by Joan Sales
The old man recalled his grandfather’s days when Colonel Brocà had evidently waged campaigns in those fastnesses of Prades and Montsant. He became more and more impassioned, lost his thread, hugged Lluís, hugged me, and repeated quietly that shocking oath which, on his lips, in that tone of voice and the way he raised his eyes to the heavens, seemed distinctly blasphemous.
He insisted we stay for dinner and sleep over. The bedroom was big, with a bare untiled floor, like all the farmhouse’s floors, and the walls had never seen paint. The bed consisted of planks on a timber frame with a straw bolster beneath three woollen mattresses. A cheap old print of Saint Michael overwhelming Lucifer was pinned above the bed. Lluís was spellbound, but I was less thrilled. He thought the old man was “a real character” – “You can see the Milmanys are from good stock.” I thought love made him say that, a love that transfigured everything connected to me. After listening to Uncle Eusebi I could imagine how in Lluís’ eyes that dilapidated farmhouse, containing an old Carlist who insulted the doubtful virtue of a bygone liberal queen with his every breath, was in effect much more honourable than a soup-pasta factory.
The next morning they invited us to have lunch with them in the woods, two hours’ walk from the farm. Lluís left at dawn with a dozen men and boys, all armed with hunting guns – they were people from the Forques farm and four or five other nearby farms. Our presence was obviously a real event in that remote fastness where, as they told us, years went by without them seeing strangers. I set out much later with the old man and his daughter-in-law. We walked slowly to the spring where we’d prepare lunch, carrying a basket with the wherewithal for the meal. I was surprised when I saw the daughter-in-law put in only a large loaf of bread, a small barrel of wine, a cruet of olive oil, some heads of garlic and a cornet of salt. “Where’s the main course?” She burst out laughing: “They’ll find plenty in the woods.”
When we reached the spring they’d already killed two dozen rabbits. Tucked away in a ravine of slate amid huge clumps of fern, the spring gushed. The daughter-in-law lit a wood fire and when it had taken she put some slabs of slate on top – what they called llicorella – after sprinkling them copiously with oil. Once they were red hot the skinned and gutted rabbits, dusted with lashings of salt, were slapped onto them. I watched all this as if it were preparations for a Palaeolithic lunch – the genuine Stone Age item! I don’t remember eating anything as tasty in all my life as those rabbits with the aioli the old man made with a big stone mortar while they were roasting. If only you knew how fresh my memories are of that smell of roast rabbit and aioli! And the wonderful wine to wash it down with! Now things are going from bad to worse in Barcelona . . . Some people say we’ve seen nothing yet: my neighbours, the ones who know everything, say the rebel aeroplanes will soon start bombing us from bases that the Italians have established in Majorca; until now warships out at sea have bombed us, but very rarely aeroplanes – “we’ll soon see what real bombing is like,” say my neighbours. And they reckon this war will last for years, with bombing raids from land and sea and more and more people starving: the worst is yet to come. If things really get that bad, if they’re going to be bombing us all the time and it’s so hard to find food for Ramonet . . . I’ll up and off with him to the Forques farm. I could help them in the fields, I’m sure they would give me a warm welcome and I’d be a good worker and no burden.
But are they still alive? My God, they have massacred so many Carlists; those dreadful massacres in Fatarella and Solivella where they say not a soul is left alive . . . The whole country is shocked – when we thought nothing could shock us again after everything we’d seen. Why is there such hatred of Carlists who only want to live peacefully in their farmhouses with their faded memories of heroic deeds and forgotten wars? Whenever I think of Carlism, that huge eighty-nine-year-old comes to mind, raising his misty eyes to the heavens and roaring “That blasted whore Cristina!” And the smell of roast rabbit with aioli with that delicious red wine we drank from the barrel, with its refreshing tang, and the water gushing from the spring and the chattering brook that ran over a bed of slate between the ferns . . . Those memories are so vivid and I’d so like to flee the bombs and the hunger and head back there right now!
17 MAY
How mysterious that so many people cannot see mystery anywhere: I mean the incredulity of people whose starting point is the belief that nobody can believe. We should really pity them like those plain witless children one ought to love but can’t . . .
Luckily, that’s not by any means true of my father. He believes: he perhaps never grasps what, but he does believe. Else how do you explain his life? La barrinada . . . do you remember how we distributed it on the streets? We never sold a single copy.
That hapless weekly still appears every Thursday, now with articles against the “cannibals disguised as anarchists”, the “hyenas who dishonour the most humane of social philosophies”. Hyenas are one of his obsessions, though I don’t think he has the faintest idea what a hyena looks like. I don’t believe he could tell an owl from a magpie, and apart from pine trees – which anyone can identify – I suspect he couldn’t name any species of tree. My poor dad, who was born and has lived in the heart of Barcelona and whose only excursions have been occasional Sunday trips to Les Planes with its ocean of greasy paper and empty sardine tins.
He must be thinking of Les Planes when he writes his articles on Nature in La barrinada: wondrous Nature would cure the world’s ills if she were only allowed to work unfettered. His beloved paper would reduce the whole of medicine to lemon, garlic and onion: he’s almost a vegetarian, and if he doesn’t agree with nudists it’s because, in spite of everything, he still clings to vestiges of a sense of the ridiculous.
How can a person as harmless as my father arouse so much hatred in other anarchists? I don’t know if you heard about it – some dailies covered the story but I’m not sure they reach the front – but supporters of La Soli attacked the editorial offices of La barrinada, that is, our flat on carrer de l’Hospital, a few weeks ago, long before the events earlier this month, and threw off the balcony a pile of back copies – unsold issues – that we kept in the lumber room.‡ Luckily the police arrived before they could do worse damage. The government even advised my father and his friends to arm themselves, avoid being caught off guard, and be ready to repel fresh attacks. “The only arms I need are ideas” was all he would say.
A few weeks after you and Lluís went to the front a taxi brought him home one day with his face covered in blood. It gave me a fright but fortunately it wasn’t serious. That great lifelong friend of his, Cosme, had brought him in the taxi – you may remember that short plump fellow with a pock-marked face, a turner by trade, who often came to our clandestine meetings. Cosme in fact supports the C.N.T. but is a close friend of my father’s and he told me what happened while I washed Father’s face with hydrogen peroxide: “Just imagine, Trini,” Cosme said. “A train of anarchist volunteers was leaving the estació de França for Madrid and my grandson was one of them – that’s why I was in the station. The place was packed, what with people leaving and those who’d come to bid them farewell. All of a sudden we heard this bawling: ‘What are you doing, you wretches? Where are you going? You want to impose your ideas with guns? Have you let them militarise you? What happened to our principles that you always supported?’ They weren’t far off lynching him as an agent provocateur! Lucky I spotted him! It was your father, old Milmany – who else could it be? It was one hell of a struggle to drag him away: he was refusing to come. I imagine he didn’t recognise me, he was so overexcited. As I dragged him out of the station by the arm he was still bellowing: ‘You’re off to defend Madrid? That octopus sucking our blood?’ ”
Father said nothing as I washed the cuts on his face. Luckily they were only scratches inflicted by a handful of women who’d grabbed him. Cosme talked and talked: “I love your father, Trini. How can I not love him when we’ve always been friends? I love him m
ore than he knows but it’s sometimes very hard to keep faith with him. If volunteers don’t go to the front, if we don’t wage war with machine guns and cannons, the fascists will win and we’ll be done for.” Yes,” I said, “it’s hard to see how any ideas can ever triumph if they reject any kind of organised strength.” I immediately regretted saying that: my father looked at me so sadly; he’d not said a word till then. “Trini, everybody is a pacifist in peacetime.” He kept looking at me. “Cosme was too, and now . . . you’ve heard him. The point is to be one always, in times of peace and times of war, whatever the situation. If not, it would mean nothing; there’d be no point in calling oneself a pacifist.”
Father stayed with me a few hours, during which I discovered that Llibert was climbing the greasy pole. “He’s got an office like a minister’s,” he told me, “with twenty typists and countless employees jumping to obey his orders. He has a cream limousine with a uniformed chauffeur who opens the door for him, standing to attention and saluting. It’s a requisitioned vehicle, naturally; it must have been the Marquis de Marianao’s, and I expect they requisitioned car and chauffeur alongside everything else.”
“Has Llibert no shame?” I asked.
“One day he wanted to show off and drive me home and I was the one who died of shame when I saw how our neighbours on carrer de l’Hospital who know me well were looking at me: they were amazed to see me in a vast vehicle that was so silent, creamy and shiny! And when his repulsive flunkey opened the door, stood to attention and saluted us militarily . . . I wanted the earth to open and swallow me up! If Llibert hasn’t gone to the front like your man,” he added, “don’t think it’s because he’s keeping faith with the pacifist principles I inculcated in you from childhood – not at all! Later I’ll tell you about his wall posters. If he hasn’t gone to the front it’s because he thinks he’s more useful in the rearguard: to believe him, he is absolutely indispensable in Barcelona, he is irreplaceable because thanks to him, as he readily tells you, we are winning the war. We are winning the war, he says, thanks to the propaganda battle . . .”
In effect, they had made my brother something like the executive director of War Propaganda. It turns out that he was the one who plastered – and still does – the city walls with those justly famous posters: “Make tanks, make tanks, make tanks, it’s the vehicle of victory!” or else “Barbers, break those chains!”§ And so many others, half in Catalan and half in Castilian, respecting the two joint official languages, which would make us split our sides if Barcelona were in the mood.
One of these posters makes me want to vomit whenever I see it: it shows a wounded soldier dragging himself along the ground and making one last mighty effort to lift his head and point a finger: “And what did you do for victory?” This is the offering from my brother and the other people safely ensconced in the Propaganda department offices! Posters encouraging others to go to the front are his speciality. There’s also the enigmatic variety, abstract posters where you can only see blotches of colour, and amid the crazy chiaroscuro mess of light and shade it says: “Liberatories of prostitution”. I’ve never met anyone who understands what that one’s all about. At the other extreme there’s a very specific one: a hen on a balcony accompanied by a slogan: “The battle for eggs”. Apparently the idea is to suggest that if each citizen of Barcelona were to keep a hen on the balcony, nobody would go hungry. As if hens don’t need grain to lay eggs! As if poor hens live on fresh air!
It seems all this is the work of Llibert, or at least so says his father. He’s not only involved in poster production. His hyper-activity encompasses broad and complex fields: the man is a walking encyclopaedia! He is behind various newspapers in Catalan and Castilian, all encouraging people to go to the front; he gives talks on the radio in a quivering tone that gives me the shivers, all to the same end; he contracts foreign lecturers to give similar talks – world famous celebrities nobody has heard of – and organises performances of “theatre for the masses” . . .
This “theatre for the masses” deserves special mention. According to Llibert, proletarian theatre must be performed by the masses. From what I’ve heard – I’ve never set foot inside – the masses fill the stage while the theatre remains empty, since nobody ever goes. This is the reverse of what used to happen when there were few actors – hardly any – and the theatre was packed from the stalls to the gods. Apparently that was bourgeois theatre.
Llibert’s stirring dynamism and boldness aren’t at all challenged by the difficulties of organising an equally proletarian opera season. He has requisitioned the Liceu and all they put on is proletarian opera. I don’t know where my beloved brother found the libretti and music for the operas he stages, because I’ve not set foot there either, but a friend of mine from the science faculty, Maria Engràcia Bosch, was intrigued enough to go. She’s a person I meet up with now and then and she tells me about what’s happening in Barcelona: if it weren’t for her, I’d never have found out. We met at the faculty years ago and although she’s quite a bit older than me and was in her final year when I was only beginning, we felt close because we’re from the same neighbourhood: she lives off carrer de Sant Pau.
I bumped into her not long ago on the Rambla and she invited me to a cup of malt in a café: “I’ve things to tell you,” said Maria Engràcia Bosch. And she told me that as she often walked past the Liceu, that’s on the corner of Sant Pau and very close to her house, she was intrigued by the proletarian opera they were advertising and one evening couldn’t resist the temptation to go – I should add that the price of tickets to the Liceu is now within anyone’s reach. She was one of the six who made up the audience that evening, and to compensate maybe two hundred people were on stage: “Opera for the masses, right! Where on earth did your brother get the score and libretto? An unbelievably awful tearjerker about a people’s uprising! The exploited masses come and go on stage, exit to the right, walk back on from the left, singing incantations to the future with their fists held high. From the rather nebulous plot you gathered that one of the exploited proletarians, the youngest in fact and a tenor, was practising free love and caught a bad dose of gonorrhoea – one for the history books! He separates out from the masses and staggers to the front of the stage. There is a deafening drumroll and the masses sink into a highly tragic silence whilst the tenor threatens the six members of the audience with a grand flourish of his arm and blasts out the first line of an aria full of pathos: ‘Accursed bourgeoisie, you shall atone for your crimes!’ ”
I couldn’t believe it but Maria Engràcia Bosch had seen it with her own eyes and heard it with her own ears.
After this proletarian opera, what could one say of my darling brother Llibert that wouldn’t pale in comparison? People who have been to his office tell me he gives all and sundry a big welcoming hug, calls everyone “companion” and is ultra friendly, that his every pore breathes out success, victory, dynamism, smarminess and efficiency; he is organisation, efficiency and audacity personified; he is the provident hand for all those seeking a “helping hand” or a “voucher”.
He brings one of Uncle Eusebi’s sayings to mind: “By dint of revolving around others, we end up believing that others revolve around ourselves.” My brother had always wanted the entire world to revolve around him. When we were kids we crossed the courtyard of the Hospital of the Holy Cross four times a day going to and from our street to carrer del Carme, and the lay school where Mother and Father taught. He’d sometimes stop in front of the “little pen” which is what we called the morgue; it looked out onto a side street that crossed Carme and a grille was all that separated it from passers-by. I had to hang on to the bars and stand on tiptoe to see the corpses. As they were laid out facing the grille, feet were what we saw best – yellow, filthy feet. Those feet were so sad! “Here’s the end that awaits us all,” was Llibert’s invariable comment, “if we don’t look after number one!” I must have been six or seven and he eleven or twelve. In my eyes he was already a “grown-up” wh
o knew everything, the secrets of life and death, and I’d listen to him like an oracle. So a way existed to avoid ending up displaying one’s filthy feet to the people walking from carrer de l’Hospital to carrer del Carme. I thought when I was Llibert’s age I’d see it as clearly as he did.
One morning we found the traffic had ground to a halt: a funeral cortège, the like of which I’ve not seen since, was coming from Bethlehem parish church; six huge horses caparisoned in black velvet were pulling a black and gold open carriage that contained a coffin resembling a chest made of silver and gold; men on foot, in breeches and wearing white wigs and black dalmatics escorted the carriage; behind came fifty or sixty priests intoning dirges for the dead and in their wake a band of gentlemen in frock coats and top hats. “Here’s a fellow who looked after number one,” said Llibert. “Who?” I asked. “The men in wigs?”
“No, love, they’re only the flunkeys.”
They’ve yet to give him a state funeral, but it will happen! Don’t you find it incredible that people can envy a corpse? Anyway, he’s already got a uniformed chauffeur opening the door to his cream limousine.
Perhaps you think I’m grousing too much, given that he’s my own brother, but I was really incensed by one barbed comment of his. I’d muttered something about his cream car and uniformed chauffeur and he roared back at me in a rage: “Yes, of course, you’ve got it all sewn up: a young guy from a rich family and an orphan to boot. I must look out for myself – it’s every man for himself, you know – I can’t go dowry hunting!”