, Largo Caballero, and other Republican politicians, had been published in the ABC of Sevilla. He was prepared to trade the papers for the prelate, but Franco did not agree to the deal. Azaña himself wrote about it in another entry, shortly before the offensive against Cataluña.”
“We’ll never know the price of a man.”
“Or of children and women for that matter,” Sandro continued. “As you read, along with Monsignor Polanco they killed Colonel Rey d’Harcourt there. They had captured them both at the fall of Teruel, which Rey d’Harcourt defended to the end and in the most desperate circumstances. When he yielded, with the written agreement of his entire general staff, Queipo de Llano accused him on Radio Sevilla of being a traitor. Apparently the Generalissimo’s general headquarters could not forgive his surrendering the stronghold while still alive. If he had shot himself, the church probably would have pardoned him and the army decorated him. One never knows the correct way to die in our unhinged history.”
“What do women and children have to do with it?”
“Ah!” Sandro exclaimed. “I’d almost forgotten about them. Before surrendering the fortress, when the entire city was frozen during the hardest winter of the century, without provisions, without weapons, and without a network of hospitals, Rey d’Harcourt arranged a truce with the Republicans in order to evacuate women and sick children who were freezing to death in those bombed-out ruins. A Franciscan friar, who managed to flee and reach Franco’s lines across snow-covered fields, wrote later that the children and their mothers screamed their pleas for death rather than salvation by the Reds. According to our monk, everyone knew the truce was prologue to the surrender, arranged by the cowardly rabble of Rey d’Harcourt. In the opinion of that raving mad determinist, the death of innocents at the hands of the enemy was preferable to mercy from the adversary.”
“Probably the friar never had any children and had desired every woman in vain,” murmured Marina.
“It’s possible, but it doesn’t matter. If we don’t know the price of a man, we can also disregard his conscience, which turns out to be totally superfluous. It seems evident that Franco’s was never troubled by the death of the bishop or the sacrifice of Rey d’Harcourt when he atoned for the errors of general headquarters. He even permitted his men to thoroughly insult him before the others killed him in that ravine. In fact, sometimes the greatest solidarity exists between the victims and their executioners.”
“What are you referring to?”
“I was thinking about another collective shooting, the one by Commander López Amor and Captains Lizcano de la Rosa, López Varela, and López Belda. They were the real leaders of the military uprising in Barcelona on July 19, 1936. When the insurgency failed there, a summary and hurried judgment condemned them all to the maximum penalty. I know the terrible details of their execution through the writing of two witnesses: an anarchist who took part in carrying it out and Jaume Miravitlles, who published two accounts of the incident. On the eve of his death, Lizcano de la Rosa sent a pathetic message to Miravitlles: ‘You’re the only friend I have left in the world. Please, be with me in the last moments.’ The next morning, Miravitlles went up to the Castle de Montjuïc, where the condemned men would be shot. He did this in accordance with Lizcano’s desires and probably as an official witness for the Generalitat, though this is irrelevant. At about six in the morning soldiers arrived, in uniform but lacking stripes and insignias: the firing squad and an unexpected truck filled with anarchist civilians. Among these, all armed to the teeth, was the witness I spoke to you about and whose name we’ll omit. He also happened to be a friend of another prisoner, Commander López Amor, though he didn’t go to Montjuïc to comfort him in his dying, but to kill him.
“In the depths of the castle, while they were preparing for the shooting, the two men shook hands. ‘You came to execute me, as I suppose you people will call this tragic farce?’ asked López Amor. ‘I came to do my duty as a Spanish citizen in response to your Fascist rebellion.’ López Amor nodded. ‘Do it then, as I did mine when I rebelled. Do it quickly because you’ll lose the war and then all of you will be executed.’ They spoke calmly, with no rancor of any kind. Perhaps with the same serenity that the anarchist brought to his account almost forty years later. In another century, as R. once pointed out to me, Bernal Díaz del Castillo had passed judgment on the destiny of our country: you will kill and they will kill you and whoever killed you. Before they took López Amor away to stand him with his back against the wall, the two men embraced.
“Miravitlles said he would never forget Lizcano de la Rosa’s eyes, fixed on his, in those eternal moments when a line in time separated his life from the death of the other man. Four black coffins awaited the remains of the men facing the rifles. López Varela, badly wounded in the battles of July 19, sat on a chair and nervously pressed a rosary in his hands. López Belda smoked with terrifying serenity and smiled carelessly. At the command to fire, Lizcano de la Rosa shouted ‘¡Viva España!’ with all his strength. The shot was delayed a few seconds. López Belda continued smoking and smiling. ‘¡Viva!’ shouted the militiamen in unison. The squad and all the anarchists fired at the same time, while Bernal Díaz del Castillo must have been laughing in hell. It was almost impossible to identify the mangled victims when they tried to carry them to their coffins. No, there’s no doubt at all that in the black paintings at the Quinta del Sordo, we all have our place.”
“I’m not very far from thinking the same way,” Martina agreed. “If Goya had been born blind, we wouldn’t be talking about these deat
hs today.”
“Soon you and I will be the only ones to remember them. Most history is made up of forgetting. Those sacrificed in its name should wait for their turn in posterity. For close to forty years the legal victims of Franquismo were prohibited. I’m referring to those shot during the war and those executed in the peace, when the volleys from that ravine with the chestnut trees were barely silenced. As soon as Franco dies, we’ll begin to revere many of his specters, and the other dead will be forbidden. This is the memory of justice in this country of butchers and clowns.”